EDITOR’S NOTE: Zabriskie Point was on the CBS Late Movie on August 5, 1977.

Another movie that I only knew as bad because that’s what the Medveds said, it took me nearly forty years from when I first read their books to finally watch this. In The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. they wrote that it was “the worst film ever made by a director of genius.” As always, they were wrong.

Michelangelo Antonioni was known at the time for a trilogy of films — L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse — as well as Blowup and The Passenger. In 1994, he was given an Honorary Academy Award “in recognition of his place as one of cinema’s master visual stylists” presented by Jack Nicholson.

Zabriskie Point was savaged by critics and performed poorly yet has been re-evaluated today. Antonioni was inspired by an article he read about a young man who stole an aircraft and was killed when he tried to return it. He wrote the first draft and then had Sam Shepard, Franco Rossetti, frequent collaborator Tonino Guerra and Clare Peploe all write drafts. Stars Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin were hired because of an argument Frechette had in a bus station and Halprin’s appearance in the documentary Revolution. Neither had been screen tested.

The film was controversial before it was even shot. Rumors were out that Antonioni would gather 10,000 extras in the desert for a real orgy; instead the scene is highly choreographed with actors from The Open Theatre. Believing this, the United States Department of Justice investigated whether this violated the Mann Act, which forbids taking women across state lines for sexual purposes. No sex was ever filmed and the production was always in one state, California. However, police in Sacramento were waiting to arrest the director and the FBI and Oakland police also were sure that he staged a riot and wanted to arrest him for that.

The only movie that Antonioni made in the U.S., it was seen as “a noble artistic impulse short-circuited in a foreign land” by Vincent Canby, David Fricke wrote that it was “was one of the most extraordinary disasters in modern cinematic history” and Roger Ebert said of the protagonists, “Their voices are empty; they have no resonance as human beings. They don’t play to each other, but to vague narcissistic conceptions of themselves. They wouldn’t even meet were it not for a preposterous Hollywood coincidence.”

During a college strike, Mark leaves, claiming that he is “willing to die, but not of boredom.” As he’s arrested outside, real estate salesman Lee Allen (Rod Taylor) is working on ads for his new Sunny Dunes resort, which will be sold with mannequins instead of humans. Mark gets out of jail and watches a police officer die in another riot — Harrison Ford is briefly in one of these scenes — and runs to an airport where he steals a plane and flies away.

Daria is driving through the desert in a big Buick to meet Lee, who may be her boss or lover. She meets Mark first as he buzzes her car. They walk to Zabriskie Point and make love, along with thousands of others. She begs him not to fly back to L.A., but he does and is killed. She makes it to Lee’s new Sunny Dunes home and she’s not the same person she used to be. Leaving, she imagines that the mansion — which was recreated on a soundstage; Antonioni was amazed by how wasteful American moviemaking was compared to Italy — blows up.

The soundtrack was filled with music of the time, unlike many movies, with songs from Pink Floyd, The Youngbloods, Kaleidoscope, Jerry Garcia, Patti Page, Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, John Fahey and a love theme — “So Young” — by Roy Orbison. There was so much music that some never ended up in the movie. Richard Wright of Pink Floyd wrote a song called “The Violent Sequence” for the end of the movie, but Antonioni used a re-recording of the band’s “Careful with That Axe, Eugene”, retitled “Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up.” Roger Waters said that the suggested song was “too sad” and sounded like church. It was revised by the band and became “Us and Them” on Dark Side of the Moon. Antonioni also visited The Doors while they were recording Morrison Hotel and while the recorded the song “L’America” for this, it went unused.

Frechette lived and died much like his character. He and Halprin also became romantically involved during the film’s long shooting schedule with Mark’s wife consent. After his divorce, Daria didn’t want to live in a commune like Mark so they also broke up. When they were on The Dick Cavett Show, Cavett said that he hadn’t seen the movie. Frechette replied, “Save your money.” Cavett laughed and said, “Well that’s the first time an actor has been on this show to unplug his movie.”

Antonioni’s original ending was a shot of an airplane skywriting the phrase “Fuck You, America.” Obviously, that was cut. But this was the first studio film to have the word motherfucker in it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Taste the Blood of Dracula was on the CBS Late Movie on September 11, 1981.

The fifth Hammer Dracula, this played double features with Crescendo in the UK and Trog in the U.S.*, where it was the top movie of November 1970. It was released the same year as Scars of Dracula.

