NAKED AND VIOLENT (America...Cosi' Nuda, Cosi Violenta, 1970)

After Riz Ortolani scored a global hit and earned an Oscar nomination for "More," the theme song for the genre-defining Mondo Cane, it became a convention of the "mondo" genre of episodic, dyspeptic and salacious quasi-documentaries to have a sweepingly romantic theme song, ideally with English lyrics and optimally with music by Ortolani himself. Director Sergio Martino had to make due with the not-contemptible Bruno Nicolai, and in English this is what they came up with for Naked and Violent:

Look away...from misery,
From bitterness and hate,
And poverty...
And men who cannot wait
For you,
Anymore.

Look away, sweet Liberty,
From what you cannot see,
But Liberty,
You swore to set men free,
So why, tell me why,
Look away?

Probably no other national cinema has been so fascinated by the United States -- made so many films set there -- as Italy. America...cosi nuda, cosi violenta (America, how naked, how violent) is contemporary with spaghetti westerns and with mondo innovators Jacopetti and Prosperi's slavesploitation apocalypse Goodbye Uncle Tom, while later in the decade it was almost a ritual obligation for zombie and cannibal films to start in New York City. Martino's mondo purports to give audiences a warts-'n-all look at America, but it clearly caters -- panders, even -- to Italians' preconceived notions of our fascinating nation...as well as their desire for a realistic exploration of naked women. For every clip above there's an obviously and often absurdly staged sex scene. We get a Las Vegas sideshow where you get to see a girl strip and dance if you hit the target with the ball; an orgy in which the participants all wear fright masks and nothing else, inhibition being easier with anonymity; a purported recreation of a Manson Family ritual involving the devouring of fresh chicken blood with a side of melted wax on a naked woman's torso; and that mondo standby, painting on live, naked female canvasses.

Mondo movies have an obligation to offer pretentious moral or sociological commentary to legitimize their more sexploitative elements, and the sex scenes in Naked and Violent arguably advance the film's apparent thesis that Americans have grown so alienated from each other and from nature that they simply can't associate with one another in any normal, natural way. Americans seem to role-play in every aspect of their lives; both NFL football and drag racing are described as atavistic re-enactments of old-time rodeos (so what about modern-day rodeos?), while blacks, in a sequence possibly more racist than anything in the controversial Goodbye Uncle Tom, are shown reverting all the way to primitive Africa in a booga-booga dance and circumcision (?) rite of Martino's likely imagination. Some people are so incapable of forming relationships that they have to rely on sex dolls for company and comfort.Traditional kinship ties have deteriorated to the point that the elderly who can't afford to settle in admittedly paradisaical Florida communities are relegated to rot in wretched old-folks homes, or wander the Bowery, or stagger out to Times Square to sell their blood along with the other losers. Cancer is a blessing to the elderly poor because it means hospitalization: a warm bed and three squares a day.

But there's something unnatural even to the fortunate elderly, a reversion to childishness shared with the often naked and sometimes violent hippies who attended the big Altamont concert in 1969. Martino himself lurked at the fringes of Altamont but didn't have access to the real action on stage or nearby and had no rights to the music played there. Your first conclusive proof that Naked and Violent isn't going to be all it could be is when you hear its Altamont footage scored to that lousy Look Away song. You get the same effect, though it can't be helped, when Martino interviews various Americans; their words are drowned out almost immediately by an Italian translator. For an American viewer, it's hard to shake the impression that Martino and his writers weren't really interested in what Americans were saying or singing.

Mondo in a nutshell: this scene is supposed to show Americans' denial of death's reality with a corpse getting a makeup job at an undertaking parlor, but its most prominent feature is the trio of miniskirted assistants, filmed by Sergio Martino in the glamorous manner of a future giallo master.

Back when I reviewed Martino's All the Colors of the Dark I wrote that I was going to seek out more of the director's films. At first I had his giallos in mind, but then I found that Netflix was offering this rare mondo that had been brought to my attention months earlier by my frequent correspondent, the Vicar of VHS. As a mondo fan, I had to give it a shot. As a prospective Martino fan, I was disappointed. The quasi-documentary format doesn't exactly play to the man's stylistic strengths, and Naked and Violent (his third feature and his second mondo) is clearly a cheap project. Jacopetti and Prosperi's epics will make almost any other mondo look impoverished, but this one looks objectively impoverished. Moving down the mondo checklist, it boasts some of the most hopelessly obvious staged action (all of the sex scenes and, more offensively, an episode of white-on-black violence building up to a presumed lynching) and possibly the most revolting bit of animal cruelty in the whole genre. That comes when we see some cowboy gun-nuts taking target practice on helpless rabbits hung upside-down like midway targets. The cowboys, we're told, simply enjoy destroying life, and the moralizing tone of mondo narration never seemed more hypocritical. On the other hand, the scene sets up Martino's cleverest transition, as he cuts from exploded rabbits to the shimmying tail of a Playboy Bunny at a Chicago photo shoot.

