Directed and written by Bert I. Gordon, The Food of the Gods was ever so loosely based on H. G. Wells’ novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth.
The food of the gods does indeed appear to Mr. and Mrs. Skinner (John McLiam and Ida Lupino), who feed it to their chickens. Bok bok, those things grow bigger than a person, but so do the rats, wasps and even worms that eat it, so soon enough their island near British Columbia is filled with dangerous human-sized creatures.,
Meanwhile, professional football player Morgan (Marjoe Gortner) — wait a second here, what position does Marjoe Gortner, no offense, play in American football? Punter? — is hunting with his friends when one of them is killed by a giant wasp. He’s so into this that he comes back to see even more, meeting up with a dog food CEO named Jack Bensington (Ralph Meeker) who wants to sell these gigantic animals for food, his assistant Lorna (Pamela Franklin) and the pregnant Rita (Belinda Balaski) and her husband Thomas (Tom Stovall).
Giant rats killed almost everyone, but then Marjoe drowns them all because they’ve become too big to swim, which is the most BS science ever, but sure, why not Bert I. Gordon. Of course, man screws up again and lets cows use the formula and they get huge and so do the kids, eventually but not in this, that drink their milk. Doesn’t pasteurization take care of giant drugs?
This did so well for American-International Pictures that they decided to make H.G. Welles movies, such as Empire of the Ants and The Island of Dr. Moreau. They were lucky Welles was dead, because if he were alive, they’d also have to pay for using a lot of his book Mysterious Island in this, not just the source book of the same title.
Directed by Krsto Papic, who wrote the script with Ivo Bresan and Alexander Grin (who wrote Morgiana), The Rat Savior is the tale of writer Ivan Gajski (Ivica Vidovic). He’s been evicted from his apartment for failing to pay the rent, as he has no money as no publisher will buy his novel about a plague. He goes to sell his books in the streets and is eventually sent to a collapsed bank to spend the night. Inside, he discovers a rat-like opulence who feasts on cheese and plot to kill the professor father of his new love interest, Sonja (Mirjana Maurec).
The professor is the only other human who knows of these rats and believes that a rat savior exists, a rat who can look human and the one who will lead them to power over the humans. Ivan tries to do the right thing and goes to the mayor and learns that he’s done exactly the worst possible thing, because he’s the titular savior and even worse, a rat is now passing as Sonja and Ivan kills it. Or her, we’re really not sure.
There is a concoction that when splashed on the rat humans reveals them like sunglasses being worn by Roddy Piper. And that seems to put the rat people down for some time, but then again, an even worse dictator is in the wings, one that will lead Germany all over Europe soon enough and have way worse plans for humanity than these rat folk and their divine leader.
And if you get bitten by one of these rats, like vampires, you become one of them. But then again, they seem like the only ones who are happy and actually have something to eat.
Not my favorite human rat movie — Bruno Mattei’s Rats: The Night of Terror forever — but this is pretty wild.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dark August was on the CBS Late Movie on December 14, 1988; April 21 and August 25, 1989.
This is something I’ve never seen before: Vermont rural horror. It has strange art-house leanings and long takes, like a French film directed by Martin Goldman, who also directed The Legend of CENSORED Charley after a career in advertising. It also has an incredibly unlikeable lead, but it was the 1970s. For being the “Me Decade,” it doesn’t feel like anyone liked themselves or anyone else.
Sal (J.J. Barry, who also co-wrote the film along with Goldman and lead actress Carole Shelyne) is amid a divorce and a resulting mid-life crisis, bringing him to Vermont. He sets up a photography business, starts building a studio and hooks up with an artist named Jackie (Shelyne, who also appeared as Carolyne Barry), who has been through a divorce herself.
It was all going so well — until Sal runs over the granddaughter of Old Man McDermitt, who just so happens to have the powers of the occult at his command. Whoops.
From then on, Sal feels even more out of place than before. His body constantly gives out on him, he has visions of a hooded demon, and everyone around him is getting maimed. One of his friend’s girlfriends tries tarot reading, but that upsets him even further. Even consulting the town’s foremost witch—Academy Award-winning Kim Hunter, getting top billing for her short screen time—can’t stop fate, particularly when Old Man McDermitt busts in with his shotgun.
