There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, though, you do desperately need a rewrite and a few more takes…

The Reptile (1966)

Distributed by: Twentieth Century Fox

Directed by: John Gilling

The best you can say is, the relationship between England and India is complicated.

In 1948, right before India was formally gained her independence, Indian workers were invited to help rebuild the British economy. As Indians came west and put down roots in the UK, English youth coming of age during the post-war years would discover the “Hippie Trail,” and soon the former colony would start to influence the former overlord.

By 1966, this blend would bear out in profound ways. Having been introduced to Indian music during the making of Help!, George Harrison would play sitar on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”. While not the first instance of Indian influence in British popular music (coming after such pieces as the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul”), it was certainly a high point in the melding of influences.

On the other end of the scale, meanwhile…

We start with a cold open as we watch Charles Spalding (David Baron) make his way up to the estate of Doctor Franklyn (Noel Willman). He is in the house long enough for something to attack him, after which his venom-filled corpse is taken by an unnamed man (Marne Maitland) and dumped in the village square.

After a brief funeral witnessed by publican Tom Bailey (Michael Ripper) and colorful character Mad Peter (John Laurie), we watch as Charles’ brother Harry (Ray Barrett) and his wife Valerie (Jennifer Daniel) receive the deed to Charles’ home in the reading of the will. The couple arrive in Cornwall to a less than warm welcome from the villagers, and their nasty encounters with Doctor Franklyn do nothing to repair the damage done here to this town’s reputation.

Of course, nothing is quite what we see; the townies don’t welcome the new folks in because too many people are dying of the “Black Death,” the name they’ve given to the affliction of the bitten, and they don’t want to get too attached. Tom and Mad Peter do try and roll out the welcome wagon, though, and the surprise the Spaldings get when Doctor Franklyn’s daughter Anna (Jacqueline Pearce) insist that they come up for dinner looks like things are starting to turn around for the couple.

At least, until Anna starts playing the sitar for them:

As Harry Spalding enlists Tom’s help in getting to the bottom of the matter, we discover Doctor Franklyn’s motivation: he and his daughter Anna are just as much victims here as anyone else for having tried to learn too much from the East.

Suddenly, everything we thought we knew is wrong; considering how badly we were informed before now, could you blame us? Going back to look at the film a second time, you start to pick out the true motivation behind these characters, but you have to work harder than necessary to find them on the second pass. The lack of any subtlety whatsoever in Willman’s acting in the early going makes you have to look more intently than you should to accept the big twist, and if you have to work that hard to read between the lines forearmed the second time out, the fault lies with them, not us.

Maybe we were never going to have this unfold in a satisfactory manner, no matter how much we deserved it to. Hammer Films made the movie right immediately after wrapping work on The Plague of the Zombies, almost simultaneously, in fact; both films shared directors, sets, and a good portion of the cast, with Pearce playing the nightmare inducer in both pics. (On the plus side, her playing two separate antagonists back-to-back was good training for the role she is best known for, Servalan on Blake’s 7.)

Frustratingly, Hammer Films ended up making many of the same mistakes they made two years earlier on The Gorgon, though this time with a smaller budget. It’s the repackaging of a creature that we’ve otherwise seen before, a “were-snake”-ish thing that, other than its bad makeup, doesn’t have any outstanding memorable characteristics, once again running around in a costume drama with familiar beats. Audiences were getting too many of those from the studio, and Hammer was just not striking a cord with them.

We might likely forget this one, too, were it not for the uncomfortable timing of its release. With Calcutta-born Marne Maitland playing the personification of the evil of the East, which pretty well describes most of his CV, the film played up the darker aspects of what the West thought of that region. At the same time that the West was being introduced to Indian music by the Beatles, some Britons were openly racist to Indians in their midst; legislation to address this behavior would not be passed by Parliament until 1968, and even then the work for a more tolerant society would have to continue for at least fifty years.

Unlike the movie, which was rushed to be released unfinished, we still needed a few more takes and a few more drafts to come to a place where we can truly accept others. Would that we were closer to that day than we are now…

NEXT TIME: Have you seen Mick Jagger’s first film, standing in the shadows…?

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: Hammer’s Spooky Snake-Woman Supplies Some Slippery Scares appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

Last year, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Monkees as a band by counting down our top 50 Monkees songs. Now, we’re celebrating The Monkees TV show by profiling each and every episode — exactly 50 years after it first premiered.

Tonight’s episode: “The  Monkees Race Again” aka “Leave the Driving to Us” (Season 2, Episode 21)

Air date: February 12, 1968

In this episode, (which is also known as “Leave the Driving to Us,” a shout-out to the Greyhound Bus jingle) the Monkees are working on the Monkeemobile when their phone rings – in the engine, of course, and is answered by Peter who hands it to Davy who learns his grandfather’s friend, T.N. Crumpets, needs their help with an upcoming auto race.

Davy, Mike, and Peter meet T.N. Crumpets (William Glover) at his garage, and he explains that someone is sabotaging his vehicle. “Yes, but are you having trouble with your car?” asks Peter. The racing car is #54, a reference to the early ’60s sitcom Car 54, Where Are You? Micky finally arrives but doesn’t explain why he’s so late.

Meanwhile, we visit the garage of Baron Von Klutz, “Maker of the Klutzmobile.” Von Klutz and his cohort Wolfgang are portraying German stereotypes complete with over-the-top accents. They are played by German actor David Hurst (The Baron) and comic legend Stubby Kaye (Wolfgang). Hurst later made appearance in an episode of Star Trek, and Kaye is probably best known for playing Nicely Nicely Johnson in the 1955 musical Guys And Dolls.

After they unsuccessfully work on their own car (“The car shtinks!” exclaims Wolfgang) the Baron spies through his periscope the boys working on Crumpets’s car. When Von Klutz suggests that Wolfgang takes a look for himself he says that he can’t because he is standing on his foot – a running gag for the first half of the episode. Von Klutz declares that they must think of a plan!

Back at the garage, the Monkees (looking bored) continue to work on the car when Von Klutz and Wolfgang pay them a visit. “So Crumpets,” announces the Baron, “I see you’re having some trouble with your car!” To which Crumpets retorts, “I see you’re having some trouble with your accent!”

After they leave, Micky whacks the car with his hand, getting the engine to run smoothly, and Crumpets decides they celebrate with tea. Meanwhile, Von Klutz suggests they kidnap Crumpets and the Musical Mechanic, Micky. Crumpets’s butler Carruthers (Maurice Dallimore) sprays the area with London Mist, and Von Klutz appears spraying the garage with knockout gas. After Monkees and crew pass out, Crumpets and Micky are kidnapped.

When they come to, Von Klutz explains that if he wins the race, the name “Klutzmobile” will be on the lips of every car buyer in the stadium! Von Klutz threatens to gag Crumpets who says to the camera “There’s enough gags in this show already!” When the Baron threatens physical torture to Micky, he unwillingly agrees to work on the Klutzmobile.

When the Monkees et al come to, they visit the Baron’s garage in search of their friends. Unsuccessful in finding them, they leave, and we learn Micky and Crumpets are being stashed in piles of tires. The Baron decides they will keep the hostages while they are still useful. After the race, they can be disposed of!

Sounds like a time for a commercial break to me!

The Monkees have finished fixing Crumpet’s racing car, and Davy takes it upon himself to be the driver for the big race since he is a British subject.

Klutz blames Micky for ruining his car and then discovers through his periscope Davy and his friends on their way to the race.

Wolfgang comes up with a plan to divert them by making an announcement that they must report to the viewing stand immediately. Mike and Peter fall for the fake announcement and as soon as they leave the garage Klutz and Wolfgang arrive and steal their car, take its engine, and places it into the Klutzmobile! Mike and Peter return to the garage and discover the car is missing!

The racing official informs the Monkees they can’t enter the race if they don’t have a car, so Davy – to the rescue again -volunteers the Monkeemobile! If the official looks familiar, it is because you saw Don Kennedy as a policeman in the episode “Monkees A La Carte.” Watch the Monkeemobile carefully as this is its final appearance in the series.

At the racetrack, Davy arrives alongside Klutz who informs him that the other contestants have all been sabotaged. Mike and Peter go back and look for Micky and Crumpet. They arrive just as Wolfgang is about to shoot them.

The race is on! Originally Davy and the Baron were to make stops during the race for tea, girls, relay races, and contests, but this idea was abandoned.

Instead of a Monkees song, the race includes music composed by Stu Phillip, which appeared again in the 1970 movie The Rebel Rousers.

Despite Klutz’s sabotage attempts, Davy wins the race, and the world is free of the Klutzmobile!

After commercial break, we are treated to “What Am I Doing Hangin’ Round” and a traditional Monkee romp, featuring a rare cameo by producer Robert Rafelson, complete with caption “The World’s Oldest Flower Child.” This wasn’t his first appearance in the show though, Rafelson previously popped up in the episode “The Monkees On Tour.”

The Nesmith-sung song “Hangin’ Round” was written under the pseudonyms Travis Lewis and Boomer Clark, whose real names are Michael Martin Murphey (a friend of Mike Nesmith’s) and Owen Castleman. The song was produced by Chip Douglas who also provided bass and some backing vocals. Douglas, of couse, is the man behind some of the Monkees’ biggest hits such as “Daydream Believer,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” as well as their albums Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.

Dave Evan, Elias Davis, and David Pollock co-wrote the script, and Davis and Pollock later reunited between 1978 and 1983 to write several episodes for M*A*S*H.

Production  was something of celebration for Jones as it began just 72 hours after his wedding to Linda Haines. It also aired one day prior to Peter Tork’s Birthday.

Jim Frawley directed almost half of all Monkees episodes – 32 in all – but this was his final ever one; he later went on to have a hugely successful career in television working on shows such as Law & Order and Judging Amy and, maybe best of all, directed The Muppet Movie in 1979.

This episode is also notable in another way: it the last full Monkees episode to be produced. Despite this, there’s nothing sad about the episode, in fact days after the original TV airing of “The Monkees Race Again,” principal production of the Monkees’ first ever feature film HEAD began!

The post Every ‘Monkees’ Episode: “The Monkees Race Again” (S2E21) appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, though you can’t always get what you want, you can never be sure if you’ve actually gotten what you need…

Performance (1970)

Distributed by: Warner Brothers

Directed by: Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg

Let’s get this out of the way up front: This discussion is very likely not for those with delicate sensibilities.

We all have to start somewhere. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones made their debut at London’s Marquee Club in 1962, while Cammell and Roeg made their debuts as directors with Jagger eight years later.

And oh, what a debut.

We open with a set of quick cuts establishing Chas (James Fox) as a man of violence; the way he makes love explicitly to his casual girlfriend Dana (Ann Sidney) with such brutal force, you almost imagine that we’ll never see her again after he’s done with her. (We don’t, but it’s because after she walks off to work he never calls her again.)

And Chas approaches his work much like his sexual technique, willing to smash things and people brutally. As an enforcer for the London criminal underground, he makes Ronnie and Reggie Kray look like choirboys; to dissuade a lawyer from going after “the business,” for example, he uses acid to erode the finish on his target’s Rolls, while giving the chauffeur (John Sterland) a forced straight razor shave of all his hair, leaving him bald and tied to the acid-washed car as a message.

He does this on behalf of Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), a boss with plans for expanding his criminal empire that he feels requires a softer touch going forward. When, against Flowers’ orders, Chas kills new associate Joey Maddocks (Anthony Valentine) after a series of violent tussles, Chas has to make a run for it. Hunted by both “the business” and the coppers, Chas lays low after working the street by posing as a performer who weasels his way into a room for let in Notting Hill Gate.

He cons the person at the door to the mansion, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg), that he’s taking over for the room’s last tenant. While she lets him claim the room, the owner of the establishment, the reclusive former rock star Turner (Jagger), initially wants him gone:

Turner’s not too keen on the new lodger, not wanting him around to distract from his search for “his lost demon.” Having foregone all human contact except for his last two faithful groupies, Pherber and Lucy (Michele Breton in her last performance), Turner spends his time playing around, mostly with his hanger-ons, at one point with both of them in the bath.

Chas insists on staying, however, and soon the two gentlemen start sharing. First, they share room in the house, then stories, then the groupies, then some mushrooms out back that help them further share clothes and make-up (Pherber’s and Lucy’s as well as Turner’s) as well as minds.

Finally, Turner has been in contact long enough with Chas that he’s able to initiate the means of penetrating Chas’ psyche and getting straight into his head:

This leads to the show-stopping sequence where Jagger becomes Harry Flowers, singing “Memo from Turner” (NSFW) as he makes Chas reflect more deeply on his choices in life. Evoking the kind of magical realism found in Jorge Luis Borges‘ work (an author whose influence permeates the script and whose image turns up a lot on the set), the switching of minds between the two gives Turner the ability to find his lost demon, helping him start to make his way out of his isolation.

While the revelation also gives Chas insight, however, it doesn’t make him change his plans, to try and get fake papers to flee to New York. It’s a plan that Flowers and his associates are aware of, however, with the mob coming ever closer to finding Chas to give him “the business”…

In terms of the business of making the film, the movie had one of the more colorful histories ever involved for a production. Cammell, a painter who grew up knowing Aleister Crowley, decided he wanted to walk away from painting and put his energies into film making; through his friendship with Pallenberg, he was able to put together a package for what was pitched as a romp through Swinging London that would have featured Jagger and Marlon Brando.

As the story developed (with considerable input from Pallenberg), the film moved away from a version of A Hard Day’s Night with the Rolling Stones in it and more Brighton Rock with a Rolling Stone in it. Brando left, Fox came aboard, the soon the gang was all here…

…literally; Johnny Shannon personally knew some of the crew that had ran with the Krays and their associates, and one of the members of “the business,” Moody, was played by John Bindon, who’s criminal ties didn’t get in the way of his acting career or from being a roadie for Led Zeppelin later on. The film’s first half, focusing on Chas and the rackets, has a lot of technical input from London organized crime figures who knew Shannon personally (including one of Ronnie Kray’s male lovers), which gave the film a style and presentation that would go on to influence the likes of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino.

As for the second half, where the film is handed off to Jagger and his entourage as Fox moves among them, much of Cammell’s experience among the artists inhabiting Swinging London comes to play here. While audiences that caught any production that came out of Andy Warhol’s Factory might have felt a sense of déjà vu, mainstream audiences expecting the Rolling Stones in a Hollywood release were going to be shocked.

