He's Clean, He's Mean, He's The Go-Between
Now Playing: ST. IVES
Sorry the Crane Shot has been silent lately. I was out of town over the weekend attending LD's wedding. Cheeseburger and Shark Hunter were kind enough to offer accomodations, and a good time was had by all.

The only crappy movie I was able to see while away was VAMPIRES: THE TURNING, which is, surprisingly, a sequel to 1998's JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES, a meanspirited and occasionally entertaining vampire western with a spirited, foulmouthed performance by James Woods as a badass vampire hunter. Carpenter wasn't involved with the direct-to-video sequel, VAMPIRES: LOS MUERTOS, which starred Jon Bon Jovi, of all people. I didn't see that one, but it had to have been better than 2005's VAMPIRES: THE TURNING, a confusing, dull and illogical DTV sequel with a colorless cast.

Last night I watched VOLUNTEERS, which I had never seen for some reason. Now I know why: it isn't very good. It should have been. Tom Hanks and John Candy reunite the year after SPLASH was a big hit, CHEERS writers Ken Levine and David Isaacs did the screenplay, and Nicholas Meyer, hot off TIME AFTER TIME and STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, directed it. Of course, Meyer isn't exactly known for rollicking comedy, and VOLUNTEERS is pretty flat. Tim Thomerson is really good as a psycho CIA agent, and Hanks has some nice chemistry with Gedde Watanabe (GUNG HO), but oddly gets nothing going with Candy. Hanks met his wife-to-be Rita Wilson on this film, so at least it worked out for somebody. There are a handful of clever sight gags, and a couple of lines made me laugh, but Hanks' character is an unlikeable jag, and there isn't much funny here.

Also, thanks to Netflix, I caught up with a Charles Bronson movie I hadn't seen. ST. IVES was the first of nine movies Bronson made with director J. Lee Thompson. In it, he plays a professional "go-between" (I don't know how you get that gig) named Raymond St. Ives who is hired by wealthy crook John Houseman to ransom some ledgers stolen from Houseman's safe. Of course, no job is as easy as it seems, and when Bronson shows up at the ransom site with $100,000 and finds no ledgers, but a dead guy in a dryer, he realizes this gig isn't going to be the cakewalk he was hoping for. He does eventually sleep with Jacqueline Bisset, which you would imagine would make the whole ordeal worthwhile. What's really cool about ST. IVES, in addition to the punchy Lalo Schifrin score, is the supporting cast. If you watched more than five movies made during the 1970's, you've seen most of the performers before. Harry Guardino (THE ENFORCER), Dana Elcar (BARETTA) and Harris Yulin (NIGHT MOVES) play cops. Maximilian Schell gets "guest star" billing as a shrink. Michael Lerner (BARTON FINK) is a lawyer. Elisha Cook (THE MALTESE FALCON) is a hotel clerk. Daniel J. Travanti (HILL STREET BLUES), Burr DeBenning (THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN), Val Bisoglio (QUINCY, M.E.), Dick O'Neill (CAGNEY & LACEY), George Memmoli (PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE), stuntman Dar Robinson and Olan Soule (the voice of Batman on SUPERFRIENDS) are in it too. You'll also see Robert Englund and Jeff Goldblum (also in Bronson's DEATH WISH) in small roles.

Warners' DVD looks really nice and even includes a couple of extras: the original theatrical trailer (widescreen and in good shape) and a short promotional featurette made during production called BRONSON ST. IVES that basically details how awesome and popular Charles Bronson is. Good stuff.

On iTunes:
"Train on a One Track Mind"--American Breed
"Do You Feel It Too?"--Monkees
BULLITT Main Title--Lalo Schifrin
"Walking Out on Love"--The Beat
"How About Now"--King Richard & the Knights
BARNEY MILLER--Jack Elliott & Allyn Ferguson
"Change Is Now"--The Byrds
"Video Killed the Radio Star"--The Buggles
"Motorcycle Circus"--Luis Bacalov from KILL BILL
"Teach Your Children"--Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
"When You Find Out"--The Nerves
FELONY SQUAD--Pete Rugolo
"Space Oddity"--David Bowie

What If It Was Your Sister?
Now Playing: TRACKDOWN
Here's a rarity for you. TRACKDOWN appears to have been an independently produced action movie released by United Artists in 1976, but it has never been released on home video in any form, and it's unlikely that it'll ever be at this point. My copy isn't the greatest quality--it's a fuzzy television print with a missing rape scene--but where else am I going to see this movie?

