Spectre (1977)

(This is based on the film’s longer UK cut with a bit of nudity and more sleaze that never made it to NBC at the time, for obvious reasons)

Former top criminologist turned occult detective William Sebastian (Robert Culp) calls his estranged former friend and associate, alcoholic sleazebag and medical doctor “Ham” Hamilton (Gig Young) for help in his newest case. He really needs a doctor, too, for somebody is regularly using magic to pierce his heart, leaving him not in ideal fighting shape. Ham doesn’t really believe in anything occult, and the men’s parting of ways some time ago might have had something to do with their difference in opinion. Ham is beginning to change his mind when Sebastian’s witch assistant Lilith (Majel Barrett) gives him a draught that causes an instant aversion to alcohol, and even more so when an oversexed succubus version of Sebastian’s client, one Anitra Cyon (Ann Bell) appears and tries to seduce our hero into what looks a lot like an erection based heart attack to me, or as much as a TV movie from 1977 can suggest that. But don’t worry, hitting her with the right page in an occult tome does get rid of her nicely.

After that business is through, we finally learn what the real Anitry Cyon wants from Sebastian and Ham: find out if she’s assuming right and her decadent brother Geoffrey (James Villiers) has indeed been possessed by EVIL, and when necessary, kill him. So off to Great Britain our heroes jet, piloted by Anitra’s other brother Mitri (John Hurt) who may or may not already be under a malevolent influence himself. There are further attempts on our heroes’ lives and virtue (such as it is), of course, action archaeology happens, and exposition tells of the time when druids and Christian priests teamed up to imprison Asmodeus.

This pretty incredible artefact directed by Clive Donner is another of the many attempts of Gene Roddenberry to make a successful non-Star Trek TV show, this time around with British money. I’m not surprised Spectre never made it to series, because it is absolutely bonkers. What we have here is a mix of a Dennis Wheatley style occult thriller minus Wheatley’s actual ideas about occultism (though fortunately also minus his unpleasant politics) with the toned down “sexy” fantasies of a middle-aged guy with very peculiar interests who never left the swinger party mindset behind, paired with the sort of random crap you put in your movie not because it is a good idea to use it, but because you think it is absolutely awesome.

As a serious horror film the result is of course pretty terrible, but it’s also ridiculously fun to watch, having given up all restraint that could turn it into a proper movie and replaced it with the mandate to just make as much absurd fun, and quite a bit embarrassing stuff, up as possible. So of course Sir Geoffrey proves his decadence by only employing young, female servants who try way too hard to be sexy; of course his sister dresses like the old maid in a 30s comedy; of course one of the main characters turns out to be Asmodeus and looks a lot like a bluish Klingon when uncovered. Of course there’s a particularly awkwardly staged satanic orgy with dancing bad and half-hearted even by the standards of bad movie satanic orgies (one hopes real-life ones are a bit more enthusiastic, because this really doesn’t cut it as a seduction to evil). There’s an evil sort of ape person costume; things feel evil to the touch; Asmodeus lives by rather complicated rules; Gordon Jackson wears demon make-up; more “how we get rid of demons” nonsense that makes not a lick of sense than one could possibly hope for is expounded upon, and so much more.

The film’s tone wavers between embarrassing – just cringe through the unbelievable scene with Ham and the three maids trying to “seduce” him and ask yourself how many people must have thought this was an idea that needed to be put to film – and utterly hysterical, Culp, Young, Hurt and Villiers hamming it up in each and every way possible. I am usually not much of a fan of Culp and find him rather bland and affectless, but clearly, if he wanted, he could take bites out of scenery so large, Vincent Price must have been jealous; it’s the only correct acting decision to take in this particular movie, too, for playing any of this straight would simply ruin the film by dragging it back to Earth from whichever planet Roddenberry was on at the time.

In short: The Gladiator (1986)

A serial killer is haunting the streets of LA, killing other drivers in his souped up car for the tiniest of infractions of the highway code. One of his victims is Jeff Benton (Brian Robbins) who gets killed for running a yellow light while on a drive with his working class car mechanic brother Rick (Ken Wahl) in Rick’s pick-up truck.

