Monthly Archives: April 2020

S.F.W. (1994)

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In tribute to Kurt Cobain: February 20, 1967 – April 5, 1994

First, there was Rick Van Ryan, the malcontent, social injustice warrior VJ of Incident at Channel Q. Then, when the metal ’80s buckled to the grungy ’90s, the Catcher In the Rye-styled, disenfranchised Generation X’ers of America needed a new hero: they got Cliff Spab.

If Cliff Spab had been a pirate radio DJ, he would have been “Hard Harry” in Pump Up the Volume. If Cliff had gone to college, became enchanted with the campus radio station, and took the course titles “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ethnicity,” he would have been Maxwell Glass in A Matter of Degrees. A well-read, apathetic convenience store clerk: he’d be Dante Hicks (well, maybe more Randal Graves) in Clerks. If Dustin Hoffman’s Ben Braddock from The Graduate had been a hippie: he’d be Spab. A filmmaker: he’d be Alan Shapiro in duBeat-eo—each expounding the same Holden Caulfield nihilism-cum-Abbie Hoffman anarchism. And, is it just me, but is Ethan Hawke’s Troy Dyer from 1994’s Reality Bites just a little too close-for-comfort-Spab coincidental?

R.E.M’s Michael Stipe produced (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Velvet Goldmine), along with noted rock video producer Sigurjon Sighvatsson (Hard Rock Zombies, American Drive-In), this loose adaptation of Andrew Wellman’s satiric Generation X novel that explores the price of fame colliding with reckless tabloid journalism. Stephen Dorff (while he played the role younger, he made his big screen debut in 1987 at the age of 14 in the “No False Metal” classic The Gate; he recently wrapped the first season of FOX-TV’s Deputy) is the apathetic-reluctant hero, Cliff Spab, whose “catch phases”—his stock answer to everything is “So Fucking What?”—during his captivity of a televised hostage crisis, transforms him into a media sensation—and his unwanted, new found fame serves as a bigger prison than his previous apathetic fast-food worker lifestyle (apparent in the novel; lost in the movie).

In this tale of youth alienation, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers goes grunge as Spab becomes a nation anti-hero after surviving for 36 days as one of five hostages in a non-descript, suburban Detroit convenience store by a gang of armed, camera-wielding terrorists—complete in white janitor-jumpsuits and stocking masks—who force the networks to carry the crisis in its entirety on the air. When Spab and his childhood friend, Joe Dice, kill the terrorists (and Dice dies in the process), Spab becomes a media sensation, alongside fellow hostage Wendy, an upper-class girl (Reese Witherspoon), splashed across the covers of magazines and reported on TV ad nauseam.

The novel’s writer, Andrew Wellman, at the age of 21, won the 1989 Playboy College Fiction Award and was quickly signed by Random House. The publisher then took the “unfinished” award-winning manuscript “The Madison Heights Syndrome,” (at a breezy 147 pages, the book is more novella than as the novel it is marketed), and chose a truncated version of the Spab character’s oft-repeated dismissive as the new title. And, because of the book’s timely correlation to the grunge ethos sweeping America, the book was marketed for a movie deal. If you read the now out-of-print book (my local library still has a copy), you’ll discover Wellman’s social commentary analogous to the voice of Bret Easton Ellis, whose (awesome) novels of disenfranchised malcontents—Less Than Zero (1985), The Rules of Attraction (1987), and, to a lesser extent, American Psycho (1991)—were adapted into films (that were more successful than S.F.W.).

Sadly, as is the case with cinematic adaptations of books-to-screenplays, an author’s flights-of-fancy narratives must be compressed, with events and characters composited and sanitized to the Hollywood screenwriting standard of 90 to 110 pages. As result, the film loses Wellman’s effective analogy regarding the sensationalistic tendencies of film by having Spab hiding out inside an abandoned movie theatre—where the character relates his story in flashbacks (just a like a movie).

Luckily, the film retained the book’s character of Morrow Streeter (an excellent Jake Busey; the jarhead “Ace Levy” in Starship Troopers), Spab’s shady-violent friend who’s prone to gay-bashing and pulling guns on and urinating on girlfriends (toned down for the film, natch). Another film highlight alongside Busey’s is Richard Portnow’s (Howard Stern’s dad in Private Parts) FBI agent who’s utterly convinced the store siege was an elaborate ruse perpetrated by Spab.

Another creative, celluloid choice that stifled the power of Wellman’s book is the film’s awkward “message” on consumerism—by stocking the non-descript convenience store with similarly non-descript, white-packaged generic item (e.g., cans of soup say “soup,” paper towels, say “paper towels” with no brand names). The “artistic” images and its related “message” flat lines on the screen.

