Shock Waves (1977)

          The lingering image from this low-budget shocker depicts a squad of expressionless zombies wearing goggles and World War II SS uniforms as they emerge from bodies of still water, intent on spreading bloody mayhem. As one of the film’s supporting characters notes, “The sea spits up what it can’t keep down.” Utterly loopy in conception, and yet compelling because of its no-nonsense execution and the unnerving synthesizer music on the soundtrack, Shock Waves is reminiscent of John Carpenter’s early work. What the film lacks in depth and logic, it makes up for with menace and mood. And while writer-director Ken Wiederhorn is no John Carpenter, as evidenced by the unimpressive nature of Wiederhorn’s subsequent career, Shock Waves works quite well as an offbeat horror show.

          The picture begins when the crew of a sea vessel discovers Rose (Brooke Adams) floating alone on the ocean in a battered dingy. In voiceover, Rose describes the ordeal she just experienced. Along with several other folks, she took a pleasure cruise on a low-rent boat skippered by Captain Ben Morris (John Carradine). One night, Morris’ boat encountered the wreck of a massive ship. Soon thereafter, strange things started happening, culminating with the death of Captain Morris under mysterious circumstances and the scuttling of Morris’ boat. The passengers found refuge on a remote island, the only resident of which was a mystery man (Peter Cushing) with a scar across his face. Revealed as a former SS commander, the man explained the nature of the ship the passengers encountered. During World War II, the commander oversaw the “Death Corps,” a squad of genetically engineered zombie soldiers capable of breathing air and water. Deemed too dangerous for deployment, the “Death Corps” were decommissioned, and the commander sunk the boat containing his inhuman soldiers. For some reason, the “Death Corps” resurfaced at the moment that Morris’ boat arrived, and carnage ensued.

          The plot is ridiculous, and Weiderhorn succumbs to a few lowbrow impulses (such as squeezing Adams into a bikini for most of the picture). Nonetheless, Weiderhorn delivers a fair measure of creepy weirdness. Zombies stalk people through swamps. Survivors struggle to find hiding places in an old mansion, adding claustrophobia to the mix. Cushing unfurls the requisite expositional monologue. And so on. Thanks to its eerie music, familiar actors, grainy photography, and gruesome premise, Shock Waves could either haunt you or strike you as silly, depending on your receptivity to this type of dark fantasy. Either way, it’s vivid stuff.

Shock Waves: GROOVY

A Man, a Woman, and a Bank (1979)

          Elevated by a charming leading performances but weighed down by a sleepy storyline, the Canadian-made heist comedy A Man, a Woman, and a Bank is pleasant to watch even though it lags frequently and leaves only the faintest impression on the viewer’s memory. Donald Sutherland, all bright smiles and twinkling eyes, plays Reese, an ambitious schemer with an idea for casing a construction site in order to rob the bank that’s being built there as soon as the bank opens to the public. Actor/director Paul Mazursky, participating here only as a performer, plays Reese’s doughy sidekick, Norman, a computer programmer experiencing a midlife crisis. Rounding out the main cast, offbeat beauty Brooke Adams plays Stacey, an ad-agency photographer who stumbles into a romantic relationship with Reese that threatens to complicate the robbery. Orchestrating these inconsequential shenanigans is director Noel Black, whose all-over-the-map career arguably peaked with his first feature, the acidic murder story Pretty Poison (1968). Set to bouncy music by Bill Conti, A Man, a Woman, and a Bank was obviously envisioned as a frothy romantic caper, with the buddy-comedy antics of Norman and Reese providing a counterpoint to the love-struck interplay between Reece and Stacey. Alas, the script by Bruce A. Evans, Raynold Gideon, and Stuart Margolin misses the mark again and again.

          The obstacles related to the robbery are too easily surmounted. The friction between Norman and Reese is too soft, because instead of challenging each other, the characters support each other almost unconditionally. Most problematically, the romance between Reese and Stacey fails to generate suspense—Reese’s lies about his activities endanger the relationship, but Stacey doesn’t learn enough secrets to imperil Reese’s plans, at least not until the very end of the story. Because of these narrative issues, long stretches of A Man, a Woman, and a Bank unfold without any dramatic conflict. Yes, the bit of Norman and Reese hiding from security guards in an elevator shaft has a smidgen of suspense, and yes, it’s possible to become sufficiently invested in the Reese/Stacey relationship to worry about the union’s survival. Overall, however, A Man, a Woman, and a Bank is frustratingly bland, and it doesn’t help that Mazurky plays his sad-sack role so credibly he engenders more empathy than amusement. While Black’s slick style ensures that every scene is polished, Adams’ warmth and Sutherland’s charm are the best reasons to overlook the picture’s mediocrity.

