Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976)

Posted on November 21, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

In the archives of the ludicrous, a special room should be reserved for Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976); a nursery, perhaps. This made-for-TV movie features exactly one returning cast member from Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet (she won an Oscar for playing the character the first time), and manages to make every wrong decision that novelist Ira Levin and filmmaker Roman Polanski had so carefully avoided almost a decade earlier. Which is to say that while it fails utterly as psychological horror, it succeeds as fabulously entertaining camp. Polanski took two hours to reveal that, yes indeed, the father of Rosemary Woodhouse’s baby is Satan. But in a trim ninety minutes (without the commercial breaks), writer/producer Anthony Wilson and director Sam O’Steen (co-editor of the 1968 film) pile in glowing demonic eyes, black magic-driven buses, electrocution, young boys getting their necks snapped, stunt car flips, mime makeup, and rock ‘n’ roll…the devil’s music.

Young Adrian/Andrew is burned by Rosemary's cross, vampire-style.

Look What’s Happened picks up right where Rosemary’s Baby left off, even playing the final dialogue from that film on the soundtrack, this time spoken by a new cast of actors (except, of course, for Gordon). Rosemary (now Patty Duke, credited as Patty Duke Astin) is raising her son with the coven from the first film, led by Roman (the great Ray Milland of The Lost Weekend and Dial “M” for Murder) and Minnie Castevet. Life in this spooky house seems to consist of wandering about in a black robe while holding a candle and chanting in Latin with the periodic refrain “Hail Satan.” The coven has named her son Adrian, but she calls him Andrew, and is secretly trying to guide him toward a life of goodness; nevertheless, his room is decorated with Satanic puppets, Nazi paraphernalia, and a giant world map just ripe for drawing big fat arrows. Her estranged husband Guy (George Maharis) – who, in the previous film, had promised their son to the coven in exchange for stardom as an actor – is now living in Hollywood, reaping the rewards of his decision. Rosemary runs away with Adrian/Andrew in tow, and takes shelter in a synagogue while Roman, Minnie, and the other witches chant their spells and shake the rafters of her shelter. She protects her son with a cross, but it burns his flesh as though he were Christopher Lee. Later, on the road and desperate, she phones up Guy and asks him to send large quantities of cash to certain locations across the United States, not telling him which she’s going to retrieve. Her distrust is well-placed, since her husband still regularly receives calls from Roman, which turn him into a nervous toady. While travelling cross-country, she has her hands full with Andrew, who at one point gets bullied by some kids and – with his eyes flashing a bright light – breaks their necks. As the first chapter of the film (“The Book of Rosemary”) concludes, she’s tricked by a deceptively friendly prostitute into boarding a bus before her child; the doors abruptly close behind her, and Andrew is once more in the hands of evil. Rosemary pounds her fists on the window and screams, but to no avail, since the bus contains neither passengers nor a driver. It barrels off toward the horizon on a highway to Hell.

Patty Duke as Rosemary Woodhouse

Chapter Two, “The Book of Adrian,” reintroduces Adrian (Stephen McHattie) in his twenties, back to his Satanic name and wearing black. But he’s not aware that he’s been raised by Satanists, and lives a relatively happy life as a singer/songwriter at the Castle Casino, run by a woman named Marjean (Tina Louise of Gilligan’s Island). His best friend, who has the very New Testament-y name of Peter Simon (David Huffman), “flunked out of divinity school” but is still prone to wearing white and keeping Adrian from picking up women at the casino. As his birthday approaches, Adrian’s “godparents,” Roman and Minnie, plot to use the occasion to test whether he’s worthy of being the Antichrist. (Guy is invited, which means he has no choice.) Adrian is to shed blood, because apparently snapping necks isn’t bloody enough; should he fail, and continue to be disappointingly not-that-evil, they will use his body as a vessel toward Satanic purposes which are left deliberately murky. “Do you know that you were conceived at midnight?” Roman casually says to Adrian over drinks at the bar. Then Roman and Minnie show their godson where the birthday party is to be held, and Adrian shows only minor concern at the eccentric touches, such as a giant sacrificial knife and a goblet of some potent elixir from which he’s urged to drink:

