Night Call Nurses (1972)

          Roger Corman’s New World Pictures continued its drab cycle of sexy-nurse movies with this third installment, another ensemble drama about the interconnected misadventures of pretty young RNs. George Armitage, who wrote and directed the previous film in the series, Private Duty Nurses (1971), penned the screenplay for this installment, and fellow New World worker bee Jonathan Kaplan made his directorial debut on the project. Somewhat redeemed by flashes of whimsical humor—as well as satirical looks at group therapy and the growth of the pharmaceutical industry—the movie is tolerable but hardly compelling. Despite the title, the nurses actually work with psychiatric patients; perhaps Corman and co. felt Psych Ward Nurses wouldn’t have quite the same box-office allure. Anyway, our heroines are Barbara (Patty Byrne), a troubled young brunette wrestling with a stalker and with a lascivious therapist; Janis (Alana Hamilton), a perky blonde who becomes involved with a trucker after he’s hospitalized during a bad acid trip; and Sandra (Mittie Lawrence), an idealsitic African-American persuaded by her activist boyfriend to help spring a black-power militant leader from the heavily guarded room where he’s receiving medical care.

          As with all of the sexy-nurse movies, Night Call Nurses is padded with empty spectacle. In addition to a dull skydiving sequence, there’s an endless scene of young women stripping during a group-therapy session, ostensibly to throw off their inhibitions. Amid the repetitive nonsense, however, are some enjoyable moments. Once in a while, for instance, Armitage inserts some of his signature offbeat humor. Kyle (Richard Young), the wigged-out trucker, courts Janis by pointing to the name tag on her uniform. “Janis—is that your name or the name of your left tittie?” Giggling, she replies, “That’s my name—the name of my left tittie’s Irene.” Sophisticated? Hardly. Droll by comparison with the rest of the movie? Sure. There’s also a somewhat amusing scene in which a sleazy drug salesman tries to peddle unnecessary medication, only to be stymied by a nurse who brings up the pesky issue of medical ethics. The movie takes an abrupt left turn into pure Corman territory toward the end, climaxing with an escape, a car chase, and a bloody shootout. One suspects the people at New World realized the novelty of nurses providing carnal TLC wasn’t enough to sustain interest across multiple movies, hence the choice to throw in random exploitation elements, whether they fit or not.

Night Call Nurses: FUNKY

Private Duty Nurses (1971)

          The second in a loose series of sexy-nurse flicks made by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, this pointless but nearly respectable drama was the directorial debut of George Armitage, who later found his niche with such gonzo projects as Vigilante Force (1975) and Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). Throughout Private Duty Nurses, one can feel Armitage struggling to integrate substantial topics, and to his credit the exploitive bits of the movie pass quickly. However, Private Duty Nurses ends up failing on two levels—it’s neither the eroticized romp promised by lurid marketing materials nor a serious drama with sociopolitical heft. In trying to serve two masters, Armitage ended up making something formless and forgettable.

          As per the norm of the sexy-nurse cycle, Private Duty Nurses follows the personal and professional lives of a group of attractive young RNs. Lola (Pegi Boucher) is an African-American woman who dates a black doctor campaigning against racist hiring practices at their hospital. Lynn (Pegi Boucher) romances an ecological activist who investigates connections between mysterious deaths and oceanic pollution. And bleeding-heart blonde Spring (Kathy Cannon) tries to coax a tormented Vietnam vet into health with sex and TLC. There’s also a meandering subplot about the girls’ landlord, Dewey (Paul Hampton), a creepy would-be stud who seduces one of the ladies back to his bachelor pad, only to prove virtually impotent. And, naturally, one of the girls gets raped, because apparently no ’70s exploitation movie was considered complete without sexual assault.

