Or, from Konga to Queen Kong
Not the 1976 Frank Agrama entry but the American female wrestler, Dee Booher, of the same name and a film that makes even Agrama's monstrosity look accomplished by comparison.
For what we have here, as the title indicates, is a short on the subject of mud wrestling, a sports entertainment that sees scantily clad women rolling around in mud for the pleasure of a mostly male and plebian audience .
The drama is provided by the US versus UK angle and its provision of the necessary villain and hero role functions, all played with appropriate excess (cf Roland Barthes' famous essay in Mythologies).
The main points of interest are sociological and historical rather than aesthetic - unless, of course, seeing women rolling around in mud gives you a particular thrill.
And that, I suppose, that was what the film-makers were banking upon.
For bankrolling Hellcats: Mud Wrestiling was none other than David Sullivan, one of the UK's biggest porn barons. He was the man who specialised in the bait and switch, of promising the punters one thing - usually then-illegal hardcore material - and giving them another - the same old softcore as last time and, if they hadn't wised up yet, the time before that.
With a plethora of magazines to uncritically hype his wares it was a winning strategy.
One of the few occasions on which Sullivan himself was taken for a ride was by veteran nude photographer Harrison Marks on Come Play with Me, a bizarre combination of 70s softcore sex comedy and old-style music hall that looked all but unsaleable.
But thanks to his magazines' ceaseless promotion of the film and its nominal star, Mary Millington, along with keeping it in one of his cinemas for four years solid, Sullivan still managed to somehow make the film profitable. (Among the posters for other films featured within Hellcats, even the not so sharp eyed can spot one for Come Play with Me.)
It was around this time that Sullivan met John M. East, the disreputable member of a respectable theatrical family. Their association outlived Millington's suicide, with East going on to appear in other productions by Sullivan's Roldvale company, within which the porn mogul also sought to find a replacement for his most profitable but now dead asset.
East is the writer on Hellcats: Mud Wrestling and conducts the on-screen interviews - with an admirably straight face, it must be said, given the preposterousness of his subjects - while the film might be read as a vehicle both for its 'sport' and for another porn performer, Vicky Scott.
Incredible though it may seem, Hellcats: Mud Wrestling may not even represent the nadir of the British sexploitation film. Its companion pieces Queen Kong: The Amazonian Woman and Foxy Female Boxers would also have to be considered contenders...
Monday, 20 July 2009
Sunday, 19 July 2009
Snuff / The Slaughter / American Cannibale / El ángel de la muerte
First things first: Snuff is not an actual snuff film.
If we define a snuff film as one in which someone is deliberately killed on camera with the intention of releasing the resulting footage for entertainment purposes, then no such thing has been found or proven to exist to date.
There are certainly films which trade on the myth of snuff - like this one - or which incorporate real-life death footage. But even in the marginal case of the mondo film Africa Addio, which features actual on-camera executions, there is no evidence that the presence of the film-makers and the camera was the decisive factor behind these killings.
What Snuff did, however, was connect the idea of the snuff film back to its origin, in rumours around the Manson family; present what snuff footage might conceivably look like; and generally popularised the form in a way that the far more disturbing Last House on Dead End street had failed to do.
The origins of the film lie in a 1971 horror film made by notorious exploitation couple Roberta and Michael Findlay, The Slaughter. Made in Argentina and post-synchronised into English, Slaughter depicts a Manson-like guru named Satan who compels his female followers to commit murder. Two of their victims are a sleazy independent film producer, Max Marsh, and his Sharon Tate-styled leading lady, Terri London, who have come to South America to make a film.
The bargain basement, utterly inept production was redeemed only by a Steppenwolf-esque rock soundtrack; some gratuitous breast exposure; and the naming of one of the characters as Horst Frank, presumably not in reference to the German actor even though there is a strange discussion of the ethics of the West German arms industry equipping Israel to indicate that nationality did have some bearing here. (We all know about The Boys from Brazil and Adolf Eichmann hiding out in Argentina, after all)
Later exploitation distributor Alan Shackleton bought the film and, realising what a dog egg he had on his hands, had a new coda filmed in which another actress, who looks nothing like her Argentinian predecessor in the main film, is supposedly killed by her director and crew.
