ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER MAN (1966) ** ½

I’m a big fan of Doris Wishman, although I readily admit I much prefer her wild, anything-goes ‘70s work to the nudies and roughies she made in the ‘60s.  Having said that, this one is pretty good.  It has all the hallmarks you’d expect from a Wishman joint, namely:  Awkward editing during the dialogue scenes (to disguise the fact she didn’t have synch sound), random ass cutaways to planters and clown paintings (again, to disguise the fact she didn’t have synch sound), and gratuitous close-ups of feet and breasts whenever things slow down (again, to disguise the fact she didn’t have synch sound). 

Ann (Barbi Kemp) just got married to Steve (Tony Gregory).  When Steve comes down with a mysterious illness, it leaves their household without an income.  Forced to support her ailing hubby, Ann turns to her former roommate’s lecherous pimp for help, who promptly puts her to work hooking.  Naturally, when Steve finally figures it all out, it leads to predictably tragic results.

A lot of the fun comes from seeing Ann’s transformation from mousy housewife to sexy lady of the night.  By that I mean, the change is almost immediate.  One minute she’s wearing demure wardrobes, and the next, she’s slinking around in a skintight bodysuit and sporting a beehive hairdo.  Her hubby is often hilariously oblivious to the change in her.

Like many of Wishman’s films, Another Day, Another Man looks great.  Wishman’s cinematography is usually on-point, and this is no exception.  The big issue is the odd plot detours that often lead to a bumpy ride.  At one point, the plot stops abruptly and goes into the pimp boyfriend’s backstory.  The stuff with the pimp courting twin sisters into a life of prostitution, and the subsequent subplot about a boyfriend breaking off his engagement because he learns his girlfriend’s a hooker eats up a lot of screen time and gets in the way of main plotline.

Another Day, Another Man is also kind of tame and a lot less seedy than Wishman’s best work.  It’s still fairly enjoyable though.  I’d say it’s about on par with Bad Girls Go to Hell, but it’s far from the dizzying heights of Let Me Die a Woman.

The most memorable part is the awesome music.  The main theme, “The Hell Raisers” by The Syd Dale Orchestra is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.  It later became the iconic Something Weird theme, and if you’ve ever watched one of their videos, you know it will be stuck in your head for days after you hear it.  The rest of the music in the movie isn’t quite as memorable, but it’s still pretty darn good.

The dialogue is often a hoot too; my favorite line being:  “I haven’t seen you since yesterday… and that’s almost twenty-four hours!”

AKA:  Another Day, Another Way.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: I SAW THE DEVIL (2011) ****

While stranded roadside awaiting a tow truck, a pregnant woman is kidnapped and killed by a deranged serial killer (Min-sik Choi).  Her fiancé (Byung-hun Lee) just so happens to be a secret agent, and he sets out to exact revenge.  Not content to merely execute his girlfriend’s killer and be done with it, our hero instead allows him to escape, only to find him and punish him again and again.  Unfortunately, the crafty killer eludes his grasp, and he sets out to make his tormentor pay by making his family his next victims.

From Jee-woon (The Last Stand) Kim, I Saw the Devil is one of the most brutal, unflinching, harrowing, and disturbing films I have ever seen.  That’s not hyperbole.  I actually had to stop the movie a couple times because it became so intense and I was so emotionally drained.  Maybe 2020 wasn’t the year to check out such a bleak, nihilistic, and depressing flick. 

That said, the craftsmanship at work here is astounding.  It is a headlong plunge into the darkest recesses of man’s soul, and it never looks back.  it would’ve been easy to let something like this lapse into your standard torture porn scenario.  However, Kim proves to be a dynamic filmmaker.  There is a scene inside a car where the camera pans around the three passengers that is on par with anything the Masters of Horror have concocted. 

The performance by Lee is an all-timer too.  He is a complete badass during his stalking and torturing scenes.  As a fan of his work in the G.I. Joe movies, I expected that.  What caught me completely off guard was how great he is during his grieving sequences.  His final scene is downright heartbreaking, and in the last few seconds of screen time is some of the best acting I’ve seen in a long time. 

In short, I Saw the Devil deserves to be discussed in the same breath as Seven and Silence of the Lambs as one of the all-time greats of serial killer cinema.  Be warned however:  This movie will chew you up and spit you out. 

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY (1988) ***

Superstar:  The Karen Carpenter Story is the wonderfully bizarre first film from director Todd (Safe) Haynes.  It tells the rise and fall of wholesome pop singer Karen Carpenter and her struggles to balance her career with her battle with the debilitating eating disorder anorexia.  That might not sound “wonderfully bizarre” until you realize it’s (mostly) told with Barbie dolls.  All this might seem a little quaint now, but I remember when it caused a sensation when it was first released. 

