Chicago 70 (1970)

          One of the stranger cultural reactions to the notorious “Chicago 7 Trial” was an absurdist theater production blending excerpts from courtroom transcripts with allusions to Alice in Wonderland alongside satirical interjections somewhat in the style of the Marx Brothers. Chicago 70 is a cinematic adaptation of that play. Presumably, the idea behind both versions of the piece was to skewer the absurdity of putting left-wing activists on trial for the chaos surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention, even though the real culprits were Chicago’s police department and the city’s mayor, Richard J. Daley. Featuring such iconic characters as Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale, the trial was a flashpoint in the counterculture era, but the story’s insane sprawl has stymied most attempts at reducing the trial to a feature-length narrative. Hence such experimental treatments as this film and Chicago 10 (2007), alongside occasional mainstream piece including Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8 (1987). Anyway, there’s not much to say about Chicago 70 beyond the description provided earlier—as written by the unlikely figure of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Chicago 70 is a flimsy gimmick stretched to feature length.
          Performing on a stripped-down set, actors spew transcript excerpts in a rapid-fire style, transforming history into farce. Sometimes actors switch roles, sometimes characters are represented by props instead of people, and sometimes the movie cuts from the court action to silly interludes—after the judge forgets the name of a defendant, for instance, he plays charades until remembering the name. Given its frenetic presentation, Chicago 70 mostly fails as a delivery device for information, so viewers unfamiliar with the real historical events are encouraged to learn facts elsewhere. Even for those who know the story, however, Chicago 70 hasn’t aged well. Stripped of the relevance it presumably had during its original release, the movie now seems childish and noisy, except for an imaginatively rendered and somewhat poignant sequence depicting the moment when Seale was bound and gagged. As for the film’s politics, the lopsided depiction of activists as valiant warriors and court officers as fascist buffoons is unhelpful.

Chicago 70: FUNKY

The Year of the Yahoo! (1971)

          One wouldn't expect to find a tart political satire in the extensive filmography of schlockmeister Herschell Gordon Lewis, and, sure enough, The Year of the Yahoo! disappoints as much as it entertains. Some scenes in this low-rent riff on the classic political drama A Face in the Crowd (1957) are sorta-clever, but the filmmaking is crude, the performances are uneven, and the pointless insertion of a skanky sex scene suggests a crisis of faith on Lewis’ part, as if he feared the drive-in/grindhouse crowd wouldn’t tolerate a movie without at least a little sleaze. Yet while it’s not as if one can envision some better version of The Year of the Yahoo! redeemed by minor tweaks, the flick has a functioning brain and good intentions, two things one doesn’t normally associate with Lewis’ output.

          Amiable Claude King stars as Hank Jackson, a country singer recruited by craven political operatives to run for state office. Initially, Hank ennobles his campaign, articulating a common-sense platform with aw-shucks sincerity. But then party hacks start pushing him to the right, compelling Hank to take cheap shots at welfare cheats and other familiar targets. This doesn’t sit well with Hank’s liberal wife, so the script—by Allen Kahn, also credited with penning Lewis’ 1971 opus The Wizard of Gore—leads inevitably toward a showdown in which Hank must choose between his political career and his principles.

         Nothing that happens in The Year of the Yahoo! is surprising, and parts of the movie drag because of that. Still, the character work and the satirical jabs, no matter how clumsy, generate some interest in how things might resolve. The picture also boasts some wry touches, as when Hank—seated on horseback for the filming of a cowboy-themed commercial—mistakes a camera cable for a rattlesnake and blasts the thing with his six-shooter. If nothing else, The Year of the Yahoo! reveals what Lewis could do with passable material—not much, but not nothing, either.

The Year of the Yahoo!: FUNKY

This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! (1971)

