The Black Sleep (1956)

Despite being made as late as 1956, when nuclear bombs, mutants created by radiation and flying saucers were all the rage for B-movie topics, The Black Sleep is very traditional horror film, harking back to the Universal, or even Monogram, features of the forties.  Which shouldn't be surprising, as it is effectively a vehicle for a number of horror stars from that era and is directed by Reginald LeBorg, who had toiled away in Universal's B-unit, mostly working on horror movies (despite being a specialist in musicals), during the forties.  Set in nineteenth century England, the plot involves mad scientist Dr Cadman (Basil Rathbone) using his drug (derived from the Orient), 'The Black Sleep', which can make a subject appear dead, rescue a former colleague, wrongly convicted of murder, from the gallows.  Back at Cadman's creepy old remote ancestral home, the revived medic is expected to assist Cadman in his brain surgery experiments.  Obviously, these haven't been going well, resulting in a cellar full of failed subjects, including another former doctor (Lon Chaney), transformed into a violent brute and assorted other lunatics including John Carradine and Tor Johnson.  Bela Lugosi turns up as Cadman's mute butler.

Cadman's experiments are all part of his attempts to revive his wife from a comatose state and inevitably end in disaster, as the inmates of the cellar escape and eventually kill him.  Along the way it is revealed that it was Cadman and his gypsy henchman (Akim Tamaroff), who were behind the condemned medic's framing for murder.  To be fair, this independently made film is actually not at all badly put together, easily on a par, production-wise, with the better forties Universal B horrors.  Unfortunately, though, it offers nothing new in terms of ideas and provides only meagre scares.  That said, it is fun to see the likes of Rathbone, Lugosi, Chaney and Carradine together in a horror film again, although, in reality, Carradine's role is little more than a cameo, Chaney is reduced to playing an imbecile and poor Bela has no dialogue whatsoever, (due largely to the state of his health - this was his last completed film role before his death that same year).  Rathbone, however, pulls out all the stops in a suitably hammy performance as Cadman.  LeBorg's direction does its best to inject some style into proceedings, but the film is all too often bogged down by a talky script, full of too much exposition.  Still, for completists, we do get to see two titans of low budget exploitation, Lon Chaney and Tor Johnson, fight to the death.  

Viking Women and the Sea Serpent (1958)

The title of this Roger Corman produced and directed AIP cheapie just about sums the movie up, although, to be fair, the sea serpent is the least of their worries, with most of the film's action centring on their conflict with the Grimaults, a savage tribe who take them prisoner.  The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, to give the film its full on-screen title, was apparently the brainchild of a pair of special effects experts, Irving Block and Jack Rabin, who convinced Corman that they could provide the effects the film's script required to a high standard, on a modest budget.  As it turned out, they couldn't.  To be absolutely fair, for this type of low budget B-movie, the miniatures work is above average, but still nothing like convincing.  The titular sea serpent itself is somewhat underwhelming and only makes a couple of relatively brief appearances.  

Exactly where the women - who are in search of their missing men - actually voyage to is never clear, with the film's ideas on geography being vague, to say the least, with everywhere, from Scandinavia to the, probable, Mediterranean locations, all look rematkably like California.  The fact that the villainous Grimaults are a swarthy looking bunch, dressed in vaguely middle-eastern looking costumes, implies that the location is somewhere in the Mediterranean.  Several critics have remarked upon the fact that while the Grimaults are slightly dark skinned, (being played by white actors in 'brownface' and degenerate, the Vikings, both male and female, are all fair haired, muscular and heroic.  Except, of course, for the token dark haired Viking woman, who is wracked by jealousy and betrays her fellow Vikings, before redeeming herself with an act of self-sacrifice.  The cast is packed full of familiar B-movie faces, including Abby Dalton, Susan Cabot, June Kenny, Richard Devon, Micheal Forrest and Jonathon Haze.  Not a great movie, but relatively entertaining while it is playing, Viking Women and the Sea Serpent at least has the virtue of running only sixty six minutes.

Two Lost Worlds (1951)

An independently produced low-budget adventure film whose action sequences consist of footage from other films, Two Lost Worlds (1951) is a head-scratching experience for the viewer.  If you were to believe the poster and the above trailer, you might well be left thinking that this was going to be a full-blown 'lost world' picture, with the characters encountering all manner of prehistoric life after being shipwrecked on a remote island.  In reality, this part of the story is crammed into the last reel of a film which runs barely over sixty minutes and feels decidedly tacked on to what is otherwise a sea-going adventure story involving clipper ships and pirates.  In between these in sandwiched a romance.  The dinosaur sequences, (followed by the inevitable volcanic eruption that ensures all trace of the lost world is eradicated) feel jarring, as if they were an afterthought to try to both pad out the running-time and provide more box-office draw.

As noted, the main action sequences are all stock footage taken from other movies, with the pirate sequences coming mainly from 1940's Captain Caution, some of the 'Australian' sequences (the whole film was shot in California) use footage from Captain Fury, while the dinosaur fight and the volcanic eruption are the same ubiquitous footage from One Million BC (1940) that found its way into countless low-budget movies of the era.  Thanks to its meandering plot, the film never really builds up any pace, nor does it feel especially cohesive as a story, with each episode so brief as to feel perfunctory.  For contemporary audiences, the most recognisable actor is leading man James Arness (or Jim Arness as he's billed), who would appear in the somewhat more substantive science fiction classic The Thing From Another World that same year.  Director Norman Dawn had a career that stretched back to the silent era and had been something of a pioneer in developing the use of travelling mattes and was the first director to have used back projection - which is probably why the over-familiar battling dinosaurs footage is better integrated with actors from the film it is inserted into than usual.

