Author Archives: bandsaboutmovies

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Wild In the Streets (1968)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Wild In the Streets was on the CBS Late Movie on February 13, 1973 and March 1, 1974.

Barry Shear (Across 110th Street) directed, and Robert Thom (Death Race 2000) wrote this youth-oriented movie. Yeah, it’s kind of heavy-handed, but it also has Shelley Winters trying to escape a barbed wire fence in a prison, and I’m all for that.

Rock singer and revolutionary Max Frost (Christopher Jones) leads the Troopers, a band that lives with him in a Beverly Hills mansion. They are 15-year-old guitarist and legal mastermind Billy Cage (Kevin Coughlin),  anthropologist Stanley X (Richard Pryor) playing drums, ex-child star Sally LeRoy (Diane Varsi) on backing vocals and hook-handed bass player Abraham Salteen (Larry Bishop) on bass guitar and trumpet. Their song “Shape of Things to Come” would end up coming out in the real world and hitting #22 on the charts; it’s really Paul Wibier and his band The 13th Power.

An entire album of songs would come out, including the song “Fifty Two Per Cent,” which explains to their fans that 52% of the world’s population is 25 or younger. That means that they can rise and take over.

Senate candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook) wants to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 and uses Max’s popularity to get some attention. It blows up because Max and the band sing a song called “Fourteen or Fight!” and demand the voting age be lowered to 14. Protests started nationwide, but Max and the Senate candidate came together and announced that the new age should be 15, and Max introduced a new song: “Fifteen and Ready.”

The politician thought the band was done with politics. They’re just getting started.

When a Congressman from Sally LeRoy’s home district dies, the band enters her in the special election because she’s the only one old enough to run. She easily wins, thanks to all the young voters. Fergus’ son Jimmy (Michael Margotta) joins the group, the voting age becomes 14, and teens spike Washington’s water with LSD and send teenage escorts to keep all the senators occupied.

The Grand Old Party gets Max on their side, and he runs for President. Once he wins, he turns on them. Everyone over thirty must retire and be dosed on LSD for life in re-education camps. Fergus tries to bring Max’s parents in (Bert Freed and Shelley Winters) but feels nothing for them. His first political act was exploding their car. He even tries to kill the new President, who soon takes over and rounds up the Fergus family.

Does Max change the world? Yes. He takes the military out of every country, puts actual smart people and computers in charge of the gross national product, ships surplus food to starving countries, breaks apart the secret police and turns America into a hedonistic place. But the problem is that even if the rest of the world is following, now the under-ten kids want to put the old people—those in their twenties, like Max—in camps someday.

Night Gallery Season 3 Episode 5: Specter In Tap Shoes (1972)

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After her twin sister Marian hangs herself, Millicent (Sandra Dee) returns home, only to hear Marian – a dancer – tapping across the floor upstairs, footsteps rapping in the room where she left this world.

“Specter In Tap Shoes” was directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by Gene R. Kearney from a story by Jack Laird. After the death of her twin, Millicent is sure that Marian is still here, as she doesn’t just hear her; she smells the smoke from her cigarettes.

Maybe she should just leave. That’s what William Jason (Dane Clark), a property developer who is a mutual friend of Millicent’s pal Sam (Christopher Connelly, soon to depart for Italy), thinks would be best. She’d get closure and away from all the memories.

Millicent keeps hearing her sister’s voice, urging her to hang herself as well. She stops at the last minute and finds William in her sister’s studio. He demands letters that Marion wrote to him, letters that she somehow can discover immediately. She also finds a revolver that she uses to shoot him.

The logical explanation is that the entire house was wired so William could gaslight Millicent just like he did Marion. But then, how did she know where the letters were?

This is a decent enough episode, but as always, Serling writes the better Night Gallery stories. Szwarc does a good job of making the story mean more than it does.

Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Enter the Clones of Bruce (2023)

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Bruce Lee died in 1973 after four major movies: The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon. Yes, he had been acting since his teens and also appeared on The Green Hornet and worked in Hollywood, but he became a cultural force through those movies. The world of film—more than that, pop culture, martial arts, and cultural identity—were all shaped by a man who died at the age of 32.

Just when the world had started to love Bruce Lee, his sudden departure left a profound void in the cultural landscape.

What happens when the demand exists and there’s no supply?

You invent a supply to fill that vacuum.