The film finally finds some redemptive potential for America in its discovery of a little city built for the care of mentally handicapped children. The caregivers and their unselfconscious charges presumably exemplify the instinctive, unconditional bonds of affection the filmmakers failed to find elsewhere in the U.S. But Naked and Violent actually closes with a recitation of some purported blues poetry imploring the Statue of Liberty to "put out your light," "turn your back to the ocean" and "put a little love in me." This ties in (I guess) to the Look Away song, and I'm going to take another guess that it all means that Americans need to turn inward and deal with their hang-ups without taking them out on the rest of the world. A scene near the end of soldiers on leave embracing their wives in Hawaii helps make that point.

A mondo movie with the U.S. as its subject will always have some interest, just because of the novelty of presenting America as the exotic, decadent nation. Naked and Violent doesn't make the most of the premise's potential, but it'll retain historical interest for its conjuration of fact and fake into an America of the Italian imagination.

THE VELVET VAMPIRE (1971)

Stephanie Rothman's film is an intriguing, titillating mix of old horror motifs and some that were new or just particular to her time. In the early 1970s the desert was probably a spookier place for many viewers than it might be today. That's because it was Manson Country, and there are other Manson signifiers in the background, such as the dune buggy the title menace drives through the desert and the ghost town the characters visit -- a stand in for the Spahn Ranch. At the same time, the desert was a visionary landscape for many people, as Zabriskie Point and other films can testify, and it plays that visionary role here as well. But the novelty of the setting doesn't obscure some traditional gothic trappings. The main setting of The Velvet Vampire is pretty basic: a strange house where a guest doesn't know her way around and often loses track of her one companion. But if the film is gothic it is still quite modern -- or Seventies modern -- in its emphasis on sexual anxiety and dysfunction -- and topless actresses.

We start with a husband and wife, Lee and Suzy Ritter, visiting Carl Stoker's art gallery, where they meet Diane Le Fanu, who takes a fancy to the young people and invites them out to her desert home for a weekend. Those last names are just too cute, but that's about as campy as the movie gets, and it plays pretty straight from there. The Ritters' car breaks down in the desert, but Diane arrives in her dune buggy to bring them home while having their car taken to a nearby garage.

The Ritters aren't quite compatible sexually. Lee is more demanding, and there are things that Suzy won't do. There's a scene in their guest bedroom where Lee seems to be requesting oral sex, only to learn that Suzy doesn't feel like it. He goes to sleep in a huff while Diane takes mental notes from the other side of a two-way mirror.

V is for Velvet Vampire, and for Voyeurism.

The bed and the mirror then form part of a desert dreamscape. Here Lee and Suzy make love, only to be interrupted by Diane, who steps through the mirror and summons Lee from the bed. I saw this fullscreen on a streaming video, but even in that diminished state I recognized the quality of the art direction, which must look much better in a proper presentation. But Suzy isn't concerned with aesthetics. She wakes from the dream in an alarmed state, only to learn that Lee has had the same damn dream.

V is also for Visions (above and below)

Suzy likes her stay less and less as Diane openly flirts with her husband ("I'd like to drive your dune buggy," he says significantly; "I'd love to teach you how," she answers). She isn't keen on visiting an abandoned mine, and she gets attacked by a bat for her trouble. When they visit the ghost town, she isn't interested in exploring and decides to sun herself in the middle of the street. For that she gets bit by a snake, but it's Diane who saves the day by eagerly sucking out the poison, and from that point, Suzy starts to warm to the place.

V is for Viper, whatever that may be crawling up Sherry Miles's leg.

There are odd things about Diane. She enjoys steak tartar, which I suppose counts as an acquired taste, but we later see her gobbling raw liver to Lee's disgust. But cats eat raw liver, she says, and aren't we all just animals? Again, an acquired taste, but how about the way she and her servant Juan treated the mechanic who came to the house, and the way they treat the mechanic's girlfriend who shows up at the graveyard snooping around. What's with Juan holding the girl down and Diane biting her neck? And what about Juan telling Suzy that Diane took him in when he was just a child? He and Diane look about the same age, but shouldn't Diane be older? How come her husband's grave has 19th century dates on it? Well, that one Diane can answer: the original dates referred to hubby's grandfather, and since hubby had the same name they just moved him into the old grave when he died. But of course.

