The Big Cube

This was made during an age when old-time Hollywood stars were destroying themselves in film and it would have been better if many had just retired instead of making god-awful films like Joan Crawford, Jennifer Jones and Lana Turner did late in their careers. BUT, these bad films are enjoyable, as they are so bad you can't help but enjoy them for their camp value.

The film begins with Turner marrying a rich guy (Dan O'Herlihy). However she tries, Turner is not able to get the man's daughter (Karin Mossberg--who was an odd choice to play the daughter, as her command of English seemed rather poor) to accept her. However, Turner doesn't realize just how deep the step-daughter's resentment of her is. When the father dies in a boating accident and Turner is left in charge, Mossberg and her freaky boyfriend (George Chakiris) decide to drive the woman crazy--that way they can get their hands on all that money. So, combining LSD and recordings weird suggestions, they drive her towards the deep end. What happens next (other than lots of crazy psychedelics), you'll have to see for yourself. Just be prepared--it's embarrassing and amazingly silly.

While there is some shock value (with all the boobies scattered throughout the film), the writing is just awful. Characters behave in insanely inconsistent ways and the ending is just dumb (you've GOT to see the play--it's amazingly dopey). A bad film but a strangely enjoyable one.

Lana Turner on an acid trip - a bizarre thought, but this low-budget Mexican production, "The Big Cube," is about just that - you know, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," the "Sugar Shack" - LSD. And what a bizarre trip it is for all involved.

Turner plays a great theater star, Adriana Roman, who retires to marry Charles Winthrop (Dan O'Herlihy) and comes up against his angry daughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg). No one explains why O'Herlihy's daughter has some sort of foreign accent. Everyone else is American. Anyway, Lisa falls for a sleaze drug dealer and soon to be ex-medical student (George Chakiris) who is after her money. When O'Herlihy dies in a boating accident, the Chakiris character hints to Lisa that they can hurry along the inheritance by - and this is really not clear - either driving Adriana nuts with LSD or using it to kill her. It falls to the playwright with whom Adriana has worked (Richard Egan) to rescue her from the clutches of these two connivers.

The plot is beyond muddled. One day Lisa hates her stepmother, and then the next day they're best buddies. One day Adriana has an acid trip while in a car, and Lisa and her boyfriend take her to a cliff, presumably to throw her over, and Adriana gets away from them and doesn't die. The next day, Adriana goes on another acid trip and tries to throw herself out a window, and Lisa saves her. Why did she save her when she tried to kill her the day before? It's a mess.

The movie is filled with psychedelic parties and horrible acting, particularly from Mossberg, Pamela Rodgers, Lisa's friend, and Carlos East, who plays an overly made-up artist named Lalo.

Turner, approaching 50, does her "Portrait in Black," "Imitation of Life" acting number wearing some horrific wigs. With a simple upswept hairdo, those enormous blue eyes, and petite figure, she's quite beautiful and glamorous, though dressed like she's supposed to be 18; with her hair down, she's a way over the hill ingénue; and with those gargoyle wigs, she looks just plain awful. Her closeups are shot through linoleum. I hate that older beautiful classic film stars had so few alternatives that they turned to these trash movies, but many did.

Campy though not on the camp level of a "Valley of the Dolls" or another Lana Turner film, "Portrait in Black" but some might find it fun. It was fun, but also a little sad for those who enjoyed Lana in "Slightly Dangerous," "Green Dolphin Street," and the Ross Hunter glossy melodramas of the '50s.

From Warner Brothers' Cult Camp Classics line, in the Women in Peril set, along with the excellent (and not at all campy) women in prison classic Caged and the truly (and hilariously) awful Trog. This is the least worth watching film in that set. I loved the ultra-stereotypical late '60s setting, and the first half hour is a bunch of fun with hippies tripping their balls off. This is kind of a Reefer Madness for LSD. Except there's more of a plot and a couple of famous actors. George Chakiris, Oscar winner for West Side Story eight years earlier, is a doctor who has been doing experiments with the drug. He's trying to marry a young girl who stands to inherit a fortune. Her mother is Lana Turner, and Chakiris plans to drug her with LSD until she goes insane. The latter two thirds or so of the movie are pretty much a bore. Turner's acid trips start off amusing enough, but grow old pretty quick. Unlike Reefer Madness, this was a major studio production (Warner Brothers itself). The psychedelic music is pretty good, if generic music of that type. Chakiris is actually a pretty good villain.