The film (which clocks in at a scant 43 minutes) was made in 1988, just before people were obsessed with Behind the Music, so seeing such a frank portrayal of fame, fortune, and mental illness was still something of a novelty.  The fact that it’s acted by Barbie dolls just adds to the overall effect.  What makes it so compelling is the acerbic wit that runs throughout the picture.  Any old YouTuber nowadays can film a movie using Barbie dolls.  It takes a gifted filmmaker to tackle the subject matter and craft it into something darkly funny and even somewhat poignant, especially when all your leads are played by toys.

At the height of her stardom, Karen is insulted by a journalist who calls her “fat”.  Soon after, she becomes anorexic.  Her bandmate brother Richard puts their career over her well-being, forcing her to tour, causing her to spiral further out of control.

Haynes’ uses many of The Carpenters’ songs (as well as a few other artists) throughout the film, and quite well, I might add.  The fact that he never got permission to use them ensured that this would never get an official release.  However, it’s that kind of bravado that helped to cement the movie’s underground status. 

Despite the fact the lead is a hunk of plastic, you strangely wind up feeling something by the end of the film.  That’s due largely to Haynes’ talent behind the camera.  Forget the fact he got all his actors from Mattel.  That montage of Karen singing and binging on Ex-Lax while the numbers on her scale continue to dwindle is as good as anything in a Scorsese movie.  I also applaud his clever set design, which is simultaneously low-tech (at one point, a Light Bright is used for stage lighting) and ingenious.

Even at 43 minutes, this is still probably a good fifteen minutes too long.  The live action snippets aren’t nearly as much fun as the stuff with the Barbies, and the man-on-the-street interviews could’ve easily been scrapped.  Despite its flaws, Superstar:  The Karen Carpenter Story is a fun glimpse into the burgeoning mind of a warped and gifted director.

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II (1976) **

All This and World War II is an assemblage of WWII stock footage interspersed with scenes from old WWII movies set to Beatles songs.  Well, covers of Beatles songs to be exact.  It’s not very good, but it’s just bizarre enough to hold your attention and leave you scratching your head.

I have a soft spot for this sort of nonsense.  It reminds me of something they’d play on Night Flight back in the day in the wee hours of the morning.  It was made during the pre-MTV days when filmmakers were still experimenting with ways to merge pop music with a visual narrative.  Like most experiments, it’s a failure, but there are a few definite highlights.

The covers are mostly terrible, and they almost always are an ill fit to the action on screen.  It’s kind of surreal hearing country and western legend Frankie (Blazing Saddles) Laine singing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” while Laurel and Hardy, Jimmy Stewart, and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy enlist.  Some marriages of sight and sound are just stupefying, like watching Pearl Harbor being bombed to the tune of Leo Sayer’s rendition of “I am the Walrus”.  The Battle of Midway, set to Elton John singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, works slightly better, but it still feels a little tone deaf (in more ways than one).

Laine’s cover of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is probably the best song in the bunch.  (It’s a lot better than Steve Martin’s version from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, that’s for sure.)  The majority of the covers are just plain bad though, and some of them border on thoroughly unlistenable.  Even the songs that sound like they can’t miss fail spectacularly (like Tina Turner’s “Come Together”) and the ones that must’ve looked good on paper (like The Brothers Johnson doing “Hey Jude”) are big disappointments.  (They should’ve used the Wilson Pickett version.)  

This review is coming from someone who isn’t a Beatles fan, so your mileage may vary.  As someone who enjoys weird shit, it went down smooth enough.  I’d certainly rather watch this over that Across the Universe bullshit any day. 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: MYSTERIES OF BLACK MAGIC (1958) ***

Egle Elohim (Nadia Haro Olivia) causes a sensation when she performs a black magic stage show in a small Mexican town.  Professor Tejeda (Carlos Riquelme) is skeptical of her abilities, but once he sees her show, he becomes convinced she is the descendant of a 15^th witch.  He investigates the matter, and Egle promptly kills him using that old black magic.  It doesn’t take long for his daughter Maria (Lulu Parga) to become suspicious too, especially once Egle begins casting a love spell on her boyfriend (Aldo Monti).

Mysteries of Black Magic is a stylish and entertaining Mexican horror flick.  What it lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in atmosphere as there are plenty of fog-shrouded crypts and torchlit-dungeons that add an eerie ambiance to the proceedings.  Egle’s magic shows are also a lot more macabre (and nastier) than the typical American mad hypnotist/magician movies of the era, which helps to set it apart from many similarly themed films. 

