Tag Archives: 1967

CBS LATE MOVIE: Battle Beneath the Earth (1967)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Battle Beneath the Earth was on the CBS Late Movie on May 1 and September 26, 1972 and December 21, 1973.

Scientist Arnold Kramer (Peter Arne) really does think if you dig deep enough you’ll make your way to China. He thinks that Chinese General Chan Lu (Martin Benson, not Asian, but Russian/Polish; he was famously in The King and I, playing the gangster who Oddjob kills in Goldfinger and was also Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz on the British TV version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)  is planting nuclear bombs under the United States but no one believes him. They put him in a mental hospital before Navy Commander Jonathan Shaw (Kerwin Mathews) comes to meet him and reveals that he thinks its true; they head down into tunnels built into Hawaii and go to war.

The last movie directed by Montgomery Tully (The Terrornauts), this was written by Charles F. Vetter.

A bad guy with a falcon, everyone with a British accent and Ken Jones did a great jazz score. Those are the best things I can say for thio, other than if you have to be in a hospital, make sure its one that has slot machines.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

FILM MASTERS BLU RAY RELEASE: Creature With the Blue Hand (1967), Web of the Spider (1971), The Bloody Dead (1987)

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Film Masters has put together an exciting blu ray with Creature of the Blue Hand, scanned in 4K from 35 mm archival elements, a new 4K scan of Web of the Spider and The Bloody Dead. Bonus features include commentaries on both movies by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman; reimagined trailers for Creature of the Blue Hand and Web of the Spider; a trailer for Castle of Blood; new documentaries on Edgar Wallace and Klaus Kinski’s acting in the Rialto krimi movies; an archival commentary for The Bloody Dead by Sam Sherman; raw and behind the scenes footage for The Bloody Dead and a booklet with essays by Christopher Stewardson and Nick Clarke.

You can get it from MVD.

Creature With the Blue Hand (1967): Based on the Edgar Wallace novel The Blue Hand and part of a long-running series of krimi adaptations by Rialto Film, this was bought by New World Pictures and issued as a double feature in the U.S. with Beast of the Yellow Night. Man, how good was life then?

Klaus Kinski plays Dave Emerson, who chokes out a nurse and escapes from a mental hospital before running to the castle of his twin brother Richard — also Kinski — as a black robed killer roams the grounds and kills people with his astounding blue claw with razorblades on the fingers, like something out of a giallo. For example, oh, Death Walks at Midnight. Or A Nightmare On Elm Street, which came 17 years after this.

Director Alfred Vohrer keeps things moving and it all looks gorgeous if indebted to Mario Bava. That said, aren’t all movies made after him? There’s also an incredible insane asylum sequence, featuring rooms filled with mice, rats and one female patient who just strips all day and night. This is the kind of movie world where you just want to live inside it, except that, yeah, there’s a killer on the loose and the cops are as always ineffectual.

Coming out just three years before giallo would surpass the krimi while using many of the same ideas from Edgar Wallace, this film reminds me that I need to get deeper into watching these German detective movies.

Creature With the Blue Hand later re-edited in 1987 with new gore inserts by producer Sam Sherman for his company Independent International — wow, I love that so much — and released to home video as The Bloody Dead. The extra scenes — almost ten minutes of new footage — were directed by Warren F. Disbrow and his father Warren Disbrow Sr.  You can learn more about that movie below.

Web of the Spider (1971): After Castle of Blood‘s disappointing box office, Antonio Margheriti felt he could remake the film in color and have it be more successful.

Edgar Allan Poe (Klaus Kinski) is our narrator and Kinski shows up for the beginning and the ending of the movie. He’s interviewed by Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa), who challenges him as to the truth of his stories. This leads to a bed with Lord Blackwood (Enrico Osterman) about spending a night in his castle, a place where he soon meets Elisabeth (Michèle Mercier, Black Sabbath) and quickly falls into love — and bed — with her before she announces that she’s no longer alive.

There’s also Julia (Karin Field), William Perkins (Silvano Tranquilli) and Elisabeth’s husband,Dr. Carmus (Peter Carsten). The ghosts need his blood to come back to life, but Elisabeth helps him to escape, only for him to impale himself on the gate, dying just as Poe gets there.

