Tag Archives: 1972

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: PRIVATE PARTS (1972)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Ayn Ruymen, Lucille Benson, John Ventantonio

PLOT: A sexually curious teenage runaway negotiates the deviant scumbags in her crazy aunt’s creaky boarding house.

Still from Private Parts (1972)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  It might make the List thanks to the atmosphere of sleazy psychosexual depravity that’s slathered on thicker than the blue eye shadow teenage Cheryl cakes on to try to make herself look like a woman.

COMMENTS: Private Parts is a haunted house movie, except that the ghosts bedeviling the heroine are the bizarre, boozy boarders at her aunt’s decrepit hotel, and she’s not nearly as wary of them as she needs to be. This is a movie full of creaking floorboards, turning doorknobs, and unseen men peeping through knotholes in a dusty old hotel. Adding to the atmosphere is a wonderfully overwrought Bernard Hermann-inspired soundtrack that’s with us so constantly that it actually creates tension when it disappears for a moment to allow the characters to speak. Not that what this collection of skid-row oddballs has to say would be particularly reassuring. We have the Reverend, who at one point suggests he should slip out of his clerical vestments into something more comfortable; the spooky old hag who calls young Cheryl “Alice” after a resident who disappeared a long time ago under suspicious circumstances; and there’s the hotelier herself, Aunt Martha, who loves funerals, hates painted women and believes “the body is a prison.” There’s also George, the silent young photographer with the darkroom in the basement and the creepy stare that focuses on pubescent Cheryl whenever she’s in the room. Each of these weirdos has deeper secrets in their closets, which Cheryl will uncover when she starts snooping around their rooms against her Aunt’s orders (hint to future runaways: you should never trust a guy who owns a customized carrying case for his personal syringe). Obviously, this is no place for a naïf like Cheryl, but she’s not oblivious to the degeneracy—she’s actively drawn to it. Curious about sex but totally inexperienced, she enjoys the feel of a grown man’s eyes on her developing body, without understanding the difference between healthy lust and sick perversion. All she knows is, after receiving presents of erotica and spiderweb lingerie from a secret admirer, boys her own age suddenly seem boring. Although the movie sports a body count, the tension comes from hoping Cheryl will somehow escape what seems to be her inevitable seduction and corruption. If IMDB is to be believed, Ayn Ruymen was 25 years old when she played the part, but you may have a hard time believing the actress is a day over 16. Not only does she have an adolescent build, she plays the part with a wonderful mix of innocent naughtiness; she mischievously snoops and pranks the boarders, but still sleeps with a teddy bear and isn’t half as sophisticated as she thinks.  The bits with a bizarre, customizable “blow up” doll are unforgettably creepy. After playing as straight psychohorror through most of the running time, Private Parts takes a strange detour into black comedy territory for the conclusion with the arrival of a couple of ludicrously blasé cops, and throws out a couple of scarcely believable twists at the very end as the weird capper. All told, Private Parts a deliciously depraved debut from oddball Paul Bartel.

Private Parts is a should-be cult movie that’s still searching for its cult forty years after release. For some reason, MGM picked the movie up for distribution, then apparently balked at the pseudo-pedophiliac subject matter and buried the movie. The flick has been consistently overlooked since; those who caught it in its brief theatrical run or stumbled upon its unheralded VHS or DVD releases remember it, but word of mouth has never made it a hit, despite its midnight movie feel and pleasing perversity. Ironically, director Paul Bartel received more exposure making films like Death Race 2000 for (Roger’s brother Gene was producer on Private Parts) than he with this Hollywood debut.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for pure excess and surreal humor, it’s something of a minor pop art masterpiece; a careful blending of the eccentric and the sleazy, very much akin to other midnight revival mainstays like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the ’70s films of John Waters, with a wickedly unique take on repressed desire and secret shame.”–Paul Corupe, DVD Verdict (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Gerby” who called it “a strange one!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Canonically Weird (The List)

95. SOLARIS [SOLYARIS] (1972)

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“This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible before it’s transformed by Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron into what they ludicrously threaten will be ‘2001 meets Last Tango in Paris.'”–Salman Rushdie on the (since realized) prospect of a Solaris remake

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Jüri Järvet,

PLOT:  In the indefinite future, mankind has set up a space station orbiting Solaris, a mysterious planet covered by an ocean that exhibits signs of consciousness.  Several of the crew members studying the planet demonstrate eccentric behavior and possible signs of mental illness, and psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to the station to evaluate them and decide whether the program studying Solaris must be scrapped.  On board the satellite Kelvin discovers an incarnation of his wife, who has been dead for seven years, and falls in love with the hallucination.

