Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)

Directed by John Hough
Starring Peter Fonda, Susan George, Adam Roarke
Rated
USA 

“What did I tell you? All you gotta be is willing to take it to the max.”

Based on an obscure novel called The Chase by Richard Unekis, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is about the birth of the muscle car and the ruckus it raised. Beginning in the mid 60's, car manufacturers began wedging V8 engines into smaller cars. The result were screaming hell-machines that could easily outrun police cars. Subsequently, for a certain breed of thrill-seeking youths, racing cops to the county  line became a popular pastime, and Hollywood noticed. From Vanishing Point to Smoky and the Bandit with dozens of films before, after, and between, muscle cars were all over the cinematic map, blowin' the doors off the fuzz from coast to coast. Crazy Larry takes the standard car chase formula, tosses in a counter-culture anti-hero and a toothy British beauty, and wraps it all up in a devastating finale that was sure to cause major word-of-mouth buzz. Although it was directed by a Brit (John Hough, who was clearly on a roll, having just bashed out Legend of Hell House and the incredible Twins of Evil), Dirty Mary Crazy Larry was a quintessentially American tale, perfectly capturing the twilight days of the all-American road warrior before the gas crisis crippled V8 outlaws like Larry for good.

Over the credits, a downer-folk tune called Time (Is Such a Funny Thing) by Marjorie McCoy. Sounds like trouble from the get-go.

Deke and Larry are a couple of Nascar-wannabes-slash-thieves. Larry (Peter Fonda) is the cool-as-ice driver. Deke (Adam Roarke, RIP) is the tightly-wound mechanic. When the film opens, Larry has just spent a night of what we can only assume was unbridled passion with local floozy Mary (Susan George). He sneaks out while she's still asleep and gets picked up by Deke. She spots him as he drives off. Something tells me that won't be the last Larry sees of 'ol dirty Mary.

The boys have got a heist to get to. They drive into town in awkward silence, and then split up.

Deke home-invades some lady, yanks her right from her shower and tells her to call her husband George (Roddy McDowell) and demand the money, or he's gonna ice her and her kid. George runs a grocery store, and it's armored truck day. Larry's waiting outside of the store waiting for Deke to call and give him the heads-up. When he gets it, Larry saunters right into George's office to fetch the cash from the safe. But George doesn't want to open the safe. Who's this fucker think he's dealing with?

Larry calls Deke back up and gives him the go-ahead to lay some muscle on the broad and her kid.
What can Roddy do? He gives Larry the dough. Larry splits, but runs into a slight problem when he gets outside – Mary found him, and she's got the keys to his car.

He's not in the mood to argue, so he just lets her tag along. He picks up Deke, who left mom and the kid tied up and squirming on the couch. He's not all that happy to see Mary either. I think that's probably a familiar pattern in her life.

And so, off they go, flush with cash, on a wild new adventure.

One problem. As they zoom down the highway, they turn on their police scanner and find out the cops are on them. And not just any cops, either. They've got Capt. Franklin (Vic Morrow, RIP) on their trail. And he's kind of a bad-ass. A rogue. He even refuses to wear a badge or a gun! Larry and Deke are listening to their scanner, so they know the noose is tightening on 'em. Luckily, Larry's not the type to worry.
“Ok, so we're off to a bad start,” he says. “You know what a bad start means with a guy like me? Not a goddamn thing.”
He's making pretty good time, too, until Mary goes bananas and bites Larry, which causes him to lose contol of the Chevy and crash into a barn. Larry tells Mary if she ever does something like that again, he's gonna braid her tits. Ouch!

The gang puts their petty squabbles on hold to fix the car, and once the wheels are back in operation, they do the sensible thing and ditch Mary. However, a few miles down the road, they realize she absconded with their map. And they need it. No GPS in '74.  Larry says he's gonna “break every bone in her crotch”, so they speed back to the general store where they left her. She's still there, sucking on a popsicle. They pick her up. The gang's back together!

