The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Deep Tango (1974) and The Young Secretaries (1974)

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 31 July 2014

  Vinegar Syndrome have proven themselves repeatedly to be one of the most interesting DVD/Blu-ray imprints and film preservation companies working in exploitation and genre cinema, releasing top-notch transfers of films that had previously only existed on home video in shoddy transfers (or in some cases, not at all). That film preservation aspect of their business is unquestionably a noble cause, and in theory every film deserves a chance at resurrection regardless of its entertainment or artistic value. In reality, though, not every “lost” film is going to be a great one, although it may have particular historical significance. The latest Peekarama release, a double feature of two films from 1974 (Deep Tango and The Young Secretaries), is the first in the series where historical significance is the principal reason to watch either of these films.

  About 70 minutes into Deep Tango, one of the characters says “I’m sick of this crap, and I have no idea what’s going on!” Chances are good that any audience member who makes it this far into the film may have very similar feelings. Mostly notable for being the second screen credit for porn superstar Annette Haven, Deep Tango is a pretentious, surreal hippie comedy. The action of the film follows parallel stories tied together by the characters of John (Keith Henderson) and Pauline (Mona Watson), who meet while looking at an empty apartment. They quickly become lovers and decide to meet at the apartment without talking about their lives. When they’re not at the apartment, John is dealing with his cinema verite-obsessed girlfriend Tomine (Annette Haven) and her ever-present film crew. Pauline works for a sex therapist, engaging with patients to aid in their therapy; her current assignment is a young woman named Rosebud who fantasizes she has killed herself and won’t get out of the bathtub where she supposedly cut her wrists with a tin can lid.

  Before each segment with Pauline and Rosebud, the therapist Pauline works for records notes on Rosebud’s progress while having sex with a nurse. Occasionally a barely-visible title card will appear over a minute or so of footage of a dance marathon. Most of the story lines just sort of fizzle out, leaving the film to end on a nonsensical downer. Leading up to that, though, there’s plenty of hippie art weirdness on display: Sex scenes are intercut with footage of the Daly City BART train, Rosebud’s funeral turns into a threesome with her boyfriend and her mother, Pauline uses some butter to lube up John’s ass before shoving a huge baguette up it, demanding he shout “McDonald’s Hamburger!” There’s a lot more, but none of it makes much sense and the overall effect of all this plus a truly atrocious soundtrack (attributed to “Nimrod”) is more a feeling of humoring a bunch of art students than anything approaching fun.

  But at least Deep Tango is weird. The Young Secretaries was apparently also released in 1974, but everything about it screams 1960s. In fact, the film is very reminiscent of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Ecstasies of Women (1969), one of “The Lost Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis” that made up Vinegar Syndrome’s very first release. Everything from the sound to the color schemes, transparent nighties and awkward, patently fake sex scenes would indicate that the film was made well before 1970, but a scene where characters drive past a theater playing Deep Throat suggests at least the exteriors were shot in 1972 or later. Director Richard Kanter had previously made Thar She Blows! in 1968 and Starlet! in 1969 with producer David F. Friedman, Lewis’s former partner in crime. It follows that Kanter may have been influenced in his approach to filmmaking by Friedman; in any case, The Young Secretaries certainly has a very distinct late-60s low-budget look, and it’s painfully dull.

  The film concerns Cameron (John Barnum), head of an advertising company bankrolled by his father-in-law. His wife Caroline (Colleen Brennan) is planning to dump him for young Marshall Adams (Gary Schneider), so Cameron tries to plot with his right-hand girl Sally (Jan Mitchel) a way to prevent the takeover of the advertising agency if not his marriage. Meanwhile, the people who work for Cameron get high and have sex in the supply room, or wait until the office party and do it there. Most everyone looks pretty bored, and the wood paneling that makes up the background of most of the film is more interesting than just about anything happening in front of it. By the end of the film, it’s hard to care about what’s going on with the implied corporate intrigue, and a relief when the abrupt end rolls around.

  Vinegar Syndrome scanned both films in 2K from a camera internegative, but in another first for the Peekarama line, the disc opens with a warning that the color of the materials they had to work with for these films was severely degraded. It’s immediately obvious that neither film is as clean as other Peekarama releases, but as noted, these two films were basically “lost” before this release. There is some weird color in Deep Tango, especially in darker scenes, while The Young Secretaries looks a little better despite some dirt and scratches. Both films are entirely watchable from a technical standpoint, but again, other than the fun of watching “lost” films, their relative replay value for the average viewer may be low. Deep Tango is more likely to be the selling point here, both because it has actual hardcore sex and because it’s easily one of the weirdest films in the Peekarama line so far. Still, it’s great that Vinegar Syndrome are saving these films, even if they’re not always quite as good as one would hope.

