Grave of the Vampire (1972)

The late 30s, in some US small town. A marriage proposal made at a graveyard – it’s apparently the first place the couple became…close – is rudely interrupted by a vampire (Michael Pataki) who has just dug his way out after a couple of years of coffin time.

He brutally murders the man and then drags the woman off into the open grave to rape her, leaving her alive afterwards. There’s also a subplot about a cop becoming convinced that the killer/rapist is indeed a vampire, but that not only leads nowhere but the death of the cop and includes some of the film’s worst acting, so let’s ignore this. Of course, the poor woman is now pregnant. Her baby, it turns out, doesn’t do milk but instead needs to be fed with blood.

Thirty years later, the baby has grown up and sideways into one James Eastman (William Smith), secret eater of raw meat, but like, totally sensitive. James has been hunting his vampire father for years now, but never seems to be able to quite catch up to him. Until now, that is, for bloodsucking Caleb Croft has acquired a new name and is now working as a folklore professor on the night school circuit, where he gives absurdly dramatic speeches while all his female students swoon. And James is part of his new course.

Of course, because nothing’s ever easy, our hero takes his dear time to actually making sure the professor is the vampire he is looking for, or indeed a vampire, and subplots about an aspirational vampire bride (Diane Holden) and a student who just happens to look exactly like Croft’s dead beloved (Lyn Peters) can ensue. Also, son and rapist father share the same taste in women.

John Hayes’s early 70s vampire movie, based on a script by David Chase (yes, it’s the The Sopranos creator’s second writing credit) is a bit of a frustrating experience. There are some excellent ideas here, like the portrayal of the vampire as a true monster that uses a semi-civilized veneer to hide how little he thinks of any individual human beyond of what use they could be in fulfilling his desires; and he’s all desires. It’s also the – in the early 70s not terribly common – version of a master vampire who scrupulously avoids creating other vampires and prefers to brutally slaughter his victims and then suck their corpses dry, really turning him into the ultimate egotistic monster.

While it is not exactly tasteful, turning the rapist subtext that also swirls around vampires into actual text is not a bad idea either, and certainly fits the unromantic idea of vampirism the film prefers. I’m not too sure that Pataki’s a great choice to embody most of these aspects, though. He’s not physically imposing enough to sell the physical threat – especially when his equal number is a pretty mountainous William Smith - and his shouty scenery-chewing is very amusing to watch but makes him feel like even less of the unliving horror he is supposed to be; and Pataki’s not a clever enough actor to make this seeming lack of power be the actual point of what he’s doing.

Of course, William Smith is not a great choice for his role either. He’s certainly trying to give a haunted and Byronic impression, but he’s simply not the kind of actor you buy as a guy hunting his father-monster while fighting his own dark impulses.

Hayes’s direction tends to the bland and the slow, but from time to time, he manages a worthwhile scene or two. Particularly the sequence of James’s mom feeding her baby with blood while sitting in a rocking chair, singing “All the Pretty Little Horseys” is creepy, clever and resonant, but Hayes is also good with some of Croft’s more ruthless murders. The more subtle interpersonal stuff, though, doesn’t work at all; whenever people are supposed to relate like proper human beings, actors, script and direction simply drag their feet and look embarrassed. Which is a bit of a problem when you realize how important this human drama should be for basically everything that’s going on here.

Darker than Amber (1970)

Florida boat-dwelling beach buds Travis McGee (Rod Taylor) and Meyer (Theodore Bikel) are managing to save a mysterious woman (Suzy Kendall), tied to an anchor, who has been dropped down the bridge they were fishing under.

As readers of the novels this is based on know, Travis really doesn’t like that going to the police or the hospital stuff normal people do in reaction in this sort of situation, so he and Meyer take care of the woman - who will eventually disclose her name to be “Vangie” - and her wounds. She’s not going to tell them anything about why someone tried to murder her, and so it’s clear to Travis early on that she was involved in something illegal.

