EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to an entire month of movies that played on the CBS Late Movie. Up first, Trog! This film played four times in the middle of the night on the Tiffany Network: February 24, 1972; May 30, 1972; September 14, 1973 and December 6, 1974.
Trog makes me sad. Beyond the fact that it feels a lot like King Kong or Son of Kong—a doomed monster from our past that just can’t survive in today’s horrible modern world—it’s also depressing at times to watch Joan Crawford act her heart out in a film where no one else can come close to her power.
That’s not to say this is a bad film. It’s delightful and well-directed by genre vet Freddie Francis (Tales from the Crypt and plenty of other wonderful Amicus portmanteau films). It’s also quick-moving and enjoyable.
But it’s still sad.
A troglodyte (TROG!) is found alive in the caves of England. Dr. Brockton (Crawford) has had some success communicating with him and sees him as the missing link. However, her neighbors do not like her having a monster in her house, mainly after it kills a dog when it steals his ball.
Local businessman Sam Murdock (Michael Gough, who appeared in many Hammer films and as Alfred in the 1980s and 1990s Batman films) worries that the creature will negatively impact local businesses. But he really has an issue with a woman being in charge.
Meanwhile, Trog undergoes multiple surgeries, which enable him to learn to communicate. In a trippy sequence, we see into his mind, which is filled with memories of the Ice Age and dinosaurs.
The court upholds Dr. Brockton’s goal of teaching Trog, so Murdock sneaks in and lets him loose. He kills several people, including the businessman, before taking a little girl and retreating to his cave. Dr. Brockton can communicate with Trog, and the girl goes free. Meanwhile, soldiers open fire on our titular caveperson, and he falls to his death, impaled on a stalagmite.
As Dr. Brockton leaves in tears, a reporter tries to interview her. She has no comment as she wanders away.
See? Depressing.
Due to the film’s low budget, Crawford used her own clothes. And it shows. She’s a beacon of fashion in a grimy town. She stands out like no one else. And speaking of suits, the one for Trog was left over from 2001: A Space Odyssey!
This was Crawford’s final film, but I don’t believe the TV show Feud: Bette and Joan. She’d continue to act afterward, appearing in an episode of TV’s The Sixth Sense called Dear Joan: We’re Going to Scare You to Death. If you’ve ever listened to My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, that’s where the sample on the song “A Daisy Chain for Satan Comes From.”
PS: I would know none of this were it not for Bill from Groovy Doom.
I’m glad I watched Trog. But the sad ending — and thinking of Joan changing in her car during the breaks in filming — make me a little misty-eyed. That said, it’s one of John Waters’ favorite films, so there’s that.
The CBS Late Movie — also known as CBS Late Night and Crimetime After Primetime — started on February 14, 1972. Late nights were still new for the Tiffany Network, as many of their stations were playing old movies after the news, but affiliates started to discover that there were less and less new movies available.
Those stations wanted something new. A 1966 poll revealed that approximately 80% wanted a late evening entertainment show Mondays through Friday, just like NBC’s The Tonight Show. Starting in 1969, they gave Merv Griffin a late night show but his syndicated ratings didn’t come over to late night and he couldn’t compete with Johnny Carson.
With the CBS Late Movie, the network committed to providing classic feature films as well as the debut of more recent theatrical fare. By the second month of this strategy, they were drawing better ratings than Carson, at least for a short time.
In a reality without VCRs, much less streaming movies, the CBS Late Movie — which ran from 11:30 P.M. to 2:30 A.M. — provided an eclectic mix of newer films, made for TV movies, pilots that weren’t bought, collected episodes of canceled shows, episodes of popular shows and some strange films that otherwise may have never aired on TV.
The first run of movies came from a new package of MGM films that had not been previously televised, as well as packages of 1950s Warner Bros. and MGM films that had been run only on local and independent stations but never on a network. In the first two weeks, eight of the ten movies were world television premieres.
Starting in 1976, back-to-back reruns of different one-hour television series started. This was my first chance to see Kolchak, The Night Stalker on TV, as well as British shows like The New Avengers and Return of the Saint and Canadian shows like Night Heat, Hot Shots, Adderely and Diamonds. When ABC canceled T.J. Hooker, the show appeared in late night with new episodes and even a TV movie. There were also original shows like Beyond the Screen and an American version of Top of the Pops.