Unlike Jeff, Rick survives the attack. Traumatized and angry, he eventually starts to turn his rebuilt pick-up into a bit of combat vehicle and starts roaming the street at night to commit his own brand of vigilante justice; he’s not out to kill anyone, mind you.

The Gladiator seems to be one of the more seldom seen films of the great Abel Ferrara, so much so that even a pretty big admirer like myself has only gotten around to digging it out more than thirty years after it came out. But, now having seen it, this isn’t mandatory watching even for the hardcore Ferraraist. Apparently initially planned for a theatrical release, the film earned a somewhat fitting place as a TV movie of the week on ABC.

It’s not that it’s a terrible film, but it goes over ground that was well-trodden even in 1986, adding very little to tales of vigilantism and cars – unlike you’re really into the concept of vigilantism in cars - and lacking the exploitation factor to make it a more fun watch. Sure, there are quite a few moody shots of Wahl or his nameless enemy cruising through the streets of Los Angeles by night, and the very Ferrara mirroring of Rick and his enemy as two sides of the same coin isn’t completely without interest, but that’s not really enough to to carry a whole film.


It’s Ferrara light, very probably cut down for TV by exactly those scenes it would need to work, ending up a bit too bland, a bit too slow, and quite a bit too friendly to be of particular interest.

Past Misdeeds: A Cold Night's Death (1973)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Dr. Vogel, at the behest of "the space program" the lone scientist manning a behavioural science station on top of a mountain somewhere in the arctic parts of the US (I suppose), hasn't been heard from for four weeks. One would think his employers would be a little faster reacting to loss of contact with him, especially when one keeps in mind that his last radio messages were hinting at a psychological breakdown, but I digress. Anyway, said employers haven't seen the pre-credit sequence that makes it quite clear that something is absolutely not right up there.

Finally, two new scientists, Robert Jones (Robert Culp) and Frank Enari (Eli Wallach) are flown to the station to find out what happened to Vogel and to replace him in his exciting work torturing helpless monkeys for science. They find the station in a state of disorder (but not disrepair), and Vogel dead, sitting frozen before a tape recorder in front of an open window. Vogel's corpse gets loaded into the helicopter our protagonists arrived in, and they begin to settle in.

It's too bad they don't listen to the last tape Vogel recorded at once, or they would have a fine explanation for what happened to Vogel made by himself. But very conveniently, they don't, and so someone or something has the opportunity to erase the tapes, although our not very bright scientists will at first think Vogel just didn't record anything. Which doesn't make any sense, but hey.

The corpse and the empty tapes are just the first mysterious things that begin to disturb the (of course methodically and characterwise diametrically opposite) scientists. Windows are opened at night, someone turns off the station's generator - one might begin to think there's someone else in the station, or a supernatural agency at work.

It doesn't take long at all until Jones and Enari begin to distrust one another and the question arises who is experimenting on whom here, and to what end?

I'm not as enamoured of US TV movies of the 70s as most of my American peers seem to be. For my tastes as someone who hasn't seen a single one of these movies when he was a child, many of them - certainly among them 1973's much-lauded Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - suffer from Boring Competence Syndrome and so don't really manage to excite me to reactions more emotional than a shrug. Of course, I'm also not very interested in the rich white people problems those films often love to deal with, so take that with as many grains of salt as you think applicable.

There are of course exceptions like Gargoyles or Killdozer which do manage to excite me, and A Cold Night's Death can now stand proudly among them. I'm sure ABC will be proud.

It's not that the film's script is anything near flawless. As more moments than just those I joked about in the plot synopsis or the very silly explanation for the mysterious happenings at the station demonstrate, the film's basic plot doesn't withstand close scrutiny very well. These plot holes, however, just don't seem to be all that important while on is watching a movie that isn't as much about showing off its clever plot as it is about evoking a mood of isolation and growing tension and letting its actors do the rest.