But these things aren't bugging Suzy the way they first did. Even the sight of hubby banging their hostess on the living room floor doesn't faze her as much as we might have expected. Suzy actually seems to be turned on by it, and Diane notices this. Something registers in the collective subconscious, too, because the dream of the desert now has a sequel. Previously, Diane had bared her breast to the naked Lee while Suzy pouted in bed. Now, Diane leaves Lee standing in the wind and goes back to the bed. She takes a knife and makes a small cut on Suzy's naked breast, and commences to suckle away. Our waking couple realizes a shift in the balance of power, and Suzy gets a kick out of Lee's swelling jealousy.

The stage is being set for something, since Diane has decided to discharge poor Juan with extreme prejudice. She's going to need, or may just want a new companion, but who's it going to be? She starts to make moves on Suzy: "Have you ever noticed how men envy us?" she asks, "The secret pleasure that only we can have?" Before long, however, she's spread out on a bed inviting Lee to join her. But she'll be back on that bed shortly extending the same invitation to Suzy....

The Velvet Vampire is a low-budget chamber piece for three principal players and a small supporting cast. It's very much a period piece, but doesn't seem as dated as other contemporary horror films. It's simplicity, combined with a little economical surrealism, is all to its advantage, though it stumbles at the end when the story breaks its bounds and extends to a Greyhound bus station and the streets of Los Angeles, where a final chase between vampire and victim plays out like an attempt at guerrilla theater, with a handful of cross-wielding hippies recruited as not very enthusiastic extras. There's also a final twist that'll probably be obvious to everyone as soon as the scene begins, but the film works well enough before the last five minutes to excuse the loss of focus.

And V is for Vigilantes, Vindication and Vengeance.

I wonder whether I feel that the film falters because it doesn't take the expected path of a Seventies vampire film. The Velvet Vampire is almost but not quite a lesbian vampire movie, more of an aggressive tease without any consummation. On one level, the one on which I'm a sexist beast, I was disappointed by that, but the script probably reflects a lingering sexual conservatism that flinches from homosexuality -- or it may simply reflect the fact that director and co-writer Rothman was a woman who considered lesbianism icky. I don't really know anything about her life or career so I can only speculate. In any event her story choices don't disqualify the film, and I'm not sure I wanted a lesbian scene with Sherry Miles, the actress who plays Suzy. She starts out obnoxious, but as the script makes her character more interesting her limits as an actress become even more obvious. She has a deer-in-the-headlights quality that if anything makes it understandable that she recoils from the sexual temptation that more daring actresses embraced around the world in this period. As the Velvet Vampire, Celeste Yarnall more than makes up for Miles's inadequacies, and her enigmatic characterization keeps viewers interested in figuring out exactly what Diane is all about.

So it wasn't quite what I was hoping for in my prurient fashion, but it was pretty good anyway and something that any Seventies horror or vampire cinema fan will find interesting if not just plain entertaining.

Back in the day The Velvet Vampire was part of a double feature, twinned with Scream of the Demon Lover. Bittercinema has uploaded the trailer for that double bill.

Fernando Di Leo's MANHUNT (La Mala Ordina, 1972)

Playing an exuberant thug who ends up the last man standing, Mario Adorf nearly stole Milano Calibro 9 from the incredible Gastone Moschin and earned himself the starring role in Fernando Di Leo's follow-up film, the second of what is called the "Milieu" or "Italian Mob" trilogy of films set in Milan. The effect, and you'll excuse a Classic Hollywood analogy, is as if, on the strength of The Glass Key, someone cast William Bendix in a starring role in a film noir, only it's the 1970s and you can have lots more violence, and hippies, too. Adorf might be more accurately described as half Bendix, half Al Lettieri. He has Lettieri's disheveled brutishness, but some of Bendix's sympathetic luggishness as well. Both qualities serve him well in this film.