The studio certainly was; test audiences overwhelmingly hated the original cut, and Warner executives held back the film for a year and a half as they had Cammell recut the movie. (Roeg during this time was in Australia to film Walkabout.) The film was so delayed that Jagger’s second effort at acting, in the title role of the Australian frontier yarn Ned Kelly, actually got to screens before Performance did.

Remarkably, the final cut released still had plenty to shock and upset viewers despite the studio notes; Cammell’s interpretation of his marching orders met the letter of the law, if not the intent. The studio, during the chaotic time it found itself in when it released The Valley of Gwangi, may have declared “Ah, what the hell?” and just put it out there, not realizing they had a serious cult film in the making starting its rounds.

Despite Warner Brothers’ reluctance and revulsion, they released the film to an audience that were mesmerized and enticed when the shock finally faded. By 1999, the film took position # 48 on BFI’s Top 100 British Films, putting it in front of Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, and even A Hard Day’s Night, the movie Performance was supposed to be analogous to when the studio green lit it.

While the audience ultimately dug it, however, there was certainly no meeting of the minds on release between Warner Brothers and the directors, unlike Chas and Turner’s…

NEXT TIME: You thought the only monstrous Danish was one of those large pastries you get at the store, didn’t you…?

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: Mick Jagger Gives Us His Best Ever ‘Performance’ appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

In 1955, a little black-and-white B-movie hit cinema screens and helped change music forever. Blackboard Jungle starred Glenn Ford as a teacher trying to make changes in a inner-city school — a theme not unusual now but ground-breaking then.

It wasn’t the subject matter that caused a sensation, however, but the song featured throughout the movie. It was so striking it had kids dancing in the aisles.

“Rock Around the Clock” is not the first rock ‘n’ roll song but it is certainly one of the most important ones. Other records may lay claim to really being the first but “Rock Around the Clock” was the first heard by millions around the world.

When it was played during the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle, kids who had never heard rock ‘n’ roll before rushed out and turned what was originally a B-side into a massive hit and the 30-year-old, kiss-curl-wearing Bill Haley into an unlikely teen hero.

The song itself wasn’t written by Haley but by songwriters  James E. Myers (under the name Jimmy DeKnight) and an almost 60-year-old Max Freedman in 1952. Myers had been working on the song for several years and was playing it one day in his office when his friend Freeman popped in and begun adding words to his tune. Myers later told the Rockabilly Hall of Fame:

“When we finished it, he said, ‘What are you going to call it?’ I said, ‘Rock Around The Clock.’ And he said, ‘Why rock? What’s that mean? Why not “Dance Around The Clock?”’ And I said, ‘I just have a gut feeling, and since I’m half writer and whole publisher, I’m the boss! Right!’ So, we called it ‘Rock Around the Clock.’”

Myers already had a long working relationship with Haley when he offered the song to him, having written Haley’s first ever single, “Ten Gallon Stetson” (recorded with his country band the Saddlemen) in 1950. Haley loved the new song and began performing it in concert but he almost didn’t record it due to a dispute with Haley’s record producer at the time, Dave Miller, owner of the label Essex Records.

Despite Haley’s enthusiasm for “Rock Around the Clock”, Miller hated Myers and refused to let any of his artists record his songs. Haley later recalled, “Three times I took the tune in the recording studio. Every time Miller would see it, he’d come in and tear it up and throw it away.”

Undeterred, Myers knew he was onto something big and was determined to get the song out there, offering it to an instrumental group called Sonny Dae and His Knights. Their version of “Rock Around the Clock” was the very first released, hitting stores in March 1954 but sunk without a trace and the band never made another record.

Thankfully for Myers, Haley left Essex Records in early 1954 to sign with major label Decca Records. Everything had been working against Haley and his band recording “Rock Around the Clock,” and his first recording session with Decca was no different.

First, the ferry taking them from Philadelphia to New York got stuck making them late, then once at the studio their new producer Milt Gabler (who also happens to be actor and comedian Billy Crystal’s uncle) wanted the band to instead work on a track called “Thirteen Women (And Only One Man In Town),” a novelty song about a nuclear bomb blast that leaves just 14 people alive that had previously been recorded by Dickie Thompson.

This was to be, Gabler had decided, the band’s first Decca single (most likely because Gabler was said to have a stake in its publishing).

It was only after they had finished recording this track that Haley and the boys were allowed to give “Rock Around the Clock” a try with the aim of it being the B-side. With Sammy Davis, Jr. impatiently waiting for his turn in the studio, there was only time (30 minutes in all) for two takes, and these were spliced together for the single.

When Haley recorded “Rock Around the Clock,” he had already released numerous singles, first as a country artist with his band the Saddlemen and then, after a name change in 1952 (inspired by Halley’s Comet), with the Comets.

Born in Michigan in 1925 to a musical mother and father, Haley was interested in music from an early age and when he attempted to make a guitar out of cardboard, his parents knew it was time to buy him a real one. Their faith in him soon paid off when, by the age of 13, Haley was already playing professionally, albeit for just a dollar a night.

By 15, he had left home to pursue a career in music, singing on local radio, in a traveling medicine show, and with a number of bands, including the Four Aces of Western Swing, where he earned a reputation as one of best cowboy yodelers in the country.

He soon found a job as a DJ on a radio station in Pennsylvania, and it was here that he began broadening his musical palette and was soon incorporating R&B and boogie woogie into the Saddlemen. Although primarily a Western swing band by 1951, they had recorded “Rocket 88” (the track some call the first rock ‘n’ roll song), and it wasn’t long before the Saddlemen abandoned country and became the Comets.

Haley and his bass player Marshall Lytle wrote the song “Crazy Man, Crazy” inspired by the slang they heard teens using at their shows, and it became the first ever rock ‘n’ roll song to appear on the American charts (peaking at #12 in June 1953).

By the time Haley & His Comets had signed with Decca Records, they were ready for another hit, but “Thirteen Women (And Only One Man)” wasn’t it. Fortunately for Haley, one of the few people who did buy the record was a 10-year-old boy called Peter Ford — who just happened to be the son of movie star Glenn Ford — and he could not stop playing the B-side, “Rock Around the Clock.”

Thanks to the young Ford, “Rock Around the Clock” ended up in his dad’s new film, Blackboard Jungle, when the director Richard Brooks, who was looking for a youthful, hip tune to open his film, heard him playing it. Peter Ford later wrote on his website:

“Richard stopped by our house on occasion to visit Dad and talk about the production. It was on one of these visits that Richard heard some of my records. One of them was ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ I now know that he borrowed that record and some others on one of his visits.

Joel Freeman, who was the assistant director on the film, recalled that toward the end of production, which would have been mid-December 1954, Brooks called him into his office to hear some records that he thought might possibly be used in the opening of the film.

He played Joel three songs and they agreed that Haley’s up-tempo ‘jump blues’ tune was the perfect choice for inclusion the film.”

When the film was released in March 1955, the song, which was featured three times in the movie, became an immediate sensation, and by July that year, it became the first ever rock ‘n’ roll song to reach #1 on the Billboard charts, spending eight weeks in all at the top.

The band then became the first rock ‘n’ roll act to appear on a major TV show when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Haley had opened the door and introduced rock music to the mainstream.

Despite its success, the song was also touched by tragedy. Only a month after it was released Danny Cedrone, the guitarist who was paid just $21 to play on the track and provided the striking, much-emulated guitar solo on the song, fell down a staircase and died. He was only 33 years old.

Cedrone sadly never got to see the phenomenal success of “Rock Around the Clock,” but his old band was soon in big demand. Hollywood quickly came knocking, and soon, they were making their own movies, one named after the song (which actually caused some youth riots when shown in the London) and another, Don’t Knock The Rock, named after another Haley hit.

Haley and the Comets then became the first rock ‘n’ roll band to tour Europe in 1957 and were given a rapturous welcome when they visited the UK for the first time. (“Rock Around the Clock” became the biggest selling single of the 1950s there and was the first to sell over a million copies.)

The UK concerts made a huge impact in another way, too, inspiring some future rock superstars. Paul McCartney later told Gibson.com, “The first time I really ever felt a tingle up my spine was when I saw Bill Haley and the Comets on the telly. Then I went to see them live. The ticket was 24 shillings, and I was the only one of my mates who could go, as no one else had been able to save up that amount. But I was single-minded about it. I knew there was something going on here.”

Graham Nash had a similar experience seeing Bill Haley: “I’ve still got the ticket stub in my wallet from when I went to see Bill Haley and the Comets play in Manchester in February 1957 — my first-ever concert. Over the years, I’ve lost houses, I’ve lost wives, but I’ve not lost that ticket stub. It’s that important to me.”

Haley had some great hits after “Rock Around the Clock” such as “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” “See You Later Alligator,” “Mambo Rock,” and “Don’t Knock the Rock,” among others, but the emergence of younger, seemingly cooler acts such as Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly, soon left the band behind.

A British newsreel once called Haley the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, but when the handsome Presley hit the scene, wiggling his hips and curling his lips, it was obvious the crown had been stolen by someone younger and sexier than the band of 30-somethings.

Haley and the Comets soon became something of a nostalgia act and, for a long time, didn’t get their due as one of bands responsible for changing music forever even when their most famous song re-emerged in films such as American Graffiti and (in a re-recorded version) as the theme song for the first two seasons of Happy Days.

It’s said that Haley himself became increasingly bitter and succumbed to alcoholism. In 1980, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and sadly died on February 9, 1981 at just 55 years old.

Even after his death, it took a while for Bill Haley and the Comets to get their due. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in 1986, he was not among the original inductees but thankfully, this mistake was corrected when he was inducted the following year. (It took until 2012 to finally admit the Comets, however.)

Now, “Rock Around the Clock” is rightly recognized as the song that popularized rock ‘n’ roll and influenced a whole generation of singers and musicians. The last word is best left to the man himself: “I was always proud of ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ It sold many millions of records, and rock ‘n’ roll was born.”

The post Songs That Made Rock ‘n’ Roll: How “Rock Around the Clock” Started a Music Revolution appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, you go to a puppet show just to see the sets…

Reptilicus (1962)

Distributed by: American International

Directed by: Sidney Pink

Bedre et salt slid over sitt eget bord, end en fersk gedde overet fremmed 

(Dry bread at home is better than roast meat abroad)

• Danish proverb, via Emanuel Strauss

When one thinks of kaiju, most examples that come to mind tend to be Japanese. Which is understandable, considering their contributions to that particular genre.

However, the field is very much an international one. The original Gojira was inspired by and an answer to the Warner Brothers film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. This film itself continued traditions started in 1925’s The Lost World and 1933’s King Kong. The revival of this tradition soon inspired other countries to make such works, such as The Giant Behemoth from England.

As well as Denmark. Oh my God, Denmark!

Yes, I said Denmark, as evident in the original Danish trailer:

Our film opens in Lapland, where Svend Viltorft (Bent Mejding) is taking core samples from the ground. In the American version of the film, he’s looking for copper; in the Danish version he’s prospecting for oil.

When he pulls up his drill, he finds blood and flesh attached to a leathery skin. Believing at first this might be yet another well preserved mammoth specimen that one found often that far north in Eurasia (and can still find to this day), the flesh and bones are dug up and shipped to Copenhagen, where a team led by Professor Martens (Asbjorn Andersen) begins the process of examining the remains.

It’s a process that takes, what feels like, too long to get through, especially as the film takes a major detour for a while as the American general assigned to provide security over the project, Mark Grayson (Carl Ottosen), does a travelogue for Copenhagen. This includes a musical number sung by Birthe Wilke at the Tivoli Gardens, a literal show stopper in that everything just screeches to a halt for this piece to take place:

What there is of the examination itself may easily be missed by the viewer, as much of the early film focuses on the antics of lab assistant Petersen, played by Danish comedic legend Dirch Passer.

Amazingly, contrary to expectations, this clown isn’t responsible for Reptilicus’ carcass warming up, regenerating into a new creature and starting to wreak havoc on the Danes.

Havoc that comes in radically different styles, depending on whether you’re watching it in the Danish version:

or the American version:

While there are some subtle difference in technique, either way, you’re going to see this monster and wonder how you’re going to get scared of a puppet that looks like it’s waiting for Kukla and Fran to show up…

There are other differences between the Danish and American versions of the creature, none of which allow you to feel anything resembling terror as you watch. For the US version, Reptilicus spits a corrosive, which as depicted on film does nothing but fill the screen with globs of green goop, more like a loogie than an acid bath.

In the Danish version, he has no range attack, but he can fly. Badly.

We mentioned this was Danish, right? It came out at an odd time for that country’s cinema: the Danish Film Institute would not start supporting films until 10 years later, and Lars Von Trier was only six years old. So when Sid Pink was looking for a new project to produce, one he had an eye on making his debut as a feature director with, he took an existing script from Ib Melchior, tweaked it to take into account the new setting, and sold the Danes on producing and staging the film in Copenhagen as a way to invigorate their film industry with foreign input while raising their profile.

It didn’t quite go that way. The original Danish version (which was shot simultaneously in English) was considered an embarrassment by Pink’s hosts, as his ineptitude with setup, pacing, crowds, actors, puppets, you name it, showed in every shot. It was so bad that American International refused to release it without major edits and re-dubbing the phonetic English the crew read their lines with, replacing them with American voice-over artists, and making the edits and additions noted above.

While there’s a lot to be upset with, the film has its, um, fans. Aficionados of films so cheesy they become brie, love to cite Reptilicus as the best of the worst, the “go-to” example of how low you can sink and yet find joy that far down. In some ways, the film wears its limits like a badge of honor; clips of the movie have appeared in The Monkees, The Beverly Hillbillies, and South Park whenever the script calls for “bad monster movie playing on TV” to be shown. And the movie had the dubious honor of being the film to open the new set of experiments on Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return.

Much like the namesake monster, the film left Denmark suffering from some long-term damage. The Danes would never again get involved with big Hollywood-based genre films.

…unless you want to count The Lego Movie, that is…

NEXT TIME: When you have to ask “Take me to your leader” on a shoestring budget…

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: A Monster Movie That’s a Dreadful Slice of Danish appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

Last year, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Monkees as a band by counting down our top 50 Monkees songs. Now, we’re celebrating The Monkees TV show by profiling each and every episode — exactly 50 years after it first premiered.