And what’s the deal with Gary Coleman from TV’s Diff’rent Strokes being cast (it’s not in the book) alongside the clumsy-uncomfortable Tori Spelling-clone (aka, the sexually-degradingly named “Dori Smelling”) in the “TV movie version” of the hostage crisis? And there’s Levy’s “in-joke” with one of his previous film’s characters from Inside Monkey Zetterland (played by Steve Antin) appearing. What’s the point? What’s the message? The self-deprecation—especially Coleman’s—falls flat. (As a kid actor, Dorff starred in an episode of Diff’rent Strokes; were they still friends and did he bring Coleman onto film?)

Then there’s the . . . well, I can best describe it as the “Eddie Murphy Coming to America gag”—via the casting of John Roarke (lots of network TV series, but I remember him best from the truly awful sci-fi comedy rental, 1989’s Mutant on the Bounty) as the thinly-disguised clones of popular, real-life celebrity journalists Alan Dershowitz, Phil Donahue, Sam Donaldson, Ted Koppel, and Larry King. True, Roarke is a very talented impressionist-mimic, but unlike Eddie Murphy’s work (also in The Nutty Professor), it’s obvious to the viewer it’s the same actor in each of the rolls. We’re not fooled. And telling us that the “distortion” of the celebrity reporters are being filtered through “Spab’s point of view” doesn’t sell it either. Why would he “distort” reporters in his mind to look like Phil Donahue? The gag induces groans and any intentions at contemporary hipness are a total loss; the film would have been better served by playing it straight via casting an array of actors as faux-celebrity news hacks.

In the end the Coleman and Roarke celluloid subterfuges negate the film’s goal: the irony of the media complex transforming tragedies (e.g. 9-11) into television “programming” and then dipping in their hands in the tills a second time with their post-adaptations of those misfortunes with biographical and fictional films (World Trade Center, United 93).

S.F.W. was written by Danny Rubin (Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day) and directed by Jefrey Levy. Levy’s career began with the multiple award-winning, 1991 independent feature Drive (starring David Warner, of From Beyond the Grave and Ice Cream Man, as an acidic, middle-aged Brit reduced to chauffeuring the rich, liberal elite). During your mid-‘90s HBO excursions, you may have come across Levy’s feature film debut proper, Inside Monkey Zetterland (1992), a semi-autobiographical tale about an out-of-work gay screenwriter in Hollywood. That film starred Steve Antin (“Jessie” of Rick Springfield’s video hit single, the teen comedy The Last American Virgin, Don Coscarelli’s post-Phantasm flick Survival Quest, and three seasons on TV’s NYPD Blue; he wrote and directed the 2010 Christina Aguilera and Cher-starring bomb, Burlesque).

After the failure of S.F.W., Levy rebounded with a successful directing career on U.S network television and self-produced a couple of never-heard-of-them, low-budget indie flicks. Rubin, after writing the Marlee Matlin and Martin Sheen-starring Hear No Evil (1993), vanished from the business.

At the time of S.F.W.’s release, grunge was all the rage and the major label record companies and film studios couldn’t sit back and allow the indie label network (Homestead! Dutch East! SST! Caroline!) and college radio stations (staffed with guys like me) that birthed the alt-rock ‘90s in the first place, rake in all the dough. So began a corporate synergy to create a plethora of soundtrack-film hybrids with the likes of the aforementioned A Matter of Degrees, along with Kevin Smith’s Clerks (the soundtrack clearances cost more than the film itself), and Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites. The only problem: the soundtracks for most of these films featuring the then college radio and MTV 120 Minutes and IRS: The Cutting Edge darlings—especially in the case of A Matter of Degrees—were more successful than the box office bomb movies they promoted. And the S.F.W. soundtrack is no exception.

“Jesus Christ Pose” — Soundgarden
“Get Your Gunn” — Marilyn Manson
“Can I Stay?” —  Pretty Mary Sunshine
“Teenage Whore” — Hole
“Negasonic Teenage Warhead” — Monster Magnet
“Like Suicide (Acoustic Version)” — Chris Cornell
“No Fuck’n Problem” — Suicidal Tendencies
“Surrender” — Paw
“Creep” — Radiohead
“Two at a Time” — Cop Shoot Cop
“Say What You Want” — Babes in Toyland
“S.F.W.” — GWAR

Three songs appearing in the film but not on the soundtrack (clearance issues) are the Ronnie James Dio-era of Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow with “A Light in the Black” (featured in the trailer), Australia’s Mantissa with “Mary, Mary” (they appear via their rock video on TV), and Ireland’s Therapy? with “Speedball.” And while they make an appearance via a “Spab Tribute Concert” and spew some dialog, Babes in Toyland do not perform their soundtrack contribution. (Personally, we could have done without the Coleman bit and had Babes in Toyland “live” on stage; the Cheap Trick original of “Surrender” (which could have been a nice homage to the similarly themed, juvenile delinquent flick Over the Edge (a Kurt Cobain favorite) on the soundtrack, and had Paw represented by their then popular tunes of “The Bridge” or “Jessie.”)