Adorf plays Luca Canali, who gets some buildup in a pre-credits sequence before we actually meet the man. A New York mafia don is sending two Italian-speaking hitmen, army veterans both, to Milan to kill Canali, a local pimp suspected of stealing a major heroin shipment. The hitmen are Henry Silva as Dave and an alarmingly hirsute Woody Strode as Frank. They're instructed to make Canali's death as publicly gruesome as possible, and to behave like "the Italian idea of Americans" in the meantime, i.e. like asinine boors. This comes naturally to Dave, but Frank's a little too straightedge to follow these instructions exactly. He appears to require his maximum concentration just to spit out his lines. Strode and Silva both did their own dubbing, as far as I could tell, but this didn't come naturally to Strode, and his is an awkward performance, as if he were understandably self-conscious about that stuff on top of his head that usually isn't there.

Frank: "I don't want to interfere with your sex life, but if the women come after you, keep your hands in your pockets!"

We're then introduced to the infamous Luca Canali strolling through a Milan park with one of his whores. He gets into a scrap with some punks and bitch-slaps a few of them before the police show up. He gets in a few extra love taps on his last victim and tells the cop that he was trying to revive a poor man who had fainted. There's a slapstick quality to the first half of the film as long as we're encouraged to think of Canali as little more than a clown. At the same time, his portrait gets rounded a bit as we encounter his estranged wife and their sickly daughter. Di Leo is also patient enough to indulge in some character time for Dave and Frank, the former trying to score with hippie/disco chicks with little success, except when he throws money around. He finds out some info about Canali, but one of the hippie chicks, Trini, takes a moment to call Canali, who's been trying to recruit her (though not very forcefully), and tip him off that he's a wanted man. But she prefers her free-love existence in some sort of commie commune where every night seems to be an orgy combined with political indoctrination. Luca doesn't understand her life choices, but he's more affectionate toward her than he is to his current, cynical squeeze. She says Trini's a whore already, but Luca defends her honor. These are details that date the film but add to my enjoyment of it as a historic document of bad fashions and bad Euro-pop music.

The local Don (Adolfo Celi) doesn't like Dave and Frank running loose on his turf, so he sends his own men in search of Luca, ordering them to take him alive for delivery to the Americans. This leads to a Three Stooges-style battle in a lumber yard in which two goons slap our hero around, pull his nose, yank his tie, and force him to smell a rose until he can't stands no more.

"Stop and smell the roses, you son of a bitch!" Not actual dialogue from Manhunt.

This approach gets nobody nowhere. It humiliates the Don before the Americans, who kneecap the goons who let Luca get away. To show that he's even more hardcore, the Don then kills the goons. The stakes grow more severe as Luca's friends and loved ones are endangered in the effort to bring him to ground and he grows steadily more confused by the intensity of the manhunt. While Milano Calibro 9 worked on our uncertainty over whether the hero had or hadn't committed a big robbery, we become convinced fairly early in La Mala Ordina that Luca is innocent. He honestly hasn't got a clue why so many people are after such a small-timer as he. No one has ever taken him seriously before, most of Milan taking him for a softy and a weakling. But he's discovered resilience and resourcefulness in keeping ahead of his pursuers, and after the Don's men go after his family, he discovers the motivating power of rage. The movie climaxes in a furious car and foot chase through the city as Canali picks up the trail of vengeance.

Unfortunately, Di Leo can't top the chase scene in the half-hour he has left to tell his story. He takes the film in potentially interesting directions but doesn't develop them as fully as he could have. Luca hides out overnight at the hippie orgy house, for instance, but we never see what could have been his interesting reaction to the sexy radicalism surrounding him. We do get a too-protracted showdown between Luca and the Don, in which the old man at first talks Luca out of shooting him and then back into shooting him, that nearly stops the film dead. By the time we return to Dave and Frank, it's like an afterthought, and while Di Leo comes up with some violent business during the final battle in an auto graveyard, it still seems anticlimactic compared to the big chase.

La Mala Ordina (called Manhunt on VideoAsia's Thug City Chronicles set, but also known as Manhunt in Milan, The Italian Connection, Black Kingpin (!), etc) isn't as good as Milano Calibro 9, but it still has a lot going for it. While the previous film was based on a novel, this film still has a novelistic quality, at least through the first half, in its eye for social detail (not to mention the abstract sculptures Di Leo's art directors are fond of) and its willingness to let the actors do stuff beside advancing the plot. The music by Armando Trovaioli is funkier and brassier than the score for the previous film, and works best during the big action scenes. Among the actors, Silva really seems to be enjoying himself, and Adorf justifies Di Leo's confidence in him by giving a great performance that keeps you rooting for Luca Canali from the beginning to the literally gripping conclusion.