I adore that the tagline of this is “Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s Night of the Living Dead.” He did write a poem “Spirits of the Dead” and the 1932 movie The Living Dead was based on Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club. But no, he has nothing to do with Romero’s movie.

I really like the soundtrack by Riz Ortolani but this can’t compare to the black and white — and yes, Barbara Steele appearance — in the original. That said, Kinski is awesome in every second he’s on screen, looking like a complete madman.

The Bloody Dead (1987): Warren F. Disbrow Jr. met Sam Sherman when he shot the interview footage for Drive-In Madness. That led to him being called to shoot new footage — 15 minutes worth — with Gene Reynolds and Tony Annunziata on remade asylum sets to make it appear that Creature With the Blue Hand wasn’t a movie made twenty years before as this was going to be released on VHS by Very Strange Video.

When this came out on DVD from Image Entertainment, Jim Arena wrote “”Sam needed to punch up the film with some gore to make the picture more appealing to modern-day audiences. That meant new scenes would have to be filmed. With a lucrative video distribution deal already on the table, Sam went to work and brought in associate Warren Disbrow to re-create the German asylum sets at his facilities in New Jersey. Hannibal Lector’s Silence of the Lambs institution cell recreation for 2002’s Red Dragon has been hailed for its precision, but Sherman and Disbrow’s attempt at duplicating Dr.Mangrove’s asylum, where most of the newly shot footage was intended to expand upon, is no less impressive. It is actually difficult to tell the difference between the two sets.”

Disbrow Sr. made a new version of the claw hand that the killer used and Ed French did the special effects. Other than the 15 minutes or so of new footage, this is almost the same exact movie, just with the added gore that late 80s audiences expected.

Spy Shadow (1967-1968)

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As part of the show Super President, which had two adventures per episode, one part of the show was where we learned of Spy Shadow, an agent of Interspy named Richard Vance (Ted Cassidy) who learned — somewhere in the mysterious Far East, just like Lamont Cranston, here said to be in Tibet with mystics who taught him the power of concentration — how to command his shadow to become another person. He’d need that power as he fought S.P.I.D.E.R. (Society for Plunder, International Disorder, Espionage and Racketeering) in Eurospy-style adventures.

Created by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, formed by David H. DePatie and Friz Freleng, this is a footnote in TV superheroics, but may have been a bigger character had it not been placed with Super President, a show that people still seem to hate sixty years after it first aired.

I wonder if the makers of this show had been reading Doom Patrol, as Spy Shadow’s powers are a lot like Negative Man from that team. At least Spy Shadow doesn’t have to be wrapped up in bandages like Larry Trainor.

You can watch all of the episodes of this show on YouTube.

Batgirl (1967)

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Detective Comics #359, the first issue of January 1967, featured “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” They were getting Batgirl into fan’s minds before she would debut on the show, even if there had already been another Batgirl, Bette Kane, who first showed up in Batman #139. Post-Crisis, her name would be changed to Flamebird.

The show was suffering from lower ratings, but producer William Dozier felt that if they introduced a younger female, it would do two things: introduce some new blood and refute any worries that Batman and Robin were gay.

ABC executives needed to be convinced that Yvonne Craig was the right person for the role, so this pilot — where she would fight Killer Moth (Tim Herbert), same as the first time she showed up in comics — was ordered. She also meets Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward), setting up the next season of the show.

You can also spot future Peach Pit owner Joe E. Tata as one of the henchmen, as well as TV vet Guy Way and stuntman Al Wyatt Sr.

In an interview, Craig said, “…while Batgirl is an active type, she is also very feminine. None of that smacking people low with karate and kung-fu. In my opinion, three karate chops, and you’ve lost your femininity. If a girl goes on a date and a fellow gets fresh, she can’t very well give him a karate chop for a good-night. But if she ducks, she’s simply adept and feminine. Batgirl will be aiding and assisting Batman and Robin, not constantly rescuing then. I like that, too.” That’s because Batgirl wasn’t allowed to throw punches, as TV executives thought that the show Honey West got bad ratings because all of her brawling made her less feminine.

In spite of adding the sexier Batgirl, as well as Eartha Kitt taking over from Julie Newmar as Catwoman and female villains like Marsha, Queen of Diamonds (Carolyn Jones), Olga, Queen of Cossacks (Anne Baxter), Nora Clavicle (Barbara Rush), Minerva (Zsa Zsa Gabor) and Lorelei Circe (Joan Collins), the show fell out of favor, ending in the third season.