And there was one more song that was planned to be included in the film. And if this chain-of-events sounds a lot like Cameron Crowe wanting to include “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in his 1992 grunge-flick entry Singles . . . then it probably is.

In the pages of a June 1994 issue of Entertainment Weekly (yes, the studio put their full marketing gauntlet behind the film), director Jefrey Levy spoke of the Cliff Spab-to-Kurt Cobain parallels, as both were just regular kids with extraordinary sensitivity thrust into extraordinary circumstances. So, to that end, Levy wanted to include Nirvana’s then hit single, “All Apologies,” from the band’s third album, In Utero.

Levy stated that while Cobain responded positively to the movie, he failed to acquire formal permission to include the song due to Cobain’s suicide (on April 5, 1994) shortly after. Levy did, however, as a consolation prize, was able to include the song “Teenage Whore” from Kurt’s widow, Courtney Love and her band Hole (for the scuzzy-love scene between Spab and Joey Lauren Adams’s Monica Dice). Cobain’s peripheral attachment to the film took on an eerie quality when Love, during the televised park vigil reading of Cobain’s suicide note, kept chastising Cobain with the term “So fucking what?” over and over.

And did that Cobain connection, in conjunction with the soundtrack that our favorite college radio DJs spun ‘n plugged (as with A Matter of Degrees and Clerks) make us rent the VHS copy, then search out Andrew Wellman’s book? Yep!

So W.T.F.? There’s no online rips? No TubiTV freebies? Not even a PPV over on Amazon? Denied. So, in addition to the official trailer upload, you can check out these film clips on You Tube: trauma, guest VJ, Tobey Maquire stoned, and Cliff Spab’s philosophy. You can also enjoy a soundtrack re-creation on You Tube.

What’s that? You need more grunge? Then check out our tribute to ’90s Gen-X films with “Exploring: 50 Gen-X Grunge Films of the Alt-Rock ‘90s,” which we also touch on, in part, with our tribute to radio stations on film: “Exploring: Radio Stations on Film.” And, speaking of box office failures (S.F.W.‘s total box office take was less than $65,000 against an unknown eight-digit budget), we explored a week of those films with our recent “Box Office Failures Week.”

And, with that, we’ll catch you on the “flippity flop,” Kurt.

About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

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The fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice is the first Bond directed by Lewis Gilbert, who would go on to make The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. And, perhaps most importantly, it seemed like it would be the last Bond film for Sean Connery.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was to be the next movie, but that would have meany searching for snowy locations. Instead, the Bond team decided to make this story first.

Roald Dahl would write the story using the book as a very loose inspiration, which he felt was just a travelogue with no story.

American NASA spacecraft Jupiter 16 has been hijacked from orbit by SPECTRE, who are being paid by China to start a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. Meanwhile, James Bond has been killed and buried at sea.

What?

It’s all ruse, as Bond is in Japan to find out where SPECTRE is hiding and what their next move is. This involves him working with Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi, King Kong vs. Godzilla), a Japanese female ninja, who is in the employ of the Japanese Secret Service. Tiger Tanaka, of course, is back as the leader of the Japanese agents. After Aki is killed, Bond teams with Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hamada, King Kong Escapes), an agent who he is “married” to after receiving plastic surgery to appear Japanese.

Wait — Bond gets surgery on his eyes to look Japanese? Yeah. It was 1967.

Teru Shimada plays Mr. Osato and Karin Dor plays SPECTRE agent Helga Brandt, two of Bond’s enemies. But the real big bad finally shows up, five movies in, as Blofeld is revealed as Donald Pleasence. Ironically, Charles Gray is in this as Dikko Henderson, but he’d end up playing Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever.

By the way — Osato’s bodyguard that fights Bond is pro wrestler “High Chief” Peter Fanene Maivia, grandfather of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

I had a really emotional reaction to the end of this movie. Obviously, we’re living through some trying times, but the final of this, as Blofeld is finally revealed and he runs through his base, shooting his own men to escape just as it explodes, leaving Bond and Kissy to try to escape their duties for just a few minutes alone…I found my face wet with tears. The meta realization that Connery wanted to run from Bond in the same way that Bond wanted to escape his MI6 hit me.