Still from Solaris (1972)

BACKGROUND:

  • For information on director Tarkovsky, see the background section of the entry for Nostalghia.
  • Solaris was based on a 1961 novel by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem.  Tarkovsky’s version was actually the second adaptation; the story had been filmed previously by Boris Nirenburg for Soviet television.  Steven Soderberg created an American version in 2002 starring George Clooney; it was a modest success with critics, but a commercial flop.
  • Solaris won the Special Jury Prize (the second most prestigious award) at Cannes; the Palme d’or was shared by two realistic, political Italian films (The Working Class Goes to Heaven and The Mattei Affair) that are now almost forgotten.
  • Although commentators frequently claim that Solaris was created as a reaction to s 2001: A Space Odyssey, cinematographer Vadim Yusov says that the director had not seen the 1968 space epic until filming had already begun.  We can safely assume, however, that Soviet authorities were aware of the film, likely viewed it as propaganda for the American space program, and were more than happy to finance a 2001 response with cosmonauts as the cosmic heroes.
  • Tarkovsky liked Natalya Bondarchuk’s initial audition for the role of Hari, but thought she was too young for the role (she was only 17 at the time).  He recommended her to another director for a different part and continued casting.  A year later Bondarchuk had completed her movie, Tarkovsky still had not cast Hari, and she still wanted the role.  The director was impressed enough with her work and persistence to relent, ignore the age difference between  her and leading man Donatas Banionis, and make her his Hari.  Later Tarkovsky would comment in his diary that Bondarchuk’s performance “outshone them all.”
  • The weird seascapes of Solaris’ surface were created in the studio using an acetone solution, aluminum powder, and dye.
  • American reviewers gave Solaris largely negative reviews on its Stateside release in 1976; in their defense, however, the version then screened here was badly dubbed and had a half-hour cut from the running time.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: During thirty seconds of scheduled weightlessness, Kris and Hari slowly rise in the air.  A chandelier tinkles, a slow Bach organ chorale plays, and a lit candelabrum and open books float past them as they embrace.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Though Solaris is far from Tarkovsky’s weirdest movie—in fact, it may be his most accessible—any movie in which a cosmonaut falls in love with an avatar of his dead wife that’s been created from his memories by an intelligent planet starts off on an oddish note. When Tarkovsky points his dreamy camera at this scenario and applies his typically hypnotic and obliquely philosophical style, the weird notes push to the forefront. The currents rippling in psychologist Kris Kelvin’s troubled subconscious turn out to be as mesmerizing as the ultramarine undulations of the surface of Solaris itself.


Criterion Collection trailer for Solaris (1972)

COMMENTS: Thirty minutes into Solaris Burton, a minor character, takes an almost five Continue reading 95. SOLARIS [SOLYARIS] (1972) →

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CAPSULE: BLOOD SABBATH (1972)

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DIRECTED BY: Brianne Murphy

FEATURING: Anthony Geary, , Sam Gilman, Susan Damante

PLOT:  A Vietnam veteran falls in love with a water nymph, but she can’t love a man who has a soul; the local topless witches’ coven offers to get rid of his for him.

Still from Blood Sabbath (1972)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Because, let’s face it, the movie’s terrible.

COMMENTS: Sometimes, exploitation movies are so rushed and cut so many corners that they become incoherent and unintentionally strange.  Cases where movies aimed at a six-pack swilling Friday night crowd dare to be intentionally bizarre are far less common.  Blood Sabbath is an ultra-rare example of a jiggle-fest that manages to be weird in both ways.  The story of a world-weary vet who walks to Mexico, falls in love with a water spirit, and sells his soul for love could have made for an odd enough little modern fairy tale, played straight.  But, instead, Blood Sabbath begins with a scene of a gang of longhaired peaceniks luring our hitchhiking hero to their flower power van so they can spray him with beer and taunt him with the dangling melons of a topless hippie chick as they zoom off into the sunset.  Then, a gang of picnicking naked women (including mammacious nudie fave Uschi Digart) try to pants the harried soldier and chase him until he rolls down a ravine and gently knocks himself unconscious.  The casually introduced fantasy elements—water sprites, the witches coven that demands an annual blood sacrifice from the local peasants—and the solemn tone make this an unusual enough drive-in horror movie, but the way the director seizes any opportunity to put a naked woman on screen, regardless of logic, is its weirdest, and its defining, feature.  In the course of the movie we discover that topless go-go dancing is a much bigger part of Satanism than anyone realized, and being sacrificed at a black mass turns out to be surprisingly similar to getting a lap dance.  The flick is amazing, and amusing, in its shamelessness.  The thespianship is abysmal all the way around; the quiet, tormented village priest who occasionally explodes into loud, dramatic bouts of anguished “acting!” is the worst offender.  Campy though her performance may be, future Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. Dyanne Thorne (playing a witch-queen named “Alotta”), emerges as the best actor in the troupe (though the guy who plays the hermit who looks like Lloyd Bridges caught in the early stages of werewolf transformation isn’t half bad).  Of course, it would be hard for anyone to shine when reciting lines like “take my soul, damn you!” and “It’s David.  He came into the cave with blood all over him.  Sacrificial blood!”  Ensorcellment is indicated by the usual array of low-budget acid trip clichés: double images, solarization, colored filters, and zoom-lens abuse.  A random shot of David cradling a dying solider suggests it’s all an allegory for America’s experience in Vietnam, or something.  Though it’s pretty terrible, it’s seldom boring, and you already knew whether you were in this film’s target audience or not when you reached the lines “taunt him with the dangling melons of a topless hippie chick…”  With its eerie fairy tale + naked lady formula, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that director Murphy had been inspired by the previous year’s (much better) Girl Slaves of Morgana le Fay.

