31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 4: THEM! (1954)

New Mexico, 1954: When police Sergeant Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) and his partner are alerted to a young girl wandering in the desert near Alamogordo, he's plunged into a living nightmare for the newly-born atomic age. The little girl is only the first piece of a puzzle comprised of mysterious and spectacular property damage and murders, one of which features a victim whose back is broken, his skull crushed, and his body filled to brimming with formic acid, with each incident punctuated by a high-pitched keening sound. Top scientist Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Glenn) and his colleague/daughter, Pat (Joan Weldon), are called in to investigate and are partnered as experts to aid FBI man Robert Graham (James Arness). Upon wafting an amount of formic acid under her nose the catatonic child is jolted out of her state of shock  and recoils in abject, primal terror while crying and repeatedly screaming "THEM!!! THEM!!!"

When I was nine years old and saw this child's out-of-her-mind-terrified reaction upon regaining her memory of the horror she'd witnessed, I knew I was not in for just any run-of-the-mill 1950's giant monster yarn. And I was right. 

The Medfords both know their shit and all of the mounting evidence clearly shakes them to the core, but they refuse to tell either the FBI or the police what they suspect until they are absolutely positive. Then, while searching the desert where the earlier incidents occurred, the investigators run face-first into an ant roughly the size of a city transit bus and barely escape with their lives after dispatching it with firearms. But that was just one lone specimen, and as everyone knows, ants are hive insects...

A "HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT!!!" moment if ever there was one.

Doing the math, the elder Medford concludes that what they witnessed was a mutation that must have been the result of the atomic testing done in the area some nine years earlier, so the first thing to do is locate a giant anthill. Such a structure is soon discovered and it's decided to bomb the shit of the place with cyanide and wipe out the mutants before they spread. As Sgt. Peterson and Agent Graham suit up to enter the hive and make sure all of the ants are decisively dead, they are informed that the elder Dr. Medford is too aged and frail to accompany them into the underground labyrinth of the hive and that Pat will go instead. In typical macho 1950's fashion, the idea of a woman going along on such a grave mission is met with strong resistance, but Pat ain't having it and makes it quite clear that the team needs an expert who'll know exactly what to look for and that she doesn't have time to give the dick-slinging FBI dude and cop a crash course on insect pathology, so she's going and if they don't like it they can go fuck themselves. With great reluctance, Graham "allows" Pat along — good luck stopping her, says I — and it's a damned good thing that she was there. Most of the ants were killed by the cyanide grenades but a few live specimens remain, so they meet their end on the receiving end of machine gun fire. 

 A descent into an atomic age hell.

But Pat's expert eye notices a dire bit of evidence: the remains of two eggs from which a pair of winged queen ants hatched and fled the hive to god only knows where, accompanied by some eager males. The elder Medford concludes that unless the queens are found and the nests they established are utterly decimated once and for all, humanity will have maybe a year until the ants wipe out life as we know it. One colony sets up on board a freighter and kills the crew, but the vessel is promptly sunk by the U.S. Navy. But what about the other queen? That question is answered in edge-of-your seat fashion during the narrative's climax as the 1950's giant bug sub-genre is born.  

The entire world in danger of getting its collective asshole eaten out by millions of giant mutant Formicidae? It just doesn't get more serious than that, folks, and the film knows it in no uncertain terms. THEM! unfolds like a scientific procedural, which it is, and we are engrossed every step of the way, making shocking discoveries along with the non-scientists. I first saw this film when I was nine years old and, speaking as the son of a veteran biology teacher, I went into it knowing nothing as to what it was about, but I knew a lot about ants, so when formic acid came up as part of the mystery, my mind did the math and I was gobsmacked by the horror of what an invasion of gigantic, hungry, savage, and reproductively viable examples of those creatures would mean. The script treats the viewer as intelligent, and at no point do any of the characters do anything stupid when facing such a threat to the entire world, which absolutely endeared me to the film as a kid who hated being talked down to.

 Seriously. Just stop and think about this fate for a moment. Yeah, HELL NAW.

The grand-daddy of all giant bug movies and hands down the finest of the lot, THEM! is a masterpiece from start to finish and it still holds up some sixty-four years after its release. It's smart, suspenseful, features solid performances from the entire cast, makes one understand where several elements in ALIENS (1986) had their genesis, and it's genuinely scary. Though often classified as a science-fiction film, THEM! is definitely a straight-up exercise in terror, albeit admittedly one with a sci-fi launching point. Stack it right alongside the Quatermass films and a number of the better Doctor Who stories in that regard.