A Man, a Woman, and a Bank: FUNKY

Days of Heaven (1978)

          Much of the mythology surrounding enigmatic filmmaker Terrence Malick stems from the making and aftermath of his sophomore feature, Days of Heaven. Following idiosyncratic artistic instincts rather than Hollywood convention, Malick took nearly three years to craft this moodily poetic work, which treats its simplistic storyline like an afterthought. During that time, rumors spread about the director’s offbeat methods: For instance, he dictated that large sections of the film be shot at dusk, thereby abbreviating many of his shooting days to short bursts of activity. Then, after the film received a mixed critical reception, Malick disappeared from the Hollywood scene for 20 years. His mysterious withdrawal cast Malick as an artist too pure for the crass ways of Hollywood, triggering years of reappraisal and rediscovery.

          By the time Malick resumed directing with The Thin Red Line in 1998, Days of Heaven was firmly entrenched alongside the director’s debut feature, Badlands (1973), as one of the most respected films of the ’70s. Does it deserve such rarified status? Yes and no. Visually, Days of Heaven is unparalleled. Malick and cinematographers Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler mimicked turn-of-the-century paintings and photographs to evoke the supple textures of a Texas wheat farm circa 1916, the movie’s central location. Malick presents several astoundingly beautiful scenes of workers wading through fields, their bodies silhouetted against pastel-colored sunsets, while composer Ennio Morricone’s lilting music evokes a time when life moved at a more contemplative pace.

          Working with frequent collaborator Jack Fisk (credited here as art director), Malick oversaw the creation of a remarkable focal point, the elegant mansion that sits atop a wheat-covered hill, and Malick uses this structure as an effective metaphor for man’s tumultuous relationship with nature: Not only is the house a shelter during weather, it’s a place where relationships that had previously been allowed to roam freely get trapped within the conventions of propriety.

          The main plot, which never quite gels because Malick leaves many details unexplained and/or unexplored, begins in Chicago. Traveling workman Bill (Richard Gere), his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams), and his little sister Linda (Linda Manz) flee Chicago after Bill kills a supervisor during an argument. Upon reaching Texas, the trio accepts work on the wheat farm, which is owned by a sickly man identified only as The Farmer (Sam Shepard). For murky narrative reasons, Bill and Abby pretend to be brother and sister instead of a couple. So, when The Farmer becomes interested in Abby, Bill encourages the romance—believing The Farmer is terminally ill, Bill hopes to seize The Farmer’s wealth through marriage and build a new life for his family. Unfortunately, complications ensue, leading to heartbreak and tragedy.

          Despite the gifts for incisive storytelling he displayed in Badlands, Malcik badly fumbles basic narrative elements in Days of Heaven. His characters are ciphers, his pacing is erratic, and he relies far too heavily on the narration spoken, in character, by Manz. (A similar device was magical in Badlands, but here the narration just seems like a desperate attempt to add coherence.) Thanks to these flaws, the whole movie ends up having the hodgepodge feel of a student film, albeit one with awe-inspiring cinematography. Nonetheless, Days of Heaven casts a spell, which is a rare accomplishment.

Days of Heaven: GROOVY

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

          The storyline of the 1958 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers is so tethered to the historical moment in which the film was made—a period of anti-Communist paranoia and rampant conformity—that it seemed unlikely a remake could update the storyline’s themes in a meaningful way. And yet that’s just what director Philip Kaufman and screenwriter W.D. Richter accomplished with their 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which equals the original film in terms of intelligence, social commentary, and terror. The premise, taken from Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, is the same in each movie: An alien race arrives on earth, gestates copies of human beings in plant-like pods, and kills the human beings in order to replace them with the “pod people” who serve the alien race’s hive-mind. In the ’50s, the plot distilled the clash between jingoistic postwar Americans and the supposed radical element of domestic communists. In the ’70s, the plot crystallizes divisions between lockstep consumers and counterculture freethinkers.

