Category Archives: Movie reviews

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde was on the CBS Late Movie on February 8, 1974.

Hammer had already made two adaptions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — The Ugly Duckling and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. But what if they combined that story with the historical Jack the Ripper and Burke and Hare cases? And what if Jekyll turned into a female Hyde? Now we have a movie!

Dr. Henry Jekyll (Ralph Bates, Lust for a Vampire) has been trying to cure all known illnesses but his friend Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim, Dr. Phibes Rises Again) laughs that by the time his experiments are discovered and used, he’ll be long dead and unable to enjoy his achievements.

Jekyll then abandons his altruistic aims and starts looking for the elixir of life, which he feels uses female hormones that he takes from the bodies of women supplied by William Burke and William Hare, real life murderers that killed people and sold them to doctors for anatomy lessons. Never mind that those murders happened sixty years before the timeline of this film.

Meanwhile, Susan Spencer lives above him and they’re attracted to one another. However, he’s too absorbed by his work to do anything about it. Soon, he’s created a serum that not only changes his character, but transforms him into a gorgeous and amoral woman (Martine Beswick, who is in the first two Bond movies, plays the Queen of Evil in Seizure and was Xaviera Hollander in The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood) that he calls Mrs. Edwina Hyde. Susan instantly hates her, but her brother Howard (Lewis Fiander, Who Can Kill a Child?) falls for her.

Dr. Jekyll soon learns that his serum requires more female hormones than Burke and Hare can acquire for him. And when they’re finally caught, he’s forced to commit the crimes that the rest of London believes were those of Jack the Ripper. Jekyll hates what he has become, but Hyde loves it, even killing the Professor when he dares question her.

The male and female sides of his/her/its body all go to war with one another with Susan as the prize. Seriously, this is a movie that demands to be remade today.

Sadly, Caroline Munro was nearly Mrs. Hyde, but dropped out when she realized that the film required nudity. That said, Martine Beswick is pretty great in this. She was initially asked to do full frontal nudity and wouldn’t talk to director Roy Ward Baker (Asylum, The Vault of Horror) for a week.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: The Killer Bees (1974)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Killer Bees was on the CBS Late Movie on February 13, 1976.

When I was a kid in the 70s, killer bees were all we heard of. They were obviously going to get us and a story on the news every night for years and then, well…nothing ever happened.

The ABC Movie of the Week on February 26, 1974, The Killer Bees, directed by Curtis Harrington and written by former lawyer John William Corrington and his wife Joyce Hooper, who teamed to write the scripts for Von Richthofen and Brown, The Omega Man, Boxcar Bertha, The Arena and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, as well as several soap operas and the syndicated show Superior Court.

Edward Van Bohlen (Edward Albert) has stayed away from his wine making family until his girlfriend Victoria Wells (Kate Jackson) asks him to go back home and try to reconnect. We all know that you can’t go home again and when your family uses African bees to make your wine better, well, you really should in no way go back home again.

Madame Van Bohlen (Gloria Swanson) not only runs the family and the winery, but the bees as well. She’s able to command them to kill everyone that she sees as a threat, but when she dies, who will the bees follow?

Bette Davis was originally going to be the star of the movie, but her doctor worried that she’d go into anaphylactic shock if she was stung by a bee. As for Gloria Swanson, she was so game for this movie that she agreed to have bees put all over her body. To create this moment, the bees were placed in a dry ice room to make them tired, then gradually warmed once they were put on Ms. Swanson’s costume.

The wine that got made by the Van Bohlen’s must have been good, because their home is now the place where noted winemaker — and yes, director — Francis Ford Coppola lives.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Let Me Die a Woman (1977)

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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!  

I’ll go anywhere Doris Wishman wants to take me.

Doris is able to be so many directors in her approach and yet remain herself. Here, she’s in the worlds of Ed Wood and Kroger Babb, making a movie that says that it wants to educate you, but really wants to show you graphic surgery of a man’s penis being sliced into a vagina in full detail. In fact, this same footage was used for the South Park episode “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina.”

It features Dr. Leo Wollman, founder of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which wrote its first Standards of Care for transgender health care. He was also the science and medicine advisor for this movie. You also get interviews and moments with other transgender individuals, include Deborah Hartin, who transitioned in 1970 and became one of the first divorces due to transitioning. She also sued the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for refusing to update her sex designation on her birth certificate.