A man named Weller (Roy Kinnear) watches Dracula die, impaled by a crucifix — so this is an actual direct sequel to Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and not just another story — and takes the vampire’s ring, a cape and cape.

There’s also three businessmen — William Hargood (Geoffrey Keen), Samuel Paxton (Peter Sallis) and Jonathon Secker (John Carson) — who pretend to have a charity yet really just go to brothels. Good work if you can get it. They meet Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates), a man kicked out of his family for celebrating a Black Mass. He tells the three if they really want an experience, they should buy Dracula’s garments from Weller and bring them to him. He mixes their blood in a big glass and asks them to drink. They refuse, he drinks and loses his mind, leading the three to beat him to death. His body then transforms into Dracula (Christopher Lee) who wants revenge for death of his servant.

Dracula then convinces an abused girl named Alice Hargood (Linda Hayden) to kill her father and lure her friends like Lucy Paxton (Isla Blair) to him. It just happens to be no coincidence that she’s engaged to one of the three men’s sons. He also turns that man, Jeremy (Martin Jarvis), into a servant and destroys Lucy.

It takes reconsecrating the church to defeat Dracula, who becomes dust again. Is it too simple to say it? Dust to dust.

Taste the Blood of Dracula would have had Lord Courtley replace Dracula and become a vampire on his own. Warner Brothers refused to release the film without Christopher Lee and that’s how he came back again. That said — this was one of four movies where Lee played Dracula in 1970. The others? Count Dracula, One More Time and Scars of Dracula.

Directed by Peter Sasdy (I Don’t Want to Be Born) and written by Anthony Hinds, this is a rare R-rated Hammer film.

*Trog also played with Dracula A.D. 1972.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Count Yorga was on the CBS Late Movie on August 16, 1974 and August 14, 1975.

Directed and written by Bob Kelljan, Count Yorga, Vampire was originally going to be soft core porn movie, The Loves of Count Iorga. In fact, some prints have that title. Robert Quarry, the man who would be Yorga, told producer Michael Macready that he would play the vampire if they turned the story into a non-sexual horror movie.

Donna (Donna Anders) is trying to contact her recently deceased mother via séance by Count Yorga, a mystic who has recently moved to America. Donna becomes hysterical and needs to be calmed by Yorga; afterward she reveals to her friends that Yorga was her mother’s last over and when she died, he demanded that she be buried and not cremated.

Yorga then conducts a campaign of terror, biting Erica (Judy Lang), who goes from party girl to vampire eating her own kitten — don’t worry, it’s just a kitten covered in lasagna — in a matter of hours. Oh yeah — Donna’s mom (Marsha Jordan) is now one of Yorga’s brides and it’s the swinging seventies, so he commands her to make love to one of his other undead women on a cold cemetery slab.

By the end of the film, Yorga and his brides have wiped out just about every one of Donna’s friends and strengthened his hold over her, which extends potentially beyond the grave. Again, it’s the seventies and life is cruel and cheap and happy endings aren’t often found after the New Hollywood. The count is also self aware and watches Countess Dracula.

EDITOR’S NOTE: RPM was on the CBS Late Movie on October 25, 1973 and April 20 and August 31, 1976.

Stanley Kramer called his movies heavy dramas but they’re what are often called message films. A liberal, he brought issues to the public eye through his movies like the dangers of nuclear war (On the Beach), fascism (Judgement at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools), creationism against evolutionism (Inherit the Wind), greed (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) and racism (The Defiant Ones, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner).

While Pauline Kael saw his movies as “melodramas,” and “irritatingly self-righteous,” she also had to realize that they had “redeeming social importance.”

But in 1970, maybe he was past his expiration date.

Did he feel like Professor F.W.J. “Paco” Perez (Anthony Quinn) does in this movie? For years, Paco has been the radical, the one that stood outside the mainstream. He says at one point that he fought Franco and McCarthy and has learned so much, but the young people don’t want to learn anything. Did Kramer feel that way, an old man in the New Hollywood that was so much more in touch with the youth?

Is Paco just a fifty-year-old fanny chaser, as out of touch with the time as the administration he’s been asked to be a part of?

Radical student activists — Paco is impressed that the blacks and whites have worked together — occupy the administration building with a list of 12 demands. President Tyler (John Zaremba, who spent the 70s and 80s wandering the Earth searching for the best beans for Hills Brothers Cofee) resigns and the Board of Trustees looks at the list that the students have written up of the presidents they would be happy with.

Top on the list? Paco.