The Two Missionaries (1974)

Another day, another Bud Spencer/Terence Hill trailer.  The Two Missionaries (1974) is an historical adventure, with the duo playing a pair of unconventional Catholic priests working as missionaries on an isolated Caribbean island.  They're frequently having run-ins with the local slave-owning trader who runs most of the trading in the area as a racket, with their smuggling operations being used to finance their mission.  Inevitably, their unorthodox approach - which involves actually helping the natives get proper medical attention and nutrition rather than just forcibly converting them - comes to the attention of the Vatican, which orders the local Monsignor to investigate them.  With their arch-enemy the trader being a major financial supporter of the Monsignor's church, things don't look good for the pair.  Consequently, many trademark slapstick fights and action sequences ensue before the situation is resolved.

The Two Missionaries clearly had a fairly large budget, with lots of location shooting and elaborate period sets and Robert Loggia playing the villain. Yet, in its English-language version at least, it has a curiously scrappy feel about it, with sometimes murky photography, poor pacing and a plot that never seems to progress particularly smoothly, resulting in a jumpiness to the film.  Even the fight sequences seem to lack the sort of energy usually associated with the duo and often feel poorly choreographed.  Indeed, the lacklustre feel extends to the whole film, with even the stars looking off the pace and somewhat uncomfortable with their roles.  Perhaps this is down to the characters they play, with Spencer, unusually, playing the more dominant character who propels most of the plot and who is relatively restrained compared to his performances in their other films.  For his part, Hill seems more like a secondary character, his usual trickery and joking for once not taking centre stage and his performance far more subdued than usual.  Something of an atypical Hill and Spencer film as a consequence, but none of the deviations from the norm would matter if the film itself ever sparked properly into life, which it never does, resulting in a rare misfire for the pair.

I'm For the Hippopotamus! (1979)

I'm For the Hippopotamus! (1979) is a Bud Spencer/Terrence Hill movie that I hadn't seen for years before deciding to rewatch it recently.  I was surprised by how little of it, beyond the beginning, a few fight sequences and the ending, that I actually remembered.  Which probably has less to do with my memory than the formulaic nature of these films - after a while, once you've seen a lot of them, they all begin to feel interchangeable.  Which isn't to say that they aren't well made or greatly entertaining, they were simply made to a strict, very successful, formula.  All the elements of said formula are present here, with Hill and Spencer adopting their usual respective characterisations of the cunning, good natured, trickster (who is never quite as smart as he thinks he is), and the curmudgeonly, short fused bruiser who really has a heart of gold.  As always, they start off sparring with each other, with Spencer, as always, rising to the bait of Hill's affectionate (yet still often cruel) tricks and teasing.  Again, as if often the case, they are unlikely relatives - in this case, cousins.  The plot also adheres to the usual formula, which sees them after their initial rivalry, teaming up to take on a local bad guy who is oppressing the locals - which involves various scams and schemes masterminded by Hill and lots of brawling, led by Spencer.

Only the locations change.  For I'm For the Hippoptamus! the setting, unsurprisingly, is Africa, with the villain being involved in running locals off of their land and rounding up the local wildlife to illicitly sell it to foreign zoos.  Of course, he has the local authorities - police, courts and judiciary - in his pocket, so it is up to Terrance and Bud to sort things out.  The villain is played, quite effectively, by former boxer Joe Bugner.  Just to confuse things, in the English language version Spencer is dubbed by a voice actor with a South African accent, while his regular English language voice actor provides Bugner's voice (although Bugner, obviously, spoke English as a first language, but this sort of post-production redubbing was par forthe course in Italian movies of the period).  As was usual from the mid-seventies onward, Hill provides his own English speaking voice, although he was dubbed by another actor for the Italian soundtrack (despite being Italian - his real name being Mario Girotto)!  Both their buddy pictures, like this one, and their individual films (which generally followed similar formulae) were incredibly popular in their day, making Hill and Spencer into huge international stars.  They weren't the first Italian comedy duo to enjoy success on the big screen, following in the footsteps of Franco and Ciccio, who enjoyed success in a long series of movies in the sixties, (usually directed by Lucio Fulci, before he found global fame with his zombie movies), but never broke into the international market like Hill and Spencer.  

Overall, I'm For the Hippopotamus!, although offering nothing new, remains a typical - and typically entertaining - Hill and Spencer outing, packed full of visual gags and comedic violence.   As ever, what carries the movie is the charisma of the two leads, who always succeed in coming over as enormously likeable, whatever trickery or acts of gross violence they engage in as the plot unfolds.  There's nothing deep or intellectual about their humour, but it rarely fails to entertain for ninety minutes, or so.

Terminal Island (1973)

For viewers of a certain age, the most interesting aspect of Terminal Island (1973) lies in the cast, with early appearances from two of the stars of Magnum PI  - Tom Selleck and Roger E Mosley -and a post-Lost in Space appearance from Marta Kristen.  A typically cheap and cheerful exploitation piece from Dimension Pictures, Terminal Island has a pretty straightforward premise: in a near future (in 1973, at least), the US, having abolished the death penalty, instead sends its worst convicted offenders to a remote island, to fend for themselves.  The surrounding sea is constantly patrolled by warships to discourage escape attempts and armed guards make regular deliveries of essential supplies.  The problem is that it really has no idea where to go after this set-up, instead opting for a survival narrative with a new arrival caught between two rival groups of prisoners.  All the usual tropes are there - the small number of women are treated as chattels and sex slaves by the dominant group, rival men fight over them and the leader of the dominant group is a ruthless psycho who kills any potential rival, for instance.  While the main group holds the island's settlement, the others have been exiled to the wilderness and there are various changes of allegiance, with the women escaping from the settlement and joining up with the other group and Tom Selleck's doctor likewise changing sides.