The effects within this sequence are unconvincing as is the way in which the camera 'just happens' to run out of film at the climactic moment. But, bolstered by Shackleton's clever promotion of the film, as he himself orchestrated a campaign of outrage against it, it didn't matter.
If someone went to see the film for themselves then Shackleton had already made his money off them, no matter what their response to it.
If Shackleton couldn't lose, nor could the feminists who put their hearts before their heads in supporting his campaigns and not bothering to research the subject. Basically, it seems the truth just didn't matter all that much when the legend was so much better to print.
Co-director Michael Findlay later died in a helicopter accident on the then Pan-Am building. He was on his way to demonstrate a new 3D camera. Part of me cannot help wondering if there is footage of his death extant and that it would thus make a suitably ironic inclusion in a Faces of Death entry.
If we define a snuff film as one in which someone is deliberately killed on camera with the intention of releasing the resulting footage for entertainment purposes, then no such thing has been found or proven to exist to date.
There are certainly films which trade on the myth of snuff - like this one - or which incorporate real-life death footage. But even in the marginal case of the mondo film Africa Addio, which features actual on-camera executions, there is no evidence that the presence of the film-makers and the camera was the decisive factor behind these killings.
What Snuff did, however, was connect the idea of the snuff film back to its origin, in rumours around the Manson family; present what snuff footage might conceivably look like; and generally popularised the form in a way that the far more disturbing Last House on Dead End street had failed to do.
The origins of the film lie in a 1971 horror film made by notorious exploitation couple Roberta and Michael Findlay, The Slaughter. Made in Argentina and post-synchronised into English, Slaughter depicts a Manson-like guru named Satan who compels his female followers to commit murder. Two of their victims are a sleazy independent film producer, Max Marsh, and his Sharon Tate-styled leading lady, Terri London, who have come to South America to make a film.
The bargain basement, utterly inept production was redeemed only by a Steppenwolf-esque rock soundtrack; some gratuitous breast exposure; and the naming of one of the characters as Horst Frank, presumably not in reference to the German actor even though there is a strange discussion of the ethics of the West German arms industry equipping Israel to indicate that nationality did have some bearing here. (We all know about The Boys from Brazil and Adolf Eichmann hiding out in Argentina, after all)
Later exploitation distributor Alan Shackleton bought the film and, realising what a dog egg he had on his hands, had a new coda filmed in which another actress, who looks nothing like her Argentinian predecessor in the main film, is supposedly killed by her director and crew.
The effects within this sequence are unconvincing as is the way in which the camera 'just happens' to run out of film at the climactic moment. But, bolstered by Shackleton's clever promotion of the film, as he himself orchestrated a campaign of outrage against it, it didn't matter.
If someone went to see the film for themselves then Shackleton had already made his money off them, no matter what their response to it.
If Shackleton couldn't lose, nor could the feminists who put their hearts before their heads in supporting his campaigns and not bothering to research the subject. Basically, it seems the truth just didn't matter all that much when the legend was so much better to print.
Co-director Michael Findlay later died in a helicopter accident on the then Pan-Am building. He was on his way to demonstrate a new 3D camera. Part of me cannot help wondering if there is footage of his death extant and that it would thus make a suitably ironic inclusion in a Faces of Death entry.
Konga
This is one of those films that’s bad in almost every way – the exceptions being Gerard Schurmann’s beautiful score and the nice animated titles – but which is nevertheless so endearing that it’s certain to win over all but the most hard-hearted viewer.
Made under the auspices of Herman Cohen under the working title of I Was a Teenage Gorilla, the plot sees the famous scientist Dr Decker return unexpectedly from Africa a year after his plane went down, equipped with a new way of growing plants and animals to giant size and accompanied by a chimpanzee, Konga.