Much of this film is devoted to the experience of being a stranger in a strange town. Long pauses, worried glances and even moments of weakness add to an overwhelming dread.
The good news is that everything ends if you enjoy movies where things happen slowly. Dark August is for you. Actually, there’s plenty to like here, and you can see how a lesser director would make this into a Blumhouse movie of the month that would end up pissing me off. Here, it just intrigues me, and I end up spending all day doing more research on this film.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Vigilante Force was on the CBS Late Movie on February 13, 1981.
The town of Elk Hills, California, has been getting rough ever since the oil field workers stuck around. Ben Arnold (Jan-Michael Vincent) joins the police to try and keep things safe while his brother Aaron( Kris Kristofferson), a Vietnam vet, hires mercenaries — his war buddies Beal (Charles Cyphers), Viner (Shelly Novack) and Selden (Carmen Argenziano) — to deal with the problem. But much like what happens after someone hires cats to get rid of the mice, who gets rid of the cats? The mercenaries — and Aaron — are now out of control and take over the town.
Director and writer George Armitage said that the film was a “very slightly coded reference to the Revolutionary War…although what I was really doing there was Vietnam.” Jan Michael-Vincent’s character was named after Benedict Arnold, while Kristofferson’s was named after Aaron Burr.
If the town where all this goes down seems familiar, it’s the Mayberry back lot set at Desilu Studios in Culver City, California.
Ben’s also a widower who falls for schoolteacher Linda (Victoria Principal), and Aaron gets with bar singer Little Dee (Bernadette Peters); who can blame either of them? Plus, David Doyle, Dick Miller and Loni Anderson all appear.
This movie gets wild because it’s almost a white version of Bucktown and has a bizarre ending where Kristofferson and his buddies dress as a marching band to rob a bank. I can’t think of another movie that ends with the guy who wrote “Sunday Morning Coming Down” standing on top of an oil tower blasting townsfolk with a machine gun while dressed like a drum major.
Produced by Gene Corman, this fine exploitation film has an above-average cast. It’s also nearly a modern Western, with an ending that pits brother against brother, and only one can walk away.
This is King’s first novel to be published and first one to be adapted to the silver screen. And if you ask me, it’s probably my favorite. Credit where it’s due — Brian De Palma presented a master class in how to build intensity and intensity in this film. It’s so perfect that it brings me to tears.
The difference between this film and any other teenager being abused who learns they have powers and gets revenge film is that we actually care about the teenagers. They’re real. Other than one of them being able to move things with her mind, their issues feel genuine. Some characters have shades of gray. And no one emerges unscathed in the end.
The film starts with shy Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) having her first period in the shower, surrounded by other girls. This typical nightmare scenario, one we expect to wake up from, like dreaming we’re stuck in school naked, is happening to her as the other girls pelt her with sanitary napkins. Christine Hargensen (Nancy Allen, Dressed to Kill) leads the others as they yell “Plug it up!” Carrie’s terror goes off as light bulbs explode and her teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley, who is so perfect in this), has to console her.
At home, Carrie is abused further by her mother (Piper Laurie, Twin Peaks) who screams at her for her sinful thoughts. Dragged into a prayer closet, she must beg God to forgive her.
One of Carrie’s classmates, Sue Snell (Amy Irving, the only actress to show up in the sequel — more about that travesty tomorrow) feels guilty, so she asks her boyfriend Tommy (William Katt, House) to take Carrie to the prom. Miss Collins makes the girls pay for the way they treat by sending them to detention, where Chris’ behavior leads the teacher to slap her and suspend her from the prom.
That’s when Chris comes up with a horrible plot: they will name Carrie as prom queen and dump blood upon her, a scheme that she gets her boyfriend Billy (John Travolta) to make happen.
Carrie’s mom learns that she is going to the prom and accuses her of witchcraft. She uses her powers to throw her mother down. While at the prom, Carrie finds happiness that she has never known until now. She feels accepted. She feels love. And she has her first kiss with Tommy.
