Tag Archives: 1976

Capsules

CAPSULE: BURNT OFFERINGS (1976)

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DIRECTED BY: Dan Curtis

FEATURING: , Oliver Reed, Lee Montgomery,

PLOT: A family of three, and their elderly aunt, find a deal allowing them to stay in an old country mansion for the summer, providing they keep the place up and leave out a plate of food for the house’s reclusive matron, who never leaves her room.

Still from Burnt Offerings (1976)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s too mild, with some slight ambiguity but no significant weirdness.

COMMENTS: Burnt Offerings was the beginning of a late 1970s/early 1980s haunted house cycle that encompassed three Amityville Horror movies; the mini-movement climaxed commercially with 1982’s Poltergeist and artistically with 1980’s The Shining. In fact, Offerings is most interesting when considered as a precursor to The Shining, which would take its theme of a parent possessed by an evil spirit and catapult it into the horror stratosphere. Offerings, on the other hand, suffers from poor pacing. It’s too leisurely getting started: it’s over a half hour into the film before we see the first incident which might be categorized as “supernatural.” Up until then, the focusing on spooky shots of light bulbs while horror movie music plays just doesn’t cut it. Even when things do finally start to happen—swimming pool roughhousing that gets dangerously out of hand, a recurring nightmare about a smiling chauffeur—events occur in fits and starts, with husband and wife spending the interim discussing how each previous manifestation of evil is affecting their relationship. Offering a few creepy moments along the way, the movie crawls to a non-surprise ending.

The film’s biggest virtue is its cast. Karen Black, by now no longer a sex kitten but not yet a matron, centers the film. Her sensuality is perfectly constrained, and we are not surprised at hints that the couple’s sex life may be well past the honeymoon phase. Son Lee Montgomery is acceptable; he doesn’t sink the film, which is the most you can really hope from a young actor. Bette Davis is unremarkable here, but she is Bette Davis; her very presence adds legitimacy. Of all the actors, Reed may understand the material’s urge vto break through into camp the best; the moments when his face goes spastic as he fights off the evil inside him give it the film some melodramatic tics of life.

Burnt Offerings was based on a 1973 novel by Robert Marasco, although director Dan Curtis (of TVs “Dark Shadows” fame) rewrote it significantly. The movie was not a critical success, but it has a small but devoted fan base (probably enough to categorize it as “fondly remembered,” but below the threshold that would make it a true cult movie). The 2015 Blu-ray contains a number of new interviews with the surviving cast and adds a new commentary track from critic Richard Harland Smith to the old one from Curtis, Black and co-writer William F. Nolan that has been ported over from the DVD release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Most of the cliches of the Gothic genre are encompassed in the plot about Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Bette Davis, and young Lee H. Montgomery having a weird summer after moving into a home owned by batty Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart… might have been interesting if director Dan Curtis hadn’t relied strictly on formula treatment.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “sunspotbaby.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Burnt Offerings (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Burnt Offerings (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]
  • This terrifying thriller does for summer homes what Jaws did for a dip in the surf
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List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: HEART OF GLASS (1976)

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Herz aus Glas

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Josef Bierbichler, Sonja Skiba, Stefan Güttler

PLOT: A Bavarian town at the beginning of the 19th century loses its master glassblower, the creator of a prized ruby-red glass. As the town’s lifeblood dissipates, the population goes mad, with a shepherd the only voice of reason remaining untouched by the malaise.

Still from Heart of Glass (1976)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: In Heart of Glass, Herzog captures the effect of an entire town losing its mind. By hypnotizing virtually every actor, the dreaminess of the shots melds with the action of the citizens, creating a dark, dreamworld effect. The most grounded character, Hias, is a seer of visions both immediate and far flung—and he is the village’s only grip on reality.

COMMENTS: This pensive movie begins with a rear-shot of a man looking over a herd of cows. His first words are in voiceover, played against grand scenes of waterfalls and nature: “I look into the distance, to the end of the world. Before the day is over, the end will come.” This seer (Joseph Bierbichler) is named Hias, and he is a shepherd of a nearby Bavarian village. A group of townsmen come to him with words of fear: “the time of giants has returned.” Their town has just lost its legendary glassblower, and as the seer predicts, the end comes to them before the day is out.

