Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Posted on June 13, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

The third installment of the now-unstoppable Planet of the Apes franchise was something of a miracle baby, and it benefited from the unusual birth. When last we left the saga, in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Charlton Heston’s Taylor had detonated a nuclear bomb which destroyed the entire Earth (and, the pressganged actor hoped, the series as well). But the series’ producer, Arthur P. Jacobs, couldn’t let something so financially lucrative burn to a cinder with the rest of the planet. He handed Beneath‘s screenwriter Paul Dehn the impossible task of writing another sequel, and Dehn found his answer by returning to the time-travel concept of the original film. Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) would be both a sequel and a prequel, with three apes piloting Taylor’s salvaged spacecraft through a wormhole in time/space, a journey which takes them from the year “Thirty-Nine Fifty-something” back to the Earth of the 1970’s (1973, to be exact – this film took place two years in the future). The opening scene provides the film’s most clever moment: beginning with the camera gazing at high cliffs overlooking a chilly coastline, the audience presumes we’re once more revisiting the final scenes of Planet of the Apes (1968). But a helicopter cuts overhead – technology the apes didn’t possess. We see the familiar triangular spaceship floating in the water, and then a military convoy pulling up on the beach. Soldiers pull three astronauts from the ship. When the helmets are removed, the human onlookers are shocked to see three ape-men: Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Zira (Kim Hunter), and a new character, Dr. Milo (Rebel Without a Cause‘s Sal Mineo). We’re back in the world of POTA, but as seen through the looking-glass.

Zira (Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) are interrogated by government agents.

Dr. Milo doesn’t last long; when the “apeonauts” are taken to the Los Angeles Zoo for examination, Milo is strangled by a (jealous?) gorilla in the next cage over. Exit Sal Mineo – who was grateful, for he was uncomfortable with the makeup; the actor, who had been struggling to win big-screen roles, would never appear in a film again. The rest of the film is devoted to the interactions between humankind and the apes, now represented by McDowall and Hunter. Cornelius and Zira receive the greatest sympathy from Dr. Lewis Dixon (Bradford Dillman, The Mephisto Waltz) and Dr. Stephanie “Stevie” Branton (Natalie Trundy, “Albina” in Beneath the Planet of the Apes), but they’re regarded with suspicion by Dr. Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden, now best known for his long-running role as Victor on the soap The Young and the Restless). Hasslein, who has the ear of the President (William Windom, Brewster McCloud), is one of the most intriguing characters of the film: brilliant but emotionally detached, he accepts the apes’ story but also penetrates its implications, namely the future subjugation of the human race by the ape-men. When it’s discovered that Zira is pregnant, he suggests the baby be aborted and the apes sterilized. Cornelius accidentally kills an orderly while escaping with Zira from the hospital; this leads Hasslein to the conclusion that they must be killed. Eventually he’s prepared to coldly gun down Zira’s squealing newborn, and yet you can never quite call him evil. He thinks he’s saving all humanity.

Lobby card: Zira cradles her newborn, played by a real (and probably really confused) chimpanzee.

Happily, this third installment returns to the fractured but philosophical tone of the original film: it’s alternately a satire, a thriller, a science fiction think-piece, a comedy of manners, and a downbeat message-picture. We’re stranded with the apes in a familiar landscape, but we see it through their eyes: absurd, overwhelming, but the civility just barely disguising a ruthlessness not too different from the world of the apes. Here, Cornelius and Zira enact the role of Taylor, and Dixon and Branton become their protectors, along with a late-arriving Ricardo Montalban as Armando, the ringmaster of a circus who shelters the apes so Zira can give birth in safety. (His over-the-top dialogue seems custom-written: “If it is destiny for Man to be dominated, oh please God let him be dominated by one such as you!” he tells Zira, as though she’s about to board a plane out of Fantasy Island.) Mirror-images of the original film are cast throughout Escape‘s running time, from a hearing in which the apes are asked to prove their intelligence, to a moment in a museum in which Zira nearly faints at the sight of a stuffed gorilla (the same moment we learn she’s pregnant). Some light satire is scattered through a montage of the two apes adjusting to the fast-paced Los Angeles scene, trying out the latest fashions, holding parties, indulging in a bubble bath for the first time, and being introduced to “grape juice plus” (wine). The change of venue does wonders for reinvigorating the franchise – this would turn out to be the middle picture in a quintet – but the modern setting inevitably renders the film more dated; even Jerry Goldsmith, returning as composer, provides a more run-of-the-mill score. But it’s hard to ignore how boldly dark the film becomes in its last fifteen minutes, as the apocalyptic themes of the series are enacted on a human level rather than a global one. Behind all the makeup and broad satirical strokes, the Apes series was never afraid to be confrontational with its politics. Dehn deliberately left room for a sequel this time, but also cleared out some space for even darker themes for the franchise to explore.