And I would be remiss if I did not single out Joan Weldon's groundbreaking portrayal of Dr. Pat Medford for praise. In an era marked by its rampant phallocratic/chauvinistic/misogynistic leanings, Pat's take-no-shit, all-business attitude when dealing with her job as a scientific expert and handling her masculine "superiors" was quite refreshing to see and admirable on the part of the filmmakers. It was quite clear that though attractive she may be, Pat's looks and gender had zero to do with her competence as a scientist or her steel-hard bravery when directly confronting the unthinkable once she got down to business. Sure, she screamed and nearly shat a Humvee when first encountering a shrieking giant ant, but who in their right mind wouldn't have, be they male or female?  But once it was time to kick some scientific ass and save the world, Pat proved logical, methodical, and possessed of nerves of steel. Since I was a child, she's been among my top-tier roster of sci-fi/horror movie heroes, and she has my utmost respect. It makes me squirm with geekish delight when I imagine what she would have made of the events at the terraforming colony on LV-426 and how she would have teamed with Ellen Ripley to hand out flamethrower ass-kickings to the legion of xenomorphs. 

 Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon): taker of zero shit and one of the saviors of the world.

Bottom line: THEM! is one of the undisputed masterworks of the genre and no movie buff's education is complete without having seen it at least once. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 3: THE WASP WOMAN (1959)

Cosmetics mogul Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) has been the advertising face of her company for nearly two decades,and now faces considerable slumps in sales as it becomes apparent to the buying public that she is visibly aging. (It's not even like she's some ancient hag; she's only forty and looks just fine, if you ask me.)  Her problems seem to be solved when an eccentric scientist, Dr. Zinthrop (Michael Mark), presents her with his recent discovery: a serum made from the enzymes of queen wasps that reverses the aging process. He demonstrates this by injecting a  decrepit guinea pig test subject with the serum in front of Starlin, and she is convinced as the creature reverts to youthful health. (The scene is ludicrous because after the guinea pig receives the shot, its youthful version is subsequently portrayed by what is quite clearly a rat. Rats and guinea pigs look nothing alike and differ greatly in scale and mass, so did producer/director Roger Corman think audiences would not know the difference?)

Impressed, Starlin shovels money into Zinthrop's research, even lavishing him with a fully-stocked lab in her office's building, with the intention of marketing the discovery as soon as possible while volunteering herself as Zinthrop's first human test subject. Zinthrop caution's Starlin that studying the extract's progress on her will take time, but the desperate cosmetics magnate, sneaks into his lab after hours and gives herself extra doses, which accelerates the process and in no time physically shaves around eighteen years off of her physical appearance. Needless to say, this freaks out her once-skeptical business partners, who launch a campaign of snooping to determine whether or not Zinthrop's a quack or a con man, and to find out exactly what is in the mysterious extract. Meanwhile, Starlin continues sneaking extra doses...

As Starlin pushes to fast track the extract's release, she begins to suffer strange headaches while growing more and more anxious. Zinthrop, meanwhile, discovers that one of his lab subjects, a house cat, has escaped, having become vicious due to the drug, so Zinthrop is forced to kill the savage kitty. Reeling from disappointment and the act of killing the cat, Zinthrop leaves the office and wanders into traffic, where he is hit by a car and ends up in the hospital, sidelined with brain damage. While having no knowledge of the scientist's accident but worried about his sudden disappearance, Starlin's stress triggers a transformation into the titular creature, and in short order she kills three of her perceived enemies, "just like the female wasp."

The transformed and bloodthirsty Janice Starlin. Nightmare fuel if you're five.

It's only a matter of time until Starlin is found out, but either way she's too far gone and is simply no longer human, but more of a quasi-insectoid throat-ripper.