Herzog’s Heart of Glass maintains the unearthly, disconnected tone that is set up in the opening shots throughout. Under the spell of hypnosis, the actors portraying the townspeople all behave as if they are several shifts from reality. The worst affected is the town’s magistrate, a man of means who, used to the great wealth the glass export brought in, crumbles when it is lost. First, he insists the glassblower’s house be dismantled and foundation dug up, just in case the secret formula is hidden therein. He demands the seizure of a davenport that the craftsman had given to his mother, in case the solution is to be found inside. He laments, “the untidiness of the stars makes my head ache.” The tragedy has no explanation in earthly logic, and the whole town faces their doom with such disbelief that no one can now seem to think for himself.

Events take an increasingly desperate turn. As predicted by Hias, one of a pair of friends dies breaking the fall of the other. A plan is hatched that all the remaining ruby glass is to be thrown into the lake, to make it turn red. Eventually there is murder and arson as the magistrate—the throbbing head of the hive-mind that’s taken over the populace—goes to greater and greater extremes to bring the secret back from the void into which it has slipped. Hias sees this, and laments, but cannot stop what occurs. During an enigmatic scene in the village tavern, he sits flanked by a white hen and a dancing simpleton, and prophesies far into the future, seeing World War I, World War II, and eventually nuclear annihilation: “…where the black box drops, green and yellow dust arises.”

Heart of Glass ends on an allegorical note. Having fled the doomed town, Hias returns to his beloved woods. Traveling through the primordial forest, he seems at one with it—until he peers into a dark cave. He goes into a fit and, upon recovery, has another of his visions. He sees two islands, “on the fringes of existence,” that have no other human contact, and do not know the earth is round. After years of spying the horizon, a man and his followers take off on a tiny craft to head toward the abyss. “It may have been seen as a sign of hope,” Hias intones, “that the birds followed them out into the vastness of the sea.” Change is terrifying, but it is also the only way forward.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The elusiveness of ‘Heart of Glass’ makes it something of a disappointment. But it is too mysteriously lovely to be regarded as a failure.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

152. ALLEGRO NON TROPPO (1976)

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“My idea was to have an orchestra in complete contrast to Disney’s. I saw Fantasia eleven times at the movies as a child. I loved the visuals but I didn’t really care much for the live-action sequences, the stylized orchestra, all the lights. It seemed too elegant, too refined. So to do something rather shabby and wacky, the exact opposite, I thought would work.”–Bruno Bozzetto

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Bruno Bozzetto

FEATURING: Maurizio Micheli, Néstor Garay, Maurizio Nichetti

PLOT: A film producer in an empty concert hall announces he will soon present something unprecedented and original—animations scored to classical music—and insists on continuing even after getting an angry call from Hollywood. An orchestra of old women is assembled and a cartoonist is released from a dungeon and ordered to draw illustrations in real time as the band plays. We then see the cartoons—a faun pining for a nymph, creatures that evolve from a coke bottle, the domestic fantasies of a stray cat—set to compositions by Dvořák, Ravel and others, with comic sketches set in the orchestra hall in between the featurettes.

Still from Allegro non Troppo (1976)
<BACKGROUND:

