The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  The neighbors also include Mr. and Mrs. Brinker (Dan Barrows and Mary Jo Catlett), who each have their own reasons for checking out the beach house through Mr. Brinker’s telescope. When Mrs. Brinker gets a look at the wild party the girls throw their first night in the house, she calls Sarah’s uncle Carl Purdue (Adam Roarke) to tattle but ends up speaking instead to his fiancee Julie (Fern Fitzgerald). Ever mindful of their status in this quiet beach community, Julie sends uncle Carl to get to the bottom of things. When he arrives, the party is in full swing and although it pains him to do it, he must have Sarah send her friends out of the house for the rest of the week. Ginger and Ducky overhear and plan to ensnare uncle Carl with their feminine wiles, at which point the audience starts to wonder: wait, what school did these girls just get out of again? In any case, there’s no way this movie could be made in 2010. Gone are the days when someone could make an R-rated movie about high school girls smoking pot, drinking, and seducing their friend’s uncles. Well, someone could, but they would probably have to go out of their way to make sure all that stuff didn’t look like fun.

  The Beach Girls is similar to many Crown International films of the 70s in that it basically just throws a bunch of characters together and then shows them interacting with each other, mostly with the “wild party” backdrop. The very light story elements barely register, even though the rivalry between the inexplicably all-gay shore patrol boat and another ship that dumps several garbage bags of weed overboard ends up dovetailing with the girls’ journey of discovery near the end of the film. Just kidding about that “journey of discovery” part, by the way. Although Sarah does eventually take off her glasses and lets her hair down, though, so at least one of them changes a little bit. The less said about the ridiculously stereotyped Mexican maintenance man and the Asian limo driver, the better.

  Director Bud Townsend was perhaps best known for directing Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical in 1976. His last directorial credit was 1984′s Love Scenes starring Tiffany Bolling and made for the Playboy Channel. Townsend directed three films for Crown International: Nightmare in Wax (1969), Coach (1978), and The Beach Girls (1982). For some reason, he’s listed as “Pat Townsend” in the credits for The Beach Girls. While it’s not a great film by any measure, there have definitely been worse films with their directors’ real name in the credits.

  Belladonna of Sadness (1973)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 12 July 2016

  It seems like the last few years have seen quite a boom in the discovery, restoration, and re-release of films that have fallen through the cracks of cinema history. Companies like Vinegar Syndrome, Drafthouse Films, Grindhouse Releasing, Garagehouse, and Distribpix have been introducing new audiences to films previously thought lost or only ever issued in subpar home video releases. While much of those companies’ work has been focused on American releases, other companies such as Arrow have been digging into the vaults of studios outside the States as well. One of the most exciting of these recent discoveries is Eiichi Yamamoto’s psychedelic animated feature Belladonna of Sadness. Before now the film was almost exclusively available from nth-generation bootlegs. The new Blu-ray from Cinelicious Pics is mandatory viewing and belongs in the library of any serious cinephile.

  Jeanne is a beautiful, pure young woman who lives in a rural village in what appears to be medieval Europe. The Lord of her village is determined to possess the girl, and when he discovers she is to be married, he demands her fiancé Jean pay an exorbitant marriage tax. The couple are just poor peasants, unable to pay, and the Lord suggests an alternate payment: he will waive the marriage tax if he can have Jeanne on her wedding night. This violent assault awakens something in Jeanne, what at first seems to be a mischievous phallic sprite but soon is revealed to be Satan himself. Jeanne tries to resist him and persevere in the face of constant miseries inflicted by the men in power over the land and its people. But as the injustices pile up and Jean becomes increasingly distraught and distant, Jeanne and Satan engage in a battle of wills in which Satan offers her revenge for the seemingly endless wrongs done to her in exchange for her soul. And whether she realizes it or not, the consequences of Jeanne’s decision will echo through the centuries.