What follows is what makes this movie a classic.
Chris’ friend Norma (Totally P.J. Soles!) rigs the election and Tommy and Carrie walk to the stage to be crowned. At the last second, Sue tries to stop things and fails. And that’s when De Palma uses nearly every trick in his book to amp this scene up. Split screen, multiple angles, time distortions…it’s pure cinema.
This scene took two weeks and 35 takes to shoot, including an intense dizzying scene that was created by placing Spacek and Katt on a platform that spun in the opposite direction of a camera that was dollied away from the actors.
After all that build and suspense, the bucket of pig’s blood covers Carrie and knocks out Billy. Our heroine has a hallucination that her mother’s warning of everyone laughing at her has come true and she unleashes the full fury of her powers. Right and wrong, good and evil, everyone pays.
You’d never guess that Sissy Spacek was her high school’s homecoming queen.
Carrie walks away as Chris and Billy try to kill her with his car, but she easily makes it flip over and explode. Soon, she is back home, crying in her mother’s arms. Margaret confesses that Carrie is a child of rape, then stabs her in the back. She fights back by crucifying her mother and burying herself within the house.
As Sue comes to the grave, months after this all happens, she is startled by a bloody hand that emerges from the tomb to attack her. Yet it’s all a dream in a shock ending that has been — and will be — copied over and over.
This is a movie that has lost none of its power. If it’s not in your collection, you don’t have one to speak of.
What’s the difference between a neo noir and a giallo? No, really, I want to know. Because in America, this even had a yellow poster and in Italy, it was called Compless di Colpa (Guilt Complex), which sure sounds like either a Hitchcock or giallo title.
Well, this is maybe more of the Hitchcock side of the equation, as this film takes the central theme from Vertigo while also have a score by Bernard Hermann.
Paul Schrader’s script was extensively rewritten and pared down by De Palma before shooting, which didn’t go over well with the writer. Yet that Hitchcock idea — a businessman is haunted by his dead wife before he falls for a young woman who looks exactly like her — remains. De Palma said, “Paul Schrader’s ending actually went on for another act of obsession. I felt it was much too complicated, and wouldn’t sustain, so I abbreviated it.” Herrmann agreed, telling the director that the script would never work. But Schrader’s idea of the movie going the whole way until another ten years past its conclusion — as he said, “an obsessive love where transcended the normal strictures of time” — as something he couldn’t bear to lose. It led to a rift between the two that las for years.
Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) is that businessman, a successful real estate developer whose wife Elizabeth (Geneviève Bujold) and daughter Amy (Wanda Blackman) are kidnapped and held for ransom. The police recommend that he give them paper instead of the cash, but the hand-off ends with a car chase and the kidnappers and his family killed in an explosion. Blaming himself for listening to the police, Courtand sinks into depression.
16 years later, he’s so obsessed by the loss that he’s even built a monument in America to the place where he first met Elizabeth, the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte. His business partner Robert Lasalle (John Lithgow) thinks he should get away and so they go to Florence, the original site of this building, and while there, Michael meets Sandra Portinari, a woman who looks exactly like his wife (and is also played by Geneviève Bujold). Of course, Courtland falls for her and works to transform her into the living version of his dead wife, even taking her home to be his new bride.
Of course, she gets kidnapped on their wedding night. The same ransom note from before sends Michael over the edge he’s already on. And once he learns the truth, well…everything gets very, very bloody. You kind of need to see it for yourself, because it’s pretty astounding — and very giallo — what the actual truth is.
The best review of this came from Roger Ebert, who said “Sometimes overwrought excess can be its own reward. If Obsession had been even a little more subtle, had made even a little more sense on some boring logical plane, it wouldn’t have worked at all.”
De Palma believes that Cliff Robertson was the biggest issue with this film. Sure, it was a success, but he sees the flaws because of the actor. He believes that Robertson would deliberately deliver a poor performance and line readings when shooting opposite Bujold. The actor also insisted on a dark tanning makeup, which seems wildly inappropriate for his role. It made lighting him so difficult that at one point cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond shoved him against a wood wall and screamed, “You! You are the same color as this wall!”
