In short: The Day Time Ended (1979)

Richard Williams (Christopher Mitchum) has built a nice, ultra-modern desert home that looks rather 50s futurist to my eyes, so that he and his family and his grandparents (Jim Davis and Dorothy Malone) can live together. While Richard’s away – expect many a shot of Chris Mitchum driving around and looking confused later on – the rest of the family is hit by a variety of strange occurrences, starting with electrical problems, time slips, the appearance of strange aliens, and finally attacks by various monsters. It’s apparently all on account of a triple supernova 200 lightyears or so away. Eventually, the family will be transported to what may or may not be another planet, until the plot, such as it is, just stops.

And there really isn’t much “plot” The Day Time Ended, as directed by John “Bud” Cardos. Instead this Charles Band (in his Charles Band Productions phase) production is all about the weirdness and the effects work, particularly the weird effects work, so that the film often feels more like a show reel that demonstrates the good and the bad of state of the art (of the day) effects techniques when used on a low budget. Consequently, some of the effects shots look pretty shoddy and awkward, but for every bad back projection, there are half a dozen fun and pleasantly grotesque stop motion monsters, swirly laser stuff and inexplicable nonsense I don’t have the vocabulary to describe but certainly the capacity to enjoy quite a bit.

Also very much speaking to me is the film’s insistence on making not a lick of sense but getting by on just throwing strange visual stuff at its audience, hoping that some of it might stick to our brains enough we can at least pretend the talk about “time space rifts” (and so on) makes an sense whatsoever. If that plan works out, we might even take being transported to a strange new planet with no way home but only a not at all mind-control like feeling that things are gonna be okay in the next alien domed city as well in stride as the protagonists do at the non-sequitur ending of the film. “#lifegoals”, as the youth of today with their Internets and their weird beards would say.

In short: Rest in Pieces (1987)

aka Descanse en piezas

Helen Hewitt (Lorin Jean Vall) inherits all money and property belonging to her estranged aunt Catherine (Dorothy Malone), facts presented to Helen in a jaunty video message recorded right before auntie’s suicide. The bequest includes what appears to be a whole housing block of villas. Or is it a street of mansions? Obviously, Helen and her husband Bob (Scott Thompson Baker) move right into the main villa.

There, they learn that Catherine has a whole bunch of weirdos and loonies (among them characters played by Jack Taylor and Patty Shepard) living rent free on her property. Weirdos who, the audience quickly learn, do like to end an evening of a string quartet playing the German national anthem with murdering the players. Which isn’t crueller than the choice of music, really. They also may be the living dead. Other complications include the possible return of aunt Catherine from the dead, a hidden cache of eight million dollars that may or may not exist, a bit of the old mutilation and murder, and a shovel duel.

The easiest way to explain Rest in Pieces to myself is to imagine its director, the great José Ramón Larraz, waking up one day believing to be Juan Piquer Simón. At least, Rest feels a lot more like the work of Larraz’s differently esteemed colleague than what you’d expect from its true director, even in the late stages of his career when things got weird, or rather, even weirder than was Larraz’s normal. So don’t look for the director’s particular sense of the perverse, or the strange elegance of his filmmaking, but be prepared for the typical goofiness of European genre films in the 80s at least pretending to be made in the US, where everything – the way people walk, talk and emote - feels inauthentic in the most peculiar, and typically very entertaining, way.

One should probably also go in prepared for some mind-bogglingly horrible main performances by Vail and Baker, where neither facial expressions nor line delivery suggest more than the tiniest knowledge of human behaviour. These two are so stiff, your usual typical piece of wood would be embarrassed to be associated with them; consequently, the performances are also very funny indeed, particularly once the plot goes off into its particularly weird last act full of plot twists and character reveals even a great thespian would have a hard time selling.

You cannot blame Larraz for making a boring film, at least. There’s hardly any scene going by that isn’t at least mildly bonkers in the Piquer Simón way. Add a smidgen of gore, and plot twists – well, also a plot - so nonsensical it boggles belief, it’s difficult not to love the film, even though it is not the sort of thing one hopes for from its director.

In short: The Nevadan (1950)

The Old West. Tom Tanner (Forrest Tucker) has stolen a nice amount of gold - first from a bank, and afterwards from his partner (which will not be important later on). Though he is caught, the Law is unable to find out where Tanner hid the loot.

While a marshal is transporting the bandit through Nevada, Tanner manages to escape, clearly bound for his ill gotten gains. On the way, he meets the seeming greenhorn - as demonstrated by his wearing of city clothes - Andrew Barclay (Randolph Scott). At first, Tanner steals Barclay's clothes and takes him as a sort of hostage, but soon enough, the greenhorn turns out to be quite handy with guns and horses and helps Tanner escape the interest of the men of Edward Galt (George Macready) - rancher, entrepreneur, greedy bastard - who wants Tanner's gold, too.

Clearly, there will be various changes of allegiance between Tanner, Barclay and Galt during the course of the film, and Barclay will turn out to be exactly who you'd expect from a character played by Randolph Scott. There's also a sub-plot concerning Galt's daughter Karen (Dorothy Malone), who has somehow managed not to realize that her dad is the evilest man alive and promptly falls for his enemy Barclay. If you smell a three-directional shoot-out for the film's finale, have a cookie.

Gordon Douglas's The Nevadan is situated at an interesting point in the history of the US low and mid budget western, created just before the real start of the wave of darker, more psychologically oriented films that were soon to come. The Nevadan is still beholden to the easier structures and morals of the films of the 40s, yet also shows its genre's developing interest in more complex characterization and a deeper exploration of themes the American western in general (I know, there are exceptions) had been circling around yet avoiding to confront head on for decades.

On paper, The Nevadan's plot already features exactly the sort of elements directors like Budd Boetticher or Andre de Toth would use to turn the genre's interest inward: there's the relationship between Barclay and Tanner that would be an ideal set-up to explore the similarity between the lawman and the bandit; the family relationship of the Galts, where the daughter turns out not to know her father at all, and the father uses her as an excuse to indulge in his worst impulses; Galt's brother pair of henchmen as another example of skewed and unhealthy family dynamics. In practice, The Nevadan does unfortunately shy away from doing more with these elements than just pointing them out, shrugging, and showing us a scene of people riding through the pretty landscape instead.

Though that comes as a bit of a disappointment for someone like me who is always hoping for the kind of western that made him fall in love with the 50s variant of the genre, The Nevadan is a pretty worthwhile example of the straight American no-nonsense western. There is after all quite a bit to like about the film: the acting is fine, if a bit too beholden to embodying standard archetypes instead of human beings (and everybody's cast exactly to his or her usual type, which is always a double-edged sword), the plot is merrily paced, and Gordon Douglas's direction shows the director (who'd later make one of my very favourite giant monster movies with Them!) as a man who knows how to shoot straight without shooting bland, and has a real hand for staging action scenes - the film's finale is even a bit exciting.

 

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