It’s after midnight and he’s asleep with his grad student girlfriend Rhoda (Ann-Margret). Yet he’s urged to rush out and fix things. The next day, he starts his new job, showing up on a motorcycle.

Paco reads their demands and many of them, like inner-city scholarships, a college reinvestment program, no military research on campus and adding an African American to the all-white Board of Trustees make sense. But the idea that students can hire and fire faculty doesn’t work for him. He’s already reached the first time where his theory and reality begin to not work together.

With Rossiter (Gary Lockwood) and Steve Dempsey (Paul Dempsey) leading the students, Paco tries to be the person between them and the Board of Trustees. But when Rossiter says that he will destroy all of the campus’ computers, Paco has to make the tough decision to call in the police. They come charging in with tear gas, turning their hero professor into just one of the old people never to be trusted. When the cops round up the students, Rhoda is one of them.

What they don’t know is that Paco has signed off on their bail. Yet he still walks past the crowd and is screamed and booed at. He has learned the hard way that the lessons of books and classrooms often mean little in the real world.

I really liked the songs by Melaine, “We Don’t Know Where We’re Goin’” and “Stop! I Don’t Wanna Hear It Any More,” that were in this. It’s quite preachy, but it also feels like this movie was Kramer attempting to determine where he fit in any longer. Then again, Kramer would say that this was his least favorite film that made the lowest amount of money. The dialogue may get silly sometimes, but that’s because it’s written by Erich Segal, who also did Love Story.

After this movie, however, I understand why my dad and other older male relatives would say Ann-Margaret’s name with the reverence they otherwise reserved for the saints.

You can watch this on Tubi.

In The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol wrote that the producer of this movie, Martin Poll, approached him about doing making his life story into a movie.Warhol responded that “a wonderful movie had already been made on the sixties, and he should just remake it — The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart.” He also said that it was “the quintessential, most truthful studio-made film about the ’60s counterculture.”

Directed by Leonard Horn (who sadly died young while shooting the pilot for Wonder Woman) and written by Robert T. Westbrook (he also wrote the book this was based on; his novels The Mexican, Insomnia and The Final Cut were also adapted into movies), this is the story of Stanley Sweetheart (Don Johnson), an aspiring filmmaker and college student at Columbia University. After the death of his father, he’s moved from Beverly Hills to New York City and is going from being a rich kid to one from a family slowly losing its money. He has no real friends, he’s bored with life and he lives in a dump.

The film goes into his many romances, like a hippie friend Barbara (Linda Gillen) who changes her name to Shayne. He has a one night stand with her, but really wants her roommate Andrea (Victoria Racimo). This is a major issue with Stanley, as whatever he has never seems good enough. Even when he scores with the virginal girl of his dreams, Cathy (Dianne Hull), he can’t help but either seduce or be seduced by her roommate Fran (Holly Near).

He also meets Danny (Michael Greer), an underground musician who once went to Julliard and who seems to have a worldly bit of advice to give. Or at least lead Stanley to the best parties. And taking his girl, who didn’t really want in the first place until she’s gone.

Stanley finds happiness with Andrea and Shayne as a triad family of sorts, but even that eventually can’t make him happy. Cathy sees him at a happening but he’s so high that he barely makes sense. The film ends with him leaving and Andrea telling him she needs him. The film leaves it up to you where he ends up, but it does show you that Danny shot himself behind his mother’s house right in front of her.

Speaking of Warhol, The New York Times reported that this movie would have Ultra Violet, Candy Darling (who actually does appear in a wordless cameo), Gerard Malanga, and Warhol as a “freaked-out psychiatrist” in its cast. One Warhol superstar did make it — almost — as Joe Dallesandro was originally cast as Danny. However, he was fired when for being late and causing trouble with the cast and crew.

This film is an interesting document of another time and not just because you can see the World Trade Center get built. It’s made at a time when Hollywood was trying to figure out how to get movies made for the counterculture and maybe not always understanding. The era of films avoiding sex and drugs was, obviously, over. It was a brief moment before blockbusters took over and films like this are vital moments out of a past that didn’t last long enough.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Dr. Craig Cooper (Peter Carpenter) is overseeing the care of the dying Ridgeley Waterman (Eric Allison), who is tended to by his daughter Victoria (Maria De Aragon) and round the clock nurse Miss Turner (Leslie Simms).