The Pat Sajak Show took over the timeslot in 1989 and by that point, most stations would show syndicated programming. Eventually, David Letterman would come to CBS and take over the late night programming. There was the 1991 Crimetime After Primetime block, CBS Summer Showcase in 2015 and even a period where there was original late night programming including The Kids in the Hall along with re-airings of The Prisoner.
Much of what I love of pop culture comes from summer nights watching the CBS Late Movie with my dad. I can vividly recall so many films and episodes of Kolchak. I’d plan for what was coming with my TV Guide and can remember one time that we watched the first segment of an episode of Kolchak and were able to get hot dogs and be back home by the end of the never-ending commercial breaks. The first one would often end by almost 12:30 A.M. for a show that started at 11:30 P.M.
All this month, I’ll be spotlighting movies that aired on CBS when everyone else was asleep. You can see the entire list on Letterboxd and if you’d like to contribute, I’d be honored.
Christopher Gans has made some great movies and gets little credit. His better-than-the-game Silent Hill, Crying Freeman, his segments in Necronomicon and the incredible Brotherhood of the Wolf are among his many accomplishments.
As a student, he made this film, which pays tribute to Bava, complete with a dedication at the end. And you know, in just around 15 minutes, Gans gets it. He understands how giallo works, and instead of making the kind of modern Giallo that everyone tries these days, he crafts a film that looks bad with love and then goes forward, taking what works and creating a near-lunatic energy that feels like where you’d hoped Argento would have kept going after Tenebre and Opera.
Only two actors are credited: Aissa Djabri as Le témoin (the witness) and Isabelle Wendling as La victim (the victim). Like all Giallo directors of ill repute, one must assume that Gans is the killer or at least their hands.
Phillipe Gans and Jean-François Torrès created the music for this, and much like the visuals, it takes the sound of the form and makes it more hard-driving and powerful, while Jérôme Robert has gone on to plenty of work in the French film industry.
Folies Meurtrières (Killing Spree) (1984): Shot on Super 8 at some time in the early 80s in France, this film is 52 minutes of a killer aimlessly killing, killing and killing some more while a fuzzed-out synth soundtrack plays, the kind of music that those that say their films are “inspired by John Carpenter” but just have a neon color palette and a few keyboard songs on the soundtrack dream and wish and hope and pray that they could achieve.
Then everything changes.
And by changes, I mean the end of Maniac gets ripped off.
Look, I get it, this is a cheap knockoff of a slasher that may be bright enough to make fun of the things we accept in these films. But man, I love these lo-fi movies that want nothing more than to make their own effects and do their best to entertain you. They’re not significant movies — they were never intended to be — but they were a lot of fun to make.
I’ve heard that this movie is in the genre Murderdrone, in which “90% of the movie is people wandering around and getting murdered set to shitty lo-fi bedroom synths, and it’s increasingly hard to pay attention, but you can’t look away, and you’re stuck in a murdertrance.” This Letterboxd list has some more of those…
As for the man who made this, Antoine Pellissier, he’s a doctor now.
Possibly In Michigan (1983): Made with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, video artist Cecelia Condit’s nightmarish short has had many lives: as an art project to help her heal from her past, as a scare tactic shown on the 700 Club and as a viral video that got shared without context and was rumored to be a cursed film.
Starting with her film Beneath the Skin, Condit uses her video work to attempt to deal with the cycles of violence that she felt were all around her and so close to her. That’s because, for a year, she dated Ira Einhorn, the Unicorn Killer, who was also one reason we had Earth Day. The entire time that they dated, the rotting body of his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, was in a trunk. A trunk that Condit constantly walked past, one assumes.
It made it onto religious television because, in addition to examiningt the self-destructive behaviors of men toward women, it alsoexaminest female friendships and love.The lead characters, Sharon and Janice, may be a couple, or they may just be supportive women. Or both. Who are we to put any bounds on their relationship?
It’s become a viral sensation several times, as teens try to copy its strange musical numbers and send it to one another as a curse straight out of The Ring.