Wishman started filming this in 1971 and debated titles like Adam or Eve and Strange/Her. Then she found Leslie, an attractive trans person who would provide the main interview in this film, yet seems to hate nearly every other trans person she’s ever met, even comparing herself at one point to Anita Bryant. This movie has a total Yin/Yang-ness to it; for every positive thing, there’s something truly deranged or negative. You get Dr. Wollman leading a support group in the same movie where there’s a re-enactment where a trans woman can’t wait for her new vagina to heal, so she sleeps with a cab driver and sprays blood between her thighs in graphic detail. And oh yeah, the cab driver? That’s Harry Reems sleeping with Arlana Blue, who was also one of the caged victims in Bloodsucking Freaks, the second murder victim in Massage Parlor Murders! and an adult actress who was in Invasion of the Love Drones, The Vixens of Kung Fu and Joe Sarno’s Confessions of a Young American Housewife.

There’s also a moment where a man uses a sharp blade and a hammer to attempt to remove his member, while you watch. And yes, that is Vanessa Del Rio and if you picked that up without IMDB, I’d shake your hand, but neither of us wants to know where our hands have been for so many years. And that john who gets picked up in the park? That’s Richard Towers, who used the name Greg Reynolds in Deadly Weapons, Tony Armada in Keyholes Are for Peeping, Joe Powers in Fleshpot on 42nd Street and Gaylord St. James when he played Dr. John Collingwood in Last House On the Left.

This ends with a long chroma key sex scene at the end that feels like the kind of images that Black Sabbath would perform in front of on a European variety show and then we’d watch it ten years later on Headbanger’s Ball.

I have no idea how to rate this movie. As a documentary, it’s not good. As trash, it’s amazing. I also understand that this is — at best — an embarrassing film for the trans community to watch. Yet without movies like this and Glen or Glenda, some audiences would have no experience with this community. Part of me would like to think this film’s heart is in the right place, but then again, this is also a movie padded out with softcore inserts. It really is almost a singular film, in the same way — oxymoron, anyone? — that Goodbye Uncle Tom is also trash yet is a fascinating document of how far you can push it.

I mean — when the weirdest part of your movie isn’t a penis gun that shoots fluid and that’s said to be an actual medical device — you know that this is the kind of thing you have to experience.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: The Immoral Three (1975)

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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!  

There is a Doris Wishman cinematic universe. This is the sequel to Double Agent 73, as Jane Genet (Chesty Morgan, who didn’t come back for this, as she upset Wishman when she cost her a full shooting day the last time they worked together; in her brief moment in the film she’s played by Cindy Boudreau) has died after being strangled while she was sunbathing and her three daughters — who had no idea each other existed — are brought together for the reading of the will by John Erikson (Robert S. Barba).

Ginny (also Boudreau), Sandy (Sandra Kay) and Nancy (Michele Marie) are charged by the will to get revenge for the death of their mother. If they kill her killer — killers? — in a year, they each get $1 million dollars. If one of them dies, they each get $1.5 million and, well, you can do the math if only one survives. If they all die, Erikson gets the money.

Is this a giallo? Holy shit, yes. There’s a black gloved killer on the loose!

There are four suspects for who the killer could be. All four of these men could also be any of their fathers. But before we get to all that story, Kay decides to fellate a banana in front of a gardener, then do the same to him while we see her banana-loving face superimposed over his. It’s mind-numbing in the way all Wishman’s movies can be and it’s just getting started.

Is Doris Wishman the American Jess Franco? Both have a banana lovemaking scene in their films. Or is she the American Bruno Mattei? Both have no issues just outright taking shots from other movies.

Sandy gets attacked by a grocery boy and Ginny makes love in an elevator for no reason other than the fact that she’s a character is a Wishman movie. Everyone has their feet focused on, slow moving on thick shag carpet or rolling in bed. Ginny does all the heavy lifting, heading off to Vegas and New York City, while the others stay in Fresno, but hey — Sandy has an “On Shit” belt buckle, so who are we to deny her lack of need to move this movie forward?

 

Written by Judy J. Kushner (who also wrote the first two movies in this series, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73) and Robert Jahn (The Yum Yum Girls, Bloodrage), this is one of the most deranged movie I’ve ever seen and imagine the ground that covers. The whole thing ends like Shakespeare and by that I mean — spoiler warning — everyone dies, but not before you find the real dad, you get declarations of love and Doris’ apartment plays Munich.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Dragonslayer (1981)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Dragonslayer was on the CBS Late Movie on February 13, 1987.