Tonight’s episode: “The  Monkees Mind Their Manor” (Season 2, Episode 23)

Air date: February 26, 1968

As our favorite show is coming to a close (but, as of this episode’s airing, its millions of fans did not know that yet), we’ve experienced mostly hits and just a few misses throughout the sophomore season of one of the most innovative television shows to date.

“The Monkees Mind Their Manor” begins in their California pad when a knock at the door introduces Mr. Friar (Laurie Main), an anxious man from England looking for Davy Jones to tell him he has inherited Lord Malcolm Kibee’s estate, the pastoral English place where Davy worked as a stable boy.

He has come to fetch Davy back to England for the reading of the Kibee’s will. Davy wonders why he was chosen for the inheritance and keeps refusing, and each time he does, Mr. Friar faints until Davy and the boys wake him up.

Davy decides to go to England after hearing from Friar that the village adjacent to the estate might cease to exist if David does not appear at the reading. The catch is that Davy has to live on the estate for five years to take ownership.

If he doesn’t, the village can buy it for £50,000. If they cannot do that, it goes to the sop Lance Kibee (Jack Good), the nephew of the deceased Lord Malcolm Kibee, who plans to sell it to a land developer which could then spell the end of the village. Got it?

Jack Good himself was, already at this time, a fixture on ’60s TV. The multi-talented Good was born in London and produced some of the earliest British rock ‘n’ roll television shows such as Oh Boy! and Wham! as well as managing some of the emerging Brit rock ‘n’ rollers around that time. He later went to America and was the leading force behind Shindig! which first aired on ABC September 16, 1964.

A huge hit at the time, it aired in black and white for 30 minutes, later going to twice a week and later still changing to an hour-long format. Conflicts with ABC suits led to his dismissal and the show was later cancelled in January 1966, many say due to the missing energy and creativity Good brought to bear.

The canceling made room on the schedule for the Batman series. Shindig! inspired such shows as Hullabaloo and other imitators. Since it was first, Shindig! remains iconic in American rock ‘n’ roll history. Good died just last year.

Back to our show. Davy and Mr. Friar fly to England while the guys are shipped in mummy cases as carriage. At the customs counter the inspector opens each case to reveal each guy swathed haphazardly in bandages.

The man playing the inspector is recognized by the guys as Jack Williams, The Monkees TV show’s property man, upon which he says, “Look, sweetie, I may be Jack Williams the Property Man to you, but to 20 million teenagers, I’m the customs man.” He then launches into Dean Martin’s “Everybody Wants Somebody Sometime.”

Arriving at the manor, they are greeted by the spacey and vision-impaired butler who is played by Reginald Gardiner, a great character actor from the ’30s onward. Inside they meet the drunkard Lance and the pompous attorney for the estate, Sir Twiggly Toppin Middle Bottom, played by television regular Bernard Fox (Bewitched’s Dr. Bombay).

Bottom explains the will’s details and Davy is shocked by the stipulation he has to reside there, which Bottom and Lance were expecting. Lance and Bottom leave and Bottom prompts Lance to sell the estate to him as they drive away, Lance nipping at booze hidden in various contrivances within his clothes as he listens to bottom’s proposal.

The boys then arrive and are introduced to Mr. Friar’s daughter, Mary (Myra DeGroot), who explains the will’s details to them and they try to get Davy to forget it and leave the estate to the villagers. Mary explains they don’t have the money to purchase it.

The boys then decide, since they are in England, to hold a Ye Olde Fair and have Davy challenge Bottom to three contests and the winner gets the estate. When Davy is told of their kooky medieval plan, he collapses dead away.

At the Fair, Mr. Friar bets Lance on the contest’s outcome and he agrees. As the joust is about to start, Bottom, who is the opponent grabs two lances and gives Davy, who is dressed in a knight’s outfit, a choice of weapons for the jousting match and Davy chooses Lance Kibee! As Bottom starts poking Lance with the lances, Lance angrily tells him to stop or lose his commission if he’s killed. Davy wins this one.

Fencing is next, and in this skit, Davy wears shorts with a robe and gloves and loses the match, thereby prompting intense booing from a angry crowd. The last challenge is with a mace and chain and before it begins a very elderly guy, who is the butler’s father, intervenes and says the choice of the last contest should be decided by the villagers. The crowd intelligently chooses a singing contest.

The song classic English folk song “Greensleeves” was chosen and Bottom, of course, is bad and Davy’s version is beautiful. He wins! The crowd roars! But they only raised £10,000 and are short £40,000. It looks like Bottom will win after all. Mr. Friar and the butler counsel Davy to return to America as it looks doomed.

But, out of left field comes Mary Friar who starts berating Lance Kibee and rather than back down, Lance professes his desire for Mary and proposes marriage. They kiss and Lance announces he is canceling the sale and the villagers cheer. Bottom faints as all his plans have collapsed.

The guys return home and Mike Nesmith begins to speak to the viewers when Peter Tork appears and wishes them a belated Christmas (this episode was filmed before Christmas 1967 but broadcast in February 1968) and then they transition to a decent video performance of “Star Collector” with Davy singing lead the tune written by the legendary team of Carole King and Gerry Goffin.

Directed by Tork, it is vividly apparent this first episode directed by a Monkee, was not one of the show’s best. The script was weak and the main plot point including the conditions of the will was complicated enough it had to be repeated several times so the viewers could keep it straight.

It is also singularly a Davy Jones episode and the rest of the group contributed little. I saw a distinct lack of enthusiasm from them and the guest stars as if they were just walking it through. Except for Jack Good who played a good, albeit, hammy Lance.

I dislike writing negative reviews of this show, especially since I admire their guts in handling the Monkeemania phenomena as well as they did. But this episode has to rank as a miss of large proportions. Tork reportedly said that this script was one of the best that wasn’t from the first season, and I find that incomprehensible if true.

There were no romps or romances in this one. No empathy for anyone. The funniest piece was the customs guy in England admitting he was the property man for the show and doing his best Dean Martin imitation.

Still, this episode garnered a large share of the nation’s viewing audience at the time of its airing, evidence of the huge popularity the Monkees commanded and the reason we are still celebrating them to this day.

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There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, it doesn’t take much to get there first…

The Man from Planet X (1951)

Distributor: United Artists

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

When one thinks about genre films from the 1950s, the most obvious trope that comes to mind is that of the aliens coming to visit Earth. Some were made with big production values, others were not as ambitious, but all of them came to be associated with the decade, the endless interactions with beings beyond our realm from space.

Which all got started here, on a minuscule budget, in April of 1951:

Our film opens as reporter John Lawrence (Robert Clarke) is doing a voice-over monologue, in preparation for his putting to paper an account of the last few days, which we then relive on screen:

He’s been given a lead about an astronomical discovery by someone he’d been in the 8^th USAAF with during the war, Professor Elliot (Raymond Bond). According to his observations, there is an unnamed planet heading towards us, dubbed Planet X, which in the days that the distance between the two bodies grows smaller have seen in increase in UFO sightings. Elliot’s calculations give a day for when the planet will be closest, and the point on earth where Planet X will be at zenith on that day, an isolated village in the Scottish moors.Lawrence goes there to meet the professor, who is attended there by his daughter Enid (Margaret Field, mother of Sally Field), and his colleague Doctor Mears (William Schallert). What was planned by the Professor as a chance to observe the oncoming planet gets shaken up when Lawrence and Enid find some space trash. Made of materials not of this world, Professor Elliot wonders how it was made, while Doctor Mears wonders how much money he could get if he cornered the market on it.

Soon after, the ship the piece fell off of turns up in the moors, and Enid has a Close Encounter of the Screaming-and-Running-Away Kind when she sees the ship’s pilot (a poor schmuck whose name and credit was lost to history, and probably his paycheck too as noted below). After the fright passes, the men make an effort to meet the titular man, which goes promisingly at first as the earth folk manage to relay their peaceful intent. Mears, however, when he gets him alone, tries to beat out of him some industrial secrets, which sours the mood and forces the man to use a hypno-ray to get cheap labor out of his hosts.Lawrence, the only one of the four not now working for the man (from Planet X), finds his way to the village, where he has to convince the skeptical populace that they’re in danger. They’re already on edge, as some of their numbers have disappeared out in the fog. (One of the scarred people was TV mainstay Harold Gould, in his first onscreen gig.) With the stakes rising as Planet X comes ever closer, everyone soon learns what there is to actually worry about over and above disappearing people…

Speaking of folks made to disappear, Ulmer himself was a good example of someone who just could not quit, no matter what was done to him or by whom. Arriving in the US from Germany in 1926, just before sound came to the movies, Ulmer’s work back home was infused in the German Expressionism style, which enabled him to bring striking visuals to his films throughout his whole career. This served him well when he directed the horror classic The Black Cat for Universal, but could not save him when he started an affair with the wife of one of Carl Laemmle’s nephews. He got the girl, but lost access to the studios when Laemmle blackballed him, forcing him to work on small pictures for the rest of his career.

This sense of style with 20 years of experience by 1951 is what enabled Ulmer to lens a visually striking film despite having a budget estimated as only $41,000 (about $379,000 in today’s dollars). Re-using sets from Flemming’s Joan of Arc and assisted by lots and lots of smoke machines, Ulmer made these modest resources go further by using glass painting matte shots he painted and crafting the props and costumes for Planet X’s visitor. He also made things move cheaply by using only six days to shoot and paying everyone in the cast well below guild minimums; supposedly, his alien got bupkis across the board.

Ulmer certainly had to put a lot in the visuals, considering how little he could do with the script (which he supposedly reworked on the fly, which with only six days to shoot, well…). Motivations for our extraterrestrial turn on a dime from scene to scene, which if thought about too closely gets in the way of any sympathy for the film. Each segment of the arc taken alone, however, builds a little momentum that keeps things going. There’s major changes in tone between stretches when the alien is behaving in a sympathetic manner, and when he’s more hostile, but both contain enough interesting ideas in them to keep you from tuning out.

What helps too to move along the sympathetic stretches is Schallert’s Mears. People who better remember his work on The Patty Duke Show may be in for a surprise at how vile he can make a character, given a chance. With a cast that otherwise does a serviceable job, he practically steals the pic from everyone as he tries to steal and abuse our visitor from space.

As for our visitor, he can be forgiven for not realizing what he was in for coming to Earth. The Man from Planet X opened three months before RKO’s The Thing from Another World and five months before Fox’s The Day the Earth Stood Still hit theaters. It came out two years before The War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars, and five years before Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. The movie came to the theaters first and beat all the major touchstones of the subgenre of alien visitor pictures from that decade, with a budget that probably covered only promotions and catering for any one of these pictures.

This one small step for spacemen proved to be a memorable effort that soon led to one giant leap for spacemankind.

NEXT TIME: We look at the second time around for some film folks; for some Creature of the Night, their second foray was better than we remembered them…

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Last year, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Monkees as a band by counting down our top 50 Monkees songs. Now, we’re celebrating The Monkees TV show by profiling each and every episode — exactly 50 years after it first premiered.

Tonight’s episode: “Some Like It Lukewarm” (Season 2, Episode 24)

Air date: March 5, 1968

Here we are in the home stretch of our big Monkees 50 Years Later project, Rebeaters, and this episode “Some Like It Lukewarm” is arguably the final conventional episode of the series. After this, we have two very off-beat installments that are an intentional break from format (in which Peter is mind-controlled in both, weirdly enough) and then the Monkees’ swan-song, the psychedelic masterpiece motion-picture Head, which we will write more about in detail to celebrate its 50th anniversary down the road.

So where does “Some Like It Lukewarm” fall within all this madness? Overall, this is a fairly strong episode, featuring a particularly striking acting turn from Davy Jones. However, what “Some Like It Lukewarm” suffers from is the fact that it falls on some very worn out tropes of the entire series at this point, something that scriptwriters Joel Kane and Stanley Z. Cherry and perennial Monkees director James Frawley acknowledge through a lot of meta in-jokes referencing the rest of the series. Also worth noting is the fact that the entire episode lifts a bunch from the classic 1959 screwball comedy, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, which you probably watched in film school.  If you didn’t, you went to the wrong film school, baby!

It’s very rare that the plots of these episodes are anything but tried and true genre formulas for the Monkees to romp around in, and this is no exception. We’ve got a radio contest (hosted by actual Sixties DJ Jerry Blavat) in which the groups must be of mixed gender. Why? So that Jerry (a dude who wouldn’t last long in our current “Time’s Up” climate) can hit on the female members of the groups. What are the Monkees to do? After quick cuts to all of the boys throughout the series dressed in drag, they decide to disguise Davy as a girl to enter the contest. Complications arise when an all-female group, The West-Minstrel Abbies, have their beautiful lead singer, Daphne, cross-dress to enter the competition as well.

There are some real missed opportunities in this episode. Daphne, played by the beautiful and charming Deana Martin (Dean Martin’s daughter) and Davy end up falling for each other in a restaurant. They have a lot in common, they’re both hip youngsters, both in bands, and amazingly, get these weird animated twinkly eyes when they fall in love.

Of all of Davy’s love interests in the series, this is one romance plot-line I would have loved to have seen continued in a third season. There’s palpable chemistry between Martin and Jones. Daphne is a compelling character in her own right. In fact, I want more of The West-Minstrel Abbies in general. They’re all cute and very cool: who doesn’t love a modded-out fictional Sixties girl group? It’s almost surprising that “Some Like It Lukewarm” wasn’t a backdoor pilot for a whole West-Minstrel Abbies TV series of their own. I’m sure it would have been a hit. Instead, after all is revealed through a series of typical Monkee misadventures, the Abbies are reduced to basically performing as the Monkees’ backup dancers for the final number: the much-contested song “She Hangs Out.” Ho-hum.

I don’t want to come off as a major drag here because this episode really is a lot of fun, sexist conventions aside. The charm all the Monkees are giving off is pure and shines through. You can tell that they are greatly enjoying working with their director, James Frawley at this point in the progression of the series.

