Daughter Of Death!

Universal’s INNER SANCTUM series of B-movies never adapted any of the INNER SANCTUM radio plays or pulp stories, but screenwriters Brenda Weisberg (THE MUMMY’S GHOST) and Scott Darling (MR. WONG IN CHINATOWN) based the second movie on Fritz Leiber’s noted fantasy novel CONJURE WIFE. Norman Reed is a professor of ethnology at Monroe College, where the girls swoon over his dynamic personality. Reed is played by lumpy Lon Chaney Jr., so you’ll just have to take the movie’s word for Reed’s status as a charmer of ladies.

On a South Seas trip, the practical Reed meets Paula (Anne Gwynne, HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN), a white woman reared by the high priestess of a jungle tribe. She believes in voodoo, witchcraft, death chants, and other primitive superstitions, but in the immortal words of Paula Abdul, opposites attract, and Paula and Norman are married. Reed’s old flame Ilona (Evelyn Ankers, THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN), jealous of his marriage, starts trouble by calling Paula a witch and pushing eager young student Margaret (lovely Lois Collier, COBRA WOMAN) into seducing him.

Reed exacerbates his problems by forcing Paula to give up her superstitious beliefs and destroying all her magic trinkets. Without Paula’s circle of immunity to protect Norman, his life really starts falling apart, including an accidental shooting of Margaret’s boyfriend David (Phil Brown, who would later be STAR WARS’ Uncle Owen) that leaves him on the hook for a manslaughter charge.

Gwynne and Ankers, who were good friends in real life, starred in many Universal horror and suspense pictures of the 1940s, but WEIRD WOMAN is surprisingly the only one in which they appeared together. Both are quite good, particularly Ankers, who rarely played bad girls. Unfortunately, the static screenplay gives them and everyone else very little to do but talk. Director Reginald LeBorg, who tried to spice up CALLING DR. DEATH’s chatty plot, has less to work with here, though his use of floating heads to illustrate an Ankers nightmare is inventive. DEAD MAN’S EYES, with Chaney and LeBorg again participating, was next in the INNER SANCTUM series. CONJURE WIFE was done more successfully as BURN, WITCH, BURN in 1962.

Terror Strikes As A Madman Rules!

Beginning in 1943, Universal and producer Ben Pivar made six B-pictures based on the INNER SANCTUM paperback and radio series. Actually, “based” is the wrong word. Pivar used only the INNER SANCTUM title as an umbrella for barely-an-hour mystery films with (very) slight horror elements. None of the six films adapted the books or radio episodes or used the show’s famous gimmick of opening with a creaking door. Universal’s popular horror star Lon Chaney Jr. (THE WOLF MAN) starred in all six, and most of them began with actor David Hoffman’s head floating inside a crystal ball and warning us of the sheer terror that lie ahead of us.

The first INNER SANCTUM picture, CALLING DR. DEATH, was directed by Reginald LeBorg (who also worked with Chaney on THE MUMMY’S GHOST and four other movies) in twenty days from an original screenplay by Edward Dein (CAT PEOPLE). Dr. Mark Steele (Chaney), a wealthy neurologist whose thoughts we strangely hear as whispering, knows his wife Maria (Ramsay Ames, a beautiful but laughably bad actress) is cheating on him. Someone murders Maria over the weekend by throwing acid in her face and bashing her head in.

Police inspector Gregg (J. Carrol Naish) thinks Steele did it, but he arrests Maria’s lover, David Bruce as Robert Duval (!), anyway and stands by as Duval is sentenced to die in the electric chair. It isn’t until Duval awaits his execution that Gregg starts popping in to Steele’s home, demanding he confess. But here’s the thing—Steele blacked out the entire weekend of Maria’s death and doesn’t know whether he killed her or not.

The first INNER SANCTUM mystery is silly, but enjoyably so, mostly for reasons of camp. Naish’s wicked scene-stealing and Chaney’s goofy whispering make you believe the plot is moving faster than it is. You wonder, because Duval was convicted with circumstantial evidence, and there’s no evidence linking Mark to the murder, why Gregg keeps hounding Steele to confess. Morison (HITLER’S MADMAN) is stiff as Steele’s sympathetic nurse, but provides eye candy.