Big Jim Mitchum stars as Big Jim Calhoun, a Montana rancher who journeys to the big, bad city of Los Angeles to hunt his teenage runaway sister Betsy (Karen Lamm, married to Dennis Wilson at the time). Like many a youngster who runs away to Hollywood, Betsy runs afoul of some bad dudes. First she's ripped off by a Latino street gang, but when one of the gang members, Chucho (Erik Estrada, who's good here), feels sorry for her, he gets her a decent job, takes her dancing, and then back to his place for lovin'. Then she's abducted by Chucho's alleged pals, gangraped, drugged, and sold into hood Johnny Dee's (Vince Cannon) stable of call girls.

The head madam, the classy Barbara (beautiful Anne Archer), manages to convince the 17-year-old Betsy that prostitution is a big barrel of laughs, which it appears to be (lots of nice clothes, extravagant parties and partying with rock stars), until one of Dee's pals gets a little too rough with her.

Meanwhile, Jim, after getting nowhere with the cops, crashes through the streets of Hollywood like an ox in a china shop before finally teaming up with Chucho and women's shelter director Lynn (Cathy Lee Crosby) for more rough stuff, but of a more organized nature.

TRACKDOWN isn't anything special, but it isn't a bad timewaster either. The first half is a bit short on action and is too much like the superior HARDCORE, but director Richard T. Heffron (NEWMAN'S LAW) really picks things up in the second half with an exciting shootout inside an elevator shaft and a fiery desert climax. Mitchum isn't the world's greatest actor, but he looks like he really can kick plenty of ass.

TRACKDOWN features a supporting actor named John Kerry, has a closing theme song performed by Kenny Rogers, and features a story credit for Ivan Nagy, who later married Heidi Fleiss.

Guy Walks Into A Talent Agent's Office...
Now Playing: THE ARISTOCRATS
THE ARISTOCRATS is the most foul, profane film I've seen in a long time. Maybe ever. It's also blisteringly funny and, yes, even educational as an insider's look at how comedy works and how comedians think. Unlike the good COMEDIAN, which examined how comics like Jerry Seinfeld prepare for their standup act, THE ARISTOCRATS takes a look at one joke from the perspective of dozens of the finest comic minds in the world (Albert Brooks, Seinfeld, Bill Cosby, and Robert Klein are notably absent).

The joke is legendary among comedians, who rarely if ever tell the joke onstage as part of their act. Rather, they use it to entertain each other as a sort of folk tale that passes along from generation to generation. Kind of like the Uncle Remus of jokes. As is mentioned in the documentary, the art of the joke comes from "the singer, not the song". It's structured like a piece of jazz, to be riffed and improvised to the artist's content. All the comedian needs to do is begin and end the joke the same way. It's the filling that's the point.

The joke begins more or less with, "A man walks into a talent agent's office." He tells the agent he has an act. The agent says, "OK, you've got two minutes. Show me what you've got." The punchline--eventually--is the agent asking the name of the act, and the man answering, "The Aristocrats." In between these bookends, the joke teller embarks on a pathological, scatological litany of grossness intended to make the audience's ears bleed. No bodily fluid, no taboo, no sexual act, no vocabulary is verboten. The point is to describe the most tasteless, bizarre, disturbing act possible, usually involving shitting, pissing, bestiality, incest, you name it.

Director Paul Provenza and co-producer Penn Jillette, well-known comics themselves, took their cameras all over the country, recording famous comedians of all ages telling the joke, relating when they first heard it and who told it to them, and their philosophy behind its humor. Some just tell it straight out. Some, like Larry Storch (F TROOP) and Hank Azaria, use funny accents. Kevin Pollak does it with a Christopher Walken impression (the DVD extras include a clip of him doing it as Albert Brooks, which might be the most fucking brilliant piece of video on the entire disc). Sarah Silverman tells it as if she were one of the Aristocrats and claims she was raped as a little girl by talk-show host Joe Franklin. Richard Lewis says the joke is "a piece of shit." Chris Rock not only doesn't tell it, he doesn't appear to see the point of it. It sounds strange coming from the softspoken Rita Rudner. One highlight is Tommy Smothers telling it to his brother Dick, who amazingly has never before heard it and doesn't think it's funny. Martin Mull tells a different joke using "Aristocrats" as a punchline, which I appreciated because I recognized it as the "Bongo Bongo" joke that I heard back in the 1970's and have never heard anyone else besides me tell in the decades since.