  • The phrase “allegro non troppo” is a musical direction literally meaning “fast, but not too fast.” “Allegro” also means happy, upbeat or cheerful in Italian, so the title could be read as a pun suggesting that the movie is lighthearted, but not saccharine.
  • Animator Bruno Bozzetto began his career making shorts and commercials. In 1965, his West and Soda was the first Italian feature-length animation film in over twenty years.
  • Allegro Non Troppo did not fare well in Italian theaters. According to animator Giuseppe Laganà, there were approximately forty people at the premiere: thirty of the cast and crew, five film critics, and only five paying customers. Bozzetto later complained that Italian audiences weren’t interested in seeing cartoons unless the name “Disney” was attached.
  • The character the artist draws on a sheet of paper during dinner is Signor Rossi, Bozzetto’s most popular creation, who would have been familiar to Italian audiences (though not as familiar as Mickey Mouse).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: As tempted as I am to select the live-action scene of the gorilla attempting to do a Cossack dance in the orchestra pit, or the drawing of the boob tree (a tree with breast fruit hanging heavy off a nude torso trunk, as envisioned by a horny hallucinating satyr), I have to concede that the march of the mutating dinosaurs to Ravel’s “Bolero” is certain to be the memory that sticks in your mind’s eye through the years.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This compilation of animated sonatas featuring satyrs, devils and dinosaurs traipsing through colorful post-psychedelic landscapes might not have been odd enough to place the movie on the List of the 366 Best Weird Films of All Time if not for the equally bizarre black and white slapstick intermezzi featuring a sleazy promoter, a bully conductor, a harried artist and an all-female geriatric orchestra. It helps that the music is transcendent and the animation witty, but throw in a guy in a gorilla suit and the deal is sealed.


Italian DVD trailer for Allegro Non Troppo

COMMENTS: Bruno Bozzetto very wisely addresses the surface similarities between his movie and Disney’s more famous animated classical Continue reading 152. ALLEGRO NON TROPPO (1976) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: RETURN OF THE KUNG FU DRAGON (1976)

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Ju Ma Pao

DIRECTED BY: Yu Chick-Lim

FEATURING: Polly Kwan (as Sun Kuan Rin Feng), Cheung Lik, Li Chung-Chien, Hsiao Wang

PLOT: A teenage princess learns kung fu so that she can return from exile inside a magic mountain to claim her kingdom from usurpers.

Still from Return of the Kung Fu Dragon (1976)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This colorful costume fantasy martial arts adventure brandishes a couple of bizarre characters, a convoluted epic plot containing a couple of unintentionally surreal digressions, and editing and dubbing problems that sink below even the usual low standards of the genre. With their warriors flying through the air and doing improbable double backflips while delivering stuttering threats in dubbed English, almost all of the 1970s chopsocky movies are at least a little bit weird; this one contains enough extra strangeness to qualify as a noteworthy movie of its type, though not enough to challenge for a place on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies.

COMMENTS: Ah, , the weirdest of the martial arts! You never see a devotee of judo using her martial prowess to put her hands all over a street vendor’s stock of steamed buns, or a karate master hanging out with an red-nosed androgynous dwarf who looks like Bjork’s stunt double. Even American kickboxers look dignified by comparison. But it’s the on-the-cheap craziness of the comic book kung fu inspired by Bruce Lee’s Seventies box office success that makes this short-lived but demented sub genre so lovable. Return of the Kung Fu Dragon is, at the same time, one of the most ambitious and the least competent of Taiwan’s action offerings of the period. There’s a childishness to the gaudy presentation, with the bright colors and wizards and princesses and invisible dwarfs, which suggests that Dragon may have been aimed at Taiwanese kids, although of course in the US it played drive-ins and UHF “Kung Fu Theater” venues rather than kiddie matinées. Dragon is constantly throwing so many new characters and twists at you that, if the story wasn’t ultimately such a generic rightful-ruler-returns-from-exile-to-depose-tyrant affair, it would be nearly impossible to follow. Much is made of certain plot devices—e.g. a magic jade dragon staff that somehow allows the evil interloper to finally attack the peaceful island kingdom—that simply disappear later in the tale. The editing doesn’t help the continuity: the aforementioned staff is seen in closeups alternated with shots of a bunny running through the underbrush (to show, we eventually gather, that the wizard is ambushing a hunter as part of the invasion scheme). The schizophrenic editing serves the castle-storming sequence well, at least, as the camera cuts from one individual melee to another and captures the chaos of battle. But even here there are odd inserts, such as when an archer shoots a flying man (?) out of the sky. Neither character was seen before that shot, and neither is seen after. The most jarring moment comes in the middle of the film, when one of the characters, who has taken time out for some martial training, suddenly starts popping into frame, high-kicking in front of a Chinese chess board backdrop, then disappearing. We assume this expressionistic sequence means to stress the analogy between learning to fight and intellectual tactics. But immediately afterwards, another set of characters stumble upon an actual game board set up in the middle of the wilderness—and when their evil imperial pursuers find them the ensuing battle is a stylized kung fu/chess hybrid. It’s that kind of movie; the disdain for realism is amusing and refreshing, but it can also be frustrating and disorienting. Dragon‘s wild cast of characters include, among others, two princesses (well, one is a fake princess who’s also referred to as “the Black Girl” for reasons that are never explained) and an evil usurper who’s given to highly inappropriate bouts of maniacal laughter. The chief bad guy is a wicked old wizard with a beard so long that he has a servant girl whose sole job is to carry it around for him twenty four hours a day; but, he’s not even the weirdest character. That honor goes to the comic relief, an effeminate dwarf with bizarre ponytails and a red nose who can turn invisible (although we in the audience can see him perfectly well whenever he does). In the eyes of the filmmakers, of course, all of this plot and characterization was just necessary filler and carrier for the fight scenes. They are frequent and energetic and, although they lack the athleticism you’d see in some of the better Shaw Brothers productions of the period, they should satisfy chopsocky fans. All in all, Kung Fu Dragon is a frantic, somewhat disorienting experience that should appeal to gonzo martial arts fans; if you’re not already a devotee of the genre, or if you require a plot that makes sense, you should stay far away.