Could things ever be this perfect again? This month of Bond films has been a catharsis as I deal with multiple life-changing events — the loss of my company, my wife’s worsening back, my father’s mental condition and hell, the potential end of all there is. I try not to let my real life come into here all that much, but I wanted to share a gorgeous moment with you, when James Bond did what he did best, if only for a few seconds. He saved my world.

Lightning Bolt (1966)

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Whether it’s Yor Hunter from the Future, Death Rage, Castle of Blood, And God Said to Cain, Cannibal Apocalypse or the Rick Dalton-starring Operation Dyn-O-Mite, Antonio Margheriti never disappoints.

Originally known as Operation Goldman, this Eurospy feature was bought by the Wooler Brothers — they brought Blood and Black Lace and Hercules In the Haunted World to America — and double-billed with the West German/Italian spy film Red Dragon, which was shot in Hong Kong. Eurospy movies really do bring the world closer together.

Their tagline? This movie “strikes like a ball of thunder.”

Yes, this was released a year after Thunderball.

Harry Sennet, Agent of Department “S” of the Federal Security Investigation Commission, is known as Goldman because he has an unlimited expense account instead of a license to kill. He’s played by former Hawaiian Eye star Anthony Eisley, who also appears in The Witchmaker, The Doll Squad and Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Margheriti  — billed here as Anthony Dawson — thought Eisley looked too Italian, so he dyed his hair blonde. It came out reddish. He no longer looked Italian.

Yes — I get the potential joke that Anthony Dawson was in Dr. No and played an early version of Blofeld.

He and his boss, Captain “Agent 36-22-36” Flanagan (Diana Lorys, who is pretty much a Eurospy queen what with appearances in this film, The Devil’s Man and Superargo and the Faceless Giants) are after Rehte. He’s a German beer magnate — Beerfinger, anyone? Dr. Reinheitsgebot? The Man with the Golden Lager? — who is destroying Cape Canaveral’s rockets with lasers on his beer trucks.

Miss Cinema of 1954 Wandisa Guida used the Americanized name Wandisa Leigh for this film. You may remember her from other Eurospy fare like Secret Agent Fireball and the amazingly named Bob Fleming… Mission Casablanca. And you can search for Barta Barri, the Hungarian-born Spanish actor here. You probably don’t remember him playing the crazy old man in Monster Dog, but I do. He was also in tons of Spaghetti Westerns.

You have to love any Italian movie that can’t afford to shoot in Florida, so they recreate the entire area in Rome. By the end of this, there’s an underwater empire, masked cronies, a submarine escape and so much more. It starts slow, but stay with it. And hey — it has a great Riz Ortolani soundtrack!

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

Top Secret (1984)

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Val Kilmer picked the right debut. This ZAZ — Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker — feature packs in takes on Elvis films, spy movies and World WAR II movies all in one huge package of rapid fire jokes, allowing the star to sing, dance and pretty much act like a maniac. It’s perfect.

He plays Nick Rivers, whose hit song “Skeet Surfin'” takes him to East Germany, which is still Nazi Germany despite the Cold War taking place. Somehow, within the mashup that this film throws together also finds time to pretty much be a pastiche of the 1944 noir The Conspirators.

Unlike past ZAZ films, there aren’t many cameos here, other than Omar Sharif as Agent Cedric and an appearance Peter Cushing playing a Swedish bookstore proprietor who is filmed backward.

While this movie has its fans — Weird Al claims it’s his favorite movie — the studio was upset with its performance. And David Zucker would claim that it may be a funny movie, but it isn’t a very good one.

Me? I kind of love any movie that has the French Resistance still fighting Germany in the 1960’s, a battle that takes them to a Swedish pizza place where Nick can win over the girls with his song “Straighten Out the Rug.”

What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)

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International Secret Police: Key of Keys is the fourth of five James Bond parody movies in Japan known as Kokusai Hhimitsu Keisatsu. Yet once Woody Allen got hold of it — it’s his directorial debut — the story turned into a battle for the world’s best egg salad recipe.

Originally intended to be just an hour-long made for TV movie, Henry G. Saperstein and American International Pictures took more footage from International Secret Police: A Barrel of Gunpowder, an actor imitating Allen’s voice and music numbers from The Lovin’ Spoonful to pad the running time of the film and get it into theaters. Allen had no control over that, a mistake that he wouldn’t make in any of his future projects.

The voices in the film include Allen’s writing partner Mickey Rose (he’d go on to write and direct Student Bodies), Julie Bennett (Madame Piranha’s voice in King Kong Escapes), Frank Buxton (a story editor on Love, American Style), Len Maxwell (the voice of Punchy, the Hawaiian Punch mascot) and Allen’s wife at the time, Louise Lasser.