Some of the bigger names pissing, shitting and fucking all over this joke in the film are Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, George Carlin, Drew Carey, Paul Reiser (extremely funny), Jason Alexander and Don Rickles. It was fun seeing older comics like Phyllis Diller, Chuck McCann (also really funny), Rip Taylor, Eric Idle, David Brenner, and Shelley Berman going at it. Also appearing: Bill Maher, Allan Havey, David Steinberg, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Fred Willard, Dom Irrera, Larry Miller, David Steinberg...pretty much anyone who's done standup on THE TONIGHT SHOW anytime within the last thirty years.

The biggest laughs are reserved for Bob Saget (who did a similarly sick and hilarious guest shot on ENTOURAGE recently), whose inventively sick rendition would make the heads of his FULL HOUSE fans explode, and Gilbert Gottfried, who told it a couple of weeks after September 11, 2001 at a Friars Club roast and brought the audience to its knees with laughter.

THE ARISTOCRATS is dedicated to Johnny Carson, who reportedly loved the joke and was a friend of sorts to nearly everyone in the picture. Dana Gould tells the joke with a funny Carson impression that feels appropriate.

The movie was released unrated--it certainly would have gotten an NC-17 from the MPAA--and it isn't for prudes. It is essential for students of comedy and for those who aren't afraid of bad taste.

Audience Of One
Now Playing: RIVER OF DEATH
I was watching 24 on Fox the other night, and was stunned to see Allan Havey in a promo for a new sitcom. It's called FREE RIDE, and I'm sure it sucks (being a Fox sitcom and all), but I'll have to tune in to at least the first episode to see Havey as the wacky dad.

Allan Havey is--or was (I haven't seen him in ages)--a standup comic who achieved his biggest stardom in the early 1990's as host of NIGHT AFTER NIGHT WITH ALLAN HAVEY on Comedy Central. NIGHT AFTER NIGHT is the greatest talk show that you never heard of. It ran one hour in length and was pretty low-key and very funny. It had no band, a small budget, a comfortable but low-tech set. Besides host Havey, the only regular was announcer Nick Bakay (who left to become the announcer on the shortlived THE DENNIS MILLER SHOW).

There was no studio audience per se. Instead, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT had an Audience of One. That's right, viewers could write in with the hope of being chosen to be Allan's Audience of One for a show. The Audience of One sat in a comfortable theater seat roped off with those cool velvet ropes and watched the taping. They also got to chat a bit and be seen on the air with Allan.

Unlike other talk shows not hosted by Carson (still on THE TONIGHT SHOW then) or Letterman, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT had little trouble getting good guests, a surprise considering how few viewers Comedy Central had at the time. I remember seeing Joel Hodgson, William Shatner, Gary Busey...lots of standup comics (I think Jerry Seinfeld was even on once)...Kevin Pollak. OK, so none of these guys is A-list material (not even Seinfeld was then), but that's a pretty good lineup.

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT was an interesting, innovative series, and television could use more talk shows like it. Comedy Central had some interesting shows on those days...MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, of course...SHORT ATTENTION SPAN THEATER...Paul Provenza had a half-hour talk show where he interviewed only comedians...I think Alan King had a show...lots of standup comedy on THE A-LIST and STAND-UP, STAND-UP. But there's no question that NIGHT AFTER NIGHT WITH ALLAN HAVEY is beloved by almost everyone who saw it.

