Nightmare In Badham County (1976)

Imagine this, if you will.  You’re a monster kid (yes, you are, so shut up).  You’re cruising around the dial (back when televisions had dials and you had to sometimes adjust the signal manually [that means with your hands]) when you come upon it.  A permanently boggled schlub in a seersucker suit who looks like he would have fit right in at the press room in His Girl Friday leveling a crossbow at an elderly lady, warning her not to approach.  She, naturally, does, and the man looses a bolt.  As the arrow finds its target, the senior citizen transforms into a gruesome, hairy monster (a rakshasa, to be precise) just before dying.  And so was I introduced to the wild, wonderful world of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, arguably one of the most fun television series ever made and one of my all-time favorites (though, in all honesty, I can’t say it’s the highest quality in the world, but how much of what we hold closest to our hearts ever is?).  The show was dubbed Kolchak’s Monster Of The Week (I believe by “TV Guide”), and it was that, but this is what fed the hunger inside me and kids like me.  However, for how formulaic the show is, the television movie from which it sprang (The Night Stalker) is exceptional and often touted as one of the best films ever produced for the small screen.  That film was directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, the director of Nightmare In Badham County (aka Nightmare).  Make of that what you will.

Cathy (Deborah Raffin) and Diane (Lynne Moody) are a couple of students from UCLA on a little road trip through the American South (always a bad idea in exploitation fare).  When their tire blows out, they get a firsthand taste of the local constabulary’s asshole-ish-ness in the form of Sheriff Danen (Chuck Connors).  Later, after the Sheriff tries to make it up to the ladies by lecherously hitting on them and is rebuffed in public, the two women quickly understand exactly how close-knit this little community is.  They also learn that the Badham County Farm is only one step removed from Hell.

This is a WIP film, and it has all of the elements needed for the genre.  It has the prisoners being abused and forced to wear flimsy, easily removable clothes.  It has aggressively predatory lesbian guards.  It depicts slave-like conditions under which the characters toil.  It has vicious internal conflicts among the inmates.  And this last point is the specific reason why the leads are played by a white woman and a black woman.  You see, the tensions at the farm are only exacerbated by its being segregated.  Though both sets of prisoners are treated as slave labor, it is the black prisoners who are given the more menial tasks.  Even at the bottom of the ladder, they get a raw deal.  This segregation and the treatment of the different races come as a shock only to the two outsiders.  To the people indigenous to the area, it’s simply how things are.  By that same token, the women in the black barracks mostly get along with one another.  It’s the women in the white barracks that get into cat fights and generally want to kill each other.  This sense of solidarity among the blacks isn’t because they’re sager than the whites any more than the discord among the whites is because they’re less civilized than the blacks.  It’s more distressing than that.  The numb obedience of the black women comes from an innate sense of racial inferiority which has been institutionally reinforced over decades.  This idea enhances the film’s overall somber attitude.

This vile corruption is embodied by three men (four, actually, but one of them has very little to do in the narrative), representing the government (or more specifically one part of it).  Danen, the Judge (Ralph Bellamy), and Superintendent Dancer (Robert Reed) are supposed to be enforcers of the law.  These are the people whom we rely on to keep the bad guys away.  These are the people who are our protectors.  That they so readily twist and manipulate the system to suit their own base desires points to an endemic illness.  We have seen this sort of corruption of power countless times in film.  It is portrayed in communities both North and South (though I would venture a guess that there are more of them set in the South, just because of its old ties to slavery).  But the one constant in films like this is that these are small, clannish localities.  Big, metropolitan, corporate corruption is another facet in other movies, but that is usually typified by its dispassion.  In small areas, where everyone knows everyone else and everyone seems in on the scheme, it’s the familiarity that makes the evil done more insidious.  This isn’t a wide net spread over a large mass.  This is a tight glove wrapping itself around your throat.  It feels more intimate, as if the perpetrators have something personal against their victims.  But even the bodies of the subjugated are just meat to be used and discarded at a whim, still just a means to an end.  No matter how much these villains may enjoy what they do, they still do it with a sociopathic detachment, because these acts no longer offer pleasure.  This is merely what they do.

All WIP films are sleazy.  That’s one of their big appeals, and Nightmare In Badham County is no exception.  Women are demeaned and molested throughout.  A scene with guard Alice and prisoner Nancy nails this home.  Alice strips down to just her panties, sits on a couch with her crotch splayed, and states, “I didn’t keep you out of the fields today just so you could eat my lunch.”  It’s not just the situation or the double entendre of the dialogue.  It’s Alice’s open repose that amps the sleaze up.  Her nudity makes her menace (again) feel more intimate.  But beyond all this, the film is resolutely grim in tone.  Intriguingly, this is illustrated with Dancer’s skanky interactions with the women and how they customarily turn out, but it takes on a quasi-meta meaning due to Reed’s casting in the role.  This is not because of the actor’s well-documented sexual orientation but to his identification as one of America’s most beloved, moralistic fathers in recorded history (Mike Brady of The Brady Bunch, for those who don’t know).  To see a man who was held up as a moral compass for many years discard said morality and get down into the gutter makes it feel somehow more wrong and just a little shocking.  It’s at this point in the film when the viewer begins to understand the gravity of the situation and believe that truly this nightmare may not be one from which our protagonists may ever awake.

MVT:  The dour quality of the film sets it apart in my experience with this genre.  This is bleak, even angry, filmmaking, and despite its exploitation roots, it has something to say.  It just says it through gritted teeth.

