The Ghastly Ones (1968)

Posted on September 23, 2013 at 6:45 am by Jeff Kuykendall

You have to set your expectations appropriately when you walk into an Andy Milligan picture. The Ghastly Ones (1968): what are we dealing with here? A movie shot on about $13,000 at his house on Staten Island with some friends and locals, some cheap gore effects, abundant use of library music, and, for the love of God, it’s a period picture with an ensemble cast and a murder-mystery plot. So what he achieves is not exactly Hammer or Amicus. It’s closer in spirit and style to the underground films of the Kuchar brothers. There’s a sensationalist, melodramatic zeal to how Milligan – a gay cruiser with an outlaw streak – sends up more respectable Victorian-themed horror movies, and how he inserts touches of sex, incest, homosexuality, S&M, and Herschell Gordon Lewis-style gore; he’s aiming his film at the New York grindhouse crowd, and the period trappings don’t trap anything – they just fall right over at the slightest nudge. By conventional standards, his film is poorly acted, haphazardly edited, and claustrophobically shot (Milligan’s primitive, 16mm sound-on-film Auricon swinging in so close to the actor’s cheeks that their faces become distorted, and you can practically see the camera’s shadow). The script is obvious and hilariously talky. Absolutely nothing convinces, except for the enthusiasm.

Neil Flanagan, in old hag makeup, reads out Papa's will to the Crenshaw clan.

The Cat and the Canary-style plot involves the Crenshaw family, whose father has just passed away, leaving riches (from “his vast holdings in South America”) to be distributed to his daughters Victoria (Anne Linden, The Filthy Five), Elizabeth (Carol Vogel, Depraved!), and Veronica (Eileen Hayes, Seeds). According to the will – which is read by Milligan regular Neil Flanagan (Guru, the Mad Monk) in some of the worst “old man” makeup you will ever see – the women are to take a boat out to Crenshaw Island, then wait at the secluded estate for three days before their reward is issued. Should anything go wrong in those three days – the lawyer is careful to note – then the inheritance will go to the eldest daughter, Victoria, to be divvied out as she sees fit. We know the island is a sinister place, because it’s the setting for a gruesome murder in the film’s pre-title sequence; although, as it turns out, that murder has nothing to do with the film’s plot, so you can disregard. Three servants attend the empty estate: sleepy-eyed Martha (Veronica Radburn, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me!), the older Hattie (Maggie Rogers, The Filthy Five), and Colin (Hal Borske, Vapors, The Naked Witch, The Filthy Five, etc.), who is a Lennie Small-type simpleton seen gleefully killing and gnawing on a cute rabbit. Soon Victoria and her husband Richard (Fib LaBlaque) find that rabbit in their bed, with a note attached stating, “Blessed Are the Meek, For They Shall Inherit.”

Victoria (Anne Linden) and Martha (Veronica Radburn).

After the film’s excruciating first half, filled with irrelevant character detail (if amusingly florid, such as the fact that Richard’s brother Walter continues to lust after him following some incestuous childhood incident), the narrative finally picks up at the Crenshaw House. A bloody X is left on the door of one couple’s room. Those who explore the basement are immediately slaughtered by a hooded figure. (After the cellar has made itself known as a place where people go to die, one of the husbands insists on exploring despite Martha’s warnings. As soon as he takes the first few steps, the hooded maniac swings in from behind and starts following; he doesn’t notice.) Colin, with his bad teeth and fragmented sentences, is at one point whipped by the otherwise sedate Martha just for accidentally dropping a chest he’s lugging downstairs. “PICK IT UP! PICK IT UP!” she howls as she flogs him. Late in the film Colin is accidentally set ablaze, a common fate to be endured by actor Hal Borske; in Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford’s 2002 book Sleazoid Express, Milligan is quoted as saying, “Hal was such a delight to set on fire.” Sex and nudity is scattered about at regular intervals, most of it unflattering as Milligan brings his camera in close on pale skin and all its blemishes. In the film’s most famous image, the severed head of one of the Crenshaw daughters makes a surprise appearance at the dinner table. A short interval later and Martha is comforting one of the distraught sisters in her room, telling her, “You must try to eat something. You haven’t eaten anything since you came.”

The hooded killer attacks William (Don Williams).