Our ladies are just trying to shop for perfume — this was shot at Beachwood Place in Beachwood, Ohio, where Condit sat outside the building manager’s office until she was allowed to shoot there; she was given twenty-minute blocks of time, which was a challenge — when Arthur begins to stalk them, a man whose face changes with a series of latex masks.
Arthur is the kind of Prince Charming who shows his love to women by hacking them to pieces; his always-changing face is a way of showing the roles that abusive men have taken in their relationships. We also discover that Sharon is attracted to violent men but also likes making them think that violence is their idea. Regardless, love should never cost an arm and a leg.
The songs, written and performed by Karen Skladany (who also plays Janice), are insidious in the way that they worm their way into your brain. This is the kind of weirdness that is completely authentic in a way that today’s manufactured social media creepypasta weirdness cannot even hope to be a faint echo of.
As frightening as this can be, it’s also a film about absorbing — eating a cannibal is one way, right? — and getting past the worst moments of life without being destroyed by them. This also lives up to so much of what I love about SOV in that while we’ve been taught that the 80s looked neon and sounded like a Carpenter movie, the truth is that the entire decade was beige and sounded like the demo on a Casio keyboard. This doesn’t nail an aesthetic as much as document the actual 1983 that I lived within, minus the shape-changing cannibal and singsong happy tale of a dog in the microwave.
Consider this absolutely essential and one of the most critical SOV movies ever.
The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook,Twitterand Instagram.
After an early conversion from Judaism to Roman Catholicism, a year in the Merchant Marine and two years in the Air Force, he attended Columbia University on the G.I. Bill.
After graduation, his first play, The Penguin, opened Off-Broadway with Martin Landau in the cast and received rave reviews—reviews that eluded his Broadway debut, Harbor Lights. He then spent the next two decades in London, where he wrote and directed Conscience Bay and The Fledglings when he wasn’t running nightclubs—one of which he sold to the Krays—and contributing to Penthouse.
He also married 16-year-old Sarah Caldwell when he was nearly forty, which formed the basis of his script for Lola(AKA Twinky AKA London Affair), a movie in which Susan George stands in for his wife — his wife did act in his film Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter — and Charles Bronson basically played him.
As the seventies began, he wrote the Italian film 1931: Once Upon a Time in New York, AKA Pete, Pearl & the Pole, which had Tony Anthony as Pete, Adolfo Celi as the Pole and Lucretia Love as the Pearl. He also wrote the Native Americansploitation film — is there a genre? — Shadow of the Hawk stars Jan-Michael Vincent, Marilyn Hassett and Chief Dan George.
Somewhere in the middle of the 70s, he shot the second unit on the adult horror comedy Dracula Sucks, which would serve him well when he made the mainstream Frightmare, a movie that has references to the Universal Dracula.
Perhaps his most interesting film is 1984’s The Black Room, which Vane revealed to Nightmare USA based on his real life, as he cheated on his wife in his black room with Penthouse centerfolds that he met while working at that publication. It’s also the only movie I’ve ever seen where a man rents a sex room from a brother and sister-couple who may or may not be vampires.
The last few movies of Vane’s career are hit and miss: Midnight, in which he was unhappy with the final cut, which was taken from him; Taxi Dancers, a sex film shot in the same nightclub used for Club Life and You’re So Dead, made when Vane was 79 years old and never shown, as far as I know.
Vane wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in 1991 in which he confessed to how hard agism had hit him, saying, “After being dropped by William Morris some years ago, I managed to sell several scripts to studios. But in recent years, the wall has been impenetrable. Instead of disappearing, I decided to write, produce and direct low-budget, independent features.”
If you want to know more, the incredible Hidden Films was lucky enough to interview Vane before he died in 2015.
But hey — we’re here to talk about Club Life.
Cal (Tom Parsekian) is a kid from a small town with dreams of Hollywood stardom. His journey takes him to The City, a nightclub owned by the coked-out Hector (Tony Curtis), who is in debt to organized crime but also loves to watch his wife Tilly (Dee Wallace) sing. Cal’s Hollywood dream leads him to become a bouncer, learning from the seasoned Tank (Michael Parks). The film features a unique scene where Tank effortlessly dodges every move Cal makes, leading to a moment of shared laughter and pain.