Note the discrepancy: We have an original title referring to a Gorilla but that Konga – who may have been a teenager in ape years for all I know – is a chimpanzee. It’s a discrepancy that can be explained away on the grounds that, first, a gorilla would have been rather more difficult to control on set and, second, that gorilla suits are easier to come by than chimpanzee ones.
Before: a chimpanzee
After: a gorilla
Indeed, one of Cohen’s earlier ventures was Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, whose man in the ape suit, Steve Calvert, actually made a career out of such roles, also appearing in The Bride of the Gorilla and The Bride and the Beast amongst others.
Another gorilla man, George Barrows, would later appear in Cohen’s follow-up to Konga, Black Zoo. Apparently Cohen here hired one of Barrows’ gorilla suits, which was then donned by another actor, Paul Stockman. The suit got damaged, encouraging Barrows to make sure that he was hired to wear it next time round.
Anyway, Decker is welcomed back by his assistant Margaret. Unfortunately he’s not as in love with her as she is with him and instead prefers co-ed Sandra Banks, who already has a boyfriend. This rivalry, along with an academic one featuring the dean of the college, is of course nothing a trained chimpanzee grown to giant gorilla size can’t deal with...
Besides Konga’s eventual suitmation rampage through the streets of London, tearing down buildings as if they were made of cardboard – probably because they were – and throwing people around as if they were dolls – probably because they are – other highlights include some decidedly phallic and vaginal carnivorous plants and an unfortunate cat whom the doctor is forced to shoot before it turns into a tiger after it drinks some of his miracle-grow formula.
Some of the plants...
Konga and a puny human
Though he was something of the go to man for any British horror film which couldn’t secure the services of Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, who plays Decker, also had his own distinct approach to the material. Whereas Lee would voice his derision at bad parts and dialogue and whereas Cushing approached each and every role with the same seriousness, believing that if he couldn’t take it seriously his audience would not, Gough always seemed to enjoy hamming things up, a bit like a British Vincent Prince, and Invariably playing the same smug, superior, self-satisfied and shouty character each time.
I wondered if the Decker name is a reference to Dr Cyclops’s Albert Dekker, especially since that film also sees its mad scientist experiment with size alteration, albeit miniaturisation.
Made under the auspices of Herman Cohen under the working title of I Was a Teenage Gorilla, the plot sees the famous scientist Dr Decker return unexpectedly from Africa a year after his plane went down, equipped with a new way of growing plants and animals to giant size and accompanied by a chimpanzee, Konga.
Note the discrepancy: We have an original title referring to a Gorilla but that Konga – who may have been a teenager in ape years for all I know – is a chimpanzee. It’s a discrepancy that can be explained away on the grounds that, first, a gorilla would have been rather more difficult to control on set and, second, that gorilla suits are easier to come by than chimpanzee ones.
Before: a chimpanzee
After: a gorilla
Indeed, one of Cohen’s earlier ventures was Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, whose man in the ape suit, Steve Calvert, actually made a career out of such roles, also appearing in The Bride of the Gorilla and The Bride and the Beast amongst others.
Another gorilla man, George Barrows, would later appear in Cohen’s follow-up to Konga, Black Zoo. Apparently Cohen here hired one of Barrows’ gorilla suits, which was then donned by another actor, Paul Stockman. The suit got damaged, encouraging Barrows to make sure that he was hired to wear it next time round.
Anyway, Decker is welcomed back by his assistant Margaret. Unfortunately he’s not as in love with her as she is with him and instead prefers co-ed Sandra Banks, who already has a boyfriend. This rivalry, along with an academic one featuring the dean of the college, is of course nothing a trained chimpanzee grown to giant gorilla size can’t deal with...
Besides Konga’s eventual suitmation rampage through the streets of London, tearing down buildings as if they were made of cardboard – probably because they were – and throwing people around as if they were dolls – probably because they are – other highlights include some decidedly phallic and vaginal carnivorous plants and an unfortunate cat whom the doctor is forced to shoot before it turns into a tiger after it drinks some of his miracle-grow formula.