  Cinelicious Pics has given Belladonna of Sadness a fantastic Blu-ray release, the centerpiece of which is the new 4K transfer from the original 35mm camera negative. For a film that was only ever previously available to cinephiles outside of Japan as a muddy VHS rip, this transfer is nothing short of revelatory. It’s truly breathtaking. Much of the film is presented as long horizontal or vertical tableaus across which the camera pans, and this new restoration allows the viewer to see every pencil line, brush stroke, and burst of color exactly as it was drawn in astonishing detail. It also gives viewers a clean audio track, which is arguably just as impressive as the film’s intense visuals. The score to the film was composed by Masahiko Satoh, and it perfectly accompanies the eye-searing visuals with beautiful and frenetic psychedelia. This is a film that was designed to be seen on as big a screen as possible and listened to as loudly as possible for maximum effect. Cinelicious deserves extra commendation for giving the film a limited theatrical release in the States this year leading up to the Blu-ray, giving modern audiences a chance to see the film on the big screen for the first time.

  Best Friends (1975)

  Originally published on Criticplanet.org

  Homosexuality is not a subject that received much attention—positive or negative—in many Crown International Pictures films. Other than The Pink Angels, which concerns a gay motorcycle gang, there are hardly any gay characters who have much impact on the films in which they appear. Keith Moon may have played a cameo as a mincing hairdresser in the utterly depressing Sextette (1978), but if the character had been played by anyone else no one would remember him at all. Such is the fate of the gay man in much of low-budget exploitation cinema, doomed to be either a cartoonish sissy or a villainous menace. Best Friends, in contrast to many other Crown International Pictures and exploitation films of the time, dares to take a different approach. Best Friends is a serious drama in which one male character is obviously in love with another, and the fact that they cannot be together leads to tragedy.

  Pat (Doug Chapin) returns home from Vietnam and is met at a bus depot by his lifelong best friend Jesse (Richard Hatch), Jo Ella (Ann Noland), the girlfriend who he had to leave behind, and Jesse’s fiancee Kathy (Susanne Benton). Pat’s first action as a civilian is to dump his army uniform into the nearest garbage can, so the audience is clued in very early that maybe things didn’t go so well for Pat during his time overseas. Doug introduces Pat to Kathy and the four friends plan a long RV road trip, after which they will all return home, Doug will marry Kathy and Pat will presumably marry Jo Ella, and they’ll settle into the life they always imagined they would have. While this is obviously the way Doug has always wanted it, Pat seems to want something else. As the trip continues, Pat begs Doug to ditch the home life and run away with him to travel America by motorcycle. Doug thinks Pat just needs to work Vietnam out of his system.

  It is apparent to the audience fairly early in the film that Pat doesn’t just want to re-enact Easy Rider (1969) with Doug. While Doug may or may not be consciously aware of it, Pat is obviously in love with him. Whether this is how he always felt or whether something happened to him in Vietnam to make him aware of his feelings is not made clear, but as the film continues and Pat attempts more and more desperate acts to break up Doug and Kathy, his motivations are unquestionable. For his part, Doug is either completely oblivious to the feelings of his “best friend” or is utterly incapable of acknowledging them. This creates a tense living situation for the travelers as Pat becomes an increasingly dangerous presence to himself and those around him.

  Best Friends was marketed on the potentially controversial nature of one particularly charged scene, in which the four friends go to a bar on an Indian reservation and Pat goads Jo Ella into climbing up onto a table
and stripping. “She Became the Ravaged Victim of a Century of Revenge!” screams the film’s poster, with a drawing of scantily-clad Jo Ella standing before a backdrop of ominous cartoon “Indians,” with Pat and Doug facing out toward the sides of the poster in fight-ready stances. As far as cheap thrills go, it’s certainly the most memorable scene of the film, but far from being what the entire film is about, it’s just one more of Pat’s outrageous attempts to connect with Doug (through their shared fighting in the bar brawl) and alienate Kathy and Jo Ella. Aside from this scene, fans looking for lurid, racially-charged exploitation action aren’t going to find much to enjoy in the film.