          Within individual scenes, Armitage generates fleeting moments of credible drama. He’s at his best depicting the weird dissonance between Dewey’s come-on routines and the man’s shoddy bedroom performance. Armitage does weird well—but weird is not the coin of this particular realm, and Armitage (who also wrote and produced the picture) displays zero interest in delivering a straight-up skin show. Although he manages to get each of his leading actresses topless at some point, the director’s boredom with such B-movie bits as extended scenes of dirt-bike racing is evident. It doesn’t help that the cast lacks any standouts. (Minor exception: Hampton’s oily turn as Dewey.) The leading actresses are attractive and some of them are more competent performers than others. Meanwhile, jobbing actors including Paul Gleason, Herbert Jefferson Jr., and Robert F. Simon deliver work that’s merely adequate.

          Nonetheless, proving that one should never underestimate the power of salacious marketing, Private Duty Nurses did well enough to justify a continuation of the sexy-nurse cycle. Three more movies followed.

Private Duty Nurses: FUNKY

Darktown Strutters (1975)

          Some generous viewers have characterized this overwrought satire of race relations as a spoof of the blaxploitation genre, but if there’s a successful joke buried anywhere in the picture, it escaped me. Designed like a live-action cartoon, complete with exaggerated body language, flamboyant costumes, oversized props, sped-up camerawork, and “wacky” sound effects, Darktown Strutters—which occasionally bears the alternate title Get Down and Boogie—is more of a recipe for headaches than a recipe for humor. The picture is too linear to work as a drug-era phantasmagoria, and too stupid to take seriously. Worse, writer George Armitage and director William Witney demonstrate horrible taste by trying to wring jokes from such grim subjects as police brutality, racism, and rape.

          While Armitage later evinced strong gifts for offbeat comedy (he wrote and directed the 1997 cult favorite Grosse Pointe Blank), this project very much represents the erratic early days of his career. In fact, there are many connections between the style of this picture and the excesses of Gas! –Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It. (1970), a strange youth-culture sci-fi epic that Armitage wrote and Roger Corman directed. Corman’s brother, Gene, produced Darktown Strutters, while Roger’s company, New World Pictures, handled distribution chores.

          The plot of Darktown Strutters is fairly simplistic. Syreena (Trina Parks) is the leader of an all-female biker gang. When she learns that her mother has been kidnapped, Syreena teams up with an all-male gang led by Mellow (Roger E. Mosley). Eventually, Syreena discovers that her mother’s kidnapper is Commander Cross (Norman Bartold), the Colonel Sanders-like overlord of a barbecued-ribs empire. Meanwhile, Syreena has several run-ins with a trio of bumbling cops, puts pressure on black citizens who fear reprisals from Commander Cross, and rocks her way through several musical numbers.

          Even though every single element of Darktown Strutters is absurd, the costumes are among the most grating components of the film. Syreena and her fellow female bikers wear helmets tricked out with bedazzled feathers and wings. The dudes in Mellow’s gang dress like stereotypical Southern-fried fools, all floppy hats and overalls, except with rhinestones. One of Commander Cross’ outfits is a superhero-style costume comprising pink tights, silver-lame boots and undies, and a pig mask. Especially when actors wearing ridiculous clothes skitter across the screen with their arms and legs pumping to emulate “jive” movements, it’s embarrassing to watch the performers humiliate themselves.

          In terms of narrative, the movie drifts down so many blind alleys—goofy chase scenes, tiresome production numbers—that the story becomes hopelessly obscured. And then everything culminates with the revelation of bizarre nonsense about Commander Cross using a machine to generate offspring without the involvement of women—which somehow relates to why he kidnapped Syreena’s mother. Trust me, you won’t feel like making the effort to parse this crap, either. Darktown Strutters is not utterly devoid of charms, since leading lady Parks is beautiful and tough, costar Mosley is energetic, and the interesting actors Dick Miller and Stan Shaw appear in small roles. Additionally, some of the R&B tunes on the soundtrack are terrific. But, man, it’s all way too much—so the viewers most likely to groove on this singular experience are those who savor cinematic trainwrecks.