The fact that all of the main characters are prisoners, convicted for the most brutal and heinous of crimes, makes it difficult for viewers to sympathise with most of them,  A point apparently recognised by the makers, as Selleck's character is revealed to have been convicted of a mercy killing, presumably considered a more 'acceptable' form of homicide, while Kristen, it turns out, was responsible for constructing a bomb for student protesters, which subsequently killed someone.  With its black heroine and feminist undertones (the women are clearly the most intelligent and resourceful people on the island, subjugated by the males simply on the basis of physical strength), the film also touches on other popular exploitation sub-genres such as Blaxploitation, as well as, in effect, being a variation on the 'women-in-prison' genre.  The feminist themes is unsurprising bearing in mind that the film is directed by Stephanie Rothman, a pioneering female director in the exploitation field, (who also directed the interesting and stylish Velvet Vampire (1972) for Roger Corman).  To her credit, she avoids the film falling into the worst of exploitation tropes by avoiding any rape scenes.  Indeed, even nudity is kept to a minimum, a surprising choise for an exploitation film of this era and with this sort of subject matter.  Production values - most of the film is shot outdoors Lake Sherwood - are rough and ready, but the pace is good and the performances decent.  While somewhat lacking in originality, Terminal island is, nonetheless, a solid piece of above average seventies exploitation. 

Stigma (1972)

While the trailer for Stigma (1972) makes it pretty clear what the film is about, this isn't immediately obvious if, like me, you come to the film cold.  At first, it looks like it might be some kind of urban-set Blaxploitation movie, with its central character released from jail and hanging out in a sleazy dive bar, full of stereotypical hookers, pimps and homosexuals.  But this is abruptly left behind, as next thing, our hero is on a rural road hitch-hiking, with little success, before teaming up with a fellow hiker, a recently demobbed white Vietnam vet, discovering that they are both heading for the same destination - a remote island off of the California coast.  We also finally get a bit of backstory for our lead character, learning that he is a doctor who served a prison sentence for performing an illegal abortion, but has now been offered a job by a former mentor, to work as his assistant on the island.  Still, though, the film's focus hasn't been made clear.  Arriving on the island and finding himself the only black person in a community of insular and suspicious islanders, it looks like we might be heading for a drama about racial prejudice.  There is, however, another twist when he finds his mentor dead of a heart attack at his home, with the viewer left wondering whether the hostile redneck sheriff will wrongly accuse our guy of murder.  But as he investigates his mentor's most recent work, the true situation becomes clearer - there is evidence of a strain of syphilis running rampant through the island's younger population.

Stigma then settles into being a medical thriller, with the new doctor racing against time to convince the islanders of the severity of the situation in the face of hostility and denial on the part of the sheriff and other leading citizens.  His search for the origins of the outbreak take us through a series of colourful interludes, including testing the women at the local out-of-town brothel, which results in a violent confrontation with some local heavies and a trip to the old lighthouse, which, it turns out, is the site of constant 'love ins' by the local youth.  Finally, wrongly accused of rape by the sheriff's daughter (who, it turns out, is the source of the infection), it all culminates with a confrontation between doctor and sheriff at the lighthouse.  Stigma is one of those unexpected films, drawing in its audience by misleading them into thinking that they might be watching a Blaxploitation piece, but subsequently ambushing them with a tale about the perils of venereal disease.  It's actually quite effective as a thriller, keeping up a decent pace and providing a degree of tension, action and character conflict.  It's biggest weakness is a tendency to descend into preachiness every so often, as we find ourselves treated to lectures on safe sex.  Although even this has a certain novelty value, bearing in mind that the film was released in the early seventies when such subject matter was usually confined to public information films rather than forming the core plot of a faux Blaxploitation movie.

On a technical level, the film, despite a low budget, is very well made, with an authentically gritty feel, with its location shooting giving a realistic edge to proceedings.  The island setting lends the whole affair a claustrophobic feel, despite the proliferation of outdoor locations, while simultaneously emphasising the protagonist's personal isolation as an obvious outsider in a tight-knit community.   While many of the characters are stereotypes, (cheerful madam, happy hookers and redneck sheriff, for instance), the cast are generally pretty decent, although the closest thing to a star is Philip Michael Thomas as the lead, in his first starring role.  David E Durston's direction moves things along at a decent pace, with the rural setting reminiscent of his best known film, I Drink Your Blood (1971), but with a less bloodthirsty scenario.  Overall, Stigma is an enjoyable, but rather curious, attempt to use an exploitation format to highlight a serious public health issue.

The Curse of Simba (1965)

A follow up to Lindsay Shonteff's 1964 horror thriller Devil Doll, The Curse of Simba (1965) - Curse of the Voodoo in the US - is a typically ramshackle low budget shocker from the director and his then production partner Richard Gordon.  One of those would be 'exotic' horror films where civilised white men find themselves on the receiving end of literal 'black magic', (at which they had previously scoffed), the film is as full of casual racism as any other British film of the era featuring race issues and culture clashes.  Every black man encountered by the white protagonist, whether in South Africa or Britain, is just a hairsbreadth away from reverting to savagery and witchcraft.  As in all such tales where white culture finds itself apparently powerless in the face of the magic of witch doctors, the white man eventually prevails through use of his superior reason, science and technology.  Or by running the witch doctor over with a jeep, which resort to brute force, one might argue, rather undermines the film's subtext of white superiority.

