Oops! All Horror - Day 7 - The Vault of Horror (1973)

Content warning: blood, dismemberment 

Five men find themselves on the sub-basement floor of a building with no way to call the elevator back.  To pass the time, they each share a recurring nightmare they have.

This anthology is based on stories that mostly appeared in the Tales from the Crypt magazine, in case they feel familiar.  It is also absolutely packed to the rafters with British talent, with Tom Baker, Denholm Elliott, Glynis Johns, and Terry-Thomas.  Normally, these kinds of movies have one, maybe two decent segments but all of these are pretty on par with each other, if not particularly outstanding.  It works more as a curiosity piece at this point.  Fortunately, the whole thing is streaming on YouTube.  My personal favorite is **SPOILERS FOLLOW** the guy who was just so annoying that he was condemned to relive his own murder for all eternity.  Like, everyone else was out for money or revenge and this guy was just a pedantic shit.  **END SPOILER**  Give it a shot for some vintage thrills.

Madron (1970)

  Content warning:  animal death (rattlesnake)

Sister Mary Joseph (Leslie Caron) is the only survivor of a wagon train massacred by Apache on the way to a mission in Santa Fe.  She wanders haplessly through the desert until she meets Madron (Richard Boone), a gunslinger on the run after a bad business deal.  Madron has managed to piss off an Apache named Sam Red (Chaim Banai) and now Sam and Madron's former business partners are all after him.  Still, he's not the kind of man who would let a nun travel by herself, even if he can't really understand what a nun is.

It's the Volcano vs Dante's Peak of Westerns-featuring-men-exasperated-by-hot-nuns, coming out the same year as Two Mules for Sister Sara.  It's not nearly as memorable, however.  It looks like a made-for-TV movie but was inexplicably nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song, a thoroughly sappy piece of work called "Til Love Touches Your Life."  

It's always nice to see Caron, although she is acting circles around Boone.  Strictly for die-hard Spaghetti Western fans, I think, but it's streaming on Amazon Prime.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

  Content warning:  gun violence, descriptions of domestic abuse

A bank robbery turns into a stand-off with the police on a sweltering summer day in Brooklyn, New York.

I have complicated feelings about this movie and some time on my hands.    

Let's begin with the basics.  This is a great Al Pacino performance.  Sonny is clearly and distinctly the main character, both sympathetic and repulsive, a man obviously suffering from untreated mental health issues and Pacino plays him with great dexterity.  The supporting cast is also great.  Charles Durning is probably not the guy you think of when you imagine someone going toe-to-toe with Pacino at the height of his powers, but he deserves the flowers here.  Penelope Allen, Sully Boyar, and Susan Peretz all turn in great character bits here.  You might recognize Carol Kane, Chris Sarandon, and Lance Henrikson popping in as well.  Also, if you've seen Spike Lee's Inside Man, you'll recognize Marcia Jean Kurtz, by the hair if nothing else.  (It took me nearly half the running time to place her and then I was filled with admiration for Mr. Lee for his homage.)

So, good performances.  Direction is also good.  Tension gets maintained throughout; even when it dips into tedium, it feels intentional, in order to ramp up the drama and fray the nerves.  Sidney Lumet was known for taut psychological films that didn't quite cross the line into thrillers.  He's a little dry for me, personally, but I can't deny the skill.

The nice thing about Lumet is that he definitely believes that subtext is for cowards.  The film is explicitly queer but not in a Very Special Episode kind of way.  It's a story about gay people that's not a Gay Story (tm), yeah?  Sonny is a conflicted man trying to reconcile his feelings with, again, untreated mental illness.  (I have a minor quibble over the way we're told about his violent outbursts but never shown any, but that feeds into my larger issue with the film.  More to follow.)  There's no pearl-clutching or Gay Panic.  Leon's gender dysphoria is actually handled pretty well, considering the time it was made.  I'm just saying.  It could have been way worse but Lumet chooses to treat Sonny as just another New Yorker.

