LET’S GET PHYSICAL: REEFER MADNESS (1936) ***

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 18th, 2007)

The most famous and funniest of the drug scare movies of the ‘30s is just as hilarious today as when it was first released. During an emergency PTA meeting, a leading drug expert tells concerned parents about how people smuggle drugs into their community then settles in and tells them a story how marijuana damaged the lives of some happening young people. A drug dealing married couple invites several of the neighborhood teens to their swinging pad to dance and play records and get them all hooked on Mary Jane. Some of the kids end up as murderers, commit suicide, and become clinically insane.

I’ve never done any kinds of drugs, but I’ve seen stoners in real life, and they don’t swing dance, play piano like Chico Marx on speed, or commit murders. Dave (The Devil Bat) O’Brien takes the acting honors as Ralph who becomes hooked on the cursed devil weed. The scenes of chain smoking, wild eyed, pot puffing teens aren’t easily forgotten. It was re-released several times under many different names and was one of the first midnight cult movies to gain notoriety. Star Dorothy Short (who was also married to O’Brien) was also in the marijuana themed Assassin of Youth the next year.

AKA: Tell Your Children. AKA: Doped Youth.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: MANIAC (1934) ****

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on December 12th, 2008)

Dwain Esper, the man who brought us the immortal Reefer Madness, directed this hilarious cult classic that plays like a Frankenstein movie cross pollinated with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”.

A psychotic physician blackmails an out of work actor (“Once a ham, always a ham!”) into assisting him in his experiments in which he tries to bring the dead back to life.  After the assistant murders the doctor, he hides his corpse behind the basement wall and uses his acting talents to impersonate the doctor.  The dude gets so crazy that he plucks the eyeball out of a cat and eats it.  (“It’s not unlike an oyster or a grape!”)  He also experiments on a drug that turns a patient into a wild screeching maniac who rips the clothes off of a woman and rapes her.  Eventually the cops come and discover the doctor’s body and lock the assistant’s nutty ass up.

To get away with the lurid subject matter, Esper tacked on a written prologue warning the audience of the dangers of mental illness, as well as title cards in between scenes giving us a lot of medical terminology.  You see because the title cards were “informative”, the nudity and murder was OK.  (Esper did the same thing with Reefer Madness.)  Esper’s directorial style is a little flat and stagy, but the constant close-ups of the mad doctor’s face superimposed over shots of devils (stolen footage from Haxan) are really effective.

While it may seem a little tame by today’s standards, Maniac is one of the earliest exploitation movies ever made and therefore it comes highly recommended.  There’s murder, nudity, catfights (one between two women and another involving actual cats) and a little bit of gore.  Filmmakers would later take these elements and run with them, but the groundwork was first laid here with Maniac. 

Maniac sits atop of the Video Vacuum Top Ten of the Year for 1934 at the Number One spot.

AKA:  Sex Maniac.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: ATLAS (1961) *

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As published in my book, Revenge of the Video Vacuum)

Roger Corman is probably the thriftiest person in Hollywood.  That didn’t stop him from dipping deep enough into his pockets to film this sword and sandal “epic” on location in Greece though.  Despite the location work (which gets cropped out anyway, thanks to the shitty DVD transfer), Atlas is one of Corman’s weakest efforts.

Proximates (Frank Wolff) is a tyrant who stops sieging a small town long enough to talk a truce with the town elder.  He says that too many people have already died and suggests both sides send their best warrior to fight mano y mano to settle the dispute.  Proximates agrees, but asks for ten days to find the best fighter.  He goes to Mount Olympus where he discovers Atlas (Michael Forest), an accomplished wrestler.  Atlas agrees to fight and easily bests the town’s warrior.  After the victory, Proximates goes around bossing everyone around while his soldiers have their way with the local women.  Eventually, Atlas has enough of Proximates’ shit and leads a rebellion to overthrow him.

I usually have a low tolerance for these sword and sandal flicks from the ‘50s and ‘60s anyway, but Atlas was much worse than most of the genre’s usual offerings.  It’s a total snoozer from start to finish, and the pacing is pretty much nonexistent.  Just when you think the movie can’t get any duller, along comes one of the most boring courtroom scenes ever filmed to completely take the wind out of its sails.

It also doesn’t help that Atlas himself is a complete joke.  He spends most of his time standing around, and doesn’t do anything remotely heroic until about the last reel.  Some hero.

The battle sequences are lame too.  There are a lot of scenes of people standing and waving swords around that are just pathetic.  Apparently Corman hired 500 extras for the battle scenes, but only 50 showed up.  Even if the extras did show up, I’m not sure it would’ve added much to the movie because of Corman’s haphazard staging of the “action”.

Wolff is pretty awful as the villainous Proximates.  He minces about for 80 minutes and never once seems threatening at all.  I will give him credit for turning the Ham Meter up to Shatner Level, but for the most part, he’s thoroughly irritating.  He does get one funny exchange with a guard though:  

Guard:  “You wanted to see me?”

Proximates:  “No!  I wanted to see your great aunt Helen from Lesbos!”