THE WASP WOMAN is not a great movie by any yardstick, but it is entertaining and does move at a brisk clip. What keeps it alive in the minds of those of us who discovered it as "horror kids" is its monster. The transformed look for Janice Starlin is about as cheap-looking and cheesy as it gets, but that aspect strangely adds to its creepy appeal. Whenever the wasp woman appears, the soundtrack is dominated by blaring musical stings and the pronounced sound of buzzing, like that of an agitated hive. The camera wisely gives us only a few glimpses of her face straight-on, and what we see is actually quite nightmarish when one let's the imagination fill in the gaps. Other than her head and hands, Starlin remains fully human and surprisingly fast when attacking, so the juxtaposition of a shapely '50's-era woman in a black dress and pumps and a bug-eyed, antennaed,  slavering Lovecraftian killer is sheer nightmare fuel if seen at an impressionable age. The buzzing, speed of movement and quick camera cutting  lend the wasp woman a nervous energy that leaves no doubt that her bite and claws are razor-sharp and sloppily effective.

I'm not gonna lie, this monster scared the shit out of me when I was little, and even now I find it quite twitchy and unnerving. The wasp woman would have been right at home in a Pertwee-era DOCTOR WHO serial, and more's the pity that she wasn't included in one.

During my infamous days anchoring the kitchen at a certain Brooklyn barbecue joint, we would occasionally run weird movies for the late-night bar crowd, and one evening we ran THE WASP WOMAN. Its mercifully short 73-minute running time was just right for holding the attention of the drunk regulars, who found it to be a lot of fun, but it was the loudly-stated reaction of our hot redheaded bartender, Kate, that will live with me forever. As the final credits rolled, there was brief silence, broken when Kate exclaimed "WHAT A CRUMMY MOVIE!!!" Yes. Yes, it is, and it treads territory handled to much better narrative effect in THE LEECH WOMAN (1960), but it's still worth checking out.

Poster for the original theatrical release. At no point if the film does the title character literally become a huge wasp with a human woman's face, and that's a goddamned shame. Audiences in 1959 had every reason to feel profoundly ripped off.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 2: HATCHET-Director's Cut (2006)

The southern-fried charm of Victor Crowley, aka Hatchetface. It's always a fun time when there's a malformed homicidal maniac running around the swamp.

Mardi Gras just isn't happening for Ben (Joel Moore), who's heartbroken after a bad breakup with his girlfriend, and no amount of boozing and ogling naked tits with his buddies can lift him from his funk. Accompanied by his friend Marcus (Deon Richmond), Ben instead seeks out a reportedly excellent haunted swamp tour and ends up on a questionable boat piloted by a douchey tour guide — described as "Uncle Remus meets Bruce Lee" — with an amateur pornographer, his two moronic would-be starlets, a middle-aged tourist couple, and the markedly unfriendly Marybeth (Tamara Feldman) along for the ride. But what none of the riders know is that the tour is being conducted illegally and its route takes it into the territory of Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder, best known as Jaon Voorhees in four of the FRIDAY THE 13th films), a powerful, deformed maniac known locally as "Hatchetface," thanks to his dad having once nailed him in the face with the titular implement. Not noticing the warning provided by a drunk who hangs out near the swamp, the group embarks on a doomed journey during which they must contend with alligators, getting lost in the rain-soaked nighttime bayou, and an inhumanly strong and homicidal killer.   

Very much a throwback and love letter to the slasher films of the 1980's, HATCHET plays in very familiar and quite tired territory, but it dishes out all of the expected genre tropes with a sense of liveliness and fun that most others in the slasher genre lack. Coming some twenty years after the slasher heyday works to the film's advantage and at no point does it come off like one of the legion of by the numbers, cookie cutter, assembly line gorefests of yore. It knows what it is and it's damned proud of it, so its creators made the most of this modest little shocker. The story is serviceable, with a rather tongue-in-cheek script, and the performances are better than anyone has any right to expect from what amounts to a bloody campfire yarn.

It's moments like this that remind one of the magic of the cinematic art form.

I can't speak for the theatrical cut, but if it were up to me the gore effects in this film would have been allowed to pass with an R-rating. Yeah, they're gory as hell, but it's all obviously make believe and the audience paying to see it certainly didn't put their asses in seats in hope of witnessing some newly-unearthed work by Paddy Chayefsky. What we get here are some very memorable, blood-spraying kills, and as such they are quite crowd-pleasing.

While not an instant classic, HATCHET is certainly worth your time if you have an appreciation for better-than-average backwoods slasher fare. If I had tween daughters who were having a slumber party, this is exactly the kind of DVD I would hand to them so they could traumatize their sleepover guests. I cannot, however, vouch for its sequels...