It took Havey more than a decade to get another regular TV gig, so take advantage of it while you can. I think FREE RIDE debuts March 1 after AMERICAN IDOL. Let's hope it doesn't blow too badly. Now if we could just find Brian Regan a job...

iTunes: In Color!
Now Playing: HAVE A GOOD FUNERAL, MY FRIEND...SARTANA WILL PAY
"I've Never Seen Evergreen"--Fever Tree
"I Don't Think You Know Me At All"--The Monkees
"Magic Bus"--The Who
"Gimme Shelter"--Josefus
"Kim Cattrall"--MST3K
"Death Angel"--Substantial Evidence
Theme from THE F.B.I.
"Brightest Lights"--Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends
"Wheel"--Space Farm
"Una Storia Indiana"--Ennio Morricone from NAVAJO JOE
"Come Back to Me"--String and the Beans
"(P.Y.T.) Pretty Young Thing"--Michael Jackson
"I've Got to Be Going"--Peppermint Trolley Company
"Little Latin Lupe Lu"--The Keymen
"Dragnet/Room 43"--Ray Anthony
"All Summer Long"--Beach Boys
THE RAT PATROL Theme--Dominic Frontiere
"Light My Fire"--Touch

A.U.I.--Airwolf Under The Influence
Now Playing: XTRO II: THE SECOND ENCOUNTER
One could make a case that "drunken Jan-Michael Vincent movies" were a special sub-genre of exploitation movie during the '80s and '90s. In ALIENATOR and HIT LIST, for instance, the former AIRWOLF star is quite visibly plastered during his scenes. In a recent interview in SHOCK CINEMA, director John Flynn claims Vincent was an alcoholic during shooting of DEFIANCE in 1979, saying that the popular '70s leading man was insecure about his acting ability.

Vincent had some box-office cachet after CBS cancelled AIRWOLF, which found independent producers of low-budget movies eager to hire him, whether he could do the job or not, simply because they could be sure that his name in the cast list would produce sales. When British director Harry Bromley-Davenport was hired by some Canadian producers to make an "in-name-only" sequel to 1983's XTRO (New Line owned the film and characters, but Bromley-Davenport owned the word "XTRO"), Vincent, about whom the director candidly states "I didn't like him,", was already part of the deal.

Just so you know, 1991's XTRO II: THE SECOND ENCOUNTER has absolutely nothing to do with XTRO and everything to do with ALIENS, which probably inspired as many lame ripoffs as ALIEN did. Paul Koslo (MR. MAJESTYK) and Tara Buckman ("Brandy" from THE MISADVENTURES OF SHERIFF LOBO) play scientists heading up a top-secret underground laboratory. Their group has discovered a way to travel to a parallel dimension, but when they send humans for the first time, only one of the travelers returns.

Under the gun from their government financiers to achieve positive results, Buckman suggests that the project's founder, played by Vincent, be brought in to help, but Koslo, who has a personal beef with the man, says no. Vincent joins the group anyway, along with a platoon of soldiers who are armed to enter the parallel dimension and search for more survivors.

That trip never happens after some sort of strange, slimy monster with big teeth rips its way out of the chest of the lone survivor and stalks the dark passageways and air ducts of the massive facility, ripping and tearing apart the inhabitants one by one. Yes, I know you've seen this movie before, we all have.

I suppose that if you absolutely must watch a movie about a giant slimy monster traipsing through dark hallways munching guys with guns, XTRO II would suffice. That is, if ALIENS, CREEPOZOIDS, ALIEN TERMINATOR, MIND RIPPER yada yada yada are all rented out. X-FILES fans may enjoy a prominent supporting performance by Nicholas "Krycek" Lea. There's a bit of gore, but nothing particularly juicy. Certainly there's little excitement or originality.

But it does have a drunk Jan-Michael Vincent. It's obvious that he was in no shape to learn lines, and Bromley-Davenport confirms my suspicion that the director was standing behind the camera giving line readings and Vincent was merely reciting them back. His voice is gravelly, and he sometimes slurs, so who knows what he's saying much of the time. A lot of his dialogue is off-camera, presumably so they could patch takes together. You can sort of see why he continued to get acting jobs, though. He was never a strong actor, but he did have that intangible "something" that made you want to look at him. And he kinda still does in XTRO II. Or maybe it's just the alcohol.

Watch Her Back (Side)
THE STRANGER AND THE GUNFIGHTER is one of the more unusual films I've seen lately. Originally released in Europe in 1974, it's an Italian/Hong Kong co-production, a rare combination of the western and martial arts genres. Probably influenced by the David Carradine TV series KUNG FU, THE STRANGER AND THE GUNFIGHTER is an entertaining kung fu western with a strange concept, one that is unique to the best of my knowledge, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that someone else has used it.

The awesome Lee Van Cleef plays a charming thief named Dakota who blows up a safe belonging to a Chinese man named Wang. The explosion accidentally kills Wang, who is rumored to be worth a fortune, but the only things in the safe are a fortune cookie and four photos of four different women baring their backsides.

