Tag Archives: 1971

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Billy Jack (1971)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Billy Jack was on the CBS Late Movie on November 14, 1980 and November 20, 1981.

You may have thought that Billy Jack was dead after The Born Losers, shot in the back while trying to do the right thing. The truth is, he was just getting started. An anti-authority film, this movie struggled to be made, with American International Pictures pulling out while it was being made. Then, 20th Century Fox stepped in but refused to distribute the film. Auteur Tom Laughlin would not release the sound for the film, making it unreleasable until he could own the film himself, getting Warner Brothers to distribute it. He was unhappy with how Warner Brothers sold the film, so he sued them and finally released the movie himself.

At the heart of the film, the movie presents a conundrum: the only way to achieve peace is to repeatedly beat the stuffing out of people.

Also, the Navajo Green Beret Vietnam War veteran and hapkido master known as Billy Jack is played by director (as T.C. Frank), producer (as Mary Rose Solti) and co-writer (as Frank Christina) Tom Laughlin, who is totally white. That said, the role of Billy Jack is anything but the way that Native Americans had been portrayed up until the early 70s.

Laughlin was also a muckraker, really in the best of ways. He’d written the film nearly two decades before after seeing the way Native Americans were treated in Winner, South Dakota, the home of his wife Delores Taylor. What took so long to get it to screen? Well, beyond building his acting career, Laughlin also quit acting in 1959 to start a Montessori preschool in Santa Monica, California.

After the school went out of business, he went back into acting and after the Billy Jack series, he was set to change the world with Billy Jack Enterprises, which had plans for a new Montessori school, a record label, an investigative magazine, books, a distribution company and more message-laden movies, including films for children. Yet the last movie, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, didn’t connect with audiences. Or, as Laughlin charged, it was the fault of Warner Brothers illegally selling the television rights to his films. Or even Senator Vance Hartke, who he said told him that, “You’ll never get this released. This house you have, everything will be destroyed.” in front of Lucille Ball, angered that the film correctly pointed out how senators were owned by lobbyists.

There was going to be a fifth film, The Return of Billy Jack, that ended in the 2000s when Laughoun got hurt and the money ran out. He claimed for years that it would get made with the title changing to Billy Jack’s Crusade to End the War in Iraq and Restore America to Its Moral Purpose, Billy Jack’s Moral Revolution and Billy Jack for President, with the plan to have Billy Jack and President George W. Bush debate each other.

Man, I wish that was made.

That said, the original Billy Jack is an incredibly strange movie, a film made of a singular vision.

Billy Jack is the defender of the Freedom School, a school full of happy children taught my Laughlin’s real-life wife Delores, who are assaulted from all sides by the horrible folks of the redneck town where, for some reason, they have decided to make their home. A movie this strange demands a run-on sentence like that to describe it.

This is the kind of movie where the hero must face off with a snake and purposefully be bitten with venom so that he can become brothers with the snake, as well as have a theme song “One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack),” which was recorded by Jinx Dawson and her band Coven, whose album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls is as metal as it gets, even featuring a black mass as its second side.

You don’t really watch Billy Jack. It washes over you. The words I use to describe it aren’t enough. It’s absolutely ridiculous in the finest of ways and I really want you to experience it.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: The Toy Box (1971)

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Uschi Digard week (June 23 – 29) Digard is best known for her work with Russ Meyer but she became an SWV fan favorite for two gargantuan reasons, her charm and her prolific career. The Swiss actress fled to America in 1968 and began a long career filling the silver screen from corner to corner with her overflowing positive energy. Show the lady some respect and watch one of her movies.

A section 3 video nasty and a production of Harry Novak, this movie should come complete with soap so that you can clean yourself up after the way you feel post-watch. But hey, before we luxuriate in filth, let’s talk about Harry and Boxoffice International Pictures.

Just take a cursory scan through some of the films that Boxoffice brought to the eyes of maniacs like you and me: Kiss Me Quick! in which an alien comes to our planet in search of feminine breeding stock*, the spectacularly named mondo  Suburban Pagans, the drinking suburban housewives and their pot-smoking daughters in The Muthers, Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire, the Gary Graver-directed Erika’s Hot Summer, redneck trash (a good thing) like Country Cuzzins and Sweet Georgia, the brutal and wonderful Toys Are Not for Children, The Sinful Dwarf, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, Lisa, Rattlers, The Child and so many more. When I first started buying trailer collections, the Something Weird Extra Weird Sampler was where I first saw Harry’s signature swirl onto my screen and then blow my mind with the aberrant junk that he was fostering on the movie buying public.