Some of the plants...
Konga and a puny human
Though he was something of the go to man for any British horror film which couldn’t secure the services of Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing, Michael Gough, who plays Decker, also had his own distinct approach to the material. Whereas Lee would voice his derision at bad parts and dialogue and whereas Cushing approached each and every role with the same seriousness, believing that if he couldn’t take it seriously his audience would not, Gough always seemed to enjoy hamming things up, a bit like a British Vincent Prince, and Invariably playing the same smug, superior, self-satisfied and shouty character each time.
I wondered if the Decker name is a reference to Dr Cyclops’s Albert Dekker, especially since that film also sees its mad scientist experiment with size alteration, albeit miniaturisation.
How much?!
Die Die My Darling poster, currently on Ebay with a buy it now price of £1,000,000, though offers for £500,000 would be considered.
Saturday, 18 July 2009
Malpertuis / Inferno
Has Argento ever commented on Harry Kumel’s Malpertuis in relation to Inferno?
Especially as Kumel's Daughters of Darkness referenced Last Year at Marienbad, as Argento later did. (Seyrig / Pitoeff)
Especially as Kumel's Daughters of Darkness referenced Last Year at Marienbad, as Argento later did. (Seyrig / Pitoeff)
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Delitto a Oxford / Alba Pagana / May Morning
This is one of those films whose alternate titles give rather different expectations.
Delitto a Oxford, Crime at Oxford, suggests a giallo, perhaps something akin to the same year’s The Weekend Murders.
Alba pagana, Pagan Dawn, suggests more of a fantasy or horror film, perhaps still a mystery/thriller but one that will move into Nothing But the Night or Wicker Man territory.
In the event, Ugo Liberatore’s film is less a giallo or a horror film than a drama, though its denouement isn’t too far from being a more realist, 1970-set version of Society.
For, like Brian Yuzna’s film, what is explored here is a particular demi-monde where it is all about fitting in, with our protagonist being the one who does not.
Not only is Alessio Orano’s Valerio Montelli an Italian in this most English of settings, but he’s also from humble origins, attending Oxford University on a rowing scholarship. As such, he’s only of interest to his fellow students and his tutors as athletic commodity and for his value as an anthropological curiosity.
And anthropological curiosity is what the film comes across as today on account of its documentary style scenes of student life and hippie subculture circa 1970 along with a prominently featured and ear-pleasing folk / psychedelic rock soundtrack, each as a vision of England through Italian eyes. (Franco Montemurro’s The Battle of the Mods is also worth a look in this regard for its representation of the Liverpool scene of a few years earlier.)
Equally, however, the combination of entrenched social hieararchy and hippies doesn’t quite gel given the latter’s purported ideology, unless we see the film as a proto-punk critique that was advancing the “don’t trust a hippie” idea six or so years avant la lettre.
John Steiner plays the aristocratic villain of the piece, Rodney Roderick Stanton; Jane Birkin the potential love interest and Rosella Falk her vaguely Mrs Robinson-esque mother, each proving ideal for their respective roles.
Liberatore’s direction is energetic and quite stylish, with some nice use of mirror-based compositions to highlight the themes of doubling, distortion and representation.
Delitto a Oxford, Crime at Oxford, suggests a giallo, perhaps something akin to the same year’s The Weekend Murders.
Alba pagana, Pagan Dawn, suggests more of a fantasy or horror film, perhaps still a mystery/thriller but one that will move into Nothing But the Night or Wicker Man territory.
In the event, Ugo Liberatore’s film is less a giallo or a horror film than a drama, though its denouement isn’t too far from being a more realist, 1970-set version of Society.
For, like Brian Yuzna’s film, what is explored here is a particular demi-monde where it is all about fitting in, with our protagonist being the one who does not.
Not only is Alessio Orano’s Valerio Montelli an Italian in this most English of settings, but he’s also from humble origins, attending Oxford University on a rowing scholarship. As such, he’s only of interest to his fellow students and his tutors as athletic commodity and for his value as an anthropological curiosity.