Darktown Strutters: FREAKY

Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It. (1970)

          Also known as Gas-s-s-s, this absurdist riff on the generation gap is a willdly imaginative movie that somehow fails to sustain interest even at its brief running time of 79 minutes. Written by George Armitage, who later channeled his weird narrative impulses into eccentric action pictures (notably the bizarre 1976 flick Vigilante Force), this picture was produced and directed by Roger Corman, as always an adventurous exploiter/explorer of youth culture. The story is a sci-fi lark that takes place after a chemical that was accidentally released into the atmosphere by the military/industrial complex has killed everyone in the world over the age of 25. The surviving kids rebuild a funhouse-mirror version of modern society, and the movie follows a gaggle of hip youths in their search for a place to settle.

          Along the way, Our Intrepid Heroes encounter gangs that have organized in strange ways, like the fascistic warmongers who behave and dress like a football team, or the automobile scavengers who “shoot” victims by aiming guns and shouting the names of cowboy-movie actors. (Best line in this scene: “Maybe I could’ve just winged him with a Dale Robertson or a Clint Eastwood.”) Among the movie’s myriad problems is the fact that it meanders through silly episodes and never defines its leading characters as individuals. There’s nothing human for viewers to grasp. Plus, many of the bits tip over the edge from irreverence into pointless surrealism. For instance, hippie characters engage in sex play by reciting “erotic” words to each other, and the apex of this practice is the invention of the word “arrowfeather.” One must admire Armitage’s imaginativeness, but there’s something to be said for using the rewriting process to focus flights of fancy into a coherent storyline with logic, momentum, and purpose. Gas! feels like something yanked straight from the head of a writer, without benefit of translation so others can play along.

          Still, the movie has a handful of genuinely tart lines. At one point, a motorcycle-riding Edgar Allen Poe (Bruce Karcher) shows up to warn the young heroes, “Now that you are sole heir to our world, you will have every opportunity to achieve wickedness.” In a more substantial context, this might have had more impact, but in Gas! laudatory elements get subsumed into the overall blur of trippy signifiers. (Corman reuses some of his favorite ’60s image-making gimmicks, including the projection of psychedelic film images onto undulating actors during a love scene.) Beyond its abundant strangeness, Gas! is noteworthy for the appearance of three future B-level stars—Talia Shire (billed as “Tally Coppola”), Ben Vereen, and Cindy Williams all play their first significant film roles here.

Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.: FREAKY

Hit Man (1972)

          At first glance, the idea of a blaxploitation remake of Get Carter (1971) sounds great, since the grim Michael Caine picture has all sorts of elements that could transfer easily from working-class England to the American inner city: gangsters, pornographers, violence, and a badass antihero out for revenge. As written and directed by George Armitage, however, Hit Man lacks the single-minded malevolence of Get Carter. (Both pictures were adapted from Ted Lewis’ novel Jack’s Return Home.) Hit Man is a fun movie in sporadic bursts, mostly due to Armitage’s odd little character touches, and it’s watchable overall because of leading man Bernie Casey’s charisma, but the flick is not the slam-bang winner the combination of genre and story should have produced.

          The movie begins when Tyrone Tackett (Casey) arrives in LA for his brother’s funeral and starts asking questions about who whacked his sibling. During the meandering first hour of the movie, Tyrone spends about half his time digging for clues and the other half hanging out with his late brother’s pals and assorted women; it’s like the movie periodically forgets to have a plot as Armitage gets lost in rich blaxploitation textures. This aimless stretch has its distractions, though: Tyrone visits a nature preserve, makes time with groovy ladies, and tussles with bad dudes. All of this is punctuated with choice blaxploitation dialogue, like this heavy line: “Look, man, I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’, and that’s the righteous truth.” There’s also some weirdly amusing stuff involving Tyrone and his late brother’s business partner, likeable used-car salesman Sherwood (Sam Laws). The two share a bizarre drunk scene, with Casey raising his voice like he’s going through puberty; later, Sherwood blows a take of a TV commercial by innocently proclaiming, “And for you prestige motherfuckers, we got . . .”