Return of the Kung Fu Dragon is in the public domain in the U.S. and can be viewed at the Internet Archive, among other Net sources. I viewed it on Mill Creek’s fun Martial Arts 50 Movie Pack Collection, which also contains the action oddities Kung Fu Arts and Ninja Champion.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Everything is thrown into the cauldron for this one (dig the magic mirror & the burning gravel!), which means there are enough crudely imaginative elements to make Return of the Kung Fu Dragon strangely viewable at best.”–Joe Burrow, The Action Mutant Reviews (DVD)

Capsules

CAPSULE: BLOODSUCKING FREAKS (1976)

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AKA The Incredible Torture Show

Beware

DIRECTED BY: Joel Reed

FEATURING: Seamus O’Brien,

PLOT: A sadist who runs a Grand Guignol off-off-Broadway show as a cover for his white slavery ring kidnaps a theater critic and a ballerina to design his greatest production yet.

Still from Bloodsucking Freaks (1976)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: I don’t think Bloodsucking Freaks is all that weird, although I have trouble convincing my maiden aunt of that fact. The problem is one of definition: many people out there identify “immoral” or “shocking” as “weird,” while I consider shock films to be a distinct, if occasionally overlapping, category from weird movies. Essentially, Bloodsucking Freaks is just cheaply made, misogynist, grindhouse soft porn, peppered with some intentional and some unintentional comedy, a bit bizarre only because it goes to the absurdest extremes in its quest to shock the viewer.

COMMENTS: A naked girl has her hand cut off with a hacksaw and her eye pulled out of its socket while a live audience chuckles at her. A naked girl has her teeth pulled out one by one with pliers. A naked girl has a hole drilled in her skull, then her brain is sucked out through a straw. That’s pretty much all there is to Bloodsucking Freaks; there’s a thin plot tying these violations together, and torturers Sardu (the tall, fey one) and Ralphus (the smelly-looking dwarf who can’t act) make bad puns in between atrocities (“I bet you an arm and a leg…”). Still, the film obviously exists for no other reason than to show naked women humiliated, tortured and dismembered.