The Ghastly Ones was Milligan’s first color film, but it’s pretty drab nonetheless; the brightest color I found was the green of the vertical lines scratching up this beaten-up print. At times it really resembles a home movie shot at his house, which it pretty much was, adding an extra level of humor to shots such as the opening, in which two lovers in Victorian garb frolic by the water, the landscape cluttered with weeds and dead trees; this is probably the only spot he could find on the shore without modernity appearing on the horizon. In other shots, the background is entirely black, so poorly lit because close scrutiny would show the set’s anachronisms. (Those come through anyway, and in droves. In the early going I frequently wondered if this was truly meant to be a period picture.) The film’s weaknesses can be attributed to equal parts incompetence and poverty – Milligan makes do with what’s available to him, endearingly. It must also be said that although it’s not a parody, neither is it straight-faced. Milligan knew what he was making and who the audience was – he was aiming his mini-epics of glorious (and camp) trash at 42nd street theaters, every bit of outrageousness served up to a crowd that liked their movies wild and raw. The film was enough of a hit to send him on to films like Torture Dungeon (1970), Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970), The Body Beneath (1970), and The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972). After contracting AIDS, Milligan died in 1991 in Los Angeles, leaving behind a vast body of work that continues to baffle the curious…

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Cinematic Titanic: The Doll Squad (1973/2013)

Posted on September 21, 2013 at 11:31 am by Jeff Kuykendall

2008 marked the 20th anniversary of a TV show called Mystery Science Theater 3000. It also marked the beginning of a project called Cinematic Titanic, begun by a significant swath of the show’s creative personnel: creator Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl, and J. Elvis Weinstein. An anniversary celebration-slash-launch party was held at the Acme Comedy Club in Minneapolis. The festivities began with a preview of Cinematic Titanic’s first DVD, in which the gang, once more in silhouette, riffs The Oozing Skull (actually Al Adamson’s 1971 Brain of Blood). After a few minutes, the voices of MST3K‘s Dr. Forrester (Beaulieu) and TV’s Frank (Conniff) are heard bickering over the soundtrack, and the reel abruptly ends. It had been a while. Their familiar voices gave me chills. What followed were stand-up sets from all the performers, including a singalong of the MST3K theme song, and a rare opportunity to see Hodgson’s “gizmo” prop comedy and magic tricks (in the 80’s, he performed some of these gags on Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman). Conniff sung his “Convoluted Man” theme song. Weinstein made some dirty jokes. As became typical of the Cinematic Titanic events to come, a signing was held afterward, and not a fan was turned away. The project mutated slightly over the following years. At first the group released more DVDs like The Oozing Skull, copying the MST3K format to such an extent that there would even be pauses in the film to do little sketches (albeit with the performers still in silhouette). A loose-fitting concept was applied to the project: at the end of each “episode,” they would place the DVD into a time capsule called the “Time Tube,” a torpedo-shaped object that was lowered into the theater; their 2008 live show was called the “Time Tube Tour.” Those live shows were such a hit – frequently they found themselves playing large theaters to sold-out audiences of MST3K fans – that gradually the focus shifted to live performance. The DVDs became recordings of their live shows, and though I like the early DVDs too, what a difference an audience makes. (That, and the fact that you can see their faces in the live DVDs, just as you can in the theater. Watching the performers try to crack each other up adds to the entertainment value.) Now it’s five years later, and we’re upon the original show’s 25th anniversary. Cinematic Titanic, who in the last couple of years made it known they would only go to cities where they were invited (rather than actively marketing themselves), have decided to call it quits. They’re making the last round on a Farewell Tour, riffing movies like Ted V. Mikels’ 1973 film The Doll Squad.

The cast of Cinematic Titanic: Joel Hodgson, Mary Jo Pehl, Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, and Frank Conniff.