          The movie gets more mojo in the second half, when vivacious costar Pam Grier becomes prominent and when the revenge story kicks into gear. The dialogue gets juicier, too: “They shot her in the fuckin’ head, but chicks like your bullshit bourgeois daughter can do anything they wanna do, ’cause you got the bread to make it cool, ain’t that right?” That’s the stuff! Casey’s performance is erratic, suggesting he and Armitage couldn’t decide whether to make Tyrone a wronged everyman or a killer waiting for an excuse to open fire, but Casey’s laid-back vibe offers a good counterpoint to the flamboyant narrative. Most of the supporting cast is forgettable, though Grier is as outrageously sexy as usual, Laws is a hoot, and future Magnum P.I. costar Roger E. Mosley is amusing as a hired gun. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Hit Man: FUNKY

Vigilante Force (1976)

          Way before making the ’90s cult faves Grosse Pointe Blank and Miami Blues, George Armitage wrote and directed this odd exploitation flick, which boasts an eclectic cast, an insane storyline, and weird flourishes like happy banjo music accompanying scenes of bloody mayhem. Vigilante Force is so disconnected from recognizable reality that it’s like a drive-in flick viewed through the prism of an irreverent absurdist. And, yes, that’s a compliment: Vigilante Force is disorganized, illogical, and strange, but it’s also compulsively watchable.
          The outrageous story takes place in a small California oil town called Elk Hills, which has been overrun by itinerant workers. Blissfully eschewing restraint, Armitage depicts the interlopers as hordes of brawling rednecks; these faceless savages seem to be controlled by sociopathic groupthink. In the first 10 minutes alone, criminals trash a saloon, murder cops in broad daylight, and literally shoot a car to death. Given the many whimsical touches that follow, one can only imagine that Armitage envisioned his film’s opening act as a spoof of other movies about random violence, but then again, his storytelling is so capricious throughout Vigilante Force it’s hard to parse narrative intention.
          Anyway, the leading moral force in Elk Hills is Ben Arnold (Jan-Michael Vincent), a salt-of-the-earth widower who wants to protect the small town where he lives with his young daughter. At the urging of his neighbors, Ben tracks down his wayward Vietnam-vet brother Aaron (Kris Kristofferson), and then hires Aaron to form a peacekeeping militia. Initially, the scheme works, because Aaron and his rough-and-tumble buddies crack down on street crime. However, it soon becomes apparent that Aaron is even more dangerous than the thugs he was recruited to fight. Enlisting secret operatives to shake down local business owners and gleefully using murder to intimidate opponents, Aaron quickly gets Elk Hills under his militaristic thumb. Among other things, Aaron’s rampage features some of the most blasé murders ever shown in movies; the comic-book universe Armitage creates is almost entirely devoid of visible emotional consequences, a bizarre tonal choice accentuated by across-the-board understated performances.
          While all this is going on, the movie tracks Ben’s romance with a saintly schoolteacher (Victoria Principal) and Aaron’s thorny involvement with a cynical barroom singer (Bernadette Peters). While future Dallas star Principal is mostly relegated to stand-by-her-man ornamentation, Peters gets to show off her comedy chops through sly running gags. Plus, both women are blazingly sexy, so even though Vigilante Force is chaste by exploitation-movie standards, there’s plenty of eye candy—and since Kristofferson spends about half the movie shirtless, Armitage ensures there’s something for everyone to ogle. Furthermore, the supporting cast features several familiar faces, including Charlie’s Angels sidekick David Doyle, Breakfast Club villain Paul Gleason, and, in tiny roles, WKRP in Cincinnati bombshell Loni Anderson and B-movie icon Dick Miller.
          After meandering through a confusing but entertaining second act, Vigilante Force sticks the landing with an incredibly colorful finale: Aaron’s crew masquerades as a marching band in order to rob the Elk Hills bank, and Ben forms a militia of his own comprising local geezers and youths. Thus, the climax features Kristofferson blasting away with an M-16 while dressed in a cherry-red marching-band outfit and standing atop a giant oil tank. From its surreal opening to its even more surreal denouement, Vigilante Force maintains a breakneck pace that precludes questions about the nutty narrative until it’s all over. As a result, Vigilante Force is among the most uniquely entertaining schlock movies of its era. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)


Vigilante Force: FREAKY