Brucesploitation is a truly unique film genre that revolves entirely around one individual. Actors like Ho Chung-tao and Moon Seok transform into Bruce Li and Dragon Lee. The titles of these films are so reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s movies that they even incorporate footage from his funeral. These films, which initially portray the life stories of these actors, often delve into sequels of Bruce Lee’s films or even venture into the realm of pure fantasy, where Bruce Lee can be seen fighting characters like Popeye and Emanuelle in the afterlife.

Directed by David Gregory and featuring contributions from Carl Daft, Frank Djeng, Vivian Wong, and Michael Worth, Enter the Clones of Bruce is a film that not only entertains but also educates. It is a must-watch for those unfamiliar with this unique genre, as well as for those who have delved deep into its peculiar and potent flower.

David Gregory, known for his work on Al Adamson’s life in Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson and the making of The Island of Dr. Moreau in Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, brings us another gem. Enter the Clones of Bruce, like his previous works, avoids being overly academic and never ridicules its subject. Instead, it celebrates how Bruce Lee revolutionized the portrayal of Asian men in Hollywood and why his films were so crucial. It also argues that these imitations were perhaps just as necessary in the healing process following the martial arts legend’s death.

The true joy of this film is in hearing from the performers and how it made them feel to become stars while living in the shadow of the man they were impersonating. Like Bruce Le, who was in Shaw Brothers’ Infra-Man before changing his name from Ho Chung-tao and appearing in movies like The Big Boss Part II, Return of Bruce, My Name Called Bruce and many more, including a cameo in Pieces. Or Dragon Lee was once Moon Kyung-seok, the star of The Real Bruce Lee, Kung Fu Fever and Dragon Lee vs. the Five Brothers. Or Bruce Li, who was in Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death and Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth.

The film also offers a wealth of knowledge from martial arts film experts, including Mike Leeder, Christophe Lemaire, Michael Worth, Christophe Champclaux, and Stephen Nogues. Their perspectives, along with those of director Lee Tso Nam, Golden Harvest producer Andre Morgan, Jean-Marie Pallardy, Uwe Schier, and Aquarius Releasing’s Terry Levene, provide a comprehensive understanding of the genre.

Perhaps one of the most insightful voices is Valerie Sou, professor of Asian studies at San Francisco State University, who explains why Lee meant so much to Asians not just in America but worldwide, as well as his cultural relevance to African-American audiences.

Even better, the film has many of the great martial arts actors of all time, including David Chiang (The 36th Chamber of Shaolin), Lee Chiu (The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter), Mars (Enter the Dragon), Phillip Ko (Heart of Dragon), Lo Meng (The Kid With the Golden Arm), Roy Horan (Game of Death II and the father of martial arts actress Celina Jade), Bruce Liang (The Dragon Lives Again), Caryn White (He’s a Legend, He’s a Hero), Eric Tsang (The Dragon Lives Again), Lo Meng (Five Deadly Venoms), Casanova Wong (Warriors Two), David Yeung (son of Bolo), Angela Mao (I lost my mind when she showed up and got emotional; obviously she was in Enter the Dragon but her films are so inspirational. She even thanks the audience for watching her movies, a charming thing to do); “Black Dragon” Ron Van Clief (Fist of Fear, Touch of Death), Wang Dao, Shan Charang, Japanese actor Yasuaki Kurata (Bruce Lo) and perhaps the greatest cinematographer of fighting ever — as well as a Bruce Lee comedy clone in The Fat Dragon — Sammo Hung.

Another amazing moment is when this film gets not just Joseph Lai but also Godfrey Ho to speak on the traditions of creating products in a demand vacuum. I couldn’t be more pleased with this movie!

Enter the Clones of Bruce does what every good movie about movies should do. It makes you want to watch all of the films in this. I love the stranger examples, like Fist of Fear, Touch of Death and The Dragon Lives Again, but I think Bruce Li in New Guinea might outdo them!

Severin also plans on a box set of Bruceploitation films that will include Challenge of the Tiger, The Real Bruce Lee, Dragon Lives Again, Bruce’s Fingers, Enter the Game of Death, Ninja Strikes Back, Clones of Bruce Lee (a movie that combines Dragon Lee, Bruce Lai, Bruce Le and Bruce Thai) and The Death of Bruce Lee. I’ll be first in line to buy it.

If you’d like to get a head start on the movies in this genre, I’ve compiled a Letterboxd list of the movies the film mentions. Watch them all, scream loudly at the camera and remember, “An intelligent mind is one which is constantly learning.” Or watching movies.

