When the topic of holiday horrors comes up, most people mention Black Christmas (1974), Christmas Evil (1980), and Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), but Home For The Holidays (1972) seems to have been largely forgotten. A made for TV thriller from back when made for TV movies could really pack a punch, Home For The Holidays is a taut, pre-slasher gem with Sally Field just fresh out of her role in The Flying Nun. She plays the youngest of four sisters (her siblings are played by Elanor Parker, Jessica Walter, and Jill Hayworth) who come home to visit their dying father (Walter Brennan) on Christmas. He gathers them together, tells them that his second wife (Julie Harris) is slowly poisoning him, and that he wants them to murder her. Tensions and suspicions are high in the large home as a torrential rainstorm comes down outside with large crashes of thunder every few minutes. A killer in a yellow raincoat starts taking people out one at a time. Is wife #2 the one wearing it? You'll have to watch to find out.
The Dirty Outlaws is a classic lesser known spaghetti western from 1967. It's filthy. Most of the people are deplorable, the towns are all mud, dust, and scum. The plot is based around an outlaw who comes across a dying Confederate and assumes his identity to try and get his hands on a stash of money being kept by the soldier's blind father. Franco Rossetti was a film critic who started writing screenplays, and this was his directorial debut. As you might hope, The Dirty Outlaws has some very cinematic moments that only a film fanatic would concoct, a great screenplay, and is described by the Spaghetti Western Movie Database as "an atmospheric, mean, brutal, and sinister film." What makes this a great spaghetti western is that it's full of style but with lots of plot, archetypal but still full of surprises.
"Let it be known sons and daughters, that Satan was an acid head. Drink from his cup. pledge yourselves, and together we'll all freak out."
One of the most infamous psychotronic films of all time, I Drink Your Blood is one of those rare gems that just delivers and delivers and delivers, from the very first frame right up until the very last. There's just so much going on in this Satanic cult, post-Manson hippie gore exploitation movie that it would take an essay to fill you in on everything which awaits you. But I'm posting this for those who haven't seen it yet, I don't want to ruin one moment of it, so I'll resist the temptation to list all of the inanity that's packed into these 83 batshit crazy minutes.
There's really nothing else quite like it. It was released by Jerry Gross' Cinemation Industries and paired up with I Eat Your Skin, an obscure 1964 voodoo zombie film, for the double feature circuit. The result was an ad campaign for the ages.
There are some stellar performances here, most notably from Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, who plays Horace Bones, the leader of the cult, Jadin Wong as Sue-Lin, and George Patterson as Rollo. Lynn Lowry (The Crazies, Shivers, Score) says nothing but looks beautiful throughout in her film debut. It's really well made, written and directed by David Dunston, who had a brief and otherwise nondescript career in the movies, but what he gave us here is something very special, one of a handful of the greatest psychotronic/grindhouse/drive-in movies of all-time.
A definitive special edition DVD of I Drink Your Blood was issued by Grindhouse Releasing in the early 2000s which is now out of print, grab it if you can. Until then, dig this DVD rip which is currently residing on YouTube.
Five Minutes To Live (aka Door to Door Maniac) was a 1961 thriller starring Johnny Cash and Vic Tayback. They hatch a scheme to rob a bank by taking the branch vice president's wife hostage and giving him five minutes to hand over the money or she'll get it. Only hitch? He was about to ask her for a divorce, throwing a monkey wrench into the plan. It's a well paced, fast little potboiler, and Cash is great in his first acting role as a cold blooded killer with a guitar. He performs the title song and is shown pickin' and singin' a few times in the film.
Tayback is suitably sleazy as his partner in crime, and the movie also stars Donald Woods as the bank executive and Cay Forester, who also wrote the screenplay, as his wife. Director Bill Karn previously did a lot of tv work, most notably Gang Busters, and also helmed Ma Barker's Killer Brood the previous year. Sutton Pictures handled the original 1961 release, but AIP got a hold of it in '66 and gave it the Door to Door Maniac title.
I'm bringing the PSYCHOTRONIC MOVIE OF THE WEEK back to the Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban blog and I'm kicking off version 2.0 with my own favorite Thanksgiving cinematic tradition, Brad F. Ginter's BLOOD FREAK.
Ginter's filmography as a director includes just five titles, and it's three that he's primarily remembered for today - the awful biker flick DEVIL RIDER (1970), the bizarre Veronica Lake swan song FLESH FEAST (1970), and today's feature, BLOOD FREAK (1972).