The problem is Sal, the other bank robber played by John Cazale.  He's not really a character; he's a placeholder to fill plot holes.  Hear me out.  We know Sonny's motivation, as ill-conceived as it is.  We see his stressors.  He's the one that interacts with the hostages, the cops, the public.  We get nothing about Sal. He has no backstory, no character development, no reveal.  He doesn't seem to be motivated by the money (he seems a little too into the apparent suicide pact Sonny agreed to before the heist), he doesn't state any relationship to Sonny like brother (*cough*Fredo*cough) or cousin so there's no familial obligation.  He's not gay, so he's not there to help Leon.  Sonny mentions that they're both veterans but not if they served together.  But if you take his character out, Sonny is caught in about two minutes.  It's a two-man job, but the story only cares about one of them.  I don't love that.

Notwithstanding my critique, this is an excellent 70s nihilistic drama.  And it's streaming for free on YouTube.

Female Trouble (1973)

  If I just said this was a John Waters film, would that count as a content warning?  Just in case it doesn't, Content Warning:  blood, attempted sexual assault of a minor, child abuse, general lechery

Dawn Davenport (Divine) is a bad seed.  Expelled from high school and a teenaged runaway, she hooks up with the first dude who picks her up hitchhiking, Earl (also Divine), and gets knocked up.  Unsurprisingly, Earl is a deadbeat who refuses to support her, so Dawn takes a series of crap jobs before joining her friends Chicklette (Susan Walsh), and Concetta (Cookie Mueller) as a house burglar.  She meets Donald (David Lochary) and Donna Dasher (Mary Vivian Pearce), a couple who have a fetish for photographing crime, and continues to spiral further out of control.

If you are not into John Waters' filmography, this is not going to be a good entry point.  It is one of his earliest features and way before he became anything approaching mainstream.  It is a cult classic, however, and surprisingly sweet.  NOT in content, but in how Waters very obviously loves his cast and crew.  He films them with such an eye for their humanity, even as he allows them to be disgusting.  

(It might get a little confusing pronoun-wise because Divine the actor never used she/her, only he/him, but in this instance he was playing a female character, so I'm going to use she/her when I'm talking about Dawn, and he/him when I'm talking about Divine.)  As I said, this was early in the partnership between Divine and Waters, but it's very clear that Divine was born to be a star.  He's utterly magnetic in this, even when shrieking and chewing scenery.  Everyone else is...trying their best.

This movie was made for approximately $27.50 and features Waters' beloved Baltimore as well as good-natured family and friends, including Susan Lowe's literal newborn son.  I cannot stress enough that this is NOT for everyone.  Hell, it's not even for mostly anyone.  But it's available for rent on Amazon.  For some reason, I had $9.99 in credits so they literally gave me this movie for free and I still don't know if I'd ever watch it again.  But I'm enough of a freak that I probably will.

A Bigger Splash (1973)

  So I was actually supposed to watch the 2015 Tilda Swinton movie called A Bigger Splash but watched this one accidentally.  

This is another experimental 70s film.  It's kind of a documentary about David Hockney, a pop artist, and his breakup with partner/muse Peter Schlesinger.  There are elements that are fictionalized, flashbacks and so on, but mostly it's just following Hockney as he tries to recover his inspiration by wandering through 70s New York and southern California.

It is very meandering and even though it's barely more than an hour and a half, it feels way longer.  It's a little whiny and self-indulgent for my tastes, but I do think it's an important snapshot of queer life in the 1970s from someone who isn't Andy Warhol.  Probably why it's on the Criterion Channel.

Celine and Julie Goe Boating (1974)

  Content warning:  child death, blood

Julie (Dominique Labourier) is minding her own business, learning witchcraft in the park --as one does-- when she sees a woman drop a scarf.  This simple act leads her to meet Céline (Juliet Berto), a stage magician and general pathological liar.  One of Céline's side-gigs is at a mansion in Paris that appears to be abandoned except for the days that she shows up.  She walks inside the house, and then some time later is violently pushed back out, remembering nothing, but with a piece of hard candy in her mouth.  Julie switches places with her one day, and the same thing happens.  Only when she eats the candy later does she remember the events, where two women --Sophie (Marie-France Pisier) and Camille (Bulle Ogier)-- scheme over a recent widower (Barbet Schroeder) with a sick child, Madlyn (Nathalie Asnar).  Julie or Céline find themselves in the body of Madlyn's nurse, Angéle, playing out the same events over and over, unable to stop Madlyn from being murdered.  The women decide that they must do something to save the little girl by figuring out whether Sophie or Camille is the killer.