Victoria has repeatedly tried to seduce the doctor, who has problems of his own. He used to perform abortions when that was illegal and he’s being blackmailed. He finally gives in to her and looks the other way when she poisons her father. Her sister Gail (Vickie Peterson) comes to contest the will, only to learn that she gets everything. She also has a would-be lover — maybe, it’s never outright said but come on — named Kate (Jacqueline Dalya), but once Gail hooks up with the doctor, she leaves. And this all puts Victoria from being bedridden over the will to absolutely a murderer when her sister reveals that she’s taken her doctor from her.

Then she paints in blood.

Shot in a home once owned by Bela Lugosi by Robert Vincent O’Neill, Gary Kent said of this, “Robert was a prop man to begin with. I had no idea he was a director. The next thing I knew he was doing it, and he called me in as a production manager. It was fun. He took it seriously, so you never got the feeling he was just in it for the bucks. I thought it just took him forever to get a shot. He was always fussing over it. It was murder. His movies were long and arduous, but nonetheless I had some affection for Robert.”

According to Leslie Simms, a year after production had commenced, she was called back to complete re-shoots for an alternate cut of the film intended for television broadcast. In order for the film to be shown on TV, the nudity and violence had to be cut. That left a lot of time. They added a subplot that has her nurse working with the blackmailer. Instead of the murders, we see Miss Turner report the killings to the blackmailer.

This movie also has Regan Wilson in the cast. She was Playboy‘s Playmate of the Month for October 1967. Those photos were taken to the moon inside the schedule of Apollo 12’s mission commander, Pete Conrad. Her co-star, Vicki Peters, was also the April 1972 Playmate of the Month.

You can also read Eric Wrazen and Bill Van Ryn‘s feelings on this movie.

Bill Van Ryn from Groovy Doom/Drive-In Asylum explained this movie short and sweet: “It’s like an episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker without Kolchak.” It’s also about the press freaking out about an eight-foot-tall alien who is killing people who eyebeam lasers in the dirty and dingy streets of Los Angeles. It was originally about an autistic child who never met people before. It was also originally to be directed by Tobe Hooper. Things kind of didn’t happen that way.

John “Bud” Cardos (Kingdom of the Spiders, Gor II) stepped in to direct. And realizing that his movie now had an alien instead of a child, he hastily put together an opening narration that talks about electric eels and Venus fly traps. If our planet has those, what about other worlds? What that has to do with the rest of the film, well, your guess is as good as mine.

What we end up with is a monster that beheads people while someone chants, “The dark! The dark!”  William Devane (Greg Sumner from TV’s Knot’s Landing) and a TV anchorwoman (original Wonder Woman and That’s Incredible host Cathy Lee Crosby) finally figure out how to catch the monster. Oh yeah — there’s also an ancient psychic who believes that a young actor will be the next to be killed, so we get some 70’s Hollywood parties along the way. Casey Kasem shows up. Keenan Wynn and Richard Jaeckel, too.

Roger Ebert referred to this movie as, “the dumbest, most inept, most maddeningly unsatisfactory thriller of the last five years. It’s really bad: so bad, indeed, that it provides some sort of measuring tool against which to measure other bad thrillers. Years from now, I’ll be thinking to myself: Well, at least it’s not as bad as The Dark.”

I really didn’t think it was that bad. It’s not the best movie ever, but I was certainly entertained. Not riveted. But entertained. But how can you hate a movie where a giant alien shoots laser beams out of his eyes and rips peoples’ heads off so that the coroner can put them in body bags (along with mini head bags)?

Edward L. Montoro, the man who was the heart and soul of the main era of Film Ventures International, only directed one other movie — Platinum Pussycat — and wrote two others — again, Platinum Pussycat and Day of the Animals — other than this movie.

Heaven (Marie Marceau, which is hilarious, because who else would mistake Uschi Digard with that body and accent?), Sin (Jennie Lynn, who played four roles on My Three Sons before this) and Karen (Phyllis Stengel, who was in tons of early adult, like Ed Wood’s Take It Out In Trade) are out to become movie stars, even leaving behind Heaven’s cop man Bernie (Scott Cameron).

This leads him to Mr. Salacity (Miles White), a Hollywood producer who gets them on the casting couch. It’s pretty much what you expect, except for the fact that the men never show anything while the women show it all. There’s also a scene where Uschi gets a cold and to heal herself, she has one of her friends cover her breasts with Vicks VapoRub. I love Vicks so much, so this scene meant a lot to me, particularly when you realize that it takes two gigantic tubs of the stuff to even get close to covering the pride of Saltsjö-Duvnäs, Sweden’s 48 F bosom.

I mean, you kind of have to see that, you know?