An excellent tag line.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 1: THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS (1957)

One of the things I mourn most since the advent and proliferation of cable TV is the death of the local sci-fi/horror movie showcase that was a beloved fixture on television stations of any given American region. Here in the Tri-State area we had several: CREATURE FEATURES (not to be confused with the exceptional Californian version hosted by Bob Wilkins), FRIGHT NIGHT, SCIENCE FICTION THEATER, THE 4:30 MOVIE and CHILLER THEATER, to name but a few. Those programs gave me and like-minded kids quite an education on the classics and not-so-classics of the genre and one can only find the flicks they once ran on sometimes obscure DVD or if you happen to get lucky with Turner Classic Movies. But wherever they may turn up, those cheesy old sci-fi and horror time-wasters often had items of raw imagination and wonder/horror that stuck for life with the kids who watched them and in my case one of the most indelible is 1957's totally ridiculous and insane THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS (or "Planet Arouse," as a certain former lady friend once snarkily referred to it).

When two scientists investigate mysterious radiation readings on "Mystery Mountain" (*snicker*), they get more than they bargained for when they enter a previously non-existent cave and discover Gor, a humongous floating brain with glowing eyes and a streak of towering assholism a mile wide. One scientist is killed by Gor's radiation powers while the other, Steve (played by Fifties sci-fi mainstay John Agar), ends up possessed by the villainous gray matter since it cannot survive on Earth without a host. Y'see, Gor's a fugitive criminal from the planet Arous ("Arouse!" as a former lady friend of mine once amusingly observed) and he intends to enslave the Earth with his super-intellect and bitchin' radiation powers, build a spaceship so he can haul ass (?) back home and then take over the known universe.

Gor, aka the Brain from Planet Arous, a critter who would have been right at home on a vintage episode of THE OUTER LIMITS.

At that point even at the age of eight I had to stop and say, "Wait a minute. If this brain-thing needs to have human slaves build it a spaceship, how the fuck did it get to the Earth in the first place? And if he's just one of a race of super-brains, doesn't that mean that the other super-brains would be out to either put his ass (?) back in jail or just destroy him outright?" At the time I didn't notice the dodgy special effect meant to represent a crash-landing spaceship, but the other query was soon answered...

Steve makes it back to civilization after having been AWOL for a full week, but his fiancee Sally (Joyce Meadows) thinks nothing of her man disappearing into the desert wilderness with Dan for long periods of time (BROKEBACK BRAIN, anyone?), or rather she doesn't until Steve plants a panty-drenching kiss on her and, when she responds quite favorably, tries to rape her. Luckily what could have been a horrible, alien-possessed felony is interrupted by Sally's faithful pooch George, a big white German Shepherd, and the sex-crazed Steve is driven away. The near-ravishment spurs Sally and her dad to check out the cave on Mystery Mountain for themselves and it is there that they meet Vol, another disembodied brain from Arouse, er, Arous, only this time it's a cop sent to stop Gor before shit gets too thick. Vol manifests at Sally's house and fills her in on his plan: Gor must periodically vacate Steve's body and during that time briefly becomes solid (in order to process oxygen or some such nonsense), at which point it's possible to kill Gor by nailing him in an anatomical bit analogous to the human brain's Fissure of Rolando. But until Gor takes the aforementioned break, Vol decides to stick around and keep an eye on things from within the body of Sally's dog.

I swear I saw something exactly like this the last time I ate a batch of "magic mushrooms."

Meanwhile, Steve goes totally fucking berserk as Gor uses his body to wreak all manner of super-powered, radioactive mayhem, turning his host's eyes silver years before the same thing happened to Gary Lockwood in the original STAR TREK's second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," a process requiring John Agar to suffer the agonies of a pair of foil contact lenses that were by all accounts painful as hell.

So Steve/Gor is totally insane and Vol awaits the moment when he can swing into action — with an assist from a partner who has hands and arms and is thus able to wield an axe — but how will it all end? You can pretty much guess, especially since the screenplay is not exactly designed to challenge the viewer with a labyrinthine mystery, but it's a hell of a lot of over-the-top fun getting to the denouement, a bit of business that was kind of shocking from an eight-year-old's perspective.

By no means a masterpiece, THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS is nonetheless worth checking out for its kinda-creepy aliens that appear to have been fashioned from papier mache and bob about on lengths of fishing wire with less grace than a piñata obtained from the local Party City.