I watched this film as part of The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN). You can learn more at their official site.

I watched this film as part of The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN). You can learn more at their official site.

Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

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Joe Dallesandro is one of those nexus points for so many movies and parts of culture that I love. Born to a Navy man and a mother who was serving fifteen years in a federal pen for auto theft by the time he was five, Joe went from foster homes to knocking out his high school principal and stealing cars just like his mom. He got shot in the leg, and when his dad took him to the hospital, the cops arrested the fifteen-year-old and sent him to the Catskills, specifically the Camp Cass Rehabilitation Center. He escaped within a few months and made it back to New York City, where he went from nude modeling to being the star of Warhol’s films.

After roles in Lonesome Cowboys, Trash, Heat and Warhol’s two monster films, Joe decided to stay in Europe, where he made all sorts of movies in all the types of genres that I love. Yeah, there’s the American The Gardener, Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime moi non plus, Savage Three, Killer Nun, Madness, Le Marge with Sylvia Kristel and many more. He even shows up somehow in Theodore Rex. Yes, the same man whose bulge is on the front of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, and the cover of The Smiths’ first album was in a movie about dinosaur cops.

This is the movie that Joe, who never once gave it away, came to Italy to make with Paul Morrissey.

Baron von Frankenstein (Udo Kier) has made his sister Katrin his wife, yet ignores her as he works to create the perfect human being, going through corpses of men and women to craft his Serbian ideal. You know, when he isn’t literally having sex with the body parts of dead women while shouting, “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life… in the gall bladder!”

He wants Nicholas (Dallesandro) to be the body of his creature, but he escapes and makes his way to the castle, where he begins to satisfy the Baroness. Once she reveals the fact that she only cares about herself, she betrays him and, in return, is given what she really wants: The opportunity to have sex with the Baron’s creation, who responds by loving her to death. Another even more graphic scene happens when lab assistant Otto literally screws the guts out of the female monster (Dalila Di Lazzaro, Phenomena), causing the angry Dr. Frankenstein to kill him.

I kind of dig that the end of this film echoes both A Bay of Blood and Manson’s quote about “These children that come at you with knives — they are your children” by having the Frankenstein children holding scalpels that they will either use to help or to hurt. The movie doesn’t tell you what happens next.

That A Bay of Blood comparison is easier to make when you realize that one of the kids is played by one of the adorable and murderous kids from that movie, Nicoletta Elmi. In the 70s, if you wanted a frightening Italian red-headed child, you went with Nicoletta, who also appeared in Baron Blood, Who Saw Her Die?, Deep Red and many more. She also played the red-head usher in Demons when she grew up.

Despite his name appearing on this film, Andy Warhol’s contributions were minimal. He may have visited the set once and briefly examined the editing. Perhaps a more involved talent was Antonio Margheriti—Anthony Dawson—who claimed to have directed some of the film. He may have just been there so that the film could claim to be Italian, as it would need a director from the country to obtain Italian nationality for the producers.

I watched this film as part of The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN). You can learn more at their official site.

TWO MORE EPISODES OF DEJA VIEW!

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Ed Glaser has posted two new videos and a revised one, too!

You can get Ed’s book, How the World Remade Hollywood, from McFarland Books. To see some of these movies and hear from Ed, check out the entire channel at Deja View: Remakes and Rip-Offs of Your Favorite Films.

3 Dev Adam: An update of a video we just shared a few weeks ago, Ed keeps finding amazing info!

Shocking Dark: One of my favorite movies ever, this combines Terminator and Aliens all in one wonderful concoction.

Our Friend Power 5: Ninja Turtles meet remixed robots in this South Korean movie made to sell toys!

Support Ed and all his amazing work!

Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Terrifier 2 (2022)

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The moments that work in Terrifier are the ones without the gore. Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) is just walking with a bag of glass, and there are moments in the pizza shop and him on that bike. The disquiet of those moments was so upsetting that I was excited to see where the next movie would go.

Directed, written, edited and produced by Damien Leone, this takes place a year after the first movie. It’s Halloween again, and Art has returned from the dead, killing the coroner, inspecting his body, and seeing The Little Pale Girl, an entity that follows him throughout the movie.

Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) are obsessed with the drawings in their dead father’s sketchbook. While Sienna takes to the angel whose costume she is making for a party, Jonathan loves the pictures of Art and his victims. Their father died of brain cancer, which they claim led to the visions inside his books; that night, a fire wipes out Sienna’s costume, but her sword—a gift from her father—remains.