In jail the night before his hanging, Dakota is visited by Ho Chiang (Lo Lieh from FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH), Wang’s nephew, who reveals that his uncle tattooed portions of a treasure map on the asses of his mistresses. Since Ho is unfamiliar with the United States, he rescues Dakota from the noose, and the pair team up to visit the four women, check out their tushies, and find Wang’s fortune. Sounds like a nice job if you can get it.

Hot on their trail is sinister Yancey Hobbitt (Julian Ugarte), a brutal preacher who drags his own church around on the back of his wagon. His woman is one of Wang's former mistresses, and Hobbitt finds out about the treasure when Dakota takes the key to her chastity belt away from him to check out her portion of the treasure map. Hobbitt figures he can build his own church with the cache and recruits a hulking Indian, whom he discovers wrestling for money, to be his sidekick.

THE STRANGER AND THE GUNFIGHTER was directed by Antonio Margheriti, a decent filmmaker who made entertaining movies in just about every genre, including science fiction and horror. Here he demonstrates a sense of humor that allows the normally stern Van Cleef to show off a lighter touch than usual (Lee even sings in the picture). Lo Lieh pretty much steals the film anyway with several rousing kung fu scenes underscored by Carlo Savina's rock-oriented music that differs from the standard spaghetti western soundtrack.

On iTunes:
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS Main Theme--Danny Elfman
"Poetry in Motion"--Johnny Tillotson
"Painted Ladies"--Ian Thomas (whose brother Dave was a member of the SCTV troupe)
"Everything I Own"--Bread
"Disco Duck"--Rick Dees (yes, I know this song sucks ass!)
HALLOWEEN radio spot
Theme from DANGER MAN--The Red Price Combo
"Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon"--Neil Diamond
"Who Dat?"--The Jury
"Think of Me"--The Cindermen
"Have You Ever Seen the Rain"--CCR
"Manic Monday"--The Bangles
"September Girls"--Big Star

You've Got Fucking Talent
I've seen a lot of crazyass bugfuck movies in my day, but very few of them can stand up next to SCORPION THUNDERBOLT, an Asian action/horror movie that carries a 1985 copyright date, but who knows exactly when the damn thing was shot or released.

SCORPION THUNDERBOLT is a ridiculous supernatural mishmash that's pretty outrageous even by Godfrey Ho’s standards. Here's what you need to know about Ho. During the 1980's, Ho and producer Joseph Lai hired American actor Richard Harrison to star in a couple of action movies about ninjas. Harrison had been living in Europe and Asia for at least twenty years at that point. He had gone to Italy in the early '60s to star in dozens of films: westerns, spy movies, sword-and-sandal adventures, etc. When his star began to wane in Italy, he did films all over the world from Turkey to Hong Kong to the Philippines. His name carried a certain cachet in international theaters, although I'm not sure how well known he was in the U.S.

What Lai and Ho did was take that Harrison footage and splice it into dozens of no-budget crapfests, in effect creating a bunch of "Richard Harrison" movies, but paying the actor for only a couple. These films are usually the result of finding an unfinished or unreleaseable genre movie and cutting into it 10-15 minutes of Harrison footage that has nothing to do with anything else in the movie. Sometimes, crude "conversations" between Harrison and an actor in the "other" film are created using closeups of the actors "talking" to each other. All of them are terrible and cheap, even though some are oddly watchable.

I don't know if I understand SCORPION THUNDERBOLT, yet it's a good idea not to think too much about the plots of these Ho films anyway. The main plot involves some kind of snake queen who lives in a red castle and is able to transform Helen, a pretty photographer (Juliet Chan), into a flying snake monster with arms and legs and force her to kill. Whom she’s killing and why, I have no idea. Helen manages to temporarily keep her awful secret from Jackie (Benny Tsui), the cop investigating the murders. When he finds out, he tries to stop the police from gunning her down.