  It’s not hard to imagine an earlier draft of the film’s script (or even some unused footage) that more clearly spelled out Pat’s feelings for Doug. However, it’s also not hard to imagine Crown International being uncomfortable with such subject matter, so while it is very clear to the audience how Pat feels, there’s never an explosive, cathartic declaration of love. Best Friends ends on an seriously depressing note, with Pat’s actions indirectly causing an irrevocable loss while he continues to live in the past, where he was always closer to his friend. The acting is all over the place, but Best Friends is a surprisingly well-made drama about a subject mostly taboo when the film was made.

  Beyond the Gates (2016)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 10 May 2017

  Throughout horror history, there have been a vast array of options for encountering supernatural evil. Ouija boards are a perennial favorite, the internet has been hot lately, and in the 1980s there was even a cursed 976 number. In the last several years, the horror films of the 1980s have been mined heavily for inspiration by many independent directors from Ti West’s The House of the Devil to Joe Begos’s The Mind’s Eye. Debut feature writer/director Jackson Stewart’s Beyond the Gates turns to that decade for both stylistic references and to introduce a new object into the arsenal which demonic entities may use to threaten our souls: a VCR board game. These games had a brief moment of popularity in the late 80s and included several games based on popular entertainment properties like RoboCop and America’s Funniest Home Videos, but are probably best known now in connection to the game Nightmare. This game and its sequels featured an opponent who taunted players through their television, and it’s this style of horror game Beyond the Gates is based on.

  Gordon (Graham Skipper) is returning to his hometown for the first time in years to help his younger brother John (Chase Williamson) deal with their father’s estate. While he had skipped town before with no explanation, this time he’s been gone seven months and the brothers have the task of packing up his old video store. Gordon’s girlfriend Margot (Brea Grant) is coming along to offer some support which he badly needs, as evidenced by a run-in with John’s abrasive friend Hank (Justin Welborn). When Gordon finds the key to the video store’s office, he and John discover an old VCR board game called Beyond the Gates and pop it in. They’re greeted on the tape by Evelyn (Barbara Crampton), who introduces the game before a burst of static and strobing lights cause them to turn off the TV. John brings the game along with him to their dad’s house where Gordon and Margot are staying, and when she finds out about it Margot insists they play. They soon discover that this particular game is a lot more interactive than the typical VCR board game when Evelyn addresses them directly and challenges them to venture beyond the gates to save their father’s soul.

  If the appearance of Barbara Crampton didn’t tip the viewer off, the bright pink lighting that dominates the film’s creepy scenes should clearly spell out Stewart’s biggest influences here are Stuart Gordon’s gory 80s Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator and From Beyond. Beyond the Gates is not nearly as wild as those films, but it does have some impressively gruesome practical effects. While the look of the film is more From Beyond, the pace and tone is closer to Re-Animator ‘s splatstick. Stewart spends quite a bit of time with the brothers, though, and the awkward fraternal chemistry between Skipper and Williamson is both endearing and convincing. Brea Grant is great as usual and it’s always fun to see Justin Welborn, but Barbara Crampton walks off with this movie without even appearing in the flesh. Her Evelyn is perfect as the demonic master of ceremonies, delivering lines that sound impressively accurate for the genre of game–just as goofy as the real thing–with a flair that makes them more ominous than they probably were on the page. It’s all wrapped up with an excellent score by Wojciech Golczewski that sounds like it could have been lifted directly from an Empire Pictures production.

  As much fun as Beyond the Gates is, it does have a few problems. It feels a bit slight at 85 minutes, although this is actually sort of a good problem to have for an independent horror film. It speaks to how much fun the world it creates is to spend time in that its ending leaves the viewer wanting more. There are a couple of nighttime scenes that are entirely too dark to make out, and it would have been a notable improvement if Brea Grant’s character had been given more to do. One final nitpick is that despite some very cool artwork and design, the rules of the Beyond the Gates board game itself seem nebulous at best. Yes, this a deeply ridiculous complaint, but when the game designer gets called out in the opening credits it’s probably better to spell out the actual mechanics of the game a bit for board-game obsessives in the audience. Figuring out a way to play the game for real (minus the supernatural killing spree, of course) will probably be foremost in the minds of certain viewers. Despite these relatively minor complaints, Beyond the Gates is a gory good time, and horror fans should keep an eye out for whatever Stewart might be up to in the future.

