Foxy Brown (1974)

 

This was the second film in a double feature at the Paramount Theater last week. I thought I had seen this movie before but I must have been confusing it with Coffy, because it was all new to me. "Foxy Brown" is the epitome of blaxploitation films of the 70s. There is a mob story, corrupt cops, a heroic black central figure and a variety of bad guys of all races to get their asses kicked. Pam Greer is the lovely title character, a woman who gets motivated for vengeance when her undercover cop boyfriend is killed by a local mobster.

 

She decides to do some undercover work of her own to identify the big boss an bring them down. Pam Greer looks great and gets to wear several snazzy 70s style outfits. At one point her character infiltrates the criminal organization by becoming a call girl for the mob. 

This plot point allows a variety of shots of naked women, which is always a draw for these kinds of films. Greer herself is frequently photographed in the nude although less conspicuously than some of the other women in the film. There are a couple of transition shots that try to titilate the audience with Foxy getting dressed or undressed. She has a love scene with the boyfriend before he is killed and it is fairly explicit. 

Another feature of this type of movie is degradation of a woman by her captors. Since it is a Blaxploitation film, when Foxy is found out and sent to confinement by the mob, she is abused by a couple of hillbilly types. There is also a confrontation scene set in a lesbian bar, no nudity but girls fighting girls is a standard component of a film like this.

There is a local gang of community activists, sort of the Black Panther Party lite. They don't rob banks, they just play vigilante against local drug dealers. When Foxy needs an army of backup for the climax of the picture, these guys show up and provide the support she needs.

Veteran Exploitation director Jack Hill wrote and directed this film. He had also made Coffy the year before and it was at the last minute that it was decided to change the lead character to a different persona, rather than making this a direct sequel. The film that was first on this double bill was "Jackie Brown" an homage to these kinds of movies with violence and witty dialogue to get our attention rather than gratuitous sex scenes

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The Hills Have Eyes (!977)

In 1977, I was in college and it wasn’t until summertime that I spent a huge amount of time at a theater. “Star Wars” and “Rocky Horror” took up most of my attention, and I barely remember this film being released. The memory that I did have of it was from the newspaper ads and posters which featured actor Michael Berryman, looking particularly creepy.

I was totally freaked out by that face and thought I did not need to have anything to do with that film. Cut to 47 years later and I wonder how a kid like me wasn’t in the theater seeing this. Wes Craven was on the cusp of becoming a go-to horror film maker and this was one of the breakthrough films of his early career. The movie was not a runaway success but it did make a substantial amount for the time and was quite profitable. It was the kind of success that could keep a struggling filmmaker in the game.

The fact that the film had a copy in the New York Museum of Modern Art was used in the ad campaigns, although the copy was not part of the permanent collection of the museum.

The story involves a family, traveling though the desert, who have a car breakdown in their station wagon pulling a trailer, but it happens in a remote area that is the home of a twisted family of cannibals. So in essence it is a home invasion film, but the home is on wheels and instead of being invaded, the victims are the trespassers.

The family that is struck in their trailer is dominated by an old school tough guy, his wife an son and two daughters and a son-in law, as well as a new baby. They also have with them, two German Shepard’s named “Beauty and Beast”. Animal lovers be warned that one of the dogs does not make it past the opening act and it’s demise is fairly disturbing. The other dog does however help get revenge later in the story.

The fact that their car strongly resembles the car my family traveled across the country in multiple times, ought to give me some good nightmares. The film of course does have a nightmarish quality, especially after the sun sets and the crazy family begins it’s assault on the normies.

There is an unpleasantly filmed sexual assault and a couple of the traveling family members are injured or killed by the cannibals. The siege mentality sets in and the family members who remain get serious about trying to fight back.

There is a good deal of violence but no real nudity in the picture. The only actors you will recognize are John Steadman, a veteran character actor who plays the grizzled gas station owner at the start of the film and who occasionally trades with the demented family, and Dee Wallace who plays the married daughter and would go on to be E.T.s adopted Mom. Michael Berryman will be familiar from roles in other horror films, B-Movies and TV shows, he also appeared in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.

This is a well made shocker, done on the cheap but with a great deal of impact. If you have not seen it yet, do so because if you are visiting this site, it is right up your alley.

Death Wish 2 (1982)

 

I’m a big Charles Bronson fan, and he was a major star of the Grindhouse Era, once he started down the path of the Death Wish franchise. Before Death Wish turned him into a U.S. star, he was famously a big thing in Europe. Later on in this project, we will get to his output in those days, but up until that huge hit, he was a reliable presence in mainstream Hollywood film, like “The Magnificent Seven”, “The Great Escape” and “The Dirty Dozen”. At the close of the seventies, he was making films for Dino DeLaurentis and his box office was on the decline. He re-paired with Director Michael Winner to make this sequel to Death Wish, and his stature was never the same, because this is a simple brutal exploitation film, and with few exceptions after, those would be the kinds of films he would make.