While these films along with Il Boss form a trilogy of Milanese crime films, there's no continuity to them except the reappearance of Adorf in La Mala Ordina and the return of Silva in a different role in Il Boss. I'll be watching the third film later this week, with a review to follow, but it seems likely already that Di Leo's Milan films are the nearest thing Italy produced to the crime sagas that Francis Ford Coppola produced in the U.S. and Kinji Fukasaku produced in Japan in the 1970s. I don't think I'll regret saying now that the trilogy should be required viewing for any fan of international crime cinema.

Here's an English language trailer (for "Manhunt"), uploaded to YouTube by JohnnyRedEyes.

DEATHMASTER (1972): He Was a Hippie Vampire

"Deathmaster" is an epithet originally applied to Count Yorga, the bachelor pad vampire played by Robert Quarry in two popular films at the start of the 1970s; the term is used in the ballyhoo for both movies. So it was a natural next step by the logic of exploitation to put Quarry into another vampire movie with Deathmaster as the title. The logic occurred to Quarry himself, who was an associate producer of this film. And of course, the same exploitation logic dictates that if you put Quarry in a vampire film called Deathmaster, then it cannot be about Count Yorga.

Instead, Quarry and company, under the direction of Ray Danton, intensify the contemporary relevance that made the Yorga films stand out from the horror crowd. Deathmaster taps into post-Manson anxieties about youth culture and cults, making its vampire a more symbolic and thus (hopefully) scarier figure than Yorga was. But the production's striving for relevance ends up making Deathmaster a more dated film than the Yorgas, and a dull ear for youthful speech doesn't help matters. At the same time, that datedness gives the film a document-of-its-time quality that keeps it an item of interest for pop-culture historians as well as horror fans.

Quarry gets real star treatment here, probably for the only time in his career, his entrance delayed as much as possible and his voice heard in advance of his visage to build anticipation for the big reveal. At first, all we see is a coffin washing ashore on a California beach, as if summoned by some tall dude playing a flute. A surfer discovers the coffin on shore and decides to take a peek. Before he can end the film at its beginning, the flautist throttles him, hauls the coffin up on his shoulders and drags it away.

After the credits, we're introduced to factions of hippies and bikers, with one couple standing out in each group. Our head hippies are Pico and Rona, while the principle biker is Monk and Esslin is his consort. Monk is a thuggish lout and the nearest thing to a cynic in this generation, while Pico is a poor man's Billy Jack of a sort -- and Billy Jack was not a rich man. When Monk hassles a craft dealer played by a pseudo-hip John Fiedler (perhaps the least Angry Man of the famous Twelve), Pico puts him down with an unexpected display of martial arts. When he later explains that he was using kung fu, Monk asks if he's Chinese.

Bill Ewing as Pico

Both couples end up at a mansion which someone may be house-sitting, or else they may all be squatting. It's a typical hippie gathering. Some rube is playing a folk song (arranged by Ray Conniff) on his guitar, and some chick is painting in the nude. "Who's the chick?" Monk asks. "Wow..." an admiring hippie answers, "I don't know."

William Jordan as Monk may not know art, but he knows what he likes.

Monk stumbles outside to take a leak and slips a ways down the hillside. When he lands, he finds an empty coffin. Closing it, he finds the tall man poised to strike. Fortunately, Monk resumes slipping downhill and escapes harm for the moment, while the tall man joins another gentleman who appears to control the weather by displaying a ring. Lightning puts out the electricity and the hippies resort to candles. The storm is a downer. One fellow who looks more like a hick than a hippie asks, "Hey, what's happening? We're all hung up on some sort of gloom."

"We're hung up, all right," Pico confirms, "but always the same old thing. Looking for our damn head."

"His head, his head," Rona sings, "Pico can't find his head!"

If you don't find Rona's wit charming, I'm afraid I can't help you. She was introduced earlier informing Pico that it was already snowing at the end of summer. Pico saw no snow, but his girl explained that it was snowing potato chips, dumping a bagful on his head. With such company it's a wonder that someone would complain that life is "a goddamn mother loving bore," but Pico agrees. "That's my whole point, we ain't living!" he says. Do you sense a moral here?

During the discussion a silhouette has snuck into the room to listen and observe. Still shadowed, he starts offering opinions of his own. Then, with a flourish, he claps his hands and the lights come on, revealing Robert Quarry in all his vaguely Christlike, less vaguely Mansonian splendor.