After some nonsensical action about the mob and the secret agents vying for the egg salad recipe — intercut with Allen himself speaking about his work on the film — the credits include China Lee, Playboy Playmate of the month for August 1964 (and the then-wife of Allen’s comic idol Mort Sahl) stripping while Allen explains that he promised her a role in the film. She’d go on to appear in an episode of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. and as one of the robot girls in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, while we’re on the subject of spy films.

Speaking of spy women, two of the secret agents in this movie — Akiko Wakabayashi and Mie Hama — would also show up in You Only Live Twice.

REPOST: Madame Sin (1972)

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: This James Bond-influenced made for TV movie/pilot features Bette Davis and is totally worth watching. We originally posted it on December 4, 2018 and have edited it in this post and added new links so that you can stream it for free.

Originally broadcast on January 15, 1972, this film emerged at the tail end of the superspy craze to present a truly insane idea for a weekly series that was never to be: Bette Davis as a villainous vixen who commands an army beneath the Scottish highlands to do her bidding. Imagine if Dr. Evil were the lead in his own show and you have a vague idea of how completely bonkers this movie is.

Arming her men with sonic weaponry and possessing the ability to implant memories that make people do whatever she wants, what the titular vaguely Asian spider lady wants is to get her very own nuclear submarine.

Helping and hindering her in this plan is Anthony Lawrence (Robert Wagner), whose father was a past lover/adversary of Madame Sin. She’s helped by Malcolm De Vere (Denholm Elliot) and a huge army of sycophants, including numerous women who dress like nuns.

If it seems like I am describing a dream I had that is my best film idea ever, this is close. Imagine if Bette Davis were a villainess on The Avengers, but one that — spoiler warning — wipes out every single person who faces her and even dares to imagine kicking the British Royal Family out of Buckingham Palace.

While intended to be an ABC in the U.S. and ITC in the U.K. co-production, this film sadly wasn’t picked up. It’d be hard to see this level of quality continued week in, week out, such as shooting everything at Pinewood Studios.

Madame Sin was directed by David Greene, who was also behind the film version of Godspell and big TV event movies like Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man. One of its writers, Barry Shear, was the director of Wild in the Streets.

Ah the 1970’s, when spy movies like this would just show up as Movies of the Week and then disappear into the ether, only to remain in our subconsciousness or perhaps a replay on the CBS Late Movie.

You can get this from Shout! Factory. Or watch it for free on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

Wicca Book (2020)

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In the late ‘90s, Robert Altman (M.A.S.H, Nashville, Quintet) transitioned into television with an innovative approach to the anthology-narrative format: Gun, which aired on the ABC-TV network. Each unrelated episode—with new plots and characters for each story—followed a .45 semi-automatic pistol on its travels from person to person.

In Wicca Book, writer-director Vahagn Karapetyan’s seventh short film, we have an intelligent amalgamation of the Altman concept plopped into the Sam Raimi universe—unfolding as a Hieronymus Bosch, medieval triptych: a garden of Greek horror centered on an ancient grimoire (convincing-beautifully crafted by artist Maria Alvanou) that passes from owner to owner. However, while there’s a Raimi connection via an ancient text (that Raimi pinched wholesale from 1970’s Equinox; sans the Dave Allen and Jim Danforth creatures), make no mistake: There’s no Bruce Campbell hammy buffoonery: a Rob Zombie-styled, Dario Argento homage snared in Karapetyan’s fisheye lens.

Film, at its core, is a visual medium. It’s an art form based in “showing” and not “telling”; for film is 90% visual and 10% dialog (and the stage is the reverse). Images tell the story though props, an actor’s body language and, most importantly: that your actors are not skilled in the craft of acting—but “being.” This is an art at which Karapetyan and his actors excel: there’s no dialog across his film’s 22-minute run time. While, at first glance, Wicca Book may be a bit longer than a short film should be, in this case, there’s not one superfluous frame on screen: every minute is artistically warranted. It’s masterfully edited.

In addition to a film’s dialog-barren image, music can also induce emotion in those frames. And all of the film disciplines are at their finest in Wicca Book as Karapetyan formulated a solid, celluloid-symbiotic relationship between cinematography Nick Kaltsas, Foley artist Enes Achmet Kechargia, and musician Christoforos Koutsodimos. He proves you do not need any title card preambles or voiceover prologues—or any dialog—to bring on the fear and dread.

And the terror unfolds in the triptych’s first panel: A frantic knock and doorbell ring at the apartment door of a young architectural student (Christos Diamantoudis) reveals the ancient text stuffed in a plastic garbage bag with a note saying, “It’s yours.” And as he turns the pages, it seems the book was written especially for him. And, it seems, the cries of children rise from its pages. He tries to destroy it; the pages won’t tear or burn. Then something presses at the front door; it wants in . . . . And he becomes one of book’s ink-scratched pages.