The film moves along at a reasonably steady clip too, and the plot-heavy dialogue scenes are short and sweet for this kind of thing, which is nice.  Although it starts to run out of gas near the end, the witch’s comeuppance makes for a solid enough send-off for the horrible hag.  The climactic appearance of a zombified, leprous sorcerer adds to the fun in the final reel. 

The only real downside is that the supporting performances are a bit stiff and/or reserved.  That’s okay though because Olivia makes a memorable impression as the scheming, brooding witch.  She more than compensates for her castmates’ lack of thespian prowess, especially when she’s conjuring demonic forces, performing black magic rituals, or barking orders at her assistant, who has ears so big they put Mr. Spock’s to shame.  Even if you didn’t enjoy the movie as much as I did, Olivia’s performance is sure to cast a spell on you.

AKA:  Return from the Beyond.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE INITIATION (1984) ** ½

Daphne (Spaceballs) Zuniga is a sorority pledge who must spend the night in her parents’ department store with her sisters as part of her initiation.  Too bad there’s an escaped lunatic lurking about who’s stabbing everybody in the throat with a three-pronged garden trowel.  Gee, do you think this ominous figure could be somehow connected to all those bad dreams Zuniga’s been having lately? 

Produced by the creators of the Buck Rogers TV show, The Initiation starts off with a scene of Clu Gulager banging Vera Miles, and let me tell you, it’s far and away the scariest part of this movie.  Sadly, this is one of those deals that is made of scrap parts of other horror films and then patchworked together in a half-assed fashion.  Among the cliched plot elements are an escaped killer, nightmare sequences, dream analysis, and long-buried family secrets.  Oh, yeah, and there’s a sorority initiation too.  There’s so much going on in the flick that it almost forgets what it’s about.

Which is a shame because once the action switches over to the shopping mall, The Initiation turns into a decent little slasher.  Heck, I even dug the last-minute twist ending.  It’s just that the first fifty minutes or so is rough going at times.

Zuniga does a fine job, all things considered.  Her character actually is allowed to have a little personality, which is a nice change of pace.  Future soap star Hunter Tyler also helps to brighten things up as Zuniga’s plucky pal.  Gulager is always a welcome presence in something like this, even if he doesn’t stick around very long.  Miles looks slightly embarrassed to be there (this came out the year after Psycho 2), but the pay must’ve been pretty good because she doesn’t phone it in. 

The gore is OK too.  The garden trowel kills are moderately bloody, but it’s nothing that would get gorehounds’ pulses racing.  To make up for that fact, we get a little T & A, although not enough to bump this up to *** territory.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: NECROMANCER (1988) **

While leaving campus one dark evening, college student Julie (Elizabeth Kaitan) is raped by her one of her fellow classmates.  Feeling powerless and looking for revenge, she turns to a local witch (Lois Matsen) for help.  She performs a satanic ritual and imbues Julie with a green-eyed succubus who roams around at night seducing and killing the men who wronged her. 

I’ve always been a big fan of Elizabeth Kaitan.  I think she really deserved a career outside of cheesy horror flicks and B movies.  With her raspy voice and crimson mane (although it’s dyed blonde here), she was always a welcome presence in even the worst cinematic offerings.  Here, she gets a decent topless scene, although it’s not nearly enough to make the often-laborious film worth sitting through.

Necromancer is one of those annoying types of movies when just when it should be over, it plods on about twenty minutes more.  All the plot threads have been wrapped up, but it conveniently finds new ways to drag on.  The superfluous nerd character (who looks like Keith Gordon in Christine, but with green streaks in his hair) feels particularly tacked on.  I’m not sure if the director lost a bet and had to give this guy a part or what, but he’s quite annoying and unnecessary. 

There is just enough stupidity to keep you watching though.  For instance, the witch’s place of business is hilarious.  It looks like an ‘80s version of a hipster pop-up boutique.  That is to say, the witch just pitched a tent in her driveway, decorated the insides with a bunch of witchcraft shit, and called it a day. 

Also, get a load of Russ Tamblyn as Kaitan’s professor (and former flame).  He really chews the scenery and makes his work in all those Al Adamson movies seem downright Shakespearean in comparison.  In fact, he even gets to perform Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in this and boy is it ever… something.  

The monster is really lame too as it looks like a bunch of strawberry jam wearing a blond wig.  I did like the green-eyed demon effects whenever Kaitan goes to kill somebody though.  They were sort of reminiscent of Bobbi Bresee’s transformation in Mausoleum.  If only Kaitan had a pair of monster boobs like Bobbi did in that picture.  Maybe then, Necromancer would’ve been worthwhile.