The actual story of this movie isn’t really a story as much as it’s an opportunity to get single women one handing it and couplings two handing it. So yeah, Ralph has taken Donna to see his crazy uncle again, but first she has to see her man in the boat before putting on a scene before the somehow dead and yet able to speak from beyond the grave uncle. And then this movie makes me wonder, who is this for? Who wants to see fellatio interrupted by stabbing or Uschi Digard have sex with — not in — a bed** or a necrophilia scene that ends with a pitchfork murder? Someone, I guess. As Harry Novak himself once said, “When I was a kid, my Daddy told me, “There’s a buyer for everything.” And I lived to find out that he was right.”

But if you make it through all that freaky 70s not so sexy sex, well, you learn the truth. The fact that Donna is really the uncle who is really an alien who sells human brains as drugs on the planet Arkon and the gifts promised from the toy box are really death as we watch a whole bunch of hippies get trapped inside a death house.

Director and writer Ronald Víctor García started out as an electro-mechanical packaging designer for the Apollo Command Module, the Saturn Stage II Helium Purge System and the Polaris Atomic Submarine Launching Systems before making movies like this. And somehow, some way, he became the director of photography for Twin Peaks and One from the Heart. In fact, he’s still out there today, working as a cinematographer on The Good Fight.

I wouldn’t say that this movie was good, but I will say that I was pretty messed up in a good way by it. It has a great movie somewhere in there and I wished that they had found it.

*Harry had a thing for sexy aliens, producing one of my favorite named movies of all time, 1975’s Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman!

**To be fair, I am a red-blooded male and I am willing to watch Uschi Digard do pretty much whatever she wants to do.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: The Cult (1971)

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Uschi Digard week (June 23 – 29) Digard is best known for her work with Russ Meyer but she became an SWV fan favorite for two gargantuan reasons, her charm and her prolific career. The Swiss actress fled to America in 1968 and began a long career filling the silver screen from corner to corner with her overflowing positive energy. Show the lady some respect and watch one of her movies.

Long thought to either be a lost film or only having a single print still in existence that was in German with no subtitles, this movie supposedly lives as a 35mm print in the library of Quentin Tarantino.

Directed and written by Albert Zugsmith (Movie Star, American Style or; LSD, I Hate You; The Chinese Room and one of the worst movies ever made, Dondi) — who used the name Kentucky Jones so that the real Manson Family wouldn’t creepy crawl his house — this was also known as Together Girls, House of Bondage and the best possible exploitation title possible, The Manson Massacre.

Invar (Makee K. Blaisdell, who had played many Native Americans on TV) is our Manson. He spends much of the film sleeping in a coffin and having flashbacks, like how he used to have sex with his mom, who is played by Uschi Digard. He also killed his dad with a chair.

This is the kind of movie whose legends are better than the reality, like the one that Lee Frost directed it or that it was made by the Mansons. That said, cinematographer Robert Maxwell also worked on the adult movie The Ramrodder that was shot at Spahn Ranch and had Bobby Beausoleil and Catherine Share in the cast. So maybe sometimes, the lie is based in real life.

The cast includes Debbie Osborne (The Toy Box), April 1972 Playboy Playmate of the Month Vicki Peters (Blood Mania), Lindis Guinness (Grave of the Vampire) and James Whitworth, Jupiter from The Hills Have Eyes.

I wish that I could tell you that this was an amazing piece of adult film but no. It certainly isn’t. It does, however, have a scene where a baby is tossed into a dumpster.

Dr. Cook’s Garden (1971)

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Originally a play by Ira Levin — A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary’s Baby, Deathtrap, The Stepford Wives,  The Boys from Brazil and Sliver to name a few — this is only the second dramatic role for star Bing Crosby, who took over the part that Burl Ives played on Broadway, Dr. Leonard Cook.

He’s the center of Greenfield, Vermont, responsible for the fact that there is hardly any crime and so much happiness. The man who is like a father to, Jimmy Tennyson( Jimmy Converse), comes back home and wants to be a doctor as well, but Cook is against it. This is his town.

Cook’s assistant Dora Ludlow (Abby Lewis) tells Tennyson to keep working on the older man, who has heart problems, as he needs an assistant. The young doctor also glows close to a former love, Janey Rausch (Blythe Danner). He soon figures out that all of the deaths in town are Dr. Cook pruning his garden of those who aren’t morally right for his small bit of heaven.

