The Red-Stained Lawn (1973): or, The Days of Wine and Robots

How do you know when it's love?

Is it that first surreptitious glance across the room, eyes meeting over swirls of cigarette smoke and strains of Wagner thumping in your ears? Is it those first furtive, fleshy fumblings in the alley behind the bar, all hands and lips and straps with complicated fasteners? Or does it come later, reclining comfortably on the couch in a shared apartment, sharing a bottle of wine and your last cigarette as you wait patiently for the next episode of Cupcake Wars to roll?

It's a mystery, parishioners.

But even though I can't say exactly when or how it happens, I know that love is real. I know because I've found it, a love that asks for nothing and gives everything. I've found it in
Riccardo Ghione's 1973 hippie-abducting, mad science-spouting, blood-bottling, ultra-groovy mad movie bonanza, The Red-Stained Lawn (Il Prato Macchiato di Rosso).

Let me tell you a little something about that girl o'mine.

Really. I insist.

We open with a hard-boiled UNESCO agent (Nino Castelnuovo) investigating what appears to be a wine-smuggling operation on the Mediterranean coast. Easily swiping a crate of contraband from a couple of very task-focused smugglers, he makes a disturbing discovery: the bottles in the box are not your run-of-the-mill Chianti, but are instead filled to the cork-line with human blood! Duly alerted, he scuttles off to headquarters to inform his superiors about this unprecedented threat to the reputation of Italian wines worldwide.

Meanwhile, in Piacenza, good Samaritan and Daniel Craig-lookalike Alfiero (Claudio Biava) travels every highway and byway in his BOSS powder-blue sports car, searching for walkabouts who look as though they might fancy a lift. He has no trouble, as the northern Italian town is apparently crawling with automotively challenged individuals of every stripe. Within moments he's picked up a flower-selling Gypsy (Barbara Marzano), a Drunken Tramp (Lucio Dalla), a modestly priced Hooker (Dominique Boschero), and young hippie couple Max and "Max's Companion" (George Willing and a stunningly afro'd Daniela Caroli). Being the accomodating sort, he invites each passenger to come back to his sister's palatial estate, to drink their wine, eat their food, and set a spell. All for free! Now just what kind of paranoid, ungrateful monster would turn down an offer like that? 

At the mansion, the guests are introduced to the lady of the house, Nina Genovese (Marina Malfatti), and her eccentric, science-enthusiast husband, Antonio (Enzo Tarascio). Through a series of rapid-fire and not-at-all suspicious questions, Nina quickly determines that none of her visitors have any friends, family, or employers who will be looking for them, nor have they informed any outside parties as to their current whereabouts. Which simplifies things, of course--I mean, you wouldn't want to set the table for eight and then have a dozen show up, would you? Particularly if any of the extras were police. Not that they would be, for any reason. Hey, did you check out our freaky robot statue in the corner over there?

"Pericolo, Guglielmo Robinson!"

It doesn't take long for the quintet to make themselves at quite at home. The Tramp displays his frankly amazing wine-drinking skills: not only does he down bottle after bottle with no apparent ill effects, he makes it interesting for the viewer by balancing one canister on his head between gulps, carrying on a conversation with his beverage, and at one point getting the alcohol into his system faster by pouring the wine directly into his eye! That's more than alcoholism, that's showmanship!

The Hooker, meanwhile, splays herself languidly on every available piece of furniture, regaling the group with unashamed tales of tricks gone by. The Gypsy steals a few unguarded knick-knacks, as is the custom of her people, and Max and his Hot Mama drape their bedroom with scarves and burn some incense before lighting up a truly monstrous spliff. The Genovese Estate is thus a hedonistic oasis, a sort of "Pleasure Island" where everyone does what he wants and there's never any price to be paid. Or...IS THERE?!?!*

*Nota bene: there is.

He never takes "no" for an answer.

Unfortunately it's true that nothing good lasts forever (q.v., parachute pants, jelly shoes, Slim Whitman's career), and before long some strange, slightly sinister things are happening in Chez Boom-Boom. First, the Tramp and Max discover the Gypsy girl tied naked to her bed with her mouth duct-taped shut--a circumstance that does not inspire quite the sense of alarm in them that you might expect. Later the hippies, going against type and availing themselves of a hot shower, are moderately surprised when the water suddenly changes to a torrent of wine--though again, not so much as you'd imagine. Even when Max and Maxine rake the coals in the estate's furnace and find a nearly complete human skull, their only reaction is to come back inside and have a bit of "the sex." Which normally I'd agree is a fine solution for any problem, but this is looking to be a special case.

The only guest who keeps his wits about him is, paradoxically, the Drunken Tramp, who eventually confronts the master of the house with his suspicions. Turns out, Antonio Genovese is more than just an eccentric benefactor to the Italian unwashed--he's a MAD SCIENTIST! And it has to be said, one of the most fabulous mad scientists in cinematic history. Don't believe me? Just take a look at this selection of dominant, scientific neckwear:

"To do: buy more wine..."

"No no, I'm sorry...but you may not touch the cravat."

"What? Have I got something on my face?"

"This one's actually a Steinkirk, only tied like a cravat. See the difference?"

It takes a lot to draw the attention away from his wife's boobs, but I think Antonio has nailed it.

