Death Race 2000 (1975)

 "I think you're one very large baked potato."

There's such a concept as "the greatest film ever". This film doesn't, it's fair to say, stand comparison with The Godfather. There is, however, a category of "greatest B movie ever". This film, at least of those I've seen, is the clear winner. It's cheap. It's bonkers. It's brilliant. It's produced (not directed) by Roger Corman.

I mean, it's Wacky Races where killing people gets you points in a dystopian future where this serves as both bread and circus. It's a delicious black comedy in a dictatorial America in 2000(!) where "Mr President" has a Winter Palace abroad and blames the French for everything, as in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The violence is hilarious, as is the not too serious documentary style. There's a moment where Joe kills a race official, and suddenly they're fair game.

David Carradine is superb, entirely embracing the fim's camp aesthetic. Sylvester Stallone, pre-Rocky, is, well Sylvester Stallone. Between them, they carry the film, although it's sad the superb Simone Griffeth never did much else.

It really is Wacky Races with more skulduggery and more gore ('70s style), but the dry, deadpan humour is delicious. It's very much of its time- one of the racers is a Nazi!-but it's gloriously dark, gloriously violent, and gloriously funny. 

Shivers (1975)

 "

David Cronenberg is a favourite director of mine, He occupies that strange middle ground between respected auteur and body horror genre director, at least in the early part of his career: later on,the body horror disappears and Cronenberg safely gets the approval of the snobbish critics whi sniff at his earlier work, even this film, which is safely gathered into the canon of we horror aficionados, Yet this is no B movie. It deserves more.

Amonst the cast, of course, is Barbara Steele, to whom the phrase "horror queen" could be applied. And this very modern film (for 1975), opening with a posh advert for a load of posh aparments on the St Lawrence in Montreal, is certainly within the horror genre. Yet it centres ver specifically on a body horror equated exactly with sexzuality. As Janine says, while trying to seductively kill Dr St Luc, mere existence is sexuality; we exist to reproduce, The species is all. So here we have a Dr Hobbes who plans to replace malfunctioning organs with useful parasites that do the same job, yet (after the nonce dies after murdering a schoolgirl he'd been shagging, causing distressingly little outrage) his true philosopjy is that humans are too cerebral and insufficiently sexual. This is the perfect premise for a film based on the phenimenon of disgusting little phallic worms which can hardly do other than represent male sexuality. There's a clearly rapey theme here, intended to evoke bloody disgust, and no one gets out alive, as we're all guilty of having sexual desires, if not necessarily violent ones. 

This is at once a superb horror film, belying its low budget, and a harbinger of what Cronenberg has yet to bring us.The man's a genius.

Out of the Trees

 “Van… is a word rarely used to start sentences.”

It's a shame this was buried on original transmission and lost for so many years; it’s superb. A sketch show scripted by the dream team of Douglas Adams and my fellow Leicestershire lad Graham Chapman, it feels in some ways similar to the style of the last season of Monty Python but is much fresher. Chapman and Adam’s as a writing team produce some splendid alchemy giving us a consistent run of excellent and very funny sketches.

The cast impresses too, especially Simon Jones in his pre-Arthur Dent days.

If you enjoyed the more verbal type of Pythonesque humour, or you’re a fan of Douglas Adam’s, you must seek this out.

Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny

I seem to be getting through this series rather quickly, and I’ll admit that it’s all somewhat addictive. This third book is the most unputdownable yet, making good use of all the patient world building and character development of the first two instalments to spin us a tale of political skulduggery and, well, games of thrones between the royals of Amber. It’s a cracking read.

And yet, at the same time, it’s more substantial than that. Zelazny’s prose is still reminiscent of Raymond Chandler for the most part, hard-boiled and lightly cynical. There’s even a nicely metatextual bit near the end as Corwin’s friend Bill from the “shadow” Earth says he feels somewhat like a minor character in a novel who never gets to know what’s really going on. Yet the prose is capable of leaping into more than that when needed, and Zelazny is quite trippily poetic when describing those moments where the doors of perception get weird.

Even more excitingly, the whodunit side is now explained. But what of Dworkin, the nature of the trap for Oberon, the hinted-at origins of the black road? Much still lies to be explained, and then the novel ends with the big revelation that there is another, “real” Amber.

This both is and is not unlike anything I’ve read before. I’m enjoying it immensely.

Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

“I'll teach those humans for failing to recognise me. They mocked me. Well, now they're going to eat their words!"

This is the film that killed the Godzilla franchise for nine years. It was never intended to do this but, despite decent reviews, it was a box office bombs. So this is the last film of an era- an era of rubber customes, toy tanks and B movie awesomeness.

And this is actually one of the superior entries. Yes, its monster stuff is more or less recycled and yes, we don't get to see much monster action (or indeed Godzilla) until really rather late on. But the science fiction intrigue and the twists and turns before them keep us entertained. We have a bitter old mad scientist! We have the shocking revelation that his downtrodden daughter is a cyborg! We have the most 70s clothing possible!

Oh, the plot doesn't really make sense, and Mechagodzilla doesn't actually do an awful lot, plus this new monster is a bit generic, but who cares? The pace, and the plot beats, are perfect for suspense. This is how to do a B movie.

So, what next? I'm genuinely watching these movies blind, having never seen any of them before. But I very much suspect that, after this film, nothing will ever be the same again. Let's hope the franchise remains enjoyable as the period charm gradually lessens as we approach more recent decades.

Jaws (1975)

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat...”

My parents still remember seeing this at the pictures, two years before I was born, at the old Cannon cinema in Hinckley. It made quite an impression on them. And now I see why.

This isn’t Spielberg’s first film by any means, but it’s where he invents the blockbuster, right here, with a film where every lock of hair and every item of clothing is, unmistakably, at Peak Seventies. If any film defines a decade, this is it.

What's incredible is how very, very, straightforward the plot is- shark attacks terrify small town; police chief is prevented from taking action by stubborn mayor; three men ultimately spend the second half of the film hunting the shark and fighting for their lives. That's it. In lesser hands this would have made a kitsch B movie. That such a ho-hum premise and plot could lead to such greatness is a testament to Spielberg's mastery of the camera- some of the POV shots are dazzlingly creative- and a wisely scarce use of a not-that-good shark prop. It’s also the start of a very fruitful film career for the great John Williams. That musical hook is genius.

The other difference, of course, is the cast. Roy Schneider, Richard Dreyfuss and a very much against type Robert Shaw are all superb, especially towards the end of the film when it’s just the three of them doing a lot of nautical stuff that we landlubbers (I’m from about as far from the sea as you can get on this island) don’t understand. A lot of the little things are done right, and that’s good filmmaking.

My God, the young Spielberg is good.

The Ghoul (1975)

”She never came out. None of them ever do.”

This is the second film I’ve blogged by Tyburn Films, an abortive successor to Hammer which uses much the same crew to make similar types of films but sadly didn’t last long. This film, alas, is rather perfunctory and forgettable, in spite of being shot well and a fine performance from Cushing as a man who, like himself, had lost his wife and missed her terribly. It’s chiefly of interest as a novelty, for Cushing’s performance, for a young John Hurt being excellent as a lecherous henchman, and for looking very suspiciously as though a certain Doctor Who story owes a lot to it.

Non-Who fans, please indulge the next couple of sentences, but Black Orchid, I’m looking at you. 1920s setting? Yep. Big country house? Yep. Son kept locked up in a room, having been turned into a crazed killer while in an exotic faraway place? Yep. There’s even a policeman. And a fairly big role for Professor Cliff from The Green Death.

There’s a lot of promise here, especially with the setting of a country house surrounded by mist and marshland, but the plot is clumsy and loses momentum as soon as the major character gets killed halfway through. The film never quite recovers from this and feels somewhat disjointed. Ultimately the problem is the script, and more specifically the awkward plotting, which feels at times like a first draft. There are also some opinions expressed about the Hindu religion, presented as a dark pagan cult, which certainly raise eyebrows. But ultimately it’s a shame that such splendid acting and direction are wasted on a half-hearted script like this.

The Ash Tree

“Cut it down!”

An obscure little gem, this; a thirty minute BBC drama from 1975 and the first of the legendary screenplays based on the ghost stories of M.R. James (who, alas, I have not read) that I’ve seen, courtesy of BBC 4 on Christmas Eve.