Backing up a bit, for the uninitiated: Mystery Science Theater 3000 began as a public access show on KTMA, a UHF channel in Minneapolis/St. Paul, before being picked up by the fledgling Comedy Channel, eager to fill up large chunks of airtime and finding a natural fit with a show that featured bad movies being riffed by a stand-up comic and his two puppets for two-hour blocks at a go. I caught up with the show when my cable provider in the Milwaukee suburbs picked up the Comedy Channel, and I’m forever thankful they chose that station instead of its direct rival, Viacom’s Ha! channel. Watching The Comedy Channel meant I was blessed with the likes of Rich Hall’s Onion World, Night After Night with Allan Havey, Short Attention Span Theater (which introduced me to Monty Python as well as the budding alternative comedy scene), The Higgins Boys and Gruber, and, of course, MST3K. Joel Robinson (Hodgson), Tom Servo, and Crow T. Robot were into their second season by then; the first episode I ever saw was Jungle Goddess, a 1948 Robert L. Lippert production with George Reeves. As an adolescent with lots of time to kill, I was hooked (and I’m patiently awaiting a DVD release of Jungle Goddess, Shout! Factory). With his meta-puppet show, rife with obscure and not-so-obscure references to pop culture’s past, Hodgson had found the perfect blend of Saturday-morning-TV nostalgia and B-movie-love. After a switch of hosts (from Hodgson to head writer Michael J. Nelson), a brief trip to the big screen (Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, just out on Blu-Ray), and a jump to another network (the Sci-Fi Channel), the show finally came to an end in 1999. Now the show is more popular than ever, thanks in large part to DVDs, Netflix, and YouTube, not to mention parents sharing it with their children. (It has puppets. What better way to get your kids into B-movies?) At Friday night’s Cinematic Titanic show in Milwaukee, a father and his little boy came dressed as Torgo and The Master from the MST3K episode Manos: The Hands of Fate. The kid wore a fake mustache and carried a staff with a hand stuck on the end of it. It was a thing of beauty.

Cinematic Titanic at the Pabst Theatre in Milwaukee.

I’ve caught CT live several times, and watched as they’ve settled into a comfortable, smooth-running show. After some crowd warm-up shenanigans by Dave “Gruber” Allen (an old Comedy Channel vet, of The Higgins Boys and Gruber), the show is divided into two halves: stand-up, then the movie. The September 20th performance was not a sentimental, fare-thee-well affair. Gruber, in tribute to The Doll Squad, performed his own riffs on Ibsen’s The Doll House, as read by Pehl and Beaulieu. (There are a few levels of meta there, including the fact that Gruber, with his snarky, “hip” jibes at boring old Ibsen, is essentially satirizing MST3K. Also notable: Pehl couldn’t keep a straight face.) During these sets there was no reference to this being a farewell tour, though I suspect it will be mentioned in shows to come. But there was something a bit touching about Hodgson’s set, which was a slideshow of photos from his childhood in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. (The Midwestern origins of the show’s cast and writers always made those of us living in Wisconsin and Minnesota feel like the show was made for us. Regional riffs abound in MST3K.) Hodgson showed pictures of his family, a shot of his youthful grinning face, a B&W still to explain why Bucky (the mascot of the UW Badgers team) terrified him, and he outlined how his imagination was shaped by TV and the movies. (A helpful diagram explains how God gave them to us.) He offers a picture of Albert the Alley Cat, a puppet who actually co-hosted the weather reports on WITI Channel 6, as evidence that such a thing existed (“No one believes me when I tell them this”). A TV Guide cover (with the Hodgson address label stuck to it, and featuring a terrifying image of a screaming Lucille Ball apparently being attacked by a joyful Flipper) accompanies his explanation that he only figured out how to tell time by learning when his favorite shows were on, including Lost in Space, one of MST3K‘s inspirations. Then an intermission, and The Doll Squad unfolded in all its grimy and poorly-lit glory.

Sabrina Kincaid (Francine York) lunges at the villain with a sword. CT's riff: "Put your 3-D glasses on now!"

Hodgson actually took a moment to explain Ted V. Mikels before the film began: how he made his fortune on The Corpse Grinders (1971), which helped finance the construction of his castle (“Sparr Castle”) in Glendale, California, where he lived with dozens of women at a time, actresses who needed a place to stay. Much of The Doll Squad is shot there, and it looked less like a castle to my eyes and more like the country’s most sprawling Melting Pot Restaurant. The team of the title is a crack squad of shapely women summoned by a teletype machine to uncover a conspiracy led by Michael Ansara (at the time, Barbara Eden’s husband), which involves rats carrying the bubonic plague. (One riff notes that this is the only film that’s too poor to afford rats.) It’s difficult to follow the plot, and that’s not so much the fault of CT’s interruptions as it is the terrible sound quality of the film, which would have been better off dubbed. The head of the Doll Squad is Sabrina Kincaid, played by Francine York, whose breasts form the center of every mise-en-scene. Her squad features five other women, including – significantly, for cult-movie fans – Tura Satana, star of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), as well as Mikels’ The Astro Zombies (1968). (Hodgson on The Doll Squad: “It’s like a Russ Meyer film, only without the substance.”) Satana’s role is unfortunately small, though she does get to stand atop a vehicle and mow down thugs with a machine gun during the film’s extended climax.