Meanwhile, we first see Richard (Harrison) picking up a sexy hitchhiker who flashes her breasts at him (“I hate to see people standing out in the rain,” he says to her, even though he's driving with all his car windows open!). She tells him she’s an actress and takes him to a screening room, where they watch a ridiculous film in which she’s tied up naked while a Chinese artist paints psychedelic designs on her body (“I have to admit, you’ve got fucking talent.”). She does a striptease for him, and tries to stab him in the back during sex. Every time we see Richard after that, somebody is jumping out of the shadows, trying to kick his ass and steal his ring. A priest finally gives him a hilariously complicated formula for destroying the snake queen, which can apparently only be accomplished on the 15th day of the month.

After being prostituted by Ho and Lai, Harrison eventually left the business and returned to California in the '80s, where he began acting in Fred Olen Ray movies. Nothing Ray ever made could be as insane as SCORPION THUNDERBOLT, which contains neither a scorpion nor a thunderbolt. But it does have a flying snake woman with arms, legs and a tail.

Recently on iTunes:
"White Knight"--David Arnold from TOMORROW NEVER DIES
GET CHRISTIE LOVE theme--Jack Elliott & Allyn Ferguson
The kickass "I'm Just A Mops"--The Mops (from Japan!)
"One Monkey Don't Stop No Show"--The Honey Cone
"The Boss"--James Brown from BLACK CAESAR
"You're My Little Girl"--The Fourmost
"You'll Kill Her"--Francisco DeMasi from PIOMBO ROVENTE
"Omaha"--Moby Grape
"Arnold Layne"--Pink Floyd
"The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins"--Leonard Nimoy (!)
"The Spider and the Fly"--Rolling Stones
"I Saw Her Yesterday"--The Sunrisers
"The Boss"--Joseph Gershenson
"Our Dream"--The Munx
"You Make Me Lose My Mind"--Mark V
"I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten"--Dusty Springfield
"Complications"--The Monks
"The Great Duel"--Luis Bacalov
"Born on the Bayou"--CCR
"Montego Bay"--The Bar-Kays

See What's Become Of Me
Now Playing: THE YESTERDAY MACHINE
After more than a week on vacation, I've had the opportunity to watch some batshit-crazy movies. Part of the thrill of watching Crappy Movies is knowing that, every once in awhile, I'm going to come across something so obscure and bizarre that it almost turns me off contemporary films for good. Certainly there's nothing being made today, be it independently or at the major Hollywood studios, that could duplicate the strangeness of 1963's THE YESTERDAY MACHINE.

It, not surprisingly, wasn't made in Hollywood anyway, but rather Texas, which also was the home of notorious schlockmeister Larry Buchanan, who gave us so-called classics like MARS NEEDS WOMEN and ATTACK OF THE THE EYE CREATURES (sic). Buchanan was quite likely an associate, a partner or even a mentor to Russ Marker, who wrote, produced, directed and composed songs for THE YESTERDAY MACHINE, a very talky and slow-moving science fiction movie that isn't completely uninteresting.

Howard, a male college cheerleader, and his baton-twirling girlfriend Margie (she shakes her hips and twirls to some groovy rock-and-roll while Howie works on his car) break down on a country road and cut through the woods to find help. They're astonished to run into two men dressed in Civil War gear who shoot at them. Howie takes a slug in the back and collapses back on the road, but Margie completely disappears.

Jim Crandall (James Britton), an obnoxious, wisecracking newspaper reporter anxious to get away on his first vacation in three years, is convinced by his boss to poke around the scene of the shooting and find a story. Lieutenant Partane (former B-movie cowboy star Tim Holt) isn't much help, so Jim fetches Margie's sister Sandra (Ann Pellegrino), a nightclub singer, to explore the woods with him. While fleeing an attacker, the two pass through some sort of warp that deposits them in the 18th century, where they encounter a horseman who confuses Jim's lighter for witchcraft.

Another "poof" and Crandall and Sandy appear in the workshop of Professor Ernst von Hauser (Jack Herman), a Nazi who escaped the fall of the Third Reich and is continuing his experiments more than twenty years later in the basement of an abandoned old house in Texas! Astonishingly, Crandall isn't surprised to see von Hauser, since Partane had miraculously just told him a story of invading a concentration camp at the end of World War II and seeing the results of von Hauser's time experiments. What a coincidence.