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

Super President (1967-1968)

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When this show aired, it upset so many people. The National Association of Broadcasters said: “An all-time low in bad taste, with the President of the United States in a Superman role. NBC was responsible for this direct ideological approach to totalitarianism. We fear that there may be other broadcasters who are irresponsible enough to keep it in circulation.”

The idea of a super-powered American President seems dumb, but four years after the death of Kennedy and as America seemed to be on the verge of falling apart, maybe it seemed like a great plot for a cartoon. At least the DePatie–Freleng studio, who also made The Pink Panther cartoons, were commissioned to make Warner Brothers specials and also animated the lightsabers for Star Wars, thought so.

The President of the United States, former astronaut James Norcross, is voiced by Paul Frees, whose voice has been in almost everything you’ve ever watched. Other voice talent included Ted Cassidy, June Foray and Don Messick, whose voices would be in the few things that Frees didn’t work on.

Super President got his powers from a cosmic storm, just like the Fantastic Four, giving him increased strength and the ability to change his molecular composition like Metamorpho, plus he has a cave and special vehicle called the Omnicar like Batman and his Batcave and Batmobile.

Perhaps this cartoon, while forgotten today, inspired Calvin Ellis, the Kryptonian President of the United States on Earth-23 who is also the Superman of that reality (and just happens to look like Barack Obama).

You can watch all of the episodes of this show on YouTube.

Wonder Woman: Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince? (1967)

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Eight years before Wonder Woman became a series with Linda Carter — after Cathy Lee Crosby appearing in the TV movie — William Dozier, who also worked on the 1967 Batman series — tried to get Wonder Woman on the air. We’re all the better that it never happened.

In this four-minute screen test, Ellie Wood Walker (Targets, Easy Rider) is Diana Prince and TV veteran Maudie Prickett is her mother, Hippolyta. They live in the big city, together, with mother needling daughter about growing too old without getting married with lines like, “How do you expect to get a husband flying around all the time?”

The narrator, who was Dozier, says that Wonder Woman has the strength of Hercules, the wisdom of Athena and the speed of Hermes — who is she, a female Captain Marvel? — but she only thinks she has the beauty of Aphrodite. This leads to her staring in the mirror, as we see her as she sees herself, as  “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” plays. In the mirror is Linda Harrison (Nova from Planet of the Apes) dressed in the famous Wonder Woman costume, as we get a full minute of her nearly touching herself.

It’s as if the women’s liberation revolution was never happening.

This was written by Stan Hart, Stanley Ralph Ross and Larry Siegel. Hart and Siegal were writers for Mad Magazine and would go on to be writers for The Carol Burnett Show. Ross worked as a voice actor and wrote several episodes of Batman, as well as developing the 70s Wonder Woman show, developing the Monster Squad and That’s My Mama series and becoming an ordained minister and marrying TV Robin Burt Ward to his third wife. He was also Ballpoint Baxter on the Batman show, a name he’d used on other projects, as well as the writer and producer of 200 songs, owned nine comedy clubs, two baseball teams and came up with the phrase “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” while working for ABC Sports.

At one point, Dozier had three TV series on the air: Batman, The Tammy Grimes Show and The Green Hornet with plans to make a Dick Tracy series. The Chester Gould newspaper strip had been the original character that ABC wanted to make a show about before settling for Batman. The pilot for that show, “The Plot to Kill NATO,” had Dick Tracy (Ray MacDonnell) battle Mr. Memory (Victor Buono). Yet by 1967-1968, Batman was down from two days a week to one, Tammy Grimes had been cancelled and The Green Hornet wasn’t as big as the campy DC series. Dick Tracy would never be picked up, despite a fully produced pilot.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Killing Game (1967)

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Directed and written by Alain Jessua, The Killing Game is a story about fantasy, the world of comic books, intersecting with our boring reality. Pierre (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and his wife Jacqueline (Claudine Auger) are collaborators on a series of popular comic books — they are drawn by a team of artists led by Guy Peellaert, who painted the cover for Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and whose painting, Frank Sinatra, which featured the headline “Frankie Goes Hollywood” which inspired the band’s name — and have been hired by a wealthy patron named Bob Neuman (Michel Duchaussoy). He wants them to transform him into a Diabolik type gentleman thief, which is quite different from his real life, where he’s controlled by his mother Genevieve (Eleonare Hirt).