Originally airing on January 19, 1971 on ABC, this was directed by Ted Post, who we all know made The Baby and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Writer Art Wallace worked on the Planet of the Apes TV series, as well as She Waits and being one of the creators of Dark Shadows. This is a really effective — and quick — movie. You’ll see the twist coming, but the end is so moving and Crosby is so good in this role, you’ll be along for every step of the ride.

You can watch this on YouTube.

SUPPORTER WEEK: Mongo’s Back in Town (1971)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s movie is brought to you by Jason, who made a one-time donation and told me to pick any 70’s TV I wanted. So how about an entire week?

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Lieutenant Pete Tolstad, the character played by Telly Savalas in this made for TV movie, feels like the early version of Kojak before that show would air in 1973. Tolstad grew up in the same neighborhood that is now his beat. He’s never had a real Christmas. He just does his job.

Directed by Marvin J. Chomsky (Tank, Evel Knievel, Roots) and written by Herman Miller and based on the book by E. Richard Johnson. Johnson was a convicted armed robber and murderer who wrote all eleven of his books from his cell at Stillwater State Prison in Minnesota. He started writing to pass the time in prison and his novel Silver Street won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for 1968 and the follow-up, which this movie is based on, was considered an even better book. Despite his success, he got into drugs while in prison. He escaped and went back into crime before being recaptured and stayed in jail until 1991.

Everyone is interested in the reasons why Mongo Nash (Joe Don Baker) is back in town and why he’s spending time with a young girl named Vikki (Sally Field) who has just come to town from West Virginia. Is he in town to do a hit for his brother Mike (Charles Cioffi)? Or does he just want left alone?

This has a great cast. Martin Sheen plays Tolstad’s partner Mike and Anne Francis is a gangster’s moll who Savalas has a flirty scene with. Baker is great and somehow makes a killer into someone that you feel some level of empathy for and the way he treats Vikki. Ah yes. He is a killer. On the way to the brutal ending, we have people get acid thrown in their faces and everyone is fair game for murder including kids.

Originally airing on CBS on December 10, 1971, this is also known as Steel Wreath, which is a strange title and probably one that makes more sense once Johnson and his books were forgotten. Perhaps they didn’t want people to think this was a Blazing Saddles sequel, which there was one that is forgotten and was a TV series.

You can watch this on YouTube.

APRIL MOVIE THON 3: The Headless Eyes (1971)

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April 28: Video Nasty: A video nasty! List here.

Arthur Malcolm (Bo Brundin, who was in Meteor, The Day the Clown Cried and Raise the Titanic) can’t pay the rent — he’s a starving artist, you know? — so he tries to sneak into a woman’s bedroom and steals money off her nightstand. He thinks that she’s sleeping, she thinks he’s a rapist and this comical misunderstanding ends with her popping out his eye with a spoon and knocking him out a window.

Arthur pulls himself back up and decides that he’s going to keep being an artist but to do so, he’s going to kill people and use their eyeballs in his art.

It was produced by porn luminary Henri Pachard and distributed by J.E.R. Pictures as a double feature with The Ghastly Ones. The director and writer? Kent Bateman, who was the father of Jason and Justine, and would one day produce Teen Wolf Too.

Back to that porn connection, it has adult actors Larry Hunter (who was also in The Amazing Transplant with another actress from this movie, Mary Lamay) and Linda Southern. Another actress, Ann Wells, was also in Anything Once, Career Bed and The Detention Girls, was married to Bateman but is not the mother of his famous children.

Don’t be confused by the poster. This is not a movie about eyeballs moving on their own. No, it’s a movie about a man with an eyepatch saying “My eye!” and “I’m twisted!” while plucking other eyeballs out of their sockets. Over and over. Sometimes even in focus. Also: set to music stole from the Cecil Leuter and Georges Teperino albums TV Music 101 and TV Music 102.

This is the kind of movie that as soon as it starts, you’re either going to love or despise it.

I loved every minute.

You can watch this on YouTube.

RE/SEARCH Incredibly Strange Films: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

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Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey claimed that the main character in this Vincent Price film was based on him. Well, his name is Dr. Anton Phibes and he’s an organist, researcher, medical doctor, biblical scholar and ex-vaudevillian who has created a clockwork band of robot musicians to play old standards at his whim. Seeing as how nearly all of these things match up with LaVey, I can kind of see his point.

