EDITOR’S NOTE: To All My Friends On Shore was on the CBS Late Movie on June 13, 1974.
Blue (Bill Cosby) works as a skycap for an airport and also scrounges for junk he can sell. His wife Serena (Gloria Foster) is a maid and going to school to be a nurse. They’re both working so they can leave the projects and have a better life for their son Vandy (Dennis Hines), who resents the fact that he can’t have fun like his other friends and spend money. Well, when he gets sickle cell anemia, everyone realizes that time may mean as much as dollars.
Directed by Gilbert Cates — the producer of the Academy Awards fourteen times between 1990 and 2008 and was credited with recruiting Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, David Letterman, Steve Martin, Chris Rock and Jon Stewart to serve as hosts — this was written by Cosby and Allan Sloane.
Cosby and Foster would reunite years later for Leonard Part 6. But that’s another story.
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
Before we start, I have to explain.
As I look for movies that feature matriarchal societies, it seems like so many of them end up being straight-up male gaze fuelled fantasies. Or so you’d think, because while this movie was made by Anthony Brooks and O.O. Miller, only one of those names belongs to a man.
Brooks may have been Raymond Phelan (the writer, director, editor and one of the main actors of Too Young, Too Immoral), but Miller is really Doris Wishman, who Joe Bob Briggs referred to as “The greatest female exploitation film director in history.” From a series of nudist colony movies to movies with incredible names like Bad Girls Go to Hell, Satan Was a Lady and Let Me Die a Woman, as well as A Night to Dismember and two Eurospy films (Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73) starring all 73-inches of the woman with the largest bust on record, Chesty Morgan.
The truth is, this movie does introduce us to a female-run society on the moon, which for some reason is the occult-created Coral Castle near Miami, but they’re all topless. Yet like many of the nudist films of the early 60’s, this comes off as quite innocent. And unlike so many of them, this movie isn’t boring.
Dr. Jeff Huntley (Lester Brown in his one and only role) has inherited millions in his uncle’s will and is finally going to the moon with his mentor, Professor Nichols (William Mayer, who shows up as in several of these movies, like Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, which was not much of a life change).
Nichols sees Huntley like a son and worries about how dangerous the moon will be. He’s old, so he’s ready to die. But he wants Huntley to live and find a wife. After all, their secretary Cathy (Marietta) is in love with him and he doesn’t see it or doesn’t care. All he wants to do is go to the moon.
They get there, wearing brightly colored spacesuits with plenty of spaces for the lack of environment on the lunar surface to kill them. But instead, you know, they end up at Coral Castle and meet an entire planet of clothing-free ladies who are led by a Moon Queen (also Marietta) who uses her psychic powers — or maybe Dr. Jeff has never seen breasts before in person — to make our young moon-obsessed friend get obsessed over her mountain peaks.
Perhaps this explains why Jack Parsons blew himself up after falling so hard for Marjorie Cameron. I mean, you become besotten with one literal Whore of Babylon and you lose your security clearance but still get a peak on the dark side of the Moon named after you.
But I digress.
For two guys who planned a trip to the moon for years, they didn’t bring enough oxygen and also leave their camera behind, so no one will believe them that the lunar surface looks more like the aforementioned Blaze Starr’s 2 O’Clock Club.
It all works out, because that’s when the hood doctor discovers that his secretary — who he’s been ignoring forever, who sits and types the same letter all night long hoping that he will notice her — looks just like the Moon Queen. They embrace, the camera dollys back to give them some privacy and then the Professor walks in on them and just looks on approvingly. He just stands there and watches and smiles to the camera.
Keep an eye out for Shelby Livingston, who just three short years later would be chopped to pieces –just a few towns away in Kissimmee, Florida — in Two Thousand Maniacs! Lacey Kelly, who was in Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera and Common Law Wife, is also on the Moon.
There’s also a moment where the two space-loving men discuss Dr. Jeff going to a movie, as they drive past the Variety Theater, which is showing Wishman’s Hideout in the Sun. Did Dr. Jeff recognize Pat Reilly when he also saw her up there in space?
This movie also has its own theme song, which is pretty cool when you think about it. “I’m Mooning Over You (My Little Moon Doll),” which was warbled by Ralph Young over orchestration that had been arranged by — but not credited to — Doc Severinsen.
While not the most feminist leaning film ever, we can still point to the fact that the Moon Queen does rule her planet and you know, if you can breathe the lack of air on the lunar surface — to be fair, at the end the scientists have no idea where they’ve really come back from — you can forget puritanical mumbo jumbo and just walk around unencumbered.