And then the chase really begins. Larry's got to shake a cop car and a helicopter, so he jumps over a bridge! They barely make it and Mary yells at him for making a “Flash maneuver”. But that's his specialty, baby!

Of course, things are starting to get a little sticky for our heroes, so they decide to get rid of the Charger and get some new wheels.Luckily they have a sweet stashed at a dusty swap meet. All they have to do is figure out how to get in and out with a million yokels milling about. Mary almost blows the deal when she steals a gizmo from a crusty redneck, but they manage to peel out of there, taking a cop's car door with them.

The cops set up a roadblock, which is what you do in these situations. Also, Capn' Franklin figured out that the fellas have a scanner in their car. And he's got a message for 'em. He calls them clowns and insults Larry's driving, figuring it'll make him angry enough to respond on the two-way radio. And he is, but Deke convinces him to keep his mouth shut. For the moment. And then Deke comes up with a clever way to buy them some time: he gets Mary to pretend she's a police dispatcher. Zing!

So then they run a bunch more cop cars off the road and they finally get to the stretch of the highway where they know the law can't catch them. It is at this point when Larry decides to get on the two-way and confront Franklin.

As Bugs Bunny would say, surely you realize, this means war.

So then they smash into a pick-up truck and almost kill a guy, but what the hell, that's racin'. They pull over to fix their car and Franklin gets on the radio to remind Mary she's on parole. One of the goons back at the swap meet tipped off the cops. Naturally, this does not sit well with Larry, so he knocks her down.

And suddenly, out of nowhere, grumpy ol' Deke get chivalrous. Turns out he's not a bad guy after all, just an ex-drunk looking for a break.

He gives Mary a little pep talk, and then Larry and Deke shakes hands, and they haul ass out of there. Hey, maybe these crazy kids are gonna make it after all!

Maybe. But then again, maybe not. I will say this much: if you like nihilistic 70's endings, they don't get much more nihilistic then this.

Peter Fonda was so cool at this point that line between actor and character is completely erased. In fact, the only reason we know this all didn't really happen is because Fonda's still around. Although with all his recent right-wing ranting, it's clear that the Easy Rider guy is long-gone. Anyway, there are some really interesting stylistic flourishes here and there - most people don't even notice that there's no music in the entire film, until you point it out -  the rampant vehicular abuse is particularly punishing, the ending is amazing, Susan George is alternately alluring and annoying, and the whole affair moves with all the urgency you'd expect on a heist-gone-wrong. It's a classic piece of American drive-in cinema. It practically defines that era and style of film making. Even if you were born too late to have ever set wheels in one of those outdoor shrines to sex, speed, and savagery, you'll feel like you did after watching this movie.

- Ken McIntyre 

School of the Holy Beast (1974)

Direwtyed by Noribumi Suzuki
Starring Yumi Takigawa, Emiko Yamauchi
Unrated
Japan


"Lord, beat me with a whip." 

This film really only needs a one sentence review.  Hot young naked Japanese lesbian nuns.  Yes.  I said hot young naked Japanese lesbian nuns.

There was a plot.  Trite at best, of  a young girl trying to discover what happened to her mother,  so she enters the “School of the Holy Beast” to become a nun and find her past.  The plot really doesn’t matter as this film declares itself “Japan’s most notorious Nun-Exploitation film”.  Does that mean there’s more nun films?  And where can I find them?  I tried to follow what was going on, but a bunch of hot chicks in habits are kind of hard to tell apart, and it got confusing keeping track of who was doing what to who.  But again, it didn’t really matter because of the hot naked lesbian nuns.  Those naughty nuns kept getting in all sorts of trouble and were constantly being punished.  Punishments were all received naked, and consisted of some kind of whipping.  Whether it be two hot young naked nuns whipping each other, one lone nun flogging herself, or our main hot young nun wrapped in thorns and beaten with longstem roses, there were plenty of bloody breasts bared.