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La noche de Walpurgis (1971)

Posted on June 11, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

The uninitiated might ask, Who is this Paul Naschy? Why has he been compared to Lon Chaney? Why have books been written about him; why has a fervent cult following developed around his name? Photos of the actor prove unremarkable: an almost comically ordinary-looking schlub. But the light of the full moon reveals a fur-covered face bearing an uncanny resemblance to Universal’s Wolf Man. In fact, La noche de Walpurgis (1971), a werewolf movie which proved to be a tremendous success for Naschy and launched a wave of Spanish horror films in the 70’s, deliberately recalls those Universal Studios monster mashes of the 40’s such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). No wonder that the film was distributed in the U.S. in cut-up form as The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, appealing directly to American “Monster Kids” who would otherwise have no familiarity with this Naschy fellow. (Call the film what you will: a literal translation of the title is “Walpurgis Night,” a holiday obscure to American audiences. The alternate English-language title is Werewolf Shadow, which the BCI Eclipse DVD uses. An earlier video copy was distributed under the title Blood Moon.) León Klimovsky, a prolific director who made films in both Spain and his native Argentina – and signs his name in the opening credits a la Cocteau – updates the formula to the more permissive 70’s with bare breasts and spurting blood (not to mention some boozy lounge music). Charmingly, at its core La noche de Walpurgis is simply a love letter to monster movies.

Students Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) and Genevieve (Barbara Capell) accept the help of Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy) to research the legend of a devil-worshiping countess.

Naschy reprises a role he had played before, and would play time and again: the haunted werewolf Waldemar Daninsky, who – like Larry Talbot before him – can’t help that he spends his nights tearing out throats; certain films in the series reference an encounter with a Yeti that led to this condition, and a passing reference to an incident in Tibet is made in this film. (So…shouldn’t he be turning into a Yeti? Or an ape? Never mind; it really doesn’t matter.) The opening scene of La noche de Walpurgis sets the mood perfectly: lying on a slab in a morgue, the dead Naschy is inspected by a mortician and doctor who express skepticism that the man was an “Hombre Lobo” as the villagers claim. The first step in the autopsy: “I’m going to take out the silver bullets,” says the doctor, “and I assure you he’ll stay as dead as before.” The bullets are removed – the full moon is revealed by the parting clouds – and a hairy claw lunges for the doctor. After the credits, the film awkwardly fixes the story in France by showing us an extra browsing through postcards of the Eiffel Tower. We meet a grad student, Elvira (Gaby Fuchs, Mark of the Devil), who explains to her boyfriend, a police inspector named Marcel (Andrés Resino), that she’s writing a thesis on the Hungarian Countess Wandesa Dárvula de Nadasdy (Patty Shepard, Assignment Terror), an Elizabeth Bathory type who sold her soul to the devil and practiced witchcraft. (The flashback is triggered by a psychedelic kaleidoscope projected onto Elvira’s face, and then onto the face of the Countess.) Hunted as a witch, she was finally killed by being stabbed in the heart with the silver Cross of Mayenza. Elvira travels into the French countryside to find the Countess’ tomb and complete her studies, accompanied by her beautiful friend Genevieve (Barbara Capell, Should a School Girl Tell). Low on gas and stranded near the ruins of a monastery, the girls are relieved to encounter Waldemar Daninsky, a writer who invites them to stay for the week at the home he’s renting. He doesn’t tell them about his need to chain himself to manacles suspended by the ceiling on nights of the full moon.

Elvira discovers that her friend Genevieve has been made a vampire by the undead Countess de Nadasdy.