His name is Khorda and his tall friend, whom some of the hippies know, is Barbado. Khorda gets right into the guru business, hectoring the hippies about their eating habits and hygiene. Contemplating their admittedly questionable meal, he asserts that "Such food defiles the blood, destroys that which is beyond price. You feast on filth in your house, yet you speak of life, love." And their house is filthy, too. They ought to clean it up and "Eat living food. Then you will come alive. Then you will be deserving of your purpose." But he clams up when Monk scoffs, and despite being urged to stay (Pico: "We groove on what you're saying.") he shuffles off and dematerializes in front of everybody. "Wow," someone comments, "that cat is something else!"

You can't deny that Khorda has a positive effect on the hippies. They actually do clean the house and commence buying organic food -- you know, no meat, animals presumably being made out of plastic. They are a tireless audience for Khorda's nattering advice, always excepting Monk, who annoys Khorda with his dangling Iron Cross. The guru orders him to conceal it, apparently having strong feelings about Prussian militarism, but Monk says it goes where he goes, which is outside in a huff.

As Monk goes off for a bike ride, Khorda starts making the moves on Esslin. In the bedroom, he dares her to notice something missing when she looks at them in the mirror. I like his aggressive, pre-emptive approach to the familiar problem mirrors pose for his kind.

Khorda: The glass reflects only what you expect to be, not what you can become. It cannot reflect the essence of the spirit, that ultimate sanctification that can never be seen by the human eye. It can only be experienced! Felt! Its power defies the mirror. Look, look!

When you think about it, Khorda's just being mean. Why such a line of buncombe when he's only going to bite her neck with his mouth full of fangs? The man must like the sound of his own voice, and if he's Robert Quarry, who can blame him? The actor's smooth delivery made him an ideal Seventies vampire and he really gets to work the voice on some rants in this show.

He also shows off his versatility with a leap attack to finally rid himself of the obnoxious Monk. The funny thing about this attack is that we'll later learn that the big tough biker died of shock. The rest of the kids are distracted from the sounds of mayhem by the sight of Esslin dancing to Barbado on the bongos. Soon, everyone but Pico and Rona gets into the rhythm and it ends up looking like the rehearsal dance from A Charlie Brown Christmas on pot in the house as everyone does his own thing to a really slow beat.

While our two lead kids seem immune from Khorda's charms, the rest of the cast succumb in short order and offscreen, the women acquiring appropriate slinky vampire-bride garb and one man sporting quite the sporty turban. They're all appetizers, however, as Khorda really covets Rona. He captures her, but Pico escapes through a network of tunnels to reach Pop, the elderly wannabe-hippie who finds himself pressed into the Van Helsing role for this picture.

Getting no cooperation from the cops, our vampire hunters invade the house in time to find Rona being prepared for a blood sacrifice that will keep Khorda going and make the rest of the gang immortal. As Khorda explains:

We do not seek to sustain ourselves on empty religious conceits. We abstain from them, in order that we may hold solely and always to the ever-enduring continuity of human life itself. We open our hearts to the unholy. We seize life, cherish it, maintain it forevermore. It is a mission of existence. To the huddled fools of this world God is but a word by which they would excuse all manner of vile behavior. We alone shall inherit existence, shall know foreverness. The hour is now, now.

So stunned are Pop and Pico by this oration that they stand stupefied as Khorda applies the fangs to Rona and catches her blood in a goblet. Weren't they there to stop that? Don't worry just yet, though. In their research (I think Pop had a paperback copy of The Book of the Vampires) they learned that there's always an incubation period after a bite, so Rona might yet be saved....

But this is a Seventies horror film, so I trust I don't spoil too much by saying don't bet on it. Indeed, Deathmaster has one of the most downbeat endings of a decade of downers. Not your normal evil-wins shock ending where the girl gets all fangy at the end and pounces on the hero, but one that expresses utter futility and hopelessness, which is only proper, since Bill Ewing proves a futile, hopeless actor. Actors and writers alike appear to have taken the Hippie Lingo as a Second Language course, their grades ensuring that this was the best work they could get, though Ewing would go on to re-emerge as the writer-producer of End of the Spear. Quarry is pretty much speaking his own language here, with dialogue to make Dudley Manlove's mouth water, but delivered with Criswellian authority. But as a whole it works, or at least he works in the part, even if he is somewhat too old to embody a Manson archetype, however supernaturalized. Nor is Quarry to blame for questionable aspects of the script, such as Khorda's habit of keeping a fishbowl full of leeches in his crypt (for what? finger food?), only to have them thrown into his face to debilitating effect by Pico at a desperate moment in the story.

