Up in the Cellar (1970)

          Perverse, saucy, and sly, Up in the Cellar tells the satirical story of a college student who takes revenge on his university’s callous president by seducing the women in the president’s life as a means of derailing the administrator’s aspirations to political office. The storyline integrates myriad counterculture-era signifiers, including campus unrest, exhibitionism, experimental filmmaking, free love, the generation gap, political duplicity, underground revolutionaries, and more. So even though the film’s production company, B-movie supplier American International Pictures, apparently envisioned Up in the Cellar as a quasi-sequel to the company’s sexed-up 1968 flick Three in the Attic, the picture works well as a stand-alone entertainment, at least for those with a dark and dry sense of humor. For while some scenes in Up in the Cellar are outrageous, screenwriter-director Theodore J. Flicker, who scored with The President’s Analyst (1967) and later co-created the sitcom Barney Miller (1975–1982), never achieves out-and-out hilarity. Instead, Up in the Cellar takes the piss out of mainstream institutions while presenting a suicidal poet as an antihero.

          Colin Slade (Wes Stern) attends college on a poetry scholarship until a computer program determines that his rhymes fall below the university’s precise mathematical standards. Colin seeks redress with Maurice Camber (Larry Hagman), the cowboy-hat wearing college president, but Maurice proves unsympathetic. Then Colin returns home to the condemned building where he squats and watches in horror as the structure is demolished. Blaming all his difficulties on Maurice, Colin is open to suggestion when approached by a representative of Ultimate Revolution, a student group planning insurrection. Together with the UR guys, Colin makes a grand plan to kill himself by jumping from a radio tower while Maurice dedicates the tower during an opening ceremony. Yet things don’t go as planned—Maurice, sensing a photo opportunity, rescues Colin. That’s why Colin resolves to ruin Maurice’s life by seducing the administrator’s wife, daughter, and mistress. Each woman requires a different approach, so Colin adopts three new personas.

          Among the many jokes embedded into this storyline is the fact that Colin is an average-looking schnook, so the idea that he drives three women wild with desire is part male wish-fulfillment and part skewering of Sexual Revolution iconography. Somehow, Flicker makes Colin seem confused and desperate instead of horny and sleazy, so Colin’s relationship with Maurice’s daughter, Harlene (Judy Pace), is tender—even though he draws the shy girl out of her shell by persuading her to appear in a stag reel. In fact, everything in the picture follows a consistent sort of twisted logic. The performances are mostly just adequate, with, for instance, Joan Collins adding little to the role of Maurice’s astrology-addicted wife. Yet the way Stern seems perplexed by everything that’s happening says something about young people trying to comprehend the true ramifications of power at the very moment they gain influence. Hagman is a hoot, presaging his Dallas days by portraying a giddily self-serving monster.

Up in the Cellar: GROOVY

Fear in the Night (1972)

          Among the softer offerings from Britain’s Hammer Film Productions—although still quite gruesome in parts—Fear in the Night is an old-fashioned psychological thriller about a young woman who worries that she’s going mad because she repeatedly experiences assaults but cannot convince others that the assaults have occurred. The situation drives her to a paranoid frenzy, leading her to commit violence, so the film’s major narrative question is whether the circumstances are the result of malicious attackers, an odious conspiracy, or something supernatural. Unfortunately, not many viewers will feel invested in solving the central mystery of Fear in the Night, because the movie is far-fetched, repetitive, and slow-moving, problems accentuated by the overly polite and reserved performances of the actors comprising the small cast. As with most of Hammer’s pictures, Fear in the Night is an attractive film thanks to colorful photography and intricate set design, and the film also benefits from a supporting turn by Hammer regular Peter Cushing. Nonetheless, the picture is disposable.

