Change Your Image
Charles Garbage
Reviews
Female Jungle (1955)
The classy side of AIP
Lawrence Tierney was given numerous low-life/tough-guy roles throughout the 40's in such noirs as BORN TO KILL (1947) and THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE (1948), until he gained himself a bad name in Hollywood for his constant bar-brawls and arrests. The Tierney architype was resurected in the 50's when minor studios decided to milk the one-time noir icon for what he was worth. His only 50's come-back films I know of are THE HOODLUM (1951-United Artists) and THE FEMALE JUNGLE (1956-ARC), directed by the very under-rated Bruno VeSota right after DAUGHTER OF HORROR.
Lawrence plays a bum alcoholic detective who investigates in the murder of an actress committed outside the same bar he was drinking in. The plot unfolds itself from flashbacks. Producer, Burt Kaiser plays an alcoholic and unemployed artist, married to waitress, Kathleen Crowley. Kaiser is asked one night by a mysterious gossip columnist (the wonderfully sinister John Carradine, looking suave as ever in white tie and tails) to have his characature painted. Kaiser and Tierney both have affairs with Candy, a deliciously slutty bombshell (Jayne Mansfield, looking stunning in her film debut). Other suspects include George, the black janitor, James Kodl providing some intentional laughs as Joe, the bar owner and Cornelius Keefe (billed as Jack Hill!) as the Chief.
During World War 2, anyone who went to the movies had no choice but to pay money and view low-budget black-and-white quickies beacuse of the restrictions. Bottom-of-the-barrel studios like PRC and Monogram were in their element turning 'em out faster than they ever did before. This also gave film noir (considered lowbrow entertainment back then) an opportunity to be shown to wider audiences. The 50's saw just about every cinema-goer heading for the 70mm CinemaScope epics and big-name blockbusters leaving all other kinds of films to be viewed by nonexistent crowds at either art-house or drive-in theatres. It also saw the very last of the film noir echoeing it's way through the minor studio system. FEMALE JUNGLE, a great noir by many standards, was sold to Sam Arkoff and James H. Nicholson for ARC (pre-AIP) in 1956 and was dumped on a drive-in double-bill with OKLAHOMA WOMAN, a western directed by Roger Corman! I still don't think that FEMALE JUNGLE has got the appreciation it deserves. It is a superior film noir full of interesting low-life characters and dimly lit side-streets which all of us noir-lovers crave for in a film.
In an interview, Jayne Mansfield said that FEMALE JUNGLE "was filmed in two weeks and led to nothing". She was paid $150 for starring and then returned to her job as a popcorn-girl in a cinema before returning to the screen again in WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? Lawrence Tierney wound up driving a taxi cab in Central Park before being resurected again (!) to play his tough-guy role in John Huston's PRIZZI'S HONOR (1985) and again in Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS (1993). Bruno VeSota later directed THE BRAIN EATERS (1958) and INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES (1962), starred in numerous drive-in features throughout the late-50's and 60's (TEENAGE DOLL, A BUCKET OF BLOOD, THE CHOPPERS...) before dying of a heart attack in 1976 aged 54.
Mondo Keyhole (1966)
Lose your mind to MONDO KEYHOLE!
Nick Moriarty plays Howard, the owner of Arts Products, a mail-order service that specializes in adults-only films, pictures, art-work and even records like Punishment in Hi-Fi! Always dressed in a stuffy buisness suit with stuffy job and coming home to his depressed junky wife, Howard seems bored with his life so he goes out and rapes women. A man-hating lesbian blackbelt finds out eventually and has her revenge.
MONDO KEYHOLE has become virtually unknown after being deleted from the Something Weird Video collection which is a pity because it's a really interesting film and on top of that it was written and co-directed by Jack Hill! It goes against the porn industry with it's narration describing Howard as having committed "the worst crime of them all - RAPE!" which all leads to his job. There are also some suprisingly very funny depictions of these adults-only films and their directors ("I've put my heart and soul in to this one!") and if you look carefully you'll spot Dave Friedman's name written in big letters inside an open magazine. Despite it's extremely low budget, KEYHOLE features some terrific, mind-boggling effects and sequences (some using a negative print) including a skull lighting up in flames and a watch swinging back and forth during the opening scene. Also during a wild dress-up party everyone freaks out after drinking the punch spiked with LSD.
This definately for accuired tastes. It's very weird, arty and dosn't end up making much sense, but is still a visual delight. I only wonder what Jack Hill thought of it....
Satan in High Heels (1962)
A heavy dose of trivia for all lovers of cheese
Del Tenney fans MUST see this depiction of early-60's club life in which he plays Paul, a bisexual pianist (!). It's pretty hard to believe that this suave leading man later directed THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH and I EAT YOUR SKIN. The main character though is Stacey, played to the bitchiest by sexy, husky-voiced Meg Myles. Stacey moves inner-city with her junky boyfriend and gets a job as a burlesque entertainer. There, she gets catty with Pepe (Grayson Hall), her female boss for wanting her own way and becomes involved in a romantic triangle with Pepe's son and husband.