Once sufficiently drugged, Adrian is painted with white mime makeup, thus confirming the link to mimes and Satanism that you long suspected. Just as Roman, Minnie, and Guy seem to conclude that the experiment in creating an Antichrist has been a failure, and Adrian must be killed, the drugged boy stumbles out of the room and back into the club, where a band is performing a generic, lyric-free psychedelic jam while young men and women shake their sweaty bodies on the floor. Mime-Adrian stumbles about, then takes the stage to gape in awe at the audience and strike dramatic poses, giving himself over to the mediocre rock music. This, according to the theology of Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, is the ultimate in evil. His Christian friend Peter Simon is appalled, but can only get through to Adrian when he dies (by Guy’s hand) in the most Christ-like manner short of a crown of thorns and a handful of nails. Adrian is shaken out of his stupor, but also falls into a coma, is convicted of Peter’s murder, and committed to a mental institution (while still comatose) – all during the commercial break.

Luckily, Adrian is escaping from the mental hospital within a few minutes, since he’s been able to convince the nurse, Ellen (Donna Mills, Play Misty for Me), that he’s been falsely accused of murder through a conspiracy hatched by witches. They set out to find what happened to Guy and Rosemary. Guy, meanwhile, is being informed by Roman that he needs to seek out and kill Adrian. Allow me to spoil the twist ending: Ellen is actually working for the coven; she drugs Adrian (who will drink anything) and has sex with him so that she can carry his child, who will be the true Mime Antichrist. Then Guy arrives, attempting to run over Adrian with his car, but striking Ellen instead. Adrian is taken away by the police for some reason, and, in another twist ending, Ellen survived the car crash and is now pregnant. We see the baby delivered over the ending credits. (It looks like a pretty normal baby girl. None of this “what’s wrong with his eyes?” nonsense.) So anyway, now we know what happened to Rosemary’s Baby (before Ira Levin got around to telling us his version of events, in the official sequel novel of 1997). Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Son’s Baby was, fortunately, never filmed.

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Viva La Muerte (1971)

Posted on November 18, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Viva La Muerte belongs on the shelf between Buñuel’s Viridiana and Pasolini’s Saló, but it is by far the angriest film I have ever seen. Shot during Franco’s regime, there is no way it could have been filmed in Spain (it was shot in Tunisia instead). Consider the scene in which a group of well-dressed students turn a corner to find themselves standing before a firing squad. The guns ignite. The boys fall…except one, who stands, a bullet in his stomach, shouting “I’m saved! I’m not dead!” “It’s the poet,” says the captain. “The faggot. Finish him off up the ass.” He places his gun behind the poet and fires. The victim is identified as none other than Frederico Garcia Lorca (killed in 1936), a man who could not even be discussed in Spain at the time this film was made.

This moment, like all of the film, is witnessed through the subjective gaze of young Fando (Mahdi Chaouch), who has recently learned that his mother (Nuria Espert) reported his father to Franco’s partisans on suspicion of his leftist ideas. He has died in prison – a suicide, his mother claims belatedly. Fando doesn’t believe it for a moment. Viva La Muerte, the first film directed by playwright Fernando Arrabal, becomes a kaleidoscopic vision of the boy’s inner rage at his mother (as well as confused lust), uncle, schoolteacher, and Franco himself. He is surrounded by murders, denials, and repression, and his torment is reflected in feverish, harshly-tinted daydreams full of imagery that is funny, shocking, and horrifying, by turns (or at once). Standing before a lighthouse on a high hill, he pisses in the direction of the village and dreams that he’s flooding the whole town. He imagines his priest getting his testicles cut off by soldiers and being forced to devour them (and thanking God for the opportunity). He sees his schoolteacher as a pig in a habit, or his mother wallowing with him in the mud. But most often he sees his mother murdering his father in various ways, and the thought consumes him so entirely that it seems to feed directly into an illness, which gets him sequestered upon a boat with other sick boys. And the fantasies and nightmares continue.