I did have fun spotting Corman regular Dick Miller as a glorified extra, and even Corman himself in a bit part dressed as a centurion, but that’s about where the fun ended.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SKI TROOP ATTACK (1960) **

FORMAT:  DVD

Roger Corman passed away a while back and I never got around to doing a proper tribute to him.  If anyone typified the Video Vacuum ideology of quantity over quality, it was Corman.  When I was working my way through this ten-movie bargain bin collection of Corman films, I decided this would be the ideal place to acknowledge his passing.  Of the films on the set, Ski Troop Attack was the only one in the mix I hadn’t seen before.  As it turned out, it wasn’t exactly the best one to work as a tribute as it’s kind of an atypical Corman picture.  (It’s a war movie done on a shoestring budget.)  I mean, I know he was one of the thriftiest men on the planet, but with Ski Troop Attack, he tosses in enough stock footage to make Ed Wood’s head spin. 

American troops are behind enemy lines in Germany.  The green Lt. Factor (Michael Forest) butts heads with the mouthy Sgt. Potter (Frank Wolff), who despite his lower rank, has more experience in the field.  He also has an itchy trigger finger, which could sabotage their supposedly stealth mission.  As the outfit presses on to their final objective of blowing up an enemy bridge, tensions mount.  Will they ever put aside their differences and work together as a team?  What do you think?

Corman was working with an obviously low budget, and while he tries to give it a bigger feel of an A-List war picture, he isn’t quite able to pull it off.  Scenes of soldiers on skis shooting enemies sort of play like a precursor to the climax of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but on a much smaller scale.  They’re not bad or anything, but they’re too few of them to make it all worthwhile.  Most of the time though, the action just resembles a bunch of kids playing soldier in the woods on a snow day. 

If I’m being completely honest, Corman’s war movies are typically the least interesting.  Other than the overuse of stock footage, there’s not much here that’s all that amusing.  The drama is strictly second rate, and the action is a mixed bag at best.  It is fun seeing Corman playing a German ski soldier though. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SWAMP DIAMONDS (1956) **

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on July 17th, 2007)

This was one of director Roger Corman’s first films. While it’s not one of his best, this female filled crime melodrama is worth a look if only for a great hateful performance by Beverly Garland. A policewoman (Carol Matthews) infiltrates an all-girl gang serving time in prison. She gains their trust and organizes an escape in exchange for a cut on some diamonds that are stashed in a swamp. Mike “Touch” Connors plays a hapless guy that gets kidnapped by the gang and provides the meager sexual tension. The beginning is hopelessly filled with stock footage of Mardi Gras to pad the already brisk running time, and the ending is wrapped up way too conveniently, but Garland is a hoot at chewing up the scenery. She starred the next year in Corman’s The Gunslinger. Marie (Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy) Windsor and Jonathan (The Little Shop of Horrors) Haze co-star.

AKA: Swamp Women. AKA: Cruel Swamp.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SHE GODS OF SHARK REEF (1958) **

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on August 18th, 2007)

Roger Corman directed this island adventure movie in color! The plot has two fugitive brothers Chris (Bill Cord) and Lee (Don Durant) escaping justice by stealing a boat and heading out to the open sea. There’s a bad storm and they end up shipwrecked on an island that’s populated by nothing but beautiful women. The native girls dance around a lot and worship the plethora of sharks that inhabit the sea surrounding the island. Chris falls in love with one of the maidens who happens to get picked to be the next sacrifice to the sharks. When Chris saves her from getting turned into Shark Chow, he upsets the gods as well as the mean old biddy that runs the tribe. Lee and Chris escape the island with his gal in tow, but Lee gets greedy and steals the women’s satchel of precious pearls and is promptly eaten by a shark.

The way Corman tries to match the action to the stock footage in the final scene is pretty hilarious. While most of the movie is stagnant, it actually features some decent underwater photography and makes great use of the gorgeous tropical locations, despite the visible boom mikes. Corman filmed this (in Hawaii) at the same time with Naked Paradise and it played on a double bill with Corman’s Night of the Blood Beast. There’s also a woefully bad theme song, “Nearer My Love to You” that’s good for some laughs too.

AKA: Shark Reef.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960) **

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on January 12th, 2010)

Roger Corman filmed Last Woman on Earth back-to-back with The Creature from the Haunted Sea.  Since Corman didn’t realize there would be time to fit an additional film into his schedule, he hired screenwriter Robert Towne (who would later go on to write Chinatown) to star.  That way whenever Towne wasn’t acting, he was off writing new scenes.  This patchwork process didn’t do the movie any favors and hampered what could’ve been a decent flick.

 

An embezzler hiding out in Puerto Rico takes his wife and lawyer out scuba diving.  When they return to the island, they are shocked to learn that everyone on Earth has died from some sort of airborne plague.  Since they were breathing air from the scuba tanks underwater, the trio weren’t affected and as a result, they are now the only three people left in the whole world (or in Puerto Rico at least).  Predictably, the lawyer gets horny and tries to steal his client’s wife away from him, which leads to various arguments and fisticuffs.

 

Last Woman on Earth could’ve been a potentially interesting post-apocalyptic love triangle, but Corman couldn’t quite pull it off.  The laborious set-up gets the movie off to a rocky start and the flick never fully recovers.  All the stuff involving the lawyer trying to hump his buddy’s wife is OK from a dramatic viewpoint but ultimately none of the characters are likable enough for you to really give two shits about them.

 

Corman also directed The Little Shop of Horrors, Ski Troop Attack, and The Fall of the House of Usher the same year.