We’re on day 2 of the Scarecrow Video Psychotronic Challenge! The rules for today? DAY 2: SHE BITES: Scientists should not fool with mother nature but they do and bad things happen.

I’ve always wanted to watch Phase IV, the lone directorial effort of famed graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Saul Bass. Bass was best known for his title sequences, including the animated cut-outs Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm and his groundbreaking graphic design work on Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Psycho. He also designed some of the most iconic logos in history, including AT&T, Warner Brothers and United Airlines.

Starting in the 1960’s, Bass moved beyond creating title sequences for films to visualizing, storyboarding and even directing key scenes and sequences. He’d get a strange credit for this: visual or pictorial consultant. On some films (like Spartacus, where he designed the gladiator school and storyboarded the final battle) he simply set things up for the director. On others, like West Side Story, where he filmed the prologue, storyboarded the opening dance and created the end titles, he set up the full direction the film would take. And on Psycho, Bass was integrally involved in that films shower murder sequence, going so far to create the boards and test footage that convinced Hitchcock how the scene should be shot.

This leads us to the only movie that Bass would direct on his own, 1974’s Phase IV. A failure upon release, it finally found an audience via television and video. It’s also the first film to depict a geometric crop circle, predating the first crop circles that were found in the UK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuhgBvOWb_k

A cosmic event has caused ants to undergo rapid evolution and a hive mind that scientists are struggling to investigate. Within the desert, those ants have created large towers and geometrically perfect designs that force the locals to abandon the area, except for one family.

Scientists James Lesko (frequent Robert Altman actor Michael Murphy) and Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport, the original voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey) have set up a sealed dome to study the ants, as well as house the aforementioned family that has not left. Soon, they are at war with the much more organized and effective ants.

After the ants invade the lab, one of the townspeople, Kendra (Peter Sellers’ widow Lynne Frederick, who also appears in Schizo and Four of the Apocalypse) becomes convinced that the ants are angry at her. Bass was obsessed with ensuring that Frederick had no trace of her British accent in this film, making her run her lines over and over again. She also had to wear a tight corset so that she could appear sixteen years old instead of her real age, twenty. Also of note, Linda Blair was almost cast in the film but the budget couldn’t afford her.

Kendra abandons the lab, sacrificing herself to save everyone else as Hubbs and Lesko argue over how to best deal with the ants. Lesko wants to communicate with them while Hubbs wants to destroy them before being stung to death and falling into a hole. Lesko decides to follow Hubbs plan and destroy the queen, but instead, he finds Kendra alive. He decides that the ants don’t want to destroy the human race, but instead make their two worlds work together.

Originally, Bass filmed a four-minute long montage sequence that ended the film, showing what life on new Earth would be like and how evolution would change Lesko and Kendra. This was cut by the distributor and would not be seen until 2012.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beLpsWaUDNk

This is the kind of movie that could only be made in 1974. This is a pre-blockbuster big movie unafraid to suddenly have long moments of gorgeous music and long elegiac shots of insects going about their daily lives. The moments of human interaction feel boring by comparison. From the posters for the film, audiences were probably expecting a Bert I. Gordon style film and were rewarded with a trippy meditation about mankind’s place in the cosmic consciousness.

Obviously, this film is a major influence on Panos Cosmatos’ first film, Beyond the Black Rainbow. It was also one of the first movies featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 during the KTMA era.

The first challenge on the list: 1. THE LADY AUTEUR: Pioneering women directors in psychotronic cinema. Now see who’s wearing the pants in Hellywood.

I’ve gone with Doris Wishman, who produced and directed at least thirty films over four decades, mostly in the usually male-dominated genres of sexploitation and pornography. Her film career began as a hobby after the death of her husband in 1958, with her feature debut being 1960’s Hideout in the Sun.

She’d already had experience in the film industry, as she worked for her cousin Max Rosenberg as a film booker for his art and exploitation films. The 1957 New York appeals court that allowed nudism to be shown in movie theaters inspired her to make that first film, which she followed in 1961 with Nude on the Moon, a film that was banned in New York because nudist colonies were legally permissible but nudism on the moon was not. She also worked with the legendary burlesque dancer Blaze Starr but as the nudie cutie genre started losing money, she moved into sexploitation.

That’s when some of her most famous — well, amongst lovers of ridiculous cinema like me — films got made, like Bad Girls Go to Hell and the Chesty Morgan vehicles Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, films in which Morgan kills people with her monstrous 73-inch breasts.