When she goes to a costume shop to rebuild her wings, Sienna has a panic attack instead of talking to her friends Allie (Casey Hartnett) and Brooke (Kailey Hyman) about Art the Clown’s victim, Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi, the final girl of the original). She has a nervous breakdown on live TV and murders talk show host Monica Brown.

By day, Jonathan watches Art and The Little Pale Girl play with a dead opossum while Art kills the costume store owner, Allie and Allie’s mother at night. That sentence in no way explains just how far these murder scenes go, some of which feel like they descend into Herschell Gordon Lewis-level gore porn for laughs.

Jonathan shows Sienna and their mother, Barbara (Sarah Voight), the sketchbook, as he has learned that The Little Pale Girl was Art’s first victim, Emily Crane. Jonathan believes their father knew how to stop Art, but his mother destroys the books and slaps him around. There is no need for revenge, as she dies moments later at the hands of Art, who takes the sword and Jonathan.

After a midnight party where Brooke doses Sienna with MDMA, our heroine is lured to the abandoned The Terrifier amusement park ride. There, she is killed by Art and resurrected by an unseen force before killing the clown numerous times to save her brother. One final time, she uses the sword to cut off Art’s head, which is taken by The Little Pale Girl. Moments later, Victoria Heyes gives birth to the living head inside the mental home, setting up the third movie.

Somehow, on a budget of $250,000, this movie made $16.1 million. There was hardly an ad campaign, either. The idea that a film that caused people to pass out and puke definitely had some allure.

I also have no idea why this movie is 2 hours and 18 minutes long, but 15-year-old me would have loved it. 51-year-old me thinks this movie is too long but recognizes that people tend to want to keep playing loud and fast when you’re playing loud and fast. I wish there had never been any information on Art, where he came from, or that he had any special powers, but I’m not making this movie. I’m just watching it. And any movie that has a comedy moment where a killer clown shreds a person and then reappears to pour bleach and salt on them has transcended criticism and just exists on its own.

I watched this film as part of The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN). You can learn more at their official site.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Children of the Damned (1964)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Children of the Damned was on the CBS Late Movie on March 6 and October 4, 1972 and September 3, 1973.

Directed by Anton Leader and written by John Briley (Ghandhi, Pope Joan), Children of the Damned features six children from six countries, all born under miraculous circumstances. These children, with their extraordinary abilities, come to be seen as the next stage in human evolution, a theme that the film explores in depth.

British psychologist Tom Lewellin (Ian Hendry) and geneticist David Neville (Alan Badel) start by studying Paul (Clive Powell), a London-born young boy whose mother hates him. He joins the others who quickly escape and hide in an abandoned church.

Paul, Nina, Rashid, Mi Ling, Aga Nagolo, and Mark, the six children, are not just a threat to the governments of the world, but also symbols of resilience. Despite the world’s rejection, they continue to fight back when attacked, showing a strength that is both inspiring and unsettling.

The idea that these are all the children of aliens is abandoned, however, as this movie is just about the kids and not where they came from. I personally prefer the much darker first film, which delves more into the children’s origins and the implications of their abilities. However, this sequel still maintains a bleak tone as the group realizes that they have arrived at a time when humans are not yet ready to deal with evolution or have their better future selves walk among them.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed was on the CBS Late Movie on March 10 and July 19, 1972 and November 23, 1973.

There’s a moment in this movie where Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) assaults Anna Spiegler (Veronica Carlson) that was filmed over the objections of Cushing, Carlson and director Terence Fisher, who finally ended shooting when he felt enough was enough. This moment isn’t even in the original script but was added at the demand of Hammer executive James Carreras, who was under pressure to keep the American distributors happy. The fact that a rape scene is what it took is pretty upsetting,

The film starts in a lab where a thief has broken in. By the time he starts his crime, a masked man has broken in as well and decapitated a doctor. The thief reports the crime to the police as the masked man reveals himself to be Dr. Frankenstein, now known as Mr. Fenner. He’s renting a room from Anna, whose fiancee, Karl Holst (Simon Ward), is one of the doctors overseeing the care of Frankenstein’s assistant, Dr. Frederick Brandt (George Pravda).

