Ex-policeman and private detective Harry Clegg (Gilbert Wynne) is hired by Lord Cruickshank (Norman Claridge) after the rich man gets a threat on his life. Clegg may be the hero, but his inner dialogue includes lines like “I’m a private eye. Also a cold-blooded killer, a liar and a thief. My big problem is, I’ve been a loser since the day I was born.”
A sex worker named Suzy the Slag (Gilly Grant, School for Sex) is killing off old rich men with beartraps, guns and her sexual charms. Maybe she’s just mad that the filmmaker chose such a poor and misogynistic name for her. Sometimes she strangles men, lets them get their breath, then drowns them in her bathtub. A former adult actress, Suzy, serves as the killer for Wildman (Gary Hope), who has waited twenty years for his revenge on these rich guys.
Wildman also has five lollipop girls — Susan Killington, Laura Beaumont (who went on to write for Thomas the Train), Hannah Leek, Susan Babbage and Felicity Leach — who may be in their 20s but are dressed like teenagers or younger, all sucking on lollipops more than once in this film.
This isn’t great, but it has a gross charm to it. That’s a compliment.
Bewitched aired throughout the most tumultuous time in modern history — hyperbole, that could also be today, but true, as rehearsals for this show’s first episode were on the day Kennedy was shot and the episode “I Confess” was interuppted by Martin Luther King Jr.’s death — from September 17, 1964, to March 25, 1972. The #2 show in the country for its first season and remaining in the top ten until its fifth season, it presents a sanitized and fictional world that at the time may have seemed contrary and fake to the simmering 60s, but today feels like the balm I need and an escape.
Within the home on 1164 Morning Glory Circle, Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) and Darrin Stephens (Dick York, later Dick Sargent) have just had a whirlwind romance and ended up as husband and wife. At some point, she had to tell him that she was a witch, a fact that he disapproved of, and that she should be a normal housewife instead of using her powers. Yet she often must solve their problems — usually caused by her family, such as her mother Endora (Agnes Moorehead) — with a twitch of her nose.
Creator Sol Saks was inspired by I Married a Witch and Bell, Book and Candle, which luckily were owned by Columbia, the same studio that owned Screen Gems, which produced this show. You could use either of those movies as a prologue for this, which starts in media res — I like that I can use such a highbrow term to talk of sitcoms — with our loving couple already settling into the suburbs.
Author Walter Metz claims in his book Bewitched that the first episode, narrated by José Ferrer, is about “the occult destabilization of the conformist life of an upwardly mobile advertising man.” As someone who has spent most of his life in marketing, maybe I should look deeply into the TV I watched as a child. Bewitched was there all the time in my life, wallpaper that I perhaps never considered.
Head writer Danny Arnold, who led the show for its first season, considered the show about a mixed marriage. Gradually, as director and producer William Asher (also Montgomery’s husband at the time) took more control of the show, the magical elements became more prevalent. What I also find intriguing is that with the length of this show’s run, it had to deal with the deaths of its actors and York’s increasing back issues, which finally forced him to leave the show and another Dick, Dick Sargent, stepping in as Darren, a fact that we were to just accept.
That long run, the end of Montgomery and Asher’s marriage and slipping ratings led to the end of the show, despite ABC saying they would do two more seasons. Instead, Asher produced The Paul Lynde Show, using the sets and much of the supporting cast of this show. He also produced Temperatures Rising, which was the last show on his ABC contract, which ended in 1974.
Feminist Betty Friedan’s two-part essay “Television and the Feminine Mystique” for TV Guide asked why so many sitcoms presented insecure women as the heads of households. None of this has changed much, as the majority of sitcoms typically feature attractive women and funny but large husbands, a theme created by The Honeymooners, and the battles between spouses. I always think of I Dream of Jeannie, a show where a powerful magical being is subservient to, well, a jerk. At least on Bewitched, Samantha is a powerful, in-control woman with a mother who critiques the housewife paradigm.
Plus, unlike so many other couples on TV at the time, they slept in the same bed.
Bewitched‘s influence stretched beyond the movie remake. The show has had local versions in Japan, Russia, India, Argentina and the UK, while daughter Tabitha had a spin-off. There was even a Flintstones crossover episode!