LeBorg’s direction is mostly static, but he ups his game in the third act. He likes to suggest violence through shadows. A scene between Chaney and Morison plays with the camera Dutched and low to the ground. He does a great job with a dream sequence, including a bit where two brick buildings seem to tip and trap a character between them. One thing that looks odd to contemporary eyes: Steele uses a letter opener to slit the pages of a book he’s reading as he turns them. Did hardcover books use to come from the factory with the edges of the pages uncut?

Chaney and LeBorg reunited about a month after CALLING DR. DEATH finished shooting to begin their next INNER SANCTUM feature: WEIRD WOMAN. Also with Holmes Herbert, Fay Helm, Rex Lease, Paul Phillips, and Mary Hale. Brian was a late replacement for George Dolenz (THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO), while Morison substituted for Gale Sondergaard, who, like Chaney, was originally planned to star in all the INNER SANCTUMs.

See Stewardesses Battle Kung Fu Killers

Shout Factory returns to Roger Corman's deep vault to create a sequel to last year's Lethal Ladies Collection. As with the first, this Roger Corman's Cult Classics 2-DVD set teams up three sexy adventures released during the 1970s by New World Pictures.

New World found much success with its unofficial “3 Girls” series. These low-budget adventures combined sex, action, and soap opera and always involved a trio of lovely professional women falling in love and getting into trouble. The series began with THE STUDENT NURSES and soon moved to teachers, stewardesses, and cover girl models. Producer Roger Corman earned a lot of money making this film over and over.

Directed in the Philippines by the prolific Cirio H. Santiago, FLY ME focuses on sexy stews Toby (Corman regular Pat Anderson, SUMMER SCHOOL TEACHERS), Sherry (Lyllah Torena, who is curiously unbilled), and Andrea (busy television actress Lenore Kasdorf), who work a round-trip flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Manila. Toby attempts a love affair with a nice doctor (Richard Young, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE), which is made difficult by her overbearing Italian mother (Naomi Stevens, THE DORIS DAY SHOW). Andrea teams up with an undercover cop to find her missing boyfriend, while white slavers swoop in to kidnap nympho Sherry.

Amazingly, all three subplots manage to intersect at the end. As you can imagine, tone is a big problem in FLY ME, which must be the only film to combine a wacky comic-relief mother protecting her adult daughter’s virginity with a sleazy storyline involving drugging nude women and selling them into sex slavery. “See stewardesses battle kung fu killers!” shouted New World’s one-sheet. With a mere 72 minutes of screen time to play with, Santiago still manages to waste time with travelogue footage serving as padding and Stevens’ screeching comic antics instead of more stewardess kung fu fighting.

FLY ME’s credits are interesting. Howard Cohen (BARBARIAN QUEEN) wrote the screenplay, but replaced his name with that of New World staffer Miller Drake (SCREAMERS). Future director Joe Dante (PIRANHA) was the dialogue director, according to the main titles. Oscar winner Jonathan Demme (SILENCE OF THE LAMBS), who began his career directing Corman’s CAGED HEAT, receives an odd credit for “Film Director.” After the film was wrapped, Corman decided it needed more action and hired Demme to shoot fight sequences choreographed in Los Angeles by David Chow. Demme probably also filmed the opening scene with Anderson and cabbie Dick Miller.

Following the same “3 Girls” formula, director Santiago filmed COVER GIRL MODELS a couple of years later in Manila. FLY ME’s Howard Cohen also wrote COVER GIRL MODELS, which plays as a less sleazy, more action-filled remake with three sexy young women getting into scrapes in the Far East.

Mark (New World regular John Kramer), a mustachioed photographer for a women’s magazine, recruits a trio of lovely models for an overseas photo shoot. In addition to posing in skimpy bikinis, Claire (SIX-PACK ANNIE’s Lindsay Bloom) poses as a call girl to attract the attention of a movie mogul, Barbara (Pat Anderson from TNT JACKSON and FLY ME) becomes an unwitting courier of secret microfilm sewed into the hem of her dress, and bubbly neophyte Mandy (HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD redhead Tara Strohmeier) tries to learn the do’s and don’ts of both modeling and lovemaking from stud Mark.

You know what to expect from a Santiago movie: inept fight choreography, clumsy story construction, and plenty of breasts. None of the various subplots are presented very well, though the vulnerable Strohmeier uses her nonchalant sexiness and charm to steal scenes. Most hilarious are the bad guys’ regular attempts to kidnap Barbara, which are always thwarted by a mysterious Filipino with the widest collar of all time who always appears out of nowhere just in time to kung fu her assailants.