Quarry is not well supported by the cast and crew of Deathmaster, but together they do manage to catch a fragment of an anxious zeitgeist. Although it was certainly designed for the drive-in and grindhouse crowd, it comes across as a film more about youth than for them. Understood that way, Deathmaster can still be appreciated for what it tries to express and, to a limited extent, succeeds in expressing.

NOOOOO!!!!!

The trailer for Deathmaster was uploaded to YouTube by DIOTD2008

ZABRISKIE POINT (1970)

The last time I tried to watch Michelangelo Antonioni's American debut was about twenty years ago, when I rented a VHS from the always-abundant Albany Public Library. My interest was prurient. I had heard that there was a large-scale orgy scene in the middle of the film. Watching the tape, I was impatient for the orgy to appear. It ended up disappointing me; it wasn't as pornographic as I'd hoped. The orgy done, I hit the stop button and rewound the tape.

Zabriskie Point was also known to me for being a great flop when it came out, another manifestation of Hollywood's desperation over reaching the new youth audience. The beginning of the Seventies was a time when the studios seemed ready to throw money at anyone from Antonioni to Russ Meyer, and the money often ended up going right out the window. My younger self had heard of Antonioni, and had even tried to watch L'Avventura some time earlier, without really appreciating it, though I had better luck with Blow-Up. Since then, and quite more recently, I was lucky enough to see The Passenger on a big screen. So when I heard that Zabriskie was coming out on DVD, I decided to give it another chance, as a real movie this time, and the Library dependably acquired the disc this month.

The one detail I remembered well apart from the orgy was the opening student radical rap session. I'm something of an historian, so this bit interested me even back then. I think people make a mistake when they look for something substantive or meaningful in plot terms in all the talk. It's really meant, I think, to create an atmosphere, a feeling for the moment in history. This seems to be Antonioni's approach throughout. Zabriskie Point is an immersion in the sights and sounds of American circa 1970, and this type of protest conclave was part of the collective mindscape. There are moments of amusement for the attentive (Black radical: "White radicalism is a mixture of bullshit and jive.") but it's not meant to inform or enlighten you. Agitprop it ain't. What ends up being relevant is our protagonist Mark's dissatisfaction with all the deliberation. "I'm willing to die, too," he tells the group, "[but] not of boredom." A friend explains that "Meetings aren't his trip," but another radical remarks: "That bourgeois--bourgeoisie individualism that he's endorsing is gonna get him killed." Because of what follows, we might be tempted to take this as the story's moral in advance, but I don't think Antonioni and his team of writers are really that interested in morals or politics. When someone closes the scene by saying, "denounce bourgeois individualism," it's more of a punch line than an editorial statement.

Mark is simply impatient. "The chick at the meeting said people only move when they need to," he tells his pal, "Well, I need to sooner than that." He stocks up on guns, making things easier for himself by telling the gun-store owner that he lives in a "borderline" neighborhood and "we just have to protect our women." Peaceful demonstrations just get his friends put in jail, and he ends up doing a little time himself when he tries to bail his pal out. A dumb cop asks for his name. He gives, "Karl Marx." "How do you spell it?" the cop asks.

Looking for action, he finds the cops about to storm a campus Liberal Arts building occupied by black radicals. When the pigs blow away one of the men, thinking he was going to pull a gun on them, Mark decides to pull his gun on the pigs. But before he can draw or fire his weapon, he hears a shot and sees a cop go down. "I wanted to, but someone else was there," he later explains. Assuming that he'll be a suspect, he steals an airplane with ridiculous ease and flies it into the desert. On his way, he playfully buzzes a car driven by Daria, who's driving through en route to her boss's lair in Arizona. This is meeting cute on a gigantic scale, and Antonioni doesn't fake a thing. That's Mark Frechette in the plane, and there aren't any soundstage pick-up shots in this near-parody of North by Northwest.

Daria is an alienated young woman who works for a vaguely alienated, vaguely unscrupulous boss played with vague authenticity by Rod Taylor. Earlier in her trek, she was menaced by a pack of feral kids who play amid overturned cars and broken pianos and say such cute things as, "Can we have a piece of ass?" After that, being harassed by an airplane might have seemed somewhat less menacing. After Mark lands, they make friends and then make love after some typical hippie babble. Daria smokes, but Mark doesn't. "This group I was in had rules about smoking," he relates, They were on some reality trip." "What a drag," Daria commiserates.

