Jack H. Harris Presents Some Nudie Cuties!

I rather doubt that many people have gone bankrupt betting on whether men like looking at naked dames. Hugh Hefner got so rich doing it, that he only ever had to wear pajamas the rest of his life. Hefner's success was the envy of many a young hustler in the 60's and I have no doubt that Jack H. Harris was among them. He made his stab at filling that niche with 1962's Paradisio, the first of his "Nudie Cuties". 

Nudie Cuties were films featuring looks at naked flesh minus the offbeat and strained rationale of the practice of Nudism or Nudist Colonies. Russ Meyer's The Immortal Mr. Teas from 1959 is considered the first installment of this kind of movie. Ed Wood's Orgy of the Dead is also a later addition. Jack Harris entered the arena in 1962 with Paradisio, a movie about a professor chap who gets hold of some x-ray glasses and then gets swept up in a spy plot. When he's looking through his glasses it generates a 3-D quality to the nudity, and we are to use our own glasses for full effect. For more details check out this TCM link. To watch the movie, follow this link. At two hours it's pretty slow.

A later installment in the form was Playmates which as you can see from the poster above was presented in something suggesting "Deep Vision 3-D". 
 

With the movie Without a Stitch Harris movie into full-blown soft pornography. There was clearly money to be made in those days with this kind of faire. This one features a young girl who seeks sexual gratification and ends up in hands of a sadist. Now Harris had no creative hand in this one, he just arranged its distribution. 

Harris found product from overseas. France was a supplier for a few of the movies he distributed. The two titles I've found at the forefront of that are Les Biches and Erotique. 

Harris scored a real coup when he got his mitts on a softer core movie title The Oldest Profession. One of the stars of this bit of cinema was Raquel Welch herself, which came the after her breakout performances in Fantastic Voyage and One Million B.C. It's a weird movie with six directors each telling a separate tale of prostitution through the ages. Welch shows up in the section about the Gay Nineties. She was the sole American actress in the film.

Raquel was a stunning beauty, that's for certain. Now for a couple of movies of a different kind. 

Bone is a movie written and directed by Larry Cohen (the creator of The Invaders and Branded for TV and many other movies). For some reason Harris got involved with the distribution of his movie starring Yaphet Kotto. It's a pretty stunning movie for its time about a loveless couple who are set upon by a cruel drifter. Here's the trailer under a different name. 

In his book Harris indicated he was involved with the American distribution of My Son the Vampire, an English movie featuring Bela Lugosi originally titled Mother Riley Meets The Vampire. Allen Sherman created a daffy song to help promote this offbeat horror-comedy in the weird tradition of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. 

To listen to Allen Sherman's kooky song and get a glimpse of the movie check out this YouTube link. 

These are the kinds of films which Harris used to make his living through the 60's but things were about to change when even weirder monsters come to call. Next time we visit the Equinox. 

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Salem's Lot - The Movies!

Salem's Lot was a hot property when it first hit the market. Stephen King was the new "wunderkind" on the horror market with his novel Carrie and the hit movie that followed it. Many Hollywood types thought the same for Salem's Lot and there was much buzz. But eventually someone had the grand idea that it would make a great mini-series on television given the length of the novel. Not a bad idea at all. Tobe Hooper was contracted to direct following his own successful flick Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And so, they made a two-part movie in 1979 which did a pretty good job of bringing the book to the screen. 

David Soul was hired to play "Ben Mears" and while he wouldn't have been my first pick, he does a good job. I only occasionally get distracted by his immovable 70's hairdo. James Mason does a great job as the vampire familiar "Straker" and his scenes are to be relished. Lance Kerwin is really good as "Mark Petrie", the boy who knows the vampire lore. Much more is made of his "Monster Kid" habits with many dandy Aurora models getting some airtime along with some vintage horror film posters. Bonnie Bedaila is exceedingly sexy as the love interest for Ben, and while she makes some poor choices, they seem not out of character or forced by the plot. Others who standout are Lew Ayers as the veteran English teacher who believes in vampires, Geoffrey Lewis as the handyman vampire, and Kenneth McMillan as the local constable. The vampire "Barlow" is changed dramatically, and in this show looks amazingly like Count Orloff from the classic silent Nosferatu. It's a solid show worthy of its reputation and features an ending not in keeping with the novel for those who appreciate the unexpected. 

I wish I could be as kind to the 1987 sequel A Return to Salem's Lot. The director for his one is Larry Cohen, a talent who makes flicks I usually cotton to, but this time he strikes out. Cohen had written a rejected screenplay for the original TV movie and if it resembled what he eventually put on screen a decade later I can see why it was rejected. We are back in Salem's Lot, that much is for sure, but the events of Stephen King's novel are largely ignored. Instead of a town assaulted by a vampire, we get a town riddled with vampires. And that might have worked if Cohen didn't insist that this settlement of Salem's Lot had always been occupied by vampires who came over to the New World along with the Puritans aboard the ill-fated Speedwell. 