If that's not a man who's getting ready to take over the world, then I've never seen one.

So yes, there's evil-doings afoot in the mansion, and as the guest list grows smaller and smaller, Max & Co. grow more and more troubled. Actually, scratch that--they're not troubled at all! The Gypsy's disappearance merits barely a nod, and when even his best friend the Tramp vanishes, all Max can deduce is that the Genoveses are kinky voyeurs who like to watch smelly hippies getting it on. Though to be fair, it's clear that the hosts are more than a little freaky-deaky. Leaving aside Nina Genovese's more-than-fraternal closeness with Alfiero and her show-stopping psychedelic outfits (which are AMAZING--in fact the flick is worth seeing for the fashions alone), there's still the little matter of the doctor's...shall we say, interesting architectural choices.

"And this, my fwiends, is the Wumpus Womb!"

In case your eyes have refused to accept what they're seeing and have replaced the image above with one depicting My Little Ponies™ prancing around a daisy-strewn field, let me confirm that yes, that IS a giant vagina portal on the wall. (Because lord knows I'd hate for you to miss out on the subtlety and nuance of that image.) Leaping through the labia like Lilliputian lust-puppets, they find themselves in a huge mirrored room, where the Hooker immediately deduces she's been brought to perform the service for which she's been hired.

"Still, it beats diggin' ditches."

Alfiero breaks out a couple of bottles of champagne and Nina puts on some super-groovy music, encouraging the Hippy/Hooker trio to agitate that with which their Mamas equipped them upon the occasion of their births. This they do, downing the booze and shucking off their clothes with admirable efficiency. This scene goes on for some time, and is in fact one of the grooviest things I've witnessed in quite a while: psychedelic music, frenetic hippy dancing, Laugh-In-style zooms, and warped, distorted reflections in which the director and crew don't even bother to hide themselves--it's a gas gas gas, truly.

Eventually the trio drop to the floor, their bodies shutting down due to sheer grooviness overload. Meanwhile the UNESCO agent is tracking down the source of those suspicious bottles, and no points for guessing where the trail leads. Sub-meanwhile, Dr. Genovese and Nina are arguing over the relative values of science and business, which ends with Nina filling the doctor's Super Robot full of lead...well, more lead. Max and AfroGirl FINALLY get suspicious and decide to investigate the basement, where they find a freezer full of dead, naked, bloodless bodies in a genuinely chilling scene. (What I did there--you see it?) The purpose of Antonio's robot is finally revealed, as is the reason behind the whole operation; the Hooker succumbs to the dictates of the Robot's silly but deadly prime directive, and the Hippies are next on the slab. Will UNESCO reach them in time, or will they be riding out in the next delivery truck, in 750 milliliter-increments?

Love Machine

It's hard to imagine The Red-Stained Lawn being made at any time other than the 1970s--in fact, it's hard to imagine it being made even then. But made it was, and I for one couldn't be happier about it. I loved the relentlessly groovy fashions, the broad-strokes characterizations, the repetitive and intrusive score, and even the overly earnest folk-rock title song (written and performed by the Drunken Tramp himself, Lucio Dalla, who was apparently a pretty big deal recording artist at the time--I will pay you for a translation! :) ). But most of all I love the unabashed weirdness of the flick, the sci-fi mixed with crime-thriller mixed with hippie drug culture and stirred up with mad science to create a hallucinatory souffle that Mad Movie fans will love getting between their molars.

The acting is all pretty good for a picture of this sort--Dalla steals the show as the comical Tramp, and both Malfatti and Tarascio as the dueling Genoveses are a delight--the missus with her Ice Queen gorgeousness and ruthless amorality, and the doctor with his kooky visionary ramblings and stunning neckties. (Both actors worked together a couple of years earlier in The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, a movie I really want to revisit now.) The rest of the cast is serviceable, and despite a few rather endearing flubs (equipment shadows in the shot, blinking "corpses," the director's pant-leg cameo in the Mirror Room sequence), the film is rather expertly and beautifully shot--the colors and compositions are often quite stunning, a testament to Ghione's eye.

♫ And I think to myself...what a wonderful world! ♪

In short, for fans of the weird, this is a little-known treasure. 2.75 thumbs.

A few more images from The Red-Stained Lawn (1973):

Anal Sex: Not For Everyone

"Now...where did I put that last bottle of wine?"

Blowout Patch

Rarrr!

Sure it is.

"Please, just try to relax."

Truth.

MORE MADNESS...

Summary only...

Naked and Violent (1970): or, Mondo Americano

I'll admit to having limited first-hand experience with the "Mondo" documentary subgenre. It's a type of film I've read a good deal about but of which I've actually watched relatively few examples, like pre-WWI German Industrialist Hygiene films or Scando-Mongolian Expressionist Midget Porn. Named after the infamous film that inspired all subsequent examples, Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti's Mondo Cane (1962), the Mondo movie specialized in sensationalized depictions of strange, shocking rituals from around the world, often focusing on "savage" cultures like African and South American native tribes.

Actual animal killings, bizarre rites of passage, and taboo sexual ceremonies were the genre's stock in trade, and the lurid scenes that fill such movies were sometimes real, but just as often staged by the filmmakers for maximum shock value. (This aspect of the Mondo film was satirized gruesomely and unforgettably by Ruggero Deodato in his even-more-infamous Cannibal Apocalypse.)