          The hero of the 1978 version is Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), a San Francisco health-department inspector who loves his co-worker, Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), even though she’s romantically involved with an uptight businessman named Geoffrey Howell (Art Hindle). Geoffrey is among the aliens’ first victims, but since Elizabeth has no idea what’s really happened, she’s unable to explain disturbing changes in his personality. Concerned for Elizabeth’s emotional welfare, Matthew introduces her to his pal David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), a pop psychologist with a predilection for catch phrases and turtlenecks. The Kibner angle is one of many clever flourishes in the 1978 version, because the film’s tuned-in characters initially believe they can solve their problems with talking-and-listening therapy—the very sort of human contact threatened by the aliens’ nefarious scheme. Yet Kaufman’s movie isn’t entirely preoccupied by sly observations of modern life, because the director is just as adept at generating excitement.

          The picture has a menacing atmosphere right from the first frames, with everything from shadowy photography to the weird look of the pods contributing to a frightful aesthetic. Kaufman stages a number of effective suspense scenes, like the scary bit at a mud bath run by Matthew’s friends Jack (Jeff Goldblum) and Nancy (Veronica Cartwright). Richter’s witty dialogue and Kaufman’s preference for naturalistic acting allow the actors to sketch individualistic characterizations, and Nimoy, in particular, benefits from the sophisticated storytelling—this is probably his best work outside the Star Trek universe. Watch out, too, for a just-right cameo by Kevin McCarthy, the star of the 1958 version—and do yourself a favor by ignoring the underwhelming later versions of this story, which include the Abel Ferrara-directed dud Body Snatchers (1993) and the Nicole Kidman-starring disaster The Invasion (2007).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers: GROOVY

Cuba (1979)

          It’s hard to decide if Cuba is a great idea executed poorly, or simply a case of terrific execution masking the absence of any central idea whatsoever. In either case, the Richard Lester-directed romantic/political thriller is frustrating, because despite incredible production values and a strong cast, the film is rudderless. When Cuba begins, it seems as if the main story will involve British mercenary Robert Dapes (Sean Connery) getting drawn into the drama of 1959 Cuba, just before rebel forces led by Fidel Castro staged a successful coup. Dapes was hired by the endangered Batista government to train soldiers for their battles against the rebels, and Dapes quickly realizes he’s on the wrong side of history. His situation gets even more complicated when he encounters Alexandra (Brooke Adams), a young woman with whom he once had an intense love affair, and who is now the wife of a playboy Cuban aristocrat (Chris Sarandon).

          The lovers-in-wartime premise is vaguely reminiscent of Casablanca, but unlike that classic film, Cuba can’t decide whether it’s an examination of geopolitics or simply a torrid love triangle. As a result, the movie bounces from one tonal extreme to another, creating a disjointed narrative and neutralizing any real emotional involvement on the part of the audience. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that the acting and filmmaking are so consistently good. Lester employs clever grace notes, such as tossed-off dialogue by peripheral characters and fussy background action, in order to generate a palpable sense of place and texture. He also works in his trademark sight gags, usually at the expense of pudgy character actor Jack Weston, who plays a crass American developer trying to score a big deal before Cuba implodes.

          Supporting player Hector Elizondo is terrific in a more serious role, as Dapes’ military handler; Elizondo’s knowing glances and sly asides communicate volumes of worldly cynicism. Denholm Elliot, Lonette McKee, and Chris Sarandon are equally effective in less nuanced roles. As for the leads, Adams looks spectacular throughout the picture, even if her character is written in such a confusing way that Adams is precluded from portraying consistent behavior. Connery pours on the manly-man charm, and he’s actually quite effective in his scenes with Adams, displaying more sensitivity than he usually integrates into his performances, but the story weirdly sidelines his character until the climax.

          Still, even with these catastrophic flaws, Cuba has indisputable virtues. The location photography by David Watkin is vivid, and the script by frequent Lester collaborator Charles Wood is witty. One typically tart dialogue exchange occurs between Weston and a prostitute. Weston: “Don’t you Cubans know that time is money?” Prostitute: “I do.”

Cuba: FUNKY