Some jokes are just too easy.  I was going to quip “this movie should be called Boob Sabbath,” but when I went looking for a critical quote, I found that someone (probably many people) beat me to it.  Great minds think alike.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this bizarre cross between seventies witch movies, NIGHT TIDE, LOVE STORY and ORGY OF THE DEAD, with romantic meadow-romping, tepid gore effects, crass exploitation… and bad acting is, in a word, awful.”–Dave Sindelar, Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (DVD)

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CAPSULE: DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN (1972)

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DIRECTED BY: Robert Fuest

FEATURING: Vincent Price, Robert Quarry, Peter Jeffrey, , Valli Kemp, Hugh Griffith

PLOT: Dr. Phibes rises from suspended animation and travels to Egypt seeking waters of immortality to resurrect his beloved wife; but another man seeks the waters as well, and Scotland Yard is once again on Phibes’ trail.

Still from Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The original was just weird enough to make it a candidate for the List, but this nearly redundant sequel adds nothing new that would justify considering giving it its own separate spot.

COMMENTS: If you liked the original The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Rises Again tries hard to give you more of the same—campy black comedy mixed with bizarre characters, sets and (now gorier) murders—except this time there’s no logic or sense in the script whatsoever.  All the beloved characters are back, including all the ones that died in the first movie.  Mysterious silent assistant Vulnavia (played by a new actress, Australian beauty queen Valli Kemp) returns from the original, as do the clockwork musicians (Phibes packs them up in a steamer and ships them to Egypt with him). The sets and art design echo the original, with an Egyptian slant replacing the Art Deco look; there are some fun new sights like Price dressed as a sheik and an octagonal mirrored hallway. The half-serious campy tone from the first effort carries over, as does the black humor (watch as Phibes drinks champagne and eats fish through a hole in the back of his neck at a picnic with Vulnavia). A very few things have changed.  Whereas Phibes was nearly silent in the first film, speaking rarely and painfully through audio cables that ran from his neck to a gramophone horn, once he Rises Again you can’t shut him up.  For this outing he brought along an extra-long audio cable so he can wander about the sets, cursing all who would dare oppose them and plotting their fiendish demise without being limited to a five-foot radius around the phonograph.  (He often speaks without a hookup at all; maybe we’re just privy to his inner monologues).  And three years in suspended animation has sharpened his supervillain abilities: whereas in the first film, the Abominable doctor spent years plotting elaborate fetishistic schemes to kill his enemies based around Biblical plagues, now whenever he needs to he can simply whip up a spiked scorpion chair filled with creepy crawlies out of spit, bailing wire and whatever odds and ends he has lying around his pyramid.  In the sequel, Phibes is pitted against another villain (a megalomaniac Robert Quarry, who makes it clear he doesn’t appreciate the inconvenience when the doctor keeps killing off his henchmen) rather than against the forces of law and order: Inspector Trout and his Scotland Yard superintendent are relegated to comic relief (they hesitate searching Phibes’ pyramid because they don’t have a warrant). So this time out we’re explicitly encouraged to root for Vincent Price (not that we wouldn’t anyway, but the lack of noble opponent makes it easier to get on his side).  As mentioned before, the deaths are more gruesome in this sequel; the scene where Phibes’ pet falcon eats an interloper, pulling wads of flesh off his bloody corpse and swallowing them, pushes the limits of the movie’s PG rating.  Lack of a sensible script aside, Fuest does a good job of giving Phibes fans more of what they loved about Abominable, but the one thing he can’t reproduce is the original’s originality.

