CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OLYMPICS (1937) ***

The government is testing a prototype remote controlled plane off the coast of Honolulu when a saboteur kills the pilot and steals the robot controller.  While on a fishing trip, super sleuth Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) stumbles upon the wreckage of the plane and follows the clues to Germany, which just so happens to be where his son Lee (Keye Luke) is training for the Olympics.  When Chan discovers the remote, he steals it to gain leverage on the criminals, but they retaliate by kidnapping Lee.  Chan then must make a desperate play to save his son, nab the villains, and recover the device.

Warner Oland gives yet another spry performance as Charlie Chan in his thirteenth appearance in the role.  His dispensing of fortune cookie wisdom is as funny as ever (“Husband… like toupee on bald head… used as cover!”) and once again has a nice rapport with Luke as his “Number One Son”.  Luke also gets some good moments as he tries to crack the case on his own while aboard a cruise ship with the rest of the Olympic team.  Oland scores some laughs too during his interactions with his younger son (Layne Tom, Jr.) who fancies himself a super sleuth in the making.  I also liked his scenes with his German counterpart (Frederick Vogeding), a committed police inspector who helps Chan on the case. 

The case is rather nifty, and the pacing is agreeable enough.  Although for a movie called Charlie Chan at the Olympics, it does take him almost a full hour to get there.  The stock footage from the Olympic Games is well-utilized though and it fits rather seamlessly with the rest of the action.  The plot is really secondary as the movie is at its best when it explores Chan’s relationship with his sons.  (It’s also notable for having Chan ride on the Hindenberg shortly before it exploded in real life.)

CUT-THROATS NINE (1973) ***

A stagecoach driver and his young daughter are tasked with the difficult assignment of transporting a group of chain gang prisoners across the wintry prairie.  Along the way, they get held up by some bandits who think they’re carrying a shipment of gold, there is a confrontation, and the stagecoach is destroyed.  That means our hero and his daughter have to lead the convicts by foot through the snow.  He also has another reason for seeing his job through:  One of the prisoners just might’ve been the man who killed his wife years ago.    

Cut-Throats Nine is a tense, mean, and nasty western featuring a bunch of ugly dudes doing ugly things to people (and each other).  It’s bleak, downbeat, and unpleasant most of the time, but it’s also suspenseful, gory, and well-made.  The script is also surprising as it gives us a pretty good plot twist halfway through that sets up the intense second half.  It’s consistently entertaining and keeps finding new ways to hook the viewer while simultaneously raising the stakes for the characters in an unexpected way. 

This was already a tough and mean-spirited movie, but the gore sequences help to really put it over the top.  These gory moments make it feel like Herschell Gordon Lewis was hired as a second unit director on a Sam Peckinpah western.  Heads are bashed in, throats are slit, faces get shot off, bodies are burned, brains are blown out, and guts are ripped out.

You almost get the feeling Tarantino might’ve watched this before he made The Hateful Eight.  In fact, it would make a great double feature with that film.  It kind of loses some of the tension in the third act once the convicts take the proprietor of a general store hostage.  However, whenever they are on the road fighting for survival and banding together against their captor, Cut-Throats Nine makes for some gripping, downbeat entertainment. 

AKA:  Bronson’s Revenge.  

SATANIS: THE DEVIL’S MASS (1970) **

Satanis:  The Devil’s Mass is a sporadically insightful but mostly boring documentary on Anton LaVey and his Church of Satanism.  One of the most interesting things it does is dispel the notion that the Church and its members are evil as it paints LaVey, his wife, and his (very small) congregation as “normal” people who are more or less just exercising their American right of freedom of religion.  LaVey tells us that at its core, Satanism is a “selfish religion” that welcomes its practitioners to indulge themselves on sex and sin without any fear of punishment in the afterlife.  The thinking is that once you have indulged yourself, you know what it takes to indulge others. 

One fascinating aspect is the Church’s progressive stance on homosexuality.  They preach “acceptance” rather than “tolerance”.  It’s a lesson that many people could stand to learn today. 

Strangely, the movie is at its weakest when it showcases the Satanic rituals.  The filmmakers go through such great lengths to make the participants average everyday people, that I guess it’s no surprise that the ritual sequences are so lackluster.  The stuff with the nude dancers writhing around with a boa constrictor may have been titillating if it wasn’t for all the rhythmic drumming.  That, combined with the muddy visuals, just about put me to sleep.  Some aspects of the rituals are downright laughable (like LaVey’s black pajamas with horns sticking out of his head).  I’m not sure how accurate these scenes are or if they were embellished for the camera, but something just sort of feels off about it.  It’s almost as if they tried to make it look like your typical horror flick so that Joe Average Moviegoer wouldn’t feel cheated. 

However, there’s just way too much boring filler (like the section detailing LaVey’s antique and knickknack collection) here to make it all worthwhile.  If it was cut down to about a half-hour it would’ve been a riveting short subject.  As is, Satanis:  The Devil’s Mass is best viewed as a curio of its time. 