Best known for his low-budget gorefests, exploitation-flick guy Herschell Gordon Lewis also made other types of bad movies, ranging from comedies to porno flicks. Like his earlier picture Moonshine Mountain (1964), This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! is a redneck saga about illegal liquor, and Gordon (who wrote, produced, and directed) takes the title somewhat literally. Although the consumption of white lightning doesn’t cause any fatalities, killers prey upon bootleggers, resulting in several gruesome onscreen deaths. As for the plot, it concerns a film-flam man who poses as a preacher and runs a moonshine operation out of a backwoods church. Presented in a dull but quasi-linear fashion, the story tracks the con man’s efforts to intimidate local liquor-store proprietors out of business, to bribe regional law-enforcement officials, and to put on a convincing show as a religious leader. Executed competently, this premise might have coalesced into a decent drive-in diversion. Executed with Gordon’s usual clumsiness and vulgarity, This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! is consistently bizarre, though not in a good way. The ersatz preacher officiates a wedding at which the male guests gang-bang the bride. A woman is stoned. Two people are crucified. Someone’s head gets blown off in a gory close-up. Sigh. Gordon fans may enjoy seeing one of the director’s frequent collaborators, Jeffrey Allen, in the showy part of the preacher (though Allen’s over-acting gets tired quickly), and cinephiles should note this movie contains both the final screen appearance of Golden Age screen star Tim Holt, who plays a G-man, and the first screen appearance of future L.A. Law costar Larry Drake.

This Stuff’ll Kill Ya!: LAME

The Wizard of Gore (1970)

Low-budget sensationalist Herschell Gordon Lewis unleashed more cheaply rendered cinematic bloodshed with The Wizard of Gore, a dreary and unpleasant thriller that borrows liberally from House of Wax (1953), which was itself derived from previous films and stories. Per the formula set by those earlier projects, The Wizard of Gore concerns a showman who gets away with killing people onstage until suspicious audience members threaten to upset his evil schemes. Specifically, Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager) does a regular theater show, inviting women onstage and murdering them in horrible ways before magically restoring them to perfect health. Days later, however, the women die of the wounds that Montag inflicted upon them, so his magic merely delays the fatal effects. Even setting aside the supernatural aspect of the premise, the question of why audiences tolerate what appear to be genuine onstage killings remains unanswered, despite Lewis’ feeble lip service to the idea that Americans crave spectacle. (Hiding behind social commentary is a favorite tack when filmmakers seek to imbue schlock with legitimacy.) The splatter in The Wizard of Gore is too silly-looking to be terrifying, as when Lewis substitutes an obvious mannequin for a scene of driving a spike through a woman’s skull, but it’s possible to be repulsed by the intentions if not the results. Even with the film’s kitsch elements—flimsy production values, stilted dialogue, wooden acting—it’s the usual ugliness of treating the brutalization of women as entertainment. Yes, leading lady Judy Cler is attractive; yes, the tone-deaf transitions between lighthearted scenes and “spooky” bits are unintentionally funny; and, yes, Sager’s leading performance is stunningly awful. So what? For anyone who cares about such things, The Wizard of Gore was remade in 2007, and Crispin Glover essayed the Montag role in that version.

The Wizard of Gore: LAME

The Gore Gore Girls (1972)

Splatter-movie titan Herschell Gordon Lewis’ final flick before a 30-year directing hiatus, The Gore Gore Girls is pure cinematic sludge, leavened only by a lowbrow sense of humor—although the jokes don’t actually justify watching the movie. In the opening scene, a mysterious maniac attacks a stripper in her home, kills her, and then mutilates her corpse. As Lewis’ camera lingers to savor every detail, the murderer decapitates the woman, carves off her face, and pummels the bones and muscles of her skull into a pulp decorated by one intact eye. Since Lewis’ camerawork is as clumsily amateurish as his team’s makeup effects, this scene isn’t so much horrifying as unpleasant; there’s no illusion of reality, of course, but it’s hard to stomach the idea that Lewis thought such atrocities should be filmed. Once the story proper gets underway, attractive reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) hires aristocratic private investigator Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress) to search out the identity of the killer. Gentry plunges into the world of low-rent strip clubs (all the victims are exotic dancers), so Lewis gets to complement scenes of bloodletting with grungy vignettes of strippers plying their trade. Inexplicably, comedy legend Henny Youngman shows up as a strip-club proprietor, so Youngman delivers crude jokes like this one: “We just got the news that Tom Jones crossed his legs quickly—he’s in critical condition!” (Jokes about Jones’ reputedly impressive manhood were already growing mold by the time The Gore Gore Girls was filmed.) It’s hard to know whom The Gore Gore Girls was meant to please, since the comedy scenes undercut suspense and the murder scenes are so absurdly extreme the movie was originally rated X. However, one hopes Lewis was aiming for irreverence with touches like the title card that appears after the final scene: “We announce with pride—this movie is over!” Would that it had never begun.

The Gore Gore Girls: SQUARE