Curse of the Alpha Stone (1972)

It's a constant refrain of mine here that those people who profess to be aficionados of so-called 'bad movies' are unadventurous in their viewing choices.  Sure, they like to revel in how many times they've watched the movies of Ed Wood and just how hilariously bad they are, but they rarely seem to venture beyond these.  How many of them have endured the exquisite agonies of watching an Andy Milligan film?  Or sat through any of Ted V Mikels bizarre micro-budgeted features?  Very few, I suspect, mainly because while these are 'bad movies' by any critical standards, they are usually low on the laughter scale, (particularly Milligan's films), instead delivering their entertainment value in other ways.  Ultimately, it is their outlandishness, their bizareness, which mark them out as the products of a truly unique world view, which makes them perversely enjoyable.  Well, to cut to the point, this past weekend I stumbled across a movie which deserves to stand right up there as a classic of bad movie making.  Not only does it present a warped world view, it is also, unintentionally, very funny.  While The Curse of the Alpha Stone  might have an early eighties release date, it was actually shot somewhen in the seventies, (either 1972 or 1979, sources differ, but personally, on the basis of the film's look, I'd go with the earlier date), something apparent from the costumes, the grainy film quality and overall style.  To say that it had no budget would be an understatement, as no-name actors (for most of whom the film is their only credit) wander around various anonymous offices and apartments, delivering dialogue rendered even more unspeakable by poor sound quality, (the locations clearly weren't chosen for their acoustics and post-synching the soundtrack was clearly beyond the budget's reach).

But the most fascinating thing about The Curse of the Alpha Stone lies in the collision of genres it represents, resulting in a truly 'What the Fuck?' experience for the viewer as it takes one bizarre turn after another, building to a truly mind-boggling finale.  It kicks off as a mad scientist-type film, with a young University professor conducting experiments in his home lab - there are lots of shots of him taken through racks of test tubes, just to reinforce the stereotype.  Apparently he's seeking to tap the energies of the titular 'Alpha Stone', which he thinks is some kind of philosopher's stone.  He also gets naked and has slow motion sex with his wife (who lives in a different apartment), before she goes home and he returns to his experiments, in which he has found that exposure to the stone's energy can increase the size of his test animals' genitalia and increase their sex drive.  Next thing you know, he's conducting human experiments - first of all, he injects a gay drug addict he meets in a bar with a serum mage from a ground up sliver of the stone.  The result is that the dude turns rampantly heterosexual and runs around attempting to shag anything woman shaped - even a mannequin.  He quickly graduates to chasing and raping random women.  All of which dismays his now rejected boyfriend.  Next up, the professor heats up the stone, causing it to give off vapour which gets into the apartment block's ventilation system, resulting in various women coming to his apartment, tearing their clothes off and having sex with him.  Oh, his cleaning lady is also affected, pleasuring herself with her vacuum cleaner before getting her kit off and bonking the prof.  

Unfortunately for the prof, he also shags the Dean's wife when she comes under the influence of the stone, which displeases her friend, who tells all to the Dean, before she goes to remonstrate with the prof herself.  Inevitably, all he clothes fall off and he rapes her so vigourously that she dies.  The homo-turned-hetero guy is still out there raping every woman he bumps into, resulting in him also deciding to confront the prof.  But before he gets there, he bumps into the prof's wife, (who had previously been watering her plot plants naked in a purely gratuitous scene), who he drags into the apartment's laundry room and rapes amongst the washing machines and dryers.  He then turns up in the prof's apartment, finding the prof still staring in horror at the woman that he's just shagged to death, closely followed by the prof's wife, still reeling from her rape ordeal.  With things now resembling the last scene of particularly dark British bedroom farce, the gay/straight guy gets his hands on the stone, his eyes glow as he is possessed by 'Alpha', who destroys the prof via some bad special effects, before declaring that he can take any form.  At which point we cut to a shot of the now sexed-up Dean's wife walking down the street, implying she's now possessed by Alpha, or maybe it was just a random shot they had left-over and tacked on to the end of the film for want of a proper ending.

As described, the whole thing sounds as if it is some kind of zany black sex comedy - except that it is all conducted in absolute earnestness.  It seems to want to be taken a serious science fiction horror film with some fashionable sexy asides.  Which is the frustrating thing about the film: like so many low budget exploitation films, it has the germ of a promising idea, which could have been developed in a number of ways.  You could easily imagine a version which plays out like a British sex comedy, 'Confessions of a Mad Scientist', perhaps, (imagine Robin Askwith in a white coat and wearing glasses with thick black frames, saying 'Bloody Hell,Missus!' as an ape he's just turned into a beautiful woman tears his clothes off and drags him off for sex behind the cyclotron).  Equally fruitful could have been one of those US campus comedies, with bevies of cheerleaders coming under the influence of the stone, while the crusty old Dean's wife suddenly turns into a vamp.  The best serious approach might have been a Cronenberg-style body horror, with those enlarged genitalia violently bursting out of guy's trousers as they become aroused, their giant members literally splitting women in half as they are rapped by the monstrous instruments.  (Or, if it was a Troma film, the prosthetic monster penises might have mouths and faces and start hurling out sexist abuse before they go about their 'work').  Unfortunately, Curse of the Alpha Stone never settles on any particular cinematic approach, instead seeming to want to incorporate elements of soft core porn, horror and science fiction into the film, resulting in an untidy mess than can never settle on a suitable tone or style.  On the positive side, though, the movie as it stands -inept in virtually every department - is gloriously bad to the extent that it is also wonderfully entertaining.