 The film is surprisingly well shot with a great use of lighting and color.  Seeing as it was made in 1974, it has a fantastic 70’s feel reminiscent of James Bond films from that time, complete with fluffy white cat warning us upon meeting the Mother Superior, that she is, of course, “ee-ville”.  The lesbian scenes are laughably symbolic, but very pretty, shot in a flower garden in the haze.  While there is nothing explicit shown, the allusion is made with some ridiculous finger licking which had me laughing hysterically.  Better than that is the sex-starved nun finding dirty pictures and going within seconds from horror to horny and having a grand old time with herself.

By far the best part of this DVD is the recent interview with the main actress.  Yumi Takigawa spends a good 15 minutes denouncing this film.  She tells the story of how she was tricked into appearing in it, and how she had no idea of the erotic nature of the script when she signed on.  Come on here, naked, wrapped in thorns, being flogged by a bunch of overly righteous nuns, and she didn’t know the nature of the script?  But on she goes telling us how she was so innocent, and how she regrets making this film.  She even tells us she has no idea why this, of all her films, was put to DVD.  Come on honey, HOT YOUNG NAKED JAPANESE LESBIAN NUNS!  I want to see that.

“School of the Holy Beast”  probably isn’t the “shocking, unforgettable masterpiece” it claims to be, and I’m probably not a better person for having seen it.  However, I now have been initiated into the “nun-exploitation” genre, and oh I am surely a better person for that.

- Scarrie Sinsation

Dead Calm (1989)

Directed by Phillip Noyce
Starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, Billy Zane
Rated R
Australia

"This is a low production."

Based on a novel with the same title (which, hopefully, fleshed out some of the  WTF moments in the film version), Dead Calm is a thriller-slash-survival horror flick that presages wave (ahem) of ocean-bound cinematic  horrors produced in the wake (again!) of 2003’s Open Water.

Aussie alpha-ginger Nicole Kidman stars as Rae, a perfectly happy wife of a naval officer, John (Sam Neill) and ,mother of a bouncing baby boy. Or, at least she was happy. Rae’s life is shattered to bits in the startling opening scene. Sam is on shore leave for Christmas break, patiently waiting  for Rae and the baby. But they never show up.

Cut to: Rea, driving  through a furious rainstorm to get to her hubby. This kid’s in the back seat, gurgling away. Everything’s hunky dory. But then, the kid pops out of his car seat, mom swerves, there’s another car, and blammo, the kid sails through the windshield – graphically – in a flurry of blood, shattered glass, and baby-brains.

So that’s why she’s late.

So, where the hell do you go from there? Well, the open seas, apparently. To deal with their grief and reconnect, John and Rae head on a sailing boat (with a motor, you know the kind) and  float listlessly in the Great Barrier Reef. Rae gulps down fistfuls of sedatives and occasionally shrieks in her sleep, but what the hell, they’re  working through some heavy stuff.

Their bubble of pain and solitude is burst by the sudden appearance of a mysterious black schooner dead ahead. It appears to be abandoned. The couple  give it a closer look with their binoculars, and Rae spots a solitary figure in a dinghy, rowing  furiously away from the black boat and towards theirs. As he gets closer, they can make him out: a young-ish guy (Billy Zane), clad only in shorts and a straw hat, slathered in sweat and twitching. He’s so desperate to get away from the other ship that he plows right into theirs. Then he jumps aboard, runs downstairs to their cabin, and hides in a corner, wrapped up in a fetal ball.

The couple are more bemused than alarmed. Rae gives the guy some water and, eventually, he starts talking. Says his name is Hughie, and that there were five other people on the black boat, but they all died ten days ago from eating canned salmon.
“Probably Botulism,” says John.
“What the hell is Botulism?” Says Hughie.

John suggests they go back to the black boat to see if anybody’s still alive. Hughie  tells him to forget it, that he’s never going back there again. Which I suppose is understandable, but also a little (damn  it!) fishy, as well. Anyway, Hughie’s tired. Furious rowing is a bitch. John suggests he take a nap in their living quarters, and once he heads in there, John padlocks the door. Just in case. Then he leaves Rae in charge, and takes the dinghy out to check out the black boat.

