Isle of the Snake People (1971) & Alien Terror (1971) & Blind Man's Bluff (1971)

          In a perfect world, horror-movie legend Boris Karloff would have concluded his epic screen career with Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968), which features an excellent Karloff performance and many sly references to the actor’s dubious status as an aging horror-movie icon. In the real world, the final gasps of Karloff’s career included some of the worst films he ever made, because a trio of awful projects he completed near the end of his life crept into the marketplace two years after Karloff's death in 1969. Two of these pictures, Isle of the Snake People and Alien Terror, were made in Mexico as part of a package deal. The behind-the-scenes story goes that Karloff initially nixed the package deal, only to say yes once producers hired up-and-coming B-movie guy Jack Hill to “improve” the material. One can only imagine what this junk was like before Hill lent a hand.

          Isle of the Snake People is confusing and tedious and weird, but it has something to do with Carl van Molder (Karloff) overseeing a cult of supernatural natives on a remote island in the Pacific. Most of the picture concerns the natives performing gruesome rituals, and there’s a dreary romantic subplot involving van Molder’s niece and a dashing young military officer. Karloff has a bit more screen time in this one and seems moderately livelier than he does in Alien Terror, but with his diminished physicality and silly-looking Colonel Sanders outfit, he’s hardly intimidating; moreover, he’s unconvincingly doubled in some scenes by an actor wearing a black veil and dark sunglasses. Although Hill did some writing on the project, one hopes he’s not to blame for the rotten dialogue. Consider this sweet nothing the officer coos to van Molder’s niece: “The fire of the sunset in your eyes is consuming my heart!” Still, Isle of the Snake People is nearly tolerable thanks to the intense ritual scenes. The movie opens with natives including a weirdly dressed little person dancing around the gauze-wrapped corpse of a sexy woman until the corpse revives, strips off some of her gauze, grabs a dude, and starts making out with him. While this happens, the little person throttles the live poultry in his hands. Yes, he chokes the chicken. Who knows if the naughty visual joke was intentional, but we take our minor pleasures where we can find them.

          For Alien Terror, Hill rewrote at least part of the script and also directed the handful of scenes featuring Karloff—but once again, it doesn’t seem as if hiring a ringer made much difference. Alien Terror, also known as The Incredible Invasion, is so rotten it’s hard to imagine a version of the film that’s any worse. Set in 19th-century Europe, the story begins when altruistic scientist Professor John Mayer (Karloff) invents some sort of radioactive ray beam. The invention alerts aliens, who send an emissary in a flying saucer to destroy the ray beam. With his shaggy hair and tin-foil space suit, the emissary looks like a refugee from a glam-rock band. Amid various turgid subplots, the emissary takes the least efficient path imaginable toward accomplishing his goal. He inhabits the body of a Jack the Ripper-type killer, hangs out while the killer commits murders and whines about psychological torment, then eventually jumps into the professor’s mind. It’s all very boring and discombobulated, though the climax does feature Karloff exclaiming, “Did you really think I’d sit quietly in a corner of my brain while you did exactly what you like?” Karloff looks and sounds weak, sitting during many scenes and breathing with considerable difficulty between lines. Compounding the indignity is the way some of his dialogue, again delivered by a double wearing a mask, is dubbed in a voice that sounds nothing like Karloff’s.

