The Lost Continent (1968)

Posted on May 5, 2020 at 7:51 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

After taking one of the black magic novels of bestselling author Dennis Wheatley and turning it into a genuine Hammer horror classic – The Devil Rides Out (1968) – the studio next embarked on one of the author’s pulp adventures, 1938’s William Hope Hodgson-inspired Uncharted Seas. The result was retitled The Lost Continent (1968), a change that was unnecessary but also confusing, given the existence of Robert Lippert’s 1951 film The Lost Continent (released in the UK by Exclusive, the distribution company established by Hammer founding fathers William Hinds and Enrique Carreras) as well as 1961’s George Pal film Atlantis: The Lost Continent. Uncharted Seas, in my opinion, is a better title – and this is also a very different film than the others. Rather than presenting a rip-roaring matinee adventure, this is a weirdly depressive, alcohol-drenched voyage that drifts aimlessly into some very strange seas indeed. In an interview on Shout Factory’s new Blu-ray, film historian Kim Newman places this in what he calls the “ship of fools” subgenre – a group of strangers trapped together on a vessel, immersed in their own dramas despite the presence of catastrophe. What’s so odd is that in this case their little soap operas have absolutely no bearing on what happens to them; I could attempt to explain, for example, that Ms. Eva Peters (German actress and singer Hildegard Knef) is the mistress of the former president of Santo Domingo, that she assassinated him and stole “two million dollars’ worth of securities and negotiated bonds” to pay the ransom for her son, and that she’s been tracked down by an enforcer, Ricaldi (Ben Carruthers of The Dirty Dozen), except that all is quickly forgotten when they’re being attacked by flesh-rending tentacles of living seaweed. Her extremely convoluted backstory serves only to mark time until the film takes at least two jarring turns into different genres altogether.

The ship of fools and explosives, with Suzanna Leigh striking a pose.

Joining Ms. Peters on this oceanic voyage from Freetown to Caracas are Dr. Webster (Nigel Stock, The Great Escape), his outrageously promiscuous daughter Unity (Suzanna Leigh), piano-playing cad Harry Tyler (Tony Beckley), a morally conflicted first officer (Neil McCallum), a bartender who looks kind of like Hammer regular Michael Ripper (Jimmy Hanley), the actual Michael Ripper (partially disguised by some scarring makeup over one eye), and a captain (Eric Porter) who’s smuggling “Phosphor B,” a dangerous explosive that’s ignited by – unfortunately for everyone involved – water. When McCallum and the crew discover their deadly cargo while sailing into a hurricane, they vote to abandon ship; but soon everyone is chipping in trying to haul the explosives out of the hold as it rapidly floods. Several take refuge in a lifeboat and ride out the storm, but become enveloped by a region of the Sargasso Sea choked with seaweed, some of which rises up to attack them. It’s here that they encounter the “lost continent,” a land mass where a giant crab and scorpion do battle. This realm is inhabited by leprous leftovers of the Spanish Inquisition, answering to the call of a boy king called El Diablo (Darryl Read), stealing the supplies of ships which become trapped in the seaweed and feeding their crew to a monstrous mouth beneath their galleon which resembles a cheaper version of the Sarlacc Pit from Return of the Jedi. Joining forces with our castaways is local revolutionary Sarah (singer Dana Gillespie), notoriously, hilariously introduced striding across the seaweed sea through the use of snowshoes and two giant balloons that offer symmetry with her colossal cleavage. In the film’s prologue, set at the end of the film, the narrator asks, “What happened to us? How did we all get here?” After watching the film, you may not be able to answer one or both of these questions.

“Hammer Glamour” publicity photo of Dana Gillespie as Sarah.