As time went on the "savage" Mondo films (Africa Addio [1966]) were joined by "sexy" Mondo films like L'amore primitivo (1964--according to imdb, "including such things as sex slavery, dwarf love, Asian brothels and lesbians!"), the wonderfully titled Mondo Freudo (1966), and even Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless (1966, reviewed right here on MMMMMovies). As long as something was shocking and exotic and suitably unconfirmable, it was fair game, and the perverted public ate it up.

For trash-film fans from the USA, however, probably none of the Mondo titles is more shocking than Sergio Martino's 1970 effort Naked and Violent (aka America cosi nuda, cosi violenta, or America: So Naked, So Violent). Directing only his third feature and with still a ways to go before finding his stride in a series of excellent, stylish gialli and horror flicks, Martino presents a view of late 60s America as a savage, brutal place, with all the sensationalism and cultural condescension one would expect from the Mondo Africa films it mimics.

"Say you love the U.S. of A. SAY IT, BOY!!!"

We open--after the AMAZING heart-felt title song, "Look Away (Lady Liberty)"--at Cape Kennedy, where for the second time NASA is about to send a group of astronauts to the moon. As the stern, disapproving narrator tells us, the moon no longer charms people the way it used to--jaded by success and affluence, curious Americans gather more to buy spaceman-shaped earrings, interstellar snacks, toy rockets, and even space-themed pornography! Rather than a symbol of the triumph of man over nature, Cape Kennedy has become a "lunar park," an amusement park for the bored, pampered, perverse citizenry to glut its insatiable appetite for thrills.

"I'm about to blast off, baby!"

Insomuch as the flick has a central thesis, this is it: America, the richest country in the world, is full to the brim with sickos. Perhaps because of its wealth and unchecked political power, even the most way-out tastes and fetishes can be indulged, and frequently are. The movie purports to be a documentary of the darkest corners of the American Nightmare.

Viewed dispassionately, it's not a bad thesis--in fact, it's neither the first nor the last film to place the American consumerist lifestyle at the center of all the manifold evils not just in our country, but in the world. A compelling and even damning movie could be made--in 1970 or in the present day--with just that argument as its basis. But of course a Mondo documentary is not the place for serious socio-cultural critiques, and Martino and crew are not interested in presenting one. They're here to shock, and shock they will, by hook or by crook!

Ain't That America?

We start in New York City, which the narrator calls "the largest Italian city in the world," as it contains at least four million people with Italian surnames. Looking at the massive skyscrapers in a dizzying vertical shot from street level, he informs us that some of these buildings, with hundreds and hundreds of floors, are built "entirely without windows!" Then we take a tour of the Bowery, where we see alcoholic bums sleeping on the street as passersby step over them. Finally we visit a Retirement Home, where sad-faced, dementia-plagued seniors languish, "forgotten" by society. One old man is happy to be used for experimental cancer treatments, we're told, as it promises him a chance to be "useful."

In a time-honored Mondo technique of juxtaposing the grotesque with the sensual, we are then flown to Miami beach, where we watch some of the "most healthy, well-fed examples of youth" in the world. It's a cheap shot to go from the dying derelict cancer patient to the beautiful bodies of Miami, but it's also an effective one--you can't help but be drawn in, and then ashamed for it, which is of course the point. Sniffing most derisively, the narrator tells us these girls "all have the most perfect figures possible...and therefore, identical ones."

Well, there's no arguing with that methodology.

A few shots underwater and on the beach hint at some of Martino's future style, but just barely. Still, as quick and dirty as mondo films were, it's surprising any got through at all. The film moves at an absolutely breakneck pace, hardly giving one scene or pronouncement time to register before moving on to the Next Shocking Thing. Therefore, narrative summation is neither possible nor terribly useful. It appeals more to my low-level OCD, therefore, to categorize the scenes first by a) subject matter and then by b) reality versus staged.

HIPPIES

• The filmmakers take us to the Woodstock Music Festival, where we see masses of nude, pot-smoking, and sometimes bleeding hippies. The narrator gives us statistics on the number of people who died at the festival (five) and the number of infants born (three) and concludes that Death has bested Life, 5-3. Clearly he wasn't correcting for the Sha Na Na bonus! All this seems to be real footage.

• We also get to see a real-live hippie tripping on smack. (Note, though the filmmakers insist it's LSD, the intravenous administration tends to imply heroin. Of course I'm no hippie myself, so feel free to correct me, junkies!) He blathers about kittens, Mao Tse Tung, salads and salt, and a lot of other stuff. Less fun than it sounds, but believably real.

• Hippie Girls rent themselves out to dirty old men to be human canvasses in an "art" class. The modest $5 fee sounds like a bargain to me. If it's not real, I want to believe it was anyway.

...but I know what I like.

• In the fairly obviously staged hippie segments, we start with the bored bourgeois housewives of San Franscisco going down the strip and picking up dirty hippies for "follow ups"--i.e., dirty weekends with no strings attached. Later on we see a trio hiring a hippie hustler for a love-in, to which they've graciously invited the cameras. Ever wanted to see a hippie forcibly bathed? Now's your chance.

