The Point (1971)

A real oddity from the early 70s, still fondly remembered and much-loved, perhaps due in part to its Beatles connections. Based on a an album of the same name by Harry Nilsson (a long-time John Lennon associate), it's an animated made-for-TV "fable" which bears more than a passing resemblance to the feature film Yellow Submarine (1968) and, in its later incarnations, it featured a narration by Ringo Starr, warming up perhaps for his stint as the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine on TV.

Beautifully animated in eye-searing psychedelic tones by a team that included prolific small screen animators Fred Wolf and Jimmy T. Murakami, The Point is a simple and idealistic but nonetheless effective plea for tolerance and understanding dressed up in dayglo colours, extraordinary design and unexpected plot twists and turns, peppered with plentiful excellent Nilsson songs along the way.

The peculiar plot charts the journey of young Oblio (voiced by Mike Lookinland, familiar to TV viewers as Bobby Brady from The Brady Bunch (1969-1974)), a child with a round head in a society where everyone else has, by law, a pointed head, who is cast out of his village at the behest of an evil Count and banished to the much-feared Pointless Forest. There he meets a string of bizarre characters (among them The Pointed Man, The Rockman and The Leafman) before coming to the conclusion that everything and everyone has a point even if at first they seem not to and returning to change the Pointed Village forever.

Nilsson never made any bones about the lysergic source for his fantasy, noting that "I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it'"[1]. And director Wolf and his team were clearly on the same wavelength and went to town with the wild, hallucinatory imagery, even outdoing the trippy weirdness of Yellow Submarine. Even if the message may seem a little too blunt and on-the-nose, there's so much to enjoy in the constantly surprising parade of psychedelic visuals that it's impossible not to find The Point endlessly fascinating.

If there's a fault to be found with The Point it is that the underlying messages - worthy though they undoubtedly are - are rather unsubtly conveyed and often seem wincingly idealistic. Like so much of the hippy inflected idealism of the time, it's hard not to agree that Nilsson has, if you will, a point, but he tends to hammer it home as though he's just discovered some extraordinary cosmic truth when in fact he's just stumbled upon the obvious thanks to a copious ingestion of acid.

That aside, The Point remains a remarkable piece of work, all the more so when one considers that it was first shown on prime-time television. It physically hurts trying to imagine anyone, least of all one of the major networks, attempting to palm off anything quite as odd as The Point in prime-time today.

When it first aired, the voice of the storytelling father was that of Dustin Hoffman but contractual problems prevented further screenings with that narration so The Point when through an extraordinary series of reworkings. Although the visual components have thankfully remained consistent, the narration has been revoiced by Alan Barzman (for further TV screenings), Alan Thicke (for a version seen on US cable TV during the 80s) and finally by Starr, whose tones grace most subsequent VHS and DVD releases.

NOTES
1. Quoted by Alan Jacobson in his review of The Point in Bright Lights Film Journal no.44 (May 2004).

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978)

Kiss are a genuine rock and roll phenomenon, four occasionally made-up, larger-than-life rockers whose over-the-top stage shows and ludicrous stage personae have made them one of the biggest bands on the planet. At the tail-end of the 1970s, at the height of their success, the foursome succumbed to that affliction that seemed to grip many a 70s band and decided that acting was the next step on the road to world domination. How wrong they were...

The result was Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, sometimes referred to as Attack of the Phantoms, a TV movie in which the group - then comprising drummer Peter Criss (alter ego: Cat Man), lead guitarist Ace Frehley (Space Ace), bass player Gene Simmons (Demon) and rhythm guitarist/singer Paul Stanley (Starchild) - are reinvented as superheroes, taking on the evil Abner Devereaux [perennial movie villain Anthony Zerbe], an amusement park engineer dabbling in mind control, a series of life-like cyborgs and robot doppelgangers.