I found myself enjoying seeing The Monkees together and in their prime. I know that’s a bit of a silly thing to write after all of these recaps we’ve been doing, but it’s the truth. There’s not a lot of classic Monkees material to cover after these next three episodes (other than the 10-part exhaustive series I’m planning on 33 Revolutions Per Monkee that’s upcoming on the Rebeat slate. Just kidding, pals. It’s 11 parts!). Through examining these episodes 50 years later, it’s apparent that there was a genuine uniqueness to The Monkees that was tough to replicate with other prefab musical projects that followed them. They had a vibe onscreen, in the studio and onstage that was always a little dangerous and unpredictable, yet also invariably full of charm and youthful sex appeal. There were multiple parts of this episode that made me smile at the sheer joy that exudes from these guys when they’re together and their madness is being corralled in a fairly tight episode like this one. It’s so true that nothing good lasts forever, and the finite nature of The Monkees TV series only makes each episode worth treasuring, even the bombs. And there were far worse installments than “Some Like It Lukewarm.”

This episode’s coda features a segment with Davy Jones interviewing songwriter Charlie Smalls, who would later achieve larger recognition by writing the ’70s Broadway classic The Wiz. The two sit at the piano and chat about what it means to play on the “one and three” versus the “two and four.” This segment is so informative and entertaining. Davy Jones could have added “engaging interviewer” to his list of other talents if he had wanted and the interview serves as an excellent ending to an episode that is all Davy’s: he was a performer who always was very into sharing his interests with his audience. Jones picked a winner by choosing to jam with Smalls, who is as charming and gregarious in this segment as Jones is. Another reason why one wishes this show would have lasted another season is for more interviews conducted by The Monkees of other artists they were enjoying or working with.

But that was not to be, and instead, maybe the whole Monkees thing being so finite in its initial incarnation is what has made its mystique so evergreen for the last five decades.

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There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, you learn from your mistakes and do much better the second time around…

Scream Blacula Scream (1973)

Distributed by: American International

Directed by: Bob Kelljan

Believe it or not, once upon a time sequels were not expected out of every genre film.

Yes, you made a film, wrapped up production, and didn’t have a follow-up on the drawing boards plotted out months ago. It was a time before “franchise” and “tent pole” were movie terms, let alone essentials, a time that was more innocent and pure…

…well, okay, “innocent” and “pure” were probably flexible terms when Blacula premiered in 1972:

One of the main pillars of Blaxploitation cinema, Blacula seemed to be a natural idea that everyone wondered why it took so long to become reality. An African prince, Mamuwalde (William Marshall), is making diplomatic ventures on behalf of his people when he runs afoul of the ruler of Transylvania, Dracula (Charles Macaulay). Vlad the Impaler’s namesake curses Mamuwalde by making him a “child of the night” which leads to his adventures in modern day Los Angeles. And thanks to Doctor Gordon Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala), a cat equal parts Abraham Van Helsing and John Shaft, Mamuwalde is turned into a pile of bones and finds eternal rest from his curse.

But, you know, the better vampires never really die…

Our sequel begins with a cold open among a meeting of a voodoo lodge. The old leader has just passed away, and there is discussion among the mourners as to who gets to lead them going forward. Her son, Willus (Richard Lawson in his first credited role), insists that the honor belongs to him; the rest of the congregants state their wish for an election, and for choosing Lisa (Pam Grier), an orphan the leader adopted who we’re told is especially gifted in the craft, when the time comes.

Furious at the rejection, Willus seeks out Doll Man (Don Blackman in his last role), another member of the lodge who was cast out, and gets from him a bag containing the bones of Mamuwalde, which was what was left of him from the last film. Willus tries to cast a ritual to resurrect the vampire to do his bidding; the spell succeeds in raising the undead, but as far as controlling Mamuwalde, not very much…

Thanks to Willus lucking out (?) with a gig to house-sit an old place up in the hills, Mamuwalde has a sweet pad to crash at, where he can go out from to prowl the city, including a side trip to the bad side of town that doesn’t turn out well… for the neighborhood “businessmen”:

On his walkabouts, he works his way into a party where African artifacts from Mamuwalde’s homeland are being displayed, a party attended by Lisa and her boyfriend Justin (Don Mitchell), a former policeman who left the force to pursue opportunities in the private sector. It’s at the party that Mamuwalde realizes that Lisa’s gifted, which draws his interest.

Which is lucky for her, since during the party he snacked on Lisa’s friend Gloria (Janee Michelle), who became a child of the night while Lisa was watching over her body as per funerary custom:

Not that Mamuwalde’s control over his minions is absolute; after letting his spawn know that Lisa is off limits, he still has to have a talk with Willus and his girlfriend Denny (Lynne Moody in her first role) to keep them from talking back to him:

The reason Lisa is valuable to Mamuwalde is, as a voodoo practitioner, he hopes she can relieve him of the burden of being undead and be mortal again. But as we’ve seen in other Blaxploitation films, can you ever really leave the game once you played it so well…?

What made Marshall’s portrayal of the title character so iconic was how he played the role; his bearing as a noble prince cursed with vampirism is built on his training for Broadway and opera, and he brings much of the flourish that comes out of those disciplines to the role. For the second film, he’s so comfortable as the character that the confidence in his delivery just overwhelms you. Only Bela Lugosi has ever been so commanding as a vampire on screen, and by the second film Marshall’s at the height of his game.

Opposite Marshall, Grier’s Lisa makes for an interesting counterbalance. She’s one of the few women vampires have sought on film for purposes other than to satiate a lust; Lisa is actually the key to Mamuwalde’s quest to become mortal again, and he has to bargain with her for release. While audiences back then may not have been willing to accept Grier in a less kick-ass role than she had played in her last film, Coffy (which was released mere weeks before Scream Blacula Scream hit theaters), she shows considerable talent as a woman confronted with horrors unimaginable who must stay strong in the face of evil.

In many ways, audiences’ reactions at that time to Grier sum up their overall reactions to the film: they make unfair comparisons to earlier works without taking into consideration how much craft and effort was made for the follow-up. The script for the second film flowed better and took a precious second now and then to explain what was going to happen, unlike the first film that just expected you to nod and keep up with it. William Crain’s work on Blacula being his first theatrical directing gig shows in his execution, while Bob Kelljan’s experience on both Count Yorga, Vampire and The Return of Count Yorga serve him well on his third focus on the undead. And there isn’t a single wasted character or characterization in this film, something that most sequels don’t manage to accomplish.

The film deserves a better reputation than it was given, as both a sequel and a Blaxploitation genre pic. There is a solid film that was crafted by experienced hands that made only one mistake, coming out after the first film did.

Sadly, there were no further Blacula pictures; the closest we’d get to a follow-up film would be 1995’s Vampire in Brooklyn, a film that is also being seen with fresh eyes and more appreciation years later.

Which speaks to the eternal nature of the Undead…

NEXT TIME: As we just showed, sometimes the attempt to continue an ongoing story actually works very well. Other times… well-l-l-l-l…

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There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, though, when you take that second trip to the well, there’s just no way you can squeak out a win here…

Ben (1972)

Distributed by: Cinerama Releasing Corporation

Directed by: Phil Karlson

Please note: There will be spoilers in this piece, though they be not as spoilt as the film itself…

Once upon a time, it didn’t take much to creep out theater audiences. In 1971, all it took were a few half-decent actors and a large number of rats:

Times were different, except for one constant: if a film made money, someone was going to green light a sequel.

In a rare case of truth in advertising, the ad copy was pretty spot on: the cold open for Ben is the last two or so minutes of Willard, when we watch the title character (Bruce Davison, who despite his prominence in the opening was not given credit in the new film) get taken down by Ben and the army of rats that he now controls.

Soon, with the neighbors looking on, the police are surrounding the house to retrieve Willard’s body from inside, presumably brought there because Willard’s girlfriend Joan (Sondra Locke) got suspicious when Willard told her to run for her life as the squeaking from the basement got louder and louder.

It’s here we get the first of a number of insidious exchanges between Police Chief Kirtland (Joseph Campanella) and newspaperman Billy Hatfield (Arthur O’Connell). In probably the most fantastic element of the film, because there has NEVER been a relationship between the cops and the press like this anywhere at any time, these two go back and forth between antagonistic and incestuous at the turn of a thin dime. (About the only real purpose their interaction serves is to bring up the fact that Willard had a diary, the only shout-out made in both films to the source material, Ratman’s Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert.)

Among the throng watching are the Garrison family, matriarch Beth (Rosemary Murphy), daughter Eve (Meredith Baxter), and little heartless bastard Danny (Lee Montgomery). And that description of the young lad is not entirely cruel; one of his defining characteristics is that he’s had a series of operations to combat heart disease that leaves him vulnerable and with a big scar down his chest, while his father is mentioned in passing as no longer being around. Though considering this family and the film they’re in, he might have made an “Irish goodbye” at the first chance he could…

It’s Danny who’s the main human focus, the one Ben sizes up as a sucker to work over makes contact with to try and find someone who falls for his crap understands him. And Danny, who’s soppy and annoying (and yes, that is supposed to be cruel), falls for Ben’s BS right away. He’s so swayed by him, in fact, he composes a song and sings it to him, accompanied by a marionette he made for the occasion:

When he’s not being sung to by his pigeon friend, Ben is busy plotting some major heists with his army of rats. A supermarket here, a candy factory there, then a cheese emporium (but of course), complete with a rat run through the health club with female patrons in towels screeching as they jump off the floor, and soon the residents of Los Angeles are looking at a serious issue.

No, not Hantavirus, something worse: real estate depreciation. You have a fairly middle class group of panicked folk who look much like the kind of folks who’d head for the suburbs back in those days, ifyouknowwhatImean, and they seem more concerned with the general skivviness of having rats next door than what such vermin could actually do. It might give the film makers too much credit to assume that this was a subtle commentary on urban affairs in the 1970s; the film’s producer, Bing Crosby Productions, was the same outfit that thought Hogan’s Heroes was worth putting on the air, so make of that what you might…

This leads to an effort to eradicate the millions of rats Ben’s amassed once and for all, going into the sewers with flamethrowers and firepower to take them out. Picture the climatic battle scenes of Them! but without the imposing monsters to go up against, which makes the whole thing kinda silly when you watch it.

Which pretty well sums up the problem with the film: what kept Willard interesting was having this cast of kooky characters to watch between shots of the rats, some of them played by the likes of Davidson, Elsa Lanchester, and Ernest Borgnine. For Ben, the rats have to do all the heavy lifting by themselves, with actors either not taking the film seriously or not up to the task of working with animal co-stars. Only Montgomery seems to try and engage with his rodent cast mates, and it’s so saccharine and over-the-top you want to forget him and the two songs he tries to sing that Walter Scharf wrote for the film.

Yes, two; the one we heard earlier, and the one that was sung by Danny early on but at the end of the film gets handed off to another singer…

Yes, this is where that song came from. Michael Jackson’s first solo hit, which made him at 14 the youngest artist to get to #1 on the Billboard singles chart, was a tie-in with this movie. The song, which originally was offered to Donny Osmond (who was too over-scheduled to record it), actually earned the film an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song, losing to “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure, which feels miraculous considering how quickly the film came and went in theaters.

This horrifyingly cheesy (#SorryNotSorry) film that feels like a made-for-TV production that got into the theaters by mistake actually gave Michael Jackson his first solo hit, by avoiding any mention of rats whatsoever in the lyrics. In avoiding association with the film, the song thrived on its own and did very well by itself.

Would that we could so emulate Michael Jackson, in making our lives so much better by excising Ben altogether…

NEXT TIME: It’s cold and the snow’s up to here, so let’s play a high stakes game to waste time; what could go wrong…?

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: Remember That Rat Michael Jackson Sang About? appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, a cold day in Hell describes more than just something that ain’t gonna happen…

Quintet (1979)

Distributed by: Twentieth Century Fox

Directed by: Robert Altman

Let me share with you a story about a time when the world drastically changed. Things had fallen apart, the old ways no longer worked, and the survivors were going crazy and doing things for their own sake, when keeping on in the face of doom was the only stimuli that kept you alive.

And the best way to get into this look at Robert Altman’s career in the late 1970s, is to review one of those films from then.

It’s an unspecified time in the future. We ultimately find out as the film slowly reveals its story that the earth is in the process of freezing to death, which is hammered home by the long shot of a train frozen in its tracks as the show blows over it to cover it up.

[Insert your preferred Snowpiercer joke here…]

We soon see two figures walking alongside the train, Essex (Paul Newman), a seal hunter who’s been out of work after the last seal died, and Vivia (Brigitte Fossey), the daughter of his former partner, who now carries his child. Essex has decided to bring his new family to the unnamed city he left 12 years earlier to go south for the seals, coming home to look up his brother Francha (Thomas Hill) and share the good news.

We get of scene with Francha before the reunion, though, where he’s playing Quintet, the game that lends its name to the movie title. We see him in a casino where the game is all important but the ambiance is decayed and ruined, more Laughlin than Las Vegas. While there, he is told he’s in a new tournament by casino owner Grigor (Fernando Rey) who also personally informs the other members that they are now in that round, Redstone (Craig Richard Nelson), Goldstar (David Langton), Deuca (Nina Van Pallandt), Saint Christopher (Vittorio Gassman), and Ambrosia (Bibi Andersson).

We soon discover some of the rules for this game through watching the film; for a full set of rules, you had to go to a first run screening where pamphlets laying out the rules of the game were distributed to the audience. One of the rules we learn quickly on is, that to win at the tournament level, you have to kill off the other players, which Redstone gets a jump on when he rolls a bomb into Francha’s apartment.

This wipes out everyone but Essex, who went out to buy more firewood while his entire family became collateral damage. He spies Redstone running from the scene, but before he can catch up to him, Redstone loses the game to Saint Christopher, who disappears into the shadows just as Essex gets up to his corpse.

Essex, desperate to know why his family was killed, channels the spirit of Lew Harper and takes up Redstone’s identity. With half the players having never met Redstone and the rest willing to allow his charade to continue, Essex gets closer to how the tournament works, why the game requires people to die, and what the ‘winner’ gets out of it, answers that don’t leave him happy…

…about as unhappy as Fox was when they got their first look at Altman’s film. The studio had entered into a long-term commitment for his films after he delivered MASH to them in 1970, allowing Altman to leave behind the journeyman work he was doing in TV on series like Bonanza and Combat! along with single episodes here and there. This being the 1970s and the period of the emerging auteur that made up the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls era, Altman was one of the greater beneficiaries of the time, and with every success from a McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, or Nashville, Altman got more ambitious and received more freedom from Hollywood to do what he wanted.