AKA:  Succubus. 

THE FRENCH LINE 3-D (1953) **

When her fiancée leaves her high and dry, a sexy oil heiress (Jane Russell) tries to take her mind off things by taking a cruise to Paris.  She decides to find herself a new man too, but she wants to make sure that this time, it’ll be someone who loves her for her and not her money.  She gets more than she bargained for when she meets a French lothario (Gilbert Roland).

The French Line is a bit more tolerable than the last Jane Russell movie I saw, The Outlaw.  It has a standard issue story (the threadbare plot is a remake of the Fay Wray movie, The Richest Girl in the World), and the musical numbers are forgettable (Roland’s songs are particularly lame), but it does at least have the benefit of the 3-D gimmick.  As a 3-D aficionado, I would be remiss if I didn’t leap at the chance to see Jane Russell and her enormous talents in all their 3-D glory. 

The bubble bath number is nice because she gets to do a little teasing with the audience, hiding her exquisite frame inside the tub, while wrapped in a towel, and standing behind a partition.  While her figure doesn’t exactly leap out at the screen like the paddleball in House of Wax, Russell’s curves are accentuated by the format, even if director Lloyd Bacon doesn’t use the gimmick to its fullest potential.  Besides some bubbles that are blown into the camera, the only other eye-popping effect comes during a random ass musical number about people refusing to eat hors d’oeuvres when a waiter thrusts a tray into the audience.  The depth-of-field stuff looks okay during the dance numbers (especially the fashion show sequence), but the standard romance sequences don’t utilize the 3-D at all.

It’s probably more famous for how it was marketed than for what it actually contains.  Producer Howard Hughes had some great taglines in the ads like “See Jane Russell in 3-D!  She’ll knock BOTH your eyes out!”  That’s about all it took for me to check it out too.

Which leads us to the finale, which is the highlight.  It’s here where Jane sings “Lookin’ for Trouble” while dressed in a slinky one-piece that was so skimpy that it singlehandedly caused the film to lose its Production Code seal and become condemned by the Catholic Church.  Is it really that scandalous?  Well, there is one shot where Russell’s chassis just about lands in your lap, and for that oh-so brief moment, you thank the cinema gods for inventing 3-D.  Is it worth the wait?  Yes and no.  That moment will definitely get your motor running.  It’s just that the rest of the flick is so pedestrian that it almost feels like it came out of a different movie entirely.

The comprehensive 3-D rundown is as follows: 

·         3-D Bubbles

·         3-D Hors D’oeuvres 

·         3-D Fabric

·         3-D Jane Russell

Keep a lookout for Kim Novak making her film debut as one of Roland’s dancers, and Sandy Descher (the little girl from Them) also pops up as a bratty kid on the ship.

NECROPOLIS (1986) ** ½

A witch (LeeAnne Baker) tries to kill a virgin (Jacquie Fitz) on her wedding night and is stopped by a runaway slave (William K. Reed) before she can complete the ceremony.  Three hundred years later, she is reincarnated as a sexy punk rocker who rides a red motorcycle around New York City looking for the descendant of the slave (now a preacher in a homeless shelter) so she can exact her revenge.  She also resurrects a zombie army to aid her in her quest to kill the reincarnated version of the virgin bride.

LeeAnne Baker is fun to watch, which makes some of the witchy hijinks go down smoother than I expected.  With her bleached white punk hairdo, she resembles Lois Ayres a little bit and has plenty of attitude to spare.  Too bad she wasn’t in more stuff (her filmography is mainly limited to Tim Kincaid and Gorman Bechard movies) because she has a memorable screen presence. 

The opening of Necropolis did not inspire confidence as it’s awkwardly (okay, incompetently) edited.  At least it features a brief bit where Baker does a sexy striptease before getting down to the witchcraft shit.  In fact, Baker does these sexy little dance numbers to no one in particular for no good reason whatsoever throughout the movie, which prevents it from becoming too boring. 

Baker’s centerpiece sequence comes during the jaw-dropping scene where she sprouts four extra breasts and invites her zombie henchmen to suckle from her teats.  (Complete with close-up of her nipple leaking thick, slimy milk.)  Although the make-up on her spare boobs isn’t really convincing, I do admire the audacity of this scene.  Even if the majority of Necropolis is a little on the wonky side, this sequence stands as a memorable slice of WTF zaniness.  It even caused this jaded B-movie fan’s eyebrows to raise. 

The finale isn’t bad either as it features burning faces, severed heads, and hacked-off hands.  Too bad the follow-up sequence is predictable and goes on a bit too long.  I guess they were trying to set things up for a sequel, but it’s really only there to pad out the running time.  A sequel finally materialized thirty-three years later as part of Full Moon’s “Deadly Ten”, a series of films that were crowdsourced by fans. 

AKA:  Necropolis:  City of the Dead. 

CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH (1968) ** ½

After a lot of heavy partying and lustful encounters, Baron Brack (Michel Lemoine) and his friends pay a visit to his neighbor, The Earl of Saxon (Howard Vernon).  They learn his daughter died only an hour before, and even though the dude just suffered a horrible loss, Brack and company impose on the Earl and worm their way into spending the night in his castle.  Naturally, one of the girls, Marion (Claudia Butenuth) is a dead ringer for the Earl’s daughter, and he schemes to use her body for his latest devious experiment. 

Oh, and there’s apparently a killer bear that’s on the loose on the castle grounds. 

I swear, half this movie is comprised of people giving each other conspiratorial, predatorial, or sexual glances.  The funniest bit of ogling comes when the Baron stares agog at the sexy Vera (Janine Reynaud) at the dinner table while she suggestively licks and sucks on a chicken bone.  The other half of this flick is devoted to long-winded, disgusting, real-life footage of open-heart surgeries.  Sometimes they are snuck in the middle of dialogue scenes, well, just because, I suppose.  Sometimes they are superimposed over nightmare sequences.  Sometimes the open-heart surgeries are superimposed over other open-heart surgeries.

I guess that means this would be perfect Valentine’s Day viewing.    

Although it was directed by Adrian (Mark of the Devil 2) Hoven, Castle of the Creeping Flesh feels a lot like a Jess Franco flick (which is fitting because he worked on the script), thanks to the participation of Vernon, the sluggish pace, the shitty camerawork, and the general air of horniness.  There’s probably a solid, concise story somewhere in there, but Hoven tells it in such a jumbled fashion that it’s often perplexing to watch.  It feels less like it had a screenplay and more like it was assembled from parts of other movies and haphazardly reversed engineered into something resembling an actual movie. 

Castle of the Creeping Flesh is slow moving for the first hour or so, but there is a span of like ten minutes that is a total laugh riot.  There’s a hilarious scene where a guy bursts in on a lovemaking couple to tell them their friend is missing, but they are too busy doing the deed to even notice.  It’s the random-ass bear attack that takes the cake when it comes to WTF nuttiness.  I especially loved the fact the bear kicks the guy when he’s down like a common street brawler after the fight is over. 

If you’re patient, you’ll be pleased to know that everything gets tied together in the very end.  If you make it that far, that is.  I can’t say it’s a conventionally “good” movie, but it’s moderately entertaining; alternating from disgusting to sexy to downright hilarious, which is no easy feat to be sure.

It also benefits from a great performance by Reynaud.  In her most memorable scene, she watches breathlessly as a young maiden is gang raped in a barn.  She gets so turned on that she whips out her breasts and heaves them up and down in front of the camera like she’s in a 3-D movie, and cackles hysterically when she climaxes.  If the rest of the ladies in the cast had the same kind of enthusiasm as Reynaud, Castle of the Creeping Flesh could’ve been a classic.

AKA:  Appointment with Lust.  AKA:  Castle of Bloody Lust.  AKA:  Castle of Lust.  AKA:  Castle of Unholy Desires.  AKA:  In the Castle of Bloody Lust. 

ROCK ROCK ROCK! (1956) ** ½

This “jukebox musical” was the first movie produced by the team of Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, the brains behind Amicus Films.  It was also the film debut of Tuesday Weld, whose singing voice was provided by Connie Francis.  It features a veritable cavalcade of rock n’ roll talent including Chuck Berry, The Flamingos, The Johnny Burnette Trio, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.  Alan Freed (a few years away from his infamous payola scandal) serves as the host of his own TV show and turns up later to emcee the prom at the end. 

Weld wants to buy a dress so she can go to the prom.  Her tightwad dad wants to teach her the importance of having a budget and refuses to give her money for the dress.  (“Money doesn’t grow on fathers!”)  To add to her woes, the new girl in school is making eyes at her boyfriend.  How can she compete with that unless she has that strapless evening gown that’s all the rage with the kids nowadays?  Why, think up a get-rich-quick scheme, that's how!  In the meantime, she watches Alan Freed introduce The Flamingos singing “Would I Be Crying”, The Moonglows doing “I Knew from the Start”, and Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers belting out “Big Beat”. 

The highlight though is Chuck Berry singing, “You Can’t Catch Me”.  There’s no backing band.  Just him on stage, tearing it up on the guitar.  It’s simply awesome.  He even does his patented duck walk too.

Oh, and… uh… Freed sings too (badly).

It should come as no surprise that the musical numbers are the main draw.  Even the ones that aren’t so hot are preferable to the inane sub-sitcom subplot with Weld running a collections racket.  Still, Weld is cute is a button, so it’s not totally without merit.  I also liked the scene where the dad slowly begins to enjoy the acts on Freed’s show and winds up giving them a big round of applause by the end.  Little moments like this help keep Rock Rock Rock! rocking, even when the bands aren’t front and center.

The future director of Space Mutiny, David Winters, also appears in a small role.