That said, it is actually very difficult to dislike the film on the grounds of its inherent racism due to its sheer ineptness.  'This is neither Surrey nor Southsea' intones Dennis Price early on, as he chastises a British tourist on safari who has tried to dismiss a local curse.  Well, it might not be either of those places, but it is quite clearly a park in England which they are standing in, Regent's Park to be precise, rather than the South African veldt.  The sight of Price and star Bryant Haliday striding around in bush hats and safari suits, with various black extras running around in loincloths and war paint, waving spears, is simply not convincing.  Not even the presence of a couple of war surplus vehicles - a Jeep and a Dodge 3/4 ton truck - helps.  While the film was pseudonymously scripted by Brian Clemens, it has none of the flair and quirkiness associated with his TV scripts for series like The Avengers, instead being a plodding, po-faced piece that seemingly takes itself far too seriously.  Its slight scenario involving Haliday being forced to kill a wounded lion in the territory of a tribe that worships the animals, thereby bringing down a curse on himself that follows him back to England, is stretched very thinly, with barely anything happening for long stretches of the movie.  While Shonteff's previous movie, Devil Doll, (which also starred Haliday), had also been slow moving, it at least had a more interesting (if still derivative) plot and included sufficient incident and general weirdness to keep the viewer watching.  The Curse of Simba, by contrast, is something of a chore to sit through, with only its ridiculous portrayal of both Africa and native culture to provide unintentional entertainment.

Summer School Teachers (1975)

A follow up to The Student Teachers (1973), Summer School Teachers (1975) is basically more of the same thing, albeit with a different cast, (although Dick Miller plays the school coach in both films).  Indeed, while watching it, there were times when I was hard pressed to remember which of the two films I was watching, so similar many of the plot elements and scenarios in Summer School Teachers were to those in its predecessor.  Following New World's established and successful 'three girls' formula, this one features three friends and newly qualified teachers from rural Iowa who go to LA to teach summer school at a high school.  As before, the film then settles into an episodic format, as each of the girl's have various experiences, including posing for nude photographs, getting involved with a student and coaching a girl's football team.  The football team story - through which the teachers uncover fraudulent use of school funds by the coach - and the involvement with a student - which leads to the breaking up of a car theft ring run by the chairman of the school board - provide the main ongoing plot threads.  

New World regular Barbara Peeters takes the directorial reins, moving everything at sufficient pace that the viewer doesn't have too much time to worry about the plot's absurdities and her script ensures that, despite the obligatory female nudity, a strong feminist sub-text is present.  The main action sequence, involving a lengthy car chase, is, bearing in mind the budget, very well staged.  Of the leads, Candice Rialson, as the sports teacher organising the girls' football team, who starred in Hollywood Boulevard the following year, gives the stand out performance.  The film is very much of its era - I very much doubt that any comedy film these days would get away with a plot in which a teacher enters into a relationship with a student yet is still portrayed as a sympathetic character and doesn't suffer dire consequences.  *To be fair, like his classmates, the student in question appears to be at least twenty five).  Like all of New World's 'three girls' pictures - whether they are about nurses, models, air hostesses or teachers - Summer School Teachers is simultaneously utterly inconsequential and smoothly enjoyable.  

Cutting Class (1989)

A would be teen slasher parody, Cutting Class (1989) is today mainly notable for its casting of Brad Pitt as one of its leads.  It was only third billed Pitt's second major film role and to be brutally frank, nothing about his performance suggests the charismatic leading man he was to become.  To be fair, the script gives him little to work with in his role as the not overly bright High School jock boyfriend of heroine Jill Schoelen, (who was probably at the peak of her popularity as a 'scream queen'.  In fact, the script doesn't give any of the cast much to work with and is simply not as funny as it seems to think that it is.  It also completely misses the mark as slasher movie, with absolutely no suspense, poorly staged murders and a far too obvious killer, (despite a desultory attempt at misdirection part way through the film, Donovan Leitch's status as an unreformed psycho is painfully obvious from the off).  The only cast member who is in any way memorable is Roddy McDowell, who makes the most of his appearances as the pervy school principal.

A big problem is that there are simply no particularly sympathetic characters - of the three leads, Leitch is a psychopath out on licence after murdering his father, Pitt is a jerk and Schoelen frequently makes utterly idiotic choices).  Now, maybe that was all part of the script's attempt at parodying the genre, except that in true slasher movies the plot relies upon people being idiots and at least some of the victims and would be victims being unsympathetic, so it's hardly a parody, is it?  Most of the attempts at humour centre around Schoelen's father, played by Martin Mull, who gets shot with an arrow while on a hunting trip at the movie's beginning and spends the rest of the movie struggling his way home, to little comic effect.  (Quite why nobody at the hunting lodge notices he is missing and calls the cops is a mystery, but then again, various characters get offed, yet nobody seems to notice, or care).  Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Cutting Class is that it is directed by Rospo Pallenberg, better known as a frequent script writer for John Boorman, (contributing some confusing and tangled - in narrative terms - scripts for Exorcist II and Excalibur, for instance).  His direction here is pretty flat, showing little aptitude either for comedy or slasher movies.

The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1962)

Another of those B-movies which feel as if they come from a decade earlier than their release date, The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1962), is a very modest affair boasting a very modest invasion.  In fact, we only see five of the invaders, all of them duplicates of the main cast, which obviously saved on the budget, with most of the action taking place in and around a country house.  Conveniently for the low budget, the Martians are energy beings that can transmit themselves down radio waves, deciding to invade the earth via the transmissions from an earth Mars probe.  Their aim is to put an end to earth's space programmes, so they start by duplicating a top US space scientist and his family.  Although a science fiction film, in truth The Day Mars Invaded Earth, for much of its length, plays out more like a haunted house story, with the family fleetingly encountering their mysterious doppelgängers in and around the house and finding themselves trapped there, with the main gates refusing to open.