Director Robert Fuest started by designing sets. While working on the TV show The Avengers, he got excited about directing and ended up working on seven episodes of the original series and two of The New Avengers. Soon, he’d be working in film more and more, starting with 1967’s Just Like a Woman. Between the two Phibes films, And Soon the Darkness, The Final Programme and The Devil’s Rain!, he became known for dark-humored fantasy and inventive sets, several of which he designed himself.

This movie is one I can’t be quiet about. It’s one of the strangest and most delightful films I’ve ever seen.

Dr. Anton Phibes died in Switzerland, racing back home upon hearing the news that his beloved bridge Victoria (an uncredited Caroline Munro) had died during surgery. The truth is that Phibes has survived, scarred beyond belief and unable to speak, but alive. He uses all of the skills that he’s mastered to rebuild his face and approximate a human voice. Also, he may or may not be insane.

Phibes believes that the doctors who operated on his wife were incompetent and therefore must pay for their insolence. So he does what anyone else would do: visit the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt on every single one of them.

Phibes is, of course, played by Vincent Price. No one else could handle this role. Or this movie. There’s hardly any dialogue for the first ten minutes of the movie. Instead, there are long musical numbers of Phibes and his clockwork band playing old standards. In fact, Phibes doesn’t speak for the first 32 minutes of the movie. Anyone who asks questions like “Why?” and says things like “This movie makes no sense” will be dealt with accordingly.

After the first few murders, Inspector Trout gets on the case. He becomes Phibes’ main antagonist for this and the following film, trying to prove that all of these murders — the doctors and nurse who had been on the team of Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotten!) — are connected. Phibes then stays one step ahead of the police, murdering everyone with bees, snow, a unicorn statue, locusts and rats, sometimes even right next to where the cops have staked him out.

Dr. Phibes is assisted by the lovely Vulnavia. We’re never informed that she’s a robot, but in my opinion, she totally is. Both she and the doctor are the most fashion-forward of all revenge killers I’ve seen outside of Meiko Kaji and Christina Lindberg.

Writer William Goldstein wrote Vulnavia as another clockwork robot with a wind-up key in her neck. Fuest thought that Phibes demanded a more mobile assistant, so he made her human, yet one with a blank face and mechanical body movements. I still like to think that she’s a machine, particularly because she returns in the next film after her demise here. Also — Fuest rewrote nearly the entire script.

After killing off everyone else — sorry Terry-Thomas! — Phibes kidnaps Dr. Vesalius’ son and implants a key inside his heart that will unlock the boy. However, if the doctor doesn’t finish the surgery on his son in six minutes — the same amount of time he had spent trying to save Phibes’ wife — acid will rain down and kill both he and his boy.

Against all odds, Vesalius is successful. Vulnavia, in the middle of destroying Phibes’ clockwork orchestra, is sprayed by the acid and killed while the doctor himself replaces his blood with a special fluid and lies down to eternal sleep with his wife, happy that he has had his revenge.

If you’re interested, the ten plagues Phibes unleashes are:

1. Blood: He drains all of Dr. Longstreet’s blood

2. Frogs: He uses a mechanical frog mask to kill Dr. Hargreaves at a costume party

3. Bats: A more cinematic plague than lice from the Biblical plagues, Phibes uses these airborne rodents to kill Dr. Dunwoody

4. Rats: Again, better than flies, rats overwhelm Dr. Kitaj and cause his plane to crash

5. Pestilence: This one is a leap, but the unicorn head that kills Dr. Whitcombe qualifies

6: Boils: Professor Thornton is stung to death by bees

7. Hail: Dr. Hedgepath is frozen by an ice machine

8. Locusts: The nurse is devoured by them thanks to an ingenious trap

9. Darkness: Phibes joins his wife in eternal rest during a solar eclipse

10. Death of the firstborn: Phibes kidnaps and the son of Dr. Vesalius

I love that this movie appears lost in time. While set in the 1920’s, many of the songs weren’t released until the 1940’s. Also, Phibes has working robots and high technology, despite the era the film is set in.

There’s nothing quite like this movie. I encourage you to take the rest of the day off and savor it.

How does Phibes live up to being a Satanic film? In my opinion, Phibes embodies one of the nine Satanic statements to its utmost: Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek. The men and woman whose negligence led to the loss of Phibes’ wife were never punished. Phibes had to become their judge, jury and yes, destroyer.