When Daninsky helps the girls open the tomb of the Countess (so Elvira can snap some photos, naturally), Genevieve accidentally cuts her wrist and splashes blood on the mouth of the skeletal corpse. She notes that the legend indicates the Cross of Mayenza shouldn’t be removed from the Countess’ chest or she’ll return to life as a vampire; Daninsky says dismissively, “It’s only a legend,” and walks off with the cross in his hand. (Thanks, Waldemar.) Shortly thereafter, a monk-turned-ghoul is chasing Elvira through the ruins, and Daninsky saves her life by attacking it with the cross. This, after Daninsky’s seemingly-deranged sister Elizabeth (Yelena Samarina) has already attacked Genevieve in a room full of bloodstains, chains, and torture devices (she was actually protecting her brother’s secret). Nonetheless, the girls stick around a little longer. Sure enough, the Countess has been revived; she preys upon Genevieve and transforms her into a vampire, who begins to stalk her friend through the hallways of the chateau, the floors carpeted by undulating fog. Daninsky’s assistance is severely hampered by his lycanthropy; on the night of the full moon, he breaks loose of his chains and embarks on a rampage through the woods. When Inspector Marcel shows up to save Elvira from her host, whom he’s convinced is a dangerous killer, he’s dismayed to find that she’s fallen in love. All that can resolve the triangle is the expected werewolf vs. vampire woman climax on Walpurgis Night, with Marcel and Elvira in chains, and El Hombre Lobo wrestling in the dirt with the fangs-sporting Countess on a set decorated with coffins and pentagrams.

The vampire Countess (American-born Patty Shepard) rises from her coffin to enact a Satanic ritual on Walpurgis Night.

Klimovsky proves his mettle with the atmospherics; the film is sufficiently dream-like, with an effective use of slow-motion during the vampire and ghoul attacks. (The werewolf attacks, on the other hand, are quick and brutal.) The transformations, by necessity, must stick to the rules from the Jack Pierce era of monster makeup, and if the effects are by comparison crude, one must take the modest budget into account. This German/Spanish co-production features an international cast, and, as with Italian films from the period, even the native-language print is dubbed. Quite a lot of exposition is packed into the film’s 91 minutes, including some dialogue scenes that get a bit draggy (some of them were cut from the American release), but for the most part the film affectionately crams in as many monster movie tropes as it can, paying equal homage to Dracula – with Elvira and Genevieve enacting the roles of Mina and Lucy, respectively – as it does The Wolf Man. The soundtrack is just as busy, choked with howling wind, organ music, discordant keys, and moans, shrieks, and wails – offset, jarringly, by the la la la las of its swinging main theme. Paul Naschy – short and stocky, his bare chest made up with scars and the scorched sign of the pentagram – may be an unlikely sex symbol for the nascent genre of Spanish horror, but La noche de Walpurgis fixes him firmly into that role with demented confidence.

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Motorpsycho (1965)

Posted on June 8, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

With Lorna (1964) and Mudhoney (1965), Russ Meyer finally graduated from his cheap but colorful “nudie-cuties” to feature-length narratives, and drive-in screens would never be the same again. His preference was lurid melodrama with hyperbolic scripts (he had his name removed from 1964’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure – he was a hired hand, and it wasn’t his idea of a Russ Meyer Film). For subtlety, he’d little interest. His stars – with bodies as if carved from the cliffs – deserved dialogue that could only be delivered by shouting. He wanted to see his men and women clash with all the grandeur of a classical myth, albeit one retold as a steamy paperback. His women weren’t shrinking violets, but sexually-insatiable she-devils, despising the men who pretended to keep them, shriveling their egos with withering one-liners. The apotheosis of this style is the notorious Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966), but often overlooked is Motorpsycho (1965), the film which bridged that gap to psychotronic bliss. With Motorpsycho, Russ Meyer let loose on the big screen one of the supervixens he’d encountered at a strip club in San Fernando Valley. Her name was Haji (real name: Barbarella Catton). She was from Québec, though on the screen she seems to have emerged from some misty, arcane portal. You can’t take your eyes off her; and she screams her overripe dialogue like nobody’s business. No wonder that Meyer considered her for the lead role in Pussycat (plans altered when he met the even more inexplicable Tura Satana).

Animal vet Corey Maddox (Alex Rocco) forms a bond with the wild Ruby Bonner (Haji) while battling a sadistic biker gang.