After all, it worked for Blaze Starr, who was smart enough to get 4% of the profits for the 1984 movies about her life, Blaze.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Last of the Secret Agents? was on the CBS Late Movie on July 8, 1975.
Marty Allen and Steve Rossi — who used the catchphrase “Hello Dere!” — were a comedy from 1957 until 1968 that appeared on over 700 television shows including 44 appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.
This film is their spy spoof, featuring Nancy Sinatra acting and singing “The Last of the Secret Agents,” which is also in the Billy Murray movie The Man Who Knew Too Little.
Paramount Pictures knew all about comedy teams. In the 1940s, they made big money off of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the 1950s. There was the hope that Allen and Rossi could do the same here, but it didn’t happen. That said, they did make Allen and Rossi Meet Dracula and Frankenstein.
In this movie, they play tourists who are recruited by the Good Guys Institute to battle Zoltan Schubach and THEM, who are stealing art treasures.
It was directed by Norman Abbott, who worked a lot with Jack Benny and was a director for the Get Smart! TV show, amongst many other programs.
Lou Jacobi shows up (he’s Murray, the man who gets lost inside his TV in Amazon Women on the Moon), as does Thordis Brandt (The Witchmaker), Harvey Korman and the one-time wife of Russ Meyer, Edy Williams.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Blood and Roses was on the CBS Late Movie on July 15, 1975.
Carmilla has been made so many times — Vampyr, Dracula’s Daughter, Crypt of the Vampire, The Vampire Lovers, The Blood Spattered Bride — but the Roger Vadim-directed movie moves the setting to Italy in the 20th century.
Carmilla (Annette Stroyberg, Vadim’s wife at the time) is torn apart by the engagement of her friend Georgia (Elsa Martinelli, The Tenth Victim) to her cousin Leopoldo (Mel Ferrer, Nightmare City, The Visitor, both versions of Eaten Alive (with and without the exclamation mark), The Antichristand dude, Mel Ferrer has been in so many movies I love, even The Norseman) and she has no idea who she loves more. Yet she’s also found a dress that belonged to a vampiric forebearer and gone into her grave and nothing good is going to come of that.
And yes, Leopoldo is Count Karnstein, which would make him from the same family as the vampire in Twins of Evil and the rest of Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy (we already mentioned the other two films, the third is Lust for a Vampire). The role was originally intended for Christopher Lee, which makes sense.
This is the artier side of vampire films when so much of this week has been wallowing in the mire and muck. See, sometimes we can be classy when we share a lesbian vampire movie.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Beware the Blob! was on the CBS Late Movie on November 14, 1974 and March 16, 1976.
Beware! The Blob or Son of the Blob is a big idea to get your head around. While the original was presented as horror, this film pretty much leans in to how ridiculous it all is. Written by Anthony Harris and Jack Woods from a story by Richard Clair and Jack H. Harris, a lot of this was improvised on set and the script — even though it took all those people — was mostly ignored.
Harris was also the producer and Anthony was his college graduate son. They were next door neighbors with Larry Hagman — who had previously directed episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and The Good Life — who had never seen The Blob. Harris screened his print for the actor/director, who loved it and said that he could get a lot of his Hollywood friends to show up and get blobbed, as long as he could direct.
Fifteen years after the original Blob destroyed parts of Pennsylvania, Chester (Godfrey Cambridge) has brought a piece of that creature from its frozen grave in the North Pole, where he does the sensible thing and puts it in the fridge. It grows in size as it eats a fly, a kitten, then his wife Marianne (Marlene Clark) and finally, while Chester watches The Blob on TV, it eats him too just in time for Lisa (Gwynne Gilford) to watch him get claimed by the creature.
As she tries to get her boyfriend Bobby (Robert Walker Jr.). to believe what she’s seen, the red jelly eats its way through Los Angeles, claiming the lives of two hippies (Randy Stonehill and Cindy Williams) in a storm drain — were they looking for Simon? — as well as officer Sid Haig, chickens, horses, a bar, a gas station, Scoutmaster Dick Van Patten, a barber (Shelley Berman) and even some home-displaced folks (Hagman, Burgess Meredith and Del Close, who is wearing an eyepatch as his cornea was scratched by a cat previous to filming; he’d return with a similar look as Reverend Meeker in perhaps the best horror remake of all time, 1988’s The Blob).
It takes an ice rink — which was torn down shortly after filming — to stop the monster — maybe — this time. As for the bowling alley in this movie, it’s Jack Rabbit Slims from Pulp Fiction.