Geez, talk about foreshadowing...

But as I said at the beginning, this goofy little movie has stuck with me since childhood and I have nothing but love for the brains themselves. In fact so much so that during my brief post-college pre-Marvel Bullpen freelance art career I had business cards printed up with a slimy-looking pinkish-purple brain (with dangling brain stem) emblazoned on them, only with a happenin' pair of Wayfarers obscuring the glowing eyes. So I say add this baby to your to-watch queue, score some righteous buds or your favorite fermented libation, kick back with some friends or a like-minded squeeze and enjoy the sight of one man's spectacular descent into very literal brain-damage.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Introduction

Hey, dear and loyal Cine-Miscreants!

October, the month that culminates in the most excellent day that is Halloween, is about to kick off, so you regulars know that means it's time once again for my annual month-long journey through the dark annals of horror cinema (and occasionally television).

Scary stories have been around as long as there have been storytellers, and a sizable segment of this planet's sentients eat up spine-chilling tales like a rapacious werewolf devours the tender flesh of an unlucky woodland wanderer, so it comes as no surprise that the horror genre has been a staple of global entertainment and has grown and thrived as the means to enthrall audiences with narratives that evolved along with us. Horror as a motion picture genre goes back to the dawn of the movies and it's been over a century since the first moving images silently flickered across the screen in the darkness as the public absorbed the wondrous diversions that unspooled. While comedies, dramas, romances, and adventure narratives held moviegoers riveted, darker, more sinister material also lurked in the indoor twilight and filmmakers were quick to realize that such chillers were a rich lode to be mined. From there the genre grew like Topsy and filled the silver screen with hordes of shambling revenants, thirsting nosferatu, eldritch demoniacal entities conjured through the wielding of forbidden rites, unrestful spectres, blasphemous man-made creatures, other-worldly wigglies that the mere sight of which drives the most stalwart of men to states of gibbering madness, medical nightmares in which our own bodies become our enemies or the healers who are supposed to grant us their aid turn their skills to dire pursuits, seemingly indestructible wielders of kitchen implements and power tools who stalk remote back-woods to prey upon randy youths, primordial throwbacks that defied extinction to terrorize swimwear-clad nubile young maidens, and even that most seemingly-mundane of threats, the unhinged murderer who walks among us and blends in while committing atrocities that would make veteran homicide detectives blanch and fall to their hands and knees while voiding the contents of their stomachs. All of those and more can be found in a richly-fetid cornucopia that often slyly reflects the needs and climate of the given era of production and examines areas of the human condition that may otherwise be un-broachable if not cloaked in shadow.

But enough of all that flowery film school yakkety-blah-blah-blah. If you've bothered to read this far, it's plain that you care about scary movies and are here to see what baleful chronicles of fright Yer Bunche will dredge up from the celluloid depths for the year of two-thousand and seventeen. As in previous years, there is no real rhyme or reason behind my choices, though there will be the occasional thematic overlap and comparison/contrast of certain sub-groups within the genre. I will also take pains to point out that stories that are ostensibly viewed as examples of other flavors — comedy, science-fiction, "thrillers," and non-supernatural drama — can quite easily be revealed as horror to the very core, and that horror can function equally well as art or junk food for the imagination.

So sharpen your axe, dust off the Necronomicon, apply fresh lipstick to grandma's mummified corpse, and make sure your homemade shroud of supple human skin is properly secured to your febrile pate. 'Tis once again the month of All Hallows' Eve and we are nothing if not prepared...

BOSS NIGGER (1975)

NOTE: This was originally written for my main blog back in 2008, but I have added a few tweaks since then.

Finally available in a legitimate DVD release, 1975’s BOSS NIGGER has (as previously bitched about on this here blog) indeed been retitled as the far more P.C. “BOSS,” but I’m happy to say that title is purely for the purposes of display on store shelves. The film itself has been altered in no way whatsoever, preserving both the title and the infamous theme song — sing along, kiddies: “They call him Boss…Boss Nigger!!!” — but introduced with the following disclaimer by writer/star Fred “The Hammer” Williamson himself:

In 1972 I had just completed “The Legend of Nigger Charley” and “The Soul of Nigger Charley.” I made this sequel that you are about to see. I used the “N” word to create sensationalism at the box office, and all three films were a success.