Fando was first glimpsed in celluloid as a young adult in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Arrabal adaptation, Fando y Lis (1968). (Jodorowsky, of course, was responsible for what’s largely considered the first “midnight movie,” El Topo. Following El Topo‘s word-of-mouth success, some theaters programmed Viva La Muerte in the midnight slot to try to tap into the same audience.) Jodorowsky filmed the allegorical play without a script, working from memory; he was a good friend of Arrabal’s, and with cartoonist Roland Topor, whose illustrations are featured in Viva La Muerte, they had formed the Panic Movement in 1962. The group performed interactive street theater and valued shock and extreme imagery as a means of making their intellectual ideas viscerally experienced by the audience. Viva La Muerte is perhaps the best example of Panic, with its constant onslaught of unfettered anger and taboo-violating imagery (animals are killed on camera, and feces, blood, and incest figure prominently). It’s a difficult film to watch – physically. But it’s also upsetting on a political and an emotional level: Arrabal intends all of these reactions at once. This is a bomb lobbed directly at Franco’s nose. There is a through-line with poor Fando which may carry you far, and it’s worthwhile to take the trip to its very end. If you don’t, I’ll tell you what you missed: the final image is of Fando, wrapped in bandages from his surgery, carried out of Spain by the girl he loves (Lis?) on a cart…entering the wilderness of Fando y Lis. It seems to imply that it’s a prequel, but in fact offers a looking-glass image of the earlier film: in Fando y Lis, Lis is the cripple, and borne by Fando (who, despite his professed love, tortures and betrays her at every opportunity). It may help to understand that Fando is, of course, Fernando Arrabal, and if Fando y Lis takes place on a more psychological landscape, Viva La Muerte may be more strictly autobiographical. He was born in 1932, and witnessed the Spanish Civil War as a child. Don’t look for illumination on the DVD’s interview, however; he answers every question in the most abstract manner possible while positioning a chair in front of his face. Where was this shot? “In Tunisia, but I wanted to film in Atlantis. Or my mother’s womb.” And what is it all about? “It’s a prayer.” Well, that at least makes sense, but it’s the most savage prayer you could imagine.

[This post originally appeared on my old blog, Kill the Snark, in 2007.]


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Tintorera (1977)

Posted on November 16, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

“Tin-to-re-ra. The Americans like you say, ‘tiger shark,'” helpfully explains the blond Mexican shark-hunter at the start of the film, who is leering at two girls in tight tops and bikini bottoms. But what’s actually important in this moment is the leering. Tintorera (aka Tintorera: Killer Shark, 1977) is a Mexican Jaws cash-in which almost forgets to have a killer shark in it: this is a problem. Instead, the film’s point-of-view is best expressed by our hero, Steven (Hugo Stiglitz of Nightmare City), when his fellow shark-hunter bitterly curses all tiger sharks. “Maybe you hate them, but I feel sorry for them. But then, that’s life. Actually, I’d rather hunt the tintorera in bikini that walks along the beach!” Cut to a shot (through binoculars) of girls in bikinis walking along the beach. The bearded Steven, standing on his private boat and stalking his prey, nods and grins at the camera.

Patricia (Fiona Lewis) is awkwardly courted by Steven (Hugo Stiglitz).

There are dozens of girls in bikinis, but for some reason Steven immediately becomes obsessed with a fully-clothed brunette on a scooter who’s on a road a good distance behind those girls in bikinis, and rather hard to see. Nevertheless, he soon discovers her lounging on a beach, and finds that, just as his instincts told him, she looks very good in a bikini indeed. Her name is Patricia (Fiona Lewis – a British actress, since this is a British co-production), and she’s intrigued by Steven’s clumsy pick-up lines and dead-eyed stare. Soon they’re having dinner on his yacht, sipping champagne, and she says dreamily, “I’m happy here.” After an evening of making love, they explore the Mexican shoreline, which leads to this self-searching discussion about the meaning of love (note the exquisitely crude transition at the end of the scene, which I have left intact since it represents the entire film so perfectly):

