News and Opinions

The Wishlist, Part 1. Wherein I pine over films that are overdue for a DVD re-release, or have yet to see the light in that format at all. Today’s subject: the 1980 sci-fi fiasco Saturn 3.

The film is a joy for a number of reasons. First, there’s the absurd plot: on a research base orbiting Saturn, passions flare as the idyll of the couple living there is disrupted by an unstable new arrival and his killer robot, who both wind up lusting after the woman on board. If the storyline were all that was ri...ible about the film, it might well be pretty entertaining on that count alone. Then there are the production values. The special effects appear to have been lifted from two completely different movies with utterly dissimilar budgets. At one moment, the audience is presented with 2001/Star Wars-style mile-long spaceships, complete with portentous fanfare on the soundtrack. At the next, the FX are suddenly far more reminiscent of a typical episode of Thunderbirds. Those shows looked pretty damn good for puppet adventures, but an audience catching big-budget SF pic within just a few months of Alien would be expecting a bit more consistency. But the film seems equally proud of all its effects, good or bad, and displays them like a doting parent.

A couple of months back, Shriek Show released its Evil Animals box set, presenting a triple feature treat for fans of 70's horror that has more than a touch of cheese to it. There are two theatrical flicks here, and one made-for-TV opus, and the titles should ring nostalgic bells for anyone who was a kid in that decade.

Two of the films – Grizzly and Day of the Animals – are the work of director William Girdler, and man whose output was never what one might actually call “good,” but was always...fast-paced and entertaining, even when it completely lost its mind (as did The Manitou with its killer-dwarf-and-laser-beams finale). Grizzly (the original “Jaws with Claws” well before The Edge) has the titular beast rampaging around a park, mutilating hikers. The plot follows that of Jaws to the letter, with the local head honcho refusing to shut the park down (need those tourist dollars, don’t you know). The bear is finally hunted by a trio of outsiders – rebellious but can-do ranger Christopher George (replacing Roy Scheider), Vietnam vet helicopter pilot Andrew Prine (standing in for Robert Shaw), and maverick wildlife expert Richard Jaeckel (instead of Richard Dreyfuss). The dialogue is riddled with Ed-Woodian gems, which keeps up interest in between the notably gruesome attack sequences. Of special note in this department is the scene where a little boy’s leg is ripped off. Hey now.

On May 21, Bruno Mattei died. He was the director of uncounted low-end Italian exploitation films, occupying a niche of horror and sex (frequently both) not unlike that owned by Joe D’Amato. It would be stretching the truth rather too far to say that he left us some good films, but he did leave us some entertaining ones. Viewers wanting a taste of his work should steer clear of Hell of the Living Dead, a zombie film that unfortunately is as dull as it is ludicrous. But Rats: Night of Terror (1983... out on DVD from Anchor Bay) is a different animal altogether, and as party movies go, this one is hard to beat. Be warned now, there are spoilers ahead. If you want to hit this film cold, stop reading now and go track it down.

A barely comprehensible crawl informs us that we are some two centuries after nuclear war. Our heroes are a group of bikers foraging for food and shelter in an unnamed metropolis. The movie is nothing if not a shameless pastiche of other (wildly disparate) flicks, and our first bit of artistic theft is from The Road Warrior. Or, at least, that is what the audience is meant to think. But these bikers are hardly threats either to Mad Max or to the Humongous. Their costumes are so varied and silly, they appear to have been lifted from several different movies. Add in the fact that, in this post-apocalypse world, copious amounts of hair care products and eyeliner are still available to both men and women, our bad-ass group appears to consists of Chuck Norris, Olivia Newton-John, Janet Jackson and the Village People.

It has been a commonplace for quite some time now to take for granted that the B-movie, as we used to know it, has died. The types of stories we used to get in those films, from, for the sake of argument, the 30s to the late 70s, have been taken over by the blockbusters. So we get the same narratives, but with budgets in excess of 100 million dollars. So not only has the B-pic lost its turf, but it has also lost its natural habitat. The drive-in is almost extinct, and anyway, it is almost impossible for such films to...achieve any kind of theatrical distribution at all.

But the form isn’t quite dead. Roger Corman, king of the Bs, saw the writing on the wall some time ago, and shifted his focus almost exclusively to producing product for home video and cable TV. That is where the B-movie now resides. And while much of that product is deservedly maligned (does anybody really deserve to be put through another Jim Wynorski film?), and equally deservedly consigned to the remainder bins of video stores, let us reconsider our instinctive bile for a moment.