You have to remember that all who used that word against me in those films regretted it.

Enjoy the movie. I approve the title and the song with the dialogue intact.

Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, 2008 

I’ve previously railed against the perceived need to retitle the film and am glad to see the film itself left as it was originally seen, but in this climate where the word “nigger” is nearly ubiquitous in popular rap music (enjoyed across every ethnic group) and just about any R-rated film featuring black men, I find the need for any kind of disclaimer, even one so obviously well-intentioned, kind of ridiculous. Plus the film went out as BOSS NIGGER thirty-three years ago without apology, but whatever; those were the days when Richard Pryor won a Grammy for an album entitled “That Nigger’s Crazy” and no one batted an eye, so different time, different mindset I suppose.

BOSS NIGGER has been somewhat rightly described as BLAZING SADDLES without the comedy, and that’s true up to a point but not wholly accurate as the film is an uneven (though entertaining) blending of straight Western tropes and a tongue-in-cheek attitude. Bounty hunters Boss (Williamson, whose character’s surname is never revealed; it's a good bet it probably isn’t “Nigger”) and Amos (D’Urville Martin, perhaps best known as villain Willie Green in the first DOLEMITE flick) ride into a remote town and set themselves up as sheriff and deputy — much to the open consternation and disapproval of the townspeople —, knowing that wanted outlaw Jed Clayton (William Smith, also known as Conan the Barbarian’s sword-making dad) and his gang of marauding assholes/rapists/thieves are holed up somewhere nearby. Unbeknownst to the townsfolk, the crooked mayor (R.G. Armstrong) is sort of in cahoots with Clayton (it’s never made clear just what the mayor gets out of this arrangement other than not being rendered suddenly dead), and the entire town are such a bunch of pussies that even though they considerably outnumber the outlaws and apparently possess weapons and ammo they do nothing whatsoever to stand up for themselves, allowing the bad guys to ride into town and rape and pillage like the bandits in SEVEN SAMURAI, so it’s up to Boss and Amos to do it for them.

When not killing, jailing or generally humiliating Clayton’s thugs, Boss and Amos (especially Amos) enthusiastically enforce laws they make up on the spot, ordinances such as use of the “N” word or general rudeness directed at either of them being punishable by a twenty-dollar fine or two days behind bars and other such similar penalties, leading to what amusingly amounts to an endless source of cash for the two bounty hunters. Between clashes with assholish white folks and the stereotypical outlaw contingent, our heroes prove to be champions of the local downtrodden (translation: Mexicans) and find themselves on the receiving end of the attentions of a variety of interested females (Amos is pursued by a horny Mexican washerwoman whom he defended from abuse by rednecks the second he entered town, while Boss is fancied by two lovelies: a cute black chick whom he and Amos rescued from bushwhackers, and the local school marm, a white chick whose bloomers become quite humid at the sight of the stylish and handsome black-clad gunfighter). But all good things must eventually come to an end and the end here comes when Clayton finally gets off his ass and takes the fight to Boss, first by running over with a horse a Mexican child Boss had saved from starvation, then kidnapping (and raping offscreen) the cute black chick, and lastly by ambushing Boss, beating the shit out of him while he’s held in place by some henchmen and tying him to a post in the full-on desert heat. Amos rescues Boss and the cute black chick and takes them back to town for a brief rest before the inevitable showdown with Clayton, and when that final battle arrives the next morning the town becomes a low budget would-be Peckinpah-esque shootout, resulting in heaps of bodies before our heroes take possession of Clayton’s corpse and ride off to turn it in for a hefty bounty.

Directed by Jack Arnold — who, believe it or not, also helmed IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, RETURN OF THE CREATURE, TARANTULA, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, MONSTER ON CAMPUS and HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, just to name a few —, BOSS NIGGER is a decent enough Western that greatly benefits from Fred Williamson’s trademark cooler-than-polar-bear-shit personality coupled with a wry sense of humor and genuine acting chops, aspects that endeared him to genre fans from the second he hit the movie screen and set him apart from many of the leading men who were his contemporaries; Richard Roundtree, Ron O’Neal and Jim Kelly were all fun presences, but there was only one Fred Williamson and those of us who appreciated his work knew we were on to something unique and consequently his legend endures with a tenacity that few, if any, can match. In BOSS NIGGER he offers a reality-based analog to Cleavon Little’s fully-humorous Sheriff Bart in Mel Brooks’s BLAZING SADDLES and he’s a pleasure to watch as he outmaneuvers his adversaries and takes no shit from anybody, ably assisted by the late D’Urville Martin who takes what could have been a huge zero of a sidekick role and milks it for all it’s worth, playing ex-slave Amos as both capable and dependable while displaying undisguised glee at flagrantly fucking with obnoxious white people. (NOTE: there are some nice white people in the town and they do not get the treatment from Boss and Amos.)