          In contemporary England, 22-year-old Peggy (Judy Geeson) leaves her job as a caregiver in a mental-health facility—where she once received treatment for a nervous breakdown—in order to join her new husband, Robert (Ralph Bates), at the remote boarding school where he teaches. Upon arrival, Peggy meets the school’s kindly old headmaster, Michael (Cuashing), and his sexy younger wife, Molly (Joan Collins), quickly deducing that all is not right. One rather large clue: Despite Michael acting as if school is in session, no students are present. All the while, Peggy suffers assaults—or delusions of assaults—during which she’s grabbed by a one-armed man. Cowritten, produced, and directed by Hammer stalwart Jimmy Sangster, Fear in the Night strives for complexity, instead delivering underwhelming results thanks to silly contrivances and thin characterizations. Still, the movie has a couple of adequate jolts, some imaginative imagery, and an enjoyably overwrought finale during which everything that came before is explained in almost laughable detail.

Fear in the Night: FUNKY

Zero to Sixty (1978)

A noisy action comedy with distasteful implications of romantic attraction between a 16-year-old girl and a man old enough to be her grandfather, Zero to Sixty wastes a spirited performance by versatile film/TV leading man Darren McGavin on a wispy plot. Some might find the picture borderline watchable because it features lots of cartoonish characters and car chases, but the combination of pointlessness and stupidity is hard to overcome. The film’s setup is convoluted and questionable. Briefly, McGavin plays an everyman who loses his home and his job following a nasty divorce, then falls in with a motley car-repossession crew. He’s teamed with Larry (Denise Nickerson), an obnoxious teenaged girl who lives in a trailer, and they cruise Los Angeles trying to reclaim cars from deadbeats. A typical scene involves Larry seizing a motorcycle from a biker gang, the members of which pursue her until McGavin’s character shows up to pretend he’s a cop and wrangle Larry free from danger. The movie also supports a gruesome subplot inspired by the Jimmy Hoffa story, because the protagonists discover the body of a murdered labor leader in the trunk of a car. McGavin gives the kind of exasperated, frenetic performance that one might expect to find in a Disney movie, but none of the other performers match his deft style. Nickerson is so loud and overbearing that she's unpleasant to watch, and the same can be said of supporting players Joan Collins (as a glamorous deadbeat) and Sylvia Miles (as the boss of the repo crew). Adding to the film’s death-by-a-thousand cuts vibe, Lyle Waggoner shows up for one scene as a bartender whose flirty patter sends McGavin’s character into a gay panic, and the awful musical score waffles between dopey stings and disco-inflected muck.

Zero to Sixty: LAME

The Big Sleep (1978)

          Three years after playing Raymond Chandler’s famous detective Phillip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely (1975), which was set in the 1940s, Robert Mitchum reprised the role in this film, which is set in the 1970s. Making the time-shift between movies even more awkward, The Big Sleep writer-director Michael Winner employs hokey devices straight out of Chandler’s Depression-era fiction, such as femme-fatale types and hardboiled interior monologue presented as voiceover. Yet in other respects, The Big Sleep is quite modern, thanks to ample amounts of gore and nudity. Therefore, it’s an old-fashioned movie filled with things that turn off most fans of old-fashioned movies.

          Moreover, Winner risked walking on hallowed cinematic ground with this project, since the first movie version of The Big Sleep—starring Humphrey Bogart and released in 1946—is considered a classic of the original film-noir cycle. Given this tricky context, it almost doesn’t even matter that Winner’s version of The Big Sleep is an adequate little mystery/thriller. In order to satisfy all concerned parties, the movie needed to be superlative, which it is not. Furthermore, Winner inexplicably changed the location from Los Angeles (as in the original Chandler novel) to London, and then populated the cast with a random mixture of Brits and Yanks. Since nothing inherently English happens, the jump across the pond is a head-scratcher from a conceptual standpoint.

          In any event, the convoluted story begins when Marlowe is invited to the home of a rich American, retired General Sternwood (James Stewart). Sternwood hires Marlowe to scare off a would-be blackmailer. Meanwhile, Marlowe receives seductive advances from Sternwood’s adult daughters, the cynical Charlotte (Sarah Miles) and the provocative Camilla (Candy Clark). As per the Chandler story, the seemingly simple job opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, eventually placing Marlowe in the midst of betrayals, double-crosses, and murders.