Wishman also produced 1972’s Keyholes Are for Peeping, which starred comedian Sammy Petrillo, a Brooklyn nightclub performer who eventually made Pittsburgh his hometown in the 1990’s. He’s probably better known for his teaming up with singer Duke Mitchell (yes, the guy who made Massacre Mafia Style and Gone with the Pope) as the poor man’s Martin and Lewis. They teamed up for Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which also somehow rips off Abbott and Costello monster films at the same time.

As the industry moved from softcore to hardcore, Wishman directed two Annie Sprinkle features, Satan Was a Lady and Come With Me, My Love. She wasn’t really excited about the shift and denied working on these films. As the 70’s were coming to a close, she released a film she’d been working on since 1971, Let Me Die a Woman, a groundbreaking semidocumentary on transgender issues filtered through the lens of exploitation.

That brings us to today’s movie, A Night to Dismember, which she started filming in 1978 to cash in on the slasher craze begun by Halloween. Wishman was ready to direct and produce the film from a screenplay by Judith J. Kushner. Most of the shoot took place in 1979 in New York at Wishman’s home.

From there, things get weird. Wishman claimed that multiple reels were destroyed in the photo processing lab, resulting in her having to reshoot several scenes and use stock footage to make a releasable final film. After four years (!) of post-production, the film would remain unreleased until MPI Media Group put it out in 1989.

There’s also an entirely different version of this film that was released in August 2018 on YouTube by the film’s cinematographer, C. Davis Smith. This version features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role and an entirely different plot, as adult film actress Samantha Fox replaced Cummings after the destruction of Wishman’s film.

According to Smith, Fox paid Wishman $2,000 to get the starring role of Vicki Kent. He said he doesn’t know for sure, but he believes that Wishman faked the story that the original print was destroyed in a fire and reshot the film with Fox. You can read more about that story here.

Whew! That’s a lot of history to cover, but this is a film that has plenty of it. Let’s get into what it’s really all about!

The Kent family suffers from an ancestral curse that has caused nearly all of them to be murdered, often by one another. Bonnie was first, hacked to pieces by her sister Susan, who was upset that her father favored her sister. After the murder, she slipped on the blood and was killed by the very same axe.

Broderick Kent’s wife Lola is next, murdered in the bathtub. While Kent tries to proclain his innocence, he eventually hangs himself.

That’s when we get to Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox), who has just ben released from an insane asylum after killing two boys. Her brother and sister, Billy and Mary, want her to be committed again.

Despite wanting to rekindle her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, she struggles to make it in the real world, constantly hallucinating. Then again, with Frankie getting decapitated and his head burned in a fireplace, that relationship seems doomed.

Vicki tries to visit some relatives who turn her away before they’re all killed by hatchet and by car. Even a trip to the lake is fraught with horror, as a zombie chases her around, only to be revealed to be her brother Billy who has been trying to frighten her back into the sanitarium.

This is the kind of movie that rewards your lack of attention with shifts in characters, hairstyles and clothing all within the same scene. It doesn’t help that there is next to no voiced dialogue and only a narrorator’s voice to carry us through every scene and change in tone. We go from Vicki performing a sexy dance and trying to seduce a detective to Vicki’s sister Mary actually being the one behind all the killings.

The detective makes his way to the house where he finds a confused Vicki holding a hatchet. Despite hitting him several times with it, he manages to strangle her to death. That’s when we get the voice over from the detective, telling us that Mary was the real guilty party, but she’s escaped after killing a cab driver. And that’s the movie, I guess.

To put it bluntly, A Night to Dismember is a mess. It’s got songs that stop and start, horrible acting, bad gore and footage that appears to be the quality of a 1970’s super 8 home movie. It’s the kind of movie that if I watched it with a roomful of normal folks, they’d scoff and laugh. And that’s why I woke up at 4 AM so that I could enjoy it all by myself, away from the insults of people not ready to cheerful enjoy a movie that combines the insane and the inane. There’s also plenty of 1970’s fashion and an unhinged voiceover to love, which continues over the credits, making me adore this piece of film even more.

Back to Wishmasn. Before her death in 2002, she was finally honored for her groundbreaking work, with John Waters featured a clips from her films in Serial Mom, appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, appearances at the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals and a showing of her films at Los Angeles’s Nuart Theatre entitled “Doris Wishman: Queen of Sexploitation.”