Yet when we first meet Pierra and Jacqueline, they’re destitute, unable to make their bills and superfan Bob comes along at the right time, giving them an escape from the poorhouse. Bob is able to tell some wild stories about his life, yet he seems like a manchild who has barely left the house. He flies the couple to his Swiss estate and they go about recreating him in comic book form as The Killer of Neuchatel.

Auger is best known for playing Domino in Thunderball, but in my head, she’s a giallo queen of sorts, appearing in Bava’s nascent slasher A Bay of Blood and in one of the meanest of the yellow films, Black Belly of the Tarantula. Jacqueline is a woman trapped in her marriage, her writer husband believing he has control of her, whether its through his concepts and words or by just being a traditional male role as the husband. Yet her artwork is what makes his ideas so appealing and she’s a gorgeous and intelligent woman who begins to expand her agency through flirtation with Bob, despite how potentially dangerous he is.

I loved the look and feel of this movie, arriving as a Euroart film with hints of the aforementioned giallo and some Eurospy as well. While it didn’t intend to, it reminds me of the constant battle of who created things when it comes to the Marvel method, where Stan Lee has claimed creation of everything while artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were given at the most a sentence to go by and returned with fully formed stories and pictures that Lee would put the words to. It’s difficult to say who was the voice of making the damn thing, though my visual side has always been with the artists.

This hasn’t been released in the U.S., surprisingly, and is a great find for cinephiles.

MOVIES THAT PLAYED SCALA: The Trip (1967)

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Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Directed by Roger Corman, written by Jack Nicholson and released by American-International Pictures, The Trip cost $100,000 to make and brought in $6 million dollars. Hollywood was listening, because within the next year, movies for the love generation were all over the place*.

In fact, seven years after this movie, AIP’s Samuel Z. Arkoff said, “Everybody else picked it up; and as late as last year they were still coming out with dope pictures. And there isn’t one single company that made a buck on dope pictures. The young people had turned off.”

You know what makes Paul Groves (Peter Fonda) try LSD? He gets his heart broken by his wife (Susan Strasberg) and joins John (Bruce Dern) to take his first trip. He runs in fear from John as the trip over takes him, wandering through a nightmare world of sex, death, commercialism and mental transformation.

Corman took LSD himself to understand what it should look like on film, which ends up being quick edits, paint on nude women and small people trying to frighten the viewer.

While you can see the International Submarine Band, with Gram Parsons on vocals, the music in the movie comes from The Electric Flag. Music is a big part of this movie, as Dern’s line “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream” comes directly from The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Other folks to look out for include Salli Sachse (How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Wild in the Streets), Judy Lang (Count Yorga), Luana Anders (The Pit and the Pendulum), Dick Miller (I mean, it is a Corman movie after all), Michael Nader (so many beach movies), Michael Blodgett (Lance Rock from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), Sunset Strip tastemake and KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, Peter Bogdanovich, Randee Lynne Jensen (so many bikers movies), Joyce Mandel (Return of the Ultra Vixens) and Angelo Rossitto (everything from Freaks to playing The Master in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome).

The Trip attempts to film the unfilmable and for that, we should celebrate it.

*For example, the next year, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Luana Anders would all appear in Easy Rider.

ARROW VIDEO SHAW SCOPE VOLUME 3 BOX SET: The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

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The first Hong Kong film to make HK$1 million at the box office, this movie make a star of Jimmy Wang, who plays Fang Kang. He’s a poor boy who has been trained by Qi Ru Feng (Tien Feng) after his father, the servant Fang Chang (Ku Feng) gave his life to save the master. To get past the guilt that he feels, Qi Ru Feng has been teaching the boy. However, he can’t escape the other students, who abuse him because he’s an orphan with no money. It gets so bad that he leaves the school and when his master’s daughter Pei Er (Angela Pan) tries to stop him, they have a sword battle that causes her to cut off his right arm. He falls off a bridge to what should be his death, but he is saved by Xiao Man (Lisa Chiao Chiao).

As she brings him back to health, they fall in love. He remains depressed, however, that he can no longer fight. She finds a martial arts manual that teaches him a new style that no one can defend against, using his one arm.