           Winner hits the sleazy elements of the narrative hard, as in scenes of Camilla posing nude for a pornographer and various incidents of people getting shot through the skull. The material is so grim and the story is so bewildering that The Big Sleep isn’t fun to watch, per se, even though it boasts abundant sex appeal thanks to Clark, Miles, and costars Joan Collins and Diana Quick. Concurrently, the men in the supporting cast provide gradations of menace, with Colin Blakely, Richard Boone, Edward Fox, and Oliver Reed playing villainous types. (Offering glimmers of gallantry are the characters portrayed by Harry Andrews and John Mills.) However, none of the film’s performances or technical contributions is extraordinary, so Mitchum dominates in the absence of anything more interesting. As in Farewell, My Lovely, Mitchum’s seen-it-all demeanor suits the Marlowe character perfectly.

The Big Sleep: FUNKY

The Stud (1978)

          Disco-era smut that tries for shock value but merely achieves trashiness, The Stud was adapted from one of Jackie Collins’ myriad bestselling novels about the sex lives of rich people, and it stars the author’s sister, Joan Collins, as a bitchy nymphomaniac who chews up and spits out the handsome young man she takes on as her employee and her lover. If Joan Collins’ character represents life in the fast lane, then leading man Oliver Tobias’ character represents discarded junk on the side of the road. Despite giving some lip service to character development and moral consequences, The Stud is nothing more than a glossy survey of attractive people conniving and copulating. It’s also about as enjoyable as an STD. The characters in the movie are uniformly horrible to each other, the “glamorous” settings seem devoid of genuine pleasure, and director Quentin Masters’ weird penchant for fisheye lenses—combined with the disjointed musical underscore—give The Stud the flavor of a horror movie. If the goal was to make something erotic, then the team behind The Stud failed miserably.

          Joan Collins, icy and vampish, plays Fontaine Khaled, trophy wife of a Middle Eastern businessman. For amusement, she spends her husband’s money on a discotheque that she uses as her personal playground, and she hires Tony Blake (Tobias) to manage the club, with the understanding that he should be sexually available to her at all times. Whenever she’s with her jet-set friends, Fontaine flaunts her boy toy, even complaining at one point that while he possesses stamina, he lacks carnal sophistication: “Do you know when I first met him, Tony thought the 69 was a bottle of Scotch?” Despite enjoying the perks of his kept-man lifestyle, Tony bristles at Fontaine’s humiliating treatment, and he dallies with other women. Things really spiral when—wait for it!—Tony meets Fontaine’s pretty stepdaughter, Alex (Emma Jacobs), who is as virginal as Fontaine is slatternly. Sensing that Tony is drifting from her, Fontaine offers Tony’s services to her friends, female and male alike, during a lengthy but uninteresting orgy scene that involves drugs, a massive indoor swimming pool, and Collins flying through the air on an ivy-coated swing while wearing lingerie. (During the orgy, one of Fontaine’s gay male friends dismisses women in general with the memorable line, “As much as I appreciate the extra orifice, they bore me.”)

          About the only palatable sequences in the picture are long, plotless montages of disco dancing set to such slinky hits as “Every 1’s a Winner” and “Love Is Like Oxygen.” Nonetheless, someone must have bought tickets to see The Stud, because the Collins sisters collaborated on a quickie sequel, The Bitch, which was released in England in 1979 and slithered into the American market some time afterward. Both The Stud and The Bitch found new life on cable and home video after Joan Collins made a smash on American television playing Alexis Carrington Colby on the nighttime soap Dynasty (1981-1989).

The Stud: LAME

Tales That Witness Madness (1973)

          UK-based Amicus Productions, a second-tier competitor to Hammer Films, earned a niche in the horror marketplace by making a series of anthology movies, nasty little numbers featuring terse vignettes grouped by framing stories. Examples include Tales from the Crypt (1972) and The Vault of Horror (1973). The success of these pictures inevitably led other companies to ape the Amicus formula, hence this silly project from World Film Services. Although Tales That Witness Madness is a respectable endeavor thanks to decent production values and the presence of familiar actors, the script by Jennifer Jayne (writing as Jay Fairbank) is an uninspired pastiche of hoary shock-fiction tropes. There’s not a genuine scare in Tales That Witness Madness, and most of the humor is of the unintentional sort. Plus, the longest story is almost interminably boring.