Speaking of obsession, Herrmann became infatuated with Bujold as he scored the film. She made a surprise visit to the recording sessions and Herrmann’s friend Charles Gerhardt remembers, “As she spoke to Benny in a heavy French accent I could tell he was about to get the hanky out. She told him of all the trouble she’d had with Cliff Robertson because he spent all his time in makeup and didn’t make their love scenes meaningful. She said, “Mr. Herrmann, he wouldn’t make love to me — but you made love to me with your music.” And Benny started to cry. He would tell that story over and over at dinner, and start crying again every time.”
Hermann died five months later — he was to score Carrie but didn’t live long enough — and his widow found a photo of Bujold in his wallet.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on .
From 1972 to 1978, William Girder directed nine feature films and would have probably never stopped, were it not for the helicopter crash that took his life while scouting the Philippines filming locations. From Asylum of Satan and Three on a Meathook to The Manitou, Sheba Baby and Project: Kill, his films may have been derivative but they made money.
Here’s the best example. Around these parts, Girder is celebrated for Abby, a movie that was removed from theaters because of its similarity (let’s say total ripoff) of The Exorcist. That brings us to Grizzly, which is essentiallyJaws on dry land. With a bear. A grizzly bear.
Grizzly found its inspiration when its producer and writer, Harvey Flaxman, came face to face with a bear during a camping trip. Co-producer and co-writer David Sheldon thought about how they could make a bear version of Jaws and they wrote a script that Girdler discovered and offered to finance, as long as he could direct.
Grizzly begins with military vet and helicopter pilot Don Stober (Andrew Prine, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, The Eliminators, Amityville II: The Possession) flying over a national park and explaining how the woods remain untouched, much like they were in when Native Americans made their homes here.
The first two attacks happen quickly — in bear POV no less — when two female hikers are dismembered by the ursus arctos horribilis villain of this story. That brings in park ranger Michael Kelly (Christopher George, Gates of Hell/City of the Living Dead, Day of the Animals,Mortuary, Pieces) and photographer Allison Corwin (Joan McCall, who besides being in Devil Times Five is also married to the film’s writer, Sheldon) in on the case.
At the hospital, a doctor tells the park ranger that a bear killed the girls, but the park’s supervisor blames the ranger and naturalist Arthur Scott (Richard Jaeckel, The Dark, Mako: The Jaws of Death and TV’s Salvage 1) for the girls’ deaths. And guess what? Just like Jaws, there’s no way the park is getting closed before tourist season.
The rangers all decide to search the mountain for the grizzly, which isn’t accounted for in their census of animals in the park. One of the rangers — of course — decides to get nude in a waterfall because that’s what you do when you’re hunting a killer bear and gets murked for her stupidity.
Kelly and Stober think they have found the bear from the air, yet it’s just naturalist Scott wearing an animal pelt and tracking the bear himself. Scott tells them that this bear is actually a prehistoric version of the grizzly that stands 15 feet tall and weighs at least 2,000 pounds.
No matter how many people the grizzly kills, no one will close the park. So when the story becomes national news, the owners of the park — a national park can have owners? — allow amateur hunters to shoot the shark (this has nothing to do with the very same thing happening in Jaws, right?). Those hunters are pretty much the worst people ever, as they use a bear cub as bait, thinking the grizzly will protect its young. Nope — it eats that baby bear and keeps on coming.
The grizzly literally shreds his way through the park and nobody closes it down until it murders a young mother and mutilates her child. And get this — the grizzly is so smart, it knows how to bury the naturalist in the ground and then waits for him to wake up so it can kill him. Can a bear be a slasher killer? Well, we already know that Bigfoot can be, thanks to Night of the Demon.
The grizzly kills every hero in this movie other than Kelly the photographer, who magically finds a bazooka in the wrecked helicopter and remembers the end of every shark movie: you must blow this beast up real good. She does and that’s the end of Grizzly.
An interesting personal note: I was telling my dad about this movie and he remembered that it has played on a bus that took he and my mother on a casino trip. That’s right — at 1 AM, pitch blackness, the TV on their bus blared this gorefest as loudly as possible. “I couldn’t wait for that movie to end,” was my mother’s review. My father’s was a bit kinder.
