Squares (1972)

          Aptly retitled Riding Tall for a theatrical reissue and subsequent home-video release, this gentle character piece was part of an early-’70s boom in movies about modern-day rodeo cowboys, and it’s perhaps the least impressive of the batch. Gangly leading man Andrew Prine is slick with sarcastic dialogue, but he doesn’t achieve anything extraordinary here. Similarly, the opposites-attract premise pairing Prine’s character with a Vassar dropout is trite, and the overall storyline is episodic. Dodgy production values compromise certain scenes as well, notably the vignettes of Prine’s character busting broncs—hardly the mesmerizing stuff of Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner, which was released the same year. So why bother giving Squares a moment’s thought? Because the movie’s best moments are charming and specific.

          Prine plays Austin Ruth, a ne’er-do-well sportsman who squanders money as soon as he earns it, which isn’t very often. After a particularly dispiriting defeat, he finds himself hitchhiking on a desert road. Chase Lawrence (Gilmer McCormick), who has fallen asleep at the wheel of a stolen Cadillac, nearly runs him down, so she repays him with a ride, and their flirtation begins. Austin surprises Chase by revealing soulfulness in unguarded moments, and Chase surprises Ruth by revealing grit—she’s been in jail, she’s broken with her conservative parents, and she’s wise beyond her years. Adding friction is the fact that the two rarely want the same thing at the same time, so when she’s feeling romantic, he’s usually feeling adversarial, and so on.

          Screenwriter Mary Ann Saxon, who appears never to have penned another movie, displays a gift for snarky patter, though her story structure leaves much to be desired. Prine, often cast as psychos or as disposable secondary characters, seems to relish playing a grounded lead, so even though he can’t fully overcome the shortfalls of the material, he’s winning in scenes that click. McCormick, who vaguely recalls Stockard Channing, makes a decent foil and conjures an appealing seen-it-all quality in her best scenes. Oh, and seeing as how the movie in general lacks a sense of direction, it should come as no surprise to learn that Squares sputters instead of culminating with a proper ending.

Squares: FUNKY

The Centerfold Girls (1974)

High and low narrative instincts collide with dismaying results in The Centerfold Girls, a misogynistic thriller about a psychopath preying on women who appear in nude magazine pictorials. The picture has a somewhat arty story structure, and the closing credits divide the film into “The First Story,” “The Second Story,” and “The Third Story.” Presumably this was the filmmakers’ workaround for the problem of killing off a protagonist every 30 minutes, since the psychopath (Andrew Prine) is mostly shown ogling nudie pictures and terrorizing his intended victims with phone calls prior to killing them. There’s even a touch of artiness to some of the actual filming, and The Centerfold Girls contains one very stylish kill—when the psychopath swipes a razor blade across a woman’s throat with terrific force, the resulting blood spray splatters across a windowpane positioned between the victim and the camera. Throughout its running time, The Centerfold Girls has a high level of technical polish, at least compared the usual woman-hating grindhouse fare. Having said all that, the movie is, at its core, clunky and ugly. The scenes with Prine create a modicum of continuity, but otherwise the picture flops from one meandering sequence to the next, burning screen time until the stalker music kicks in and the razor blade emerges again. At its most directionless, the picture drifts into a wholly separate storyline, with a nurse taking refuge in a mountain cabin only to get menaced by hippie cultists who rape her. Yet another unpleasant narrative detour involves a character played by B-movie regular Aldo Ray. Introduced as a Good Samaritan, the fellow is revealed as a would-be rapist who gets frustrated because his intended victim doesn’t put up enough of a fight. Ugh. Loaded with excessive bloodshed and gratuitous nudity, The Centerfold Girls is among the better-made films of its type—but there’s not much glory in being the best of a bad bunch.

The Centerfold Girls: LAME

Simon, King of the Witches (1971)

          A strange melodrama that blends elements of campy comedy and supernatural menace, Simon, King of the Witches apparently has its admirers, who consider the picture a wry send-up of the horror genre. However, the storyline is so befuddling and the tone is so inconsistent that the picture is perhaps best described as an acquired taste, and I most definitely did not acquire the taste. Andrew Prine, a workaday actor who spent much of the ’70s appearing in bad horror movies and second-rate Westerns, plays Simon Sinestrari, a would-be magician. For reasons that are never particularly clear, Simon lives in a storm drain and his best friend is a gay hooker, Turk (George Paulsin). Turk introduces Simon to debauched party people who dig the idea of a magician doing tricks at parties, so Simon becomes friendly with a rich queen named Hercules (Gerald York) and starts dating a girl named Linda (Brenda Scott), whose father happens to be the police commissioner. Working the party circuit gets Simon laid and provides some cash, but he has grander designs to pursue—mastering an otherworldly force and becoming a god. However, Simon’s ambitions don’t prevent him from getting distracted, so he spends lots of time on nonsense.