Kiss get involved when Devereaux creates a mechanical Gene Simmons which goes on the rampage in the park and the daft plot culminates in a fake Kiss taking to the stage and trying to incite the crowd to riot. Naturally the real Kiss - inexplicably imbued with superpowers - come to the rescue and strut their fire-breathing, blood-spitting stuff in a climactic concert.

Extraordinarily bad in almost every respect, Kiss in Phantom of the Park is an ordeal even for the most devoted of Kiss fanatic, let alone the rest of us. Kiss may have been right when they declared that God gave rock and roll to us - sadly He took his eye off the ball when this piece of televisual excrement was being prepared and failed to step in to save Mankind from that most unpleasant of terrors: the rock band vanity project. Everything about this effort is cock-eyed or just plain wrong, from the title (Kiss never actually meet any "Phantom of the Park") to the premise (Kiss as superheroes? Please...) to the special effects (special? Ha!) to very notion that Kiss could carry a film on their acting talents alone (the entire band appears to be stoned throughout and for all he contributes the proceedings Frehley may well not have turned up at all).

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park was made by Hanna-Barbera Productions, better known at that time for its seemingly endless production line of cheapjack kids cartoons and it resembles nothing more than a live-action version of one of the company's best known shows, Scooby Doo, Where Are You? (1969 - 1972). And it's just as predictable and vapid as that show was. Director Gordon Hessler was a very long way from his late 60s/early 70s British horrors (The Oblong Box (1969), Scream and Scream Again (1970), Cry of the Banshee (1970)) and it's clear from the lazy way he stages the token "action" scenes that his heart just wasn't in it. And who can blame him...

Extraordinarily, Kiss contribute less music to the effort than you might expect. After a sort-of promo video opening sequence, there are couple of concert sequences but the rest of the soundtrack is bog standard (ie horrid) late-70s disco wah-wah crap that would have had most Kiss fans vomiting as much blood as their heroes.

Even more extraordinarily, Kiss (sort of) got a second chance at screen stardom when they were the subject of fans' attempts to blag their way into a concert in Adam Rifkin's Detroit Rock City (1999), which wasn't terribly good but which was far and away preferable to Phantom. In the years between the two films, Gene Simmons had a go at "proper" acting, turning up in the likes of Runaway (1984), Trick or Treat (1986), Wanted: Dead or Alive (1987) and Red Surf (1990). perhaps unsurprisingly, Oscar has yet to come a-calling.

Terrible, terrible terrible... If you're a Kiss fan, you'll want to watch it of course but prepare yourself for nothing but disappointment, heartache and disillusionment. You have been warned!
KEVIN LYONS

The Secret of the Loch (1934)

The first attempt to put the fabled Loch Ness Monster on the screen is a beast almost as curious as old Nessie herself. Made at a time when reported sightings were cropping up all over the British press, Secret of the Loch no doubt benefited enormously from the famous photographs of the monster taken by respected surgeon Colonel R.K. Wilson which appeared shortly before the film was released in 1934.

What strikes the unwary viewer on their first encounter with The Secret of the Loch is that it's mostly played for comedy. Seymour Hicks mostly plays it straight (though cuts the ham extra thick for the occasion) as the obsessed and publicity shy professor determined to prove that something monstrous is lurking beneath the surface of the Loch, but just about everyone else is presented as a buffoon, drunk or half-wit. The press pack pursuing Hicks' Professor Heggie are particularly hopeless and any Scottish viewer might be forgiven for having serious issues with the way the locals - drunken superstitious rednecks almost to a man - are presented. That said, the scientific intelligentsia are equally shoddily treated in the film's funniest scene set in the British Museum (presumably) when Heggie tries and fails to present his theories to a room full of scientists madder than anything Universal was cooking up at the time.

It's no real surprise that scriptwriters Charles Bennett (later a writer for Hitchcock (The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936)) and Irwin Allen) and Billie Bristow played it for laughs as they had precious little else to work with. Hampered by a miniscule budget they were never going to be able to write scenes to match the previous year's King Kong and indeed go out of their way to delay the appearance of the monster for as long as possible. The clowning around of the cast is presumably meant to tide us over until the climactic unveiling of the beastie itself.