Prof. von Hauser sends his two Nazi lackeys and his Egyptian female slave to lock Sandy up with Margie, while he delivers what is simultaneously the movie's highlight and lowlight. Actor Herman's acting is way out of control as he goes on for what seems like hours, plowing his way through pages and pages of technical dialogue that is supposed to sound scientific, but is really just gibberish. Considering himself to be more brilliant than Einstein, von Hauser even scribbles his formulas on the blackboard while Jim scratches his head and the audience fights sleep. I don't know what Marker was thinking in piling all this deadly exposition into one clump that must consist of at least ten minutes of screen time. Maybe he thought we'd be fascinated by his scientific acumen, as if we'd really believe he might have something to this time machine thing.

The time machine itself consists of a bank of cheap metal computer equipment on the wall, a regular wooden chair, and four glowing light poles around it. Besides the brief appearance of the Rebel soldiers and that quick spin to 1787, Marker never uses the time machine. Instead of creating some creative romps through time, Marker merely writes an easy escape for Jim and the women from their cells and has Jim blast their way out of the lab, which opens to a trapdoor located in the house's backyard cemetary.

Shot in black-and-white with an original music score that popped up a few years later in Buchanan's classic ZONTAR, THE THING FROM VENUS, THE YESTERDAY MACHINE gets points for ambition, but loses some for its inert middle act and Marker's failure to provide any dramatic punch, even on his miniscule budget. It's still no worse and maybe even a little better than the more famous Buchanan's handiwork--a backhanded compliment, to be sure.

A Hate Story
I haven't found confirmation online yet, but a poster on the DVD Maniacs forum has announced the death of filmmaker William Allen Castleman, who directed three exploitation movies during the 1970's and produced and scored several more. I've seen two of his three films as a director: THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF ZORRO, which is an overlong but fun softcore sex adventure, and JOHNNY FIRECLOUD (he also made BUMMER!, which is paired with FIRECLOUD on the Something Weird DVD).

JOHNNY FIRECLOUD is a good movie, co-produced by exploitation legend David F. Friedman, shot at 2.35:1, and released by 20th Century Fox (the only Friedman film to get a major studio release?). Native American 'Nam vet Johnny Firecloud (Puerto Rican actor Victor Mohica) returns to the small desert town where he grew up, only to find that his people are being ridiculed and beaten by the bigoted white thugs on the payroll of town boss Colby (Ralph Meeker). Firecloud is particularly a sore subject with Colby, since the Indian was dating his daughter June (Christina Hart) prior to joining the Army. In fact, he went so far as to intercept the letters the young lovers sent to each other, causing June, now an alcoholic, to believe Johnny had dumped her and vice versa. After Colby takes his hazing too far, the film switches from ripping off BILLY JACK to cribbing DEATH WISH, and Johnny begins meting out his own brand of vigilante justice, much to the chagrin of weak sheriff Jesse (David Canary), a basically good man who feels disgraced by a personal secret known only to Colby, who uses it to keep the law under his thumb.

What was a very obscure action movie that played briefly in drive-ins in the mid-1970s and has hardly been seen since is revealed by Something Weird Video's DVD to be a thoughtful, absorbing drama with action overtures. Directing a screenplay by Wilton Denmark, whose credits range from the sleazy low-budget western CAIN'S CUTTHROATS to teleplays for THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, Castleman crafts a surprisingly mature morality play that goes bounds beyond what was surely called for. Sure, the exploitative elements are there, such as gory revenge, nudity, and rape, like you'd expect in a Friedman film, but in between are some heady characterization and fine performances. Canary in particular is marvelous as the complex sheriff, torn between doing what he believes is right and following Colby's orders in order to protect his secret. He was a recognizable TV actor at the time, due to his supporting role as Candy on BONANZA, and has since played twins on ALL MY CHILDREN to great acclaim. His performance in JOHNNY FIRECLOUD is very strong and provides the somewhat talky finale with some power.

Hart, a familiar TV face who started her career disrobing in drive-in flicks like THE STEWARDESSES and THE MAD BOMBER, is the cast's only misfire, playing her drunk role too far over the top, but she does appear topless, as does Sacheen Littlefeather (best known for accepting Brando's 1973 GODFATHER Oscar), the recipient of obvious breast augmentation.

Crisply lensed in Southern California by co-producer Peter B. Goode, JOHNNY FIRECLOUD slightly transcends its drive-in origins, adding social commentary and solid performances while still delivering the bloody goods. It's too bad Castleman didn't make another film after this, because he worked wonders with the $225,000 he had to work with here.

Castleman apparently died at the age of 83.