Tag Archives: 1977

60*. RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE (1977)

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

“This is really weird.”–Raggedy Andy, when a camel asks him to climb on and join him as he chases an invisible caravan in the sky

DIRECTED BY: Richard Williams

FEATURING: Claire Williams, voices of Didi Conn, Mark Baker, Fred Stuthman, Niki Flacks, George S. Irving, Marty Brill, Joe Silver, Alan Sues

PLOT: On her owner’s birthday, Raggedy Ann and her brother Andy meet Babette, a snobbish new doll from France. Babette is quickly abducted by snowglobe pirate Captain Contagious. Ann and Andy venture out into the night, where they encounter a camel, a taffy pit, and an inflatable Loony king, before finally confronting the pirate ship.

Still from Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

BACKGROUND:

  • Raggedy Ann began her life as a mass-produced rag doll in 1915. A series of children’s books based on the character followed in the 1920s, continuing until the 1970s. Fleischer Brothers studios made three animated Raggedy Ann and Andy shorts in the 1940s. The dolls are still produced today.
  • This feature film was loosely adapted from the 1924 children’s book “Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees.
  • Director Richard Williams took over for originally-slated director Abe Levitow, who died before production began.
  • The adaptation was originally conceived as a Broadway musical, then a TV special, before becoming a feature film. An actual Broadway musical with many of the same characters (but a different plot) followed in 1986.
  • The film ended up costing more than double its original budget, and was a box office failure. It was released on VHS, but has never officially been released on DVD or Blu-ray.
  • Voted onto the Apocrypha by readers in this poll.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Greedy, an inexplicable being who inhabits the Taffy Pit and exists as a sort of candy-themed, eternally mutating ian horror-cum-cupcake.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Ghost camel caravan in the sky; expanding looney king

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Raggedy Ann was a hobo doll, the cheapest and most unassuming children’s toy imaginable. Throwing this plain Jane toy into a backyard “Alice in Wonderland” scenario shouldn’t have produced results as odd as it did. A Musical Adventure is uneven, but in its insaner moments, it genuinely goes for broke.

Original trailer for Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

COMMENTS: “Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all Continue reading 60*. RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE (1977)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ALUCARDA (1977)

AKA Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas; Innocents From Hell

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Tina Romero, Susana Kamini, , David Silva

PLOT: When orphaned 17th-century teenager Justine is shipped off to a convent, she meets up with the similarly motherless Alucarda— who happens to be the spawn of the devil—and soon the pair are wreaking havoc amongst the clergy.

COMMENTS: In the recent papal political potboiler Conclave, ’ Cardinal Thomas Lawrence makes the case for the critically intertwined nature of faith and doubt. Certainty, he tells his fellow cardinals, is dangerous because it nudges us toward arrogance and intolerance. “Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery.”

One can scarcely imagine what Cardinal Lawrence would make of Alucarda, a film that hasn’t got a doubtful bone in its body. Given director Moctezuma’s history as an acolyte of Alejandro Jodorowsky, one might expect a certain amount of surrealism or mysticism, but this is a movie that fully believes in the devil and doesn’t find metaphor in a single damn thing. When a satyr cavorts with young girls, communion with Satan can be the only goal, and when you meet the story’s lone skeptic, a doctor who stakes out a position firmly in favor of science and reason, you can be sure that he will learn a harsh lesson in demonic possession and will drop his rational pose at a moment’s notice. Your sense of the film’s credulity is very dependent upon your willingness to believe that biblical evil lurks nearby awaiting its opportunity.

That amusingly unambiguous tone drives the film’s central performance, the teenaged, born-to-be-bad Alucarda herself, who exudes a nervous wild-eyed energy, desperate to win the favor of her potential new playmate Justine, and irrepressibly eager to start being naughty. (Romero, in her 30s, is an impressively convincing youth. Her counterpart, Kamini, is… not.) She’s like a toddler in her emotional purity, which gives her quest to upend the stodgy righteousness of the convent a potent charge. Unfortunately, that single-mindedness serves other characters less well, like the upright, uptight Father Lázaro (Silva, in his final role) who leads a round of self-flagellation to fend off bad thoughts, or the host of nuns whose performances must be reductively but accurately described as histrionic, writhing and shrieking in turn. The world of Alucarda is devoid of nuance, which is a time-saver, but makes the proceedings less engaging.

If there’s one word that sums up Alucarda, it’s “impatient.” Moctezuma aspires to the wildness of Argento or the eroticism of Rollin, but you get the meat of those filmmakers without any of the sauce. It’s mere minutes from Alucarda and Justine meeting a goat man to that same demon leading the two girls in a nude blood ritual, and a full orgy in the woods is just around the corner from that. Moctezuma is in such a hurry to get to the good stuff there that he dispenses with all of the build-up that makes the shock and gore so entertaining. Alucarda is a horror film without suspense, like frosting without cake or sex without foreplay.