• Things get wilder with a suburban/hippie mash-up, as a group of stoned orgy enthusiasts don rubber horror masks and then practice free and indiscriminate love all over each other. I don't know why I never thought to bring a fog machine to my orgies, but these flower children have shown me the error of my ways.

• Less fun is the peep-show between the gates of the Polanski mansion, where Sharon Tate et al. met their grisly and famous demises. This is immediately followed by a Black Mass Ceremony in which a hippie girl is stripped naked (Zang!), her body covered with hot dripping wax (kink wahey!) and then a live chicken has its head pulled off and the blood graphically squeezed all over her skin (Yeah bab-hey, wait, shit, that's fuckin' gross...). The animal death is real, and so was my vomit.
  

Don't think about the chicken

RACE RELATIONS

Of course the great shames of America's history are the country's treatment of the Native Americans and the slave trade, and the fallout from both serves for prime fodder for exploitation.

• With the Native Americans, we see a poverty-stricken village in the Grand Canyon, which is fairly respectfully done. They try to milk a later scene with a group of Native American's staging a protest at Alcatraz, but there's really not much there.

• With Black/White relations in the US, the filmmakers have considerably more luck. In the real footage, we get to see a "South Will Rise Again" old woman toting her shotgun around her city streets, presumably looking for negroes. We also hear from the female owner of a newspaper in a town that has just elected its first black mayor, and she has some unflattering things to say about it, both in print and on film.

• In a rather amazing betrayal of the width of the cultural disconnect and the Italians' own racial attitudes, Martino films a Black church revival meeting, explicitly connecting the religious celebrations with the former slaves' African pasts. That's as may be, but he follows it with "actual footage shot in New York City!" of a full-on voodoo ceremony, where a chicken is killed and women go through a rite of passage that involves a machete in the crotch. Later we see a middle-class voodoo rite where the witch doctor "parks his Cadillac before putting on his grass skirt," leading to more African costumes and dancing. It's as if the filmmakers think they can't have a Mondo movie without tribal ceremonies, and have bent over backwards to make sure they can fit them in. (Not voodoo, but still exploitative: there's also a staged lynching re-enactment that's as uncomfortable as it should be.)
  

New York, Yesterday

BIZARRO

And then there are the things that just have no category.

• Cowboys string up a dozen live rabbits by their feet to a clothesline, then take target practice with rifles, the effects of which on the helpless bunnies' heads are graphically shown. Not for the weak of stomach, this scene was probably the most cruel and unnecessary I've seen since the monkey-eaten-by-python sequence in Slave of the Cannibal God--also, coincidentally, directed by Martino.

• A lonely nebbish brings a surprise package home with him, which turns out to be an inflatable sex doll! We get a lot of mileage out of the poor fellow blowing up his date and then dressing her in nylons. Fortunately we cut away before he actually gets his groove on. It does make one appreciate the advance in technology, however.

Even your fantasy girl disapproves

• In Las Vegas, men at a circus-themed casino throw balls at a dunking-booth style target while blanket-covered women on mechanical beds watch. When one hits the target, the girl is dumped to the stage where she performs a strip-tease! Which casino is that again?

• A pacifist, hoping to stay out of the draft, recruits his long-haired friends to chop off his fingers so he can't hold a gun! This is shown in graphic detail, which points out the absolute fakeness of it, and thus becomes hilarious.

The Shocking Truth

• And then there are the parts of American culture that must seem strange to anyone not borne to it: American football (49ers and Bears, or Gladiatorial Combat?); drag racing and short-track motorcycle racing (the latter of which looks legitimately, CRAZILY dangerous); a drive through Dallas along the very route where JFK was assassinated, and the statement that because of the tourist industry rising around the site of the murder, it has become "an amusement park of death"; Hugh Hefner's contradictory Playboy philosophy (juxtaposed with the killing of the rabbits above, of course); the Amish (which the Italians don't get AT ALL); and even a short segment devoted to the phenomenon of monster toys!

Multo Mondo

After these and dozens of other scenes by turns shocking, hilarious, and downright baffling (and sometimes all of these at once), Martino winds up with a short vignette about old folks retiring to the "paradise" of Florida--lots of the happy aged cavorting about in ill-advised bikinis, etc.--which is a 50-years-on revisit of the Miami Beach cheesecake from earlier (cottage cheesecake, maybe?) , but also directly contradicts his early uncomfortable visit to the nursing homes where we supposedly lock away the aged who can no longer live a happy life. Ah well, whattaya expecting here, Ken Burns?

And possibly a comb

The final manipulative twist of the knife is a scene purporting to show something good and noble about the American spirit, to offset all the preceding ugliness. What demonstrates the basic humanity of Americans better than anything else? Well, according to Martino, it's a 2000-soul strong home for "retarded" children, where kind-hearted USA-sians teach the mentally deficient to feed themselves, dress, and perform Christmas pageants. It's a choice clearly made as an excuse to show the afflicted children as sideshow grotesques, and is fairly shameless and exploitative in the worst sense--what I mean is, it's one thing to make fun of middle-class hippies in psychodrama therapy, but another to leer at mentally handicapped children smearing oatmeal in their hair and shrieking "Silent Night" off key. I've got a pretty high threshhold, I'd like to think, but this seemed extremely icky in its intent and execution.