This movie is 3 hours and 14 minutes long.  Just going to put that out there first.  It is incredibly shaggy, as in you just follow Céline and Julie around for like half the runtime before you even get to the central mystery.  That may put some of you off and I get it.  But if you give it a chance, this movie is incredibly entertaining.  Labourier and Berto are so charming and lively that it's not a hardship to watch them run-around like Lucy and Ethel on the set of a Twilight Zone soap opera.  

It's streaming on the Criterion Channel.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

  Content warning:  racial slurs, violence, men being gross about women

Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) is facing a difficult choice:  do time for running liquor and cigarettes for the Mob, or snitch to the cops on his underworld associates.

This would make a good double-feature with The Departed, if you wanted to stick with Boston, or Goodfellas if you just wanted crime.  For Mitchum-centric, you should do this and the original Cape Fear.  

For all that, this wasn't my favorite gangster movie.  It felt very predictable and by-the-numbers to me, but that could have just been the mood I was in.  I can't really find fault with it.  It's appropriately grimy for the time period, it's well-shot and well-acted.  I just didn't like it all that much.  It's a little hard to find, but it is available to rent on Amazon or Apple, and you can own the Criterion Collection blu-ray for a cool $31.  

Sorcerer (1977)

  Content warning:  terrorism, suicide (gun)  Ah, yes, the American remake that manages to remove all anti-American sentiment from the original.

Four ex-pats hiding from their criminal pasts take a dangerous job hauling nitroglycerin over bad road in order to get enough money to claw their way out of this one-horse town in the South American jungle.

Because I watched them back to back, it's almost impossible for me to not compare this to Wages of Fear.  Let me start by saying, both movies are excellent.  You cannot go wrong if you decide to only watch one, no matter which one you choose.  Personally, I'd give the edge to Sorcerer for tension, only because of the rope bridge scenes, which are absolutely harrowing and must have been a total nightmare to film.  William Friedkin, the director, shot on location in the Dominican Republic and the rain and mud and heat are palpable.  Considering the Arctic temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic region right now, it was nice to pretend to be warm again.  

Some other differences:  Sorcerer includes little mini-prologues of backstory for the four main characters, where Wages leaves them open for interpretation.  Sorcerer shifts the oil company management to the local regime, instead of the USA, removing Wages' commentary on colonialism.  It changes the circumstances of a major character death as well as the ending, which is still bleak but less existential.  Basically, if you read my review of Wages and thought, "sounds good but a little too French," Sorcerer is for you.  It's also streaming in its entirety on YouTube.  

Hilariously, this opened the same weekend in 1977 as Star Wars: A New Hope and got immediately shunted to the bottom of the box office.  It was enormously over budget and a huge flop which just goes to show that timing is everything and that you shouldn't use a box office gross as a marker of quality.  This is a great film and I look forward to forcing my friends to watch it.

The Mouse and His Child (1977)

  Still working my way through Christmas.  Content warning:  cartoon violence?, some indefinable thing but you should definitely watch it before you show it to your kids

A clockwork mouse (Alan Barzman) and his child (Marcy Swenson) are joined by the hands.  After accidentally falling into the trash, they wind up at the dump and under the power of Manny the rat (Peter Ustinov), who uses discarded windup toys as slave labor.  He wants the mouse and child to rob a bank holding his favorite sweets, but is foiled when the henchman he sends with them is too stupid and allows Mouse and Child to escape.  They wander through the land, searching for a muskrat (Bob Holt) who can allegedly give them the power to be self-winding.  

This is some late 70s animated nightmare fuel!  And on top of that, there's the existential crisis of the central plot.  Zero reason this had to go so hard!  Fully insane that there's a clock that tells the characters that their paths in life are predetermined and immutable.  The whole movie is on YouTube on what appears to be a VHS transfer, which frankly only adds to the fever dream of it all.  Vet this before you show it to your kids.  I'm so serious.

Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (1977)

  I watched this for Movie Club several weeks ago but didn't get a chance to post it, with all that was going on.  

