One Million Years B.C. (1966)

Posted on February 17, 2017 at 3:48 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

The new Kino Blu-ray of One Million Years B.C. (1966) is to be welcomed with applause for a number of reasons. The film has become a beloved genre staple over the decades – hasn’t everyone caught a little bit of it on TV on some random Saturday afternoon? – but it’s also a benchmark film for both fans of special effects artist Ray Harryhausen and Hammer Films. Its poster, with Raquel Welch showing off her physique in a ragged hide bikini, is one of the most iconic promotional images of the decade. Yet despite its cult status many times over, it’s been woefully underserved on home video. The U.S. DVD provided only the U.S. cut, which is nine minutes shorter than the international version. This is significant because among the deleted footage is a fair chunk of Harryhausen’s stop motion animation, rightly regarded as precious among fans, considering how laborious an undertaking stop motion is. To gain the full version, fans such as myself had to import the U.K. DVD, which was non-anamorphic. To rectify the situation, Kino generously presents the film in a two-disc Blu-ray package, with the first presenting the 100 minute international version in high definition, and the second offering the U.S. cut, both from a 4K restoration. You can safely throw out the old U.K. DVD, as the extras have been ported over (interviews with Welch and Harryhausen), and a few new ones added, including an interview with co-star (and Bond Girl) Martine Beswick, and an audio commentary from Video Watchdog‘s Tim Lucas. This is the ultimate dinosaur movie of the pre-Jurassic Park era, and it’s been treated lovingly.

An allosaurus attacks the Shell Tribe.

One Million Years BC was conceived by Hammer exec (and studio scion) Michael Carreras, who, despite the success of the company in Gothic horror films, had a greater fondness for pulpy fantasy: consider his later directorial effort The Lost Continent (1968), or his direct follow-up to One Million Years B.C., the camp classic Slave Girls (aka Prehistoric Women, 1967). Carreras conceived of a remake of the Victor Mature-starring B-movie One Million B.C. (1940), in which cavemen battle alligators and iguanas blown-up and dressed up to be dinosaurs; it is a film most notable for how often its giant-reptile footage was subsequently pilfered for other pictures. He wanted two things for this picture: (1) quality special effects, and (2) a divine Hammer Glamour beauty to match the marketing behemoth that was Ursula Andress in She (1965). In fact, Andress was offered the part but turned it down – though her She co-star, John Richardson, accepted the role of the male lead. To fill Andress’ shoes, American distributor 20th Century Fox loaned out one of their contract starlets, Welch, who had just appeared in another notable fantasy film of the 60’s, Fantastic Voyage (1966). Welch didn’t want to do it, but she had no choice, so she gritted her teeth and hoped the movie would be quickly forgotten. But the assembled elements constitute the smartest decisions Carreras ever made in his career at Hammer. He enlisted a special effects artist at the top of his game; collaborated with Harryhausen on the story and agreed to hire one of Harryhausen’s recommended directors, Don Chaffey (Jason and the Argonauts); top-billed an up-and-coming sex symbol, and shot not in the usual Hammer locations but at the exotic, far-flung, and primordial-looking Canary Islands (Lanzarote, Grand Canary, and Tenerife). As a result, Carreras made a movie that doesn’t look like Hammer, but a big-studio fantasy spectacle. He had an international hit on his hands, one that he would never be able to properly recreate, though how he tried…Slave Girls, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), and Creatures the World Forgot (1971) all featured scantily-clad cave-people, but the particular magic of One Million Years B.C. was missing.

A pteranodon on the hunt for food.