For Quintet, he assembled an international cast and took them to Montreal to film amidst the crumbling pavilions of Man and His World, fka Expo ’67. In the depths of winter, no less, where he had the crew apply coats of water every few hours to the sets to grow icicles on them that were many feet long. And if that somehow failed to project how cold this world was, Altman used a ring of petroleum jelly around the lens in most shots (picked at random, it seems) to suggest that as the world was freezing that the viewer was too, or something, the reason behind which like every shot this technique pops up in remaining fuzzy to us.

Altman was notorious for letting the actors on set improvise the crap out of a scene, which is a lot easier to do when you have a vision you can share with them as to what’s going on, then working like crazy in the edit bay to pull it all together later. Considering the film when conceived was just an outline he’d hoped he could pass off to Walter Hill to make it work, and came to be his project before he could call out “Not it!”, he may have just winged it, thinking that since there was casino gaming aspect to Quintet that he could channel the vibe off of McCabe & Mrs. Miller and California Split and roll with it.

But while doing that, he also takes on the death of the human spirit and nihilism at the end of the world. The reason Quintet is so important in the city and is played the way it is, we discover, is that there is nothing else to do. Everyone knows the end is coming in a few years, tops, and the only way to get through the last few days without losing your mind is to scream “Screw It!” and give in to the brief rush of imminent death.

The two themes don’t mesh as well as they could, and in more mercurial hands (say, those of David Cronenberg, whose Crash touches on similar topics more deftly) the film might have done better. Even the die-hard fans of Altman have had problems with this piece of his canon; like all of his films, the elements don’t start to gel until just before the end, and you start to pull for the movie to justify having stayed with it after the less patient members of the audience have already walked away. But here, the payoff just doesn’t work, and it’s suggested that because there was nothing to work with, that there was no hope for the film, no matter what he could do with it.

This was picked up in reviews from the time from Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby, who both found some effort in presentation but not a lot of product behind it. The film’s release, along with the issues Fox had with Altman’s other film for them, H.E.A.L.T.H., led to a change in the studio’s leadership; the same folks who favored Damnation Alley over Star Wars got swept away as patience for Altman’s work habits dried up.

Seriously in need of work to redeem his rep, Altman had to next take up the opportunity to direct a picture that behaved like an industry shoot, Popeye. Which proved to be a game he tried to play that could have been for him the end of it all…

NEXT TIME: Wait, he was in this film? Seriously? I mean, how did he end up here? (Which was probably what he was wondering, too…)

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: Paul Newman Plays the Game in Robert Altman’s Chilly Dystopian Tale appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

Ever since variety show hosts realized they could sit down and talk to their guests, the talk show has been a fixture of television. In A Great Show For You, Rebeat’s own talk show expert David Lebovitz runs down the history of the format, in all its glory, failure, and occasional outlandishness.

This edition: the long, mostly dead history of the guest host.

The concept of a late night talk show guest host is one long dead to history. To the best of my knowledge, no network late night talk show has had a non-emergency guest host since 2003.

But it was once commonplace part of the game. It wasn’t just a way for hosts to get a night off; it was a way for talent to get recognized beyond being on the couch next to Carson. It was a way to foster a new general of hosts themselves. It was just the way things were done.

While Johnny Carson wasn’t the first to do this (it’s a practice that well predates his tenure at The Tonight Show, and was often used to fill the gap between host changes), the talk show legend will always be the man most associated with guest hosts.

During the ’60s and ’70s Carson had a revolving door of guest hosts, some hosting for a day, others staying for an entire week. Since Carson was the only game in town, nobody thought too much of his frequent vacations and absences; they, too, were just part of the game. Among the more notable recurring guest hosts were David Letterman and David Brenner, both of whom would go on to have their own talk shows. Others included John Denver, Joey Bishop, and my personal favorite, Kermit the Frog.

Though it was brief, perhaps the guest host with the most historical significance was Harry Belefonte. In February 1968, Belafonte took over The Tonight Show for a full week and was given an unheard of degree of creative control. He was permitted to sing in place of the standard monologue, and he chose his own guests. (In contrast, Frank Zappa once tried to guest host The Late Show on Fox and his predictably bizarre episode never even aired.)

Belefonte’s two most prominent and unexpected guests were Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., both of whom talked about civil rights in front of an audience that wasn’t used to hearing such heavy topics on such a show.

Only months later, both men would be dead.

Around the late 1970s, Carson grew tired of his extensive workload and threatened to either retire or move to ABC, which was offering a much more accommodating contract. After a fair amount of legal wrangling, Carson re-signed with NBC on a contract that allowed him to work 37 weeks a year, with Mondays and Fridays off. Tuesdays became a day for reruns and clip shows, and Monday became the domain of the guest host. The deal also gave Carson power over the time slot after his, which is how regular guest host David Letterman got his own late night show.

Eventually, Carson settled on having permanent guest hosts, which meant that, instead of a one-off appearance, guest hosts would be under contract to fill in for him during his day off each week. It was easier for all parties involved: the guest host would have steady work, and the audience at home would know what to expect each Monday.

All three of Carson’s permanent guest hosts went on to have their own talk shows — or, at least, close approximations.

Carson’s first guest host was Joan Rivers, starting in the early ’80s. She’d go on to host her own talk show, The Late Show With Joan Rivers. The circumstances that led to it are among some of the most infamous moments in late night history. Rivers jumped to Fox to get an opportunity she knew she wouldn’t have at NBC, but didn’t tell Johnny before accepting the deal. Carson never spoke to her again.

Her show didn’t last long — partly because of ratings battles, partly because of infighting — but in the grand scheme of things, she was just another show for Carson to take down.

When Joan Rivers was fired from The Late Show on Fox, the network brought in a series of guest hosts to fill the gap until the show ran its course. The most popular of the guest hosts was Arsenio Hall, who was offered a deal to stay but chose to move on and give Hollywood a try. Several years later, he started his own popular eponymous show.

Of course, all of this still happened while Carson was on air, making The Late Show one more competitor Carson outlasted.

His second permanent guest host was Garry Shandling. Another favorite of Carson’s, Shandling was courted for several forces the early ’90s— including being offered a blank check by a syndication company — before deciding to explore Hollywood on his own and circling back to TV with faux-talk show The Larry Sanders Show.

Carson’s final permanent guest host, often cited as his best, was Jay Leno. An edgy, innovative comedian at the time (how things change), Leno appealed to the younger crowd while being perfectly unobjectionable to Carson’s core audience. He ended up being the anointed one, and took over the show in a famously acrimonious transition.

Guest hosts have been rare since Carson retired. Jay Leno, a famed workhorse, only had one guest host his entire run at The Tonight Show. But even that comes with a bit of an asterisk: he and Katie Couric swapped places for a day as a joke, so he took the morning slot and she took his slot.

Now, networks are more likely to show a repeat than find a guest host. When Jimmy Fallon had to attend to the birth of each of his children, his shows were canceled that night. The same goes for Seth Meyers.

I suspect that the drop in guest hosts can be traced to the late night wars between Leno and Letterman. Letterman posed the first genuine competition for The Tonight Show, and all parties involved would do anything to come out on top. That involved carving out a strong brand for themselves, and proving that they were worthy of wearing the late night crown. If that meant never taking a break, so be it.

The only major shows that have had any guest hosts since the turn of the century were Ellen, The Late Show with David Letterman, and The Daily Show.

Letterman briefly flirted with using guest hosts on a more regular basis before abandoning the concept. One largely forgotten to time but surely significant now was Jimmy Fallon in 2003. He was a cast member on Saturday Night Live at the time, with no plans on hosting a talkshow. He later said, semi-jocularly, that doing this gave him “the bug” for hosting a talkshow.

Most of the time guest hosts appear when the regular host becomes ill. When Letterman had heart surgery in 2000, CBS wheeled in a series of guests hosts to cover for him while he recovered. On a few other occasions, Letterman was sick and had last minute guest hosts, notably, Adam Sandler.

Ellie Kemper took over for a sick Ellen DeGeneres for a single show. One of Trevor Noah’s shows was canceled due to Noah’s burst appendix, while another was hosted by Jordan Klepper while Noah was otherwise sick. Under Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Jason Jones each helmed a show or two when Stewart was absent. Most recently, Jimmy Kimmel had guest hosts fill in for him while he attended to his ill newborn son.

Television production has changed dramatically in the decades since Carson reigned supreme. There’s more competition, and people aren’t just happy to have a job in television anymore. Indeed, one of the reasons the entire show tends to take off when the host does it because the crew needs a break, too; writing four or five shows a week for 52 weeks a year is demanding for all parties involved.

With so many hosts fighting for an audience — and with so many trying to copy the work ethic of Leno and Letterman — guest hosting may be a thing of the past. We’re likely at least 10 to 20 years out before the talk shows on NBC and CBS need a new host. Up-and-comer James Corden is young enough to take over from Stephen Colbert eventually. Kimmel has hinted that he’ll retire once his contract is up, but there’s no word on his planned replacement.

Unless there’s a seismic change in the way late night is done, guest hosts are a thing of the past. That’s good for reliability and perhaps, for ratings. But where the next great host will come from is a big question mark.

The post A Great Show for You: Late Night Guest Hosts appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, we find ourselves doing things in our jobs that are definitely not the stuff dreams are made of…

The Return of Doctor X (1939)

Distributed by: Warner Brothers

Directed by: Vincent Sherman

When you go through a lot of genre films, some names keep popping up often. Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee; you could almost fill whole shelves of your video library solely with works containing any one of their output.

Some names do not show up that often, though, and may be a surprise on some level. Jodie Foster certainly comes to mind, as does Marilyn Monroe, Warren Beatty, and even John Lennon.

Probably the last person you’d expect to find in a genre picture would be Humphrey Bogart. And yet…

Oh hell!

Our film starts when Midwest-boy-in-the-Big-City and ambitious reporter Walter Garrett, aka “Wichita” (Wayne Morris) gets a phone call from stage star Angela Merrova (Lya Lys), who is willing to give the reporter an interview. We don’t have long enough to question how big a star she really is, as she made her own call as opposed to her PR person doing the press contact, but as this is only a 62 minute film and there’s a lot to cover, we can only just keep going.

Garrett gets to her place and stumbles on in to find her body there, drained of blood and with a deep cut in her torso. He calls the paper first to get the scoop before he calls the cops (?!?!?), then leaves the scene of the crime to meet the fuzz downstairs where he annoys Detective Kincaid (Charles Wilson) on sight, which we gather is his usual interactive state with him. However, the body is gone when they get there, and soon after that Merrova shows up at the paper demanding an apology. As part of their settlement, the paper asks Wichita to go back to Wichita, firing him.

Out of a job but not the game, Wichita turns to his pal, Doctor Michael Rhodes (Dennis Morgan), a brilliant doctor with questionable work practices, taking time to hit on student nurse Joan Vance (Rosemary Lane) right before a big operation. Wichita describes his experience, which Rhodes feels is impossible, although for the sake of due diligence he’s willing to speak to his mentor, Doctor Flegg (John Litel) about the matter, who also dismisses the story.

When Rhodes encounters a man whose death mirrors Merrova’s “condition,” though, he decides to check with Flegg again, seeing him at his personal practice, where he meets another doctor on the premises:

The man Bogie is playing is Doctor Quense (which is pronounced “Caine” and not at all related to that other guy…), who immediately creeps him out. Him and everyone else, except for Flegg, and even he’s not entirely easy around the guy sharing his space.

With sleuthing that makes what the Hardy Boys did look like an episode of Sherlock, Rhodes and Wichita sleuth out that Quense used to be known as Dr. Xavier (no, not that one), who had been sent to the electric chair a few years ago for murder, but whose body was claimed by Flegg while an empty coffin was buried. The two ultimately confront Flegg with their findings, who provides them with an explanation as to what’s going on:

The problem is, Flegg further reveals, that Quense/Xavier needs fresh blood to keep going, hence the murders, including Merrova’s. Twice, as Flegg brought her back, but our “DIY vampire” couldn’t keep from wanting seconds when he needed a drink, which puts poor Nurse Vance in a bad spot as the film rushes to its conclusion…

“Rush” is a good word to use to describe the film’s origin. As one of Warner’s B-card pictures, where the films are made on the cheap and in quantity to run as part of a double feature, this was not what you’d call a dream assignment for anyone involved. This was director Sherman’s first film, and it shows. This was an upgrade from being in the story department where he palled around with Bogie during off hours, and Sherman was assigned his ensemble by the studio as a package; the fact that no one died on set is probably the best thing you can say about his efforts.

As a contract player, Bogie didn’t have a lot of say in the matter. In fact, Richard Gehman in Bogart, his biography of the star, gets a quote from his subject as to how much he despised taking on the role:

“This is one of the pictures that made me march in to Jack Warner and ask for more money again. You can’t believe what this one was like. I had a part that somebody like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff should have played. I was this doctor, brought back to life, and the only thing that nourished this poor bastard was blood. If it had been Jack Warner’s blood, or Harry’s, or Pop’s, maybe I wouldn’t have minded as much. The trouble was, they were drinking mine and I was making this stinking movie.”

And yet, Bogart was a professional. This performance was no wild hammy shtick that he used as an excuse to flail about with; his role as written was as a depraved doctor who comes back from the dead to continue to work while drinking blood, and not for one second do you imagine he’s anything but that. In fact, were it not for history screaming at us and making us look closely at the man under the makeup, we’d be likely to buy the performance easily as one of the better depictions of a vampire (albeit an unusual one) to show up in a horror film.

Unfortunately, because this was a B film with second tier talent, the picture would likely be entirely forgotten had this accident of casting not happened. While we could easily see that Bogie had potential to do greater things (in two years, he’d be cast as the lead in The Maltese Falcon, and a year later achieve immortality in Casablanca), about the only bright light that showed potential was Morris, and as his career took a turn from films when he became a Naval ace during WWII, that never went anywhere. Like the five ships Morris sent to the bottom during the war, none of the principals on screen was ever really seen again, although bit players Huntz Hall and Glenn Langan would go on to do their own memorable leading roles.

As for Sherman, he did get better. He got in a few good films later on, including Adventures of Don Juan and The Young Philadelphians, before finding his place on television. He got some decent assignments there, including episodes of The Waltons, Baretta, and Trapper John, M.D.

As well as doing a made-for-TV biopic called Bogie, surprise, surprise…

NEXT TIME: If this is who we have defending our country, what’s the point of any of this security…?