The beautiful women and entertainingly bad action sequences are enough to keep my eyes interested, though Santiago fills time with the girls posing for pictures or wandering around town just to stretch to a releasable 73 minutes. Mary Woronov (DEATH RACE 2000) plays Mark’s editor in the opening scene shot at the New World office, probably by second unit director Mel Damski (YELLOWBEARD).

“Do you mean we have to satisfy their animal heat?” Girlfights, nudity, revolt, racism, shower scenes, whippings, betrayal—sounds like one of New World’s classic women-in-prison vehicles, doesn’t it? And that’s really what THE ARENA is—a sleazy and violent WIP set amid the squalor and slavery of ancient Rome. Think THE BIG DOLL HOUSE meets SPARTACUS.

The stars of BLACK MAMA, WHITE MAMA, Pam Grier and Margaret Markov, reunite as Mamawi and Bodicia, slave girls forced to serve the decadent Roman upper-class during violent gladiator matches to the death. While the rulers wring their hands at the games’ dwindling box office, corpulent Timarchus (Daniele Vargas) hits upon the idea of female gladiators, enlisting the sexy slaves for armed fights to the death in the arena. If you’ve seen enough 1970s drive-in movies about beautiful female prisoners pushed to the limit by a cruel environment, you know a bloody revolt is in order. Various body parts fly as these sensual sword-slingers carve a gory swath to freedom, led by black mama Grier and white mama Markov.

Happily, THE ARENA offers more action than talk, a good thing considering the execrable dialogue penned by John and Joyce Corrington (THE OMEGA MAN), and director Steve Carver nicely serves up a few helpings of wet and oily female nudity (including both leads) to complement the gore. Carver also made BIG BAD MAMA and CAPONE for New World before moving up to major-studio exploitation like DRUM (also with Grier) and LONE WOLF MCQUADE.

Filming in Italy allowed Carver to use Francesco de Masi (THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS) as his composer and Aristide Massaccesi as his cinematographer, much to the film’s benefit. Massaccesi, who had a directing career under the name Joe D’Amato, was often thought to have directed THE ARENA, due to Carver using Massaccesi’s name during production to foil Italian labor laws. Executive producer Roger Corman’s old HOUSE OF USHER star Mark Damon was the producer and ended up marrying Markov. Corman remade THE ARENA in 2001 using PLAYBOY Playmate Karen McDougal as the lead and the Corringtons’ original screenplay.

All three films are well-represented on DVD using 35mm prints: THE ARENA at 2.35:1 and FLY ME and COVER GIRL MODELS at 1.78:1. They look quite good, though FLY ME's battered and scratched 35mm print has been harvested of some of its nudity by a horny projectionist. THE ARENA contains two extra scenes that weren't in its 35mm source print, but have been ported over from a full-frame transfer for completist's sake. Trailers for FLY ME and THE ARENA are included. Steve Carver and moderator Katerina Leigh Waters provide an audio commentary about THE ARENA, which also receives its own 18-minute documentary featuring Carver, Corman, Mark Damon, and Margaret Markov.

The Impossible Mission of Laurence Heath

I've written several posts about MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, but one of the most fascinating stories related to that television series comes from writer Stephen Bowie on his essential Classic TV History Blog. Patrick J. White, whose THE COMPLETE MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DOSSIER is one of the best and most thorough books ever written about the production of a television series, neglected to tell this story, though it's possible he either didn't know about it or was afraid to bring it up in his interviews.

The story concerns Laurence Heath, a terrific writer responsible for some of MISSION's best teleplays, including the two-part "The Controllers" and "The Mercenaries," which ranks high among my favorite episodes. He was also MISSION's story consultant and, later, producer. He also fulfilled those functions on series like 21 BEACON STREET, BONANZA, THE MAGICIAN, DYNASTY, and MURDER, SHE WROTE.

 In 1963, a year in which he managed a single teleplay for SAM BENEDICT, Heath murdered his wife. And, as Bowie notes, seven years later, Heath was producing MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.

You can read Bowie's engrossing true-crime account here.

Lord Of Lust

One thing in writer Marc Olden's favor is that he creates terrific villains. And if there's one thing fans of adventure fiction know, it's that a hero is generally only as interesting as his adversary.