The dungeon where the Doll Squad is imprisoned; or, in CT's words, the inside of Frank Conniff's brain.

There’s no shortage of violence in The Doll Squad, a film that influenced Kill Bill and (probably/arguably) Charlie’s Angels. The plot setup is delivered while the characters are skeet-shooting (the exposition is constantly interrupted by shouts of “Pull!”). In one scene a female agent is shot straight through the head, an unexpectedly gory moment that made the audience gasp and then laugh. But what sticks in the memory, apart from the loud 70’s fashions and funky score, are the numerous explosions. Mikels’ technique is to superimpose the image of an explosion unconvincingly, and he leans on it hard. In the most uproarious scene, two gun-toting guards are detonated from the inside after they consume some vodka spiked with an explosive substance. They simply stand in place and Mikels slaps his cheap effect onto them. (For moments like these, no riff needs to be written. The audience is laughing too hard and too long for anything else to be heard.) Never mind that it doesn’t look real; for the finale, Mikels blows up the enemy base by repeating this effect over different shots of his house, which the Cinematic Titanic crew lends a patriotic musical accompaniment befitting a Fourth of July fireworks show. For all its violence, The Doll Squad decides to substitute cheesecake for sex, though Satana does get a rather revealing striptease (of which she’d be no novice), which is also a little bizarre; the curious can find it on YouTube (Satana’s spinning causes Beaulieu to complain, “My wiener is dizzy”). The climax, in which an endless army of guards are shot by the black-suited gals, would be a lot more fun if it weren’t so dark; still, though this takes place around midnight, in certain shots it’s broad daylight. There’s plenty here for Cinematic Titanic to take on.

It’s sad to see Cinematic Titanic go, though nice to have the opportunity to give them one last standing ovation. It was a good five years, and perhaps if the members lived closer to each other (apparently they’re now scattered across the U.S.) the project would continue. Certainly interest couldn’t be higher right now, with Shout! Factory releasing DVD sets of MST3K three times a year (a 25th anniversary collection is due this winter), and new groups of movie-riffers popping up, including Austin’s Master Pancake Theater and comedian Doug Benson’s Los Angeles-based Movie Interruption, in which he’s frequently joined by celebrity comics like Zach Galifianakis and Patton Oswalt. There’s also, of course, Rifftrax, the MST3K offshoot that predated CT and was founded by show vets Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett; they continue to release downloadable MP3s and pack movie theaters for their live Rifftrax broadcasts (the most recent being Starship Troopers). But I’ll always have a special attachment to CT, because I grew up with Joel Hodgson’s MST3K. I’m sure he’ll be back soon – he has a new live show, Riffing Myself – and I’ll take it as a significant hint that he asked the audience at Friday’s show to follow him on Twitter. In the meantime, keep circulating the tapes memories.

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Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976)

Posted on September 20, 2013 at 6:45 am by Jeff Kuykendall

There’s a moment in Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976) that shows us its cards, beautifully. A one-armed drunk has wandered into a spacious tavern. While stuffing his mouth with food, he smashes seven flies at once: “Seven in one blow!” he exults. A few minutes later he’s boasting to the tavernkeep that he’s a mighty one-armed warrior and “today I killed seven in one blow”; from the upper landing, the ears of an old blind man prick up. He’s been on the trail of a one-armed warrior, and this may be the man he seeks. He opens what appears to be a red hat, razor blades lining the inside snapping into place. He hurtles it over the landing, and it clasps a net around the victim’s head and neck. The old man jerks the chain attached to the hat, and the one-armed drunk collapses headless to the floor. No blood spills from between the shoulders, though the dummy’s severed neck is painted red. If his “Brave Little Tailor” story of seven-in-one-blow doesn’t make it clear enough, his surreal death drives the point home: this is a fairy tale. Albeit a Chinese fairy tale, of the wuxia & martial arts variety, with warring clans, noble heroes, and cunning villains. Like so many Chinese fairy tales, it’s rooted in history. The film takes place during the 18th century, as the current emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Yongzheng, has rebel supporters of the previous Ming Dynasty hunted down by assassins wielding these hat-like “flying guillotines.” (The weapons themselves were a real device, and even recently featured on Mythbusters.) One of the emperor’s assassins, the blind Fung Sheng Wu Chi (Kam Kang), receives word in the opening scene that two of his disciples have been slain by a man with one arm (Jimmy Wang Yu, The Chinese Boxer), as seen in the earlier film, The One-Armed Boxer (1971). He sets out to have his revenge.