Plus, WandaVision takes its central conceit — a witch hiding in the suburbs — from this show. And Dr. Bombay was on Passions!
This is the kind of show that has always been — and will always be — in our lives. Despite my dislike of Darren’s wedding vows of no magic, there’s still, well, some magic in this show. Just look at how late in its run it went on location to Salem for a multi-episode arc, something unthought of in other sitcoms.
You can watch this just for the show itself, to see the differences between the two Darrens and when Dick York had to film episodes in special chairs because of his back pain, when the show did tricks like have Montgomery (using the name Pandora Spocks) playing Samantha’s cousin Serena to do episodes without York or just imagine that the world was changing outside. Yet, magic and laughter were always there on the show, throughout the lives, divorces and deaths of its principals and supporting cast.
The Mill Creek box set is an excellent, high-quality way to just sit back, twitch your nose and get away from it all. This 22-disc set has everything you’d want on Bewitched, including extras like Bewitched: Behind the Magic, an all-new documentary about the making of Bewitched, featuring special guest appearances by actor David Mandel (Adam Stephens), Steve Olim (who worked in the make-up department at Columbia), Bewitched historian Herbie J Pilato, film and television historian Robert S. Ray, Bewitched guest star Eric Scott (later of The Waltons) and Chris York, son of D. York (the first Darrin). There are also sixteen new episodic audio commentaries, moderated by Herbie J Pilato that include behind-the-scenes conversations with Peter Ackerman (son of Bewitched executive producer Harry Ackerman), David Mandel, Bewitched guest star Janee Michelle (from “Sisters at Heart”), Steve Olim, Robert S. Ray, former child TV actors and Bewitched guest stars Ricky Powell (The Smith Family), Eric Scott (The Waltons), and Johnny Whitaker (Family Affair and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters) and Chris York (son of D. York). There’s also an exclusive 36-page booklet featuring pieces by Bewitched historian Herbie J. Pilato, as well as an episode guide. You can order it from Deep Discount.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Moon Zero Two was on the CBS Late Movie on January 26, 1973 and June 7, 1974.
Hammer does science fiction! Directed by Roy Ward Baker and written by Michael Carreras, this promised that there would be moon colonies by 2021. Millionaire J.J. Hubbard (Warren Mitchel) wants space explorer Bill Kemp (James Olson) to capture an asteroid in low orbit that can be transformed into better rocket fuel, allowing people like Kemp to not just colonize or be a tourist to the moon but to go to other worlds. After all, kemp was the first man on Mars.
Kemp lucks out by offering to help Clementine Taplin (Catherine Schell), whose brother owned a nickel mine — and was killed by Hubbard — putting her in the position of being rich once the asteroid lands there.
One of the film’s other writers, Gavin Lyall, wanted this to be much tougher than as glossy as it got. His wife, Katharine Whitehorn, said, “It was about — or supposed to be about — space travel when it had got to the beat-up-old-Dakota stage of grubby reality. The people who made it were dazzled by Kubrick’s 2001 and couldn’t resist trying to make it glossy and improbably perfect, the exact opposite of what the authors intended: all the gritty realism was gone.”
It came out three months after man went to the moon — maybe — which caused Ward to say, “Moon Zero Two was a bad picture. It was hopeless, and never got off the ground. We didn’t have enough money to do it properly. It was crazy – a complete muddle. And, it was undercut by the fact that you could turn on the television and see Neil Armstrong jumping about on the real Moon.”
Maybe he wasn’t totally right, as the sets were so realistic they were reused for years on TV shows like Space:1999, Moonbase 3 and UFO, as well as the movies Superman II, Superman IV and 2009’s Moon.
In the U.S., this was sold as the first space western. It played double features with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.
July 14-20 Vanity Project Week: “…it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughter is vanity.” Are these products of passionate and industrious independent filmmakers OR outrageous glimpses into the inner workings of self-obsessed maniacs??