Of course, the Black Samurai is pretty darned interesting in his own right. Robert Sand, a black man who also happens to be the only Westerner to successfully complete Japanese samurai training, is truly his own man, but partners with former POTUS William Baron Clarke, a Southerner with immense wealth and power, to fight for justice against those who can't help themselves.

In Olden's THE DEADLY PEARL, Signet's fourth Black Samurai novel of 1974, Sand's target is Pearl, a nasty New York City pimp who traffics in underage girls--kidnapping them, addicting them to smack, and selling them overseas as sex slaves. Pearl is also a formidable warrior who trains daily with a professional fencer and fancies an elaborate sword cane as his choice of weapon.

Sand becomes involved to help a friend, Secret Service agent Gray Foster, whose 15-year-old daughter Rochelle is missing. It doesn't take the Black Samurai long to learn that Pearl has her. It's just a matter of getting to the man and getting him to talk. Which ain't easy, because Pearl is as smart as he is mean, and he's surrounded by an army--in particular, a giant martial artist named Chink.

Olden, who also wrote the Narc series, is a master of urban adventure fiction. His New York City is truly alive, festered with pushers and pimps so thick you can practically smell the evil. Robert Sand is a great character, but his supporting cast is also rich, and Olden's sense of time and place make you believe in the harsh reality of the novel's story.

I haven't yet read all the Black Samurai books, but I give the series my highest recommendation.

They Left Her No Choice

Gina Carano is for real.

The 27-year-old mixed martial artist and bit actress (BLOOD AND BONE) plays her first leading role in HAYWIRE, a low-budget trifle churned out by director Steven Soderbergh (OCEAN’S 11) in Ireland, Spain, and New Mexico. As an actress, the brunette easily holds her own opposite steely veterans like Michael Fassbender (INGLORIOUS BASTERDS) and Michael Douglas (WALL STREET), and as an action star, Carano has few peers of either the male or female variety.

As if acknowledging the wafer-thin nature of the plot dreamed up by screenwriter Lem Dobbs (THE LIMEY), Soderbergh tries to juice it up with non-linear storytelling with flashbacks, silent sequences, and shifts to black and white. He needn’t have, because HAYWIRE is at its best when Soderbergh (who, as usual, worked as his own cinematographer) plants the camera and lets his performers do their work.

Carano is cast as Mallory Kane, an ex-Marine now working as an operative for a private security company run by Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), her former lover. Although she has just returned from a mission in Barcelona rescuing a Chinese journalist, Kenneth goads Mallory into a quick weekend job in Dublin acting primarily as eye candy on the arm of MI-6 agent Paul (Fassbender). After poking around the edges of her assigned milk run, she quickly learns she has been led into a trap that has law enforcement on her back and unjustified murder charges on her head.

HAYWIRE is a revenge tale, pure and simple, and when Soderbergh keeps it simple, it really rocks. Eschewing contemporary trends of quick cutting and shaky handheld shots, Soderbergh knows there’s little he can do to make Carano look badass that she can’t do better. Choreographed by stunt ace J.J. Perry, the fight scenes are rough, brutal, and made devastatingly real by Carano. Even so, HAYWIRE’s best setpiece is a foot chase over Dublin rooftops and through a labyrinth of hotel hallways in which Carano is clearly doing her own stunts without help from the visual effects department. Dobbs could have laced the screenplay with a more liberal dose of humor, as Carano’s unexpected run-in with a deer provides a chuckle right when the film needs one.

As for Carano’s acting, she’s just fine. Frankly, she’s a better actor than Channing Tatum (21 JUMP STREET), here playing a fellow operative with whom she has a quick affair, and certainly more believable in her role than Tatum is in his. Stripped down to about ninety minutes and containing enough buff action to keep it from dragging, HAYWIRE is more pretentious than it should be, but a strong debut for Carano.

Here Come De Prince

Independent filmmaker Peter Perry spent the 1960s and much of the 1970s working as a director, writer, editor, and producer on various drive-in movies. Most of them belonged to the long-gone and little-heralded sexploitation genre, which consisted of low-budget movies made for adult audiences only. They were softcore pictures, which meant full frontal female nudity (and occasionally male too) and simulated sex. Even though no penetration was shown, the movies were still too graphic to receive an R rating (though the sexploitation genre peaked during the 1960s before such a rating existed).