Warner Brothers originally wanted to finance Grizzly, but were furious that Edward L. Montoro and Film Ventures International (FVI) had taken the project. That’s because a year before, the studio sued both of these companies for copyright infringement when they released Beyond the Doorin the US.
Sadly, while Grizzly was one of 1976’s best-performing films, earning $39 million worldwide (adjusted for inflation, that’s around $177 million in 2018 dollars), its distributor Edward L. Montoro and Film Ventures International kept all the profits. Girdler and Harvey Flaxman and David Sheldon (the film’s screenwriters/producers) had to sue to get their share.
Even after all that, Girdler still directed Day of the Animals, a spiritual sequel to Grizzly, for Montoro. While this film added Leslie Nielsen and Lynda Day George to the returning cast of Christopher George and Richard Jaeckel, it wasn’t as successful.
Grizzly just seems like a movie that’s buried in legal shenanigans. A sequel, Grizzly II: The Predator (also known as Grizzly II: The Concert, a title that would assuredly guarantee that I would buy this film) was made in 1983.
Filmed in Hungary by André Szöts and written by Sheldon, the co-producer and writer of the original, it was never released. The film had Louise Fletcher, John Rhys-Davies and unknowns but about to be big stars like Charlie Sheen (who took this movie over the lead in Karate Kid), George Clooney and Laura Dern in the cast, as well as live performances (hence Grizzly II: The Concert) by musicians like Toto Coelo (who had one song I can name, “I Eat Cannibals Part 1”) and Landscape III.
The movie was such a mess that the film’s caterer ended up rewriting it. And while the main filming was completed, special effects and all of the actual bear footage wasn’t. That’s because the film’s executive producer Joseph Proctor had disappeared with the money (and may have even been already jailed when filming began). While a mechanical bear was to be used, there was still footage shot of a live bear attacking concert-goers filmed (!). There’s a bootleg workprint, but the full film has ever emerged. This New York Post article has even more amazing info about Grizzly 2. Now that film has been released, if you’d like to see it.
Finally, a trivia note for comic book fans. The amazing poster for this movie? Neal Adams did the art.
And in the universe of Tarantino, Don Stober was played by Rick Dalton, not Andrew Prine.
You can watch this on Tubi or get it from Severin.
William Girdler said that Project: Kill was “…the beginning of what I can do if I’m given the opportunity. Here I’m not pinned down by cliches or lousy material. It’s the only picture I’m really proud of.”
John Trevor (Leslie Nielsen) has spent six years as part of an MK-ULTRA experiment that gives American soldiers better killing abilities through training, drugs and hypnosis. It’s kind of like a cult for killers and now, he wants out. He even tells his second-in-command Frank Lassiter (Gary Lockwood) that he’s about to escape. It’d all be great if the withdrawal didn’t make John incredibly violent or that an Asian gang wasn’t looking for him in the hopes of taking the drugs from his system and using them for their own army.
Come for Nielsen dressed like a 70s dad despite being billed as an action star, stay for his romance with Nany Kwan and by all means, come back for his fight with Lockwood on a beach. It even ends a lot like Scorpio, where the older killer tells the younger one, “Now they’re going to come after you.”
On the William Girdler web site, Girdler’s insurance man Joe Schulten said, “Project Kill was supposed to be distributed in a lot of countries. Nancy Kwan was an international star at the time, and it was booked up all over the place. But the man who was going to distribute the movie was either killed or committed suicide right before the film was scheduled to come out. So the release was tied up in an estate dispute. I don’t think Project Kill was ever released to movie theaters. I think it only showed up on cable in the eighties.:
Producer David Sheldon had the answer: “Project Kill was released in the theaters, though not a very wide release. It has been on television quite a bit and there’s a home video in the stores. We pulled the picture from Arnold Kopelson (Inter-Ocean Films) who was supposed to distribute the film overseas, but was taking too long. A company called Sterling Gold tried to take it next, but the owner was found murdered organized crime style. Finally, I put it with Picturmedia who released it theatrically and sold the home video rights. The CEO of Picturmedia is Doro Vlado Hreljanovic. Picturmedia has done a poor job in releasing the picture. It deserves more.