Due to bungled rights issues, TV broadcasts and the original home video releases of Dr. Phibes Rises Again did not include Price’s rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” replacing the sound in that key scene with generic instrumental film cues. MGM’s latest DVD releases (sold in a single disc edition, as a double feature with Abominable, and as part of a seven-movie Vincent Price box set) restore the soundtrack of the original.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Vincent Price usually came across as barking mad at the best of times, but add a daft wig, the inability to talk and some truly weird costumes, and you are taken into Salvador Dali territory by this performance…  If you saw it a while ago and tend to think of it as a gaudy example of psychedelic kitsch, it’s time for a major re-evaluation.”–Chris Wood, BritishHorrorFilms.com (DVD)

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LIST CANDIDATE: WHAT? [CHE?] (1972)

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NOTE: In our December 2010 poll, readers decided we too hasty to dismiss What?, and voted to make it a candidate for the List.

AKA Diary of Forbidden Dreams

DIRECTED BY: Roman Polanski

FEATURING: Sydne Rome, ,

PLOT: An American hitchhiker in Italy loses her clothes and finds a Mediterranean villa full of oddball characters.

Still from What? (1972)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: What? is an absurdist sex comedy that’s highly absurd, mildly sexy, and not one bit comic.  It’s weird, all right, but also slapdash and frequently insufferable; in short, not good enough to make a List of the 366 Best Weird Movies.

COMMENTS:  Some films are ahead of their times, misunderstood on release, and are ripe for reappraisal years later.  And sometimes, the critics get it right the first time, as when they ran screaming from early showings of What?.  Sandwiched in between Roman Polanski’s intricately constructed classics Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974), What? seems like the improvised work of an overconfident director who believes he can do no wrong.  Polanski may be a genius, but light tone and full-out surrealism are a poor match to his talent for creating tension through subtly weird atmospheres.  The overarching concept is great, the assembled talent is impeccable, the Mediterranean setting is sublimely elegant, Sydne Rome is a perfect specimen of femininity… yet the script sucks all the life and fun out of the movie, delivering one scene after another that lands with a dull thud.  Heroine Rome, a hippie-esque ingenue, escapes a gang rape and flees to a villa inhabited by a cadre of eccentrics.  Foremost among them is Marcello Mastroianni, uncomfortably playing a dirty old man and ex-pimp.  Despite rumors of homosexuality and venereal diseases, Rome inexplicably falls for the lecher, and their trysts involve Mastroianni dressing in a tiger skin while she beats him or dressing like Napoleon while he beats her.  It’s a novelty to see an actor of Mastroianni’s status willingly degrade himself this way, but it’s neither as fun or as funny as it sounds.  Other poorly-sketched weirdos populating the mansion include a scuba diver (portrayed by Polanski) nicknamed Mosquito, a piano playing doctor, a dying patriarch who also turns out to be a dirty old man, a priest, and a naked woman wandering about the grounds.  Absurd gags fall flat: in one of the earliest, a housemaid sprays shaving cream in the air in an attempt to kill a fly.  Later, a workman will paint the back of Sydne’s appealing thigh blue, a rather uninteresting incident that the script insists on reminding us of over and over.  The biggest running gag is that someone keeps stealing Sydne’s clothes, although the thief doesn’t pilfer quite enough of them; there are long stretches of the movie where Rome runs around clothed. Not coincidentally, the movie then starts to drag.  A few clever ideas emerge, such as when certain scenes start to repeat themselves with slight variations, but in general the movie misses several golden opportunities to ratchet the absurdity up to truly entertaining levels.  Particularly disappointing is the dialogue; the potential for clever nonsense interplay between the innocent American and the depraved Europeans devolves into crude, uninteresting jokes.  A classical music score, references to Heraclitus, and paintings by Francis Bacon and Théodore Géricault in the background are deployed in an attempt to dress up the sleazy material in the clothes of high art.  What? isn’t recommended, but it can be viewed, and even enjoyed, as a novelty.  It’s unhinged, unpredictable, and full of that slightly naive and innocent late 1960s/early 1970s experimentalism that can be refreshing in this cynical age.  But it’s clearly a product of its time, not a work that transcends it.

The film that What? most resembles is the star-studded (Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Ringo Starr) 1968 erotic misfire Candy, a doomed attempt to translate Terry Southern’s satirical porn novel to the screen.  The concept of an erotic version of “Alice in Wonderland,” with a wide-eyed innocent encountering a cast of sexual deviants, has great promise, but has never been executed properly on screen.   Alex de Renzy’s XXX feature Pretty Peaches (1978) is probably the movie that runs the farthest with that particular ball.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Polanski seems to be enjoying a weird, borderline-nonsensical joke at our expense, one without a punchline or a setup… a self-indulgent mess masquerading as a trippy free-for-all.”–Nathan Rabin, The Onion A.V. Club (DVD)