Our hero is Michael Moriarty as "Michael Weber", an actor Cohen loves but who in this picture is all over the map in terms of his personality. His son is played by a newbie actor named Ricky Reed who is barely hitting his marks. Other characters, almost all of them vampires are played by reliable types like Andrew Duggan as the vampire mayor and June Havoc as Weber's aunt. There is a lot of vampire carnage which seems totally irrelevant to the plot. The town is also occupied by hybrid vampires who can operate in sunshine. The town has turned its back on hunting humans and instead relies on a healthy herd of cows to supply their bloody sustenance. It's not a back premise for a movie really, if handled with more care, but it's got almost nothing to do with King's original novel. 

There was a later adaptation of Salem's Lot starring Rob Lowe and I've seen it but didn't bother to scout up a copy for this review. It's pretty ho-hum and just treads the same ground but without the panache of a vintage 70's TV. I read that they are making a new television prequel and another film adaptation, but my interest is low on both counts. The classic from the late 70's still resonates sufficiently with this viewer. 

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God Told Me To!

Thanks to a recommendation here at the Dojo when I taking a gander at another Larry Cohen movie, I was made aware of and swiftly got possession of a copy of Cohen's God Told Me To (also released under the title Demon), a 1975 Horror-Science Fiction-Crime drama blend which delivers on all its premises surprisingly effectively. The movie sports a very strong cast with a bevy of familiar faces if not names occupying nearly every scene. Even the late Andy Kaufman the rebel comedian makes a showing as a killer cop. This is one of those movies that takes a few different directions. If you've not seen it, I recommend it, if you have than venture further.

We begin on the streets of New York City when suddenly folks begin to drop dead, the victims of a sniper tucked in high above the crowds on a water tower. He kills many and when queried by our hero cop named "Michael" played by Tony Lo Bianco says simply it was because God has told him to. He then promptly leaps to his death. This is just the beginning of a spate of murders, with each murderer stating unequivocally that God had told them commit their crimes. And as the hero pursues the clues, the story switches from a crime drama to a horror story with implications of the supernatural abounding.

We meet Michael's girlfriend and ex-wife, both of whom he still seems to be friendly with. We learn that Michael is a devout believer in God. His journey leads him into the unnatural which slides over into the sci-fi vein when alien abduction becomes the possible explanation for a "man" who seems to have the power to order people to do whatever he wants them to do. Naturally enough the authorities are reluctant to reveal to the public such theories so Michael takes it upon himself to do so and promptly is suspended. But that doesn't stop him.

He suspects and soon so does the audience that Michael is specifically connected to the man named "Bishop" who is behind the killing spree and when we meet him he's clearly nothing from this world, or least not completely. After Michael confronts a woman who evidently was his own mother despite her status as a virgin and you quickly get the sense of what Cohen is driving at.

This is a fascinating movie, richer in texture than you'd expect from a relatively low-budget affair. The editing is a little awkward in places, but overall you have no trouble following the plot and there are some outstanding performances along the way. I'm glad to learn of it at long last.

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Just Call It "Q"!

I've been watching a lot of Larry Cohen movies of late and recently learned that this maverick director passed away just a few months ago. He seemed to be one of those energetic characters that the movie industry loves and hates at the same time, a go-getter but not one who does things by the book. That's all well and good until someone gets hurt and on Q, a movie about the great flying god of the Azetics Quetzoquotal setting up shop in New York City there was ample opportunity for that.

I've long wanted to watch Q, but it never seemed to be a movie which played anywhere I was and I kept running across references to the stop-motion animation, a dying art even when this 80's flickw as being made. The flying monster in this one is okay and performs its functions well enough,but like so many movie monsters fails to live up the outstanding imagery of the posters. Boris Vallejo outdid himself on this one.

The story of how the movie got to be made is fascinating as well. Cohen was fired off a project and just to keep his hand in and to stick to the folks who sent him packing he put together a movie in a matter of days, calling favors from across the world. David Carradine , Richard Roundtree and Michael Moriarty give this monster epic heft, and the presence of Candy Clark assures one and all its status in the cult community. Cohen and Moriarty got along so well on this movie that they worked together on several of other projects.

Q ain't a great monster movie by any stretch, but it's a darn entertaining one and has an energy many of the modern much ballyhooed epics fail to match.

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Warning! The Stuff!

In the late 50's we had the Blob descend from the depths of space, and in the 70's a small part of it found its way back to wreak more havoc. In the 80's Larry Cohen's The Stuff seems to be a movie that wants to hit a number of the same notes as the The Blob, but with perhaps a bit more pointed humor and a little sharper satire. The Blob came from outer space but the Stuff seems to come from the depths of the Earth itself.

An old man finds a bit of the Stuff in a mine and finds the white goo tastes surprisingly good. We cut forward many months and discover that The Stuff is a popular food product which is taking the nation, if not the world by storm. We are treated to some well-designed ads for The Stuff and then we meet our hero, an industrial spy with a wild wit and perverse attitude. (To put this movie within a very narrow time frame of pop culture awareness, Clara Peller of "Where's the Beef?" fame has an exceedingly appropriate cameo. )He quickly finds that this Stuff is something which has a profound effect on people, even to the point of making them not people anymore. Those who have come under its spell fight mightily to keep it safe and to keep its secret.

The only problem with this movie is that its got some dissonance in tone, with some characters played too broadly to fit in with the overall scheme of biting satire. But that aside, the movie still lands many punches not the least of which is how modern culture is addictive to pleasure at its core and all too susceptible to the whims of modern marketing.

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