And when it does finally put in an appearance, the sense of anti-climax is crushing. There was no room in the budget here for stop motion animation. Not enough even for a man in a suit. Instead, we get a rather lethargic looking iguana, photographically enlarged in a terrarium which the film-makers have done nothing whatsoever to disguise - there's never any sense at all in any of the climactic scenes, supposedly set in the depths of the Loch, that we're actually underwater at all.

Today, the film is interesting not for what it does but for who did it. Director Milton Rosmer - a former actor with a filmography stretching back to the 1910s - was half way through a not-terribly-exciting career that also included the Tod Slaughter vehicle Maria Marten, of the Murder in the Red Barn (1935). His acting credits were somewhat more interesting, numbering among them titles such as The Man Without a Soul (1916), High Treason (1928), a TV version of Gaslight (1947) and The Monkey's Paw (1948). Of more interest is the credit for one David Lean as the film's editor. Lean famously earned his dues toiling away in the lowest echelons of the British film industry before becoming one of British cinema's most revered directors.

The Secret of the Loch is available on budget Region 1 DVDs and is of some interest to students of the Loch Ness legend and historians of British genre cinema alike, but anyone else might find it something a chore. The humour is more hit than miss, the monster is laughable and the performances wildly variable but it nevertheless has a naïve charm that's curiously hard to resist.
KEVIN LYONS

Find out more about The Secret of the Loch at the main EOFFTV site.

Morgiana (1972)

Juraj Herz has become one of the great overlooked movie fantasists. 1968's Spalovac mrtvol/The Cremator (1969) is possibly his best known work outside of his native Czechoslovakia though he's created several fine genre pieces since then - among them Panna e netvor/Beauty and the Beast (1978), Deváté srdce/The Ninth Heart (1978), Upir z Feratu (1981) and the subject of this trip into Kev's Cupboard, Morgiana (1972).

Very much a borderline horror film - it's much more a Gothic in the purest sense of the word - Morgiana nevertheless plays with many of the tropes of the horror genre, from it's Hammer-like design, monstrously villainous anti-heroine, blaringly emphatic score and swooning, hallucinating apparently doomed heroine. Derived from a story by Russian writer Alexandr Grin (who apparently starved to death), Morgiana stars Iva Janzurová making the most of a twin role, playing sisters Viktoria and Klara who have both inherited homes from their recently deceased father. But the black-clad, scheming Viktoria is jealous of Klara's popularity and sets in motion a plot to kill her with a slow-acting poison. But it all backfires when much of the surrounding population - including Viktoria's beloved cat Morgiana - seem to succumb to the poison and the supplier of the drug starts blackmailing her.

The story is, frankly, overwrought nonsense but what makes Morgiana such a pleasure to watch and why it sticks in the mind for so long afterwards is Herz's outragerosu visual sense. While the soundtrack tries to pummel you into submission, the visuals are also busy trying their best to disorientate the unwary viewer - the jittery, nervous camera seems to be constantly on the prowl, even switching at times to shots from Morgiana's point of view. As Klara succumbs to the poison, her hallucinations are vividly portrayed in trippy, red-hued sequences which fit perfectly well with the film's overall air of hysteria and melodrama. Imagine Ken Russell's Gothic (1986) only done properly.

Regrettably, Morgiana comes to an unsatisfactory conclusion with Viktoria faking her own suicide but dying anyway when Morgiana intervenes (it's never really clear just how smart that cat really is) and Klara recovering from her affliction, the 'poison' having been nothing of the sort. Quite why she hallucinates so violently and what it is that's affecting the locals is never explained.

But until then, Morgiana is a highly commendale film for those who like their horror cerebral and Gothic. It boasts an excellent dual performance from Janzurová (who continues to act in Czech film andf television to this day), stunning photography from Jaroslav Kucera (who lensed several other films with Herz as well as Oldrick Lipský's Nick Carter spoof Adéla jeste nevecerela (1977)) and vivid production design from Zbynek Hloch.