The conclusion of the documentary will get any red-blooded American's dander up, as the narrator unleashes a poetically damning speeach at one of the country's most beloved symbols, the Statue of Liberty. After reciting the "Give us your poor, your tired, etc." speech, the narrator responds:

"Oh, put out your light you hoarse old gal. Your shouts do not move me anymore. Your call sounds always fine, I must admit. But I cannot accept it any longer. After years listening to your lies, I don't care anymore. Put out your light! Ye tired old gal. And turn your back to the Ocean. And put a little love, if you can, in me too."

It's a good thing for Martino & co. Toby Keith wasn't around in 1970--and also that one presumes he doesn't watch that many movies with subtitles. (Or maybe he does, what do I know?) He'd have put more than love into him, that's fer sher. Boot-shaped love, courtesy the Red White and Blue! YEEE-HAW!

Of Thee I Sing

I can only assume the print MYA DVD used for their transfer was the best surviving one they could find, but it's still in pretty rough shape--lots of scratches, specks, and occasional print-damage jump-cuts. But as you might imagine, that sort of enhances the viewing of a Mondo film rather than taking away from it.

As a film by a man whose later work I admire a great deal (well, except for the cannibal stuff), I find it interesting to see how Sergio Martino got his start, even if little of his later trademark style is in evidence. As a time capsule of perversion, an exercise in gross-outs, and a fascinating look at my own country's culture from an outside point of view, I'd recommend Naked and Violent to those interested in that sort of thing. 2 thumbs.

Just keep it away from Lee Greenwood, though--God knows it would probably kill him!

"*Sigh.* Well, shit."

MORE MADNESS...

Summary only...

Bay of Blood (1971): Or How I Learned To Stay Out Of The Real Estate Market

Do not fret, my dear ones, the Duke of DVD has returned, no worse for the wear after my foray into snow sculpture, to give thee succor. Cling to my bosom, oh ye of frail mind, and let me take away your pain. Give pause as you sit on the side of your bed, bearded neck scratching as you let your head slump forward onto your pale chest, your sausage-like fingers gripping the handle of grandpappy's revolver. Stay your hand! Life is worth living once more, for I bring you once again the gospel of Mario Bava!

Cease your blubbering as Bava's genius washes over you, much like Jesus jumping out from behind a bush to scare you during your morning jog. Only this Jesus has a last name of Sanchez and is dressed only in a fertilizer sack, his turgid member tenting the front as he screams incoherent Spanish obscenities at you. You turn to run but trip over your iPod Shuffle's headphone cord, a moan escaping your lips as Jesus mounts you and begins to thrust in time to the tinny sounds of "Come On Eileen" issuing from your device lying nearby in the grass.

Such is Bava. Let us explore, shall we?

Bava's 1971 flick Bay of Blood opens with a twirling camera whisking us around the woods. We're following a fly, which promptly plunks into the water to its death. This is a fantastic way of establishing the movie we are about to see, which deals with a lot of themes, not just blood-letting. Next we see an old woman in a wheelchair, wheeling her way through an opulent home. She stops before a window, gazing out as rain streaks down. The scene is very lonely, and we get the sense that the woman lives in isolation.

She doesn't, however, live for very much longer! As it turns out, she is the Countess Federica, owner of a wide tract of desirable land around a bay. As she leaves the melancholy window-scape, her husband Filippo jumps out, throws a noose around her neck, then kicks the wheelchair out from under her. Bava's camera lingers for quite sometime, cutting back and forth between the bulging eyes of the Countess and her shuffling, useless feet as she tries in vain to save herself. Soon enough her struggles cease. Filippo thinks he hears a noise and goes to investigate. Finding only the wind causing the front gate to bang, he returns to the scene of his crime, pulling out a doctored-up suicide note, leaving it on a table near the spot where the Countess still hangs.

"This auto-erotic asphyxia thing just isn't working for me."

Suddenly, an unknown assailant stabs Filippo to death! The movie just got way more interesting, to say the least! We next meet Frank and his secretary/lover Laura as they lie in bed, the two wrapped in the hide of a dead animal, as all Italian lovers are in such scenes. Frank discusses how they are set to acquire some lucrative land just as soon as the Countess is taken out by her husband. Seems they have planned this out between them. Frank has to leave, but not before Laura drops the animal hide to display her goodies for him. Alas, we do not get to see this, for which I was greatly saddened.

"Please dear, be gentle. I only agreed to this because I love you."

Next we meet two other players, a bug enthusiast named Paolo and a local fisherman named Simon. Paolo is out trying to catch a rare bug, while Simon literally takes a bite out of a still-living squid in order to kill it. Right off we know that, while Paolo is kind-hearted and aloof, Simon is definitely the type who might do a little of the ol' stabbity-stab-stab when the need calls for it. We then cut to a carload of hippies, two couples in fact, driving around in their Dune Buggy of Love looking for a place to crash so that they can get their drug-fueled hippie sexing on. They end up, of course, choosing the late Countess's house.

Herbie the Love Buggy carries more hippies to their deaths.

First, one of the chicks gets the brilliant idea to go swimming in the bay (of blood!) by her lonesome. She's not in the water for five minutes before running into the floating, bloated body of Filippo. She runs screaming, but doesn't get very far before someone cuts her throat.

"Must... squeeze... out... final... fart..."