Of course, Travis’s sensitive macho ways and Vangie’s lost girl number fit each other perfectly, romantically seen, and the inevitable happens once they’ve gotten to know each other. Alas, Vangie decides to return to her old haunts to fetch some money (living off Travis’s seemingly endless supply of cash forever isn’t really her thing) and is killed by the charming personality responsible for the whole anchor business, Terry (William Smith with the fakest blond dye job imaginable, which is actually a plot point).

Again, Travis doesn’t do police, so he starts investigating his lover’s death and the nature of the trouble she was involved in on his own, eventually getting even with Terry and his partners with a needlessly complicated – and therefore perfectly awesome - plan.

This is one of only two movie adaptations of the much-loved Travis McGee series by John D. Macdonald. I’ve never been as fond of the books as many readers seem to be, mostly because I find the author’s inability to see that his hero, with his habit of murdering a book’s bad guy and ritually dumping his victim’s corpse in the ocean, is at least bordering on being a serial killer, and because McGee generally comes over as a self-righteous prick, 70s macho version, again without his author seeming to recognize this. Which rather puts a damper on the novels’ effective – if often overwrought – plotting and period mood for me.

On the movie side of this affair, I’ve also never had much time for Darker then Amber’s director Robert Clouse, whose movies I’d generally describe as bland at best, usually badly paced, dubiously edited and staged with disinterest. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that I have rather a lot of time for Darker than Amber. It’s not that Clouse reveals himself as a great director here, but he is certainly working competently enough inside of the idiom of early 70s crime cinema, never doing anything clever with clichés, but realizing them well enough, I’m perfectly okay with the lack of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Pacing still wasn’t Clouse’s strong point even here at his best, so a viewer has to expect some dragging of feet and some needless reiteration of things you already got the first two times. On the other hand, there are a couple of cracking, grim and brutal action scenes here. Particularly the final fistfight between Travis and Terry comes to mind there, which looks so brutal, Taylor and Smith have told in various interviews they were having an actual fight and weren’t laughed off by anyone. Actors, of course, have no tendency of using a good in for a bit of self-mythologizing whatsoever, so the story must be true.

Taylor is a curious choice for the sensitive thug role of McGee, mostly because he’s not exactly great at selling the first part of the description, but he also embodies a particular kind of machismo that’s part and parcel for the character type perfectly; never in a way that’ll question any of the assumptions of being a 70s macho man, obviously, but as a human time capsule of the type, he’s pretty perfect. Particularly when contrasted with Smith, who simply turns up Taylor’s ten and a half up to eleven, finding the place where “man of his time” turns into “outright violent psychopath” and really getting his teeth in.

Seen from today, a lot of this very un-questioned macho posturing will look uncomfortable to some (and understandably so), but as a pulp fantasy of this particular kind of violent machismo, I find Darker than Amber rather hard to beat.

Past Misdeeds: Black Samson (1974)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Samson (Rockne Tarkington) has made quite a life for himself - he owns a well-loved, permanently overcrowded strip bar, has a big stick to hit people with, a (probably doped up to the gills) lion lying around on the bar's counter and is very much in love with his girlfriend Leslie (Carol Speed) who just happens to have the biggest afro I've ever seen.

Samson deserves all that, too, because he is a deeply righteous man who lets the local elderly alcoholic spend the night in his bar, and helps drug addicts clean up their act. Well, after he has threatened them with his stick. He's also the man responsible for keeping his part of town clean from two larger criminal organizations.

The more harmless one of these organizations is lead by his old friend Arthur (Michael Payne) - who also moonlights as a perfectly legal and supremely terrifying undertaker - and is not much of a problem, but the mafia family of the Nappas is quite a different thing.

Old man Nappa (Titos Vandis, the first mafioso with a Greek accent) might be the Gandhi of organized crime abhorring violence and spurting ridiculous wisdom whenever the camera meets him, but his nephew Johnny (William Smith) is quite a bit less tolerant.