Back in the martial world, the master is celebrating his birthday and has invited all of his students, as he plans to choose a successor. However, Long-Armed Devil (Yeung Chi-hing ) and the Smiling Tiger Cheng Tian Shou (Tang Ti) have turned this into an opportunity to murder everyone.

Despite the promise to Xio Man, our hero re-enters the martial world to save his master. Nearly every student is already dead and the master is wounded, but with just one arm, Fang Kang is triumphant. Yet instead of taking back the school, he returns back to his small farm.

Chang Cheh went on to great fame, as did Shaw Brothers, after this film. As for Jimmy Wang, he would play several other one-armed characters in films such as Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman, Return of the One-Armed Swordsman, One-Armed Boxer, that film’s sequel Master of the Flying Guillotine, One-Armed Swordsman Against Nine Killers and One Armed Swordsmen, which he co-directed and co-starred in with David Chiang, both playing one-armed killers. Yes, Jimmy Wang could beat you up with one arm literally tied behind his back.

To announce the new era of wuxia, Chang Cheh and Jimmy Wang made a hero so resilient that even losing the appendage that enabled him to be so dangerous can’t stop him. Everyone else had to catch up.

The Arrow Video Shaw Scope Volume Three box set has a brand new 4K restoration of The One-Armed Swordsman as well as commentary by David West, author of Chasing Dragons: An Introduction to the Martial Arts Film; a newly filmed appreciation of the One-Armed Swordsman series by film critic and historian Tony Rayns; interviews with Wang Yu, Chiao Chiao and Ku Feng as well as Daniel Lee, who directed the remake; an appreciation of director Chang Cheh’s work by film historian Sam Ho; One-Armed Side Hustles, a brand new video essay by Brandon Bentley on Wang Yu’s career playing amputee protagonists; theatrical trailers and trailers for other films by Chang Cheh films.

You can get this set from MVD.

RADIANCE FILMS BLU RAY RELEASE: Eighteen Years In Prison (1967)

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Trying to survive post-war Japan, Kawada (Noboru Ando) and Tsukada (Asao Koike) are caught by the military stealing copper wire. While Kawada is arrested and goes to prison, Tsukada escapes and starts a gang with the money he’s made. As he suffers the cruel attention of Warden  Hannya (Tomisaburo Wakayama), Kawada dreams of getting out of prison and the revenge he must take.

Directed by Tai Kato, this was followed in the same year by a sequel, Choeki juhachi-nen: Kari shutsugoku. Noburo Ando volunteered for a suicide frogmen unit during World War II, but that ended before he could give his life. In 1952, he formed his own Yakuza family, the Ando-gumi, which had three hundred members at one point. He was sent to jail for six years after sending a hitman to kill a rival and when he got out, he dissolved the gang and went into acting.

He said, “In Japanese, the only difference between yakuza and yakusha — an actor — is one hiragana character. All yakuza have to be actors to survive.” He was also a singer and played himself in movies about his life, but American audiences probably know him best for New Battles Without Honor and Humanity and Graveyard of Honor.

As Kawada comes to terms with what the war has made him do, he rises to the defense of the underdog in jail life, all while Tsukada is the opposite, now firmly embracing power and ruthlessness.

Art imitates life, as Kawada also feels that he must atone for sending the brother of Hisako (Hiroko Sakuramachi) on a suicide mission during the war. Noburo Ando left prison to meet with the mother of the man he had killed and asked for forgiveness. In this movie, he tries for the same by attempting to mentor her brother Shuichi (Masaomi Kondo) when he is placed in the same cell.

When Kawada learns that his former partner hasn’t opened a market to help people but instead a brothel — and caused the suicide of a former lover — he must leave behind prison and the mentorship of the Yakuza elder Osugi (Michitaro Mizushima).

This is a movie that shows just how bad Japan was at the close of the war and how it had to both forgive itself and find a new path, even if it was one person doing so.

The Radiance Films blu ray of Eighteen Years In Prison has extras like an appreciation by critic and programmer Tony Rayns, a visual essay on Japanese prison films by author Tom Mes, a trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow and a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Ivo Smits and an archival interview with Noboru Ando by Mark Schilling. It’s a limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.

You can order this from MVD.