Meanwhile, back at the house, the chick-less hippie dude makes the last mistake he'll ever commit: answering the door. He pays for it with a sickle to the face that nearly splits his head in two! Elsewhere in the house, the other hippie couple are gettin' jiggy with it, when our killer arrives and runs them through, mid-coitus, with a stone-tipped caveman-esque spear.

"I only wanted to buy some Girl Scout Cookies..."

I was really impressed by the depth of Bava's perversion in this scene, as he has the couple continue their sexual writhing even while impaled, for a good 20 seconds, which feels like a long time when you are watching two impaled people continue to fuck.

"Stick it in me!"

Very soon, we find out that Simon the Squidman is the killer. He hooks up with Frank the Real Estate Man, who is quick to accept the death of his former partner in crime, Filippo. Arriving next on the scene is Renata and her simpering husband Albert, along with their two kids, who we see in their travel trailer (more on them later). It seems that Renata is the daughter of the Countess, and is assuming that the estate is hers by right. Soon, however, we find out that Simon is also the son of the Countess, and presumably rather a black sheep since he didn't live in the main house and was forced to harvest squid for a living. At any rate, with no will to be found, the two are instantly at odds, and neither hesitate to resort to murder to get what they see as rightfully theirs.

"I'm telling you, this bug had a dick this big!"

To add once again to the menagerie of characters, we are introduced to the bug guy's wife, who is a amateur fortune teller. Renata and her hubby pay a visit to the odd-ball couple, where the fortune teller insinuates that Simon may be at fault for the death of Filippo, Renata's dad. Renata and Albert leave to go investigate the estate, and when Albert leaves Renata for a moment, Frank (he's the real estate guy, remember?) jumps out of nowhere to try and kill Renata, only to instead be killed by her! Unbeknownst to her, the bug-guy is watching all this and tries to call the cops, only Albert intercepts him and ultimately strangles him with the phone cord!

"Switch your service away from AT&T, will ya?!"

Whew. I hope you're taking notes, dearest friends. Bava isn't done yet! Renata, not to be outdone by her husband and wanting to take care of the increasingly annoying fortune teller, brutally decapitates her! Meanwhile, Laura shows up (Frank's lover/secretary/co-conspirator), looking for Frank. Finding only slack-jawed corpses, she finally finds Frank, whom it turns out is not dead just yet. He gives her the 411, and she takes off to find Simon. However, Simon is pretty pissed with the lot of them, having figured out that Laura was instrumental in his mother's death. Laura tries to flee, hurling boiling water into Simon's face, which doesn't even slow him down. He ends up strangling Laura in a very brutal and awesomely shot scene.

Even the dead can't resist Uncle Li's squid sushi!

Albert arrives and gets Simon to basically sign away his share of the estate in exchange for helping him get a new lease on life, and by "new lease" Albert means an end to Simon's life, as he runs Simon through with a spear! So, in the end, we only have Renata and Albert left, foul murder having been done on all sides by all parties involved, except for the unlucky hippies, who should have damned well known better than to have sex near mysterious bays/lakes/inlets.

"Never mind the Head & Shoulders...have you got any just Shoulders?"

In what can only be termed the biggest fucking surprise ending since the Vicar's wedding video (hint: he was drunk, marrying an ox, and it was consummated on film), Albert and Renata head back in triumph to their travel trailer, and while standing by their car the trailer door opens and a shotgun appears, gunning down both Albert and Renata, the shooter one of their own children!

"Ugh, this is worse than those burritos I ate yesterday!"

I'm not sure exactly what life lesson Bava is going for here, but damn if he didn't get some sort of point across to me. As the children run off to some sappy music playing, we hear one of them exclaim "Boy, mommy and daddy sure are good at playing dead!" Fin. The end. The end result is a body count second only to the aforementioned Vicar wedding video, and a moral lesson on the nature of, um, nature and man's greed brings nothing but death, and you can probably sprinkle a little bit about how bug-collectors shouldn't fornicate with fortune tellers, oh and how sexy secretaries draped in animal hides can only mean bad things for land developments planned around the murder of invalid Countesses.

"Critique my real estate skills, will ya!"

Got all that? Good. I must say that while this isn't the best Bava film (see my take on Lisa and the Devil for that honor!), it has immediately captured a place in my heart for many reasons. First we have Bava's trademark camera (he was the Director of Photography for this film as well as the director). Stunning shots of the bay, rain falling on water, and even the way a squid slides off a corpse's face. All of these things are rendered with an eye for detail, a nuanced control that few others ever achieved, and certainly a rarity in the realm of horror. The plot itself is also a wonder, taking us on a breathless ride through greed and murder, with some excellent special effects accompaniment that gives it that extra edge.

The WTF-ness of the ending is just the icing on the cake. The children murder the parents, thus completing the circle of how the movie starts. Bay of Blood was called Ecologia del Delitto in Italy (and also goes by the super-awesome name of Twitch of the Death Nerve), and the Italian title gives us a little more insight as to what the movie was intended to be. For me, it's a tour-de-force of crazy killing, fucked-up endings, and trademark Bava insanity. Two and a Half Thumbs Up for this one, kiddos.

"Yay, murder!"