In the longer, second panel: The now unbound demon comes to the dreams of Mia, a young archeological student (Kika Zachariadou), and inspires her to discover the book while spelunking. Upon opening the book, her name appears in blood on her bathroom mirror and, the book instructs her to “give it away.” Then we learn the truth: Mia was the frantic knock and doorbell ring opening the film; she passed the book onto the architectural student. But it was a trick: By giving the book away, not only will she sacrifice the receiver: she’ll transform into a witch. So, to save them both, she breaks into his apartment, steals the book, and tries to return the book from where it came. As she runs from the apartment, she runs into her neighbor: the book’s instructed third sacrifice is complete. Mia will become a witch, after all.

The Bosch garden rots in the third panel of this supernatural triptych, as Mia returns to the cave (with an inspired POV shovel-in-the-dirt shot) for a final knife-wielding showdown with The Devil. . . .

Wicca Book is a horror film of old, not of the modern film world that wobbles on the crutches of shock-scares and motion-captured, CGI-grafted gore. This is a film that reminds of Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck’s feature film debut, 1973’s Messiah of Evil (a movie so good, we reviewed it three times: HERE, HERE, and HERE), L.Q Jones’s Brotherhood of Satan, and Burt I. Gordon’s Necromancy. Wicca Book is a classic, shot-in-camera ‘70s-styled suspense-horror flick, like those Dan Curtis ‘70s U.S TV movies of old (shameless plug: check out our Exploring: Dan Curtis featurette). (Also, please note that there’s neither reference of nor an appearance of Hieronymus Bosch’s medieval triptych in the film: that is my personal interpretation of the film’s narrative structure.)

While attending Aristotle University, Karapetyan, an Armenian director and writer based in Greece, wrote a thesis paper: “How a Traditional Myth Becomes a Horror Film,” so he knows his material. While I haven’t seen Karapetyan’s six previous horror shorts, based on what I’ve seen with Wicca Book, I wait in anticipation for his first international English language feature film, Go Dark, currently in its pre-production stages. I also believe all of the parts are there for Wicca Book to be expanded into a feature film as well.

Referring to my comment regarding the runtime: 30-minute programs are actually 17 to 22-minutes in length. Once you add commercials, you have a half-hour program; so again, the length works in that regard and Wicca Book could become a television series. Another goal is to turn Wicca Book into a web-series, using elements of time travel to explore the book’s birth in 16th century New England and how the book came to be in the cave explored by Mia. The concept—in any form—is exciting and worth following its development.

It may take some time, but Vahagn Karapetyan is on his way to becoming a voice in Euro-horror. And all good things take time. Wicca Book is currently under the wing of Film Freeway, so let’s hope it comes to a U.S film festival sometime soon near you. It’s worth the price of admission. You can learn more about the film at Darkstream Entertainment on Facebook and Vahagn Films on Facebook.

About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

Disclaimer: This movie was sent to us by its PR company and, as you know, that has no bearing on our review.

Thunderball (1965)

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Here’s where things get messy.

Thunderball would have been the first Bond film, if not for all the lawsuits.

Yes — back in 1958, Ian Fleming was already planning a James Bond movie.

Fleming and a young writer and director named Kevin McClory wrote a script that had many working titles — SPECTRE, James Bond of the Secret Service and Longitude 78 West — but mainly concerned spying and an underwater battle. McClory’s first film, The Boy and the Bridge, bombed and somewhere along the way Fleming grew disenchanted with the script and the author.

Not disenchanted enough that he didn’t turn said script into his next James Bond novel.  By November of 1963, the case was in court. It lasted three weeks, with a pause after Fleming had a heart attack. The end result? McClory got the literary and film rights for the screenplay, while Fleming could publish the novel, as long as he stated that it was based on a screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and the Author. Fleming would die nine months later.

The legal issues would find their way to Bond producers Broccoli and Saltzman, who were faced with the fact that McClory retained screen rights to the novel’s story, plot, and characters. This could have allowed McClory to make his own series of Bond films — more on that later — and is the reason why so many of the licensed properties, like Victory Games’ RPG, didn’t have SPECTRE.

Guy Hamilton — citing creative burnout — stepped away from the series. And Terence Young, who directed the first two films, stepped back in.

Bond starts this film by punching out the widow of a SPECTRE agent at her husband’s funeral. Surprise — the man was never dead and 007 chases him with his Aston-Martin and a jetpack, which was a practical effect. That said, Connery and several of the stuntmen were nearly killed by sharks while making this, just in case you’re wondering why CGI works.

