Out of Season (1975)

          Even if one ignores the story’s implications of incest, Out of Season is a creepy little number. Cliff Robertson plays an American who visits the seaside British hotel run by his old flame, played by Vanessa Redgrave, then rekindles their affair—even as he sleeps with her adult daughter, played by pouty-mouthed sexpot Susan George. Oh, and more than half the film’s scenes comprise bitter arguments, with the mother and daughter spitting venom at each other while the ex-lovers trade vicious accusations and criticisms. This stuff never quite reaches the level of high art, but Alan Bridges’ stately direction, an intelligent script, and three strong performances give Out of Season a certain dark magnetism. And even though the picture is quite talky, one could do worse than listening to Redgrave and Robertson issuing reams of dialogue. George acquits herself well, compensating for one-dimensional shrillness by raising the movie’s temperature considerably during erotic scenes. It’s not fun to watch three people eviscerate each other, but Out of Season holds the viewer’s attention for nearly all of its 90 moody minutes. As for the film’s provenance, reports differ—some sources indicate that the picture is based on a play, though the credits are vague, and it appears the British dramatist Harold Pinter was at one point set to direct the picture. (He made his cinematic directorial debut with the previous year’s Butley, a similarly cruel film.)

          In any event, Joe (Robertson) shows up one day and surprises Ann (Redgrave), whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years. Both were married to other people in the intervening period, and Ann is caught in a nasty cycle of squabbles with her daughter, Joanna (George), who resents living in a tiny town. Watching Ann and Joe fall back in love drives Joanna mad with jealously, so she throws herself at Joe, who’s too much of a drunken, self-involved cad to refuse her. There’s more to the picture than that, but those are the broad strokes, so Out of Season unfolds like a thriller—how far will Joe take his illicit affair with Joanna, and when will Joanna spring her trap by revealing what’s happening to her mother? The story isn’t quite meaty enough to support an entire feature, so the narrative energy flags periodically; Bridges and his collaborators would have done well to add a subplot or two. Taken for what it is, Out of Season gets the job done. Robertson’s macho intensity strikes sparks against Redgrave’s pained coldness, and George plays sexual games with such uninhibited insouciance that she’s simultaneously seductive and unbearable, just the right toxic mixture for the situation. Pity the filmmakers didn’t stick the landing, but so be it.

Out of Season: FUNKY

Tintorera (1977)

Mexican shlockmeister René Cardona Jr. strikes again with this lurid Jaws rip-off about a mammoth tiger shark preying upon sexy singles near a Mexican beach resort. The movie is abysmal, of course, but Tintorera delivers the goods in three respects—it’s gory as hell, the production values are better than one normally expects from Cardona, and there’s an enormous amount of nudity. Cheap thrills aside, however, Tintorera is a painful to watch because of the stupidity on display both in front of and behind the camera. The characterizations range from nonexistent to superficial; the story is a muddled blend of horror and melodrama; the picture features several distasteful scenes of real animals being killed; and the dialogue is marred by bad acting, ghastly writing, and (for actors not native to English) sloppy dubbing. The narrative revolves around two Mexican studs, Miguel (Andrés García) and Steven (Hugo Stiglitz), who make their living as shark hunters near a resort. The studs hook up with a sexy British tourist, Gabriella (Susan George), for an idyllic period of hookups and threesomes. Tintorera is basically just a compendium of scenes featuring attractive people screwing, stripping, and swimming, and once in a while the shark shows up for a snack. Further, it seems as if the studs are the only people who get the idea of fighting back, even though the shark’s body count is astronomical. The vibe of Tintorera is weirdly lackadaisical, although the intensity of the gore occasionally demands attention; scenes of a shark with someone’s head in its teeth, and of the dismembered lower half of a human body floating to the bottom of the ocean, are particularly realistic. Yet the kills aren’t the least bit scary, especially because Cardona employs a ridiculous device of playing heavy breathing on the soundtrack whenever the shark approaches a victim. Huh? Still, for those who care about such things, the movie’s eye-candy quotient is significant, with starlets Priscilla Barnes, George, and especially Fiona Lewis generously sharing their physical gifts. Even the actors playing the studs get into the exhibitionist act.

Tintorera: LAME

Straw Dogs (1971)

          Director Sam Peckinpah liked to play rough, whether he was bombarding viewers with slow-motion bloodshed or defying good taste by showcasing the terrible behavior of evil characters, but in many ways he never put audiences through more abuse than he did with Straw Dogs. A complicated movie with a simple story, the picture is frequently misunderstood as a revenge tale, but a close examination of its storyline reveals something more devious; the motivation for the horrific violence the protagonist commits during the film’s climax is ambiguous, layered, and provocative.