Apart from the split screen work to allow actors to encounter 'themselves' in some scenes, special effects are minimal, with the most notable being the scientist's friend burning up and being reduced to ashes by the scientist's double.  While only running around seventy minutes, The Day Mars Invaded Earth still drags, with too many slow, talky scenes padding out what feels as if it should have been a half hour Twilight Zone episode, (in truth, the trailer actually gives away pretty much all of the movie's highlights, condensing them into less than two minutes).  The cast have a decidedly B-movie feel, led by Kent Taylor, who looks as if he's simply going through the motions, which well he might have been, being a veteran of many a low budget movie.  Marie Windsor - often dubbed the Queen of B-movies, so many did she appear in - seems similarly unenthusiastic as his wife.  The film's biggest problem is that once the situation is established, the script simply doesn't seem to have any idea of where to take it, with the film rolling to an abrupt and downbeat ending, (perhaps its most novel feature).  Produced by Robert Lippert's Producer's Associates - which turned out dozens of B-movies, many, like this one, for Twentieth Century Fox, The Day Mars Invaded Earth would, be but for that ending, entirely forgettable - it's the only part of an otherwise bland production that lingers in the memory.

Cathy's Curse (1977)

A Canadian production that is clearly aimed at cashing in on everything from The Exorcist to The Omen, taking in Rosemary's Baby along the way, Cathy's Curse (1977), in contrast to the A-movie production values of those titles, is very much a B-level production.  It's opening, a flashback to thirty years previously, with a man and his young daughter burned to death in a fiery car crash, is probably the best part of the film:  vividly filmed against a snowy night time landscape, it seems to be setting the tone for the rest of the film.  Unfortunately, though, what follows is decidedly stodgy, indifferently filmed and moving at a pedestrian pace through a series of genre clichés, none of them particularly well, or even atmospherically, staged.  From a contemporary perspective, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the script is its prefiguring of the misogynistic brainwashing that modern day so called influencers like the Tate brothers go in for.  Except that here, it isn't a young male child who has been so 'influenced', but the young girl who was burned to death at the beginning.  She and her father had been abandoned by her mother, who took her brother with her, with the father subsequently railing against the evils of women, how they are all 'bitches' and 'whores'.  The film's main plot involves the brother, along with his wife and young daughter, Cathy, moving back to the old family home, where the daughter finds herself possessed by the vengeful, woman-hating, spirit of the dead girl, her aunt.

The depiction of the possession itself is strictly by the numbers - it takes place the via the medium of an ugly looking doll she finds in the attic (which occasionally comes to life to scare people) and a photo of the dead girl, whose eyes glow green when she's getting Cathy to do especially evil things.  Cathy is predictably unpleasant to the other local kids, defies her mother and the housekeeper, but plays up to and manipulates her father and the handyman.  It's not just human females the ghost hates - the handyman's female dog (which growls at the possessed child), also ends up in the firing line.  There are all the usual manifestations of snakes and spiders, baths full of blood, food suddenly turning rotten and maggot infested and a couple of deaths.  Cathy's main target, her mother, is recovering from a nervous breakdown after a miscarriage, so, obviously, nobody believes her claims about Cathy being possessed.  It all builds to a decidedly underwhelming climax and abrupt ending.  The film as a whole has a somewhat disjointed feel, as if there are scenes missing - either cut or unfilmed - and the script serves its cast up plenty of clunky dialogue, probably one of the reasons why the performances seem detached and uninvolved.  As a horror film, Cathy's Curse is a non-starter - there is absolutely no sense of urgency in the film, either in the acting performances or the direction, resulting in a complete lack of tension and suspense, while the effects work is poor and there isn't even any gore to enliven the proceedings.  To be fair, while it most certainly isn't a good film, Cathy's Curse is blandly watchable, but entirely forgettable.  

The Black Cat (1981)

I had a not entirely satisfactory weekend of movie viewing.  My mistake was in watching too many 'modern' films (ie, ones made after 2000), which I rarely find satisfying in the way that I do older stuff.  Even the recent B-horror I saw, which, to be fair, at least tried to do something different in terms of style and approach, felt more like an extended episode of an anthology TV series, (it actually had a very strong resemblance to an episode of The Twilight Zone).  Still, I did fit in my annual viewing of The Longest Day (1962) on Sunday afternoon and caught up with a British comedy of similar vintage that I hadn't seen in years.  All of which brings us, finally, to the subject of this 'Random Movie Trailer', Lucio Fulci's 1981 version of The Black Cat, which I caught up with again after watching a particularly disappointing big budget horror film of very recent vintage.  The Fulci film actually does have slightly more to do with the Poe story than the Luigi Cozzi's later version - for one thing, it actually features a black cat front and centre as one of the main protagonists and someone does end up being walled up alive with the cat, whose cries alert the hero.  As you'd expect from a Fulci horror film, The Black Cat features plenty of bloody and bizarre, murders, all instigated by the titular beast and is full of strange characters and strange goings on which, sort of, make sense.  A lot of it is quite atmospheric and suspenseful but, like most Fulci films, overall it is barking mad.

It's biggest problem is a meandering script which tells its story in such an unfocused way that it often becomes difficult to keep track of exactly what is going on, with characters suddenly appearing, dominating several scenes as if they are about to establish a new sub-plot, then being abruptly killed off.  Consequently, the film has an irregular rhythm and never manages to establish an even pace.   Set in an English village, the film boasts some excellent exterior filming across a number of Buckinghamshire locations, all used to good effect.  It also boasts a strong cast, led by Patrick Magee as a retired academic who hangs out in the graveyard in order to record conversations with the dead and who may or may not have psychic abilities.  He is also the owner of the very hostile black cat of the title, that repeatedly claws him, but is, apparently, also enacting Magee's subconscious hatred of the local villagers in its reign of terror.  The cat, which hypnotises its victims into crashing vehicles and stepping in front of cars, is, it has to be said, a pretty bad actor., sometimes looking as if it is about to fall asleep under the studio lights and quite obviously having had to be bribed with food to perform the simplest tasks for the camera.  I'm afraid that I have never found domestic cats remotely menacing, (they're anybody's friend in exchange for a saucer of milk), so the cat's performance here just undermines the film's central threat even further for me.  Still, David Warbeck, as a motorcycling Scotland Yard man, and Mimsy Farmer, as an American tourist who gets drawn into the plot, are on hand to make up for the weakness of the feline's performance.  Whilst not quite prime Fulci, The Black Cat is hugely enjoyable in a typically, for this director, eccentric way.