The music was by jazz composer, Mundell Lowe who's album TV ACTION JAZZ has become a rare collector's item over the years. One of the songs from that album (a nice version of 'Naked City') as been issued on to CRIME JAZZ, a CD compilation avalible from Rhino. The music in SATAN IN HIGH HEELS is pretty mundane jazzamaspazz but I'm after the the original soundtrack (from Parker Records) just for one great song sung by Meg Myles (in leather clothes and a whip!), 'More Deadly Than the Male'. Also starring in the film is Sabrina, something of a poor man's Jane Mansfield, who sings a really bad number before Stacey's act. I was amazed to know that Sabrina was a real sensation down here in Oz! She was down here regularly starring in television commercials (one was for Amcal oil-cubes!) and was featured in lots of newsreel footage (always holding her poodle, just like Jane) and magazines. I even found reference to her in Peter Doyle's AMAZE YOU FRIENDS, a crime novel set in Sydney during the 1950's.
Aside from all these fascinating facts, SATAN IN HIGH HEELS is a fairly enjoyable little film with lots of class. It also remains a decent examination of sleazy, smokey inner-city burlesque clubs which will never again be seen or experieced.
Teenage Rebellion (1967)
Oh lord, take me there!
Towards the late-60's, a new breed of "rebellious teens" had supposedly emerged and as a result lot of great, fun movies were released on the exploitation circuit to give warning to "teenagers and straight people alike". Some of these gems include MONDO MOD, MALAMONDO and HIPPIE REVOLT. TEENAGE REBELLION is one of these films but in my eyes it is something of an individual. For one thing it's in black-and-white, has nothing to do with hippies and rather than just sticking to good ol' USA, we get to see rebellious teens from a whole lot of other parts of the world (mostly Europe).
There's never a moment of boredom as Burt Topper's serious narration informs us about teenage protests, revolts, prostitution, drugs and unwed mothers. There are lots of memorable (sometimes staged) scenes involving LSD, beatnik parties, young homosexuals in Italy, an interview with a British prostitute and a wonderful, surprising clay-animated scene depicting man's discovery of the wheel (great editing, too!). The groovy dancing scenes (from US, London and even Tokyo) and music (Mike Curb produced the Sidewalk lable soundtrack!) are unnecessarily picked on by Topper's narration and stills of old folks walking in the street with phony voice-overs ("Call that dancing? We had real dancing in my day!"). The flashbacks with people jitterbugging and dead movie stars walking across Sunset Blvd. represent how time has changed since then.
TEENAGE REBELLION usually played under the title MONDO TEENO (!) and was released several times during the late-60's and early-70's. One time it even played with H.G. Lewis' JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT! My video copy is from Something Weird who sadly had their copy deleted some time ago making it completely unavailable. If you dig this sort of 60's thing, you should definitely look it up because films like these are like nostalgic tours of and era which will never again be experienced.
Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)
RM's last and least
It was Russ Meyer who pretty much launched the new Sexploitation industry in 1959 when he made THE IMMORTAL MR. TEAS, the first nudie-cutie which grossed one-million dollars and spawned a new breed of adults-only movies throughout the early-60's. Nudie-cuties and nudist-colony movies then became a bore among the male audience so they began to mature. "Roughies" were films which mixed nudity and violence with women getting what they deserve. By that time around the mid-60's the Sexploitation era was at it's peak with "Roughies" like OLGA'S HOUSE OF SHAME and THE DEFILERS along side more creative and even more entertaining nudies like KISS ME QUICK knocking 'em out at grindhouses along 42nd street.
By the 70's, the innocence of Sexploitation had transformed itself in to "porno". Old masters obeyed their audiences' lusts and turned up with more dirtier flicks containing more nudity and less artistic touches. Some usually went over-board while others like Russ Meyer kept their brains in their head to create more funnier and sexier films which we can now look upon as art that has been lost through this age of video-taped and digitised filth.
Meyer's 70's features were usually lots of fun. Films like SUPERVIXENS and UP! are highly original and humorous spins on society with the typically great Meyeresque cinematography, editing and dialogue. BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA-VIXENS is his last film to date made in 1979, the coming-approach of video-cassette in which men could just go their local videostore to get aroused instead of their local grindhouse. It was also a year where things were really changing in the Sexploitation industry and even auteurs like Russ Meyer seemed to be going along with the flow. ULTRA-VIXENS is a pretty outrageous film but that does not necessarily mean it's a great film. Stuart Lancaster repeats his role from SUPERVIXENS as a farmer living in Smalltown USA narrating the tale of Lavonia (Kitten Natidad) and her husband Lamar who does not seem to be as horny as the rest of the town. They go around laying the town's small population and end up happily laying each other again. ULTRA-VIXENS contains *lots* of exaggerated sex and (lower-deck) nudity. A bouncy-boobed evangelist makes it with Martin Boorman to 'Old-Time Religion' while Kitten is fully naked for over half the movie making it with lingerie salesmen, nurses and underage boys. So basically, this is a movie that will satisfy the more perverse members of the audience. You can be anything but a porn freak to enjoy most of Russ Meyer's movies but it is a completely different case here. His amazing twenty-year career in film-making explored a whole range of Sexploitation sub-genres: nudie-cuties, "documentaries" on busty women, backwoods dramas, morality tales and bigger budget films for Fox Studios all make up for this; a tasteless, boring, totally unsophisticated piece of pornographic crap which seems to crave for more of it's director's special touches. You do get (in very small proportions) his snappy editing, cinematography and characters from previous films. Stuart Lancaster, who had been appearing in Meyer's films on and off since 1965, can sometimes be entertaining to watch, Uschi Digart once again plays Soul (humping her 15-year-old son), Henry Rowland as Martin Boorman and even RM himself shows at the end.