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: Humphrey Bogart as a Mad Scientist? Meet Doctor X appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, you’d be surprised by what turns up as you throw out the trash…

The Ambushers (1967)

Distributed by: Columbia Pictures

Directed by: Henry Levin

Imagine if we had a genre work where women are truly important to the plot.

We’re talking something suggesting Annihilation crossed with Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman film, where woman are truly important to the story and to making a better world. We discover that women are necessary for our ability to reach distant stars, mainly because our ships require them to be the pilots, and that in order to insure that this vital program be in place that we have a security force, one with very capable women in them to secure our future.

Well, we did get a film with those elements; unfortunately, it was this one:

Yeah, we’re talking an f’n’ Dean Martin as Matt Helm film, of all things, which starts with a credits sequence from Hell scored by Boyce and Hart that bears no import whatsoever to the rest of the film…

When we finally get to the film itself, it starts with a test of America’s own flying saucer program, producing a scout ship capable of bridging the stars. This interstellar marvel is piloted by Sheila Sommers (Janice Rule), an accomplished pilot and agent of ICE, which stands for Intelligence and Counter Espionage and has no relation to the real life ICE (thankfully),  who in addition to everything else is female, which is important because the fields generated by these craft kill male subjects regardless of species, making the only ones going to the stars women.

The test, overseen by men (naturally/unfortunately) and led by MacDonald (James Gregory), are impressed with the results, until interference overtakes the EM fields on the craft, forcing it to crash in Mexico. The interference was produced by Jose Ortega (Albert Salmi), who has eventual plans for selling the saucer, and immediate plans for Sommers, leaving her with a horrid case of PTSD…

…which we learn about when our scene turns to the training academy for ICE, where we find Matt Helm (Martin) getting (re)fresh(ed) on/with the recruits. We find Helm was placed there for reasons other than having an agent going over procedures with the trainees, while the audience was going over them as well through the “male gaze”: We find that Helm had been on a prior assignment with Sommers (one not depicted in either of the two prior films, The Silencers or Murderers’ Row) where they had gone on assignment as husband and wife, and the powers that be feel that Sommers is more likely to “snap out of it” if they team her with her ersatz hubby…

Yeah, I think we could all use five minutes to take a break to get over using this “defining a woman through her man” trope crap; see you on the other side…

Yes, well, right; our happy (?) couple make their way to Acapulco to investigate beer magnate Quintana (Kurt Kasznar), who is the front for Ortega and gives him cover while he goes about his schemes, which for this story consist of offering the flying saucer to the highest bidder. Trying to get in the way of bids by Francesca (Senta Berger) and Nassim (David Mauro) for the craft, Helm and Sommers have to fend off these anxious saucer buyers as well as the thieving seller, hoping that at the end of the-

But yeah, you knew right away that this is how it was going to play out. We’ve gone through all the “spy-fi” that the 1960s gave us and all those secret organizations trying to take over the world we all sat through, so there’s no real surprises here: Hero shows up, defines/defeats villain, rinse and repeat. And there’s nothing to encourage the producers to go off formula; if anything, the less surprises, the better, mainly in deference to their lead.

To call Dean Martin’s part in this film (or any of the Matt Helm movies, really) a “performance” is to use the term in a way you may not have intended. Martin shows up and does a version of the drunken persona that he’d trot out when on stage with the rest of the Rat Pack, only with a gun in one hand and a beautiful woman underneath him way too easily, and that’s the extent of each film. You’re on board only if you’re a Dean Martin fan or have no concern for the safety and dignity of any of his co-stars.

No, the film’s no Atomic Blonde; the best you can say is, it’s not as outright misogynistic as In Like Flint. The effects are as crap as the quips and the rest of the actors probably dialed it back to allow Dino to shine more, or at the least allow some glow from what embers he could muster. Aficionados of the Helm films (which, yes, amazingly, there are a few) claimed this was the worst of the four; somehow, the follow-up film, 1968’s The Wrecking Crew, ended up being better received by these “fans” despite pandering to even lower tastes than this film.

Which is the biggest problem with the picture, and why as a film with lots of genre elements this is especially worth dragging into the light: This is one of the worst examples of extreme sexism ever offered, one where women with extraordinary abilities, like being the only ones to carry Earth’s flag to the stars and form the core of an efficient counter-intelligence agency that keeps us safe, all of that is just accessories the babes are made to wear while they shut up and smile. These accomplishments? That’s nice, honey, now get me a drink and sit on my lap like a good girl, you…

It’s because we had films like The Ambushers that we need films like Atomic Blonde, Wonder Woman, and Annihilation. It’s not enough to hope the proposed new Matt Helm film featuring Bradley Cooper would do a better job with the source material and apologize for the 1960s films; we need to balance the scales on a cosmic level with new works to counter these in our cultural conscience.

Let these women do amazing things on their own for themselves, damnit!

NEXT TIME: “Stumbling is not failing” – Malcolm X

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: Looking for a feminist action flick? This Dean Martin spy-fi is sadly not it appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, you just get fed up and want to fly away when you see how little’s been done…

Space is the Place (1974)

Distributed by: Rhapsody Films

Directed by: John Coney

When you mention Afrofuturism, the first thing to come to the mind of the modern audience is usually this film:

As significant as Black Panther is, as both representation for those who don’t get an equal say as well as for genre work in general, it is also the inheritor of a tradition started many years before with the jazz artist and visionary Sun Ra.

In 1971, Sun Ra’s journey, which included proclaimed trips to Saturn as well as documented long residences in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, during which time he formed the Arkestra and expanded the boundaries of bebop and big band jazz, led him to deliver a series of lectures at UC Berkeley. Entitled “The Black Man in the Cosmos,” he used his position as artist in residence on the campus to discuss in his class his worldview, which drew upon Rosicrucianism and Ancient Egyptian mythology to suggest that African Americans were better off disassociating with their current lot and starting on their own elsewhere, where they could expand their consciousness and be better attuned with the universe.

It’s out of these lectures that Jim Newman, a San Francisco gallery curator and jazz musician, built upon Ra’s discussions and ended up producing his first feature, which opens with the following declaration by Ra, who plays a version of himself in the film:

We next find ourselves in 1943 Chicago, where Ra is a piano player at a strip club, working under the name “Sonny Ray.” One night, in walks the Overseer (Raymond Johnson), a man with a stake in keeping African Americans from being awoken. He asks the club owner (Christopher Brooks in his last feature role) to fire Sonny, but before that can be carried out Ra makes his presence known, with a keyboard solo that literally shatters glass and hurls people down the stairs.

From there, after formal acknowledgements, Ra and the Overseer teleport away (as beings beyond our existence are wont to do) and sit at a table in the desert and play a game for the fate of African Americans. Ra hopes to be able to take them with him to the planet he discovered, while the Overseer would rather continue with making their lives one of pain and worthlessness.

As the game starts, we find ourselves in the present (1974), where Ra and his Arkestra have landed their spaceship in Oakland, CA. There to cover the event for the media is Jimmy Fay (Brooks), who as a person tied to the Overseer is predisposed to cover Ra’s adventures with a cynical take when he’s not in Ra’s presence. Even after meeting the man and starting to get Ra’s message, Fay has to try and compromise Ra’s mission on behalf of his boss.

A mission that Ra explains to Fay and to us soon after disembarking from his ship:

And it is further discussed by Ra when he visits a youth center in Oakland to discuss his plans with an audience that challenges him:

As he promises, Ra sets up his agency, where he interviews clients whom in HR speak are “not a good fit”:

For much of the film, the Overseer seems to be racking up points in his game with Ra; he seems comfortable watching things go as they do while his companions Candy (Barbara Deloney) and Tania (Erika Leder) suffer indignities at his hands. And when the two government agents (Walter Burns and Morgan Upton) who were doing surveillance on Ra decide to kidnap him, things seem desperate for the musician…

Although there is some debate whether the term “musician” is encompassing enough to describe Sun Ra. By the time of the film, having released over 40 recordings of studio and live work reinforcing his statements, Ra had a developed worldview, if not a full-on philosophy, that he presented to his audiences. It was a belief that trying to stay within the patterns and confines of what had passed before was just not working, and that the best response to the diaspora was to disengage and go elsewhere, preferably off Earth.

It’s a faith in humanity’s ability to pick themselves up and leave this planet that puts the film on the same plane as many of the other great space exploration films of the mid-20th Century. This “New Frontier”-inspired faith that in reaching for the stars we address all our problems is a major motif found in science fiction through this time. What separates this from its contemporaries is its willingness to address race relations head on in a radical and frank manner, one that gets in the face of the viewer and asks them on the spot for a gut check.

This is also the main theme of Ra’s work up to and including this film, the belief that there’s nothing here for African Americans, whether “here” is Earth or just the United States, and that it’s time to move on. The call to disengage and reject the status quo certainly would have shocked audiences then, whether the statement was embraced wholeheartedly or as a piece of performance art; either way, it’s a statement that carries a lot of heft the way Ra delivers it.

Indeed, the approach to this statement comes up in the film itself, when some of Ra’s followers question if his stark pronouncements are meant to just sell records. That these folks reach Ra just as he’s kidnapped by the government and requires their help seems to state pretty clearly where the film comes down on the issue; even the fact that for this section Space is the Place uses the “getting the act to the stage on time” trope found in other films starring musicians doesn’t diminish the call for leaving the planet and finding better elsewhere, which was likely distressing for some audiences back in the day.

The most distressing thing about the film in the present is that much of what prompted Sun Ra to state what he did is still with us; if anything, it’s worse than it was in 1974. This small movie, with its low budget effects and a story drawn from Ra’s classes after the fact, more a set of sketches to buttress a concert film than a screenplay, would on paper appear to be a very unlikely project of note. And yet it holds our attention because it speaks to very real issues regarding how we get along with each other, and how things have gotten so bad that there doesn’t seem to be a way forward together.

It speaks so well and straightforward, in fact, that it enables the film to be the very first serious work of Afrofuturism. Everything that comes after this point, from George Clinton pushing the release of Parliament’s Mothership Connection, through the film The Brother from Another Planet, right up to A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Space Program” and Black Panther, owes a major debt to this film and its philosophy. If nothing else, Sun Ra’s film allowed us to be aware that there are problems so great which may force us to take up radical solutions.

Thanks to this movie, audiences might not have known to ask for the “Pax Wakanda” had they not been told before that space is the place…

NEXT TIME: Yes, there is still magic to find in movies, from time to time…

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: Jazz legend Sun Ra Brings Black Power from Outer Space appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, all it takes to keep people amused from time to time is a little magic…

The Time Travelers (1964)

Distributed by: American International

Directed by: Ib Melchior

There are some unavoidable spoilers herein.

People sometimes refer to “movie magic” when discussing how films try and take you somewhere else. Even if the film itself is not much of an enchanted destination, we can at least appreciate the trip to get there if it’s done well.

And that applies whether the trip’s through the third or fourth dimension…

We open at UCLA, where we watch a project being worked on by three researchers, Dr. Eric Von Steiner (Preston Foster), Steve Connors (Philip Carey), and Carol White (Merry Anders). Their project is a portal device that allows operators to see into the past or future, which works pretty well peeking at the past, but is having problems looking forward.

When a worker from technical support, Danny McKee (Steve Franken), comes around because the university wants the team to give back some equipment they “borrowed” to get the project rolling, the team makes a desperate effort to give their project the juice and show some results. They then open a window into the future 107 years later, which shows the campus to be a veritable wasteland.

Danny, giving off a serious Howard Wolowitz vibe, takes a closer look at the window on the future, and discovers that’s actually a door. And like any character in lab-appropriate clothing, he steps through, gets lost and needs to be saved. First the two guys go after him, leaving Carol at the controls; however, when two mutants find the portal and try to come for her, she fights them off, then comes through to try and get her colleagues back.

Before she can succeed, however, the portal collapses, leaving the four stuck in the future. Just as the mutants start to gain on them, however, the find the cave system run by the last humans left and their android workforce, led by Dr. Varno (John Hoyt). He brings the four up to speed as to what’s happened over the last century: Nuclear war has devastated the planet, the mutants are after everyone, and the last humans are trying to build a rocket to get to Alpha Centari.

The refugees from the year 1964 are welcomed to join the collective. Some are more welcoming than others, as Reena (Delores Wells) makes a hard play for Danny. Though, to be fair, he’s not doing much to defend his honor or dignity, so she doesn’t have to try all that hard…

While Varno and his colleague Gadra (Joan Woodbury in her last role) are very friendly, their colleague Willard (Dennis Patrick) is less inviting. His cold reaction has an understandable basis, though: The window for the launch of the rocket off Earth is too tight to allow them to make allowances for four more people to go with them, and so they must leave the time travelers when the time comes. With a deadline looming, Connors and company start work on recreating the lab accident to allow them to go home.

Come launch day, and things go sideways badly; the mutants break into the compound and mess up the rocket on the launch pad, rampaging through the humans’ caves. Under pressure, the time portal is opened just as the mutants swarm in, bringing our four chrononauts and what’s left of the future folk back to the beginning…

…right back before, in fact; because they came home too early, to before the accident, they encounter their same selves frozen in time. They soon realize that a temporal paradox is created, trapping everyone out of time. Desperate not to age out of existence amidst a frozen fugue, everyone goes through the time portal to a spot where the window was focused ever so briefly, hoping it’s a potential safe spot.

Which allows their time frozen selves to resume their own agency, setting up a fantastic ending:

The revelation that the characters created a temporal loop that they’re continually struck in is one of many solid ideas about the way time works and what scientists in survival mode would do in the script. There’s plenty to work with in terms of concepts presented, more than a thin budget would be able to handle; with a budget closer to the one for Forbidden Planet this could have been an all-time classic.

Melchior – who came into films after serving during WWII as a counter-intelligence officer and gave us scripts for Reptilicus (which he was planning to direct before producer Sidney Pink edged him out) and Robinson Crusoe on Mars  – got creative when it came time to bringing some magic on screen. For this film, he turned to his co-writer, David Hewitt, who had been a stage magician before breaking into film, and suggested using stage illusions for some of the sequences. As these could be shot on set during production instead of inserted in post, it gave the film a more realistic feel.

One of the better uses of stage craft was the demonstration of the teleportation technology developed in the future, using a version of “the vanishing lady”:

By bringing magic to the set (shot beautifully by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond), Hewitt’s first film gig launched a long career in visual effects to great acclaim.