          The picture begins with a shrink, Dr. Tremayne (Donald Pleasence), showing a colleague around a psychiatric facility where four odd patients are housed. As each patient is presented, his or her tale appears in flashback. The first bit, “Mr. Tiger,” features a little boy whose bickering parents discover the lad’s imaginary friend may not be imaginary. Next comes “Penny Farthing,” a drab yarn about an antique dealer getting possessed by the figure in an old painting. In “Mel,” the best vignette of the batch, an artist (Michael Jayston) brings home an old tree and then decides he likes the tree better than his wife (Joan Collins). The final sequence, “Luau,” is a tedious tale about people caught up in a ritual-sacrifice scheme. Except for “Mel,” which has a pithy, Twilight Zone-esque tone, the stories drone on lifelessly. (“Mr. Tiger” is fine, but the “twist” ending is so obvious from the first frame that there’s no tension.)

          The actors all deliver serviceable work, with young Russell Lewis (as the boy in “Mr. Tiger”) and Jayston (the artist in “Mel”) providing the most vivid performances. As for the leading ladies, Collins, who inexplicably spent much of the ’70s appearing in bad horror movies, does her usual shrewish-sexpot routine, while Hollywood actress Kim Novak—playing the lead in “Luau”—drains all vitality from the movie with her colorless non-acting. Director Freddie Francis, the former cinematographer who directed numerous frightfests for Hammer and Amicus (including the aforementioned Tales from the Crypt, among other horror anthology movies), handles this project with his characteristic aplomb, but even his smooth style can only compensate so much for the enervated nature of the stories.

Tales That Witness Madness: FUNKY

The Great Adventure (1975)

An abysmal Italian production that tries to blend elements of Jack London-style adventure with tropes from cowboy cinema, The Great Adventure would be rightly relegated to complete obscurity were it not for the presence of two familiar Hollywood B-listers, Joan Collins and Jack Palance, who are among the most indiscriminate selectors of material in film history. That they only play supporting roles with limited screen time should make no difference to anyone, because even hardcore fans of the actors would be hard-pressed to find redeeming values here. The story begins when a little boy living in the wintry Alaskan wilderness bonds with a wild German Shepherd while out hunting one day with his father—to the strains of saccharine music, the boy extracts the dog from a bear trap, and then the dog saves the boy from a wolf attack. Next comes the first of many major story shifts. The boy’s father ventures away from the family cabin for supplies, leaving the boy alone with his teenaged sister. The father dies. Then two trappers who are lost in the wilderness seek shelter with the children. Eventually, all of the characters travel to a small town ruled by gambler/landowner William Bates (Palance). One of the trappers is killed, and the other embarks on a romance with Bates’ saloon operator, Sonia Kendall (Collins). And so it goes from there—The Great Adventure can’t decide if it’s an outdoors survival tale, a boy-and-his-dog melodrama, a violent action story revolving around the evil machinations of Palance’s character, or an Old West romance. Exacerbating the chaotic storyline are cruddy production values, spastic editing, treacly music, and—of course, given the film’s Italian origin—terrible audio dubbing. Oh, and Collins and Palance phone in terrible performances, adding the final insult to unwise viewers who sample this bilge.

The Great Adventure: SQUARE

Empire of the Ants (1977)