When he gets to the boat, he finds the naked corpses of several women  and a fat guy floating around. Also, even though the electricity is fried, there’s a TV set on that’s playing  a videotape of the crew’s antics. Turns out that they were all on a Girls-Gone-Wild-on-the-High-seas type of adventure. Four girls, the captain-slash-producer, and Hughie, the cameraman. As the footage rolls on, Hughie gets more paranoid and delusional, until at the end, it’s all just screaming and running and crashing around.

Huh. So it wasn’t salmon. It was crazy Hughie, murdering everyone on board. Hughie. Who’s on the other boat with John’s wife.

Now it’s John’s turn to row frantically. But by the time he gets back, Hughie’s already knocked Rae out and commandeered the vessel. And he’s headed in the opposite direction. John’s forced to head back to the corpse-stuffed black boat – which is now rapidly sinking – and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, terminally depressed Rae has to snap out of it, subdue this lunatic, race back to the black boat, find it in the fuckin’ dark, and rescue John before he sleeps with the fishes.

But how?

Well, first she makes sweet love to Hughie.

Then she wrestles with him in her underwear.

And then she picks up a spear gun, and things get a little nuts.

Dead Calm’s crazy meter dips substantially after the toddler-splattering opening, but the tension level never lets up. It’s almost pornographic in its single-minded obsession with unease. Nobody’s happy, every moment is fraught with fear and violence, and even If the couple survives their ordeal, they’re left with even more trauma than the dead-kid issues they started with. This is one ugly joyride. Zane’s off-the-charts nuts, Neill’s a better action-hero than you might expect, and Kidman – well, even when she’s desperately trying to kill a maniac with a spear gun and she’s covered in bruises and crusty blood, she still looks good. And her hair is amazing.

All in all, a tight, taut, (very) 80’s thriller. Just be ready for some darkness.

- Ken McIntyre

The Stepford Wives (1975)

Directed by Bryan Forbes

Starring Katherine Ross, Paula Prentiss, Tina Louise 

Rated R

USA 

"I like watching women do little domestic chores." 

Based on the novel written by Rosemary's Baby author Ira Levin and directed by British actor/director Bryan Forbes, The Stepford Wives is a pitch-black comedy-slash-paranoid sci-fi thriller that carefully up-ends the standard notions of decency and happy-faced conformity prescribed to post-war American suburban life, exposing the creeping fear and paranoia that bubbles just below the surface. It was a box-office bomb upon releases and wrongly lambasted for being anti-woman (if anything, it's the opposite), but it has since become a minor cult classic over the ensuing decades, thanks to a top-notch cast, its deadpan delivery, its absurd premise, and most of all, for its cloying, eerie atmosphere. The film's title and central plot point have also permeated popular culture: everyone knows what a "Stepford wife" refers to, even if they haven't seen the film. 

When the film opens, New Yorkers Joanna Eberhart (Katherine Ross, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), her asshole husband Walter (Peter Masterson) and their kids (one of which is Mary Stuart Masterson, future 80's teen star!) are loading up the station wagon to move away from the loud, disgusting city. While they wait for dad to tip the doorman once last time, they see a dude walking across the street with a naked mannequin. Joanna snaps a couple pics. The kids tell dad what they just saw. He knows, man. Believe me, he knows. 

And so off they go to the idyllic  burg of Stepford, where the birds are always chirping, the cobblestone flows freely, and nobody locks their front door. While the movers lug all their junk into their sweet new abode, Walter heads to the backyard to feed the dog. Out of the bushes trundles their new neighbor, the suspiciously unemotional Carol Van Sant (Nanette Newman), who hands him a crockpot, welcomes him to the neighborhood, and then slinks back off into the bushes. Walt's not sure whether he's amused, creeped out, chubbed-up, or what.