          Dustin Hoffman stars as David Sumner, an American mathematician who receives a grant to work in a remote English village that happens to be the hometown of his wife, Amy (Susan George). We meet the Sumners at the same time we meet the residents of the strange little village, so in just a few moments, Peckinpah and co-writer David Zelag Goodman establish how woefully out of place David is in a clannish, working-class enclave. Amy, meanwhile, is quite literally right at home; she’s also young and unsophisticated enough to think she can get away with flirtatious behavior around local young men who drink themselves stupid at the neighborhood pub every night. Out of boredom and a childish desire to be the center of attention in her household, Amy wears revealing clothes and even, at one point, parades naked in front of local men who are working on the remote farmhouse she and David have rented.

          Meanwhile, an adult simpleton named Henry Niles (David Warner) lurks around the village, taunted by everyone because of some past offense in which he menaced a young girl. As the film progresses, these divergent elements—combined with a running trope of hyped-up young men, led by Charlie Venner (Del Henney), lusting after Amy and openly mocking David—come together during a bloody siege that comprises nearly the entire last half-hour of the movie.

          Often cited in academic studies of cinematic violence, Straw Dogs is ostensibly a meditation on the idea of a civilized man pushed to savagery by circumstance, but it’s the nature of those circumstances that makes the film so thorny. It’s giving nothing away to say that Amy is assaulted partway through the movie, since the attack is foreshadowed almost from the first scene. However, people who talk about Straw Dogs often suggest the violence David subsequently commits is a response to his wife’s violation. It’s not, because Amy never tells her husband about the crime. Instead, David’s descent into brutality is triggered by random events. The implication, then, is that David was churning with animalistic fury all along, and that he was, psychically speaking, waiting for an excuse to unleash his inner demons.

          This nuance helps define Straw Dogs as a deeply cynical film, because if Peckinpah had simply told a story about a man responding to an unspeakable crime, the picture would have become something like Death Wish (1974). Straw Dogs is entirely different. It’s an unpleasant film to watch, of course—there’s nothing fun about two hours of abuse, murder, rape, and excruciating tension—and the film has been debated and dissected so many times that whether it actually delivers meaningful insights is best left for individual viewers to decide. What’s beyond question, though, is that Straw Dogs represents Peckinpah’s artistry at its most forceful—and perverse.

          Plus, the movie contains one of Hoffman’s nerviest performances, a meticulous balancing act in which Hoffman charts tiny, moment-to-moment changes in his character’s psyche while also giving himself over to scenes in which his character loses control. Leading lady George is hopelessly outclassed by Hoffman (a talent disparity that actually serves the story), and the English players portraying the locals all contribute salty flavors. Warner, whose performance is uncredited, stands out with his disquieting mixture of innocence and menace.

Straw Dogs: GROOVY

A Small Town in Texas (1976)

Man, if this one lived up to its poster, the movie would be killer. Unfortunately, A Small Town in Texas is not the lean, mean exploitation flick one might expect. It awkwardly straddles drive-in sleaziness and legitimate dramatic terrain, and a movie trying to be two things succeeds in being neither. For instance, leading man Timothy Bottoms, a strong presence when playing sensitive souls, is miscast as a rootin’-tootin’ wild man with a penchant for bikes, booze, and brawling, so the actor’s endearing persona is neutralized and the potential of the role is unrealized. When we meet Poke Jackson (Bottoms), he’s just gotten out of jail following a pot bust, and he’s ready for vengeance against Sheriff Duke (Bo Hopkins), the small-town cop who sent Poke up the river. Poke’s grudge against the lawman grows deeper when he realizes that the whole time he’s been in jail, Duke has been courting Poke’s girl, Mary Lee (Susan George). Had that been the whole story, A Small Town in Texas could have been a tidy little package of low-rent nastiness. Yet screenwriter William Norton adds a layer of political corruption that never quite coalesces into a worthwhile subplot, with Duke and rancher C.J. Crane (Morgan Woodward) executing some sort of power grab over their municipality. As a result of this extraneous material, the promising Duke/Poke tension gets dissipated, and poor Mary Lee gets relegated to whimpering while Duke threatens bodily harm against her once-and-future significant other. The action in A Small Town in Texas doesn’t get underway until the 40-minute mark, and even though things eventually become gruesome—beatings, deaths, explosions—the movie never tips over into the gleeful excess of gen-yoo-wine Southern-fried trash cinema. It’s all a bit too restrained, with tasteful widescreen compositions and solid production values, so in the most important particulars (for this sort of picture, that is), A Small Town in Texas fails to impress. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