It’s not as if the world needed another schlocky H.G. Wells adaptation from producer-director Bert I. Gordon, following his execrable 1976 giant-animal movie The Food of the Gods. Yet apparently that one did well enough for American-International Pictures to release a follow-up—and while Empire of the Ants is an awful movie virtually devoid of redeeming values, it’s moderately better than its predecessor. Both films are adapted from Wells in the loosest sense, borrowing merely the fantasy-fiction legend’s titles and central gimmicks. Therefore, as in The Food of the Gods, the plot of Empire of the Ants is mostly Gordon’s own—not a good thing. The setting is the Florida Everglades, where Marilyn (John Collins) is a real-estate con artist. Escorting a boatload of losers to whom she hopes to sell worthless swampland, Marilyn leads her group deep into the wilderness, unaware that illegally dumped radioactive waste has transformed local ants into monsters the size of grizzly bears. How can the ants function at this overgrown stature, given their rail-thin limbs? Why do the ants suddenly develop a taste for human flesh? And why are the ants the only animals transformed by the radioactive waste? If you expect answers to these questions, you’ve never seen a Bert I. Gordon movie. Instead of logic—or, for that matter, excitement—viewers get tacky scenes in which bland footage of real ants is awkwardly superimposed onto location shots in order to create the unpersuasive illusion of large creatures running amok. Gordon also humiliates his actors by forcing them to wrestle with large mock-ups of ant torsos during close-ups of bloody attacks. None of the performers delivers laudatory work, though eye-candy starlet Pamela Susan Shoop fills out her skintight costume well. Luckily for all concerned, Gordon stopped pillaging Wells’ oeuvre after this flop crawled in and out of theaters.

Empire of the Ants: LAME

The Devil Within Her (1975)

          Originally titled I Don’t Want to Be Born for its domestic release in the UK, then renamed The Devil Within Her for American exhibition, this supernatural howler may be the silliest of the myriad evil-baby movies that proliferated in the post-Rosemary’s Baby era. Joan Collins, as glamorously awful as ever, plays Lucy Carlesi, the English wife of an Italian businessman. When the movie begins, Lucy moans and screams through the difficult delivery of her first child, a sequence so extreme that attending physician Dr. Finch (Donald Pleasence) remarks, “It’s as if he doesn’t want to be born!” But born he is, a black-haired, 12-pound tot named Nicholas, and trouble soon follows. In a serious of ridiculous scenes, the newborn bites people with teeth he shouldn’t have yet, scratches their faces with nails that shouldn’t be as sharp as they are, and even commits impossible crimes like shoving people into rivers. Although Lucy’s husband, Gino (Ralph Bates), stupidly ignores the obvious, Lucy realizes that little Nicholas is a problem child. Making a rather dramatic leap of logic, she determines that her pregnancy was cursed by the evil dwarf whose affections she spurned when they worked together in a strip club.
          Thus informed, Lucy seeks assistance from Gino’s sister, Albana (Eileen Atkins), who conveniently happens to be a nun. Cue exorcism! Powered by an insane score that mixes influences from Indian, Italian, and progressive-rock music, The Devil Within Her glides along smoothly for a while, with logical characterizations and sensible scenes complementing the gonzo premise. But once the movie really gets cooking, logic and sense give way to absurdity and goofiness. Atkins’ performance gets more bug-eyed and frenetic, Bates’ Italian accent fades in and out, and Collins’ breathy speaking voice grows more irritating. (It’s a sure sign of trouble when Donald Pleasence comes across as the most restrained cast member.) The finale of the movie approaches a kind of so-bad-it’s-good campiness, and the filmmakers get points for making it clear that no character is safe from the nasty newborn. Nonetheless, calling The Devil Within Her anything but awful would be irresponsible.

The Devil Within Her: LAME

Sunburn (1979)

          There isn’t much to enjoy about a comedy-romance caper flick that’s neither amusing nor seductive, so even though Sunburn offers some kitschy distractions, the picture is so bland and uninvolving that it feels much longer than its actual 99-minute running time.
          The premise is fine, because Sunburn is about an insurance investigator who travels to Acapulco in order to sniff out possible fraud related to a multimillion-dollar policy; he recruits an actress/model to pose as his wife, and they fall for each other while exposing the bad guys. Where it all goes wrong is in the casting and execution. The leading man is Charles Grodin, a comic actor whose style is so bone-dry that if he doesn’t have a great scene partner, he’s left flailing; seeing him slide dialogue toward an unresponsive costar is like watching someone lob tennis balls at a mannequin. The leading lady, and unfortunately the picture’s biggest impediment, is ’70s sex goddess Farrah Fawcett-Majors, at the apex of her sun-kissed prettiness. Although Fawcett looks lovely in a series of revealing gowns and swimsuits, she’s so vapid one actually starts to forget her presence while she’s still onscreen: After the initial impact of her dazzling smile wears off, there’s simply nothing about her to sustain interest.

