Black Tight Killers (1966)

Hondo (Akira Kobayashi), a battlefield photographer, meets cute with Yoriko (Chieko Matsubara), a stewardess, and the two decide to spend some time together.  Little does Hondo know that Yoriko is wanted by no less than four nefarious groups (three of them straight up gangsters plus the titular ninja team) for information she may have in regards to her father and his legacy.

Yasuharu Hasebe’s Black Tight Killers (aka Ore Ni Sawaru To Abunaize aka Don’t Touch Me I’m Dangerous aka If You Touch Me Danger) is a film that I’m sure people would claim owes a ton to the work of Seijun Suzuki, especially Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter, if they didn’t know any better.  Thing is, Drifter was released the same year as this one, and Branded was released the following year.  But the films do bear a striking resemblance in terms of style, if not necessarily in their approach to narrative.  Black Tight Killers is much more traditional in story structure like the more nailed down rock ‘n roll used in the film while its aesthetic is pure artsy freestyle jazz (also used in the film).  This combination makes the film a little more approachable than some of Suzuki’s more outré work.  Black Tight Killers is a hepcat’s action fantasy with Kobayashi (one of Nikkatsu Studios’ “Diamond Guys”) as its ginchy ring leader.  The film is full-on garish excess most of the time, experimenting with form and directly applying art to create a unique cinematic world (something which was very much on the rise in Japan at the time, I believe).  For example, the rear-projected background in a night driving scene is tinted dark blue, but when the car enters a tunnel, it changes to orange-yellow.  A street at night (filmed on a set) is nothing but black silhouettes of buildings, the only details the bright neon signage of the clubs that litter the city.  A dream sequence becomes an extended fantasy sequence, as Yoriko is chased across sets decorated with nothing other than the saturated colors of their boundaries.  

This unorthodox approach gives way to a more exploitative fashion in the actual narrative.  The gangsters are the kind that George Reeves’ Superman would have burst through a wall to thwart.  They’re all ugly as sin and mean as wolverines.  They tie up, strip, and torture the women in the film at several points.  One female is chained up and painted silver (the paint will suffocate her, of course).  One female is chained up over a pool of water and wired with electrodes.  You get the picture.  More than these, however, it’s the Black Tights who have the wildest moments imaginable.  Their form of Ninjitsu is idiosyncratic, to say the least.  They employ weapons such as razor sharp tape measures (yes, really), ninja chewing gum bullets (yes, really), and 45 RPM records that they hurl like shuriken (yes, really).  Their actual physical techniques extend to voice impressions, the requisite kicking, punching, and thigh chokeholds, as well as something called the Octopus Pot technique, about which I will say no more so you can discover its glories for yourself.  Hasebe combines forthright action tropes with the more abstracted artistry of this universe, and the two produce a quasi-freeform union that carries the film along nicely.  This marriage is, very arguably, no better displayed than in the death scene of a character towards the film’s end.  As the character dies, a pool of brilliant blue paint pours into frame on the ground below, not only an artificial representation of said character’s blood, but also a statement that this character is as much a work of art as any of the ultra-stylized settings we’ve seen.

So let’s discuss some of these characters.  Our male lead, Hondo, is part womanizer, part man of action, all casual attitude.  He’s intended to be a groovy daredevil, but his charms are so slight, he’s practically a non-entity.  Even more of a cipher is Yoriko, a quintessential damsel in distress.  She has no personality to speak of except that she loves Hondo for some inexplicable reason (this does have a nice payoff at the end, but it’s a bright spot on a dull polish job), and her secret is what drives the plot.  Fused together, the leads barely provide enough interest to buoy the film above drowning level.  The gangsters, as previously mentioned, are the standard issue thugs we’ve come to know and loathe from movies of this time and place.  They are skanky, underhanded, and visually striking.  And that’s about it.  The real core of the film is the Black Tights, yet even they are hardly distinguishable from one another except in the looks department (my favorite is Natsuko [Kaoru Hama], but that’s neither here nor there), partially because they dress the same (down to the Red Star Lilies they all wear on their leather coats), partially because none of them really has a personality to differentiate one from another (while they each get individual scenes to alternately antagonize and fall in love with Hondo, the only one of these that stands out for very specific reasons is the one with Akiko [Akemi Kita], but all of them are more situation-based than character-based).  They have a purpose.  This, to my mind, is the point.  The Black Tights aren’t meant to be different people but one (moreso than the indistinct villains), a sort of gestalt representing where they came from, and that representation represents the demarcation between noble and ignoble, in light of certain events.