It’s well-made on location, superbly acted with a role by none other than Lalla Ward as the not-to-be Lady Fell, and uses good, economic direction to tell a rather complex, non-linear story very quickly. You have to pay attention and, I suspect intentionally, not everything gets explained- what are the creatures in the tree? What’s the connection of the tree to the witch trials of a century earlier? We get only a general gist of what’s going on, but a bit of mystery is good. It’s refreshing to watch something from a time when the audience wasn’t talked down to, earlier. We aren’t spoon fed; the only clue to Sir Richard’s time period is the clothing and the fact that Tom Jones is a current novel, and the switch between time periods is narrated visually rather than overtly signalled. Edward Petheridge, whom I know best as George III in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, is superb both as Sir Richard and the hypocritical Sir Matthew, who directly causes an innocent woman to be hanged as a witch.

This packs an awful lot into thirty-odd minutes and is a nice little curio from the BBC of the ‘70s. I shall certainly try and watch more of these M.R. James Christmas ghost stories.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

"Your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries!"

I'm obviously not blogging the telly series; it’s brilliant and revolutionary, of course, and any kind of “best of” will always be hilarious, but a sketch show with thirteen episodes to fill will inevitably be, to use the hackneyed phrase, hit and miss. And it’s not an appetising thought to attempt to review individual episodes of a series that is, deliberately, rather stream-of-consciousness. But I’ll have a go at the films. And yes, I know And Now For Something Completely Different is technically the first Python film, but I think we’re safe to treat that as a stand-alone compilation.

So, what of the film? Well, it's utterly hilarious, obviously, a serious contender for funniest film ever made. The Python style and humour translates perfectly to the big screen, in spite of the obviously low budget. The great locations and bloody good direction by Terry Jones (not Terry Gilliam, but they didn't know at the time that he would go on to be a big Hollywood director) really help here.

It's interesting to see, though, how coherent the sketches more or less are as a longer narrative, the perfect fruition of what Michael Palin and Terry Jones were trying to do increasingly during that final, truncated series. But the many iconic scenes, which we all know so well, are an absolute triumph. Forget the gleefully dodgy history; this is comedy gold. Even Elvis thought so.

Legend of the Werewolf (1975)

"We do not cater for unusual tastes in here!"

This looks and feels like a Hammer horror film, is directed by Freddie Francis and stars Peter Cushing, but technically it isn't- it's made by Tyburn Films, a company specifically set up to continue the Hammer tradition after the Hammer horrors sadly came to an end (well, if you ignore To the Devil... a Daughter). Sadly, Tyburn only made three further films before giving up the ghost in 1975, and this is the last of those; very much the end of an era.

This is, essentially, a bog standard average Hammer horror in both style and quality. It's hard to gauge how dated this would have felt, if at all, in 1975, but the quality is certainly good enough, if not great. The script is ok, Cushing carries the film with his usual charisma and there's a delightful performance by Hugh Griffith early on. And the rather poor werewolf make-up is more than compensated for by some extremely clever effects and direction.

The setting is mid-nineteenth century France, a time of brothels (Ron Moody plays the very dirtiest of dirty old men), daguerreotypes and Napoleon III; a little later in time and a little to the west of the usual setting for these films but suitably atmospheric as far as Hammer goes. The script may be predictable, David Rintoul may be an average actor but, as ever, the film is carried by the splendid Peter Cushing as a pathologist who constantly solves cases for the inspector.

Not a bad film, then, and perhaps quite fitting that (and yes, I know this technically isn't a Hammer horror film, and that there would be one more such film to go, but...) it's a suitable closure for an era of which I am very fond.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

"Planet, schmanet, Janet."

I'm not sure, in hindsight, that watching this film on the telly, alone, after Mrs Llamastrangler had an early night; it's a film that should be watched with others and with audience participation. Oh, I enjoyed it, but I've seen the live show- and can do the Timewarp flawlessly, he said, trying to keep a straight face- which was a much more fun experience than seeing the film. It falls rather flat when watched alone on a small screen. I've seen it, but not, I suspect, at its best.

Still, I love Tim Curry's performance. And the Charles Gray cutaways are a brilliantly cinematic touch. The design is inspired, the clothes a clear influence on punk fashion. And, well, it's Rocky Horror. And this time I get the film references. It's an inspired one-off, and it's amazing to think that such a very LGBT film was getting such a following back in 1975, just eight years after homosexuality was legalised in England and Wales- and was still illegal in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Brad and Janet, the essence of heteronormativity, are thrust into a joyously gay, bisexual, transsexual milieu which gleefully seizes control of the narrative from them- and note that Frank N Furter's sin is none of this, but the murder of Eddie; his alien executioners are as LGBT as he is.