Also a first was a cameo by Forrest J. Ackerman, super fan and publisher of Famous Monsters of FIlmland, the Hollywood Reporter of genre films from the 1950s to the 1980s. Ackerman would go on to have a total 48 different cameos owed him as a publisher of genre fare; for those keeping score, Stan Lee (when not playing a version of himself) has so far only gotten 36 such appearances in.

(Speaking of scores, as an aside, for the mutants, Melchior recruited members of the Los Angeles Lakers to play these evolutionary dead ends. None of the players were specifically named, but if you want to cross-compare their roster to figure out who was actually in the film, hey, knock yourself out…)

While there were plenty of magical shots, there were areas that could have used some more basic magic. Some segments, like the android factory and the final battle, go on a bit too long; when you realize that a good 14 minutes could have been cut from the film, out of 82 minutes total run time, it diminishes some of the appreciation for the work. It’s a big knock against the movie, as it makes viewers feel that the film’s just stalling for time (no pun intended).

Which is a shame, because as mentioned there are some great concepts here. Which brings up Irwin Allen, the producer who some of his properties seem, well… uncomfortably close to Melchior’s work. There is the generally accepted acknowledgement that The Time Travelers likely inspired (at minimum) Allen’s TV series The Time Tunnel. While Melchior didn’t claim his project was stolen the same way he pointed out how his Space Family Robinson project became Lost in Space in Allen’s hands, it’s hard not to casually reach that conclusion.

Then again, Melchior didn’t make much of a stink either when his collaborator Hewitt blatantly ripped off made a remarkably similar film in 1967, Journey to the Center of Time, where the plot elements are nearly identical between the two.

Somehow, these “homages” didn’t turn into major IP fights in the courts. But amazingly, everyone kept on going with amazingly little vitriol, as if by some magic…

NEXT TIME: We’ll have an interesting write-up on an adaptation of a classic; assuming, of course, that we’re allowed to read that by this time next week…

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: An Adventure Movie That Brought a Little Magic to Time Travel appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, you just can’t do things by the book anymore…

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Distributed by: Universal Pictures

Directed by: François Truffaut

Please note that there will be spoilers here for both the film and the source material.

Ray Bradbury’s account of a dystopia where the state asserts control over the populace through convincing them that books need to be burned for their own good is probably one of the most influential American novel ever written. Readers for decades after its initial publication were terrified of a society that would abandon collected knowledge and instead immerse themselves in wall-to-wall reality television.

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As terrifying as Bradbury’s vision was for his characters to live it, it was certainly no fun for French New Wave pioneer Truffaut to film…

The film opens with a credit sequence that reinforces its anti-reading values: All we see are close-ups on and tracking shots of television antennas, while the credits are read by a voice off-screen (Alex Scott). By doing this, Truffaut establishes early on how much reading is discouraged in this society, and draws you in instantly to his bizarre environment.

Much like the book, the film focuses on Guy Montag (Oskar Werner), a fireman in a society where the profession has a whole new set of tasks: to hunt out and burn books. He’s very good at his work, as we see when the film opens after the credits with a call to an apartment where he hunts for and gathers up every book hidden there and then sets them ablaze like a funerary pyre on the sidewalk outside, while his boss Captain Beatty (Cyril Cusack) looks on approvingly:

On his way back from his job, he encounters on the monorail ride to the suburbs Clarisse (Julie Christie), a young woman who strikes up a conversation with him and starts to plant seeds of doubt in him:

Montag is slightly shaken by the encounter, but descends into his usual annoyance with his wife Linda (also played by Christie) who is so into her reality programming and free pills the government encourages folks to take that she way as well just be a figure being broadcast into the house, like the ubiquitous announcer Cousin Midge (Noel Davis).

The more his dissatisfaction rises with Linda, the more time he spends with Clarisse, getting involved with her habits, including her book smuggling operation. This sets up Montag to question his role in life, and when he decides to not be part of the system, he ultimately has to take drastic action, including setting fire to Captain Beatty and going on the run from the cops, which gets on air coverage that will seem way to familiar to anyone who ever watched a police chase shot by a news helicopter.

Ultimately, Montag finds his way out of the city, where he encounters the “book people”, who feel it is their mission to memorize a complete book in order to insure that, as explained by their leader (Scott playing an onscreen character now) as he introduces Montag to the rest of the “library”:

Speaking of books, Truffaut was still enthralled by his conversations with Alfred Hitchcock, which were compiled in 1966 into the book Hitchcock/Truffaut. In many ways, the adaptation he lenses is based more on Hitchcock’s than Bradbury’s work. This becomes evident as one listens to the score by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Hermann and notices some of the homages Truffaut weaves into the film, such as the dream sequence Montag has that suggests the similar sequence in Vertigo. (It would have been even more noticeable had one of Truffaut’s earlier choices for Clarisse or Linda, Tippi Hedren, actually gotten at least one of the parts.)

And that may have been one of the few parts of the shoot Truffaut was looking forward to. He committed to the film, his first (and last) film in English, before he had mastered the language; he could barely speak to his producers at Universal and most of the crew in England where this was shot without the help of a translator.

His lead, Werner, could speak in French (having done Jules et Jim with Truffaut four years earlier), but neither man wanted to speak to each other. Many observers on set noted that Werner’s having “gone Hollywood” since the last the two worked together made him an “insufferable f’n’ bastard”, and Truffaut, who was not in his element in terms of country, language, or genre, could barely get him to do the film as he envisaged.

In terms of Truffaut’s vision, his general disdain/lack of appreciation for genre made him take liberties with the source material that gives the film at best a tangential connection to the original story. In his hands, the story becomes a personal, intimate tale of an individual who has to go through a hellish process of questioning everything around him. Doing it through the love of books, a personal subject for the director, imbibes the story with a sense of gravitas, the joy of acquiring learning through reading being an act of personal growth that we experience up close.

Which is fine in and of itself, but ends up losing some of the heft and chill that Bradbury’s book contained. By making Clarisse in the film an active participant, as opposed to being as in the book a brief encounter before becoming an unfortunate victim of a hit-and-run, some of the shock at how callous people had become is lost. The removal of the nuclear attack on Montag’s city, the ultimate burning ordered by the authorities, removes not only a major irony that buttresses the themes of the book but a sense of scale as to how bad problems had gotten in society that they needed “book people” to help out.

In many ways, the film itself is much like the society it portrayed: it’s a continual battle of words versus pictures. Where the script falls flat, between Truffaut’s handle on the language and Werner’s refusal to work with what he had as requested, Truffaut’s camera work (aided by Nicholas Roeg’s cinematography) is fascinating to observe. He uses an extensive tool kit of shots and set-ups to add more to the scene than a straightforward shot would have gotten, and makes us wonder what we might have gotten had this been an entirely original Truffaut genre piece in his native French.

We would never get that film; the only other genre work he would take up after this film was as an actor, playing Claude Lacombe in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Which was one more effort than he made to make a film in English, never trying that again.

As for the original property, the book would continue to go on as a work of important literature, and as of this writing HBO will soon air a new adaptation of the work. And while the book is being so celebrated, it has a number of times been banned by different communities, with threats to burn the book on occasion because of how it makes the reader feel.

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NEXT TIME: When it comes to film production, you can’t get by with a little help from your friends if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing yourself…

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: An American Dystopia Through the Eyes of a French Auteur appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

In 1977 two space probes, Voyager 1 and 2, were launched to explore the outer solar system and, in the words of Star Trek, go where no man has gone before . Aboard those crafts are two golden records filled with information about Earth, including images, sounds and musical selections meant to represent our world to any intelligent life out there in the universe who may come across them.

Among all the classical and folk music included, there’s just one rock song: “Johnny B Goode,” the classic tale of a young boy who dreams of success with his guitar, by one of the most influential guitarists of all time and one of the greatest rock ‘n’ rollers: Chuck Berry.

The fact that NASA chose Berry’s signature song speaks volumes of his importance in the history of rock music. Often called the father of rock ‘n’ roll, Berry not only was one of the first black artists to cross over to mainstream radio but also was a major influence on some of the defining rock bands of the ‘60s such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones, as well as rock giants from the ’70s like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Prince. And, partly thanks to its use in an iconic scene in the classic time travel adventure movie Back To The Future, it’s a song that still resonates with kids today 60 years after it was first released.

Berry later said that “Johnny B. Goode” Berry was partly autobiographical, but unlike the country boy from Louisiana in the song “who never ever learned to read and write so well,” Berry was born into a middle class family, the fourth of six children, his mother one of the few black women of her generation to have a college education.

Despite this, Berry was uninterested in school, dropping out at just 17 to join two friends on a road trip from his home town of St. Louis, Missouri to California. Unfortunately the trio only managed to get to Kansas City when the teens found a pistol in a parking lot and stupidly decided to rob three stores and a steal a car at gunpoint. Berry was sent to the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men and eventually released three years later on good behavior on his 21^st birthday in 1947.

Putting his brief life of crime behind him, Berry married the following year to Themetta “Toddy” Suggs and the pair would eventually have four children together. He supported his new family by working various blue collar jobs and even trained and worked as a beautician.

It was only when his old high school friend Tommy Stevens invited him to join his new band in 1951  that Berry took up the guitar again for the first time since his teens. He accepted hoping to make some extra money for his growing family and soon was wowing crowds in the local nightclubs.

This led to him joining the band of a successful local jazz pianist Johnnie Johnson – the Sir John Trio – as a last minute replacement when long time band member Alvin Bennett had a stroke. It wasn’t long before Berry’s showmanship helped bring the trio to a wider audience and set the young guitarist on the road to stardom.

Johnson would continue to be an important figure in Berry’s life and it’s no accident that “Johnny B Goode” bears his name. In 1998, Johnson told monroenews.com:  “I played no part in nothing of “Johnny B. Goode”. On other songs, Chuck and I worked together, but not that one. We were playing one night, I think it was Chicago, and he played it. Afterward, he told me it was a tribute to me. He did it on his own. I didn’t know nothing about it. It was never discussed.”

By 1955, his success in the Sir John Trio led to Berry traveling regularly to Chicago hoping to get a record contract. It was there he went to see his favorite musician, the legendary Muddy Waters. After the show he managed to talk to his hero, asking his advice on how to become a recording star.

Berry later remembered, “It was the feeling I suppose one would get from having a word with the president or the pope. I quickly told him of my admiration for his compositions and asked him who I could see about making a record.” Waters suggested that Berry try his luck at blues label Chess Records.

Berry went the next morning and amazingly managed to gain an audience with boss Leonard Chess. Impressed with his unique adaptation of the Bob Wills country tune, “Ida Red,” which Berry had written new lyrics and renamed “Ida May,” the label offered him a record contract. Leonard Chess didn’t like the country-sounding name of the song though and changed it to “Maybellene,” inspired by the popular makeup line (although with a different spelling) and within months the single had sold over a million copies.

With his newfound success Berry decided to go solo but Johnson and Ebby Hardy from the Sir John Trio became his backing band. With his friends in tow, Berry quickly followed “Maybellene” with a slew of hit singles that would become rock ‘n’ roll classics: “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” “School Days,” “Rock And Roll Music” and “Sweet Little Sixteen.”

Berry was already in his 30s at this point but had a knack of relaying the teenage experience in his songs. This coupled with his brilliant guitar-playing, his natural showmanship and his signature and iconic “duck walk,” Berry became one of the biggest stars of the new rock ‘n’ roll movement.

Although “Johnny B. Goode” was written in 1955, Berry didn’t record it until 1958 and surprisingly the man who inspired the title of the track didn’t play on the song. Instead it featured regular Chess Records musicians Lafayette Leake on piano, Fred Below on drums and the legendary blues musician Willie Dixon on bass.

Berry had intended the song to be about Johnson but he admitted it ended up “more or less about myself.” In a time of terrible racial segregation, he also decided to change the lyrics so not to alienate white audiences, telling Rolling Stone in 1972; “The original words [were], of course, ‘That little colored boy could play.’ I changed it to ‘country boy’ – or else it wouldn’t get on the radio.”

The incredible opening riff, that rock critic Greil Marcus once described as “the most deliciously explosive opening in rock ‘n’ roll,” influenced a whole generation of future guitar legends. “What Chuck did with Johnny B Goode is just beyond belief for any other musicians around in their day,” Jimmy Page later told the BBC.

Released on March 31, 1958, the song proved another big hit for Berry, reaching #8 on the Billboard charts and #2 on the R&B chart but the song really found its success in the years after, its enduring popularity 60 years later is its true legacy.

Long before the song appeared in Back To The Future, its success inspired the name of a 1959 rock ‘n’ roll movie called Go, Johnny, Go! starring legendary DJ Alan Freed. Berry of course appears in the film performing the song and even has a small speaking role (although sadly the Johnny in the film is a white guy called Johnny Melody played by pop singer Jimmy Clanton.)

Years later when Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale were writing the script for Back To The Future they had only one song in mind for one of the most important scenes in their new movie and throughout many edits and cuts, the song they wanted never changed. “We didn’t have an alternative,” Gale told Uproxx. They were so determined to have the song in the film they paid as such as $75,000 for the rights: a huge amount of money for song rights at that time. Played by Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and the Starlighters and overheard by Chuck’s fictional cousin Marvin Berry (“Chuck, it’s your cousin Marvin Berry. You know that new sound you’re looking for? Listen to this.”) it’s probably the film’s most iconic scene and a nod to Berry being one of the creators of the rock ‘n’ roll sound.

Berry himself never commented on the scene but was obviously aware of it: his backing band at his 60^th birthday concerts which included huge fan Keith Richards and Julian Lennon, were dressed in the same suits worn by the Starlighters in the film.

It’s also notable that the same year Berry was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame and, backed by Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, performed “Johnny B. Goode” at the induction ceremony.

As for Johnson, he parted ways with Berry in the early ‘70s and battled an alcohol problem until the 1987 Chuck Berry documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll! highlighted his contributions to music and helped resurrect his career. Johnson went from driving a bus in St. Louis to performing on stage with the likes of Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards.

Johnson later tried to unsuccessfully sue Berry for songwriting royalties, but Berry apparently didn’t hold a grudge and their friendship continued with Johnson still popping up now and again with Berry on stage until Johnson’s death in 2005.