On the other hand — or hoof, as it were — Phibes is the exact antithesis of the ninth Satanic sin, Lack of Aesthetics, which states that “an eye for beauty, for balance, is an essential Satanic tool and must be applied for greatest magical effectiveness. It’s not what’s supposed to be pleasing—it’s what is. Aesthetics is a personal thing, reflective of one’s own nature, but there are universally pleasing and harmonious configurations that should not be denied.” So much of what makes this film is that Phibes’ musical art is just as essential as his demented nature and abilities. Music is the core of his soul, not just revenge.

Another point of view comes from Draconis Blackthorne of the Sinister Screen: “This is an aesthetically-beauteous film, replete with Satanic architecture as well as ideology. Those who know will recognize these subtle and sometimes rather blatant displays. Obviously, to those familiar with the life of our Founder, there are several parallels between the Dr. Anton Phibes character and that of Dr. Anton LaVey – they even share the same first name, and certain propensities.”

RE/SEARCH Incredibly Strange Films: The Corpse Grinders (1971)

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Ted V. Mikels lived the kind of life that most teenage boys dream of. He lived in a house that looked like a castle, made exploitation movies and lived with gorgeous women who wanted to be filmmakers that he referred to as Castle Ladies.

When the Lotus Cat Food Company finds itself going out of business, its owners Landau (Sanford Mitchell) and Maltby (J. Byron Foster), who decide to start using dead bodies from a graveyard for the source of their cat food. The cats then have a taste for man and start killing. Only veterinarian Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and nurse Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly) can stop the wild cats.

Not only was this written by Arch Hall Sr. — the father of Arch Hall Jr. — the script was touched up by Joe Cranston — the father of Bryan Cranston.

This film had quite a life. It played triple features with The Embalmer and The Undertaker and His Pals, double features in the UK with Horror Hospital and played drive-ins from 1980 to 1985 as The Flesh Grinders. It also was part of the legendary 5 Deranged Features lineup, playing as Night of the Howling Beast along with Dracula vs. Frankenstein under the title They’re Coming to Get You, The Wizard of Gore as House of Torture, Creature from Black Lake and Shriek of the Mutilated. House of Schlock has a great article about this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

RE/SEARCH Incredibly Strange Films: Werewolves on Wheels (1971)

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Is a biker movie not enough action for you? What if I told you that a biker gang named The Devil’s Advocates happen upon some warlocks and then one of them is bitten by a female werewolf and transforms under the full moon? How’s that sound?

I literally just told you the entire plot of this movie. Soon after the cult members cast a curse on the biker leader’s (Stephen Oliver, who was married to Lana Wood, sister of Natalie Wood and also the star of Motorpsycho and Angels from Hell) girlfriend that makes her turn into a werewolf, she turns him as well. Soon, the bikers are being killed one by one until they see their leader and his girl transform.

The bikers head back to the church for revenge, but suddenly stop when they see themselves in the cult lineup.

This movie has been sampled by Rob Zombie repeatedly, including the line “We all know how we’re going to die, baby. We’re gonna crash and burn.” It’s also better than anything he’s done since The Devil’s Rejects. Actually, it’s probably better than that, too.

Real bikers were used for all the stunts in this movie, so it has a real authenticity to it. And the weirdness of the cult’s rituals breaks into that so nicely, giving this movie a real air of pure strange. The cult leader, One, is played by Severn Darden, who played Governor Kolp in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. He’s so great in this movie!

The soundtrack is also so good. It’s very blues country rock with a bit of doom. It’s perfect for the action on the screen. This movie gets a very high recommendation!

You can watch this on Tubi.

ARROW BLU RAY RELEASE: Murphy’s War (1971)

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Murphy (Peter O’Toole) is the only survivor of the merchant ship Mount Kyle, which was sunk by a German U-boat and the survivors all shot. He gets to the shore of Venezuela, where he is nursed by Dr. Hayden (Siân Phillips), a pacifist who may not be interested in his plans to kill everyone who put him here.

Based on the book by Max Catto, this was directed by Peter Yates and written by Stirling Silliphant, this was originally going to have Frank Sinatra as Murphy.

Robert Evans brought the director and producer Michael Deeley to the project before losing interest. However, they had a pay or play contract and Evans wanted them to make The Godfather instead. They chose this.

It’s definitely not a movie that makes war look romantic or in any way filled with honor. Instead, it’s just people losing and dying and failing. No wonder critics were so rough on it.

The Arrow Video blu ray of this movie comes with a new visual essay by film critic David Cairns, archive interviews with assistant director John Glen, focus puller Robin Vidgeon and film critic Sheldon Hall, a trailer, an image gallery, a reversible sleeve and an illustrated collector’s book. You can get it from MVD.