Let’s face it, this is a thoroughly absurd film, and you can argue it never should have worked. Richardson plays Tumak, a member of the Rock People tribe, who are all brunettes. A dispute has him exiled, and he braves this barren prehistoric world until he encounters the Shell People, who are all blondes (!). The Shell People live at the edge of the ocean, and the beautiful Luana (Welch) shows him how to use spears for fishing; he applies this skill to help defend their home from an allosaurus. Eventually he is turned away from the Shell People too, and returns to his tribe with Loana to teach them how to use spears. But turmoil erupts again, ended only by an exploding volcano that tears the landscape apart. One accuracy is that no one speaks English, though this means Carreras limits his script to dialogue along the lines of: “Tumak! Loana!” Welch is, of course, perfectly coiffed and made up, and there are plenty of anachronistic dinosaurs (from various eras, and seldom in their appropriate habitats) to break up the long scenes of desert wandering and intense gazes. Notably, the first dinosaur glimpsed is a real, live iguana, towering over Tumak in the style of the original 1940’s film. This has always come across as sacrilege to Harryhausen fans like myself, who expect only meticulous hand-made models. He has explained his thinking many times. In An Animated Life he writes, “At the time I felt that by using real creatures we might convince the viewers that all of what they were about to see was indeed real…On reflection, it was an irrational mistake.” The iguana is followed by another real animal, a giant tarantula, but thankfully he then presents us with a fabulous array of his own dinosaurs, fulfilling the prehistoric fantasy that he had begun in his parents’ house when he was just a young King Kong fan, assembling a never-completed stop-motion film to be called Evolution. (Apart from a brief sequence for Irwin Allen’s 1956 documentary The Animal World, this was his first studio-financed project to feature dinosaurs. He followed it up with another one, The Valley of Gwangi, from a story by his mentor, Willis O’Brien.)

Publicity photo of Raquel Welch as Loana.

The anachronisms don’t really matter. No one is going to look to a caveman vs. dinos picture like One Million Years B.C. as a serious depiction of the prehistoric world. But it is executed with such a straight face, and so much skill, that it has the sort of weight an epic fantasy film needs. The score by Hammer veteran Philip Martell (The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, The Evil of Frankenstein, etc.) is memorably ominous and sometimes approaches the avant-garde, using experimental primitive sounds for the Rock Tribe. Cinematographer Wilkie Cooper (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, Mysterious Island), also recommended by Harryhausen, makes the most of the location shooting, conjuring a landscape that really stuck in the mind and lit the imagination of this writer when he was a very young viewer. There is not much for the actors to do but shout each other’s names and poke at monsters with sticks, but nonetheless Chaffey gets committed performances from Richardson, Welch, Percy Herbert (The Bridge on the River Kwai), Robert Brown (later “M” in the Bond films of the 80’s), and Martine Beswick (From Russia with Love, Thunderball), who gets a surprisingly physical, and torch-swinging, fight scene with Welch. Harryhausen is in top form too, providing his most exciting moments with the battle with the allosaurus (when the creature leaps suddenly into the frame, it’s genuinely thrilling) and the famous abduction of Welch by a pteranodon that just wants to feeds its children. When Harryhausen’s dinos expire, they collapse onto the ground with labored breath, a convincing bladder installed in the models to simulate panting. The final breaths overpower the soundtrack, sufficiently conjuring the King Kong-like pathos Harryhausen always sought. None of this could ever be real, but he makes it real enough; that’s what escapism is all about.

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This is Spinal Tap (1984)