Later that evening, when out for a stroll with the pup, Walt runs into Ted, aka Mr. Van Sant. Apparently they know each other. Walt says, “She cooks as good as she looks, Ted”, and they both smirk and walk away. So that was awkward.

Anyway, Joanna, being a photo-journalist, is not convinced that moving to the middle of nowhere is a good idea. She's not even sure why they did it. Walt gives her the rundown: nice people, no violence, no drugs, no street-hassles. Plus, there's a fireplace. He can lay her down by the fire. That's a definite  bonus. Chicks love that. She's unconvinced, but she slugs down some gin and hopes for the best.

The Eberharts settle into life in Stepford. The Eberhart kids start school and get on the schoolbus for the first time. They are a little shocked by the fact that all the other kids have dead eyes and dress the same, but what the hell, the suburbs are weird.

Also, Joanna peeps Carol and Ted getting amorous in the front yard at 10 in the morning. What a kooky place this is.

She tells Walt about it when he gets home, but he is unsympathetic to her growing anxieties about Stepford. 

She tells him she's already sick of this oversexed suburb, but Walt loves the place. In fact, he's just joined the Stepford Men's Association. No chicks allowed!

Couple days later, while the Ebersons are out grocery shopping, Carol Van Sant gets into a fender bender in the parking lot. Her brain seems to short-circuit, and she repeats herself over and over until the EMTs show up.

The ambulance picks her up and carts her off, but Joanna notices something curious as it speeds away: The hospital is in the opposite direction it leave in. 

So, Walter goes to his inaugural Men's Association meeting. Whatever he saw there freaked him out so badly that he came home and sat in the dark, drinking and crying.

Joanna decides to spend the afternoon sitting in a field all by herself, when suddenly, crashing through some weeds, comes Bobbi (Paula Prentiss), who is also from New York and also hates living in Stepford. Bobbii saw the piece on Joanna in the local Stepford ladies' paper (!), and she figured they'd have a lot in common. So they girl-bond. 

A few days later, Walt decides to host the nightly Mens Association meeting at their house. They hang out and talk about Man Caves while a very nipply Joanna serves them refreshments. While in the kitchen she meets the creepy president of the association, Diz. 

Joanna insists she sit in on their meeting, so they try to bore her to death by yammering about charity events while one of the guys sketches her. He's a well-known artist, apparently.

Also, George Jefferson's neighbor is there too, so that's fun.

Diz throws a pool party, and the whole town shows up. Joanna and Bobbi pal around together and goof on everybody. Also, something's up with Carol. She wanders around the party like she's stoned to the tits, wandering up to people and saying, “I'll just die if I don't get this recipe.” What recipe, crazy lady?

Later on, Ted makes her go to Joanna's and apologize to her and Bobbi for her episode, blaming it on booze. The two city-ladies are appalled that she was forced to apologize by her hubby, but that's status quo in Stepford, baby.

Jo and Bob (hey, they both have boys' names!) can't deal with it, though, so they decide to form their own Women's Association! 

They start going door to door, trying to drum up some interest in their women's club, but all the wives of Stepford are too busy baking, gardening, and/or fucking their husbands to bother with the silly womens' libbers. The only one who will talk to them seriously about it is Charmaine (Tina Louise AKA Gilligan's Island's own Ginger!).

She's up for it, so that's a three-girl wolf pack. And then the guy from the men's association who stutters drops by Joanna's to as her if she'll read the dictionary into a tape recorder for him – part of a “life-long hobby” of his. She figures he's just some kinda nut, but tells him she'll do it if he gets his wife and her friends to join the club. And so, the first  meeting of the Stepford Wives Women's Lib club begins.  At first, everybody just stares at Joanna. Eventually, Charmaine starts complaining about her marriage and  it looks like some real talk might actually happen, but the other wives refuses to discuss anything except for housework.  