  Birth of the Living Dead (2013)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 7 November 2013

  The pop culture obsession with zombies shows no signs of abating, with The Walking Dead currently shambling through its fourth season and somebody, somewhere still trying to get an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies off the ground, to say nothing of the never-ending stream of low-budget direct-to-disc films clogging up Redboxes and VOD listings across the planet. With new generations of zombie media come new generations of fans, many of whom have no idea about the history of their new favorite monster. And so it is with great relief that we now have Birth of the Living Dead, a documentary about George A. Romero’s classic film from which all these clumsy, stumbling living corpses first sprang: Night of the Living Dead.

  Thankfully, Birth of the Living Dead prominently features among its interview subjects George A. Romero himself. After giving a brief background of Romero’s work with commercial/industrial/educational film production company The Latent Image, where he honed his technical chops before tackling his first feature film, Birth of the Living Dead spends a good amount of time talking to Romero about the production of the film. Additional talking heads include Romero’s Night of the Living Dead collaborator Chiz Shultz, film critic Elvis Mitchell, fiercely independent filmmaker Larry Fessenden, Shock Value author Jason Zinoman, The Walking Dead producer Gale Anne Hurd, Spike Lee collaborator and film editor Samuel D. Pollard, and Pictures at a Revolution author Mark Harris. The interviews alternate Romero and Shultz’s memories of putting the film together on the cheap with stories of how and when subjects first saw the film and how it impacted their lives and the culture at large.

  Director Rob Kuhns wisely keeps the film’s focus narrow, concerning himself almost entirely with the production of the film and how it commented (purposefully and otherwise) on the culture of the United States at large during the late 1960s. This element of the film alone would make it required viewing for anyone curious about how the Romero-styled zombie story came to be and what kind of ideas and subtexts were built into the concept of the modern zombie from its inception. Each interview subject brings their own personality and talent to the lively footage, giving the viewer a well-rounded look at what the film means both to the individual fans, the filmmaker, and to the genre.

  There are plenty of unexplored avenues for curious fans to continue researching on the
ir own, but as a quick overview about one of the most significant horror films in cinematic history, Birth of the Living Dead is very informative and highly entertaining.

  Bite Marks (2011)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 14 November 2011

  Horror fans, allow me to put a question to you: If you see that Stephen Geoffreys is in a movie, and you know there is another character in the same movie named “Brewster,” you are automatically going to draw certain conclusions, correct? But imagine for a moment that you are wrong, and that in fact your conclusions are utterly confounded. Can you imagine how this would be a pleasant surprise? How great it would be that your expectations could be confounded? Sure, fans of Fright Night love Stephen Geoffreys and are glad to see him in a film in 2011. And sure, some of those fans would probably be disappointed if they didn’t hear a certain famous tagline. Those fans will not be disappointed with his appearance in Bite Marks, but anyone looking for a film that confounds expectations likely will be.

  Before the opening credits roll, Walsh (Stephen Geoffreys) is attacked in the darkness by some thing hidden from the audience. He’s a truck driver, and when he doesn’t show up for his shift, his boss calls Walsh’s brother Brewster (Benjamin Lutz) to cover for him. Perfect timing, as it allows Brewster to avoid questions about his recent trouble in the bedroom with Walsh’s wife. Brewster sets out for Kansas and picks up a pair of hitchhikers the next morning, not realizing that they’re a gay couple backpacking across the country together. Cary (Windham Beacham) and Vogel (David Alanson) are very different: Cary is sensitive and responsible, while Vogel is impetuous and sarcastic. Vogel also has a very active libido, and when Brewster catches Vogel and Cary having sex in the bathroom of a truck stop restaurant, Brewster begins to wonder if there’s not something more to his recent lack of interest in sex with his brother’s wife.