          To cut the actors some slack, they’re not helped by an inept screenplay that wastes all the potential of the premise, bombarding the audience with stupid attempts at bedroom farce and high-stakes action. The bedroom farce comes courtesy of a boozy nympho (played by Joan Collins in an epically awful performance), and the high-stakes action features trite gimmicks like a car chase and an underwater assault on a scuba diver. In the most painfully stupid sequence, Fawcett-Majors and Grodin drive a car into a bullring, leading to an unfunny fight between an automobile and a steer. All of this nonsense is scored with gruesomely bad disco music, complete with a cringe-inducing theme song by Graham Gouldman, of 10cc fame, who should have known better. Poor Art Carney, quickly descending from the heights of his amazing ’70s revival, does his usual professional work as Grodin’s sidekick, and his scenes are among the movie’s only redeeming values.

Sunburn: LAME

Tales from the Crypt (1972) & The Vault of Horror (1973)

          Years before the cult-favorite 1989-1996 HBO series reintroduced the title Tales from the Crypt into popular culture, the notoriously gory short stories that first appeared in the EC Comics periodical of that name inspired a pair of British anthology films. Here’s the backstory: Published by William Gaines, EC Comics’ horror titles were scandalized during a mid-1950s witch hunt that blamed comic books for juvenile delinquency. Gaines’ books were easy targets, with their viscera-laden morality tales about nefarious people suffering horrifically ironic fates; the vignettes were like O. Henry yarns with dismemberments. All of Gaines’ horror books were canceled as a result of censorship pressures—yet once the passage of two decades made lighthearted bloodshed socially acceptable again, Amicus Productions, the English company that briefly competed with Hammer Films for dominance of the lucrative Brit-horror market, licensed a slew of EC stories for a pair of films.

          Unfortunately, neither movie is particularly good. One gets the impression that brisk shooting schedules were to blame, since the acting and photography feel rushed, and, as a result, neither picture evokes the beloved shadowy atmosphere of the source material. The first picture, Tales from the Crypt, includes a familiar framing device: A character called the Crypt Keeper (Ralph Richardson) gathers several people into a mysterious tomb and exposes them to visions of horrible things they might or might not have done. Instead of the cackling cadaver from the comics or the HBO series, however, Richardson is just a bitchy old Englishman, sort of like an otherworldly schoolmaster.

          The five episodes in Tales from the Crypt are unnecessarily long-winded, though Tales benefits from the participation of Hammer Films stalwarts including director Freddie Francis and actor Peter Cushing. In the most generic episode, “All Through the House,” Joan Collins plays a murderous wife who gets stalked by a psycho on Christmas Eve, and in the most sadistic story, “Blind Alleys,” Nigel Patrick plays a former Army major who runs a home for the blind with ruthless efficiency until his charges exact bloody revenge. The picture also features “Wish You Were Here,” the umpteenth variation of the old short story “The Monkey’s Paw,” about people who get into trouble by making unwise wishes. Everyone delivers professional work in front of and behind the camera, but it’s all quite rote.

          The follow-up flick, The Vault of Horror, features more of the same, albeit with more efficiency and less impressive marquee value. In the most amusing episode, “The Neat Job,” a memorably prissy Terry-Thomas plays a clean freak who drives his wife to murderous distraction, leading to a gruesomely appropriate fate. Several Vault episodes go the supernatural route, including “Drawn and Quartered,” featuring onetime Dr. Who star Tom Baker as an artist using voodoo to kill people who stole his work, and “This Trick’ll Kill You,” with Curt Jurgens as a magician who steals a gag from the wrong snake-charmer. The problem with these movies, aside from their unrelenting gruesomeness, is the formulaic story structure: villain does creepy stuff, villain gets bloody comeuppance. Some episodes have more zing than others, but the novelty wears off quickly.

Tales from the Crypt: FUNKY

The Vault of Horror: FUNKY