          Rounding out this ignominious trio is Blind Man’s Bluff, also known as Cauldron of Blood (and The Corpse Collectors and Death Comes from the Dark and The Shrinking Corpse). Featuring a recognizable leading man (Gallic heartthrob Jean-Pierre Aumont) and a relatively coherent story, Blind Man’s Bluff also benefits from a bit of kinkiness. It’s a bad movie, but it’s less insultingly terrible than its predecessors. Set in Spain, the flick follows reporter Claude Marchant (Aumont) as he pursues an audience with elusive sculptor Franz Badulescu (Karloff). The artist lives in a remote villa with his decades-younger wife, Tania (Viveca Lindfors), who controls his world because Franz is blind and confined to a wheelchair. Karloff gets some colorful dialogue (he describes an art installation by saying “the work consisted of a group of small goats in repose”), and there’s a tragic quality to his characterization. Alas, he’s not onscreen that often, so the filmmakers compensate with boring subplots. Episodes of pretty girls modeling and moping are pointless, the recurring trope of a sex maniac killing women is handled clumsily, and the thread concerning Claude’s scheme to develop a tourist attraction is befuddling. Better are the campy scenes with Lindfors as a whip-cracking fetishist. All of this leads down the usual Mystery at the Wax Museum route of a crazed artist using human remains in his creations. Karloff deserved better.

Isle of the Snake People: LAME

Alien Terror: SQUARE

Blind Man's Bluff: LAME

The Cheerleaders (1973) & The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974) & Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976) & The Great American Girl Robbery (1979)

          American sex comedies don’t get much worse than The Cheerleaders, a witless slog just shy of outright porn. Coproduced, cowritten, and directed by a gentleman named Paul Glickler, this excruciatingly tacky flick concerns a gang of high-school cheerleaders who help their school’s team win games by screwing boys from opposing teams into mindless exhaustion. Thrown into this carnal mix is the mousy Jeannie (Stephanie Fondue), who believes the only way she can lose her virginity is to become a cheerleader. And if for some reason it wasn’t yet clear to viewers that this movie has nothing but sex on the brain, one of the central locations is the Beaver Car Wash. Featuring interchangeable actresses giving terrible performances, The Cheerleaders grinds through one salacious scenario after another—girls trading sexual favors for school privileges, a janitor watching ladies through a peephole while masturbating, lesbians making out while using exercise machines, an orgy, toe-sucking—while failing to generate anything resembling narrative interest or a proper joke. The movie is embarrassment for all involved, and thoroughly unpleasant to watch. Nonetheless, sex sells, so The Cheerleaders earned three sort-of sequels. Although some actors and behind-the-scenes participants recur in subsequent Cheerleaders movies, each picture tells a stand-alone narrative.

          The second flick, The Swinging Cheerleaders, improves tremendously on its predecessor, though it’s still mediocre at best. B-movie stalwart Jack Hill cowrote and directed The Swinging Cheerleaders, which has the benefit of actual characters, a logical plot, and some measure of restraint. The jokes are still weak, but the movie is brisk and coherent enough to sustain interest. Set at fictional Mesa College, the movie follows Kate (Jo Johnston), a counterculture-minded student journalist who goes undercover with a cheerleading squad in order to expose their sexual shenanigans. She soon learns to like and respect the cheerleaders, along the way uncovering a plot by administrators and alumni to fix football games in order to score big gambling prizes. It’s all very simplistic, but Hill manages to inject a tiny bit of humanity while also keeping peekaboo shots of naked girls to a minimum. Characters reveal dimensionality, the story turns in somewhat interesting ways, and themes ranging from conformity to duplicity to peer pressure are given lip service. Viewed in isolation, The Swinging Cheerleaders might seem little more than passable, but compared to the other Cheerleaders movies, it’s respectable.

          The third installment, Revenge of the Cheerleaders, returns to the skin-flick rhythms of the first picture. Once again set in a high school, Revenge depicts the antics of cheerleaders using mischief and sex to help their team win, even as crooked adults conspire to sell the school’s physical plant for profit. “Highlights” include a long vignette of people in a school cafeteria wigging out after the daily special gets dosed with pot, a cartoonish sequence of a gymnasium-shower orgy resulting in an tidal wave of soap bubbles, and a topless funk-music dance party. For good measure, the movie also features a young David Hasselhoff as a peripheral character named “Boner.” The sex scenes in Revenge are particularly grimy and realistic, such as the bit during which a young woman does something unmentionable to a young man while he’s working at the counter of an ice cream shop.