Steve Hawkes, whose previous acting resume was highlighted by two low-budget, shot in Florida Tarzan movies, co-wrote the screenplay with Ginter and stars as Herschell, a Nam vet biker who gets invited to a party by a beautiful young lady and well, one thing leads to another and before we know it, Herschell is addicted to the pot! He ends up eating some chemically altered turkey and when he wakes up he's become a monster with a giant turkey head who needs to feast on the blood of drug addicts to satisfy his cravings. In the end, the only thing that can save him is turning to God - the film was described by Shock Cinema's Steven Puchalski as "the world's first Christian, anti-drug splatter movie!" And if that plot wasn't enough of a trainwreck, wait until you get a load of Ginter himself as the narrator, sitting at a desk in front of faux wooden paneling, talking about "the human body as a mixing bowl," spewing Reefer Madness-style anti-drug rhetoric while smoking a cigarette. At one point he breaks into a coughing fit that only adds to the delicious (unintentional?) irony. You would think they would have done another take, but I guess it wasn't in the budget.
BLOOD FREAK was released on VHS in the 80s by Video Treasures, which promised "A Dracula on Drugs!" Something Weird Video released the ultimate special edition DVD in the early 2000's which is now out of print but can be found on Amazon and eBay. I highly recommend seeking it out, but in the meantime, here's the entire movie as posted on YouTube, DIG!
EDIT: YouTube has already removed the video I originally posted, but you can still watch it broken down into six parts.
Today, May 22, marks the 100th anniversary of the day that the immortal Sun Ra first arrived on Earth. To celebrate his centenary, here is a collection of links that will both entertain long time acolytes of the intergalactic one as well as inform those who are just discovering this titan for the ages. First up, you can listen to last Sunday's broadcast on WNYC when David Garland welcomed Michael D. Anderson (aka the Good Doctor and Dr Bop) and WFMU's Irwin Chusid to talk about the legacy of Sun Ra and the new reissues of his music that the two of them are overseeing. An informative and entertaining hour of music and conversation that should not be missed.
Type "Sun Ra" in the search box on YouTube and you will find an endless supply of music and video clips. But here are a few longer videos that will give you a fuller picture of his singular genius. Sun Ra: Brother from Another Planet is a one hour BBC documentary from 2005 directed by Don Letts, an excellent overview of his life and career, featuring interviews with Wayne Kramer, John Sinclair, Archie Shepp, members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and many others along with lots of vintage performance footage.
Sun-Ra: A Joyful Noise is a 1980 jazz film by Robert Mugge documenting performances by Sun Ra and His Arkestra in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Baltimore, along with interviews and rehearsal footage.
Sun Ra: Prophet of Music is a half-hour episode of Detroit Black Journal, originally broadcast on WTVS television in 1981.
Space is the Place, filmed in 1972 and released in 1974, is Sun Ra's feature film. An utterly unique blend of science fiction, surrealism, comedy and jazz, Space is the Place is essential viewing for fans of Sun Ra's music and psychotronic movie fans alike. (edit: upon revisiting this post a year later, the YouTube link I originally provided has been removed. I have replaced it with a version of the movie which is split into six parts, below is Part 1).
All of this audio and video should be plenty to keep everyone busy on this most holy of days. But to continue keeping up on all news Sun Ra, bookmark the Sun Ra Arkive and follow it on Facebook. I also recommend a new paperback published by the good folks over at KICKS Books, This Planet is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry of Sun Ra, collected from tape recordings and transcriptions culled from the Sun Ra Archives.
Sun Ra left this astral plane on May 30, 1993, but there is no doubt that he is still out there, perhaps living on his native Saturn, watching us from afar, or more likely zigzagging across the universe and spreading his message to interplanetary life in galaxies we mere mortals don't even know about yet.
1968 - Paramount Pictures - D: Otto Preminger S: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Alexandra Hay, Groucho Marx, Frankie Avalon, Fred Clark, Michael Constantine, Frank Gorshin, John Phillip Law, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, George Raft, Caesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Arnold Stang, Slim Pickens, Richard Kiel, Harry Nilsson.