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The Night God Screamed (1971): or, The Wrath of the AY-TONER

With a title like that, it surprised me that I had never even heard of Lee Madden's 1971 killer-hippie movie The Night God Screamed before stumbling across its poster over at the excellent site Moon in the Gutter (overseen by noted horror blogger Jeremy Richey, along with many other exemplary blogs). Of course it shouldn't come as *that* much of a surprise--if my treasure-hunting forays into the lower depths of cinema have taught me anything (and I'm not saying they have) it's that no matter how many hours you spend in front of the TV, scouring the internets, or dumpster-diving behind out-of-business Mom & Pop video stores, there's always going to be *something* flying under your radar. Therefore, when you discover one of these hitherto-unheard-of items, well, you just have to learn to take advantage.

Which is why upon finding the flick's ad materials at Jeremy's post here, I immediately sent out my scouts in search of this potentially delicious booty. Of course the Vicar's scouts are the BEST scouts, so soon I was cupping said booty in my greedy, grabby hands, thoughtfully caressing its curvature and wondering what delights might be in store for me once I spread its warm casing and probed and prodded for its tasty, forbidden secrets.

Man, I love movies.

We open with a very ominous figure walking slowly through some very shadowy woods. He is wearing a monk's robe, the hood of which completely hides his features, and bearing a cruciform staff like a crusader or plague-crier. Watching his deliberate progress, our time frame could be anywhere from the 1500s to the present day to the far future. Luckily Madden gives us another clue, as the figure finds his way to a watering hole absolutely infested with free-love hippies!

What a long, strange dip it's been

It doesn't take long to establish that these are hippies of the Manson-esque cult variety, as their leader Billy Joe Harlan (an excellently wacked-out Michael Sugich) baptises a few of his flowery children before laying down his unique form of the Gospel. Gesturing to his followers, he cries out in a loud voice, saying: "They was all just a bunch of sinners, Lord, fighting and bothering each other...but I saved them, Lord! I showed them that using dope was the way to turn on to You!" Gimme that old time religion! And always pass the Eucharist to the left.

Far from being a harmless eccentric preacher-man, however, Billy Joe quickly puts the "freak" in "Jesus Freak" by encouraging the prosecution of pigs, squares, and anyone else not with it enough to see the light: "We got trouble! The Heat won't leave us alone! They want to bust us for being hooked on You! Them pigs is watching us, Lord...they don't dig our kinda thing!" The answer? Pray for plans to off the phony preachers, stop the pigs, and bring the new gospel to the youth of today. Inspiring, no?

Having learned a thing or two from Jesus's lackadaisical attitude toward betrayers in His flock, Billy Joe next singles out a hippie chick who has refused baptism, and calls down the hooded figure to take care of her. This Warrior of God is known only as The Atoner (or as Billy always pronounces it, "AY-TONER"), and his method of bringing strays back to the flock involves baptising them till their hearts are filled with the holy spirit and their lungs with a couple gallons of water. The rest of the flock looks on impassively as the girl gives up the ghost, or maybe they're just really, really stoned.

Next we cut to a gritty urban scene, where middle-aged do-gooder Fanny Pierce (former Hollywood starlet Jeanne Crain) is bringing groceries back to the mission where her preacher husband Willis (Alex Nicol) feeds the hungry. When a drunken bum steals the food from her right outside the door of the soup kitchen, Fanny begins having a crisis of faith in her husband's calling--particularly when the preacher expresses more concern in the loss of foodstuffs than in his wife's post-robbery safety. Willis has big ideas about building a church "in a nicer area," one that would bring in more money in offerings, showing himself the kind of profit-oriented preacher Billy Joe had been railing against. Fanny replies archly, "God isn't going to make our house payment!"

In an effort to fund his mission and get a leg up on starting the new church, Willis spends a good chunk of the couple's savings on a gigantic wooden cross, which he plans to erect outside the revival hall he's rented in a more affluent suburb for a one-night only performance. As they haul the cross cross-country, the marital tension gets even thicker, with Fanny bemoaning her 25 years of sacrifice for nothing and Willis doing his best to convince her that big cross is their meal ticket. When they stop at a filling station where it just so happens Billy Joe and a biker henchman are also filling up, the stage is set for confrontation and tragedy.

"Don't mind me...just checking the fit."

While the biker boy makes lazy sexual innuendo with the shocked churchwoman, Billy Joe asks lots of pointed questions about Willis' cross and his plans for revival. The exchange between the two self-styled evangelists is fraught with dramatic irony, as the preacher happily admits his fund-raising motivations for the soup kitchen, which we know is just the sort of thing to get Billy Joe in a smiting frame of mind. Sure enough, once the Pierces are on the road again, Billy Joe calls his apostle aside and gives the word: "We're going to a revival meeting tonight...we're going on a crusade! Just you, and me, and Izzy...and the AY-TONER."

Sure enough, after a sermon with all the passion of a college history lecture that brings in much less money than they had hoped for, Fanny goes outside with Willis' assistant, leaving him alone in the revival hall. The hippies move in for the attack in a shadowy and fairly effective suspenseful scene, wherein Billy Joe pronounces a sentence of death on the "false prophet," and the other hippies hold Willis down while the AY-TONER crucifies him on his own cross! Drawn back inside by her husband's screams, Fanny can only cower in the shadows as the hippies torture and murder her husband, his cries of "Fanny, help me! For God's sake, hellllp meee!" going forever unanswered.