And the actors are putting a lot of effort in. I'm not always a fan of Robert Culp's performances. Too often he doesn't seem to know how and where to apply his decided talent for scenery-chewing and (oh, the pun, it hurts!) bites off more than he can or should chew. In this particular case, possibly held in check by the controlled yet intense performance by his acting partner Eli Wallach of whom I don't expect anything less, Culp is doing very fine work indeed with his intuitive genius scientist.

Being as effective as A Cold Night's Death at evoking mood is not what I'd have expected from a film made by a TV workhorse like director Jerrold Freedman, but he effortlessly and often elegantly transforms some very basic sets into a very cold haunted house through lighting and the sometimes gliding, sometimes lingering, always inventive photography of Leonard J. South.

One can't talk about the film, or rather the oppressiveness and tension of its mood, without also mentioning the movie's sound design. You can give David Lynch's much later Twin Peaks the main credit for bringing a consciousness of the importance of proper sound design into the US TV landscape, Twin Peaks however wasn't the first TV production to put thought and emphasis into this surprisingly often ignored aspect of the art of filmmaking. Case in point are this film's simple, yet excellent sound effects, especially the eerie howling of the wind and the unnerving screaming of the monkeys. It doesn't sound like much when you just read about it; hearing it is quite a different thing, especially accompanied by Gil Melle's bizarre yet appropriate (and so avantgarde sounding it wouldn't be out of place as a product of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop) synthesizer score that further emphasizes the irreality of the situation.

Add to all these things A Cold Night's Death does right that it pushes a lot of buttons belonging to my personal narrative kinks, as films and books taking place in cold, isolated places where people are plagued by mysterious forces usually do, even when they not hold the promise of the Blackwoodian supernatural in the end, and you will probably be able to imagine how much I liked this one.

In short: Hannie Caulder (1971)

When bandit brothers Emmett (Ernest Borgnine), Frank (Jack Elam) and Rufus (Strother Martin), murder her husband, rape her, burn down her home, and only leave her with a single blanket she’ll become rather found of as a shirt replacement for the rest of the film, young Hannie Caulder (Raquel Welch) decides vengeance is her goal now. As a very convenient turn of events will have it, the next man she meets is legendary bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price (Robert Culp).

At first, Tom declines teaching her the ways of the gun, but after repeated begging, he changes his mind. Soon, Tom finds himself falling in love, and Hannie gets to wear a gun made by legendary weapon smith Bailey (Christopher “Southern” Lee). After a bit of training, it’s off to the races.

And that’s really the film’s whole plot, if you even want to call it that. The way it is presented, it’s not as if director Burt Kennedy was aiming for anything archetypal with this lack of…well, anything. Because what Kennedy’s aiming at more often than not is Raquel Welch’s ass, or some of those coy shots of side thigh films who try try to mold themselves after Spaghetti Westerns but are actually too stuffy for anything as honest as actual nudity (plus, Welch didn’t really do nudity).

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, at least half of the film, and probably all of the reasons for its existence, is to show off Raquel Welch again, and while I’m not immune to her charms, I really wish the people involved – the main guilty party here being good old British Tigon productions – would have bothered with making an actual movie around her. Oh ,there are promising bits and pieces, particularly Edward Scaife’s often very pretty photography, but for every fine shot, there’s at least half a dozen wasted opportunities here, and many a puzzling script and direction decision.

Why, for example, play Hannie’s arch enemies like comedic freaks reminding me of the Three Stooges instead of as dangerous monstrous people? Why use the rape revenge angle when your film is neither prepared to get truly nasty or unpleasant about it, nor has the ability to become as emotionally harrowing as the matter needs? What’s up with the ridiculous slow motion in some of the shoot-outs? Why not hire a better actress for your lead? Oh, right, the answer to that last question is of course clear: because this isn’t a movie so much as a pretty boring and problematic way of showing off said lead.

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On WTF: A Cold Night's Death (1973)

Robert Culp and Eli Wallach, are lonely, cold and isolated with a bunch of monkeys they are experimenting on. Whatever could go wrong?

My write-up on WTF-Film explains.

 

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