          In one scene, he crashes a Wiccan ritual and heckles the high priestess. And in the film’s major subplot, Simon puts a curse on Hercules and one of Hercules’ rich friends, all because of some perceived slight. When combined with the weird scene of Simon practicing his sexualized power ritual while standing over a gay man who’s on all fours and wearing only briefs, Simon, King of the Witches becomes so homoerotic and sarcastic that a better title might have been Simon, King of the Bitches. There’s a vague sense of irreverence running through the picture, and Prine’s world-weary vibe suggests that he’s in on the joke. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to discern just what the joke is supposed to be. If the picture was meant to satirize self-important mystics who use mumbo-jumbo to rip people off, then why does the movie contain actual magic? And why is the magic depicted through such cheap special effects as large glowing orbs? And what’s with the downbeat ending? Some fans of bizarre cinema may have fun parsing these mysteries, but Simon, King of the Witches will leave most viewers bored and confused.

Simon, King of the Witches: LAME

The Barn of the Naked Dead (1974)

          Originally titled Nightmare Circus and then rechristened Terror Circus, this horror flick truly deserves its final moniker, The Barn of the Naked Dead, not so much because the title accurately describes the movie’s content—it does not—but because the title captures the film’s sordid aesthetic. Taking the ’70s trope of misogynistic killers to an absurd extreme, the picture introduces a character who kidnaps women, chains them inside a barn, calls them “animals,” and trains them to perform circus tricks. Whenever one of the women gets out of line, the psycho punishes her with a whip or by leaving the woman alone with a hungry lion or a lethal snake. Even though modern history has proven that men who treat women this horribly exist in reality, it’s one thing to make a thoughtful drama about the monsters in our midst (e.g., The Boston Strangler or Helter Skelter), and it’s another thing to transform the flailing of pretty girls into drive-in entertainment. Further, it’s galling to learn that The Barn of the Naked Dead was cowritten and directed by Alan Rudolph (under a pseudonym) early in his career. After all, once he blossomed under Robert Altman’s tutelage, Rudolph made a series of offbeat indie films with strong female protagonists—atonement for participating in this project, perhaps?

          Anyway, the plot is painfully simple. When three showgirls experience car trouble while crossing the desert on the way to a gig in Las Vegas, handsome stranger Andre (Andrew Prine) offers to drive them to his house, where they can use a phone to call for help. Once there, the showgirls discover a barn full of captive women, and they’re added to the prison population at gunpoint. Eventually, the lead showgirl, Simone (Manuela Thiess), gets Andre’s attention because she reminds him of his long-dead mother. This precipitates lots of dialogue scenes about Andre’s abandonment issues. However, it’s hard to take the character stuff seriously since The Barn of the Naked Dead also includes a killer mutant who is horribly scarred from radiation poisoning. Adding to the overall unpleasantness is a dissonant score by Tommy Vig, which waffles between repetitive go-go grooves and sharp atonal stings. As for leading man Prine, he doesn’t come close to elevating the material, instead offering a mundane screamy-twitchy turn in the familiar Anthony Perkins style.

The Barn of the Naked Dead: LAME

Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (1973)

An American-Spanish coproduction that was shot in Europe, with leading actors from the U.S., this underwhelming horror flick has been distributed under several different titles, including Crypt of the Living Dead—and it’s even been distributed in two different color schemes, because some prints are in black-and-white and some are in color. Such are the fates that befall movies in the public domain. Anyway, Hannah, Queen of the Vampires is standard shock fare, somewhat in the Hammer Films mode. After an archeologist is killed while exploring a crypt on a remote European island, his intrepid son, Chris (Andrew Prine), travels to the same location in order to investigate his father’s death. Abetted by skittish local schoolteacher Mary (Patty Sheppard) and her spooky brother, Peter (Mark Damon), Chris learns the crypt is occupied by the corpse of Hannah (Teresa Gimpera), a 700-year-old vampire whom the island’s residents fear has been resuscitated. After the usual perfunctory scenes of Chris scoffing at the superstition of provincial types, Chris splits his time between romancing Mary and answering hypnotic calls to visit Hannah’s tomb. This repetitive business goes on for a while. Then the villagers do their pitchforks-and-torches bit. Seen in its original color version, Hannah, Queen of the Vampires is so dull and trite that even calling it ordinary would be a compliment. However, there’s something to be said for the scratchy black-and-white print that’s in circulation, because the monochromatic incarnation of the movie has a Bergman-esque quality. Seriously. Turn off the sound, and it’s possible to groove on moody low angles of angst-ridden people drifting through clouds of mist and walking around graveyards. However, noting that Hannah, Queen of the Vampires is best appreciated without its color or its soundtrack says everything you need to know about the movie’s inherent virtues.