A Small Town in Texas: LAME

Fright (1971)

          Proving that John Carpenter and his collaborators on Halloween (1971) weren’t the first people to juxtapose babysitters and psychopaths, the passable British thriller Fright stars Susan George as Amanda, a sexy teen tasked with watching a young boy on the night a killer lays siege to the boy’s home. Eventually, it becomes clear that the invader is actually the boy’s father, Brian (Ian Bannen), a nutter who just escaped from the loony bin. He’s been incarcerated ever since he tried to kill the boy and his mother, Brian’s now-ex-wife, Helen (Honor Blackman). On the night during which the movie takes place, Helen and her new husband try to enjoy their first evening out since the original Brian episode, so, of course, their departure coincides with Brian’s return. Director Peter Collinson, an eclectic storyteller who made a handful of tense thrillers in addition to action movies and dramas, helms Fright competently, layering on exactly the elements one might expect to find in a picture of this sort. The camera angles are low and shadowy, the jolts are cheap and sudden, and the atmosphere is laden with sex.

          George spends the entire movie in a purple minidress, her tan legs on constant display, and for a good portion of the picture, the front of her dress is torn open, making her white brassiere a de facto costar. And while George’s performance is merely adequate—she’s best when expressing a mixture of disgust and fear while being violated—her sexiness compensates somewhat for her dramatic shortcomings. Bannen’s performance is florid but imbued with sympathetic tonalities, so even though he’s playing a cartoonish madman, it’s possible to feel for his anguished plight. And the elegant Ms. Blackman, best known for playing Pussy Galore in the 007 classic Goldfinger (1964), acquits herself well in a one-note role. However, Fright isn’t particularly frightening, though it’s certainly creepy; in particular, the transgressive moment when Brian assaults Amanda while thinking she’s actually Helen is enough to make any viewer uncomfortable. Plus, the complicated implications of the ending retroactively add a bit of substance to the rest of the picture.

Fright: FUNKY

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)

          While not actually a good movie in terms of artistic achievement and/or narrative ambition, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is in some perverse ways the epitome of its genre. Throughout the ’70s, filmmakers made innumerable ennui-drenched flicks about young people hitting the road for crime sprees that represented a sort of anti-Establishment activism. In the best such pictures, the wandering youths articulated their angst so well that their actions felt meaningful; in the worst such pictures, the basic premise was simply an excuse for exploitative thrills. Since Dirty Mary Crazy Larry exists somewhere between these extremes, it’s emblematic of the whole early-’70s road-movie headspace. The picture also has just enough cleverness, reflected in flavorful dialogue and oblique camera angles, to validate the existence of genuine thematic material, even in the context of a trashy lovers-on-the-run picture.

          Peter Fonda stars as Larry, an iconoclastic driver pulling crimes to earn money for a new racecar. Riding shotgun during Larry’s adventure is Deke (Adam Roarke), an accomplice/mechanic. During the movie’s exciting opening sequence, Deke breaks into the home of a grocery-store manager (Roddy McDowall) and holds the man’s family hostage while Larry waltzes into the store to collect the contents of the store’s safe. Unfortunately, Larry’s most recent one-night stand, Mary (Susan George), tracks Larry down during his getaway—she steals his keys and threatens to tell the cops what he’s doing unless she lets him tag along. Thus, Deke, Larry, and Mary form an unlikely trio zooming across the Southwest with police in hot pursuit. Working from a novel by Richard Unekis, director John Hough and his assorted screenwriters do a fine job of balancing talky interludes with high-speed chase scenes, creating an ominous sense of inevitability about the drama’s impending resolution.