Hammer executive Michael Carreras, who would guide the company through its waning years of the 1970’s, wrote the script and eventually took over directing duties after the original director, Leslie Norman (X the Unknown), was let go. Carreras had produced some excellent films for Hammer, including Ten Seconds to Hell and Yesterday’s Enemy (both 1959), though his career as a director was decidedly more eccentric; Lost Continent would pair well with his previous film, the cheesecake Slave Girls (aka Prehistoric Women, 1967), for its straight-faced approach to material that’s off-the-charts absurdity. This film boasted a luxurious budget of £500,000 and tremendous water tank sets at Elstree Studios for the scenes of abandoning the ship and becoming stranded in the Sargasso Sea. The monstrous puppets were created by no less than Robert Mattey (Jaws, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea); though it must be said the giant crab and scorpion are ludicrous in appearance and bumbling in their movements, in a genre film that cries out for the involvement of a Ray Harryhausen or a Jim Danforth. The film is also saddled – or blessed – with a jazz-pop title song by the Peddlers, about as unconventional a choice for this type of film as one can imagine. And yet it sets the right boozy mood. This is not an escapist family adventure movie; it does, after all, spend about an hour lost in pointless melodrama as the various travelers bicker, make drunken passes, extort, and conspire, before the action finally arrives. Then everything happens so quickly that we struggle to keep up. There are conquistadors? Who’s El Supremo? Why the sudden shift into occult horror when just a second ago it was settling into the mood of a Japanese monster movie? And then it’s over just as it seems to have been getting started, leaving the distinct pangs of a hangover. This movie has fans. How can it not, with such sights and mood swings? But I’m always wistful at the oceanic horrors saga this could have been: when I first saw a bit of this on TV long ago, it was the moment when the crew are being attacked by a tentacular creature on their ship caught in the seaweed-clogged waters beneath a blood orange sky. Once I managed to see the entire film a few years later, I was disappointed – there was so little of what was so fantastic. A year later, Carreras produced Moon Zero Two (1969), another expensive flop for Hammer that spelled the beginning of the end of the company; it, too, features a delirious array of bad taste stampeding over a germ of a good idea. Depending on your point of view, as art these two films are disastrous or unexpected triumphs. And either way, watch it with a stiff drink.

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The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963)

Posted on April 29, 2020 at 1:20 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

So much in Mario Bava’s masterful Hitchcock riff The Girl Who Knew Too Much (aka Evil Eye, 1963) relies upon the luminous, feline features of Letícia Román. Bava puts his heroine through the ringer, but often stays close to her face, occasionally cutting in close to eyes that widen in curiosity or terror, by turns. Román, the audience surrogate, is a mystery buff thrust into a world in which any given event may or may not be real; in critical moments Bava shoots her perspective through a watery distortion so that we also have reason to doubt. We first meet her character, an American tourist named Nora, on a plane en route to Rome. The AIP Evil Eye cut of the film gives her a clever introduction unique from the Italian version: Bava lets his camera drift from one passenger to another down the aisle, eavesdropping on their thoughts (one in untranslated Italian) before settling on Nora, who’s dwelling on a murder. A quick pan down to her reading material – The Knife, which appears to be a giallo – allows us to understand that the crime in which she’s complicit is purely fictional. A fellow passenger offers her a cigarette, and in the next scene he’s getting arrested in the airport for trafficking marijuana cigarettes; Nora discreetly tries to lose the pack of them that he gave her but is thwarted when a passer-by tells her she dropped something. This pays off in a funny gag that ends the Italian cut of the film, as Nora realizes she’s been smoking them through the whole movie – and wonders if everything she’s witnessed is a drug-induced hallucination. It’s an unconvincing argument, but on point: she is, after all, an enthusiast of Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace, so couldn’t she be writing her own pulp paperback? One of the reasons Bava’s film is so fun is that it’s a black-and-white thriller about these kinds of black-and-white thrillers, which were so common in the wake of Les diaboliques (1955) and Psycho (1960). Nora isn’t just reacting to the terrible events that have occurred; she’s also remembering what investigative steps to take, and fearing she’s not the protagonist at all, but merely the next victim on the murderer’s list.

A murder, or a vision of a murder from the past, or just Nora’s imagination?

Shortly after arriving at the home of her bedridden Aunt Ethel (Chana Coubert), Ethel passes away – while Nora is watching, her shock mirrored in the hissing reaction of a cat. The lights flash on and off as though something supernatural has occurred, and indeed, this is the moment of the film that is closest to the eerie gothic horror mode to which Bava had contributed so strongly with Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio, 1960), while in several details directly anticipating the episode “The Drop of Water” from his 1963 portmanteau Black Sabbath (I tre volte della paura). If this feels, like “The Drop of Water,” to be a short film within the film, that might be because it’s also a red herring. Aunt Ethel’s death serves no greater purpose than to get the terrified Nora running out into the street and to the Piazza di Spagna, where she is promptly mugged (also irrelevant), and awakens from a faint or concussion to see a screaming woman collapse on the street and a man pull a knife from her back and drag her off. The rapid succession of traumas sends Nora reeling, until she finally regains her footing and tries to prove both to the police and her friend Marcello (John Saxon, lively and funny) that the murder really occurred, despite the complete absence of evidence. There’s the troublesome detail that the murder as she describes it is an exact match for a crime from 10 years prior, a killer never caught who was apparently choosing victims by working through the alphabet (as in Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders). Did Nora have a psychic vision of the past? She receives a mysterious phone call from a stranger who speculates she might be the next victim, since her last name (different depending on what cut you’re watching) starts with a “D” – the next in line if the killings resume. She tries to think like a detective from one of her stories, scattering talcum powder on the passage leading to her bedroom so she can catch the footprints of intruders, then lacing up a spider web of strings to be triggered if the door is opened – a wonderful image that makes her look not like a spider but a fly already paralyzed in its trap.