Emmet Otter (Jerry Nelson) and his Ma (Marilyn Sokol) live on the river.  Ma takes in washing and Emmet does odd jobs.  Both hear about a talent show where the prize is $50.  That would be a significant sum, so they each independently sign up, Ma as a singer and Emmet with some locals in a band, without telling the other, each figuring that a win will allow them to buy the other one a present.

If you ever thought "Gee, I wish the Muppets could deal with abject poverty and be depressed," 1) what the fuck is wrong with you and 2) here's your movie!

This is the Jim Henson version of O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi" short story.  It is still pretty heart-warming but it is also a huge downer.  But like, in an important life lessons kind of way.  All the music is (of course) by Paul Williams and Kermit even makes a guest appearance.  It's a legitimate Muppet movie that I had somehow never seen.  I don't think I'd rush to watch it again, but I would definitely recommend it to people looking for kind of an off-beat Christmas movie to show their kids.

I think I had to actually rent this one from Amazon.  

Blackenstein (1973)

  Here's another entry from the blaxploitation era.  Not a spoof like Black Dynamite, but the real thing.  Content warning:  blood, some gore

Eddie (Joe De Sue) is a quadruple amputee after stepping on a landmine in Vietnam.  Fortunately, his fiancée, Dr. Winifred Walker (Ivory Stone), knows a Nobel-winning geneticist who has been working on reattaching limbs with DNA therapy.  Dr. Stein (John Hart) is hopeful that they can give Eddie a new lease on life, but his assistant/manservant Malcomb (Roosevelt Jackson) sabotages the formula because he's angry that Winifred rejected his advances.  Eddie is turned into a violent killer who rampages night after night.

This is one for the "unintentional comedy" files.  I can't find photos of the writer, Frank Saletri, but my money says he and the director, William Levey, were both white men trying to capitalize on the blaxploitation movement.  The movie feels profoundly racist, specifically in Eddie's choice of victims, the continual references to being primitive, using animal RNA in the serum, amidst a general vibe.  It's poorly shot, poorly acted, and poorly written.  That being said, if you get a group of friends together, this movie is hilarious.  It's so bad on so many levels that it circles back to being a crowd-pleaser.  Amazing.  It's streaming on Amazon Prime and on Shudder.

The Last Tycoon (1976)

  This has an incredible pedigree to be as mid as it is.  Content warning:  homophobia

Monroe Stahr (Robert de Niro) is a hotshot Golden Age Hollywood studio executive.  Everything he touches seems to succeed but he is haunted by the death of his wife.  An earthquake causes damage to the studio sets, and while supervising, Stahr sees a young woman who looks exactly like his late wife.  Kathleen (Ingrid Boulting) keeps telling him no but he pursues her anyway.

If you are in the right mood, this is probably a really lovely film about the price of success versus happiness.  If you're not, this is a nothing-burger about a man who experiences one (1) rejection and torpedoes his career.  Guess which one I was in.

The cast is stacked with Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, and De Niro, and with cameos/bit roles from Donald Pleasance, Ray Milland, John Carradine, Anjelica Huston, and Jack Nicholson.  It was directed by Elia Kazan from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, based on an unfinished F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.  Which I think is the problem.  If you kept one of those elements and nixed the rest, it probably would have made for a better movie.  

It's streaming on Kanopy but there are much better films out there.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

  Yeesh.  Content warning:  physical abuse, emotional abuse, child endangerment

A housewife (Gena Rowlands) slowly goes mad from neglect and boredom while her idiot husband (Peter Falk) flails ineffectually.

Shocking no one, I hated this movie.  It's long, boring, and interspersed with domestic violence that has aged like milk.  Somehow, it's considered a classic.  

Rowlands is very good but it almost feels like a wasted performance because I will never watch this movie again.  As always, your mileage may vary.  It's available on the Criterion Channel.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

  If you grew up watching this on TV in the 90s, like I did, I urge you to find an unedited version.  The full movie is almost two and a half hours and TV cut so much for time and content.  