I enjoyed this film but, well, it's not one to be watched alone.

The Story of O (1975)

"You're very lucky. They'll be more severe with you."

I've blogged a lot of geeky films lately: time for another subtitled foreign film, I think, and after blogging nearly 300 films it's about time I got round to a French one. So how about The Story of O? It's very continental, very controversial and banned in the UK for a decade and a half. So what's it like?

Well, er, very Seventies. I know it's sold as a French version of Fifty Shades of Grey, but this is 1975 and the source material is not, apparently, straightforwardly about what these days we would call BDSM but saying that women are naturally submissive to men, which is more than a little dodgy. Still, none of that is apparent from the film, and it's made explicit throughout everything that happens unambiguously consensual. More surprisingly, although a lot of fairly rough stuff happens, it happens largely off camera, and there's precious little sex either. This is soft porn to the extent that it's porn at all: indeed, the direction is somewhat arty, with a definite dreamlike effect which echoes the narration.

This being the Seventies, the clothes are bloody awful although, on the evidence of this film, the interior decor could be utterly gorgeous and not brown or orange at all, at least in Paris, while still being thoroughly if the decade. Bizarrely, though, all the cars seem to hail from about three decades earlier- was France going through a vintage motors phase at the time?

The film is utterly fascinating as, anchored by an appropriately impassive performance from Corinne Clery, it traces us into a world of submission, whippings, Seventies fashion photography, emotionally fraught polyamory, lesbianism and bad hair. From an opening reminiscent of the video to John Lennon's Imagine to its ambiguous ending its a compellingly weird feast for the senses. Still, one is left with the general question of why the more well-known films featuring bondage and submission always seem to show women in the submissive role and not vice versa.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

"And now the woman's of Er-Heb will cut his bollocks off. Ha ha!"

Let's deal with the elephant in the room first: is this film racist?

First, let's consider that this is an adaptation of a story written in 1888 by Rudyard Kipling, and we can therefore expect a bit of raving imperialism which can't fail to be transferred to any adaptation.

Secondly, let's consider that there are two stupid answers to the question: "yes" and "no". These answers betray the mindset that thinks there are only two types of people in the world- outright Nazis and people "without a racist bone on their bodies". That's what's implied by any question that asks us to rule on whether something is either racist or "not racist" whereas, in fact, 99.99% of us fall between these poles. Personally, I'm a Guardian-reading liberal type who abhors racism, but I wouldn't dream of claiming that I "haven't got a racist none in my body". How could I possibly know that? There could be all sorts of unexamined racist assumptions hidden somewhere in my subconscious. They're unexamined. That's the point.

So let's just briefly note that the original source text, given the author, the subject matter and the setting, can hardly fail to display both racist attitudes and a voyeuristic othering of people from other cultures. Let's also briefly note that, being integral to the plot, these things are inevitably transferred to this film adaptation. Also, 1975 is an age ago in terms of attitudes to race- a film like this would never be made today- and both India and Kafiristan are presented as an exotic "other", not on their own terms. But let us also remember the context. Past attitudes are what they are. This film was less racist in the context of 1975 than it would be if made today.

So let's talk about things that are more interesting. Such a show unusual it is for John Ford to direct a film like this, how amazing the location filming looks, or how Sean Connery's Scottish accent jars somewhat with dialogue clearly written with a voice from south of the border in mind.

Also interesting is that Kafiristan was a real place, called this by its Muslim neighbours as it was the only pagan part of Afghanistan, and thus mysterious and unique, at the time Kipling wrote his original story. Sadly, though, it was converted en masse during the 1890s and is now called Nuristan. Isn't the onward march of conformity a depressing thing?

But what of the film? Well, it's superb: gripping, great to look at and full of incident and deeply charismatic performances, not least from its stars Sean Connery and Michael Caine but also from Saeed Jaffrey, whose superb comic timing helps to partly hide the vaguely racist undertones of the character he's playing.

The emphasis on freemasonry is... odd, and doesn't give us an entirely sympathetic portrayal of Kipling. Interesting. But this is ultimately a classic tragedy, where Danny is brought down utterly by his hubris and Peachy brought down low by his own relative hubris. As a tale, and as a film, it is superb.