Chuck Berry passed away last year at the age of 90 and his final album, Chuck – his first in 38 years – was released just two months later. The record included a sequel to “Johnny B. Goode” called “Lady B. Goode.”

Despite his success and influence, Berry did not lead a charmed life. He served two more prison terms, the first at the height of his fame for transporting a girl across state lines for “immoral purposes”(after the 20 months spent inside, friends said he was never the same again) – a charge he always disputed – and later in 1979 he served four months for tax invasion, due to his insistence on being paid cash for his live performances (stemming from being cheated by promoters during his early years.)

But not many men could say that the Beatles covered so many of their songs, in fact they performed more songs by Chuck Berry than any other artist, including of course, “Johnny B. Goode” (as heard on Live At The BBC.) Paul McCartney later explained, “Chuck Berry was another massive influence with “Johnny B. Goode”. We’d go up to John’s bedroom with his little record player and listen to Chuck Berry records, trying to learn them.” Lennon himself famously gushed: “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.”

Not surprisingly, Berry was one of the first artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1985. “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Chuck Berry,” Keith Richards said in his induction speech, “cause I’ve lifted every lick he ever played. This is the man that started it all!”

Chuck Berry will always be one of the innovators of rock ‘n’ roll music and every kid that watches Back To The Future in years to come will discover “Johnny B. Goode” and hear Berry’s lick that sounds “just like a-ringing a bell.” No wonder then that the NASA scientists behind the Voyager spacecraft decided that the song should be extraterrestrial life’s first introduction to the wonders of rock ‘n’ roll.

Not long after Voyager launched, Steve Martin appeared on Saturday Night Live joking that the first message from another world had actually been received and would be published on the next issue of Time Magazine. Holding it up it read simply: “Send more Chuck Berry.“

The post Songs That Made Rock ‘n’ Roll: Chuck Berry, Marty McFly and the Birth of “Johnny B. Goode” appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, when you’re committed to a film, even though everyone’s talking at you, you can’t hear a word they’re saying, only the echoes of your mind…

Son of Dracula (1974)

Distributed by: Cinemation Industries

Directed by: Freddie Francis

For some of us, the trouble always starts when a few mates come over for a drink…

There was a certain amount of socializing among rock musicians in the early 1970s. Much like among the rest of us, such gatherings led to stories, more rounds, and plans to come together to drink again. With them, you would also get out of these appointments to drink plans to do other things together, often including doing session gigs on each other’s projects.

Which is as good as any explanation for this film…

Before the credits roll, we’re treated (for lack of a better word) to a scene that’s identified as taking place at Dracula’s castle in the 1880s, where we see Dracula (Dan Meaden) being hunted down, the camera giving us the POV of the vampire hunter, assisted by a dwarf in his employ (Skip Martin in his last film role).

After being assaulted with a scene that might make the surprised viewer have quick thoughts of Max Schreck getting offed by Tyrion Lannister, the film gets stranger as Dracula’s major domo calls in Merlin the Magician (Ringo Starr), who’s there to clean up the mess and insure that the loss of the King of the Underworld does not cause grave repercussions. There they find her coffin Countess Dracula (Pamela Conway in her last role) who they discover is with child. Merlin declares that everything will be all right, as the child will be of age to become the new King in 100 years.

Come 100 years later, which is technically the 1980s, though in their version of the future nothing’s changed except that they have the Chunnel 10 years early, but anyway… The child of Dracula (Harry Nilsson) has come of age, using the name Count Downe…

…okay, breathe; there, there…

…who makes his way to London after snacking on a gas station attendant and her boyfriend during a quick stop for petrol. He’s welcomed by Merlin before he goes out for a walk and does what all Creatures of the Night do when stalking the streets of London…

…invite himself to sit in with the band at a club…

Well, he must have some form of otherworldly power if he can get Peter Frampton and John Bonham to sit in on this band on short notice, right…?

In fact, Count Downe admits to his lackey Brian (David Balie) that given his druthers, he’d rather immerse himself in music. He makes this clear before taking to his coffin for the night by unwinding with a run at the piano:

It’s soon after this that he admits to Merlin, Doctor Frankenstein (Freddie Jones) and Professor Van Helsing (Dennis Price in his last role), that he’d rather renounce his birthright and stick to making music as a mortal. Part of what prompts him to want this is his falling for Van Helsing’s personal assistant, Amber (Suzanna Leigh), for whom he falls quickly for, for no apparent reason other than this script calls for a love interest.

Which we don’t get a lot of time to consider, as we get another taste of Count Downe’s love of music, this time with Keith Moon, Dr. John, and Klaus Voorman in on the set:

You can tell just watching the film where’s Downe’s passion lies, or at least assume it; the fact that Nilsson just sleep walks through the film, taking his mark and doing what the role requires, and only really seems alive when he’s performing music, demonstrates how little he has to bring as the lead for the film. It feels like he showed up and checked off the list of things vampires are supposed to do before wandering off: turn into a bat, check; mesmerize young lady, okay; show fangs and bite neck, yep, that’s that, and we’re good here.

Even the kindest interpretation, that his character is supposed to not want to be undead and just doesn’t care, can’t work here. With everyone else a much better actor, even Ringo (who also produced the pic for Apple Films), it’s too easy to spot how much his approach to the hero lacks bite.

It probably seemed like a good idea on paper, which was probably put together over drinks. Freddie Francis had done The Evil of Frankenstein and Hysteria for Hammer Films and should have been able to pull something together, especially as many in the rest of his cast had done such fare before. The only potential weak link other than the star would have to be the script from Jennifer Jayne (writing as “Jay Fairbank”), which ironically or not was the last writing she ever did for film. It’s interpretation of some well-known characters as Van Helsing and especially Merlin were, to put it mildly, “unique,” but even then a good producer could have brought in someone to help punch up the script, which puts a lot of the blame on Ringo for this. (The fact that at one point Ringo wanted to bring in Graham Chapman to do a new script to overdub the existing material with, a la What’s Up Tiger Lilly?, then just abandoned the idea altogether, speaks further of Ringo’s failures.)

If Ringo had done for Harry Nilsson what he did for Mark Boland with Born to Boogie, a documentary Ringo directed as well as produced, he might have had a film people would be willing to acknowledge. Instead, the film was like the eyes of Medusa (who shows up in the film for no reason, played by Nita Lorraine) in that everyone was afraid to look at them lest they meet a horrible fate. Its distribution was worse than spotty, going only to out-of-the-way venues and only ever getting one VHS release, which is again something the producer could have handled properly had he believed in the film.

There’s an account of how badly the producer stood by the film years after its release, as told by Steve Shorten, who works at the Fest for Beatles Fans (fka Beatlefest), which he recounts below:

I *THINK* it was one of the ’82 Fests – it’s been a long time – but, the way I recall it, Harry was showing Son of Dracula in the video room on the 2^nd floor; apparently he had asked Ringo to send him over a copy. Memory is a funny thing but I also seem to recall that not only did that copy only turn out to be the first hours’ worth of the film but that it was an alternate edit or work print or some such. Bottom line: when the hour was up, Harry trooped the video room masses over to the piano area (which back in ’82 wouldn’t have been occupied 24/7 by itinerant “musicians”) where he told the rest of the story and played “Without You” for the assembled audience.

But could the film have been better remembered had it been given a little more care, like Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tree? If nothing else, the music performances by some of the more notable names of 70s rock make this an interesting curio. And while Nilsson is no Christopher Lee, he’s not entirely inept either. The fact that there are people who are better actors than singers who have done more painful vampire depictions gives him something that he need not have been ashamed of.

It’s not like the film’s lead never should have gotten involved with haunting the nightlife. After all, he ultimately finds a place as a member of the Hollywood Vampires drinking society, going on legendary benders with Mickey Dolenz and John Lennon during his LA years, as well as Alice Cooper, who appropriated the name for his own current band.

Which is yet again a good example of the trouble you get when a few mates come over for a drink…

NEXT TIME: “One can never produce anything as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about.” – H. P. Lovecraft

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson in a Rock ‘n’ Roll Vampire Movie? appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, bridging two worlds together beyond the barrier of reality is a lot tougher than it looks…

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Distributed by: American International

Directed by: Daniel Haller

With American International doing so many literary adaptations, bringing the works of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to the screen, it was probably inevitable that they would soon get around to doing H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft is probably the most influential writer in horror to come out of the last century. His complex background of a “mythos” that all of his written works are set in, one where the “Old Ones” walked the Earth before we did, and we silly humans pursue forbidden knowledge to understand and maybe control the universe through these entities, not realizing that such acts are pure madness, made him a potent influence through the 20^th century. The fact that his works were enrobed in pure xenophobia and read as racist AF in his characterizations of non-WASP males portends a diminished influence as the 21^st century progresses.

None of which about the author you’re likely to garner from this picture derived from his work:

Based on a short story penned by Lovecraft in 1929, the film opens cold with a woman in the throes of labor, being watched by a member of her family (Sam Jaffe). This cuts quickly to a hideous animated credit sequence, which then cuts quickly to the rest of the film; you have to get used to the super-fast edits early for this one, otherwise you may as well give up now…

So when we do start for real, we’re at Miskatonic University, the pride of Arkham, MA, where Dr. Henry Armitage (Ed Begley, in a role he completed just three months before his death) has just finished a lecture on the Necromonicon. At the end of his talk, he asks his student Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) to carry it back to the library and put it back in its case, as if it were a copy of Weird Tales.

If you’re a Lovecraft student, watching them handle the Necronomicon here is like watching how military-grade weapons get handled at a gun show in South Carolina, you just know something bad’s going to happen soon…

Cue Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), who pops up unexpectedly and starts giving the eyes to Nancy. While fellow student Elizabeth Hamilton (Donna Baccala) immediately gets a bad vibe off Wilbur, Nancy is more than gracious to give in to Wilbur’s request, to take the book for five minutes to give it a read. This at first annoys Dr. Armitage, but when he realizes that the man making off with the book is the grandson of someone studied by the scholar, Armitage invites Whatley to dinner with Nancy and Elizabeth.

At the end of the meal, Wilbur notes that he missed the last bus from Arkham to Dunwich, and Nancy offers to drive him home. They make it to Wilbur’s creepy house, where he invites her in for some tea before she heads back. She accepts, he drugs her tea, she drinks it, and from there the weekend’s off to a great start…

…for Wilbur, in any event…

Nancy’s so far under, than when Armitage and Elizabeth find her, she assures her rescuers that yes, she’s spending the weekend in Dunwich of her own free will. Something we can tell is just not the case, as there are very few people who would willingly lie on a cursed altar like the one her host leads her to:

Armitage and Elizabeth, meanwhile, try getting to the bottom of the mystery of the Dunwich Whatleys. They start asking around the town, including the town physician Dr. Corey (Lloyd Bochner) and his nurse Cora (Talia Shire, in the second role of her career and still using her maiden name, Talia Coppola). Both offer warnings about the family as well as some background and clues.

Among the bits of information we get is a story Doctor Cory tells Armitage about Wilbur’s grandfather (Jaffe’s character0), who called for a physician at the time his grandson was born:

The doctor relates that he helped deliver Wilbur, but was told by the family that his twin brother died at birth, which they disposed of. The birth of the twins drove Wilbur’s mother Lavinia (Joanne Moore Jordan) insane, as Armitage notes when he visits her with Cory at the asylum.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, goes back to the Whatley place, sneaks past Grandpa Whatley, and finds a locked room that she should not have opened the door to…

It’s here that we are introduced to Yog-Sothoth, one of the Old Ones in Lovecraft’s mythology, in what ends up being one of two scenes Haller clearly shows us the main threat to our world. (Not counting Wilbur, who we’ll deal with shortly.) For most of the film, we don’t look directly on the horror, but we see what it does, with wind blowing water before it, bright flashes of colors blotting out the scene, much of the time the camera taking Yog-Sothoth’s POV as it brings mayhem about. The creature in fact is less scary when we do see it than when it’s just suggested out of our sight.

It’s actually very effective, and one of the tricks Haller uses that works. While this feature is not his first directing gig, this feels like he took every trick he used as art director for everything from A Bucket of Blood and Master of the World through Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and threw it in along with every kitchen sink found in R’lyeh on screen. Whether it was artistic temperament or a fear that this would be his last time as a director and he’d never have another chance (an founded fear, as he directed a lot of TV episodes in the ’70s and ’80s), the result of all the numerous cuts and filters is a film that’s way too busy for its own good, distracting and aggravating the viewer.

This is in stark contrast to Stockwell’s Whatley, who seems even more out of phase with normal rhythms than Nancy does after she gets drugged. The casual viewer will wonder how someone so laid back could be an evil mastermind cultist if he seems to care so little for his plan. People watching the film who are familiar with some of Stockwell’s other work, even if they only remember Quantum Leap, will be especially surprised at how distant he seems on screen; whether it’s the actor’s choice or the director’s is hard to discern from casual viewing.

The rest of the cast manages pretty well to work with what they have. Sandra Dee’s drugged out Nancy is the only person trying for lower wattage than Stockwell’s Whatley, but at least she has a good excuse, being drugged the whole time while in a small Massachusetts town.

[Insert your preferred recreational use in Massachusetts joke here…]

If there’s any really weak parts that make this otherwise watchable film hard to take, it’s the script. There are better written pastiches of Lovecraft’s work than this adaptation; hell, there are better written modules for the Call of Cthulhu RPG than this script. Like other A-I adaptations, this takes a lot of liberties with the source material, and if anything is even less in the spirit of the original writer’s oeuvre. And with some terrible turns in character decision making and some flat dialog, it’s not hard to see why this would be the only effort A-I made to adapt Lovecraft.

Which considering how deep Lovecraft’s created universe is, was likely to be inevitable if they were only going to do this half-considered adaptation. The fact that passing references to the Old Ones in such works as Cast a Deadly Spell and The Cabin in the Woods better capture the feel for Lovecraft and his work than this directly derived version of his story shows how much of the writer’s spirit permeated our culture.

Then again, it’s not like Shakespeare was being abused here. As Lovecraft wrote in a letter to Frank Belknap Long in 1931 about the Yog-Sothoth, “The fact is, I have never approached serious literature yet.”

NEXT TIME: Trying to get into orbit with a stiff upper lip, wot not…

The post FANTASIA OBSCURA: Dean Stockwell is Sandra Dee’s Date from Hell in Lovecraft’s Weird Tale appeared first on REBEAT Magazine.