Now here's something completely different. And by different, I mean different compared to,... well, just about anything I've ever seen. Long left stashed in the Paramount vaults and only wondered about by those who missed it in its initial run, this is Otto Preminger's misguided attempt at one of those "generation gap" films that were becoming more and more prevalent around 1968. The plot is comedic mash-up of hippiesploitation and a gangster movie. Jackie Gleason is a retired mobster living a legit life with his wife (Carol Channing) and their hippie daughter. One day, a mob boss (named "God" and played by Groucho Marx!) sends a couple of guys over to pull Jackie out of retirement for one last hit on a snitch (played by Mickey Rooney). Resistant at first, he eventually relents and gets put in the same prison as Mickey so he can do the hit. But before that can happen, someone slips "the Great One" some LSD, Gleason trips balls, and his whole worldview is blown away. In a sense, it almost becomes a PRO-drug movie if you can believe it! While he's in the slammer, his house becomes a playground for his daughter's hippie friends, and eventually Carol Channing, dressed in full pirate regalia leads the kids in a siege of God's boat. Oh, and did I mention there's musical numbers? Or that it was endorsed by Timothy Leary? Yeah, this is one strange piece of celluloid - worth watching for its jaw-dropping absurdity, the parade of famous Hollywood actors who somehow signed on for this, and its time-capsule quality, but mostly because the scene where Jackie Gleason trips in his prison cell is positively epic.
1964 - Industria Cinematografica Apolo (Brazil) - D/S: Jose Mojica Marins
Today's selection marks the occasion of its creator's 78th birthday. Jose Mojica Marins, better known to the world as Coffin Joe, was born on March 13, 1936, and is still alive and kicking, frequently seen on tv in his native Brazil. He created the Coffin Joe character in 1963, for this film, possibly his greatest work, At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul. Marins described the conception of Coffin Joe in a 2006 interview:
"In a dream saw a figure dragging me to a cemetery. Soon he left me in front of a headstone, there were two dates, of my birth and my death. People at home were very frightened, called a Priest because they thought I was possessed. I woke up screaming, and at that time decided to do a movie unlike anything I had done. He was born at that moment, the character would become a legend: Coffin Joe. The character began to take shape in my mind and in my life."
This was the first Coffin Joe film. It was followed by This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967), and, forty years later, Embodiment of Evil (2008), completing what is known as the Coffin Joe Trilogy. He revived Coffin Joe many times over the years, though not always as the central character, in films including Awakening of the Beast (1970), The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974), and Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (1978).
And now, our feature presentation.
Special bonus feature, Damned: The Strange World of Jose Mojica Marins (2001 documentary)
1971 - A South Street Production - D: Michael Levesque - S: Stephen Oliver, D.J. Anderson, Duece Berry, Billy Gray, Barry McGuire, Severn Darden
The Psychotronic Movie the Week is back and this time I've got a real doozy for 'ya, a one of a kind classic brought to you by the king of the biker flicks, Joe Solomon. A biker gang called The Devil's Advocates come across a cult of Satanic monks in the California desert. One of the gang's "mamas" is cast under a spell in her sleep and led into an occult ritual that weds her to the Devil. When she returns to the Advocates she bites her old man and turns him into a werewolf who rips apart another gang member and his woman who had split from camp to go get it on. The gang buries the dead the next morning and move on, but every night more grisly attacks follow. This one drags a bit in the middle, but the first and final acts are pure psychotronic bliss and it features a great guitar soundtrack by Don Gere, enjoy!
1963 - Fairway International Pictures - D: James Landis - S: Arch Hall, Jr., Richard Walden, Marilyn Manning, Don Russell, Helen Hovey
Arch Hall, Jr. only appeared in a handful of films in the early 1960s, all produced by his father, Arch Hall, Sr., but his star will shine forever in the psychotronic universe for his turns in The Choppers, Eegah!, Wild Guitar, and this, perhaps his greatest moment. He plays the sadist of the title, Charlie Tibbs, who, along with his mute girlfriend Judy, terrorize a trio of teachers who stall out in the desert on their way to a ballgame at Dodger Stadium. Hall is a man possessed in this film - a sneering psycho ready to snap at any moment. If you notice some sharp camera work while you're watching, there's good reason for that, as the cinematographer was none other than a young Vilmos Zsigmond, who had previously worked on Ray Dennis Steckler's The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, but would go on to do award winning work on films such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encouters of the Third Kind, Blow Out, and The Deer Hunter.