          Well after the producers should have let the Cheerleaders brand die, the series returned for a final entry originally titled The Great American Girl Robbery—but also exhibited as Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend, among other titles. Eschewing the sex-comedy formula of the previous flicks, The Great American Girl Robbery is a hostage picture with the feel of a sleazy horror movie. Thugs hijack a bus containing three teams of high-school cheerleaders who are on their way to a competition. Once the girls are stashed in a remote cabin, the thugs call in to a radio show hosted by DJ “Joyful Jerome” (Leon Isaac Kennedy) in order to issue demands. While awaiting ransom payments, the thugs cajole the cheerleaders into performing a topless beauty pageant, which leads to the icky spectacle of a row of half-nude girls gyrating on a makeshift stage at gunpoint. There’s also a catfight and various scenes in which cheerleaders try to screw their way to freedom. Boring, cheap, and exploitive without being titillating, The Great American Girl Robbery finally managed to kill the franchise. Good riddance.

The Cheerleaders: LAME

The Swinging Cheerleaders: FUNKY

Revenge of the Cheerleaders: LAME

The Great American Girl Robbery: LAME

Switchblade Sisters (1975)

           A cartoonish exploitation movie rescued from obscurity by grindhouse godhead Quentin Tarantino—who re-released the picture theatrically and on home video through his short-lived Rolling Thunder Pictures imprint—Switchblade Sisters is a distaff precursor to Walter Hill’s infinitely superior gang-warfare thriller The Warriors (1979). Like the latter film, Switchblade Sisters features action and characterization that wouldn’t be out of place in a comic book, even though the lurid storyline’s tropes of rape and sexual politics are strictly for grown-ups. Directed by ’70s staple Jack Hill, who made most of Pam Grier’s best vehicles, Switchblade Sisters has been exhibited under many titles, including The Jezebels and Maggie’s Stiletto Sisters. As the various monikers imply, the story revolves around an all-girl street gang. Led by tiny but vicious Lace (Robbie Lee), the Dagger Debs get caught in a turf war with a rival male gang at the same time a new member, Maggie (Joanne Nail), discovers misdeeds by Lace and slowly usurps Lace’s role as leader. By the end of the story, the Dagger Debs have become the Jezebels, a hardcore outfit with a fierce reputation and a violent track record.
          The movie is filled with fights, prison scenes, and undercover missions, so nearly every cliché of female-centric action cinema is represented. Bull-dyke prison boss? Check. Climactic catfight? Check. Babes using their wiles to outsmart men? Check. None could accuse the makers of Switchblade Sisters of shortchanging the audience in terms of silly violence, especially since the ending features a full-fledged street war involving armored vehicles, machine guns, and—just for good measure—an all-black gang comprising nothing but militant females. There’s even room in the flick for a Dagger Deb named Patch who has—you guessed it!—an eye patch. The acting in Switchblade Sisters is generally awful, though leading lady Nail has a certain sexy swagger, but the dialogue is so cheesy it’s not as if highly developed dramatic skills were required. Similarly, while the story is highly predictable, Hill delivers the goods so abundantly that the picture never fails to generate something resembling excitement. And because Hill goes much lighter on nudity than usual, it’s easier to except the quasi-feminist posturing of Switchblade Sisters than it is to accept similar rhetoric in Hill’s other drive-in flicks.