The feet of Justice move swiftly in the early 70s, as we now jump cut to a courtroom scene in which Billy Joe and his accomplices--minus the still-at-large AY-TONER--are on trial for the murder of Willis Pierce. Judge Coogan (Stewart Bradley) is too busy to learn his lines, reading them instead from a prominent sheet of "evidence" on the bench in front of him, but he's not too busy to quickly pronounce a death sentence on the would-be messiah. This gives Sugich a chance for one more excellent crazy outburst--"You son of a bitch! You DUMB son of a bitch! YOU'RE MAKING ME A MARTYR! AHAHAHAHAHA!"--while the unindicted cult members surround Fanny and promise revenge for their leader's death. Fanny, obviously wracked with guilt for her failure to help her hubby, wanders off in a daze.

"I'd like to cross-examine, your honor."

Lucky for Fanny, the Judge is in need of a housekeeper to keep his two sons and two daughters (all teenagers, it seems) in line, and the next thing you know she's working as a kind of PTSD-afflicted Alice to the Coogans' Brady Bunch. When the Judge and the wife decide to head off for a dirty weekend at some swinger's camp or other, he offers Fanny half a c-note if she'll spend the weekend at the Coogan residence babysitting. Fanny is still afflicted by reverbed-out voice-overs of her husband's dying cries, though, and doesn't want to have to worry about kids being out all night and not coming home. The horny judge fixes this, however, by grounding his kids for the weekend so they can stay right under Fanny's watchful gaze--which of course makes her very popular with her young charges.

While giving Fanny a lift to his pad, the Judge tut-tuts her worries about the two hippies on motorcycles who seem to be following them, and then goes on to instill some social relevance in the pic. "Those kids, like the ones who murdered your husband...they come from broken homes...poor education...they're just dropouts! Not like *my* kids!" If your ironic foreshadowing meter isn't going off by this point, it's probably time to have it serviced.

Once at Chez Coogan it becomes clear not everythign is rosy between the judge and his kids. Nancy and Sherry are upset about missing a hot date and a play rehearsal respectively due to Fanny's overprotectiveness, but it's eldest son Peter (co-scripter and curly-headed punk Dan Spelling) who is most upset, as he's missing out on an important tennis tournament. He lashes out at his dad, is unforgivably nasty to Fanny, and generally does a great job of making himself intolerable to the audience in under 2 minutes of screen time. So nice job there.

Peter learned the hard way that for Mrs. Pierce, there was but one penalty for sassy-mouth: squozen balls.

As you probably expected, the rest of the movie involves a seige of the Connor residence by outside forces, presumably the group of vengeful hippies and the never-seen but glimpsed every-now-and-then robed figure of the AY-TONER. It starts with heavy-breathing phone calls and threats, then escalates to phone-line cutting and door rattling, all while the kids are getting more and more snotty and Fanny is freaking further (the fuck) out. Snotty Pete takes command when Fanny's shock gets the best of her, sending younger brother Jimmy (Gary Morgan, future busy stuntman and the only halfway tolerable Coogan kid) out on a fatal escape attempt and not seeming too surprised or broken up when he doesn't make it. Things progress about the way you'd expect, with a somewhat facile twist you'll probably see coming nearly AYTONED for by a similarly unsurprising but still nicely-done coda.

On the film's plus side, Madden does a good job with the pacing, pulling you right along and never letting things get too boring. This is especially impressive during the seige section of the film, since the director sets himself the challenge of building tension from the victims' pov without ever showing the attackers themselves. He accomplishes some of this with sound (the ominous phone calls and Fanny's "voices"), some with light (the hippies hit the breaker box) and occasionally even with a creative tracking shot or two. It's not just the god-damnedest direction I've ever seen in my life, but considering the low-budget constraints, it's not the worst either.

The acting is all over the board, with Sugich as Billy Joe Jesus on the top of the scale and the younger Coogan kids at the bottom. In fact, Sugich is such an arresting presence as the maniacal cult leader that once he's safely on death row, the wind really goes out of the movie's sails and never fully recovers. That said, Spelling makes a good villain substitute with his counterpoint of snotty entitlement and unfeeling selfishness. I wish I had more good things to say about Jeanne Crain, but she's really merely competent here, and everyone else does worse.

"I'll open that hippie like a god-damn letter."

On the negative side, the twist is fairly telegraphed, though whether that bothers you or not depends on your ability to enjoy something that doesn't necessarily surprise you--a good ability to cultivate, imo. Also, for a movie about killer hippies the body count is appallingly low, there's surprisingly little gore and even less sex...in fact, there's no nudity to speak of, and only the crucifixion scene really carries any wallop. And while Spelling might be a fine villain, he obviously doesn't have much of an ear for dialog, judging from the script.

That said, The Night God Screamed is an entertaining if undistinguished entry in the hippiesploitation subgenre, and you could find a much worse way to spend an hour and a half. It's worth at least a soft 2 Thumbs rating, especially if you're a killer-hippie completist or a fan of Charles Manson impersonators. I'm certainly not sorry to have watched it, and while that's not a glowing recommendation, it's the best you're going to get today. ;)

"Say, Ze...are you SURE you never had a son?"

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