Perry, who often hid behind the pseudonym A.P. Stootsberry, was a pioneer of the sexploitation genre, working on pictures like THE JOYS OF JEZEBEL, KISS ME QUICK!, and MY TALE IS HOT. The genre isn't one that I've cottoned to, as I become bored rather quickly during the lighthearted but lengthy sex scenes associated with it (for purposes of this discussion, I'm avoiding mention of "roughies," a grim subgenre that rests within the sexploitation genre).

However, I'll recommend a pair of Perry's pictures, which were very likely made back-to-back using the same costumes and sets. Both were heavily influenced by ROWAN & MARTIN'S LAUGH-IN, which debuted in 1968 and quickly became the most popular comedy show on television. Both also took stories from the public domain and put an amusing, sexy twist on them.

LAUGH-IN was clearly a major influence on Jim Macher, the screenwriter of Perry's THE SECRET SEX LIVES OF ROMEO AND JULIET. Shakespeare’s lauded lovers break the fourth wall, toss off witty bon mots, and get psychedelic between sexploits. Catchphrases like “Sock it to me” and “Here come de Prince” abound, and Perry often interrupts scenes for quick cutaways to Joke Wall-style gags.

The film, which Boxoffice International released to theaters and drive-ins in 1969, uses the conceit that it’s a 16th-century production of Shakespeare’s play performed before a group of hairy California hippies hilariously pretending to be drunken revelers. Cast members introduce themselves to the camera, many of them, like Perry, using pseudonyms. Macher follows the basic plot of ROMEO AND JULIET, but only as a loose throughline connecting the lengthy sex scenes. To Perry, sex is a lot of rubbing and moaning—nothing hardcore, but still X-rated (though Boxoffice International tended to send these quickies out unrated). Forman Shane (THE BUSHWHACKER) is Romeo, and Dee Lockwood (Maid Marian in THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD) is Juliet.

SECRET SEX LIVES, like other period sex romps made by Perry, is rather sumptuous in its sets and costumes, which lends the sophomoric and sometimes smutty humor a touch of class it probably doesn’t deserve. A whipping scene is played for camp, as is Stuart Lancaster’s performance as Lord Capulet. Hell, Lancaster (MUDHONEY) even blows a line early on, and Perry, recognizing his film’s artificiality as a prime source of humor, left the blooper in. Long lovemaking scenes aren’t my cup of tea, but the enthusiastic cast and good-natured gagging make Perry’s picture one of the more entertaining of the sexploitation genre.

Perry and Macher followed up THE SECRET SEX LIVES OF ROMEO AND JULIET with another trashy period piece, 1970's THE NOTORIOUS CLEOPATRA. Despite the then-trendy breaking of the fourth wall a la LAUGH-IN, it isn't as funny as SECRET SEX LIVES and turns uncomfortably serious at the end. Perry and Boxoffice International head Harry Novak’s production is cheap and could have used exterior shooting to allow fresh air to infiltrate the heavy breathing (the battle scenes occur entirely off-camera). However, the sets and costumes are decent for an inexpensive sex film, and Perry doesn’t hesitate to move the camera or stage scenes theatrically to pump extra life into the, er, pumping.

Loray White, who once was married to Sammy Davis Jr. for ten minutes, stars as Cleopatra using the pseudonym “Sonora.” Many—probably most—cast and crew members used assumed names, including Perry (again billed as A.P. Stootsberry). Caesar, played by Jay Edwards as a fat, lazy, bored slob, sends his general, Marc Antony (Johnny Rocco), to bring him Cleopatra, the Queen of the Nile, so he can sleep with her. The logic of sending “the greatest lover in all of Rome” after her seems a tad stupid, especially when Caesar warns Antony to keep his mitts off her. He doesn’t, of course. In fact, he falls in love with Cleopatra, who begins scheming to replace Caesar on his throne.

The thin story is padded by several extended sex scenes, including a couple of orgies. Or more accurately, Macher wrote a few dialogue scenes to tie the sex scenes together. The score, credited to Vic Lance, is very good and includes original songs.

The acting, for the most part, is more professional than one might expect in sexploitation (the actors worked almost exclusively within the genre). The stacked Sonora/White is cast well and gets to show off her dancing prowess. Rocco’s impossibly deep voice bursting through his perpetually clenched teeth is good for campy laughs. Of course, none of the actors bother hiding their 1960s hairstyles and sideburns.