Switchblade Sisters: FUNKY

The Big Doll House (1971) & Women in Cages (1971) & The Big Bird Cage (1972)

          Overflowing with gratuitous nudity, sadistic violence, and various iterations of sexual abuse, this trio of babes-behind-bars pictures—which were filmed together in the Philippines and share many actors, but which do not comprise a continued narrative—is trashy in the worst way. The movies are also, surprisingly, quite boring. The first flick, The Big Doll House, sets the numbing tone. After sexy blonde Alcott (Roberta Collins) gets thrown into a primitive Filipino prison overseen by perverse warden Miss Dietrich (Christine Schmidtmer), Alcott runs into hassles with cellmates including tough-talking African-American Grear (Pam Grier). The movie features myriad ugly scenes of Alcott being fondled by a swarthy cook (played by B-movie staple Sid Haig), being tortured by the warden’s goons, and/or trudging through catfights with Grear. (The ladies’ climactic battle is fought in a puddle of mud, with the combatants wearing only panties and tank tops.) The slim narrative involves Alcott uniting her fellow inmates for an audacious escape, but the story is really just an excuse for generating scenes of women in demeaning situations. And while Collins, Grier, and their cronies are attractive, the movie is so crass that it’s hard to find much enjoyment in director Jack Hill’s tacky take on titillation. That said, blaxploitation fans may find The Big Doll House interesting simply because it features Grier’s first major role. Her acting is dodgy, but Grier is so committed that she even sings the theme song, an R&B thumper called “Long Time Woman.”

          The second picture in the cycle, Women in Cages, is a decidedly weird type of drive-in sludge. Scored with dirge-like music and featuring such a fragmented storyline that the movie feels more like a series of torture vignettes than a proper narrative, Women in Cages comprises 81 minutes of nearly unadulterated brutality. The gist of the piece is that a political prisoner (Jennifer Gan) gets tossed into jail and rallies her cellmates for an escape. The lovely Collins is back, in a florid supporting role as a heroin-addicted inmate tasked with murdering a fellow prisoner—her methods include loosing a snake into a cell, poisoning a sandwich, and tossing acid onto her intended victim. Grier switches to full-on villain mode, playing a psychotic matron who runs her own personal torture garden. Grier’s performance is bug-eyed and silly, but the actress participates in the movie’s best dialogue exchange: After one of Grier’s victims asks, “What hell did you crawl out of,” Grier replies, “Harlem!” Given the lack of a compelling storyline, it doesn’t really matter that leading lady Gan is inept; this one’s all about grooving on seedy textures.

          The best of these three movies, though it’s not saying much, is The Big Bird Cage, which benefits from an action-packed climax and lots of wink-wink jokes. This one stars icy beauty Anitra Ford as an American who sleeps with political figures for social advantage until a misunderstanding lands her in the slammer. Grier and Haig play revolutionaries who pursue the oddball idea of freeing inmates from prison and transforming them into fellow revolutionaries. Written and directed by The Big Doll House’s Jack Hill, who brought more pizzazz to this skeevy genre the second time around, The Big Bird Cage has several interesting gimmicks, such as the presence of a giant sugar mill in the prison yard; the mill is the “Big Bird Cage” of the title, because workers toil inside the towering structure. The picture also benefits from campy humor, usually involving Haig doing something outrageous. (At one point, he masquerades as a swishy homosexual.) Leading lady Ford has a beguilingly reserved quality—she’s the Faye Dunaway of grindhouse cinema—and Grier locks into a groove playing a gun-toting mama with a smart mouth. In fact, of the three pictures, The Big Bird Cage comes closest to delivering the full Pam Grier persona that blaxploitation fans know and love.

The Big Doll House: LAME

Women in Cages: FREAKY
The Big Bird Cage: FUNKY

Foxy Brown (1974)