And anthropological curiosity is what the film comes across as today on account of its documentary style scenes of student life and hippie subculture circa 1970 along with a prominently featured and ear-pleasing folk / psychedelic rock soundtrack, each as a vision of England through Italian eyes. (Franco Montemurro’s The Battle of the Mods is also worth a look in this regard for its representation of the Liverpool scene of a few years earlier.)
Equally, however, the combination of entrenched social hieararchy and hippies doesn’t quite gel given the latter’s purported ideology, unless we see the film as a proto-punk critique that was advancing the “don’t trust a hippie” idea six or so years avant la lettre.
John Steiner plays the aristocratic villain of the piece, Rodney Roderick Stanton; Jane Birkin the potential love interest and Rosella Falk her vaguely Mrs Robinson-esque mother, each proving ideal for their respective roles.
Liberatore’s direction is energetic and quite stylish, with some nice use of mirror-based compositions to highlight the themes of doubling, distortion and representation.
London in the Raw
This is a DVD that I have somewhat mixed feelings about on account of its provenance. The British Film Institute has long been, after all, the gatekeepers of official British film culture, the one who decide what counts and what does not.
Indeed, in the 1960s it was their journal, the Monthly Film Bulletin, which had a policy of reviewing every film released theatrically in the UK, but which also divided these releases up into two categories: those of special interest and everything else, where the best a film could typically hope for was to be acknowledged as a good example of its type.
No prizes for guessing where London in the Raw was placed, nor for guessing the BFI/MFB's general attitude towards mondo-type documentaries as a whole.
As such, the whole project can't help but have a sense of gamekeeper turned textual poacher (or vice versa) to me, of someone within the BFI belatedly recognising the social historical or potential economic value of the kind of material that they would hitherto have preferred did not exist, even as it was often sustaining the British film industry. (The film's producers, after all, subsequently bankrolled Polanski's Repulsion and Cul de Sac and Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General.)
The first thing that differentiates the film from most of its Italian mondo counterparts its its staying fixed within the one geographical location, which helps provide an additional degree of coherence whilst also lessening the exploitative aspect: Rather than witnessing some film-makers overtly intent on acquiring the the weirdest, most sensationalistic footage they could find from around the world, we instead get a more focussed portrait of one particular city at one particular time.
As is common for the form, imaginary continuity is provided by the narrator's voice over and the montage-style juxtaposition of scenes: At one point a sequence dealing with the theme of beauty juxtaposes women in a health club with another buying a figure enhancing bra, with these being followed by a woman undergoing electrolysis to remove 'excess' hair and a man undergoing a hair transplant to treat its absence. At another a group of alcoholic tramps drinking methylated spirits are contrasted with society types an exclusive club ordering expensive vintages of wine.
With no animal or human death footage, the hair transplant scene is also the goriest London in the Raw gets, as the hair surgeon removes plugs of flesh and follicles from the back of the patient's head and inserts them into holes in the front. The tramps meanwhile prove the closest the film-makers get to exploitation of those less fortunate than themselves, precisely because it isn't as clear whether they're "just doing a bit of acting" like many of the other characters featured.
Otherwise we get a number of stage routines including the obligatory nude; she doesn't do a strip-tease routine on account of a legal particularity of the time, that you could have nudity or movement but not both simultaneously. The commentators voice-off doesn't mention this, although elsewhere it does point to the peculiar situation whereby a man playing a penny whistle in the street was committing a public order offence whilst the prostitute above him calling down to potential trade was not. Needless to say this scene, or at least the part with the prostitute, is one of the more obviously staged ones, the camera moving behind her to catch a shot of her bum as she leans out the window.
What the other stage routines lack in exploitation they gain as historical document of the changing city, as with the contrast between the relatively new Cypriot community and the longer established Jewish one. In this regard the skits we see at London's only Jewish theatre are also interesting for their insiders' play upon stereotypes and as a reminder of the origins of a number of those connected with the film, including co-director Norman Cohen, who would later direct three of the Confessions... films amongst others (again: yes, they were shit, but they and other sex comedies also sustained the British cinema in the 1970s), and producers Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser, of Compton/Telki and Tigon note.