The Human Duplicators (1965)

The most surprising thing about The Human Duplicators (1965) is that it isn't a United Pictures Corporation (UPC) production.  With its mix of espionage and science fiction, low production values and use of past their prime, but still recognisable actors, it certainly looks and feels like one of the low budget science fiction films produced by UPC around the same time.  Even the sets and exteriors used look similar.  Undoubtedly, the similarities are in large part due to the fact that Human Duplicators was written by Arthur C. Pierce, who also wrote the UPC films, which included Dimension 5 (1965) and The Destructors (1966).  These latter two films are very similar to Human Duplicators in terms of their low budget portrayals of secret intelligence organisations, even down to the individual characters, who feel interchangeable between the three films.  The Human Duplicators, however, has the highest science fiction content - while the time travelling of Dimension 5 and the death rays of The Destructors are ultimately simply plot devices, secondary to their espionage plots, here the science fiction elements are central to the film.  

An Italian-US co-production, distributed by the Woolner Brothers, who handled US distribution of a lot of Italian exploitation films at this time, The Human Duplicators has the 'Intergalactic Council' send Dr Kolos (Richard Kiel) to earth in order to facilitate their plans for colonisation.  His job is to take over the cybernetic research and lab of Dr  Dornheimer (George MacCready) - he's one of those maverick scientists with a huge, remote, house with a private lab - and start turning out android duplicates of various scientists, politicians etc, in order to aid the alien takeover.  Starting with Dornheimer himself.  Opposing Kolos is NIA agent Glenn Martin (George Nader), who becomes suspicious of Dornheimer when one of the body of one of the duplicated scientists is found near his house.  The plot does take a few twists and turns, with Kolos questioning his orders after developing feelings for Dornheimer's blind niece, refusing to duplicate her and destroy the original, the android Dornheimer rebelling and deciding to cut the aliens out and stage an android takeover of the earth instead and Martin gets duplicated, his android double sowing confusion with the NIA, before the real Martin breaks out and saves the day.  Somewhat more ambitious in its scope than the UPC films it so resembles, Human Duplicators nevertheless brings nothing parrticularly new to the table, its ambitions undermined by its poverty row budget and flat direction.  Its main point of interest is in seeing Richard Kiel in a leading role - in which he is actually OK, giving one of the film's more animated performances and succeeding in conveying the character's growing reservations over his task.  It is also mildly surprising to see George MacCready, a character actor who was still getting roles in A-list movies, mixed up in such a low budget affair.  Reasonably enjoyable while it is playing, The Human Duplicators just doesn't have enough to make itself linger in the memory afterwards.

Seven Guns for the MacGregors (1966)

A mildly unusual spaghetti western which invokes that magic number seven in the title (Return of the Seven - also shot in Spain - would have been on release at around the same time), Seven Guns for the MacGregors (1966) is an early example of an entry in the genre that aims for laughs alongside the action.  This format would become more popular in the early seventies, following the success of the Terrance Hill/Bud Spencer Trinity movies, as an increasingly stale genre tried to revitalise itself.  But back in 1966, it was still a reasonably fresh idea.  Also novel is having a bunch of Italian and Spanish actors dubbed with cod Scottish accents instead of American accents.  To be fair, it's only the elder members of the MacGregor clan who have the dodgy Scottish accents - their offspring have dubbed voices provided by the usual array of American voice artists working in Rome at the time.  

The film's plot is pretty much by-the-book as far as spaghetti westerns of the era went: the MacGregors are a family of Scottish ranchers having trouble with horse rustlers working for a Mexican bandit and his gang.  When the younger MacGregors take their horses to a town they think is free of the bandit's influence, they find themselves in jail and their horses stolen.  Escaping, they hatch an elaborate plot - with the aid of other victims of the bandit and corrupt local sheriff - to bring down the gang.  This involves the eldest son infiltrating the gang, while the others impersonate the bandit and his men in a series of bank and train robberies.  It all culminates with the elder MacGregors, along with various relatives and neighbours, descending on the bandits' base for a pitched battle.

The film's biggest strength lies in its array of action set pieces, starting with the opening battle with rustlers at the ranch - which involves a cannon, amongst other weapons - and continuing through various bar room brawls and a train robbery.  Consequently, for the first two thirds or so of its length, Seven Guns for the MacGregors moves at an impressive pace, but slows down for the last third, as plot complications take the place of action, before returning to form with a climactic massed battle.  Like most cheaply made spaghetti westerns of its time, the film has a rough and ready feel about, with little finesse in editing, photography and general production values.  But it more than makes up for that in entertainment value.  Indeed, it was successful enough to spawn a sequel, Up the MacGregors! (1967) (also known as Seven Women for the MacGregors), which, confusingly, was released first in the US, despite the fact that it's plot follows on directly from the first film.  Certainly not a masterpiece, Seven Guns for the MacGregors nonetheless provided me with some suitable Bank Holiday afternoon entertainment.