The girl Cal left behind, Sissy (Jamie Barrett), has come to Los Angeles looking for him, but she falls into a bad crowd at the same time as Cal leaving behind The City, as he comes to work at a lesbian bar called Different Drummer. Sissy also sings, and her number “First Class Man” gets her both booed off the stage at the ladies-only club and also catcalled.
This movie is awash in neon and fog. It also has one of the most fantastic sex scenes ever, as Cal and Sissy work it out on a clear waterbed lit from the inside and filled with fish. This is the movie that proves to you that you haven’t seen everything.
It’s not done yet.
After Tank gets killed, during which one of the tough guys says, “The cat can’t sleep if he wants to breathe.” Cal returns to The City and tries to keep Hector safe from all his debts. Did I mention that Cal can also dance? Or that he uses — and here’s the part that might be better than the waterbed filled with sea life — neon nunchucks that get a slow-motion dance fight scene that blew my brains out my nose.
This is a movie filled with strange BDSM fog-enhanced dancing set to music by Frank Musker (who is credited on the Stardust song “Music Sounds Better with You” thanks to a sample it contains from the song “Fate” that he did with Chaka Khan), Michael Sembello (the Flashdance force is strong within this) and Terry Shaddick (who co-wrote Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”).
Smiley-faced balloons intrude on breakups, graffiti clowns watch over overdoses, and a funeral happens inside a nightclub. It’s also shot by Joel King, whose resume includes camera work on Just Before Dawn, The Beastmaster, Carrie, Out of the Blue and Embrace of the Vampire. That should give you an idea that this movie looks everywhere. As for the wild dance numbers were choreographed by Dennon Rawles, who also worked on Voyage of the Rock Aliens and Staying Alive.
Also, Kristine DeBell shows up, and again, her career has some wild choices, from Meatballsand the erotic Alice in Wonderland to playing Jackie Chan’s love interest in The Big Brawl to being in A Talking Cat!?!
This film ends as only it can. Cal smashes the hall of mirrors where his friend Tank died and basically decimates the entire club with his neon nunchucks. He then splits the disco ball and throws his brightly colored martial arts weapon over the Hollywood hills.
You best believe I was crying.
PS: Norman Thaddeus Vane was not paid for the movie, and when it was nearly finished, he stole the film itself. He told Hidden Films, ” The movie was being edited at Consolidated Film Industries, and I went over and stole these really heavy cans of negatives and put them in the cellar of a friend’s house. And then I told our representative, “Listen, tell Guy Collins that I’m not giving the negatives back until I get some serious money.” They called the police and I said to them, “I’ve been working for this company for three months and I haven’t been paid dollar one. I’m holding the negative as a lien against the money they owe me by contract.” The police took my side. Guy’s brother came over and paid me $40,000 and said he’d owe me another $40-50,000, but I never got it.”
Florence Booker (played by Daniella Alma) is a character that many can relate to, as she navigates the complex feelings of isolation that often accompany marriage. Despite being in a relationship, she feels more alone than ever before. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she shares a cigarette with Roy (Nicholas Baroudi), a charismatic line cook. This seemingly innocent encounter sparks an affair, leading Florence to contemplate abandoning her current life in search of something more fulfilling. However, as she tries to escape her circumstances, she only deepens her sense of incompleteness and confusion.
The film, shot over the course of ten days on the lively streets of New York City by director Alexander Canepa, begins in the middle of Florence’s story, immersing the audience directly into her struggles. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that Florence has a tendency to attract individuals who are emotionally needy, particularly her husband, Louis (David Edwin), who epitomizes this dynamic.
At a film festival often dominated by genre cinema, the presence of a realistic romantic comedy like this may come as a surprise. However, those who appreciate a fresh and nuanced take on relationships will likely find this film captivating and thought-provoking. With its unique blend of humor and heartfelt moments, it challenges the conventions of the genre while offering a genuine exploration of love, longing, and personal fulfillment.
The Chattanooga Film Festival runs from now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.