SPECTRE isn’t having any of this, so Number One Blofeld (still Anthony Dawson in disguise) and Number Two Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi, who used this movie to basically have a career in the Eurospy field; he’s in OK Connery and Danger: Diabolik, two of the better films in this genre as well as tons of giallo) decide to steal some nukes and blow up the world real good unless they get paid $100 million pounds.

Miss France Monde and first runner-up in the 1958 Miss World contest Claudine Auger plays Largo’s mistress Domino. She — of course — ends up with Bond. Auger would later appear with two of her fellow Bond girls (Barbara Bouchet and Barbara Bach) in Black Belly of the Tarantula.

There’s all manner of SCUBA action in this one, some of it coordinated by Ricuo Browing. There’s also a ship called the Disco Volante, an exceedingly long running time and a battle at the end that seems to go on forever.

On SPECTRE’s side:

  • Assassin Fiona Volpe is played by Luciana Paluzzi (The Green Slime, Jess Franco’s 99 Women,  A Black Veil for Lisa)
  • Agent Number Four is Guy Doleman, who was also in the Michael Caine-starring Harry Palmer series; he was also the first Number Two on The Prisoner.
  • Vargas is Largo’s main henchman; he’s killed off with a spear gun.
  • SPECTRE Number Five, who planned the Great Train Robbery, is played by Phillip Stone, Alex’s dad in A Clockwork Orange.

On Bond’s side:

  • Felix Leiter is played by a new actor in this one, Rik Van Nutter, who was once married to Anita Ekberg.
  • The doomed Paula Caplan is played by Martine Beswick, who was also Zora in Dr. No; she also played the titular roles in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde and The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.
  • Molly Peters plays a doctor who saves Bond’s life; she’s also the first woman to take her clothes off in the series.
  • French spy Madame La Porte is played by Maryse Guy Mitsouko, who appears in the Eurospy films Agent 077 – Mission Bloody Mary, Code Name: Jaguar, Z7 Operation Rembrandt, Furia a Marrakec and Bob Fleming: Mission Casablanca.
  • There’s also a scene where all the 00 agents are gathered, but we don’t get to see much of them. They would be 002 John Bill Fairbanks, the unnamed 003 through 005, 006 Alec Trevalyan and several others who aren’t named. Of them, only Bond and 008 don’t die all the time.

The theme song for this movie was originally going to be Shirley Bassey’s “Mr. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” whose title was taken from the Italian nickname for 007. That track was too short, so it was re-recorded with Dionne Warwick. And then the producers worried that the name of the movie wasn’t in the lyrics, so they got Tom Jones to sing the theme. Jones wanted to impress them so much that he held the last note so long that he passed out.

Johnny Cash sent in a song. It wasn’t used.

This is the first Bond movie where the ladies are nude in the opening credits and the actual actor — Connery of course — appears in the gun barrel sequence. It’s also the biggest blockbuster in Bond history, making $141 million in 1965, which would be worth $1.16 billion today.

As for the legal battles, they would continue long past the release of Thunderball.

In 1976, McClory planned to produce an original James Bond film — called either Warhead, Warhead 8 or James Bond of the Secret Service — but United Artists and Fleming’s estate sued. McClory won two different trials and licensed the rights to Jack Schwartzman for Never Say Never Again.

Speaking of that film — the script is insane. As written by Sean Connery, spy writer Len Deighton (who wrote those aforementioned Michael Caine Harry Palmer films) and McClory, it involves Blofeld, the Bermuda Triangle, sharks with nukes strapped to their heads, an underwater kingdom called Arkos and Bond only showing up for three scenes.

A few decades later, McClory resurfaced with plans to make Warhead 2000 A.D. with Sony, who ended up settling with MGM/United Artists. He also worked with Sony in 1999 to try and get the rights for all past Bond films, but this suit was thrown out as it was decided that McClory had “waited too long.”

A decade or so later — and after McClory’s death — MGM, Danjaq and his estate came to an amicable conclusion over nearly half a century of legal and business disputes.

Some Girls Do (1969)

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You wouldn’t know it from the title, but Bulldog Drummond is back again after Deadlier than the Male. Richard Johnson, Terence Young’s original choice of 007, returned as well. Of never playing Bond, Johnson said to Cinema Retro magazine, “Eventually they offered it to Sean Connery, who was completely wrong for the part. But in getting the wrong man they got the right man, because it turned the thing on its head and he made it funny. And that’s what propelled it to success.”

He’d go on to play Dr. Menard in Zombie, as well as roles in The Comeback, Beyond the Door and the Sergio Martino movies Screamers and The Great Alligator.

The world’s first supersonic commercial plane is having problems, what with killer women like Maria Aitken, Yutte Stensgaard (who replaced Ingrid Pitt in Lust for a Vampire) and Joanna Lumley in an early role (she and Virginia North were both filming On Her Majesty’s Secret Service at the same time — and the very same Pinewood Studios — as this film!) murdering and sabotaging everyone and everything to stop its creation.