In all honesty, Black Tight Killers is nothing to write home about if taken strictly on the virtues of its story.  It’s as by the numbers as these things get (with the very slight exception of old coot Momochi’s [Bokuzen Hidari] underserved Ninja Research Society).  The action is fairly well-handled, though some of the hand-to-hand stuff involving the Black Tights looks like they’re playing rather than fighting (come to think of it, that might not be such a bad idea).  Truly, the film lives or dies on its style, and in that department, it excels.  Whether they’re dancing at one of the local go-go clubs or picking fights with guys twice their size, the Black Tights exemplify the Swingin’ Sixties in Japan about as well as any other pop-art-influenced film does.  The chances Hasebe takes as to how he tells his tale (actually, one based on a Michio Tsuzuki novel, but why quibble?) are what sets the film apart marvelously, like the bright orange flowers of the ninja femmes set off the basic black leather canvases of their apparel.

MVT:  The eponymous ladies are both the show and the showstopper.

Make or Break:  If you can’t make it through the dance sequence playing behind the opening credits, you won’t like this movie.  If you do like it, you’ll know you’re right where you need to be.

Score:  7/10   

Episode #303: Lord Love a Striker

Welcome back for some more of that GGtMC goodness!!!

This week Sammy and Will are joined by Tom Deja from the Better in the Dark podcast for coverage of Lord Love A Duck (1966) directed by George Axelrod and Striker (1988) directed by Enzo G. Casteralli!!!

Direct download: ggtmc_303.mp3 

 

Emails to midnitecinema@gmail.com

Adios!!!

Island Of Terror (1966)

Back before the internet, back before the proliferation of cult toys, back before the rise of comic book culture to regal status, kids had essentially two things when it came to playtime: really shitty toys and their imaginations.  Not all of the toys were shitty, to be fair.  Some were even well-designed and encouraged some form of thought (whether that be through their scarcity or intent, I can’t say, though I doubt the latter), and when we would play War, the toy guns weren’t colored like a pack of bubble gum; they actually looked like guns (shocking today in a world brimming over with street gangs and overzealous police).  I fondly remember a line of toys called Pocket Super Heroes and had quite a few of them.  Seeing photos of them now, I have to say that said fondness is clearly fogged by nostalgia, however when I was a child there was no other way to get an action figure of a character like Aquaman or the Green Goblin, so that does need to be taken into account.

Still, like Moses (Sidney Dawson) in Raising Arizona said, “…when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.”  And so it was, especially for those of us who loved monsters.  Oh, there were the odd model kits, and you could probably find a nice hard rubber gorilla that you could pretend was King Kong, but characters like Godzilla and his cohorts were simply not to be found (unless of course you had a store nearby that imported toys and a wad of cash in your pockets; I had neither).  There are reasons why phrases like “necessity is the mother of invention” are coined, and this is just such a one.  Since I wouldn’t even lay eyes on a Hedorah action figure until well into my adulthood, I had no option but to make one.  Armed with crayons and paper, I drew all of my favorite monsters which were non-extant in action figure form (that’s a lot of monsters), cut them out, and used those for my monster mash flights of fancy.  I even drew cityscapes for them to demolish.  

The pros and cons should be readily apparent.  Being made of paper, they were pretty fragile, but the beauty of this particular coin’s flip side is that they were also cheaply re-attainable.  Another downside was that if you admired the way a certain likeness came out and that “figure” got wrecked, the odds on you being able to reproduce said likeness the way that caught your eye the first time were slim (conversely, there was also the chance that the new one would catch your fancy more).  It was like those drawn out army fights with which so many of us used to litter our notebooks, but with moveable “parts” (and before things like Presto Magix [another toy I relished] though not before Colorforms, which is probably where the inspiration for the former came from anyway). I’m going to such lengths with this because some of the creatures I created via loose leaf were Silicates from Terence Fisher’s Island Of Terror.  I don’t remember if mine were Godzilla-sized, but I would guess so.  Everything else was back then.