But, it’s a comedy, so that’s OK. (Seriously, this is people’s defense of the film: it’s intended as comedy, so we shouldn’t be offended. These same fans would presumably champion a Ku Klux Klan white supremacist screed, if it’s presented in the form of a humorous monologue). The problem with Bloodsucking Freaks, of course, is all one of attitude and context. Nudity isn’t controversial, graphic violence isn’t categorically offensive, and even mixing the two doesn’t automatically create offense. Freaks’ sin is that its main purpose is to give men who watch it an erection from watching women being tortured. The movie’s constant parade of nude, nubile victims have no personalities; they rarely object to the torture, or plead with their captors, and never hint at having jobs or families or any existence outside of the dungeon. For the most part their cries of pain are indistinguishable from a porn actresses’ faked orgasmic moans. When a woman is tortured via electrocution administered through nipple clips, her writhing appears to come from a sensation very different from agony.

Male arousal isn’t a matter of free choice or will; being exposed to sexual images causes the male libido to click into readiness, and Freaks’ main calling is to relentlessly associate that stirring in the loins with expressions of wanton cruelty. I’m no politically correct critic who searches out nude scenes so I can howl about the “objectification” of women, but when Sardu eats dinner using a naked woman as a table or tosses darts at a bulls-eye painted on a lass’ backside, it’s hard to argue that there isn’t some slight, perhaps unconscious objectification of women going on here.

But the most offensive issue with Bloodsucking Freaks isn’t its pornographic nature, but its refusal to own up to its own obscenity. The movie contains witty black jokes: a box of white slaves marked “fragile,” Sardu and Ralphus’ grossed-out reactions to the doctor’s brand of “elective neurosurgery,” and the unforgettable line “her mouth will make an interesting urinal.” But the purpose of putting such gibes into the script at all is to provide an excuse to watch swomen being symbolically punished and brutalized. Men can claim to watch Bloodsucking Freaks for the comedy the way that they used to pretend to read Playboy “for the articles.”

The movie is in self-denial; it holds itself at arm’s length and pretends its images don’t mean the things they quite obviously do. In the opening moments of the movie Sardu congratulates the attendees at his off-Broadway torture show on their “courage” in watching a nude blonde’s fingers crushed in a vise, then argues “this is just a theatrical presentation, a show, which offers no reality, not a fraction of reality, and just allows us, you and me, to delve into our grossest fantasies…” That’s writer/director Reed speaking directly to the movie audience, preemptively disowning his own vile tableaux by arguing they have no power or meaning, granting viewers permission to indulge the most loathsome parts of themselves. More perceptive, however, are the lines he wrote for the theater critic: “No true actor would submit to engage in such trash.” In advice I wish I could follow, he continues, “If I were to review your so-called show, even badly, I fear some of my readers might come just out of curiosity.”

I have no doubt that many of you will want to see Bloodsucking Freaks after reading this review. Watching a truly filthy movie is something of a rite of passage, and it won’t turn you into a rapist. It’s not my job to tell you not to see it, just to give you fair warning that its reputation is not exaggerated: this movie can scar your soul, and you will see things you may wish you could forget. But if you don’t mind watching something Ted Bundy probably masturbated to, then by all means, have at it.

Many people believe Entertainment produced Bloodsucking Freaks (they did not make it but only distributed it, buying the rights and re-releasing the movie to drive-ins in 1983 with a brilliantly cynical campaign that included tipping off “Women Against Pornography” on what theaters to picket). Troma is responsible for the special edition “director’s cut” DVD, however, with an audio track provided by torture porn impresario Eli Roth. Roth’s sarcastic commentary, which compares the movie to Taxi Driver and muses about the symbolism of the caged cannibal women, starts out amusing, but the mockery wears thin (just how much trash should the director of Hostel be talking, anyway?) Roth’s insincerity is a typical approach to Bloodsucking Freaks, though: cover up a guilty erection with the lowest form of wit.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a boffo presentation is arranged out of Busby Berkeley, Hi, Mom! and Theater of Blood, borrowing Herschell Gordon Lewis’s electric organ while building toward the image of the chained reviewer kicked in the mouth by the topless ballerina… a manifesto for an immoral cinema…exists in that disconcerting crossroads of loathsome exploitation and annihilating art.”–Fernando F. Croce, Cinepassion.org

(This movie was nominated for review by Lee Townsend, who said “this distorted my mind many years ago and let me realize what weird really was.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)