Herz's original plans for the film would have resulted in something completely different to what was eventually released. In an interview with Kinoeye [1] he explained how the film was supposed to end with Klara waking up, asking for her sister and being told that she doesn't have one, the implication being that Klara has been fighting a battle between the good and bad halves of her personality. In the original novel Viktoria and Klara were the same schizophrenic person and this revelation might well have saved the film from the disappointing climax we're stuck with here.

Morgiana temporarily put paid to Herz's career. Head dramaturg Ludvík Toman complained that the film was not the romance that he had been expecting Herz to make and initially called for the film to be banned. Only when the film became a hit with the Russians two years later (the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc forces had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968) was Herz able to work again but only on television. It would be fourteen years before he made another feature film.
KEVIN LYONS

[1] http://www.kinoeye.org/02/01/kosulicova01.php

Crash che botte!/Supermen Against the Orient/The Three Fantastic Supermen in the Orient (1974)

In 1967, Gianfranco Parolini gave the world I Fantastici tre supermen, a knockabout comedy that fused then-popular elements from the James Bond films and the crop of small screen superheroes like Batman (1966 - 1968) and The Green Hornet (1966 - 1967). It spawned a series of sequels and spin-offs, many of them directed by Bitto Albertini (aka Al Albert) who was at the helm for 1974's Crash che botte!, aka Supermen Against the Orient and The Three Fantastic Supermen in the Orient.

Designed to cash in on the mid-70s craze for kung fu movies, Crash che botte! stars Robert Malcolm (a mostly forgotten would-be leading man, here with fine 70s porno star moustache, who made only a handful of movies in the mid-70s before disappearing) as inept FBI agent Captain Robert Wallace who ducks out of his own wedding (as he did in the previous film Che fanno i nostri supermen tra le vergini della jungla?/Three Supermen in the Jungle (1970)) to take on a case in Bangkok where a number of American expatriates have mysteriously vanished. Following a series of leads (one of which is supplied by the incontinent, Richard Nixon-obsessed US ambassador to Thailand (Jacques Dufilho)) Wallace sets off in hot pursuit of the martial arts master Tang, played by Shaw Brothers legend Lo Lieh. Unlikely meetings (Wallace meets Italians Max (Antonio Cantafora) and Jerry (Sal Borgese) at a kung fu match), mistaken identities (Tang turns out to be an undercover drugs cop on the trail of the real villain of the piece, Chen Loh), appalling dialogue (Wallace rounds on one set of low-lifes with a cry of "mother grabbers!") and a set of superhero costumes that make the wearers invincible fill out he rest of the film's frenetic running time.

There's never a dull moment in Crash che botte! - lots of very silly ones, certainly, but the pace is such that there's always something daft going on to keep your attention. Albertini does a fine job of replicating the Shaw Brothers look, complete with those never-popular crash zooms and - accidentally - the stilted, faltering dubbing we've come to know and love over the decades. The obligatory martial arts scenes are surprisingly well done given that they were filmed by a Westerner (a very young Jackie Chan turns up briefly in one of them) though inevitably they're horribly compromised in the many full-screen versions of the film that are doing the rounds. The humour is less successful. Dated and often racist, it's an embarrassing collection of worn-out gags and poorly conceived slapstick scenes that really haven't stood the test of time at all well.

But the real problem with the film is that Albertini becomes so entranced by his 'exotic' locations and the high-kicking martial arts that he pretty much neglects the Fantastic Supermen. Malcolm doesn't collect the invulnerable longjohns until almost an hour into the film and then does nothing with them until the climax, which make the film much less of a fantasy film than an energetic if not-terribly-good kung fu film. But if you can make it through the terrible gags and reach the finale, you'll be rewarded by a breathless and extended action scene that mostly makes it all worthwhile.