          Still, the characterizations are thin—although the crooks’ main pursuer, Sheriff Everett Franklin (Vic Morrow), is an enjoyably eccentric small-town lawman—and the performances are erratic. Roarke anchors the getaway scenes with a quiet intensity that complements Fonda’s enjoyably cavalier persona. Englishwoman George, however, is a screeching nuisance, presumably impeded by the task of mimicking redneck patois. She’s so annoying, in fact, that it’s easy to laugh when Fonda berates her with this bizarre ultimatum: “So help me, if you try another stunt like that, I’m gonna braid your tits!” Dirty Mary Crazy Larry zooms along as fast as the cars featured onscreen, delivering several nerve-jangling crash scenes and generally setting an interesting trap for the reckless protagonists. Yet the movie’s ending changes everything, and the finale is so quintessentially ’70s that it’s reason enough to check out this hard-charging romp.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: GROOVY

Mandingo (1975)

          This lurid story of sex and violence in the slavery-era South stands alongside The Klansman (1974) as one of the most reviled race dramas of the ’70s. Shameless even by producer Dino De Laurentiis’ déclassé standards, Mandingo is an overwrought soap opera about Falconhurst, a 19th-century plantation owned by aging monster Warren Maxwell (James Mason). The callous patriarch is preoccupied with getting his son Hammond (Perry King) hitched so he can produce an heir, and with buying a Mandingan slave in order to breed “suckers” (a nasty slang term for black babies) who’ll fetch high price tags. However, most of the screen time is devoted not to the master of Falconhurst but to his son’s conflicted relationship with various slaves. Hammond falls in love with his “bed wench,” Ellen (Brenda Sykes), growing closer to her once he enters a loveless marriage with his drunken shrew of a cousin, Blanche (Susan George). Then, when Hammond buys a Mandingo named Mede (Ken Norton), who brings glory to Falconhurst by defeating opponents in brutal bare-knuckle brawls, Hammond buys into the delusion that he’s found a friend. When the threads of Hammond’s life converge in tragedy, however, his true nature as the son of a heartless slave owner emerges.
          Mandingo is a strange movie, because on a technical level, it’s executed with considerable artistry: Richard H. Kline’s shadowy cinematography, Maurice Jarre’s menacing main theme, and the evocative locations create an oppressive mood. Yet journeyman director Richard Fleischer lets scenes run wild, with George flailing and screaming like a wild animal, and the startlingly miscast Mason camping it up as a greasy old son of a bitch who constantly rests his feet against slave children because he believes doing so will cause his rheumatism to drain out of the soles of his feet. One major problem is that the movie never fully develops any of the slave characters, so the slaves come across as caricatured narrative mechanisms instead of people. And though it’s a given that the movie is tasteless, the inevitable scene when Blanche demands sex from Mede is beyond stereotypical, the bloody fight scene in the middle of the picture is beyond excessive, and Mede’s final fate is beyond vile. Mandingo also seems to take itself quite seriously, which is confusing: Did the people making this movie actually think they were tackling a serious subject with the appropriate respect? Still, Mandingo can’t be entirely dismissed because it’s watchable despite a fleshy 127-minute running time. That said, the semi-sequel Drum (1976) has the same lurid appeal without Mandingo’s pretentions to relevance.

Mandingo: FUNKY

Lola (1970)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s this movie from 1970 starring Charles Bronson as an American porno novelist living in London whose affair with a 16-year-old girl gets him kicked out of England, so the lovers make a go at marriage once they relocate to the U.S. Oh, and the movie’s directed by Richard Donner, the fella behind such manly-man romps as Lethal Weapon, The Omen, and Superman. You didn’t stop me. Guess you haven’t heard this one after all. Not a big surprise. Lola rates pretty high on the obscurity scale, probably because Bronson fans don’t savor watching the actor whom an Italian critic once famously dubbed “Il Brute” doing the whole sensitive-artist thing. It also doesn’t help that the version currently available on DVD bears the pointless alternate title Twinky, and features a print that looks like it was processed through intestinal secretions instead of photochemical solutions. Still, the movie’s far from awful, even if it belongs to a pervy subgenre depicting with-it older dudes nailing precocious young women (Breezy, Lolita, Petulia, etc.). It’s a kick to see Bronson playing an articulate adult instead of a gun-toting troglodyte, and Donner moves the thing along at a killer pace (most scenes feature some sort of movement, with characters climbing up and down ladders or stairs, and so on); the director also employs mod gimmicks like flash cuts to transition between scenes. The supporting cast is enjoyable, especially Trevor Howard as Lola’s lecherous granddad, and playing Lola is Susan George, a year away from her memorable performance in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. Since she was actually 19-ish when she made the picture, I suppose it’s kosher to remark that she’s awfully sexy in her little schoolgirl outfits, even if her character whines more or less constantly. Lola boasts some of the most ear-splittingly awful music ever used in movies, and at least one priceless line of dialogue: “I make one uncool move with a nutty 16-year-old kid, and suddenly my whole world is turned upside down.” In my book, listening to Bronson chew his way through vintage hipster talk like that is a sure sign that one has discovered a truly watchable cinematic oddity.

Lola: FUNKY