Homeless orphans Carrie (Cindy O'Callaghan), Paul (Roy Snart), and Charlie (Ian Weighill) are sent to the  English countryside during WWII.  They end up in the reluctant care of Miss Price (Angela Lansbury), a spinster heiress pursuing witchcraft as a solution to the Nazis.  But the war has necessitated the closure of her correspondence course, so she takes the three children to London via a magical bed (which sounds like the worst euphemism but it's not) to find her professor, Mr. Emelius Brown (David Tomlinson), and get the final spell she needs.

I cannot overemphasize how much of a disservice the TV edit is to the original.  It removes so much context, character building, and at least one entire musical number while cutting others down sharply.  If you watched this as a kid and thought it was mid- to lower-tier Disney, please give it another try.  If you still don't like it, that's fine.  

Hopefully, the full version is on Disney+.  I have no idea.  I bought this on DVD ages ago.

Funny Lady (1975)

  This is the sequel to Funny Girl, the Fanny Brice biopic.  

After her disastrous relationship with Nick (Omar Sharif) ends, Fanny Brice (Barbara Streisand) just wants to throw herself into her work.  Unfortunately, Ziegfield's is closing and finding a new show is difficult.  A new impresario, songwriter, club owner, and general entertainment polymath named Billy Rose (James Caan) wants to design an entire show around Fanny but personality-wise, they are oil and water.  As always, success comes at a price.

This is also a musical, but the songs aren't nearly as good.  Partly because Caan isn't a singer.  Streisand could have carried the entire movie but it would have been nice to have her duet with someone who could match her.  Costumes are top-notch and there are some very lovely sets and shows-within-a-show, especially the synchronized swimmers but this definitely feels like a lesser entry.

It's not currently available on any services, except to rent or buy.  Dust off your VPN, I'd say, rather than pay actual dollars for this.

In other news, I watched the miniseries Escape at Dannemora, about two prisoners serving life sentences who escaped from a prison in upstate New York after seducing a worker in the textile sweatshop.  It's a monumentally depressing series and an indictment of the for-profit prison system in general.  But it is competently told with excellent performances from Paul Dano, Benicio del Toro, and Patricia Arquette.  Currently streaming on Paramount+.

I tried to watch Melvin at Dinner, an independent film directed by Bob Odenkirk, but it was so fucking boring I couldn't make it more than 30 minutes.  I also DNF'd an Australian film from 2007 called Vigilante.  It is Margot Robbie's debut, but everything else about it is terrible.  And I made it about one and a half episodes into Club de Cuervos, one of Netflix's first "original" shows but I was not in the mood to suffer through the amount of misogyny required of a Mexican soccer show.  Ted Lasso it ain't.

Foul Play (1978)

  This features way more Goldie Hawn than it does Chevy Chase.  You can almost pretend he's not in it at all.

An unassuming librarian (Goldie Hawn) looking for love finds herself drawn unwittingly into a complicated assassination plot involving an albino, the Catholic Church, and a man called The Dwarf.  

Man, this movie was a fossil (complimentary).  I wasn't alive in the 70s but watching this made me feel like I was seeing a historical record.  The soundtrack is by Barry Manilow, the hair is big, the cars are bigger, Chevy Chase is supposed to be funny, and everybody smokes.  Wild, lawless times.  

Hawn is effervescent and charming without being a man-crazy ditz.  Burgess Meredith has a supporting role as her neighbor with hidden depths and I could have watched them interact for hours.  Chevy Chase has the charisma of mold but like I said, he's really only in the last third of the movie.  Dudley Moore is one of those build-up characters that doesn't have a pay-off until the final act.  I thought he was just going to be a cameo so I was confused.  

This is not well-represented on streaming sites so you may have to dust off your VPN to find it but it's not terrible for a late-70s screwball comedy.

The Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

  This movie is bananapants bonkers and I don't know if I love it for itself as much as I love the idea of inflicting it on others.  But I love the latter reason a whole lot.  Content warning:  drug use, mild gore

Winslow Leach (William Finley) has spent his life writing a major cantata of the story of Faust only to see it stolen and bastardized by pop music impresario Swan (Paul Williams).  Discredited, disfigured, and disgusted, Leach sets out to sabotage Swan's music palace, The Paradise, only to succumb to the lure of fame and the talent of Phoenix (Jessica Harper), his muse and unrequited love.  But when Swan sets his greedy sights on Phoenix, Winslow knows he must destroy the monster once and for all.