Crash che botte! isn't essential viewing by any means but if it comes your way and you've a taste for 70s martial arts (the Shaw Brothers variety in particular) and Italian slapstick you'll have a whale of a time with it. And there can't be anyone reading this who could fail to be amused by the quite brilliant theme song by Nico Fidenco which turns up over and over in different instrumental arrangements throughout the film. Not so much sung as beaten into submission by an anonymous gruff-voiced session man, it contains such deathless couplets as "Call me Ping Pong, I'm the boss from Hong Kong" (a particularly curious lyric as there's no-one in the film named Ping Pong) and the quite wonderful "I love to destroy and dismember" and is one of the finest theme tunes any 70s movie can offer. Priceless stuff.

The Last Dinosaur (1977)

Back in 1966, TV animation producers Arthur Rankin Jr and Jules Bass won the rights to use King Kong in a short lived animated TV show, King Kong (1966) and subsequently took the character - along with one of the TV show’s new creations, the cheekily named Dr Who - to Japan for Kingu Kongu no gyakushû/King Kong Escapes (1967), a co-production with kaiju masters Toho. A decade later, they were back in Japan for The Last Dinosaur, a lost world adventure originally destined for theatrical release but which, in the States, ended up debuting (with cuts) on ABC as part of their Movie of the Week strand. Elsewhere, it escaped into cinemas but has since disappeared back into semi-obscurity.

An ill-looking Richard Boone - whose slurring, halting delivery suggests that he was under the influence for most of the shoot - stars as billionaire Maston Thrust (a joke name surely, though I can’t figure out how - surely they didn’t mean it to be serious) organizes an expedition to a tropical world in the shadow of an active polar volcano where the team encounter several men in rubber monster suits and a scabby look tribe of cavemen.

Kicking off with a terrible Bond inspired theme song, warbled by Nancy Wilson, The Last Dinosaur gets off to a shaky start when we’re introduced to the titular character - not, as one might expect, the Jurassic monsters that we get to see later but the chauvinistic, arrogant and deeply unlikable Thrust. It’s hard to watch Boone, so good in TV’s Have Gun - Will Travel (1957 - 1963) and as a heavy in a string of 50s and 60s movies, looking so out of sorts here. It’s hard not to laugh at his sunglasses, which never seem to sit on his face properly throughout the entire film, or chuckle at his bizarre delivery but it’s deeply sad to see the former Hec Ramsey (1972 - 1974) reduced to this.

Things get slightly more interesting when the expedition reaches the lost world via a tunneling machine that owes much to the previous year’s adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core. Almost immediately, the team are set upon by dinosaurs - a pterodactyl suspended on clearly visible wires that can perform physics-defying mid-air turns; a four-legged creature obviously but effectively played by a man on all fours in a rubber suit; and the star attraction, something supposed to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex but which resembles nothing thus far discovered by paleontology.

Some cavemen turn up to make the stranded crew’s life even more complicated, but no-one’s really interested in them. The dinosaurs are the main attraction here and they’re good value for lovers of bad cinema. Being a co-production with Tsuburaya Productions, the effects are of the standard we’ve come to expect from Japanese monster movies of the 1970s, after the company’s founder, the legendary Eiji Tsuburaya, had died. Thus, you’ll either find them too irritating and cheesy to watch or will revel in their endearing fakeness and take some pleasure in the vaguely surreal imagery. Men in rubber suits rarely look good and the monsters here are ridiculous beyond words, though the optical work is frequently rather good. And fans of classic kaiju eiga will love the frequent use of Godzilla’s trademark roar whenever the dinosaur appears.

When The Last Dinosaur was first broadcast, its already shoddy technical achievements were made to look all the more slapdash by some clumsy editing, forced upon it by ABC’s Standards and Practices suits who wanted some of the dino-violence toned down. This explains why some of the scene transitions are so ungainly but doesn’t explain the disorienting jump in the middle of the film - when the explorers first encounter the cavemen, dialogue suggests that they’ve actually encountered them before (Thrust notes that they’ve got spears now) and it turns out a few seconds later that they’ve been stranded in the lost world for four months. It seems that some expository scenes were written but never even filmed, thus leaving a jarring hole in the plot.