Wu Shao Tieh (Doris Lung) and the One-Armed Boxer (Jimmy Wang Yu) discuss plans to stop the Master of the Flying Guillotine.

The One-Armed Boxer has been teaching a martial arts class in a village, where his students are also dissidents against the current emperor. Much of the film consists of a martial arts tournament which the boxer and his students attend as spectators. As contestant after contestant enters the ring, the film settles into a hypnotic series of over-the-top duels; I’m reminded that films like these set the template for video games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat (as they punch and kick, the same two thudding sound effects are repeated over and over, as though someone is tapping the A and B buttons on a Nintendo controller). Helpfully, each contestant has a nickname which describes their fighting technique. “Flying Rope” Chao Wu has a rope; “Tornado Knives” Lei Kung has many knives; “Iron Skin” Niu Sze has impenetrable flesh (like “Brass Body” in RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists); “Braised Hair” Cheung Shung Vee has braided hair that can strangle his opponent. One battle takes place on the tops of poles stuck in the ground over deadly sword blades, while the opponents try not to lose their footing. When Wu Shao Tieh (Doris Lung, Brave Girl Boxer in Shanghai), daughter of tournament president Wu Chang Sheng (Yu Chung-chiu), steps into the ring, she uses each blow to strip her opponent, until he’s sprinting naked and bruised out of the arena.

The Eagle Claws Tournament: two contestants battle above sword blades stuck into the earth.

The tournament is interrupted by the flying guillotine, decapitating yet another one-armed man who isn’t the One-Armed Boxer. (This grants us the amusing sight of an actor with both one arm and his head shoved under his shirt collapsing to the ground.) Now alerted to the assassin’s presence, our hero retreats to his school with his students, but before he can organize a plan of defense, he’s drawn into a fight with a Thai “foreigner” (Sham Chin-bo) aiding Fung Sheng Wu Chi, before the blind man himself comes sailing through the window; there’s quite a lot of jumping through walls and rooftops in this film. The final battle is delayed – the One-Armed Boxer successfully escapes – because there are still more of the assassin’s henchmen to dispatch. Each battle is another breathless setpiece. Most memorable is the Boxer’s fight with the Indian assassin Yogi Tro La Seng (Wong Wing-sang), who not only can summon sitar music on the soundtrack, but can elongate his arms like Plastic Man. Their battle, with his awkwardly swaying arms, looks like something directed by Jim Henson. In one of the film’s most creatively staged scenes, the One-Armed Boxer and his Merry Men set a trap for the Thai bruiser, trapping him with the protagonist in a hut surrounded by fire (his attempts to escape out the window are blocked by the students’ jutting spears). The barefoot fighter finally succumbs to the searing-hot floor, while the One-Armed Boxer, protected by his shoes, leaps out of the hut to cool his feet in a bucket of cold water. Satisfyingly, he can only take out the Master of the Flying Guillotine using all his resources: a clever scheme (bamboo is involved), fast moves, and some gravity-defying footwork (he can climb walls and hang from the ceiling).

The Master of the Flying Guillotine, Fung Sheng Wu Chi (Kam Kang), lets fly his blade.

The film was not just a sequel, but an entry in a specific subgenre of “flying guillotine” movies, preceded by the Shaw Brothers’ Flying Guillotine (1975); there’s also The Fatal Flying Guillotine (1977), Flying Guillotine 2 (1978), and The Vengeful Beauty (1978), among others. A similar weapon threatens James Bond in Octopussy (1983) while on a trip to India, but, sadly, the assassin does not elongate his arms. Much of the credit for Master of the Flying Guillotine‘s endless charm can go to its star, Jimmy Wang Yu, who also wrote and directed. By 1976 he was already well established as a star of martial arts cinema, though not without notoriety in both his professional life (legal troubles arose after breaking his contract with the Shaw Brothers, which exiled him from Hong Kong to Taiwan) and his personal (an unusually tumultuous love life, as well as other personal scandals including a murder charge in 1981, later dropped). Here, he plays straight to the audience’s Id, delivering on their expectations in spades. Master of the Flying Guillotine is a pure martial arts movie. There’s a minimum of complicated exposition, a wealth of characters and fighting techniques, a pounding soundtrack (sampled from Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Tangerine Dream), and inventive choreography with a surprisingly smooth integration of special effects. It’s proof that nonstop action in a film can avoid being dull provided there’s a steady supply of imagination – and humor – in the mix.

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