Something familiar, not quite placed: Nora (Letícia Román) investigates a possible clue.

The mystery – which also takes into account characters played by Valentina Cortese (Day for Night), Dante DiPaolo (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), and Titti Tomaino – is a satisfying one, but throughout Bava dazzles, whether through gorgeously photographed looming shadows and blinding-bright lights, elegantly choreographed trips through the streets and sights of Rome, or witty, unexpected transitions. An example of the latter comes at the end of a tension-filled journey into an empty apartment where Nora has been lured by a threatening voice (or a typewriter, if you’re watching the AIP version). After being joined by Marcello, the two gather close to the reel-to-reel recorder from which Nora says she heard the voice. They rewind and play it back, only to hear the film’s theme song, Adriano Celentano singing “Furore,” played at peak volume and squealing speed; both jump just as the viewer probably does, and Bava hard cuts to the two back home, again investigating the recorder in less disconcerting surroundings. Another winking edit occurs only in the Italian version: while sunbathing on the beach in a revealing bikini, Nora becomes concerned about the increasingly hostile looks from Marcello. He corners her and we see the fear in her eyes – is he the killer? – before, overcome with sexual desire, he kisses her; Bava then cuts to the two of them sharing the same passionate kiss elsewhere, delighted at the end of a long day together, as if, to Nora, fear and sexual excitement have become interchangeable in her new, pulp thriller lifestyle. In the film’s climax, a figure’s death is signaled by their dropping out of frame, revealing gunshot holes in the door behind them, illuminated with bright beams of light cutting through the smoke. The emphasis on style and self-contained suspense setpieces paved the way for the giallo genre which would later dominate Italian cinemas; for now, improbably, this perfect entertainment was (and would remain) Bava’s lowest grossing film.

 

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Streets of Fire (1984)

Posted on April 27, 2020 at 8:16 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire (1984) opens with a disclaimer of a subtitle, “A Rock & Roll Fable,” before introducing us to its world of “another time/another place.” It’s the equivalent of letting us know that it’s a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: a retro-future or forward-thinking past that exists in a wormhole beyond genre. Hill is conjuring this highly original landscape out of disparate elements: postwar noir, Depression-era crime story, Westerns, 50’s biker movies, rock and roll movies, 80’s MTV, even a bit of Mad Max. The look and sounds vary wildly as you drive from street to street, from backlots to location shooting under the Chicago “L.” As in his earlier masterpiece, The Warriors (1979), this is a fantasy take on urban life, with boroughs divided by colorful tribalism – not too dissimilar from Escape from New York (1981), minus the science fiction hook. The only connecting thread between these subcultures is an awe of rock & roll. That, and the collective exposure to drenching rain and searing lines of neon. Hill’s characters are intentionally broadly drawn, spouting hard-boiled dialogue and not so much belonging inside a pulp magazine as on its cover. Vehicles are casually stolen and driven really, really fast. Everyone has a gun. Bill Paxton is a bartender with a missing tooth. Everything explodes really easily, and punches connect with the crunch of battering rams. This is the kind of detailed cinematic universe in which you might want to spend more than a weekend walking around, assuming you had the right protection.

Diane Lane as rock star Ellen Aim, fronting the Attackers.

