The Big Cube

Bad movie lovers rejoice. Craptastic mess from that unfortunate time period when the studios were trying to connect with a youth audience that just wasn't there. Poor Lana, looking dreadfully gaunt, and her terrible two tone hair are stuck in this tripe with nowhere to hide. Her costarring with Dan O'Herlihy reminds the viewer that they were in Imitation of Life together and makes you wonder why you're not watching that instead! The rest of the acting is of the seriously wooden variety and the direction inept. Trash but if you are in the mood for something to make fun of or a Lana completist than give it a chance but one view will be more than enough.

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.

My father in-law was channel surfing and accidentally found this movie playing on TV last night. I heard some of the lines and the weird 60's style music from another room and thought what the heck they were watching. It intrigued me enough to walk over to see what it was and my in-laws commented that it looked like a 'B' movie. At a glance, I thought the acting was really bad. But then I took a closer look at one of the actors and realized that it was Lana Turner! I couldn't believe my eyes. I noticed immediately how much older she looked. I love how every time the camera was on her face she looked mysteriously out of focus. Kind of like what they did with Sybil Shepard in Moonlighting. The lines were really awful and painful to hear but we all found ourselves compelled to keep watching it. Even my husband woke up from a snooze on the couch and started watching it. The daughter, Lisa sounded out of place with some French-like accent. The special psychedelic effects were really bad. I felt almost embarrassed for Ms Turner. I was also surprised there was nudity in this film.

She shouldn't have done this movie. She looked really out of place as if she was still playing one of her roles in her older movies like Imitation of Life. Don't get me wrong, I loved Imitation of Life. That was a really wonderful movie. She was really great in it and her acting was right for that time. But this movie was not right for her type of acting. It looked really out of place.

Also, the guy who played Johnny looked really familiar until I realized that it was 'Bernardo' from West Side Story! He seemed to play this sleazy character all too well.

I do have to say that it was entertaining. But if you're a real big fan of Lana Turner, save yourself the agony if you want to remember her as she was in her heyday. Cheers!

Being a Lana Turner fan, and having seen most of her films, "The Big Cube" had always been amazingly allusive. It's not an easy movie to find, but once I got my hands on it, I was like a little kid at Christmas. I had read reviews on it and seen the disdain for this film over and over again, but I wasn't as horrified by it as most reviewers had me expecting to be. And, strangely enough, that was both a disappointment and a relief.

Lana plays a supposedly great stage actress (though you wouldn't know it based on the horrendous play the film opens with) who retires to marry a wealthy man whose witchy teenage daughter resents Lana's intrusion into their lives. This diva daughter, meanwhile, begins to date a sleazy drug pusher whom neither her father nor Lana approve of. The daughter (played oddly enough with an Eastern European accent of some sort) teams up with her boyfriend to drive poor Lana mad by lacing her medication with LSD.

"The Big Cube" is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. Many of the lines and scenes are laughably bad. Lana's LSD-induced hallucination scenes are beyond campy. And seeing Lana in the same film with bare breasts and naked rear-ends is a little disconcerting. But the film will suck you in and have you hooked - much like LSD itself. And in an oddly appealing way, there is a dash of awkwardness thrown in when you see how seriously Turner takes herself in this film. For a woman who was on the verge of 50, she still acted like a young vixen in her 20's.

This vehicle is one of pure exhibitionism. Truly only for Lana fans or those who like trippy '60s flicks. But I have honestly seen much worse. "Valley of the Dolls" is from the same era and in the same vein, but much more ridiculous and tedium inducing. "The Big Cube", strangely enough, resembles a drugged-out version of Turner's 1959 hit "Imitation of Life". Between Lana's successful stage actress character and the conflict she experiences with her step-daughter, plus the on screen reunion with Dan O'Herlihy (who plays her husband here), the similarities are striking enough for me to imagine that the director of this bizarre film must have been a fan of Lana's older melodramas. Having said that, "The Big Cube" is also about as far away from "Imitation of Life" or "Peyton Place" as one can get.

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.