1965 - Allied Artists - D: Robert Gaffney - S: Marilyn Hanold, James Karen, Lou Cutell
In The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon's review of Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster said it all in the first two sentences: "Don't miss. It's the worst." The plot is about a Martian princess and her flamboyant dwarf assistant coming to Earth in search of women to help repopulate their planet. They both have hilariously un-subtle homoerotic undertones. There's an android astronaut named Frank (the "Frankenstein" of the title), who ends up fighting the Martians' giant monster they keep chained up in their spaceship (played by an uncredited Bruce Glover). There's also some groovy soundtrack music, including "That's the Way It's Got to Be" by the Poets. And that's pretty much it. All in all, a mindless but fun flick that cruises along and delivers plenty of laughs. This was Gaffney's only credit as a director, but he later showed up as the DP on Superfly T.N.T. in 1973. Enjoy!
Mike Vraney and Lisa Petrucci, photo credit: Lars Erik Holmquist
Shocking news awaited us as we awoke this morning. Mike
Vraney, the founder of Something Weird Video, had passed away from lung cancer
at the age of 56. An official statement from SWV said, "Mike was a very
private person and didn't want anyone, except his closest friends, family and
colleagues, to know about his illness. He went through aggressive chemotherapy
and radiation treatments for over a year, but sadly the cancer spread and
cruelly took him from us."
The news hit those of us who have been fans of
his life's work for the last three decades like a ton of bricks. You see, his was not merely just another home
video company. Founded by Vraney in Seattle in 1990, Something Weird unearthed
thousands of films and entire b-movie and exploitation sub-genres from the
dustbins of history. Especially back in the early and mid-90s, when information
on the kinds of films he championed was not widely disseminated or easily
found, the Something Weird Video catalog was a revelation. The films were
categorized under headings like "Untamed Video", "Sexy Shockers
From the Vault", "Grindhouse Follies", "Spies, Thighs &
Private Eyes", "Crime Wave USA", "Sci-Fi Late Night
Creature Feature Show", "Wrasslin' She Babes", "Nudist Camp
Classics", "Twisted Sex", and the perfectly succinct "Big
Bust Loops". I and countless other intrepid cinematic explorers poured
over those catalogs, with their eye-catching graphics, tidbits of biographical
and historical information, and original ad mats and poster art, like holy
grails. We ordered these films through the mail, and some of us were lucky
enough to live near adventurous mom and pop video stores that actually carried
them. My own local mecca was Scotty Cooper's Video Bazaar in Metuchen, NJ, who
always stocked a large collection of SWV titles on VHS, their colorful spines
practically jumping off the shelf and into my curious hands, enticing me to
take them home and dive into a world that had been lost to time, or may have
existed only in the mind of a single, twisted auteur who died penniless and
unknown, but whose life's labor was finally being presented to a
(comparatively) wide audience.
He brought the films of people like David F. Friedman,
Herschell Gordon Lewis, Andy Milligan, Doris Wishman, and Harry Novak to public
attention and helped spread the gospel of the "forty thieves", a
loosely-affiliated cabal of roadshow impresarios whose traveling exploitation
shows in the early decades of cinema played fast and loose with local vice ordinances as they zig-zagged back and forth across the
countryside. And he didn't merely do it on a subterranean, cult level. In the
early 2000's, he pulled off something that we all would have thought impossible
just a few years earlier (and which would have been impossible only a few years
later), when he made a distribution deal with Image Entertainment which led to the then ubiquitous Borders Books chain to stock Something Weird
Video DVDs in their big box stores nation-wide. Suddenly, middle Americans
looking for the latest Adam Sandler or Sandra Bullock movie might accidentally
come across The Monster of Camp Sunshine, Color Me Blood Red, or Satan in High
Heels. He also got the films exposure on mainstream television, first with a
series on the USA Network in the mid-90s, Reel Wild Cinema (hosted by Sandra
Bernhardt), and more recently with the Something Weird On Demand channel
available through Comcast cable. Today, we take it for granted that these kinds
of movies are part of our collective kitschy Americana, but Vraney blazed a
trail, without a map, not knowing how it was going to end up. His was a mission
fueled by personal passion, and without his work, we'd all be living in a less
interesting world.
Mike is survived by his wife, Lisa Petrucci, and two
children, Mark and Danielle. Our deepest sympathies go out to his family, his
friends, and everyone else who will miss him.
Now lets take a look at some of the familiar images that we
may never have even known about if not for Mike Vraney via the famous classic
opening bumper that kicked off every Something Weird Video release.