Make Or Break:  The scene with Danen and the girls in the local lockup manages to be nasty and creepy without being explicit.  It also sets the timbre for the remainder of the film and reminds the audience that this is only the beginning.

Score:  6.5/10      

Red Heat (1985)

I am half-Italian (just the good half), and I think that this has largely influenced my love of Italian cuisine. Shocking, I know. It's not that I feel that Italian food is better than foods of other nationalities; it is just my preference. Granted, I have never eaten food in another country (unless you count Canada, but when I was there many moons ago I mostly grilled food I brought), so what I actually like is Italian food as prepared in America. Does that make me jingoistic? I would plead not. Still, the more I think on it, regional epicurean dishes like shepherd's pie or coq au vin, while I'm sure are quite tasty, simply don't appeal to my tastebuds. To my understanding, the cuisine of East Germany (you know, before David Hasselhoff brought down that pesky Berlin Wall) was much more potluck-y, due to the paucity of certain ingredients, and substitutions which, at least the way I imagine them to taste, would make my mouth pucker and seal like when Tweety poured alum into Sylvester's gullet. One has to wonder if the food in their prisons was better or worse. Sfortunato!

Christine Carlson (Linda Blair) flies to West Germany to meet soldier and fiancé Mike (William Ostrander), who's time in the armed forces is expiring. After some heavy petting, the mood chills when Chris discovers that Mike doesn't want to leave the military. Taking a walk to calm her nerves, Chris espies scientist Hedda (Sue Kiel) being abducted by (we assume) East German secret police. So, naturally, they abduct Chris, too, force her into a false confession on trumped up charges of espionage, and send her to jail. Inside, Chris learns that the big cheese in her barracks is Sofia (Sylvia Kristel), Warden Einbeck's (Elisabeth Volkmann) literal lapdog (in more ways than one) and just a plain old meanie. Meanwhile, Mike attempts every diplomatic avenue available to get his betrothed sprung but to no avail. Will Chris ever breathe in free air again?

Red Heat (not to be confused with the film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi) falls under the auspices of the Women In Prison movie. In this regard (and so many others), it fulfills its obligations. You have the masculine lesbian warden. You have the shadowy interrogation scene. You have the obligatory shower scene. You have the obligatory love scene (and I have always had a problem with that title; they're sex scenes; the characters in them may love each other, but the only purpose they serve in the film is to get some skin onscreen). But like all things cliché, stereotyped, and old-hat, it's not what you have but what you do with it that counts. And the filmmakers behind this piece have certainly brought, if not their A Game, their B Game (which, if we were grading on a bell curve, would probably bring it up to an A anyway). The shower scene is anything but sexy, I thought. The interrogation scene is highly effective in its treatment of the action and the interrogators. The warden actually has some depth (not much but some) rather than just being some cardboard villain. There appears to be some pride taken in the final product, and the viewer can't help but appreciate it. 

Co-writer, (and according to IMDB) co-director Robert Collector brings an alarming degree of professionalism and thoughtfulness to what could easily have been a by-the-numbers WIP film. Both he and cinematographer Wolfgang Dickmann treat much of the shot compositions like a Classic Hollywood Film Noir. Many shots are bathed in pools of shadow and light. They aren't afraid to move the camera, and it's almost always motivated and unobtrusive. The filmmakers know how to reframe a scene within a single shot to give a sense of editing, as well as cutting back on set ups. The shot variety belies other films in this budget range (which couldn't have been more than a few million), though some of the compositions in the exterior scenes look a trifle flat.

The film gives us that perennial 1980s theme of the good guys, embodied by the United States Of America versus the bad guys, in the guise of the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics. Quite cleverly, though, they did it in an end run sort of way. After all, most people (I'm sure Germans excepted) usually think of China or Russia when they think of communist countries. East Germany was underused cinematically in this regard, probably because so many other films used Nazis as their main villains. Yet, East Germany has that great, Eastern Bloc look to it, while also having the grace and grandeur of the natural countryside and the history of its ancestral architecture. The question, then, is do the filmmakers make full use of this resource? To some slight degree, yes, particularly in the early going, as the stage is set. However, the film is primarily set in a prison, so there are not many opportunities to utilize the regional charm. Still and all, the villains are communists, from Sofia, who is "Red" not only in her allegiance but in her hair, lingerie choice, even her lipstick, to the aphotic men who hold dominion over the institutions which hold our characters captive.

Another motif of films set in prisons is dehumanization. Even the most stalwart of characters with the noblest of hearts are tested inside prison walls. But the effect is the end result of a process. There is a system of inculcation that the prisoners go through. They all wear drab, formless gowns, marking them as sexless and nondescript (again, Sofia being the exception). Their lives are governed by mindless, robotic work, turning out product to feed the faceless State. The repetition of humiliating acts turns any sense of hope the victims may have into one of despair and surrender, until even rock bottom is not the lowest one can go. Of course, as consumers of this sort of cinema, you and I know that there's only so far and so long a person can be pushed before they push back, and when Chris hits that point, it gratifies completely. And in a film that is of a higher quality than it has any right to be, that's just sauce for the goose.

MVT: Dickmann displays a deft eye for composition and lighting. His shots are textbook chiaroscuro, and his camerawork is fluid and refined. His efforts go a long way in turning an exercise in formula into an attractive, satisfying film.

Make Or Break: The Make for me is the buildup to the film's climax (you'll know it when you get there). The filmmakers use precision crosscutting (okay that may be a bit overstating, but…) to raise questions and then answer them satisfactorily at the right moment, and it sets the tone for the onrushing finale, wherein (inevitably) all hell breaks loose.

Score: 7/10

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