Daria Halprin has a healthy appetite for life in Zabriskie Point. Spin that dress, girl!

She suggests that "It'd be nice if they could plant thoughts in our heads, so nobody would have bad memories." Mark is before long planting something else in her, but this seems to plant thoughts as well. This is the famous orgy in the desert, which is really Daria's erotic delusion of polymorphous perversity (is she imagining she and Mark multiplying their own bodies?) and universal love covering the world in twos, threes and fours.

Mark approaches things more prosaically.

Mark: I always knew it would be like this.
Daria: Huh?
Mark: The desert.

Despite knowing himself innocent, Mark seems to be having final thoughts. After nearly killing a cop who passes through, he dumps his ammo on the sand and decides to return the plane he "borrowed" after applying a semi-psychedelic, semi-sophomoric paint job to it. Quite abruptly we're left without our hero, or this film's equivalent of one, with twenty minutes to go.

So Daria carries on with her trip and arrives at Taylor's lair. And I do mean lair. This little palace seemingly carved out of a mountain looks worthy of a small-time Bond villain, and ends up rather the same way, at least in Daria's mind.

The movie's infamous finale is a bookend to the orgy. Having learned via car radio of Mark's fate, Daria's romantic idealism is destroyed, and like Mark and many others of his generation, she succumbs to fantasies of absolute destruction.

Two things about Zabriskie Point seemed to trip up initial audiences. First, there was an assumption that Antonioni was making some sort of personal political statement and that it wasn't flattering to the United States. People reacted as if he endorsed the opinions expressed in the rap session or advocated the detonation of refrigerators and bookshelves Daria fantasizes about. They harped on his constant attention to billboards, logos and other advertising art as if they assumed he was condemning it all. If that's so, then mine is a perverse appreciation of the film, since those details make it a realistic reproduction of the world of my childhood. I don't think that this foreigner's attention to superficial details means that he's condemning some perceived American superficiality. Rather, it's just the easiest way to define America in cinematic terms, and no different in that respect than his soundtrack, which ranges from Pink Floyd and Jerry Garcia originals to "The Tennessee Waltz" in one old cowboy's moment of serenity over beer in a bar and Roy Orbison singing, "Zabriskie Point is anywhere" over the end credits. One can go overboard with a thesis contrasting the ad-ridden city with the purity of the desert because...well, it's a desert! A fine place to have a be-fruitful-and-multiply fantasy, don't you think? As a matter of fact, yes it is, because Antonioni likes deserts, and one suspects that the location was kind of an end in itself for him.

One man's scathing critique of consumerism (above) is another's blatant product placement. If Antonioni had real critical intent behind his commercial imagery, it'd probably be lost on many modern viewers; some might even call him a sell-out.

The other detail that riled people was the self-evident amateurness of neophyte stars Mark Frechette (soon to be a real-life criminal) and Daria Halprin (soon to be Mrs. Dennis Hopper). But dare I suggest that they're supposed to be shallow, and that we aren't meant to see them as brilliant, lovable individuals who undergo intersecting character arcs and complete each other? Let's face it, anyway: lots of us know people in real life who are pretty much ciphers like these. Once you understand that Zabriskie Point is a broad-stroke sketch of the U.S. with a Euro sensibility indifferent to concerns for closure or other narrative niceties, and mainly a pretext for Antonioni to let rip with masterful self-indulgence, the sooner you'll lower your expectations of the actors and accept them for the types they are. There's a certain sensibility that needs to care for characters and will never appreciate films like Zabriskie, but movies are about more than characters and can sometimes thrive even without careful attention to them in the novelistic manner. Some people will never accept that, but I hope they might at least stop confusing their preferences for aesthetic laws.

Dean Tavoularis did wonders as Antonioni's production designer. You have to see this bit in motion with the waving flag and the rotating clocks on Taylor's TV screen to get the full effect.

That VHS from twenty years ago was not letterboxed. That made a world of difference, because the widescreen DVD reveals Antonioni's vision in its proper proportions. Whether he's taking in the sprawl of the desert or filming Rod Taylor in his office, nearly every image in the film (some seem to be stock or news footage of student protests) is a marvel of composition. Antonioni is the Michelangelo of widescreen (for who else could be?) and Zabriskie Point is art run amok. I hope the snips have made that clear. It took a while, but I learned how to appreciate this film. I commend it to the faster learners in the wild world of cinema.

The trailer (uploaded from TCM by foxter65)offers a fair sample of airplane antics, billboards and orgy action. Check it out.