As a delivery system for horror conventions, Alucarda is an impressively efficient machine, but that makes it more like a highlight reel or a series of clips on TikTok than like a real film. What it really needs is a little uncertainty, some sense of mystery to give it depth. As it is, Alucarda is like faith without doubt, which some among the religiously inclined might tell you is not faith at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This movie is just plain weird… The story is really shallow (girl meets girl, girls worship Satan, everybody dies) and simplistic.” – Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro

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

Alucarda
  • Factory sealed DVD

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN (1977)

Li san jiao wei zhen di yu men; AKA Deadly Hands of Kung Fu

Still from The Dragon Lives Again (1977)

DIRECTED BY: Lo Chi

FEATURING:  Siu-Lung Leung (as Bruce Leong), Ie Lung Shen, Ching Tang, Alexander Grand, Jenny, Wong Mei, Eric Tsang, Bobby Canavarro, Hsi Chang

PLOT: Martial arts superstar Bruce Lee dies, winds up in the afterlife, and soon butts heads with the King of the Underworld, the Godfather, the Man With No-Name, Zatoichi, 007, Emmanuelle, the Exorcist and Dracula—but he’s still Bruce Lee, and he’s got Caine the Wanderer, the One-Armed Swordsman and Popeye the Sailor Man backing him up…

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: There are many, many films in the wake of Bruce Lee’s death made to capitalize off of the death and his fame. Very, very few of them pull off the feat of being entertaining and imaginative enough to surpass their crass origins to become something that stands on its own.

COMMENTS: The Bruce Lee Phenomenon is unfathomable to someone who didn’t grow up in the mid-70s. You had to experience it firsthand. There’s no one in the present day who comes close to Lee: cultural icons all have their share of imitators, but few can spawn an entire subgenre after their death.

The “Bruceploitation” phenomenon encompassed all aspects of Bruce Lee’s short life and ongoing legacy, from biopics and docudramas to variations on his most popular films to total fantasies on his death (or faux death) and afterlife, all with a variety of imitators/wannabees/clones presented to the still Bruce-hungry public. Some were unapologetic cash grabs, while some genuflected some modicum of respect towards Lee.

The Dragon Lives Again occupies its own niche. It’s the most bonkers Bruceploitation movie and probably the most entertaining of the bunch, making good on its opening “Dedicated to the Millions Who Love Bruce Lee” title. It’s one of the best examples of a theory what experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin would encapsulize years later in his motto, “Copyright infringement is your best entertainment value.” It’s actually kind of wild that it works as well as it does, bringing such disparate characters together. (Lee is as much of a brand character as the others, fighting Dracula and his minions in his Kato wardrobe from “The Green Hornet”.)

The Dragon Lives Again (1977) KatoThe comedy is good, including moves named for films Lee appeared in and talking skeletons. At times it’s naughty: a running gag involving Lee’s rumored sexual prowess and the Underworld King’s wives attempting to find that out firsthand; a joke involving nunchucks and “Bruce Lee’s Third Leg,” which was snatched subsequently for other kung-fu comedies. And just the idea of bringing together Popeye, Emmanuelle, 007 and others is brilliant, especially since such a thing wouldn’t even be possible in today’s corporate climate unless it were a no-budget ultra-underground project that maybe 30 people would even be aware of existing.

The Dragon Lives Again has been available in various dodgy versions for years, but I doubt that anyone is going to better the Severin Blu-ray in their box set “The Game of Clones: Bruceploitation Vol. 1.” The original negative was deemed unusable, so they utilized a 2K scan of a print from the AGFA Collection. It’s not immaculate, but it’s much better than what’s was previously available. The disc has a commentary by Bruceploitation experts Michael Worth and Frank Djeng, an audio essay by one Lovely Jon, and 7 minutes of deleted/extended scenes from the French release.

The Dragon Lives Again (1977) The Third Leg of Bruce

Cinefamily trailer:

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…perhaps no Kung-Fu film is more insane; more bizarre; more completely fucking bonkers than THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN. Not only does it fit quite snuggly into the Bruceploitation genre, but it has more weirdness per minute than any production you’re likely to see this side of David Lynch.”–Doug Tilley, Daily Grindhouse

 

WEIRD VIEW CREW: DEMON SEED (1977)

There’s no demon in the movie, but “TRS-80 Seed” just didn’t have the same ring. Pete concludes it’s a weird movie (and a possibly a prophetic one), but not necessarily a great watch ( concluding it’s like The Story of O meets Lawnmover Man). Julie “Don’t Look Now” Christie stars, Donald “Performance” Cammell directs.

WEIRD VIEW CREW: ANDY WARHOL’S BAD (1977)

A pitch-black, campy comedy about murder for hire in which the victims include babies and puppies, starring cult icons Carroll Baker and . Directed by one Jed Johnson (Warhol’s lover at the time). Before , there was . Pete thinks this one is deserving of Apocrypha status.

(This movie was nominated for review by Christian McLaughlin of Westgate Gallery, who called this “astonishingly ahead-of-its-time 1977 black comedy” his “#1 choice” for the list, but also warned “it’s almost impossible to see a decent & uncut print.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)