Posted on February 11, 2017 at 3:19 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Before the Spinal Tap reunion shows, the many TV appearances, the albums, the induction into the Criterion Collection; before the Christopher Guest-directed mockumentaries, often reuniting Guest with his fellow Tap members; before the exponential rise in the original film’s reputation, now widely regarded as one of the greatest comedies of all time, there was just This is Spinal Tap (1984), not even ninety minutes long, so exactingly assembled that many theatergoers confused it for an actual documentary. They shouldn’t have felt bad about never hearing of Spinal Tap before. The band – principally consisting of guitarists/vocalists David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), accompanied by bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) – had appeared on a failed pilot called The TV Show several years before, performing a song called “Rock and Roll Nightmare.” Neither should anyone have had guilty feelings over not recognizing Guest and Shearer, who were obscure, if prolific, comedic actors, Guest being a veteran of National Lampoon’s Lemmings, Shearer enjoying (or, rather, enduring) a brief run on Saturday Night Live during its first notable fallow period. McKean would have been far more recognizable, being the Lenny of “Lenny and Squiggy” on the hit show Laverne & Shirley, and some may have noticed that on-screen director Marty DiBergi was actually Rob Reiner, who had appeared on All in the Family. But if you failed to place any of the faces, there is nothing to tell you outright that This is Spinal Tap is a big con, and apart from rare examples like Eric Idle’s made-for-TV The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978), mockumentaries were not quite a thing just yet. The laughs come from the believable mishaps and embarrassments of an aging touring band well past its expiration date, as depicted warts and all by DiBergi and his crew. Like when the band looks aghast at a theater marquee inside an amusement park, and David’s girlfriend and temporary road manager Janine (June Chadwick, Forbidden World) says, “If I told them once I told them a hundred times to put Spinal Tap first and ‘puppet show’ last.” There were so many bands like Tap – bands which had begun in the 60’s and just followed the changing fashion, from folk to psychedelia to heavy metal, though the more common course was into prog rock and then toothless 80’s pop. (British band The Status Quo is often cited as a band whose mercenary trajectory was very similar to Tap’s.) When Tufnel and St. Hubbins recall their constantly shifting band names in the early 60’s – they called themselves The Originals, but there was another band called The Originals, so they changed it to the New Originals, etc. – the joke, like everything else in the film, dances on the sublime line between authenticity and parody. (Or, as the band would put it, between clever and stupid.)

David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) with Spinal Tap performing “Listen to the Flower People,” in the pre-heavy metal years.

In conceiving of Spinal Tap’s odyssey, Reiner and his lead actors/writers hewed closely to real rock and roll attitudes and anecdotes they had culled over the years, from the fighting in the recording studio (based on a bootleg of The Troggs) to the band being booked at an Air Force Base (Uriah Heep) and getting lost backstage (Tom Petty). The film also borrows a few notes from Martin Scorsese’s film of The Band, The Last Waltz (1978) – “Marty DiBergi” is a nod to Scorsese. Guest, who has played music with McKean since their teenage years, claims the inspiration for Spinal Tap was more general than any one particular band, though he recalled during a 2014 screening and Q&A at the Lincoln Center one specific memory that likely kick-started the project:

“In the ‘70s, I was in LA, in the lobby, waiting for a friend at a hotel,” Guest recalled. “And a British band came in, and the manager went up to the desk, and he was checking in. And he turned, and one of the musicians was standing there, and he said, ‘Where’s your bass, where’d you put your bass?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I think I left it at the airport.’ ‘You left your bass at the airport?’ ‘My what?’ ‘Your bass. Where’s your bass?’ ‘I don’t know, do I?’ This went on for 20 minutes. ‘So you’re saying you left your bass at the airport?’ ‘Well I don’t know, do I?’ And I guess somewhere in my head, this lodged into some kind of bizarre one-act play, where this circular thing just kept going around.”

Guest’s Nigel Tufnel – who is perpetually “confused,” as St. Hubbins puts it – thus became the apotheosis of the spaced-out, oversexed, oblivious guitar god, who has a real talent for composing a beautiful medley, but must call it “Lick My Love Pump.” Whatever the inspirations, so accurate is the film’s depiction of rock and roll life that many of the film’s first fans were rock and rollers, recognizing exactly what the film was sending up – people like Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and Eddie Van Halen. (Although Ozzy Osbourne was one of the dupes who thought it was a true documentary.)

Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) demos “Lick My Love Pump” for director Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner).