Despite Steven’s haunting beard and atrocious dubbing, Patricia casually abandons him for the beach’s top hunk, shark-hunter Miguel (Andrés García). In response, Steven hits Miguel in the face, Patricia calls him a “stupid fool,” and Steven is socially ostracized. That night, Patricia makes love to Miguel, then takes a nude swim, where…wait for it…she’s killed by a tiger shark. When Miguel awakens, he presumes she merely ditched him, just as she did Steven, because…I mean, women, am I right, guys? Later, Steven encounters Miguel in a cafe sharing drinks with two pretty young ladies. “Watch out, the wild man has arrived!” Miguel impishly shouts, picking up a chair and holding it between them in defense. “Do you always go around playing the part of the clown?” wet blanket Steven asks. Miguel responds, “I’m just a happy-go-lucky guy,” and relaxes casually into his chair. Ultimately Steven is won over (without changing his dour facial expression), less by the happy-go-lucky Miguel and his teeny-tiny speedo, than by the fact that the two attractive women at his side are evidently very promiscuous. By the end of the night, they’re all abandoning their clothes on the beach and swimming naked to Steven’s yacht, partying hard, and having sex in hammocks before swapping partners. This is all set to an easy-listening score by Basil Poledouris, incidentally. The composer (who died in 2006) is best known for Conan the Barbarian (1982) and other big-muscled films of the 80’s, but glancing at IMDB, it’s apparent he was also the go-to composer for anything involving beaches and swimsuits: Big Wednesday (1978), The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Summer Lovers (1982) were all his work. His music here is a combination of light jazz and disco, but he steps up the effort by composing a song, “Together Until Goodbye,” sung by one Kelly Stevens. The endless and lethargic song becomes the romantic ballad of the film, since this is really a love story; it just happens to have a killer shark in it, somewhere…oh yeah, remember? Patricia was killed. That happened.

Andrés García as Miguel, ladies' man.

After their debauched night, Steven and Miguel form a blossoming bromance. Then into the picture steps another British girl, Gabriella (Susan George of Dirty Mary Crazy Larry). They both like her a great deal, and – you know what? – she likes them too. Equally. As David Crosby wrote, “It’s plain to see/Why can’t we go on as three?” This leads to a series of montages which actually take up most of the film. We see them gazing at one another lovingly, and sailing across the beautiful blue waters while gazing at one another lovingly. We even get a hint of the logistics surrounding their sexual encounters, but this is discreet and passed over pretty quickly, to the audience’s relief. One particular montage involves them posing while taking pictures of one another, and having their picture taken by a kindly old Mexican woman, and this is very important because the sequence will be replayed over the ending credits in full. Then, one day, Miguel is killed by a tiger shark while diving, and Steven and Gabriella are witnesses. Steven delicately suggests that they could continue a relationship without Miguel, but Gabriella is as disgusted by the idea of ignoring Miguel’s death as she is the notion of a traditional two-person arrangement, which is for squares. She departs the country and the film.

Miguel goes shark-hunting.

A despondent Steven returns to the beaches to pursue more women. At a beach party, he encounters the two promiscuous ladies from earlier in the film, and they take shots out of a conch shell filled with “the favorite drink of Emperor Montezuma”: tequila, cocoanut juice, rum, and green tea (“for rheumatism”). Then the partiers strip naked and dive into the water, where suddenly the plot arrives, and a tiger shark commits mass slaughter. Shaken out of his stupor, Steven goes on a quest for revenge, and since there’s only about ten minutes left in the film, this shouldn’t take long. He teams up with that blond, leering shark hunter from the start of the film, and they pursue their quarry in a murkily-lit climax.

A massive skinny-dipper massacre as the tiger shark makes its belated move.

Tintorera was directed by René Cardona, Jr., a prolific Mexican director who made several films a year between the mid-60’s and 2000. The script, which doesn’t seem very interested in being Jaws, was co-written between Cardona and Ramón Bravo, a Mexican journalist, photographer, freediver, and tiger shark expert; he wrote the novel upon which Tintorera is based. But the finished film seems less interested in sharks than whether or not a ménage à trois can be sustained without jealousy causing the relationships to implode. The three carefree, tiny-swimwear-sporting lovers create a pact: no commitments, no falling in love – just enjoy yourselves and share your bodies equally while snooze-inducing disco music plays on the soundtrack. Is the tiger shark – cruel, murderous – the symbol of a closed-minded society which prevents the existence of such free-minded arrangements? In the end, Tintorera remains ambiguous, elusive – like the killer of the sea, rising swiftly and then disappearing once more into the dark depths. Note: Universal Studios sued the producers of another shark-driven exploitation film, Great White (1981), and succeeded in having the film withdrawn from the market. But they didn’t go after Tintorera, and I can kind of see why.

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