It’s a good thing that Bulldog — and his assistant Flicky (Sydne Rome, The Pumaman) — are on the case. The culprit? Carl Petersen (James Villiers, who is in For Your Eyes Only), a rich criminal who stands to get $8 million pounds if his plane isn’t ready by a certain date.

Beyond having two henchwomen named Helga (Daliah Lavi, who was also in The Silencer, Nobody Runs Forever, The Spy With the Cold Nose and Casino Royale) and Pandora (Beba Lončar, who also appears in Jess Franco’s spy film Lucky, the Inscrutable), Petersen has created an army of female robots who can use ultrasonic frequencies to maim and murder.

Of course, Drummond and Helga hook up, but she fails several times to kill him off. Hell, she sleeps with him again after capturing him for Petersen. Everything gets blown up real good though, Flicky ends up being a Russian double agent and Bulldog hooks up with the only fembot who is really human, number 7, who is played by Vanessa Howard (she’s in the Dan Curtis version of The Portrait of Dorian Gray).

Robot number 9 is, of course, the aforementioned Virginia North, forever Vulnavia from The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Another one is Shakira Baksh, who would soon become the wife of Michael Caine.

This is on the good side of Eurospy film. Nothing is all that serious and everything moves quickly. I’d definitely pick this one — and Deadlier than the Male — if you’re looking for a non-Bond spy movie.

Deadlier Than the Male (1967)

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Bulldog Drummond predates James Bond by four decades or so. Yet in the late 1960’s, his adventures somehow suggested to producers that he’d be the perfect Bondian analogue. This would be the 23rd movie with Bulldog in it, but his name was featured nowhere in the title. Instead, it refers to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Female of the Species,” as well as an earlier Drummond adventure, The Female of the Species.

You may recognize the song, “Deadlier Than the Male,” which was recorded by the Walker Brothers. It’s essentially a Scott Walker solo song and was sampled by the band Space for their song “Female of the Species.” Their song was used in the closing credits of the first Austin Powers film, which sort of brings its history full circle.

This movie was directed by Ralph Thomas, who was behind the Doctor series of films. He’d also come back to make a sequel, Some Girls Do. Betty Box, who was married to Carry On producer Peter Rogers, was this movie’s producer.

Jimmy Sangster, who would direct Lust for a Vampire and write nearly every major Hammer film, along with The Legacy; Scream, Pretty Peggy and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? among many others.

This starts off with a bang — quite literally. Irma Eckman (Elke Sommer, Lisa and the Devil), disguised as a an air hostess, murders an oil baron with a cigar, then parachutes to safety. After being picked up by Penelope (Sylva Koscina, So Sweet, So Dead; the wife to Steve Reeve’s Hercules), they go off and kill another man, making it look like a spearfishing accident.

The goal? To take over Phoenician OIl. Any executive that gets in the way is going to pay. And the girls also try to kill Bulldog (Richard Johnson, the original choice to play Bond in Dr. No) when he gets pulled into their caper.

Virginia North shows up here. She’d come back to appear in the next Bulldog movie as Robot Number Nine and in the same year, would become a Bond girl thanks to a short scene in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Perhaps you’ll know her better as the deadly Vulnavia, the assistant to The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

Nigel Green — the same man who was the Electric Messiah in The Ruling Class — plays the villain here. He has a gigantic robotic chess set that’s a marvel of practical filmmaking.

Check out this article to see what eventually happened to the pieces — it’s amazing how long they survived!

As the villain plays Bulldog in a deadly game — with the life of one of his girls named Grace (Susanna Leigh, who was the love interest of Nilsson in Son of Dracula) in the balance — one of the bodyguards attempts to murder our hero. Bulldog gets the best of both of them and emerges intact.

The bodyguard is played by Milton Reid, who once wrestled professionally as The Mighty Chang. You’ll recognize him from three Bond roles — a guard in Dr. No, a temple guard in Casino Royale and as Sandor, who Roger Moore fights on a rooftop in The Spy Who Loved Me. Legend has it that he wanted to play Oddjob so badly that he challenged fellow pro wrestler Harold “Tosh Togo” Sakata to a shoot match for the role. The producers wisely stepped in and just gave Sakata the hat tossing role that made his career. He also shows up in Terror and Dr. Phibes Rises Again.

The ending explosion of this movie basically comes down to who is wearing a hairclip. Yes, sometimes hairstyle choices can determine who lives and dies.

Deadlier Than the Male was given an X rating for the brutality — and promiscuity — of its two female villains. Today, it could play on regular television.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.