Also known as The Godfather and the Lady and Six Champions Go Wild, this starts with a girl — I should say dame, in the parlance of this movie — named Caress Softly (Sharynne Dale, The Runaways) learns that some hitmen want to rub out Johnny Stiletto. She quickly warns Stiletto’s gang, who box the hitmen with wacky sound design.
Oh yeah. So I should tell you who is in this.
Johnny is Peter Savage. A self-taught writer, actor and filmmaker, Savage wrote the book that Raging Bull is based on. He’d been friends with Jake La Motta since they were kids and the two boxed together. He directed, wrote, produced and stars in this. Johnny is the godfather to the Cauliflower Cupids gang, who are made up of six world boxing champions: Gentle Jim (Jake LaMotta), The Rocker (Rocky Graziano), Willie the Eye (Willie Pep), Bennie the Bug (Paddy DeMarco), Tony the Bomber (Tony Zale) and Dinty the Dope (Petey Scalzo).
Johnny wants to retire so that his daughter Paulette (Carol Walker) can have a better life than he did, especially because she’s pregnant with rich young man Armand’s (Joe Bennet) child. He demands that they get married, but his guardian, Aunt Nira (Jane Russell), is standing in the way of their enforced bliss.
She’s getting all of her money from Uncle Bruno (Bud Truland), who hates the rest of the family, who all use him for money. So Johnny gets made up like Bruno, they change the will, fake the old man’s death and Johnny and his boys — who keep refusing to allow him to retire — can go out in style.
That is, if John Bradley (Alan Dale) doesn’t arrest them first.
This ends with Johnny serving as Nira’s love slave, a role he expected from her, and is even forced to kiss her feet. That’s a pretty BDSM close for an early 70s mob movie.
Jane Russell is 45 in this (it was shot in 1966 and didn’t come out until 1970) and looks better than women twenty years younger. She’s way better than this movie deserves, and yet I love that she’s in it.
As for Savage, he comes off a lot like Duke Mitchell, which is a compliment. He’d already made The Runaways, but would go on to direct and write Hypnorotica (Jamie Gillis is in it!), the American version of The New Life Style (Just to Be Loved), Sylvia (an X-rated version of Sybil that has Sonny Landham in its cast) and They Shall Overcome. He’s in all of those films and also shows up as a john in Taxi Driver, as DeMarco in Crazy Joe, as a boss in Double Agent 73, as an assistant in New York, New York, as a lawyer in Firepower, as Jackie Curtie in Raging Bull and as Thomas “Mr. T” Stokely in Vigilante, a movie that William Lustig dedicated to him.
As for the boxers in this, several of them show up in other films:
Jake LeMotta was also in Firepower, Hangmen, Maniac Cop, The Runaways, Who Killed Mary Whats’ername?, The Hustler, Rebellion In Cuba, La Violenza dei Dannati, The Doctor and the Playgirl and, of course, Confessions of a Psycho Cat.
Rocky Graziano appeared in several films, including Tony Rome, The Doctor and the Playgirl, Teenage Millionaire, and Country Music Holiday, where he played himself alongside June Carter, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ferlin Husky, and numerous country musicians.
Willie Pep was only in one other film, Requiem for a Heavyweight, just like Tony Gale, who was also in The Golden Gloves Story. This is the only movie that Paddy DeMarco and Petey Scalzo were in.
I’ve been looking for this movie for years and am so excited that I finally found it. It’s by no means excellent or even good, but to me, it’s everything that I wanted it to be.
EDITOR’S NOTE: They Call Me Trinity was on the CBS Late Movie on December 23, 1976..
The Spaghetti Western Database is my guide when I watch these movies and they say this about They Call Me Trinity: “…often described as the film that destroyed the spaghetti western and saved the Italian movie industry. In Italy, the movie even linguistically marks the end of an era. Whereas the diehard Westerns were called spaghetti Westerns, the Trinity movies and the numerous imitations they spawned would be called fagioli Westerns. Fagioli (= beans) refers to the obsession with food, notably beans, both Trinity movies express.”
Terence Hill, who plays Trinity, is nothing like the dark heroes in the rest of the Italian West. Sure, there’s some violence in this movie, but by the end, it’s become an actual comedy, and you care more about the characters than what they’ll do or who they’ll kill.