Considering that the film paves the way for the cycle of Guest-directed mockumentaries that began with Waiting for Guffman (1996) – each of which leans hard on its documentary realism – it’s interesting that the improv-driven This is Spinal Tap contains so many scenes of actors breaking character, their deadpan faces bursting into grins. But that kind of “corpsing” (to borrow a British phrase) never swings the film into the cutesy realm of The Carol Burnett Show, where the laughs derive from watching Harvey Korman break up. Oddly, it enhances the reality. Watch the scene where Reiner reads harsh reviews to Guest and McKean, who obviously have no idea what he’s going to say. When he gets to the two-word review of their album Shark Sandwich – “Shit sandwich” –  the actors laugh, but then Guest, perfectly in character, accuses Reiner/DiBergi of making it up: “You can’t print that!” In another scene, Guest makes McKean lose it when he describes the fear generated by the “armadillos” in their trousers. In both cases, we don’t necessarily feel the artifice falling away; instead, they seem more like real people, not just caricatures. We’re hanging out with the band. And so we find them even more endearing, even when they can’t see two feet past their noses; like Tufnel beside himself complaining about the size of the bread in his dressing room, or his beautifully delivered dialogue with DiBergi showing off his collection of guitars and amps. The famous “goes to eleven” scene becomes classic comedy with a simple but expertly timed pause after Reiner lucidly explains that Tufnel could have just made ten the loudest. “This one goes to eleven,” he answers, impenetrable.

Fred Willard explains military time to Harry Shearer’s Derek Smalls.

Despite the reliance upon improvisation, the film demonstrates a very thoughtful conception and razor-sharp editing (the film was edited down to 82 minutes; a rough cut was closer to four hours). Just look at the way the songs are used. When Reiner wants to build up a gag onstage, the lyrics aren’t overloaded with jokes: “Rock ‘n’ Roll Creation” is pretty straightforward as far as Spinal Tap songs go, because the focus of the humor needs to be on Derek Smalls being stuck inside his chrysalis prop. Similarly, “Stonehenge,” though a knowing pastiche of the fantasy mythologies of 70’s heavy metal, is nowhere near as lyrically funny as “Big Bottom,” “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight,” or “Sex Farm” – but that’s because it’s building toward one big, memorable gag. And as for “Sex Farm,” the extreme lewdness of the lyrics are sung over images of its appalled audience. The story arc of This is Spinal Tap is very rudimentary: the band runs afoul of its own Yoko, David’s Horoscope-obsessed girlfriend Janine; their manager Ian Faith (National Lampoon writer and editor Tony Hendra) quits the band; David and Nigel have a falling-out, then finally reunite for a triumphant tour when “Sex Farm” hits big in Japan. It’s just a skeleton on which can be hung any number of improvised scenes or visual gags, like Shearer’s smuggled zucchini or the elaborate build-up to David’s indignant outburst, “I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.” But the structure of the film works, and in its final twenty minutes Reiner allows for scenes which don’t end on a punchline, but help the audience empathize with the characters and lend a bit of emotional heft to support the climax. In subsequent years Guest would run with that baton to greater distances, such that even in an improv comedy like A Mighty Wind (2003), the break-up and reconciliation of folk duo Mitch & Mickey (Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara) carries such a human authenticity as to be genuinely moving. But Spinal Tap doesn’t need big emotions. It’s a lean, hilarious, groundbreaking comedy, one whose meta-mythology would spill out infinitely into the real world, as the fake band became, for all intents and purposes, a real one. The blurring goes ever on; in the film, Spinal Tap plays a fake venue in Milwaukee called Shank Hall. Since 1989, there has been a real Shank Hall in Milwaukee. In 1992, Spinal Tap held a press conference there. Spinal Tap has become the ouroboros of parody.

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The Sorcerers (1967)

Posted on February 4, 2017 at 8:45 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Swinging London takes center stage in The Sorcerers (1967), an unusual horror film with science fiction elements featuring a late career performance from Boris Karloff and directed by cult icon Michael Reeves. Reeves made his reputation on the strengths of his next film, Witchfinder General (1968), widely considered to be one of the best British horror films of the 1960’s. But not long after that film’s release, Reeves died of an accidental barbiturate overdose on February 11, 1969. He was only 25 years old, but he had already directed three films (the other one being The She Beast, with Barbara Steele), and served as a second unit and assistant director on several others. Despite his experience, there is still a sense in The Sorcerers of a young, creative man cutting his teeth in filmmaking. It’s a very low budget film, made for the playboy producer Tony Tenser (who produced Polanski’s Repulsion) and Tenser’s Tigon Productions, which specialized in poverty row exploitation films, most in the horror or sexploitation genre. (Tigon’s finest achievement would be the sublime and chilling Satanic panic horror film of 1971, The Blood on Satan’s Claw.) The chief exploitation element in The Sorcerers is the presence of Karloff, who was 78 when the film was shot, and would pass away two years later. Karloff looks frail, though it is to his advantage that the film requires him to be a more sympathetic, somewhat pitiful character. He is not playing a formidable boogeyman, but a mad scientist who discovers that the real monster he’s created…might be his own wife.