After Popeye, this was the second joint production with Paramount of films that were more mature than the expected Disney offerings. That meant that Drahonslayer’s violence, themes and even brief nudity ended up being controversial, despite only being rated PG.

Set the film after the Roman departure from Britain, prior to the arrival of Christianity, the film shows a world of sorcery unlike many others in the genre. Co-writers Hal Barwood (who also wrote The Sugarland Express, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, MacArthur and Corvette Summer, as well as writing and directing Warning Sign and creating video games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis) and Matthew Robins (who wrote Crimson Peak and wrote and directed Batteries Not Included and I would be remiss not to mention that he also directed The Legend of Billie Jean) were inspired to make something new. Barwood said, “our film has no knights in shining armor, no pennants streaming in the breeze, no delicate ladies with diaphanous veils waving from turreted castles, no courtly love, no holy grail. Instead, we set out to create a very strange world with a lot of weird values and customs, steeped in superstition, where the clothes and manners of the people were rough, their homes and villages primitive and their countryside almost primeval, so that the idea of magic would be a natural part of their existence.”

Vermithrax is also one of the best dragons ever made, even forty years after the film’s release. More than 25% of the movie’s budget went to realizing the dragon. This was the first movie to use go-motion, which had parts of the mechanical dragon be programmed and filmed by computer. The forty-foot tall beast was brought to life by sixteen puppeteers. Its full name — Vermithrax Pejorative — means The Worm of Thrace Which Makes Things Worse.

As for the story, it’s all about Galen Bradwarden (Peter MacNicol, who is embarrassed by this movie, perhaps because you can fully see his ween in it) saving Valerian (Caitlin Clarke) from being a virgin sacrifice to the dragon. She’s no damsel in distress, however, as she’d hid her gender identity to help create the sword that can destroy the beast.

But yeah. It’s worth watching for just the dragon.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: It’s Alive (1974)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s Alive was on the CBS Late Movie on July 11 and December 22, 1986 and September 30, 1987.

The TV commercial for It’s Alive terrified me. The music, the slowly turning bassinet, the fact that a demon baby was inside — it was too much for my child brain to handle. I would cover my ears and yell every single time I saw it. The power and memory and latent fear for this thirty seconds created stayed with me for decades, ensuring that I would never watch this film.

Frank and Lenore Davis are excitedly expecting the birth of their second child. They’ve been waiting for years and properly planned the child’s birth, with Lenore using birth control pills until the time was right. However, their infant is a monster, a deformed creature with fangs and claws that is so horrifying, one of the doctors instantly tries to suffocate it. The baby kills the team who delivered it before escaping, leaving a crying Lenore and frightened Frank.

The baby goes on a murderous rampage while Frank denies that the child is his, as a parallel is made to Frankenstein and how Dr. Frankenstein abandoned his creation. It turns out that the birth control drugs Lenore was on may have caused the mutation. To protect their bottom line, they want the child destroyed.

The baby finds its way home, where Lenore embraces her child. Their first son, Chris, becomes homesick (he’d been staying with Charley, a family friend) and returns home, where he meets his sibling and promises to protect him. Frank discovers that the child is being hidden and shoots at it, but the baby escapes and kills Charley.

The police and Frank track the child to the sewer, where the father realizes that the beast is his flesh and blood. Hiding the baby in his coat, Frank tries to escape, but he’s caught by the police. Then, his child leaps from his arms to kill the pharmaceutical company representative who is with the cops. The police open fire, killing the child and the man who he is attacking.

As the police take the Davis family home, we learn that another deformed child has been born in Seattle.

When Larry Cohen completed the film, he learned that the executives who had produced the film were all gone. It’s Alive got a paltry one week run in Chicago and a limited release. Three years later, after that team of executives were replaced, Cohen convinced Warner Brothers to re-release the film with the ad campaign featured above, leading to a successful run.

It’s Alive preys on our worst fears — that our children will grow to become monsters. However, Cohen takes it a step further. These children instantly are monstrous killers.