Hill was coming off the blockbuster hit of 48 Hrs. (1982), which gave him the leverage to mount this dream project for Universal. As so often happens in situations like these, such a personal, singular, lovingly crafted film didn’t find its audience until home video. In June of 1984 this poorly-marketed wildcard was up against Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, two films where eager audiences knew exactly what they were going to get. Yet the PG-rated Streets of Fire (which probably would have been PG-13 if it had been released in Temple of Doom‘s wake) is every bit the broad-appeal comic book adventure the summer season treasures. True, it’s an idiosyncratic vision, but the story is well-worn (for better or worse). The setting has the look and feel of a post-apocalypse adventure movie; everything is dirty and crumbling. The hard-bitten, seemingly amoral mercenary proves that he has a good heart when the chips are down. The villain is properly, shamelessly evil. There’s even a princess to be saved, memorable sidekicks for the journey, and engaging scenes of tough people beating the bejeezus out of each other. The fact that the songs are almost universally excellent – this is, in fact, a rock musical – shouldn’t have hurt. The film features songs written by Jim Steinman (best known for his work on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell), Stevie Nicks, and Tom Petty, among others; and performances by the Blasters (Dave Alvin’s sweaty rockabilly group), the Fixx, Dan Hartman, and Ry Cooder. Cooder also wrote the score, which is one of the best decisions Hill made: it always sounds like if a fight isn’t about to break out, a rock concert will.

Willem Dafoe as Raven Shaddock.

And although the best opening sequence of 1984 must remain the mix-up at Club Obi Wan in Temple of Doom, Streets of Fire is a close second. Hill cuts an adrenaline-pumped rapid-fire montage of screaming fans crowding into a theater to see a performance by Ellen Aim and the Attackers; her manager and boyfriend Billy Fish (Rick Moranis, almost simultaneously appearing in Ghostbusters) frets on the sidelines; Diane Lane, 2 years after playing a teenage rocker in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982), runs onto the stage and takes the microphone; a few minutes later, the leather jacketed gang the Bombers, led by the sadistic Raven Shaddock (a shockingly young Willem Dafoe), storm the theater and abduct the main act. The streets outside the theater descend into brutal chaos, the Bombers like a Viking horde. The next day, Billy hires Ellen Aim’s ex-boyfriend Tom Cody (Michael Paré, fresh off Eddie and the Cruisers) to find and rescue her, convincing him only by paying out a small fortune. Cody, an ex-soldier, agrees to pay 10% to a gun-toting drifter, McCoy (Amy Madigan, sensational), who will quickly prove her worth. The three lay siege to a biker club where the Blasters are performing and a dancer in fishnets and nothing else entertains the crowd, and soon the title of the film becomes literal as Cody sets up distraction after exploding distraction to misdirect Raven’s psychos. If it’s surprising enough to see Moranis in a prominent role in an action film (in a bowtie, no less), there’s also the left-field cameo by Ed Begley, Jr. as a helpful hobo, Paxton’s aforementioned bartender (who gets punched in the face by Madigan), and even a pre-Hollywood Shuffle Robert Townsend.

Michael Paré as Tom Cody.

The film builds to three major setpieces, the first being the rescue of Ellen Aim and the second being the final confrontation between Cody and Raven, which involves much pummeling in the middle of the street for an audience of just about every single character who has appeared in the film, including the entire police force. But the real finale is a full-circle blowout concert back at the old theater; so this is, in the end, a musical. This stretch features the film’s biggest hit song, Dan Hartman’s “I Can Dream About You,” which is still the most recognizable thanks to its ubiquity on 80’s radio; it’s also, ironically, the most dated number, sorely sticking out. Much better are the film’s two songs written by Steinman, credited to Fire Inc., to which Lane lip syncs using the combined voices of Laurie Sargent and Holly Sherwood. “Nowhere Fast” and “Tonight is What it Means to Be Young” are pleasingly histrionic, soaring power ballads that are convincingly dressed up as in-film hit songs. But everything in this film is playing self-conscious dress-up: baby-faced Lane acting not just the rock star but one that’s been around the block a few times; Moranis with his torrent of tough guy lines; Dafoe sporting, at one point, a pair of slick black overalls that look like they were purchased at a sex shop; a still-green Paré trying to bear the weight of a character who’s meant to be Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Harrison Ford, and Sylvester Stallone fused into one. Only Amy Madigan, as McCoy, and Deborah Van Valkenburgh (The Warriors), as Cody’s sister and moral center, feel completely “authentic,” for however much that matters in a film like Streets of Fire. And it doesn’t really matter for as much as you’d think, because Hill’s self-aware about all this, and expects you’re in on the joke – and don’t mind indulging in it all, when there’s so much rain, fire, neon, sweat, and rock & roll.

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