There is A LOT to unpack in this movie.  It is Faust, Phantom of the Opera, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and a searing satire of Phil Specter and the history of rock-n-roll all tossed in a blender with a fuckload of cocaine and directed by giallo-noir pioneer Brian DePalma with a soundtrack of parody and an actual Faust musical written by the Muppets' "Rainbow Connection" guy who is also the villain of the movie.  Somehow it came out a year before Rocky Horror which feels like the fakest part but is true.  

In the words of the prophet Stefani, it is B-A-N-A-N-A-S.  

This was a major flop that has become kind of a cult classic but still isn't hugely known.  It's streaming on Amazon Prime and words truly do not do it justice.  If you liked Rocky Horror and its very lesser-known sequel, Shock Treatment, this will feel like a long-lost sister film.  If you didn't, stay far away.  

North Dallas Forty (1979)

  The poster is a complete lie.  This isn't a comedy.  Content warning:  party scene that skirts very closely to sexual assault but generally falls under the umbrella of "rape culture"

Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte) is a professional football player but at 39, he is growing more and more concerned with the physical and emotional toll being taken from him with each game.  He is at odds with number-focused management, boorish other players, and his own sense of ennui and disillusionment.

This wants to be Easy Rider so bad but cannot make Elliott likable or sympathetic.  

As opposed to Pigskin Parade, where football was more or less just a backdrop, North Dallas Forty does require a passing knowledge of the game itself.  

**Editor's note:  This was as far as I had gotten when I got a phone call telling me my father had died.  Sorry for the truncated review but I had to make an emergency trip down to Alabama for the funeral and this blog post was not a priority.  I will make it up to you (internet) next weekend.**

**P.S.  TL;DR: This movie sucked.  Watch something else, up to and including actual football instead.**

Nashville (1975)

  Content warning:  gun violence

A concert organizer (Ned Beatty) tries to cajole various country music personalities and their management   into performing at a rally for a divisive political candidate.

This is an ensemble drama with a huge cast that won a couple of Oscars and got nominated for a bunch more.  It's kind of a musical in that people sing, but not really because the music is just music and doesn't further the plot.  There is, however, a lot of music so if you don't like old-school country like Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, or country-adjacent singer-songwriter stuff, you will be in hell for most of the 2+ hour runtime.  Also, this movie is really shitty towards women.

I'm pretty sure I got most of the references.  Geraldine Chaplin plays possibly the most annoying character to ever be on-screen, but that's on purpose and I think meant as comedy?  The late Henry Gibson is the stand-out here at least as far as screen-time with Keith Carradine kind of stealing the show.  I'm used to seeing Carradine as the lead and Gibson as supporting so it was interesting to see them switch roles.  

This has been in my queue for ages now.  It's supposed to be one of Robert Altman's best movies but I wasn't terribly engaged with it.  At no point was it funny, cathartic, or particularly dramatic.  People just kind of showed up, said stuff, and then the camera moved on to the next person.  Your mileage will vary, of course.  It's available for rental only according to the internet but I don't know that it's worth $4 of your time.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

  This was the other pick for last week's Movie Club but I figured I had posted enough last week and didn't want to oversaturate.  Content warning:  child death

A gang targets a man (Martin West) in retaliation for killing one of their men and chases him to a police precinct that is being closed.  The precinct retains a skeleton crew, including Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker), and a handful of prisoners on a medical stop during transport.  As the siege continues, the line between cops and criminals becomes less important than the one between alive and dead.  

I'm glad I saw this after I saw the remake because the 2005 version would never have held up the other way around.  The original is super low-budget, gritty, and doesn't have a single polished facet.  It is raw, undiluted genius from John Carpenter.  

There's obviously a huge influence from Night of the Living Dead and you can see the bones of what would become Halloween in some of the shot compositions, music, and editing, but don't think of this as a practice run.  It's solid on its own merits.  It's just that Carpenter had so many hits in such a short time, this was bound to get overlooked.  Consider this your gentle push to check it out if you haven't.  

It's streaming on Criterion Channel, Peacock, Tubi, Freevee, and Crackle so there's no excuse.