Other than the occasional lapse into pacing more suited for a B-grade TV show (which is unsurprising as Arnold did a lot of TV work), the only thing that annoyed me about BOSS NIGGER was its soundtrack, a wildly inappropriate and strictly by the numbers generic blaxploitation score heavy with “wakka jawakka” electric guitar, and its lazily-written themesong that comes off more as a list of the hero’s attributes than an actual song, and the sumbitch doesn’t even have the decency to rhyme. But if that’s the only gripe that I can voice about this blaxploitation Western — other than it being PG-rated and not the R that would have allowed it to go totally apeshit with graphic violence, sex, cussing and the general sleazy offensiveness that made blaxploitation flicks so much fun in the first place —, it’s a small quibble indeed, so TRUST YER BUNCHE and give the long-unseen BOSS NIGGER (or BOSS, if you insist) a shot.

ADDENDUM: In 2010, I attended the Chiller Theatre convention in New Jersey and got to meet several of my heroes from the blaxploitation boom, including the one and only Fred Williamson, so I made sure to bring a photo from this movie for him to sign, which he gladly did. He was still the coolest of dudes and I wish him nothing but the best.

With the Boss himself.

The uninspired and rather chickenshit packaging for the DVD release.

All-Time Favorite Movies: A PATCH OF BLUE (1965)

 Home is where the heart is...NOT.

In an effort to take my mind off of my current medical woes, I'm going to start posting capsule looks at my favorite movies of all time, in no particular order. Hopefully, you will find some items that interest you enough to check them out. 

Today we start with A PATCH OF BLUE (1965), a sweet but jarring and tragic tale of the friendship between Sidney Poitier, in yet another of his "perfect negro" roles, and Elizabeth Hartman as the blind, isolated, and abused daughter of aging whore Shelley Winters. (Winters won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this performance and deserved every ounce of it.) It's Hartman's journey from an abused adolescent to blossoming womanhood as her friend (Poitier) teaches her how to become self-sufficient in the sighted world during daily visits to the local park, a world her horrible mother has intentionally kept her unprepared for. As the pair become close, the young woman develops deep romantic feelings for her friend and intends to act on them, but he kindly keeps her at bay due to her age and innocence. 

Life lessons in the park.

But as the narrative progresses, he and the audience learn just how unspeakably horrible the young woman's life was until she met him, a tale involving her witnessing her mother's work as a low-rent whore in their apartment, her being blinded by acid thrown at her father during a vicious spat between her parents, and getting raped by one of her mother's customers while her mother had stepped out for some reason, a scene made all the more terrifying because we experience it from the girl's blind and uncomprehending point of view. Seeing her friend as a way out of her hellish life with her mother, she tries to convince him to take her in as his willing lover, which she says is alright because she's "already been done over." She relates all of this in a matter-of-fact way that communicates that she has accepted such violence as just the way life is, so her relationship with her friend/desired lover is something she never considered as possible. (The appalled look on Poitier's face after her recounting of her sexual assault is like being hit in the face with a hammer.) 

The film's sole decent man holds in his horror and disgust as our blinded and abused heroine nonchalantly recounts being sexually assaulted by one of her mother's vile clients.

And things are further complicated when the evil prostitute mother gets wind of her daughter's friendship with a black man who intends to honorably save the girl and enroll her in a school for the blind, but mom thinks his plans are more lecherous, which does not sit well with her nigger-hatin' attitudes. And worst of all, the mother plans to retire from hooking and open her own brothel, pressing her innocent blind daughter into unwilling service as her first deployed whore. It's a gripping study of world-class family dysfunction and a touching tale of a damaged young girl blossoming to womanhood under the most adverse conditions possible. A hardcore tear-jearker if ever there was one, and hands down my favorite drama from the 1960's, HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

 Poster from the original theatrical release.