Paul Kersey is still an architect, only now he lives in Los Angeles, dates a beautiful newswoman, and has moved his formerly catatonic daughter to a recovery center near him and she is making progress. So it all looks good, except at the start of the film, we hear crime statistics being presented on the radio, and inevitably, our New York vigilante will be back in action. The original film contained an assault on Kersey’s family that was horrifying and more explicit than we had seen in mainstream movies up to that point. Director Michael Winner upped the ante here with two rape scenes, the first of which brought howls of protest from critics about it’s gratuity. The housekeeper/maid is brutalized on screen in multiple shots that come close to being pornographic.

The first time I saw this film was in it’s original release, and I went with my wife and another couple. Both of the women we saw this with were traumatized by the film and unhappy that we had selected it for our date night. Completely understandable, and a mistake on my part for sure. In spite of the obvious exploitation, the rest of the film does try to bring a story to the screen that is not bad.

Kersey’s actions in this film differ from those in the first. In this case he is specifically targeting the gang that committed the crimes against his family. The generic social context of the crime issue is replaced with a straight revenge story, and that is much more in the wheelhouse of these exploitation films.

The imagery is definitely designed to make these particular criminals the subject of the audience’s ire, and thus make us root for the vigilante as he tracks them down. There is a good idea in the film, to bring in the cop played by Vincent Gardenia from NY, to consult with the LAPD, but it is the meeting in NYC with the police commissioners that makes the whole thing intriguing. They are worried that if Kersey gets caught, he will spill the beans about how they let him go without being prosecuted in NY. So there is a chance for a political element to sneak into the film. Ultimately that does not pay off, and Gardenia, after some cat and mouse following of Kersey, leaves the picture, and we are back to the revenge plot.

The cast of killers in the gang includes future star Laurence Fishburne.

He gets his in the most elaborate shootout scene in the movie. His character has been carrying a boombox for most of the film, so you know…Chekov’s boombox!

Well before Arnold was making quips with the vermin he was going to take out, Paul Kersey has a come to Jesus moment with the first of the bad guys he catches up with.

The last part of the film is an elaborate plan to execute the final gang member in the mental facility that he has been placed in. The deaths of the criminals have to be dramatic to satisfy the audience’s blood lust. A year after this movie, Clint Eastwood not only dispatches one of the bad guys as Dirty Harry with a big gun, but also has him plunge down on top of a carousel and get impaled by a wooden unicorn. Charles Bronson only manages a bit of electrocution.

The end of the film, clearly leaves the path open for Paul Kersey to return, and it contains a nice shot that will make us want that to happen.

Scream and Scream Again (1970)

 

So the initial post on this site is a 1970 shocker that features three classic horror icons, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. In a bit of a surprise, they each have relatively small roles, at least when it comes to screen(or scream) time. Cushing is out in one scene, and Lee has maybe three or four. Price is a little more prominent but if you timed the scenes out of a 95 minute movie, I’d be surprised if it added up to much more than ten.

Regardless of the three stars, this film is really odd for one main reason, the story lines seem schizophrenic. There is a fascist country with near Nazi like iconography, and one of the Military Officers, appears to be climbing the ladder of power by killing those who question his methods. Meanwhile, in Great Britain, a serial killer is on the loose, picking up girls and then physically mutilating them, including draining them of their blood. We also have patients in a mysterious clinic, being dismembered, one limb at a time, and we don’t know who is doing it or why.

Most of the story follows a police procedural, as a pathologist works with the detectives, to try and capture the serial killer. A by-the-book inspector connects one of the victims to a Dr. Browning, the Vincent Price character, who seems to have some medical research that he is engaged in on his estate. Later, when they have laid a trap to ensnare the killer with a decoy, that suspect ends up suspiciously at Dr. Browning’s property.

The 1970s trappings include a club scene with a rock band. The music is not memorable and everyone seems to be struggling to dance to it. We never really see much of the murders, just a little bit of the aftereffects. There is however a very lengthy chase scene and cars run through the countryside and towns at a reckless pace, but there is not much more than that. When the suspect runs across the farmlands and into a mountain wall, there is a little bit of excitement but it was still odd.

The best scenes in the film suggest the terror that the story wants to provide. A woman is to be tortured, and we are shown the instruments to be used, but not their application. The patient in the clinic, can’t get any response from the nurse and he is losing limbs every time she comes in. The serial killer manages to escape his handcuffs in a way that would make “127 Hours” seem more reasonable. Does it all come together in the end? Sort of. There is a connection between the stories but it feels like a contrivance and the end of the film plays with the notion that there might be a sequel, or at least, we have more to dread.

The only nudity in the film came from an as yet unanimated corpse that is moved from a storage area to an operating table and then back. There was nothing titillating about the scene and the only shocking moments concern a vat of acid, that does not seem to offer any gruesome moments to give us nightmares. I accessed this film on Tubi, and watched a few commercials, but the film seemed unedited. The best thing about it is that it is short.