Lana Turner plays Adriana, a stage actress who retires to marry wealthy widower financier Charles (Dan O'Herlihy). Charles has an adult daughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg) who resents this and takes up with the hippie types. One of those, med student Johnny (George Chakiris), finds out that Lisa is rich, and takes Lisa for his girlfriend.

Then Daddy dies, leaving Adriana as executor of the will. There's a clause about her having control over disbursement of the estate and her approval of any husband for Lisa (at least before she turns 25), and when Adriana doesn't approve of Lisa and Johnny getting married, Johnny comes up with a devious plan to drive Adriana crazy by spiking her sleeping pills with LSD! The basic plot, that of a parent not approving of a child's marriage, and the two young lovers deciding to do something about it, isn't a bad one. With the right script, as in Pretty Poison, it can be quite good.

Unfortunately, The Big Cube doesn't have the right script. And it certainly doesn't have the right acting. Mossberg is wooden; O'Herlihy is wasted in a bit part; Adriana's playwright Lansdale (Richard Egan) plays the guy who just knows he knows more than all of the doctors; and then there's Lana, who has to play bad acid trip scenes. Oh my.

There are also the other hippies, and the Travilla-designed gowns Lana has to wear. Parts of the movie wind up in "so bad it's good" territory, but too much of it winds up in the realm of just being tedious.

So many of the great film actresses from the Golden Age were driven hard by their own ambitions and the maintenance of stardom: they seemed unable to gracefully leave the screen and their considerable achievements, and would rather be horrors than has-beens. Joan Crawford's last film was the dreadful Trog, Bette Davis appeared as the Wicked Stepmother, and even Mae West, at age 85, creeped her fans out in the tedious Sextette. I thought of Mae West especially, and her attempt to be sexy while watching Lana Turner negotiate her way in the exploitation film The Big Cube.

If you want to understand how mainstream America envisioned the 1960's counterculture and all that it implied--psychedelic colors, heavy drugs and trippy music--the first 30 minutes of this nutty camp classic have it right: a visit to a San Francisco nightclub is a complete hoot, full of coeds dropping sugar cubes (LSD) into their beer, a freak out in the center of the dance floor so bad the police arrive (rather quickly, as if they had been waiting offstage) to drag the poor victim to rehab--and even, however briefly, a topless dancer!

But to return to Lana Turner, trapped in a bad situation when her husband drowns unexpectedly and she's left with an avaricious stepdaughter whose malicious boyfriend (George Chakiris, who should have fired his agent for casting him in this turkey) decides the two of them should drug mama and drive her slowly mad; Lana hasn't a clue why she's having psychedelic hallucinations, and one hopes she wasn't secretly hoping this was her final chance for an Oscar as she screams and wails and carries on like Godzilla on a bender.

This wild immersion in off-the-wall exploitation is entertaining fun for the first half, and then gets bogged down in the melodrama; Lana's co-star, the young Karen Mossberg, competes with her mother for worst blonde wig, but her wooden acting style and bizarre accent makes her hard to understand, and she never made another film; watch instead for her redheaded BFF, played by Pamela Rodgers, whose perky personality enlivens the screen with a totally zany sex kitten. TV star Richard Egan maintains a stoic attitude throughout the film, a steady if stolid presence.

This is a fun romp "of a kind," and succeeds at that level. For Lana fans, it's probably fairly horrifying to see the persuasive actress of the excellent Bad and The Beautiful and The Postman Always Rings Twice stuck in such a turkey, but in spite of fairly fuzzed-out lenses and a slightly anorexic appearance, the lady does her best and soldiers on.