Alabama's Ghost (1973)

Where to start with Alabama's Ghost (1973)?  One of only four films directed by artist Frederic Hobbs, it mashes together elements from a number of genres in a style that tries to evoke the feel of thirties B-movies, serials and weird pulp magazines, while at the same time encompassing the whole hippie psychedelic counter-culture.  The story encompasses magicians, ghosts, Nazis, robots, vampires, elephants and voodoo - with the voodoo witch doctor as a good guy - as the titular hero finds himself unwittingly involved in a plot to enslave the world via psychedelia, for the benefit of the vampires. Oh, he also drives around in a car that appears to be made from bones.  Incredibly, it all, sort of, makes sense.  Sort of.  Shot with what are clearly limited resources, Alabama's Ghost features a cast mostly recognisable only from appearing in Hobbs' other films, most of whom perform as if they are in an amateur dramatics production, not helped by very flat sound production and near-unspeakable dialogue.  Which, in a way, is pretty much what the film is.  The whole thing is performed in a frenzy, with the plot veering all over the place and taking frequent detours to introduce more characters.  Every so often everything stops for a long, talky scene of exposition.  Yet, somehow, it remains quite compelling while it is playing: you just have to stay with it to see where on earth it is going to next.  

It all starts innocuously enough, with hapless nightclub janitor and frustrated musician Alabama (Christopher Brooks) crashing his forklift through the wall of the club's cellar while moving stuff around, revealing a secret room.  Said room is full of the effects of long-dead magician Carter the Great.  Trying on Carter's costumes, Alabama decides he is going to find fame and fortune as a stage magician, recreating Carter's illusions.  After this, things begin to get complicated.  An opening voice over had already informed the audience that, before World War Two a Nazi scientist, Dr Caligula, had sought out Carter in Calcutta, in an attempt to secure from him the secret of his discovery of a hashish-like substance called Raw Zeta which, if introduced into the human body by acupuncture, could be transformed into Deadly Zeta, which could give the recipient the power to hypnotise people into becoming their slaves.  Or something like that.  Back to the present day and Dr Caligula is still seeking the secrets of Raw Zeta, but is now working for an international organisation of vampires, headed by media mogul Jerry Gault.  In order to learn Carter's act, Alabama goes to see Carter's sister, who is really Gault in disguise, who, in turn sends him to Carter's former assistant.  When Alabama finally masters the art of Carter's illusions, he is signed up by shady promoter Otto Kent (who speaks in what I think is meant to be a Liverpool accent), who sends him on a tour, complete with entourage of groupies, that makes him the darling of the hippie crowd.  Kent then signs Alabama up to headline a pop event which Gault is going to televise worldwide - on condition that Alabama climaxes it by revealing the secret of Carter's vanishing elephant trick, for reasons that remain unclear to me.  

All the while, Alabama is being harassed by the ghost of Carter the Great, who keeps warning him of the perils of performing his illusions for material gain.  Alabama thinks the ghost is simply a racist who doesn't want to see a black man succeed and, in a panic, flees to see his mother.  She, in turn, calls in the local voodoo witch doctor, (because all black people know one, obviously).  Anyway, Alabama ends up refusing to reveal the secrets of the elephant trick, so Gault has Caligula make a robot double of the magician, powered by Raw Zeta, to take his place, but the witch doctor gets wind of the plot to use the robot to turn the Raw Zeta into Deadly Zeta and hypnotise the hippies and all the viewers at home into becoming slaves to Gault's vampires.  The witch doctor takes control of the robot, which starts shooting beams out of a wand as the entourage turn out to be vampires, who attack the hippies and the whole thing descends into chaos, with some vampires being killed by the rays, the elephant killing others and Carter's ghost taking care of Gault.  If that bare outline of the plot sounds confusing, the film itself is even more so, with the action punctuated by a number of utterly incomprehensible illusions performed by Alabama, (one involving a sailor, a witch and a monkey) and several hallucinatory sequences experienced by the magician.  The whole thing is wrapped up with a distinct hippie vibe, anti-establishment vibe, with its crude satirising of capitalist business moguls like Gault as vampires, out to try and exploit the whole hippie counter culture for their own profit, (in this case, in blood), even turning their own psychedelics against them.

The film itself comes over like a very low budget, road company version of those films popular in the sixties and seventies, that were built around pop groups like The Beatles or The Monkees.  While Alabama's Ghost is certainly as surreal as any of those pop vehicles, it is undermined by its lack of production values, seemingly non-professional cast and, most crucially, a script that simply can't provide the sort of witty and clever dialogue that such films require.  Its set-pieces are simply not well enough staged and frequently seem to go on too long.  Moreover, Hobbs' direction just feels too static, with too many scenes framed as if they are part of a filmed stage production rather than an actual motion picture - there is none of the imaginative and innovative camera angles and movements that are required to make a surreal comedy work effectively.  Yet, despite all of its shortcomings, Alabama's Ghost is certainly an experience to watch, leaving the viewer wondering just how it ever got financed and exactly who its intended audience were.  A truly bizarre production, Alabama's Ghost remains a beguiling entertainment, by no means good, but certainly compelling in its weirdness.