Billy Two Hats (1974)

Another stop on my journey through various films I vaguely recall being released in my youth, but which I never saw and subsequently vanished, Billy Two Hats (1974) is a western from an era when they no longer made westerns.  At least at the volume or scale that they once did.  By the mid seventies the genre was deeply unfashionable, with only westerns being made (outside of TV movies and series) if they fell into the category of 'revisionist westerns', which questioned the conventions of the genre and presented a far grittier, dirtier version of the Old West than classic westerns had ever done.  In this context, Billy Two Hats is something of a curiosity, on several levels.  While it isn't exactly 'revisionist' - both plot and characters fall into established western tropes - it is shot in a 'gritty' style, with a realistic, grimy look rather than the slickness of traditional westerns.  It is also very minimalist, taking place mainly in rocky, semi-desert and very sparsely populated outdoor locations.

Ultimately, it is one of those old outlaw/young sidekick pursued by relentless lawman stories, a staple of the traditional western, offering little that is innovative.  Gregory Peck affecting a not very convincing Scottish accent provides a distraction from some fairly banal dialogue, which the film falls into every time the action flags.  Which is all too often as the film progresses: a bright and brisk start with some well choreographed action soon loses momentum as the pace slows and action is replaced by talk.  By the last third, it feels as if the script has run out of ideas completely, with the young sidekick given a fairly arbitrary romance with a rancher's wife and Peck's outlaw running into a band of troublesome Indians, before the reappearance of the pursuing Marshal rushes everything to a hasty climax.  It's actually pretty well directed by Ted Kotcheff, who makes the most of his locations, (the film was shot in Israel, thereby avoiding the usual over-familiar US locations featured in every other Hollywood western).  Billy Two Hats is quite enjoyable, but ultimately unmemorable, offering nothing new - after watching it, it doesn't seem surprising that it was one of those seventies films that quickly faded from view.

Terror From the Year 5000 (1958)

An independently produced science fiction thriller whose lack of budget is plain to see in every murkily shot frame, Terror From the Year 5000 (1958) was released by AIP in support of either The Screaming Skull (1958) or The Brain Eaters (1958), two other, equally poverty stricken, independently made would be shockers.  Rather like The Brain Eaters, Terror From the Year 5000 has some interesting ideas (both films are also uncredited adaptations of recently published science fiction stories), but its budget precludes it from ever really doing much with them.  The Brain Eaters, though, at least manages to build up an atmosphere of fevered paranoia and has a weird, skewed, feel to it, whereas Terror From the Year 5000 mainly feels flat, with director Robert J Gurney Jr only intermittently managing to conjure any real atmosphere or feeling of strangeness.  The central conceit of scientists breaking the 'time barrier' and establishing contact with a future civilisation, starting with the exchange of objects and culminating with an actual person arriving from the future, has possibilities, but is here executed on such a small scale that it fails to have any impact.  It doesn't help that much of the 'science' on display is patently absurd: there is no way that carbon dating, which relies upon the rate of decay of radioactive elements to estimate the age of artifacts, could be used to date an object as coming from the future.

The film also falls back on the trope of associating physical deformity, particularly facial deformity, with evil, with the radiation scarred woman from the future turning out to be a murderous savage.  It also deploys another science fiction cliche of having her in search of present-day males to provide untainted DNA for breeding purposes, (it at least reverses the sexes in this iteration, as it is normally alien or mutant males seeking nubile earth women for such purposes).  But even by 1958 standards, its scenario of eccentric scientists independently pursuing radical research in their remote private laboratories must have seemed dated - like something out of a 1930s or 1940s poverty row mad scientist picture.  None of this would necessarily matter if the film moved at a decent pace, but the script instead takes forever to actually get anywhere, padding out too much of its running time with a tedious love triangle, before rushing through the most interesting part involving the woman from the future in the last few minutes.  In the final analysis, Terror From the Year 5000 isn't really that bad a movie, but it isn't that good a movie, either, committing the cardinal B-movie sin of being far too slow and uneventful.

Mansion of the Doomed (1976)

Mansion of the Doomed (1976), an early production from Charles Band's Full Moon Pictures, seems to have been inspired by those surgical horror films that flourished on the continent during the sixties and into the seventies.  This was a sub-genre centered around the attempts of mad doctors to rectify disfigurements, madness or some other ailment in some female relative, most often a wife or daughter.  This would inevitably involve large quantities of gore and organ transplants from unwilling donors.  Amongst the best known examples are Jess Franco's The Awful Dr Orlof (1962) and Georges Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960), both of which involve the attempts of scientists to restore their daughters' faces.  Mansion of the Doomed follows the same template, although this time the surgeon is trying to restore his daughter's vision via a series of eye transplants, all of which, inevitably, go wrong.  What carried the earlier films through their rather limited plots was their visual style - the Franju film, in particular, features some striking and haunting visuals - and directorial flair.  Mansion of the Doomed, by contrast, is, in the hands of director Michael Pataki, a crude shocker, jarringly edited with uninteresting visuals and no sense of style whatsoever.  In place of suspense and tension, it relies upon the sheer nastiness of its central idea of people having their eyes forcibly removed to try and shock the viewer, with repeated shots of the eyeless sockets of his various victims, (who he keeps alive, locked up in the cellar).

Unfortunately, the film's script quickly becomes repetitive, with each eye replacement failing and the doctor seeking a new donor, over and over, with too little variation in the pattern.  The only abduction attempt that generates any real tension is when the scientist tries to abduct a child, persuading her to get into his car with him.  With its distinct undertones of child molestation, (it could be one of those seventies UK public information films aimed at kids, warning of the dangers of getting into cars with strangers), the sequence is genuinely disturbing and there's a palpable sense of relief when the girl panics and manages to get away from the doctor.  Not that it is an entirely wasted effort from his perspective: trying to chase her, he collides with another car, whose two occupants become his next victims when they follow him to his house to remonstrate with him.  Ultimately, the plot unfolds entirely predictably, with no twists or surprises.  You just know that those blind people are going to escape from that cellar and enact their own version of 'an eye for an eye' on the doctor.  The main point in the film's favour is the cast - Richard Basehart stars as the doctor, while Gloria Graham is his faithful assistant, there's also an early role for Lance Henriksen as the first victim.  Basehart gives his role all that it's worth, his performance effectively charting the doctor's stumbling descent into obsession and madness, as his professional veneer gradually disintegrates and he becomes a mumbling, on;y semi-coherent, wreck, driven solely by his obsessive quest to restore his daughter's sight.  Sadly, by the time the film finally staggers to a conclusion, the audience is past caring about his plight, relieved that their ordeal is finally over.