Off the coast of Ireland lies Petrie’s Island, a small, agrarian community whereupon resides the hermitic Dr. Phillips (Peter Forbes-Robertson).  Phillips’ cancer research goes slightly awry (with a flash of white and red and a wicked sting on the soundtrack), and soon thereafter local villager Ian Bellows (Liam Gaffney) is found with no bones in his body and no apparent wounds.  Island doctor Reginald Landers (Eddie Byrne) calls upon pathologist Dr. Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing) who calls upon bone disease specialist Dr. David West (Edward Judd) whom they interrupt while working on a bone of a different sort with paramour Toni Merrill (Carole Grey).  The lot takes off for the island and discover just how awry Phillips’ research has gone.

This is one of those films that skirts the line between traditional and unusual Horror.  After all, it was around this time we got a Were-Moth in The Blood Beast Terror (also with Cushing), a Were-Snake in The Reptile, and a Were-Gorgon in…um…The Gorgon.  But what Island Of Terror does, and to my mind does so well, is does a marvelous job of balancing its two aspects.  The Petrie’s Island community is small, its characters very traditional, even superstitious in some ways.  They have no phones, a problematic power generator, and a supply boat that comes by once a week; the perfect setup for a Horror film.    The manse where Phillips’ lab is housed could easily have been a hand-me-down from Dr. Frankenstein (“it looks like Wuthering Heights”), with its gothic masonry and twisting stairways.  Yet the rooms where Phillips’ experiments are performed are modern, antiseptic, metallic.  And even here, there are concessions with tanks full of bubbling, brightly colored water (or whatever).  As a compromise to modern times, we get some nice effects work with the boneless bodies, and there’s even a nice, quick gore shot when a character loses an appendage (replete with a nifty spurt of blood).  The film takes its time in its pacing, allowing the mystery to play out of its own volition.  This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and even though the audience knows that the explanation is going to be outlandish to at least some degree, they are engaged by the asking of questions, the compiling of the monster’s profile.

The Silicates themselves are clearly an example of Body Horror (and a fairly early instance to my mind, although I also think cases could be made that a whole slew of Horror films could be considered Body Horror).  They are artificial life intended to eradicate cancer, but this is one of those times where the cure is arguably worse than the disease (think: Dr. Raglan’s Psychoplasmics from The Brood).  They are cells enlarged and outside the body.  They divide like cells (with the help of a great deal of chicken noodle soup), and they attack organisms like any aberrant bodies but from the outside in (rather than preying on individuals from the inside out, yet they are still exemplars of the body in revolt, even while not being naturally occurring).  Silicates have no intellect, no reasoning.  They are pure of purpose.  They live only to eat and propagate.  Nevertheless, they are an unfortunate byproduct of mankind’s search for answers, but when confronted with the concept that there are some areas in which men shouldn’t meddle, David pulls a Quatermass and offers the rebuttal, “Science has its risks.  But the risks aren’t enough to hinder progress.”  There is the acknowledgement that these things happen, but there also doesn’t seem to be any indication that precautions need to be taken to prevent their recurrence.  It’s almost as if the creation of monsters is something we just have to live with, even though we’re the ones who create them.  

MVT:  I love the Silicates.  They’re gross and silly and visually interesting.  And did I mention that chicken noodle soup pours out of them when they divide?  It’s disgusting and delicious, all at once.

Make Or Break:  The Make is the cell division scene.  See above.

Score:  7/10               

Lightning Bolt

Just about every Eurospy film that got made during the craze that began right after the death of peplum and right before the rise of spaghetti westerns got made because of the success of the James Bond films, and most of the Eurospy movies aren't shy about wearing their influences on their sleeve. For some, it was by way of casting one of the many European actors who played a villain or a love interest in a Bond film. Thunderball's Adolfo Celli appeared in several Eurospy productions, as did Bond girls like From Russia With Love's Daniela Bianchi. Bernard "M" Lee and Lois "Miss Moneypenny" Maxwell actually both starred as characters very similar to their Bond characters in a Eurospy film starring Sean Connery's younger brother, Neil, who was passed off as 007's brother in a way vague enough to avoid being sued by the producers of the Bond films. For most, however, it was simply a case of repeating the formula and mimicking the ad campaigns.