Director Enzo Barboni wrote the original story and screenplay for the film. Which was supposedly much darker than what ended up being in this movie. Producer Italo Zingarelli suggested the inclusion of a brother, which is how Bambino (Bud Spencer) comes in.
The original idea was for Peter Martell and George Eastman to be the brothers, but Hill and Spencer were popular after God Forgives… I Don’t!, Ace High and Boot Hill (which was rereleased as Trinity Ridesin some areas). This wasn’t just big in Italy; it was huge in France and Germany.
Again, unlike every Italian cowboy before him, Trinity doesn’t come into town dragging a coffin or tall in the saddle. He’s sleeping, lounging as his horse drags him somewhere new. His first meeting in the movie is with bounty hunters who have an injured Mexican with them. Trinity takes their prisoner and kills the others when they try to shoot him in the back. He’s nearly superhuman in his ability to draw and shoot, which is the opposite of his laconic demeanor.
Similarly, Bambino is the sheriff, someone who can shoot just like Trinity, but he is a burly man twice his size and someone who is ill-tempered, whereas Trinity is full of smiles and kind words. All they have in common is that when they need to kill someone, it’s second nature to them. It’s what they do best.
Bambino became the law when he accidentally killed the man riding to town to take that role. No, his scam is taking that job until his gang arrives. He has to deal with a lot, like Major Harriman (Farley Granger), who is trying to run the Mormons off their land so that he can use it for his prize horses. Unbranded horses, so that means someone — someone like Trinity and Bambino — can make a lot of money stealing them.
Despite being called the Right and Left Hands of the Devil, the two keep doing the right thing, Maybe it’s because he’s fallen for two angelic Mormon girls and is thinking about marrying them both. Or perhaps Trinity just sees protecting these peaceful Mormons as the right thing to do, even convincing his brother and his henchmen to show them how to fight.
Of course, they’re successful. Trinity also learns that being a Mormon means working hard, so he lies back down and lets his horse take him somewhere, maybe further west, perhaps somewhere that he can annoy his half-brother some more.
“You may think he’s a sleepy-type guy; he always takes his time. Soon, I know you’ll be changing your mind when you’ve seen him use a gun.”
I know that I should be protective of the rougher movies of the genre, but I have to confess that I loved every moment of this movie. It’s pure joy on film, from the arguments between Trinity and Bambino to the fact that Trinity looks at beans like most Western heroes look at money.
If you ever wonder what I want for Christmas, it’s this Trinity action figure.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Priest’s Wife was on the CBS Late Movie on February 21 and November 14, 1972 and October 22, 1973.
Directed by the master of commedia all’italiana, Dino Risi (Operazione San Gennaro, Fantasma d’amore), who wrote the script with Ruggero Maccari and Bernardino Zapponi, this film pairs Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni as Valeria Billi and Don Marco. She learns that her boyfriend was already married and shocked by that reveal, tries to kill herself, but not before running that man off the road, beating him and smashing his car. Ending up in the hospital after calling a Help Line and speaking to Don Marco, he visits her as she recovers. She falls in love with him, but he’s already married to the Roman Catholic church, as he’s a priest.
Sure, Loren and Mastroianni are one of the screen’s most famous couples. Still, even though producer Carlo Ponti did his best to make this work for international audiences with better dubbing than usual, it’s a rough movie to get through. Maybe I am cursed, because when I see Rome, I’m always looking for a masked killer with black gloves. I also didn’t like that Loren is either a strong woman or someone ready to die because a guy leaves her from scene to scene. I preferred the version of her slapping her unfaithful boyfriend into oblivion.
June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!
The Cavalcade of Perversion is run by Lady Divine (Divine) and Mr. David (David Lochary) and it has everything you’d want to see when it comes to getting grossed out, like a Puke Eater. At the end of every show, Divien robs people, but now she’s moved on to wanting to murder them.
“Yes folks, this isn’t any cheap X-rated movie or any 5th rate porno play, this is the show you want! Lady Divine’s cavalcade of perversions, the sleaziest show on earth! Not actors, not paid impostors, but real, actual filth who have been carefully screened in order to present to you the most flagrant violation of natural law known to man! These assorted sluts, fags, dykes and pimps know no bounds! They have committed acts against God and nature, acts that by their mere existence would make any decent person recoil in disgust.”