Two sequels — It Lives Again and It’s Alive 3: Island of the Alive — followed, as well as a remake. The original — shot at the same time as Hell Up in Harlem by a crew that was doing day and night shoots 7 days a week — is an impressive film. Like all Cohen’s work, the idea is stronger than the budget and the final product looks so much better than the dollars it cost to create would suggest.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Embryo (1976)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Embryo was on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and December 2, 1983 and March 17 and December 8, 1976.

Directed by Ralph Nelson (Charly) and written by Anita Doohan and Jack W. Thomas — who had stopped screenwriting for more than a decade to become a Los Angeles County deputy probation officer and write a series of books on troubled youth — Embryo finds Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) living a life of solitude after losing his wife in a car accident, a fact that his sister-in-law/assistant Martha Douglas (Diane Ladd) reminds him of near daily.

One night, he runs over a dog — maybe he should stop driving — and ends up taking that dog’s unborn child and bringing it to healthy — if murderous — life in his lab. If he can play God like that, well, why not bring the unborn child of a suicide victim to life and have her become just about instantly 22 years old and named Victoria (Barbara Carrera)?

Despite how smart Victoria is, she’s also quickly dying as her body is addicted to the immune suppressant drug methotrexate and has no issue killing Martha to keep her origins a secret. And oh yeah — making sweet love to the much older doctor.

The end of this movie is ridiculous and I love it. I mean, rapidly aging clones drinking dead fetus fluids, the doctor watching her kill his son and chasing after her only to learn that she’s having his baby? 70s science fiction carny BS at its finest.

It goes without saying: Barbara Carrera really must have been grown in a lab. I don’t know if that kind of perfection can come from the coupling of a man and woman. It must have some kind of science added to it.

This also has a party scene with Roddy McDowell and Joyce Brothers during which chess is the main source of fun, not drinking. Sure.

Somehow, due to Cine Artists Pictures going out of business this movie is in the public domain.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: The Amazing Transplant (1970)

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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!  

I’ve seen some strange movies, but Doris Wishman’s films often feel like they belong to my favorite genre: movies made by beings not from our reality, beamed to us in the hopes that we won’t notice that there isn’t a single moment of normal human behavior in what they have created.

Arthur Barlen (João Fernandes) starts the movie by visiting his ex-girlfriend Mary (Sandy Eden) to propose to her. As she happily celebrates, he catches a vision of her earrings, loses his mind and chokes the life out of her in a way that only appears in roughies. The police are chasing him for the murder, while his mother Ann (Linda Southern, The Headless Eyes, A Night to Dismember) asks her police detective brother-in-law Bill (Larry Hunter) to find her son.

Let me see if I can explain why this happens, if I can do the narrative of this movie justice. Dr. Cyril Meade (Bernard Marcel) treated Arthur because the young man was upset about being a virgin. Dr. Cyril also had an assistant, Felix (Sam Stewart). He loved Felix to the point that he glows when he talks about him. He also introduced Arthur to Felix, who tried to set him up on a double date and ended up having sex with both women (Linda Boyce, The Curse of Her Flesh, and Uta Erickson, The Ultimate Degenerate) at the same time while Arthur helplessly watched. Yet Arthur also loved Felix and once he realized that his friend was dying, he was surprised that Felix wanted to live on, giving Arthur his gigantic penis to replace his micro cock. However, once the surgery — which trust me, if it was a real surgery it would happen every day — is complete, the sight of golden earrings makes Arthur insane with lust and anger.

If that isn’t strange enough, keep in mind that every environment has just a touch of strangeness happen. When we first see Mary, she’s naked and playing a zither, a stringed instrument that looks kind of like a miniature harp. Some of the apartments have paintings that look cursed, another has a moose head, yet another has a gigantic saddle, which causes Bill to ask the owner of the place, “Do you ride horses?” and she nonchalantly says, “It came with the apartment.” An entire wall of riding equipment, like how Ponderosa used to have that crap up on the wall, and she didn’t take it down or redecorate?

Speaking of Bill, he’s just as creepy as his nephew, often eyeing women as they cross and uncross their thighs while telling him of the horrifying assault they have endured at the hands and transplanted wang of his brother’s son.

You know, Wishman also made Let Me Die A Woman and you’d expect this movie to have a gory trouser snake transplant moment, but no. It’s like a lone moment of self-restraint in a movie that starts with black and white images of its protagonist attacking women and has a scene where he attacks a lesbian, causing her to throw up all over the place.