A pre-credits sequence doesn’t have much to do with the plot, but throws you – with a literal splash – into the world of Russ Meyer. A middle-aged fisherman bends over his line while deliberately ignoring his absurdly voluptuous young wife (Arshalouis Aivazian). She jumps into the water, forcing her bikini-clad body into his line of vision, scattering the fish, and laughing with a tease that has a strange touch of the sadistic: “You’ve got the best there is on your line right now!” she tells him, but of course these Russ Meyer men just never understand. The title crashes onto the screen, accompanied by a surf-music instrumental that will become the main theme of the villainous “motorpsycho” gang (tellingly, the opening credits categorize its cast by “The Women” and, less significantly, “The Men”). The three Wild Ones – Peter Fonda-lookin’ leader Brahmin (Steve Oliver), and cronies Dante (Joseph Cellini) and Slick (Thomas Scott) – motor from one sexual assault to another, first laying waste to the pre-credits couple, then interfering with the lives of straight-laced veterinarian Casey Maddox (Alex Rocco of The Godfather) and his wife Gail (Holle K. Winters). While Casey is away from home doing his level best to resist the buxom temptations of a cowgirl, the gang, seeking revenge for a slight, finds Casey’s home and rapes and beats his wife. He gets no sympathy from the misogynistic sheriff (Russ Meyer, in a cameo), who shrugs off the violent assault with the eyebrow-raising line, “She’ll be okay in a week or so; after all, nothin’ happened to her that a woman ain’t built for.”

Russ Meyer has a cameo as the unhelpful, woman-hating arm of the law.

The enraged Casey takes to the road on the hunt for the gang, and arrives just in time to save their latest victim – Ruby Bonner (Haji), grazed on the brow by a bullet fired by the gang just after they murdered her tubby, grizzled husband, played by bad-movie auteur Coleman Francis. (Is every woman in town a mail-order bride?) Memorably, she’s introduced by shouting at her mate, “I need you like a hole in the head!”- which seems prescient. Ruby is a real Wild Thing, and it takes an experienced vet like Corey Maddox to handle the likes of her. United in the middle of the desert, they fend off the trio of psychopaths while also enduring the inhospitable night, and a deadly rattler. The latter leads to the film’s most memorable scene, one which Meyer would repeat like a Greatest Hits track in Supervixens (1975): frantic over the snake poison, Rocco forces the startled Haji to suck it out, leading to an orgasmic conclusion: Rocco slumping to the dirt in exhaustion, and Haji spitting the black poison at the camera, which Meyer – in a giddy little edit – parallels with one of the bikers spitting out some canteen water. You can see that this over-the-top, dirty joke of a sequence flashes like a lightbulb over Meyer’s head: so here’s what a Russ Meyer Film could be. Not mere trash: glorious trash. This snakebite would prove a point of no return in his filmography.

Mind you, there was room for improvement. The film suffers some pacing issues in its second half, as Meyer contents himself with endless shots of the bikers meandering through the desert, and the film seems to be biding its time until a final, dynamite-driven showdown (again, a device again recycled in Supervixens, to greater effect). Screenwriter W.E. Sprague, collaborating with Meyer, can’t quite match the absurdity that Jack Moran would bring to Pussycat. But Meyer injects a pulpy intensity into this little exploitation film. Everything is heightened and exaggerated beyond standard B-movie proportions, and I’m not just talking about the bust-lines. Without resorting to nudity – he wanted this film to have a wider circulation – he keeps his actresses in a state of near-undress, with Haji in particular losing her clothing piece by piece as the film progresses, until she’s lying half-conscious in a shallow gully with Rocco, her arm draped over her abundant toplessness, while he struggles to light a stick of dynamite. Eyes hidden under fearsome false eyelashes, lips often sculpted into a sneer, Haji dominates the film like a dust-devil of the desert wastes. As for Alex Rocco, who would move on to the more lucrative acting career, Motorpsycho offers him a rare starring role and a chance to essay the square-jawed, gravelly-voiced manly-man who would be played, in later films, by Charles Napier. So here you have Russ Meyer directing a biker-gang thriller with Haji, Alex Rocco, guitar music, sex, and violence. It may not have Tura Satana, but you’ll get your kicks.

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