That said, it does have Vic Diaz in it.
Writer Galen Thompson went on to script Superstition, The Eviland several Chuck Norris projects while David Sheldon was part of Grizzly, Lovely but Deadly and Foxy Brown.
That title means 40 degrees in the shade of the sheet but you may know this Sergio Martino-directed. movie better as Sex With a Smile. In the U.S., all of those ads focused on Marty Feldman, who briefly shows up in one of the film’s five chapters. It’s American distributor Centaur/Surrogate even cut all of the credits and just have Feldman’s name in them along with changing the order of the stories.
“One for the Money” takes place in Switzerland as a rich Italian bride (Barbara Bouchet) meets a man (Enrico Montesano) who offers her 20 million lire (around $4.5 million dollars in 2023 U.S. cash) to make love. She blows him off but then starts to wonder “What if?”
“The Bodyguard” concerns a socialite (Dayle Haddon, who went from Disney movies like The World’s Greatest Athlete to movies like this and Just Jaeckin’s Madame Claudeand The Last Romantic Lover) who hates how well her bodyguard (Feldman) keeps her secure. And then when she tries to escape him to met a new lover, she learns that maybe he was right to do his job so perfectly.
“Catch It While It’s Hot” is about a countess (Giovanna Ralli, What Have They Done to Your Daughters?) hooking up with her chauffeur (Alberto Lionello), while “Dream Girl” finds Edwige Fenech being so ravenous that she intrudes on the dreams of her neighbor (Tomas Milian), which he actually complains about. Come on, dude.
Finally, “A Dog’s Day” has a man save a woman (Sydne Rome, The Pumaman) from jumping off the ledge outside his apartment. They make a date and that’s when he meets her very jealous dog.
Martino’s sex comedies basically have the most attractive women ever dealing with men who look like buffoons. But I mean, would I fair any different upon trying to speak to Edwie Fenech or Barbara Bouchet? Also: Look for an appearance by Salvatore Baccaro, who played The Beast In Heat.
There’s also a sequel to this, Spogliamoci così, senza pudor, if you enjoy Italian sex comedies. In the same year that Martino made this, he also directed the poliziotteschi movies Gambling City and Silent Action as well as the giallo The Suspicious Death of a Minor. Few directors could hit so many genres with so much success.
VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the April 18, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.
Also called Bluff, High Rollers, The Switch and The Con Man as well as its Italian title, Bluff – storia di truffe e di imbroglioni(Bluff – Histories of Scams and Cheaters), this movie finds director Sergio Corbucci making a transition from violent Westerns like Django, The Mercenary, The Great Silence and The Hellbenders and into making comedies such as The White, the Yellow and the Black, The Beast, Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure and Super Fuzz. You know those social media posts that say “four films, all the same director?” Corbucci made movies where a gunfighter’s hands were ruined before he opened a grave and massacred his enemies with a gigantic machine gun, Civil War soldiers keeping a treasure hidden in coffins and a mute hero who dies in front of his lover in an inverse of every Western ever with, well, a movie where a super cop is invulnerable against everything except the color red. It’s a big shift but his movies are united by their quality.
Philip Bang (Anthony Quinn) is expecting his ex-wife Belle Duke (Capucine!) and his daughter Charlotte (Corinne Clery!) to get him out of the high security prison he’s supposed to live out the rest of his days in. But in the middle of the plan, Felix (Adriano Celentano) gets sprung instead. He’s coerced into breaking Bang out — which he does — only to learn that the elder con man might not want to see his former love, as he stole plenty of money from her. That means it’s time for one movie long scam — well, a series of them — as Felix has fallen in love with Charlotte and Bang has reunited his gang.
Writer Dino Mauri directed and wrote Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die as well as serving as one of the writers of one of my favorite Franco Nero movies, Street Law. He wrote this along with Massimo De Rita, who wrote Violent City, The Heroin Bustersand Blastfighter.
The tagline was “A comedy of stings and double stings!” so if you’re wondering what movie this should remind you of, it does it twice.
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