Hannah, Queen of the Vampires: LAME

One Little Indian (1973)

          In a strange little career blip between his big-screen heyday in the late ’60s and his return to television with The Rockford Files, beloved leading man James Garner headlined a pair of inconsequential Disney movies. One Little Indian is darker and deeper than the company’s usual fare, telling the story of how a condemned man becomes the surrogate father for an orphaned child, and the feather-light The Castaway Cowboy is an offbeat romance. Were it not for the presence of colorful animal scenes in both flicks, it would be difficult to realize these titles came from the Mouse House.
          Written and directed, respectively, by old hands Harry Spalding and Bernard McEveety, One Little Indian is surprisingly respectable given the slightness of its storyline. Garner plays Keyes, a post-Civil War cavalryman sentenced to hang for treason. As we discover late in the story, Keyes tried to prevent fellow soldiers from conducting a Sand Creek-type massacre on an Indian village. Meanwhile, Mark (Clay O’Brien) is a white youth who has been raised by Indians. When a cavalry unit rounds up Mark’s tribe for relocation to a reservation, Mark tries repeatedly to escape. Through the magic of Disney coincidence, Keyes and Mark discover each other and become traveling companions.

          Adding novelty to their journey is the fact that their steeds are camels rather than horses; the animals are leftovers from an Army experiment in using dromedaries for desert transportation. Over the course of their journey together, man and boy bond with a frontier widow (Vera Miles) and her young daughter (Jodie Foster). They also engage in high jinks and shoot-outs as they evade capture. Excepting some silliness with the camels, One Little Indian is basically a straight drama, and rather a somber one, so Garner is able to sink his teeth into a few solid dramatic scenes. (He and Miles, who reteamed in The Castaway Cowboy, make an attractive screen couple.) O’Brien is a passable child actor, neither greatly adding to nor detracting from scenes, and reliable supporting players like Pat Hingle, Andrew Prine, and Morgan Woodward fill out the rest of the story. One Little Indian won’t linger very long in your memory, but it’s pleasant viewing.

One Little Indian: FUNKY

Grizzly (1976)

          When you’re in the mood for 90 minutes of pure ’70s cheese, you’d be hard-pressed to find something more appetizing than the shameless Jaws rip-off Grizzly. As the title suggests, the movie depicts the rampage of a ravenous 18-foot bear through a national park filled with unsuspecting campers. Narrative logic isn’t exactly this picture’s greatest strength—so don’t ask why hunters have such a hard time tracking the bear, or why rangers can’t simply evacuate the park until the danger is past. Just go with the flow, and you’ll have a goofy good time, because the movie delivers all the requisite creature-feature clichés. The picture stars square-jawed ’70s guy Christopher George as the peace officer charged with protecting a small community from a hungry menace—except instead of a sheriff, like Roy Scheider’s character in Jaws, he’s a park ranger, so his jurisdiction is millions of acres of wild, mountainous forest. When a grizzly inexplicably appears in the forest and starts chomping on folks, George teams up with a bleeding-heart naturalist (Richard Jaeckel) and a good ol’ boy helicopter pilot (Andrew Prine) to hunt down the beastie, even though—wait for it!—a greedy politician (Joe Dorsey) stands in his way.
          Hewing to the Jaws formula allows the picture to toggle between bloody bear attacks and angry confrontations between the righteous ranger and his smarmy superior; the formula also facilitates Jaws-style scenes of manly men bonding out in the wild as they stalk their prey. The acting is erratic, the dialogue is terrible, and the storyline is the definition of predicable. Yet Grizzly has a certain kind of vibe. George is endearingly square, but Jaeckel and Prine bring pleasant degrees of crazy to their characters, and the location photography lends authenticity—the film’s many aerial shots, for instance, offer intoxicatingly lush tableaux. Better still, the thrills-per-hour ratio is pretty good, the PG-level gore gets the job done without succumbing to excess, and there are a handful of solid comin’-at-ya jolts. Further, it’s amusing to see how reverently the filmmakers copy Jaws, from the way Jaeckel’s naturalist character echoes Richard Dreyfuss’ shark guy in the earlier film, to the way Prine delivers a monologue about a bear attack in the style of Robert Shaw’s legendary U.S.S. Indianapolis speech in Jaws. For viewers with certain cinematic appetites (myself included), Grizzly is a nearly perfect specimen of ’70s drive-in shlock.

Grizzly: FUNKY