In the first movie, the Blob was made of silicone and dyed red. It had to be stirred throughout the movie to keep its color. This Blob was made from a red-dyed powder blended with water, as well as a big red plastic balloon, red plastic sheeting and a red drum of hard red silicone spun in front of the camera. Tim Baar and Conrad Rothmann created these effects and beyond working on second unit camera, Dean Cundey helped, years before he’d become such a force in filmmaking.
In 1982, when Hagman was on Dallas and the shooting of his character J.R. Ewing was the biggest moment in pop culture, this was re-released with the headline “The film that J.R. shot!”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Firehouse was on the CBS Late Movie on March 25 and August 20, 1975.
Richard Roundtree — a star from Shaft making a TV movie a year later, was that a step back? — is Shelly Forsythe, a black firefighter bringing racial tensions to a firehouse. This is even worse when Spike Ryerson (Vince Edwards), the oldest firefighter, claims that an arsonist has to be black. The men include Val Avery as cook Sonny Caputo, Richard Jaeckel as Hank Myers, Michael Lerner as Ernie Bush and Andrew Duggan as Captain Jim Barr.
This was based on Report From Engine Company 82 by retired FDNYC firefighter Dennis Smith. Another thing you may catch — the firehouse for this movie would one day be the Ghostbusters’ building.
What’s strange is that this became a TV series with Richard Jaeckel the only cast member to appear in both the TV movie and the series. They dropped the black firefighter angle for the show when that’s the main reason we’re watching this.
To save money, most of the firefighting is newsreel footage. That said, the idea that Shelly has to fit in with racist co-workers, have the black community not think he’s an Uncle Tom and still not die in a fire are all great plot elements.
Firehouse was directed by Alex March (Serpico, Shane and Paper Moon — the TV shows) and written by Frank Cucci (The Andros Targets).
Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
Dr. Percy Corly (Robert Wood) teaches sex education and he’s still a virgin. If that makes sense, this movie might. He and Dr. Hamilcar West(Jim Vance) build a machine that creates women — well, it makes a rabbit instead of a Playboy Bunny and a gay man, which they soon erase — and they both become addicted to it.
There is no nudity in a sex movie. Herschell Gordon Lewis has flim flammed you, making you think you’re going to see a man create his dream women and have orgies. No, he just kisses them. Well, he is a virgin. And that’s not a computer, it’s a Lady Schick Consolette Portable Hair Dryer Model 307.
The point of this movie was to get marks into a theater and not really to entertain anyone. This movie, however, entertained me because it’s just so strange. Lewis told Bleeding Skull how it was made in one sentence: “I had a partner named David Chudnow. His peculiar wife, Rosamond, wrote that script. What the heck.”
Seriously, I can only imagine how angry people were watching this when it came out because there are still people who get mad about it today and they weren’t going to an art theater to see some nudity. Instead, they watched a movie that is baffling on nearly every level, one that challenges you to keep watching it.
Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
Boojie Baker (Dan Conway) has been screwing bands — like Charlie — and ruining their dreams. He discovers the band The Faded Blue and renames them The Big Blast. To get them the best studio in music, he and his assistant Gordy (Ray Sager) send women to make out with the engineers and blackmail them. This group of musicians is smarter than the others and they confront Boojie about where their money is. He then sets them up with a drug bust, but they figure out a way to get back at him.
A non-nudie or gore movie from Herschell Gordon Lewis, this movie is probably most famous for featuring Colonel Sanders, who Lewis often used for catering on his movies. His scene was filmed in a Cleveland Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant with Sanders requesting multiple takes, his own billing in the credits and even wanting to direct his moment in the movie!
Here’s the dialogue:
Gordie: Hey, man. Do you serve fried chicken?
Harland Sanders: Do we serve fried chicken? Whoo-wee! We DO serve fried chicken!
Gordie: I got five hungry musicians in the parking lot wanting five buckets of fried chicken.
Harland Sanders: Musicians you say? Hey, I love music! If you let them play some music outside, I’ll let you have lunch for free.
Gordie: You got yourself a deal, buddy!
With a name like Blast-Off Girls, you might be hoping for some of the nudie cutie movies that Lewis did just a few years before. Instead, you get garage bands and fried chicken.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wrecking Crew was on the CBS Late Movie on November 17, 1977 and November 10, 1978.
Directed by Phil Carlson (Walking Tall, Ben), the last of the Matt Helm movies dispenses with screenwriter Herbert Baker, James Gregory as MacDonald and Beverly Adams as Lovey Kravesit.
Thanks to Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, this is probably the best known of the four Matt Helm movies (not to mention the Tony Franciosa-starring TV series).
Matt Helm is assigned by ICE to bring down Count Contini (Nigel Green, Countess Dracula), who is trying to Auric Goldfinger the world economy. Matt’s assistant is now Freya Carlson (Sharon Tate), a gorgeous but goofball Danish tourism bureau agent.