In sum, a very British take on the exploitation documentary both in the film itself and the way it has been presented and contextualised here, with the balance between exploitation and documentary further towards the latter than the former.
Or, at least, in the integral version. For also included on the impressive DVD as the main extra is a shorter cut of the film which drops most of the stage routines to concentrate on the sleazier stuff to be more transparently targeted at the normal Soho picture-goer of the time...
Indeed, in the 1960s it was their journal, the Monthly Film Bulletin, which had a policy of reviewing every film released theatrically in the UK, but which also divided these releases up into two categories: those of special interest and everything else, where the best a film could typically hope for was to be acknowledged as a good example of its type.
No prizes for guessing where London in the Raw was placed, nor for guessing the BFI/MFB's general attitude towards mondo-type documentaries as a whole.
As such, the whole project can't help but have a sense of gamekeeper turned textual poacher (or vice versa) to me, of someone within the BFI belatedly recognising the social historical or potential economic value of the kind of material that they would hitherto have preferred did not exist, even as it was often sustaining the British film industry. (The film's producers, after all, subsequently bankrolled Polanski's Repulsion and Cul de Sac and Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General.)
The first thing that differentiates the film from most of its Italian mondo counterparts its its staying fixed within the one geographical location, which helps provide an additional degree of coherence whilst also lessening the exploitative aspect: Rather than witnessing some film-makers overtly intent on acquiring the the weirdest, most sensationalistic footage they could find from around the world, we instead get a more focussed portrait of one particular city at one particular time.
As is common for the form, imaginary continuity is provided by the narrator's voice over and the montage-style juxtaposition of scenes: At one point a sequence dealing with the theme of beauty juxtaposes women in a health club with another buying a figure enhancing bra, with these being followed by a woman undergoing electrolysis to remove 'excess' hair and a man undergoing a hair transplant to treat its absence. At another a group of alcoholic tramps drinking methylated spirits are contrasted with society types an exclusive club ordering expensive vintages of wine.
With no animal or human death footage, the hair transplant scene is also the goriest London in the Raw gets, as the hair surgeon removes plugs of flesh and follicles from the back of the patient's head and inserts them into holes in the front. The tramps meanwhile prove the closest the film-makers get to exploitation of those less fortunate than themselves, precisely because it isn't as clear whether they're "just doing a bit of acting" like many of the other characters featured.
Otherwise we get a number of stage routines including the obligatory nude; she doesn't do a strip-tease routine on account of a legal particularity of the time, that you could have nudity or movement but not both simultaneously. The commentators voice-off doesn't mention this, although elsewhere it does point to the peculiar situation whereby a man playing a penny whistle in the street was committing a public order offence whilst the prostitute above him calling down to potential trade was not. Needless to say this scene, or at least the part with the prostitute, is one of the more obviously staged ones, the camera moving behind her to catch a shot of her bum as she leans out the window.
What the other stage routines lack in exploitation they gain as historical document of the changing city, as with the contrast between the relatively new Cypriot community and the longer established Jewish one. In this regard the skits we see at London's only Jewish theatre are also interesting for their insiders' play upon stereotypes and as a reminder of the origins of a number of those connected with the film, including co-director Norman Cohen, who would later direct three of the Confessions... films amongst others (again: yes, they were shit, but they and other sex comedies also sustained the British cinema in the 1970s), and producers Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser, of Compton/Telki and Tigon note.
In sum, a very British take on the exploitation documentary both in the film itself and the way it has been presented and contextualised here, with the balance between exploitation and documentary further towards the latter than the former.
Or, at least, in the integral version. For also included on the impressive DVD as the main extra is a shorter cut of the film which drops most of the stage routines to concentrate on the sleazier stuff to be more transparently targeted at the normal Soho picture-goer of the time...
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