Lightning Bolt is particularly obvious about its intentions to compare itself to Thunderball, which came out in the same year, right down to the tagline, "Lightning Bolt -- He Strikes Like a Ball of Thunder!" Which makes even less sense than just the word "thunderball," which already doesn't make any sense. What the hell is a thunderball? But hey -- that was just for American audiences, right? It's like when shifty distributors insisted on forcing Bruce Lee's name into the title of every kungfu movie ever made during the 1970s. You can't blame the filmmakers for that, right? Sure, except that the original Italian title for the movie makes the Bond exploitation even more obvious. The main villain is straight out of Goldfinger with a dash of the Matt Helm film The Ambushers, of all things, thrown in. The original Italian title, in fact, works as hard to recall Goldfinger as the American one does to recall Thunderball. Unless you think Operacione Goldman is a coincidence.

The plot -- in which a nefarious arch villain is using laser waves to misguide and blow up moon rockets launched from Cape Canaveral, is actually quite similar to the plot of the Nick Carter novel, Operation Moon Rocket, which was published in 1968. Although it seems unlikely that an obscure Italian spy movie would have been an influence on the Nick Carter novels, it's certainly still a possibility. The Nick Carter stable of authors was varied, after all, and they were drawing ideas from everywhere. So here we go. NASA is in trouble. Every moon rocket they've tested has exploded into a great, fiery ball, though whether or not it's a thunderball remains debatable. The scientists are convinced that computers and technology behind the rockets are sound, so the only answer must be sabotage.

Lt. Harry Sennet (American actor Anthony Eisley) is called in to get to the bottom of things. His cover, naturally, is that of a rich, womanizing playboy looking for good times and big boobs along Florida' coast, which has been visited by just about every 1960s spy from James Bond to Matt Helm. Assisting Sennet on his mission is bombshell Captain Patricia Flanagan, another genre stalwart who had appeared in everything from The Awful Dr. Orloff to Superargo and the Faceless Giants. In between gratuitous but welcome scenes of Sennet cruising around the bikini-clad babes lounging about the hotel swimming pool area and frequent grainy stock footage of rockets from NASA, our tale of intrigue is woven, and it leads to a powerful, um, beer brewer (thus the Matt Helm movie similarity).

But this is a Eurospy film, and one of the wackier ones at that, so this particular evil brewmeister (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Gert "Goldfinger" Frobe), has a laser he uses to blow up rockets from his -- get this -- space age underwater lair where he keeps his biggest enemies frozen in a state of suspended animation so he can thaw them out from time to time, taunt them, and get them up to speed on the success of his mad, evil schemes.

Although the production is cheap and the plot is outlandish, this is actually a pretty fun little adventure. Anthony Eisley looks tough and handsome, and he's probably one of the few spies in any of these movies who begins his mission by trying to buy off the bad guys -- with a check! Imagine Sean Connery asking Robert Shaw how much money he'd need not to kill Bond, then saying, "OK, mind if I write you a check?" The women surrounding Eisley are ridiculously gorgeous, which is one of the things even the cheapest of Eurospy films could get right. The set designs are actually pretty impressive considering the budget and have a swanky 1960s pop art feel to them. There's plenty of fist fights, lots of clumsy sexual innuendo, shoot outs, sea plane flying, and then the whole finale in the undersea fortress.

Eurospy films are like any other continental knock-off of a popular American or British genre. Some are very good and lavish, managing to rise above small budgets to deliver a slick looking little thriller full of beautiful women, sets, and locations. Others are threadbare pieces of junk that will bore you to tears. And some are utterly bizarre and incompetent in the most wonderfully enjoyable of fashions. Lightning Bolt falls closer to the last description. A lot of the film's energy undoubtedly comes from director Antonio Margheriti, possibly the most prolific of all Italian action and thriller directors. Margheriti, who was often renamed "Anthony Dawson" when his films were exported to America, directed his fair share of clunkers, but the bulk of his career is filled with perfectly acceptable genre films, and a few genuine classics. Lightning Bolt, like most Eurospy films, is completely ludicrous, but it's not as if anyone involved with the film doesn't seem aware of that. There's a playful sense of fun, almost tongue in cheek, that makes the film a great deal more entertaining than it might otherwise be.

MVT: The set design. For a movie that had a tiny budget, they get the most out of matte paintings and cardboard when they designed the villain’s underground lair. And even the worst Eurospy productions were usually full of cool suits and bikini models.

Make or Break: The hero attempting to end all this intrigue by offering to buy the villain off with a check. If you can’t roll with that concept, this movie will try your patience.