After scoring at the box office with Coffy (1973), writer-director Jack Hill and blaxploitation queen Pam Grier delivered more sexed-up crime drama with Foxy Brown, a nasty flick about a woman taking on the mob. Yet while Coffy has force and momentum, Foxy Brown gets mired in a murky storyline. It’s also much more unpleasant than the previous film, thanks to a gruesome sequence in which the heroine is bound, drugged, and repeatedly raped. The storyline gets off to a bad start, because it’s never clear what Foxy does for a living or how she came to know Michael (Terry Carter), her lawman boyfriend. Plus, how does Foxy balance her relationship with a cop and her tight bond with a drug-dealing sibling (Antonio Fargas)? For that matter, when the hell did she learn how to fly a plane? To cut Hill some slack, Foxy Brown apparently began life as a Coffy sequel, and the director was instructed to transform Foxy Brown into a stand-alone film so late in the game that he wasn’t able to properly reconfigure key elements. Notwithstanding these issues, Foxy Brown has built a huge cult audience over the years. Much of the appeal, of course, stems from Grier’s formidable physical presence. She looks fantastic, whether she’s glammed up in a silky wig and evening dress or down-and-dirty in a giant Afro and head-to-toe leather, and she’s a relentless killing machine. The moment when she coils a wire hanger into a claw and gouges out a scumbag’s eye is memorable, as is the bit when she introduces a thug to the business end of a plane’s propeller. Fargas is almost as entertaining as Grier, jive-talking through a campy performance, and Coffy costar Sid Haig shows up briefly to infuse the picture with a welcome burst of nutjob energy. Yet while some elements are watchable, the movie as a whole is distasteful, and the main villain is awful: Every scene featuring the startlingly amateurish Kathryn Loder, as conniving madam Miss Katherine, is excruciating.

Foxy Brown: FUNKY

Coffy (1973)

          Pam Grier’s status as the queen of blaxploitation movies was secured by her appearance in Coffy—even though she doesn’t give a particularly good performance, she creates an indelible image. Tall, gorgeous, outrageously built, and believably ferocious, she’s a cartoonish vision of empowered womanhood, a superheroine sister with a shotgun mowin’ down every rotten mother*#@%er who does her wrong.

          Just as Grier’s performance is a triumph of attitude over skill, Coffy is more about vibe than cinematic virtues. Writer-director Jack Hill’s narrative is as simplistic as a pulpy comic-book story, portraying Grier as an indomitable avenger cutting a swath through the criminal underworld in order to exact revenge against the system that caused her younger sister to become a brain-damaged addict. Feeling like she’s unable to affect real social change in her day job as a nurse, Coffy (Grier) moonlights as an adventurer, using her wiles to penetrate criminal organizations.

          Coffy soon sets her sights on King George (Robert DoQui), a flamboyant pimp who also deals the nastiest junk in town. So, naturally, Coffy goes undercover as one of King George’s working girls, allowing Hill to put Grier into a series of barely-there outfits, and giving the director an excuse for epic catfights involving screeching hookers who are threatened by the buxom new arrival. Meanwhile, top-level criminal operator Arturo Vitroni (Allan Arbus) takes an interest in Coffy, at least until his underlings realize she might not be what she seems.

          And so it goes through a series of standard detective-story beats: Coffy digs for evidence, schemes her way out of trouble when she’s trapped, and ultimately confronts the baddest bad guy in the climax. It all goes down smoothly, after a fashion, since Hill’s filmmaking is crudely entertaining and since the director doesn’t skimp on exploitation elements. Coffy overflows with boobs, gore, vulgarity, wah-wah funk music, and horrific ’70s fashions. (DoQui’s pimp outfits are particularly heinous.)

          The movie has lots of lunkheaded exuberance, especially when Sid Haig shows up as Vitroni’s most sadistic lieutenant. Bearded, chrome-domed, and nearly always wearing a sick smile, Haig is Grier’s opposite number, an image of animalistic fury driven by base impulses instead of righteous ones. He’s also weirdly funny, and undoubtedly a big part of why Coffy has enjoyed decades of devotion from its cult of fervent fans.

          Brisk and brutal, Coffy is only incidentally a feminist statement, since it’s really just unapologetic trash—the picture is so shameless in its pursuit of cheap thrills that it has a kind of gutter-level integrity. That it also happens to feature a powerful female protagonist who retains her femininity and sensitivity amid horrific circumstances is an added bonus.

Coffy: FUNKY