Mike (Ian Ogilvy) subjects himself to a mind-altering experiment.

The setting is the hip London scene that its young director likely knew very well. Mike (Ian Ogilvy, who appeared in each of Reeves’ films) is a cool, reserved young man in the David Hemmings/Blow-Up mold who hangs out at clubs listening to (bad) psychedelic bands and flirting with the pretty Nicole (German actress Elizabeth Ercy, Phaedra), despite the fact that one of his friends is interested in her. While walking the streets late one night, he encounters Dr. Marcus Monserrat (Karloff), who offers him a mind-expanding trip better than LSD. At the promise of the next bold new experience, Mike takes the bait, but is surprised that their destination is the doctor’s modest, drab-looking home, where his wife, Estelle (Catherine Lacey, The Lady Vanishes, The Mummy’s Shroud), awaits. He’s taken into a back room with white walls and lab equipment, and sits in a chair, allowing the doctor and his wife to attach an electrical apparatus to his head. A projector illuminates his face with a psychedelic light show like those projected behind Pink Floyd at the local UFO Club; it’s a visual technique used in the same year’s The Trip (1967). When the performance is over, Dr. Monserrat and his wife have hypnotized Mike. They command him to leave the house with no memory of what’s transpired. And as he goes about his evening – including a late night swim with Nicole – the Monserrats discover that their experiment is a success: they have become telepathically linked to Mike, and can experience his physical sensations a la Netflix’s Sense8.

Dr. Monserrat (Boris Karloff) hooks Mike up to his machine with the help of Estelle Monserrat (Catherine Lacey).

Dr. Monserrat encourages disconnecting from Mike before the telepathic sessions go too long, but Estelle becomes addicted to the vicarious sensations. She discovers that her ability to control Mike can overpower her husband’s, and a sociopathic streak emerges. She commands Mike to start physical alterations with his friends. When Mike visits his Ex, Audrey (a young Susan George, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry), to confess that he’s having blackout periods where he can’t recall what he’s done, Estelle compels him to stab her to death with a kitchen knife. He then strangles a singer (Sally Sheridan, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) from the club he frequents. Estelle brings her new propensity for violence into her housebound world, as she clubs her husband, leaving him slumped, paralyzed, on the floor; then she continues driving Mike to further and further extremes, while his friends Nicole and Alan (Victor Henry, Privilege) begin to suspect Mike of the murders. She doesn’t take heed of the fact that when Mike is cut, the wounds also appear on her and her husband – signs that the experiment might prove dangerous for more than just their subject. The simple but clever premise of The Sorcerers, as conceived by John Burke (his original screenplay was rewritten by Reeves and his Witchfinder General co-writer Tom Baker) allows for a science fiction/horror tale with no special effects or elaborate sets. It even permits its elderly stars, Karloff and Lacey, to perform all their scenes in one location, and mostly seated at a table. Reeves shoots in the streets, clubs, and back alleys of London – as well as an antiques shop with the unfortunate name “The Glory Hole” – to keep the budget low enough to satisfy Tenser and Tigon. It’s a modest thriller, but an inventive one, with a satisfying ending to match the Gothic yarns for which Karloff had become a legend. But mostly The Sorcerers was a proving ground for Reeves’ next effort, a period picture that would be much more challenging, ambitious, and grand in scope, and starring another horror legend, Vincent Price.

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