The Last Dinosaur will appeal to lovers of dinosaur cinema and fans of kaiju eiga but will probably leave everyone else scratching their heads or frantically clamoring for the remote control’s stop button.
KEVIN LYONS

Lolita vib-zeme/Lolita Vibrator Torture (1987)

The history of the Japanese pinku eiga has been peppered with some of the most outrageous viewing ordeals imaginable. Initially softcore sex romps made from the early 60s onwards and immensely popular for two decades, the pinku films were largely the province of the smaller studios that proliferated in the post-war years. Shot quickly and on low budgets, and usually in a little more than a week, the pinku eiga barely ran more than an hour and were made under the restrictive hand of the Japanese censors who forbade any glimpses of pubic hair.

By the early 70s, companies like Toei were dabbling with the genre but it was Nikkatsu, the oldest studio in Japan, that really claimed pinku eiga for their own, initiating what has since become known as the Roman porno series. The Nikkatsu films were a cut above the usual pinkus, boasting better production values but even they suffered with the arrival of home video and the rise of the AV (Adult Video). Moves by Eirin, the Japanese censor board, to curb the excesses of the pinku resulted in stricter controls that all but killed off the theatrical pinku by the late 1980s. Nikkatsu declared bankruptcy in 1993 but by now a new generation of ambitious young directors were using the pinku tradition for their own ends.

Among them was Hisayasu Sato who made his debut in 1985 and went on to be one of the most prolific pinku directors although, like his peers, he soon started toning down the consensual sex scenes in favour of much darker, nastier concerns. Films like the notorious Nekeddo burâdo: Megyaku (1995), known in the West as Naked Blood, favoured horror over sex earning him comparisons with David Cronenberg for his affinity for 'body horror.' He's also unusual among the current crop of pinku directors for happily alternating between gay and straight pinku - more often directors will stick to one or the other but Sato refuses to recognise any such boundaries and restrictions.

But although Sato's later films have been confrontational and unsettling - he's made films about bestiality and regularly uses guerrilla film making techniques, including sending scantily clad actresses out into the streets to interact with unsuspecting passers-by - it's his 1987 short, Lolita vib-zeme that remains one of his nastiest works.

Known in the English speaking world as Lolita Vibrator Torture it's every bit as nasty as its title suggests. Made for Shishi Pro and distributed by Nikkatsu, it pretty much abandons any pretence at being erotic in the accepted sense of the word and instead trades in sadism and humiliation. The plot is minimalist - a sexual psychopath abducts schoolgirls and rapes and tortures them to death with the aid of a dildo. Subtle this certainly isn't.

It's very long way from what most would think of as erotic but by this stage in the game, eroticism wasn't really what Sato was striving for. His detached, somewhat cold direction thankfully discourages us from getting too involved with what we're seeing but that doesn't make the film any less unsettling. The truck in which most of the action takes place, festooned with distressing photographic images of the killer's previous victims, rivals the family's hell-hole of a home in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) as the most unpleasant setting in horror films.

The fact that the actresses involved (all, we are assured, of legal age) look much younger than they really are and all wear the sailor suit uniform so associated with Japanese schoolgirls makes an already disquieting film all the more sleazy and questionable. You'll likely feel uncomfortable while watching Lolita vib-zeme rather than entertained and certainly there's little likelihood that you'll be aroused. But it undoubtedly pushes some buttons and you certainly won't come away from it felling nothing. Whether you want those buttons pressed or those feelings evoked is another matter.

Despite the presence in his extensive filmography of the likes of Nekeddo burâdo: Megyaku, Sato actually mellowed somewhat in the years since Lolita vib-zeme though still had plenty of confrontational and challenging films to come, even casting the notorious cannibal Issei Sagawa (who murdered and partially consumed Dutch student Renée Hartevelt while studying in Paris in 1981) in his 1992 film Shisenjiyou no Aria/Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture.
KEVIN LYONS