Speaking of that young lady with the saddle on her wall, that’s Ms. Evans. She’s played by Kim Pope, who appeared in many of the Golden Age of adult films like The Passions of Carol, White Slavery In New York and Deep Sleep, which was the first movie of Alfred Sole. Janet Banzet plays another victim, one who comes on to Arthur in the stairwell before he notices those earrings. Always those earrings. She was also in The Party at Kitty and Stud’s, the movie that started the urban legend of Stallone being in a hardcore movie. Suzzan Landau (Keyholes Are for Peeping) also shows up.

Is this kind of a giallo? Is it a remake of The Hands of Orlac that could only be named The Cock of Orlac? Why is there happy jazz playing over the sexual assaults? How bad can the dubbing get? Why is every home in this movie festooned with bric a brac? Why are there ransom shots of shoes and carpet? Why does a child choir sing along when one of the victims turns Arthur’s attack into lovemaking? How did raincoaters feel when they thought they were getting something to jack off to and were confronted by this blast of dada?

Stranger still, star João Fernandes started his career shooting second unit and acting in adult films — he was given the name Harry Flex by director Gerard Damiano during as he used an Arriflex camera — before being the cinematographer or director of photography of Legacy of Satan, Darktown Strutters, The Kirlian Witness, Human Experiments, The Prowler, The Nesting, Children of the Corn, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Hollywood Vice Squad and Red Scorpion, In the 1990s, he shot eight episodes and directed three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger. That may be because after working on Joe Zito’s Norris movies Missing In Action and Invasion U.S.A., he also shot Chuck’s movies Braddock: Missing in Action III, Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection, The Hitman, Sidekicks, Hellbound, Top Dog and Forest Warrior.

I have seen so many weird movies. This has moved way to the top of the list of the oddest.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Ghosts, Italian Style (1967)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Ghosts, Italian Style was on the CBS Late Movie on June 28, 1977.

Pasquale Lojacono (Vittorio Gassman) and his wife Maria (Sophia Loren) have no money, nowhere to live and no future until they are allowed to live rent-free in a cursed apartment haunted by an old Spanish nobleman’s ghost.

Questi Fantasmi played U.S. theaters under this title so that people would remember Loren in Marriage Italian Style. In fact, her co-star from that movie, Marcello Mastroianni, shows up in as a headless ghost at the end. This film was produced by Sophia’s husband, Carlo Ponti. You know, the man who brought us both Dr. Zhivago and Torso.

Maria’s past love, Alfredo (Mario Adorf) shows up to try and win her back from her recently fired opera singer husband, who thinks that he’s not a living person, but the ghost.

Directed by the writer of Marriage, Italian Style, Renato Castellani, this has a huge list of writers who worked on the script, including Castellani, Adriano Baracco, Piero De Bernardi and Tonino Guerra, based on a play by Italian writer Eduardo De Filippo.

This is a goofy farce that didn’t do well at the box office in Italy or America. But hey, here it is on the CBS Late Movie!

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Seizure: The Story of Kathy Morris (1980)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Seizure: The Story of Kathy Morris was on the CBS Late Movie on October 7, 1986.

Kathy Morris died at the age of 29 three years after this TV movie was made. She suffered from seizures for seven years of her life, starting when she was a student at the Manhattan School of Music. According to the New York Times, during an operation in 1976 “her brain unexpectedly swelled, and the surgeon, convinced that Miss Morris would not survive the day, did not complete the operation. After six weeks in a coma, she suddenly responded to a doctor’s instruction to squeeze his hand. She later underwent five brain operations and countless hours of therapy to restore her ability to read and write.”

Two years later, she performed her operatic recital in five languages.

Penelope Milford plays Kathy in this movie, in which she learns how to put her life back together while her neurologist, Dr. Richard Connought (Leonard Nimoy), learns about relationships from her.

Brought to you by products of the Procter & Gamble Co., this was one of those uplifting TV movies that we don’t have any more. Nimoy is really great in it and seems to be enjoying the chance to play a human being.

Director Gerald I. Isenberg usually worked as a producer. This is his only directing credit. Based on the book Seizure by Charles L. Mee Jr., this was written by Robert Lewin and the husband and wife duo of Jack and Mary Pleshette Willis.

You can watch this on YouTube.