Johnny has a few problems with things like impulse control and a tendency to react violently to, well, everything, and he really really hates Samson, so he's planning on killing our hero and taking over the bar owner's area, if his uncle likes it or not.

That's easier said than done, though. As Johnny's uncle would say: "Piece of cake? I know a man who choked on a piece of cake".

Samson doesn't have much of a problem with surviving the first murder attempts of Johnny's goons, what with his would-be killers bringing no weapons when they are trying to kill someone and him always armed with the Stick of Hitting +5, so Johnny has to get creative. And he has some brilliant ideas. The first one is letting his own girlfriend (Connie Strickland) work as an undercover stripper at Samson's place to get info on his enemy's activities. Not surprisingly, that doesn't work out too well for anyone, and only when Johnny's plans get more baroque with blowing up Samson's bar, kidnapping Leslie (this time with armed men!) and pushing his girlfriend out of a driving car so that she will tell Samson of Leslie's whereabouts, does our hero have to work a bit harder for his money.

As one might surmise from the more bonkers details of Black Samson's plot, it isn't a film bound to win the Across 110th Street memorial prize for intelligent and politically sound blaxploitation movies, but it is such an enthusiastic piece of low-brow fun that I don't think that matters too much in its particular case. It's not a completely stupid film either. Most of Black Samson's characters (ignoring the psychopathic Johnny Nappa) aren't deep, yet are at least two-note instead of one-note characters. Take Arthur (played by Payne with insane enthusiasm, bug-eyed stares, a love for cocaine and a tone of voice that make him look like Flavor Flav born too early), who is definitely a bastard, a drug dealer and a coward but still stops short of taking sexual favours from Leslie to help Samson. While that's not necessarily character depth, it's more than I'd have expected to find in a blaxploitation film directed by a future TV workhorse like Charles Bail.

It is also of interest to note that Samson is supposed to be a Black Nationalist of some kind, and still allowed to be the film's hero and source of inspiration to the people of his quarter. Compare that to the way politicized African Americans are shown in most other blaxploitation movies and be amazed.

Bail's direction is mostly just workmanlike, without any of the more psychedelic flourishes you sometimes find in the genre (which would have fit the film's weirder ideas nicely), but the film doesn't drag and the action scenes - while they aren't exactly Hong Kong quality - are quite solid.

The actors seem to be having a lot of fun doing their respective things, too. I already mentioned Michael Payne's scenery-chewing, and that would be enough for a normal film. Surprisingly, Payne's performance is overshadowed by William Smith, who tries to be the most insanely insane bad guy in blaxploitation and mostly achieves his goal by smirking, shouting and punching like a loon. I was especially enamoured of the scenes with his uncle, which consist of him cursing and getting angrier by the second while still needing to keep smiling and his uncle spouting ridiculous words of wisdom.

Tarkington doesn't share in the overacting of his fellows and does instead the cool (yet funky, don't worry) hero bit very well indeed, while the actresses just don't have all that much to do except for looking pretty, crying and being kidnapped and roughed up - unfortunately a destiny all too typical of women not named Pam Grier in this genre.

I also need to point in the direction of the film's dialogue again that contains some great pearls of silliness (and probably wisdom). Did you for example know that the smell of death is not a nice smell, Johnny?

And then there's the film's grand finale that starts with a punch-up between the Stick of Hitting and a few mafiosi, turns into a peculiar car chase whose participants just steal a new car when they crash their old one, and ends with the bad guys being bombarded with household appliances, doors and mattresses. I think one of them is even killed by a flying fridge, which is hard to beat when it comes to inappropriate ways of dying.
It's all as pleasantly silly as one could wish for and exactly the sort of thing I hope for in my classic exploitation.

On WTF: Black Samson (1974)

It's been way too long since I have talked about a blaxploitation movie, so what better way to correct this could there be than to spend some time with a film about a Black Nationalist with a very big stick and a drugged lion fighting the mafia?

I report about my experiences with Black Samson in my review on WTF-Film.

 

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