Elke Sommer (Baron Blood, Lisa and the Devil) and Nancy Kwan (Wonder Women) play the women out to kill Matt. It turns out that Freya is actually a deadly British agent who, of course, ends up in Matt’s bed. It’s kind of funny that Sommer and Green play pretty much the exact characters as they did in Deadlier then the Male.
Matt’s boss is played by John Larch (Bad Ronald, The Amityville Horror) this time and Tina Louise — Ginger Grant herself! — also makes an appearance.
While The Ravagers was revealed as the next Matt Helm movie in the credits, it was not to be. Martin had no interest in returning after the death of Sharon Tate. So when he refused to make the film, Columbia held up his share of the profits on the second Matt Helm film, Murderers’ Row. As we learned from Airport, Dean was about to be rich and no longer care. Man, I wish the proposed Martin and Sinatra double bill of Matt Helm Meets Tony Rome had been made.
This movie is packed with pro wrestlers and karate experts. That makes sense, as Bruce Lee was the karate advisor for the film. Some examples include:
Karate champion Mike Stone was Dean Martin’s fight double. You may know him better as Elvis’ karate instructor who ran away with his wife Priscilla.
Prince Wilhelm von Homburg, who is perhaps better known as Vigo the Carpathian in Ghostbusters II.
Pepper Martin, a pro wrestler who was friends with Woody Strode; he also appears in the 1981s slasher Scream.
Boxer, stuntman and friend of Henry Miller, Joe Gray.
Joe Lewis, considered the best American karate fighter in the 1970’s.
Ed Parker, founder of American Kenpo karate.
And in his first movie ever, Chuck Norris.
I’m sad to see the Matt Helm movies end. Hollywood has been discussing remaking them, but I’ll always have my four DVD box set to go back to.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Excalibur was on the CBS Late Movie on June 6, 1986.
Shot entirely on location in Ireland, employing mostly Irish actors and crew, Excalibur was an important film for the Irish filmmaking industry and helped start the careers of Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and Ciarán Hinds.
It was also known as the Boorman Family Project, as several members of director Jonathan Boorman’s family appear, with his daughter Katrine Boorman playing Igrayne — Arthur’s mother — as well as his daughter Telsche as the Lady of the Lake and his son Charley acting in the role of Mordred as a boy. It was shot a mile from his home, so he was able to be at home for the entire making of the movie.
Boorman has been wanting to make the movie since 1969, yet the three-hour script was seen as too costly by United Artists and instead, he was offered The Lord of the Rings, which he did not make yet did develop. He ended up using some of the work that went into that adaption here, as well as potentially being inspired by Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
He’d worked with Rospo Pallenberg on that canceled film (as well as Exorcist II: The Heretic and The Emerald Forest; Pallenberg would also direct Cutting Class), so he worked with him here to bring Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to theaters. Boorman said that his film was about “the coming of Christian man and the disappearance of the old religions which are represented by Merlin. The forces of superstition and magic are swallowed up into the unconscious.”
I love Roger Ebert’s review of this movie, in which he said that the film was both a wondrous vision and a mess, “a record of the comings and goings of arbitrary, inconsistent, shadowy figures who are not heroes but simply giants run amok. Still, it’s wonderful to look at.”
It’s beyond gorgeous, actually, a movie that combines shocking gore with artistic flourishes, like the three ladies in white who attend Arthur to Avalon at the close. Boorman was also smart enough to cast Nicol Williamson as Merlin and Helen Mirren as Morgana Le Fay, two actors who had had a conflict when they acted in Macbeth together. He felt that tension would be seen on screen and it certainly is. That said, Mirren claimed that the two become friends while making Excalibur.
It rained every single day of the shoot, which adds to the foggy look of the film. It had many issues, as the first fight scene had to be filmed three times. It was filmed at night and the exposure meter was broken, leading to two different scenes of underexposed film.
Boorman’s career is pretty great. Sure, there are the big movies like Deliverance, but I love that he shoots for the fences and makes off the wall stuff like Zardoz and Exorcist II: The Heretic. Here’s to less playing it safe for directors, even if the misses end up being spectacular losses. I don’t think that that can happen any longer in entertainment.
My initial exposure to this film came from Mad Magazine. Often as a kid, we wouldn’t see an R-rated movie until it was on HBO, so many of the films I’ve had to find as an adult were first seen through the eyes of Mad’s Usual Gang of Idiots. This time, Don Martin did the movie adaption. I’m happy to share a few panels with you thanks to Jesse Hamm on Twitter.
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