Hands of Steel (1986)

A vaguely Terminator inspired slice of Italian schlock, Hands of Steel (1986) - or, if you prefer, Vendetta del Futuro - also mixes in some of the aesthetic of the various Italian Mad Max and Escape From New York knock offs, with its lightly sketched in dystopian near-future setting.  In truth, it's a future that doesn't look too different to the present at the time the film was made, doubtless for budgetary reasons.  Pollution is the big threat in this future, with a political leader promising to take on the corporations and save the world, becomes a target for said corporations, who send a brainwashed cyborg to kill him at his headquarters in a run down hotel in an LA ghetto.  Unlike the 'Terminator', this cyborg isn't armed to the teeth with firearms, instead killing with his hands (the titular 'hands of steel').  But this time he doesn't kill, rebelling against his programming, he only injures his target, before going on the run from both his employers and the authorities.

At which point the plot shifts gears, with the cyborg holing up at a remote desert bar, where he gets involved in the local arm-wrestling scene.  Initially getting involved to protect the female bar owner from local thug George Eastman and his gang, he subsequently challenges the title holder, a big bald bearded truck driver, beating him despite Eastman's attempts to nobble him pre-contest.  Not surprisingly, all of this inevitably attracts the attention of both cops and evil corporation, who converge on the area.  In the ensuing conflagration, the cyborg gets to fight a female cyborg, has numerous shoot outs with corporation goons and is involved in several car chases involving articulated lorries and helicopters, before finally facing off against chief bad guy John Saxon.  Hands of Steel is one of those films which is good fun while it is on, but which ultimately leaves little impression, being entirely derivative of other, better budgeted, films.  What lingers in the memory are some well mounted action set pieces and Sergio Martino's pacy direction, which doesn't leave you too much time to think much about the film's short-comings while it is playing.  

Perhaps the most memorable aspect of the film is the way in which Martino manages to create a future world on what was clearly a very tight budget, sketching in details here and there to create something that, while remarkably like 1986 (people still drive third generation Camaros), still has enough differences to make it seem futuristic.  Unfortunately, the lack of budget means that the film can never really develop its scenario of a badly polluted world, where people have to dodge showers of acid rain, instead opting to go off into its desert arm-wrestling middle section, which could have come from another film entirely, in order to pad out the action.  The performances are adequate for this sort of film, with Daniel Greene suitably monosyllabic and inexpressive as the cyborg, while Eastman and Saxon, who had already made countless Italian schlock movies, go through their paces, delivering exactly the sort of villainous performances you'd expect from them.  All-in-all Hands of Steel is an enjoyable diversion, certainly more entertaining and action packed that many bigger budgeted action films of its era.

The Vampire Happening (1971)

Director Freddie Francis pretty much dismissed The Vampire Happening (1971) as being a 'vanity project' that he mistakenly became involved in.  Watching it, you can see why he formed this opinion, as the film stars the producer's wife, in a dual role, and the script seems largely as an excuse for her to get her knockers out.  Not that I'm complaining about the latter point, as Pia Degermark, a Swedish actress who had appeared in a number of European films, most notably Elvira Madigan (1967), had very nice knockers, but I do like my gratuitous nudity to be part of an actual plot which it can at least pretend to be integral to.  (I've often pondered that there's a whole doctoral thesis to be written on the psychology of film producers married to attractive actresses who like to star them in films where they get naked for global audiences to ogle.  Is it some kind of twisted alpha male behaviour of showcasing their wives to the rest of the male population with the gleeful underlying message of 'Yeah, you can look, but I'm the one who gets to have sex with her'?  Certainly, it is the ultimate expression of the idea of women being 'property' and objects to be displayed and paraded as displays of their husbands' masculinity).   According to Francis, he thought that he'd been hired to direct a horror parody, but quickly found that he had little artistic control over the project with the producer treating it as a 'home movie'.

The resulting film, an international co-production shot in West Germany, fails to work as either parody, comedy or horror, with a script that can never settle on an appropriate tone and performances from the cast that are far too broad to be effective in any context.  While the film's obvious inspiration was Polanski's Gothic horror parody Dance of the Vampires (1967), the script for The Vampire Happening eschews genuine parody of the genre and its conventions in favour of humour more on the level of a Carry On film or a sex comedy.  Indeed, it is very reminiscent of one of those German sex comedies inspired by classic fairy tales - and just as lame.  Interestingly, the plot's central conceit - the confusion of identity between the American actress who has inherited the castle and her undead vampire ancestress - is also vaguely reminiscent of Hammer's Twins of Evil (1971), which must have been shooting at around the same time.  Francis does, at least, manage to give it a professional sheen, with some good photography of the German locations and some occasionally mildly creepy chasing around dark and dank corridors and dungeons.  While undoubtedly conceived as a vanity project to allow Degermark to showcase her, well, assets, the fact is that her performances in the dual roles of actress and vampire aren't that bad.  She had, after all, won the best actress award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival for Elvira Madigan.   Here, unfortunately, the script doesn't give her much to do, other than flash her breasts and bare her fangs periodically.  Sadly, these aren't enough to save the film which, at an hour and forty minutes, long outstays its welcome.