So that didn't work out. But one afternoon while Jo and Bobbi are out, they run into the crazy old lady who runs the newspaper, and she gives them an interesting historical tidbit about Stepford. Turns out their used to be a women's club, a long time ago, and Carol Van Sant was the president! But somebody put the kibosh on it. But who? 

And then Charmaine goes to the dark side. She gives up her tennis court so that her hubby can have a pool and she starts getting into house work. Jo and Bobbie wander around trying to figure out what's up. Bobbie thinks the chemical plant outside of town is leaking tranquilizers into their water supply. Seems valid.

Turns out Jo's old boyfriend is a chemist in New York, so they take a sample to him and ask him to check it out. He says it's clean, but he's kind of an asshole, so who knows?

Fuck it. Bobbi and Jo make a pact to bail. Joanna asks Walt and, surprisingly, he agrees. So the girls start house-hunting in nearby towns.  But before they make any decisions, Bobbi asks Jo to watch her kids and dog for the weekend so they can go away for their anniversary. Jo takes the opportunity to take a bunch of pictures and shows them to some gallery dude in New York. He digs 'em. She's pretty psyched.

But when the weekend's over and she brings the kids back, Bobbi is....different. She's wearing a dress and using Ajax! No, Bobbi, say it ain't so! 

By the way, it's obvious from the outset that this was gonna happen, but it's still pretty devastating.

So now Joanna's all alone in wicked Stepford! Can she escape intact? And just what the hell is going on in Stepford, anyway? She goes to visit a psychiatrist who seems sympathetic, tells her to grab the kids and get the hell out of town.

But first, she gives her a prescription and tells her to fill it. C'mon Joanna, you're not gonna fall for that, are you?

Maybe.

Meanwhile, she goes home to get the kids and they're not there. Walt – who's drunk off his tits, assures her they're safe. Then he tells her to hgo upstairs and lie down. When she refuses, he shoves her and smashes his whiskey glass. It's a bad scene.

She gets outta there and goes to see Bobbi. Bobbi's still robo-Bobbi. Joanna has to find out what's going on with her. Some kind of test.

So Joanna stucks a knife in her guts, to see what happens! Things get pretty weird from there.

PS the super-fucked up ending reveals why Joanna's tiny, eraser-nippled boobs were so prominently displayed throughout the film. 

The Stepford Wives presents us with an alternate reality wherein men would rather have robot sex-slash-domestic slaves for wives than actual women. On the surface, it's one of the dumbest premises I can think of. However, as the decades have rolled on, society has gotten increasingly fragmented and isolated; inside is the new outside and pornography is the new sex, with a much wider range of appliances and applications than the real thing.  What are Real Dolls, after all, except really lazy (and equally expensive) Stepford Wives? On some level, for a small but significant chunk of the male population, Stepford Wives is not a cautionary horror tale, but a hopeful fantasy of a bright new future where women come with helpful off-switches. As such, it is clearly not the anti-feminist manifesto 70's film critics called it out as, but rather a pretty lethal skewering of everything that's wrong about modern man's approach to sexual politics. But on a more superficial level, it's also a super-creepy movie with elements of goofy humor, a classically downbeat 70's ending, and a strong cast with many of the principal players acting against type. Paula Prentiss is clearly the stand-out - even though we know how her character will end up the moment she bounds onto the screen, it still stings when it happens - but Peter Masterson is also great as craven creep Walter, and it's almost surreal watching Tina Louise playing an oddly self-reflective version of Ginger. The syrupy score by Michael Small makes the film feel like a TV movie, and at nearly two hours, the pace could be peppier, but otherwise, Stepford Wives is an atmospheric slice of prime 70's downer-cinema, fun, weird and moody.

It is survived by a at least three TV movies (Revenge of the Stepford Wives, 1980; The Stepford Children, 1987; The Stepford Husbands, 1996), a campy 2004 remake, and even a softcore spoof (The Breastford Wives, 2007), all of which suggests that this strange tale continues to resonate and evolve.



- Ken McIntyre