During the last forty years men's entertainment has depended on it's (mostly male) audience and what they enjoy viewing. THE IMMORTAL MR. TEAS was made at a time when most bachelors were clean-cut and sophisticated. Today's hard-core, non-simulated sex viewed over the internet seems to be aimed at brainless sleazebags who have never had a girlfriend or, for that matter, many friends. Meyer made this right in between these two eras and seems to be confused whether he's doing another one of his standards or a film for perverts. It's hard to sit through a film who's director does not know what he's getting at. Basically Russ should have stopped with UP! Like the rest of the reviewers, some of you may enjoy ULTRA-VIXENS more than I did.
A Smell of Honey a Swallow of Brine (1966)
Well, it's different (for Dave Friedman)!
Barbara Jean Moore (Stacey Walker) was a dropout from Texas who, while vacating in Santa Monica, was discovered on a beach one afternoon by cigar-chomping sexploitation producer, Dave Friedman who decided to cast her in the title role for his latest picture THE NOTORIOUS DAUGHTER OF FANNY HILL (1965). Pleased by her acting skills (and looks I suppose), he casted her in this as well as a nudist camp short. A Paramount executive saw some of the films and was eager to run an interview with Walker but while Friedman went looking for her she had already gone back to Texas. So for all we know Miss Walker could have become a big Hollywood name!
In A SMELL OF HONEY, she plays Sharon, a sexy, sadistic office worker who teases men to their limits and screams "rape" once she's done. "Roughies" had become big in the adults-only film industry so Sharon gets what she deserves from some horny b*stards towards the end.
The cinematography was by the great Lazlo Kovacs so you can always keep yourself occupied during the 71 minutes just admiring the b/w visuals. It's slow in spots and ends abruptly (may be the print) but for a post-BLOOD FEAST Dave Friedman film, it's not bad. Walker's twangy accent and an equelly twangy, reaccuring tune by Et-Cetra (which you're sure to be humming in your head after viewing) strangely creates some kind of rural, southern feeling to the film (don't expect Russ Meyer, though). For a more slappy, enjoyable Dave Friedman experience try THE ACID EATERS (1968).
Sisters in Leather (1969)
What ever happened to men's entertainment?
Joe, a bored and seemingly depressed business man has another bad day when he is blackmailed by a couple of female bikers when caught making it with an underaged girl at the back of his car. The gals in leather then take Joe's wife which forces him to go down to a nearby strip joint (where Pat Barrington does her thing) to get some male bikers to straighten them lesos out and the ending is just fabulus.
It's no history lesson but this simple b/w sexploitation film can be very funny (and sexy) and the unknown, unbilled actor who plays Joe (who also narrates) is great. Zoltan G. Spencer also wrote the enjoyable dialogue and had previously made Satanis: The Devil's Mass (1968).
Il mostro di Venezia (1965)
Just because it's Italian, dosn't mean it's Bava
A guy with a snorkle steals the beautiful women of Venice and takes them in to his parlour to preserve their beauty. A clean-cut reporter investigates.
This b/w spaghetti-schlocker first showed in a drive-in double bill in 1966 with Michael Reeve's first film, THE SHE BEAST with Barbara Steele. It was then picked up again in 1973 in a triple-bill alongside T.V. Mikels' THE CORPSE GRINDERS and THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS where a nurse checked everyone's blood pressures before they watched these three absoulutely terrorfying movies!
Pretty interesting screening history for such an ordinary movie. Well, I suppose it's just standard drive-in fare. Enjoyable in it's own dull sort of way and worth the effort for all us completists.
Fireball Jungle (1968)
"It's a fireball jungle we're living in"
The Cuban-born Joseph Prieto (aka Joseph Mawra) could be the single most under-rated person in the history of exploitation films. He not only directed SHANTY TRAMP and SAVAGES FROM HELL, he is also responsible for all four OLGA movies and the dykesploitation film CHAINED GIRLS.
This extraordinary, action-packed car-racing wonder is his very best.
The whole film revolves around a big race and the urges of the evil, snickering Cateye Meares (Alan Mixon) who'll do anything to win it. OK, pretty standard plot. What really makes the film is it's countless exploitation elements. Within 94 minutes you get a screeching car elimination, a cat fight, references to LSD and, in the best scene, a totally bent comedy-filler set in a bar with toilet-seat bar stools and urinal beer-taps!
A great, great film that stands beyond any other car-racing film ever made. See it to believe it.