Karl has a secret. He’s been stealing narcotics to treat Anna’s mother, a fact that Frankenstein uses against him. They work together to free Brandt, and Karl even kills a man in the middle of a robbery, further giving the doctor power over him.

After Brandt has a heart attack, they take his brain and place it into the body of Professor Richter (Freddie Jones). When his wife refuses to accept him because of his horrifying appearance, he goes wild. By the end, he’s poured liquid paraffin all over his house and lures the doctor there, planning to burn him alive or put him out of commission long enough until the next movie in the series, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. Yes, I realize there’s also The Horror of Frankenstein, but that movie is a remake of Curse of Frankenstein and has Ralph Bates in the lead role.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Pretty Poison (1968)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Pretty Poison aired on the CBS Late Movie on May 15 and December 5, 1973 and July 23, 1974.

Dennis Pitt (Anthony Perkins) wants a life of adventure, and he gets it.

On parole from a mental institution — he set the fire that accidentally claimed the life of his aunt — he works a menial job watching bottles go through the line at Sausenfeld Chemical Company. So when he sees the gorgeous Sue Ellen Stepanek (Tuesday Weld) march across the field in her majorette uniform, he brings her along into the games in his head, pretending to be a CIA agent and having some fun with a young and innocent teenager.

Except that Dennis goes from being the antagonist to the protagonist.

Directed by Noel Black (Private School) and written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. (the TV Batman, Flash Gordon) from the book She Let Him Continue by Stephen Geller, Pretty Poison spends so much of the movie making us think that Dennis is the same kind of killer that Perkins played in Psycho — the last film he was in before going back to the stage — and he’s really just a scared little boy being shocked by the evil inside a gorgeous young lady.

Semple told Shock Magazine, “It was very hard to cast. Tuesday was excellent for it but Tony was much too obvious for it. We really tried to find somebody young to do it. We never could find a new, young actor the studio would go with.”

Weld had tremendous issues with Black. She told Rex Reed it was “The least creative experience I ever had. Constant hate, turmoil and dissonance. Not a day went by without a fight. Noel Black, the director, would come up to me before a scene and say, ‘Think about Coca-Cola.’ I finally said, ‘Look, just give the directions to Tony Perkins, and he’ll interpret for me.” She further hated the movie, saying, “I don’t care if critics like it; I hated it. I can’t like or be objective about films I had a terrible time doing.”

The movie pretty much disappeared in theaters, and any reputation it had came from critics like Pauline Kael, who vilified Fox for its failure to market Pretty Poison. 1968 was a strange year. However, it was a time when the country felt like it was falling to bits, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both shots. A film that has a young woman gleefully accepting murder and even turning a gun on her mother (Beverly Garland) was going to have a hard time.

But wow — this movie. It really took me unaware, and I loved the turn Perkins gives to his character; at the end, he is so frightened of Weld that he willingly goes to prison for her crimes. She’s learned nothing and is already moving on to her next victim, yet the end teases that parole officer Morton Azenauer (John Randolph) has figured her out. At one point, it seems like Dennis has all the answers, but when the world cracks on him, he becomes a child.

By the way, Dennis and Sue Ellen go to see The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, directed by Roger Corman.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Village of the Damned (1960)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Village of the Damned on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and August 17, 1972; January 11, 1974 and January 17, 1975.

Based on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, this movie was delayed by two years when MGM gave in to pressure from the Catholic Legion of Decency, who objected to the depiction of virgin birth and other blasphemous implications of this story. It was sent to MGM-British Studio, where director Wolf Rilla and producer Ronald Kinnoch punched up — and made more English — the script by Stirling Silliphant.

The population of Midwich was asleep for four hours. No one knows why. But two months later, all women of childbearing age are pregnant, giving birth at just seven months old to children who communicate with their minds, have platinum hair and have the brightest eyes.

Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) and his wife Anthea (Barbara Shelley) are the parents of David, one of these extraordinary children. Midwich is not the only place affected, as similar births have occurred in other parts of the world. The town is gripped by fear of these children, who walk in unison, dress alike, and possess the power to control others.

After attempting to understand the children, he realizes the futility of his efforts. There’s no controlling them. For the survival of humanity, they must be eliminated. He envisions a mental barrier, a distraction, and uses it to plant a bomb in their school. The explosion claims their lives, as well as his own, in a tragic end.

This is a happy ending in 1960.

British censors were worried that the glowing eyes of the children would scar people who saw it—many of whom survived the Blitz, mind you—and demanded another version without the effect.