One night, when she gets home to her daughter Cookie (Cookie Mueller) and her Weatherman Underground boyfriend Steve (Paul Swift), she learns — from Edith Massey! — that Mr. David is cheating on her with Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pearce). Divine races out to confront them, but gets assaulted by glue sniffers. Then, Bonnie joins the show.
Then, the Infant of Prague (Michael Renner Jr.) leads Divine to a church, where she has a religious experience, during which Mink Stole describes the Stations of the Cross while inserting a rosary into her. This leads to a war between Mr. David and Bonnie versus Divine and Mink, which ends with Divine being overcome by bloodlust and killing everyone in her way. She’s assaulted again, this time by a giant lobster, and like a kaiju herself, Divine battles all of Baltimore before being shot in the streets by the National Guard.
Hope you aren’t offended easily!
Inspired by Two Thousand Maniacs!, this ends with Divine seizing. her power, shouting “I’m a maniac! A maniac that cannot be cured! O Divine, I am Divine!”
Throughout the movie, Divine taunts Mr. David with the idea that he is responsible for the Manson murders. At one stage of filming, this was to end with Divine being responsible.
Making his way to England instead of Staten Island, Andy Milligan created a vampire movie in which Rev. Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed) has an entire family of vampires — a wife who doesn’t speak, three green-skinned vampire women and a hunchback named Spool — living in Carfax Abbey.
Inbreeding is destroying this vampiric brood, so he calls out to America for more family members to add to the DNA and increase their chances of survival.
To get this on film, Milligan handmade costumes and smeared vaseline all over the lens. As always, he also had everyone scream at the top of their lungs.
Spool is abused throughout the movie, even when he’s trying to do the right thing and save the victims.
Many people seem to dislike this movie, and, to be honest, maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome because I watched so many Andy Milligan movies in the same week, but I’m not seeing the same film that they have. I kind of fall into a drone dream when I watch these, letting them wash over me and take away the world that I don’t want to be in. I feel sad for others who can’t use these movies in the same way.
Released as a double feature with Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers finds Andy Milligan making another one of the classics. Sweeney Todd, to be exact.
Sweeney Todd (John Miranda) and Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) come together to kill off their customers, steal their money and valuables, and give the bodies to Tobias Ragg (Berwick Kaler) for disposal. After a few kills, they start getting way into murder, so they decide to start using the bodies to make meat pies, including one that has a woman’s entire breast in it.
Shot in London, this actually feels like it could be in its period, unlike the New York City Milligan movies, where you can see modern buildings and hear the traffic. Milligan made five movies in 1970 alone — Torture Dungeon, Nightbirds, Guru the Mad Monk and The Body Beneathare the other films — and it’s pretty wild that he was doing so much so often. Then again, to the casual viewer, these movies are overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod, but to those who love these movies, well, they’re also excessively melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod. Perspective is important.
TV Guide said that Bloodthirsty Butchers was a “gory and typically cheap retelling of the Sweeney Todd legend.” One star.
Satan’s Serpents and The Choppers are happy to coexist, but the cops start pushing racial tensions between them in the hopes that the two biker gangs will wipe one another off the face of the planet. Any wars these gangs had before this were about turf, not the color of their skin. But Lt. Harper (Clancy Syrko) hates bikers, and there you go.
What sets this beyond other biker films is that there’s a pet racoon who smokes weed, a mountain lion, snakes used to kill people, bikers pissing all over one another, screaming stuff like “It’s champagne! I just blessed you with my golden shower!” and people have names like Chainer (he has a chain) and Knifer (because he has a knife). They’re named like off-brand GI Joe lines, like America’s Defense and The Corps, used to name the bad guys. There’s also a go-go dancer who doesn’t let a full-on brawl stop the dance.
Mostly, people ride bikes. If you like to see people ride bikes, that’s good news. People ride lots of bikes.
This was directed and written by Laurence Merrick, who also made Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? and Manson. He was killed by a stalker in 1977.
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