  Deported Women of the SS Special Section (1976) and Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977)

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 3 June 2014

  The Italian film industry is fascinating, and for the dedicated genre and exploitation enthusiast the decades of the 60s through the 80s were particularly interesting. Constantly swayed by what films were popular at any given time, the Italian studios would crank out countless variations on successful formulas. The Spaghetti Western and the Giallo may be the most well-known (and among the longest-lasting) genres of this trend-chasing craze, but more modest hits spawned smaller movements. One of these was the short-lived “Nazisploitation” cycle that followed in the wake of Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), Don Edmonds’s Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975) and Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty (1976). Many of the Italian Nazisploitation films made their way to the U.S. on video store shelves under any number of different titles, making them highly sought-after by exploitation fans looking to revisit the films they watched on VHS. Intervision and Severin Films have now brought two of these films to the U.S. on DVD: Rino di Silvestro’s Deported Women of the SS Special Section (1976) and Cesare Canevari’s Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977).

  Silvestro had already made two exploitation classics by the time he made Deported Women of the SS Special Section: Women in Cell Block 7 (1973) and Werewolf Woman (also released in 1976). Deported Women reflects Silvestro’s interest in taking his material very seriously, even when it’s in as questionable taste as an exploitation film set in a Nazi prison camp. The principal story follows Tania Nobel (Lina Polito), a Polish prisoner, brought by train to a camp run by Herr Erner (an outrageous John Steiner). As a soldier, Erner had previously encountered Tania, and he is ecstatic to have her under his power. Erner tries to break Tania’s will while her fellow prisoners suffer the attentions of the violent Kapos (female prisoners given special authority as guards) and desperately try to plan an escape.

  By the standards of the genre, Deported Women is very well made and not as exploitative as many of its contemporaries. Silvestro carefully researched the hierarchy of such prison camps, and the film presents a version of life in such a camp that is more realistic than cheaper “Nazisploitation” films that would follow it. That is not to say, of course, that there are no exploitation elements here: the film frequently shows its female prisoners in the nude, and there are scenes of male and female guards fraternizing with the prisoners (sometimes consensually, sometimes not). The film as a whole is light on gore, although Tania’s final strike against Herr Erner is a spectacular exception. As difficult as these films often are to watch, Deported Women is an example of one which was m
ade with some care (including a typically great score by Stelvio Cipriani) and at least a nod to historical authenticity.

  Historical authenticity was clearly less of a concern in the production of Gestapo’s Last Orgy, appropriately released in the States on home video under the truly unbelievable title Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler. Director and co-writer Cesare Canevari lifts this film’s plot almost wholesale from The Night Porter: at some point after the end of World War II, former camp inmate Lise Cohen (Daniela Levy) reunites with the commander of her camp, Conrad von Starker (Adriano Micantoni). They rendezvous at the ruins of the camp where she was held and wander the grounds, occasionally stopping for Starker to declare his love for Lise while she stares off into the distance, remembering the atrocities committed in this place. Starker, blinded by his lust for Lise, seems to have no idea why she has brought him here when he wants to take her away with him to South America. Suffice to say that she has a different idea.

  Told entirely through flashbacks, Gestapo’s Last Orgy is just a catalog of depraved horrors. Lise arrives at the camp already prepared to die, so even watching as Starker and his fellow officers burn a fellow inmate to death on their dinner table doesn’t appear to faze her. Starker is infuriated by her willingness to die, and so puts her through a series of increasingly brutal tortures, bringing her closer and closer to death. While he spends his time trying to put the fear of death into Lise, his second-in-command Alma (Maristella Greco) starts to become jealous, lashing out at the inmates mercilessly. Only the camp doctor provides Lise with any sort of sympathy, and eventually she learns to value her life, but at the expense of any sympathy she may have had for her fellow prisoners. Virtually nobody gets out of Gestapo’s Last Orgy looking anything like a decent human being; everyone here is just varying shades of evil. Gruesome and bleak, Gestapo’s Last Orgy earns its reputation as one of the most notoriously unpleasant films of an already seriously unpleasant sub genre.

  Intervision’s new DVD releases of the films both include a nearly 40-minute featurette entitled “A Brief History of Sadiconazista – Interview with Film Historian Dr. Marcus Stiglegger.” This is a fascinating interview, in which Dr. Stiglegger traces the roots of the “Nazisploitation” style from anti-Nazi propaganda during WWII through Italian art films and Israeli pulp fiction and finally to the late 1970s exploitation films. This is an invaluable interview that helps put the films into their proper historical context. The DVD of Deported Women of the SS Special Section also includes a nearly half-hour interview with director Rino di Silvestro (who passed away in 2009) and a ten-minute interview with star John Steiner. Both of these interviews are very entertaining and informative, and well worth a look for anyone curious about the making of the film.

  There’s no question that “Nazisploitation” is not for everyone, but for curious fans of exploitation cinema in general and Italian exploitation film in particular, these new DVD releases are illuminating. It’s doubtful that they’ll change anyone’s mind about the relative tastefulness of “Nazi exploitation” cinema, but for students of exploitation film history, they will be required viewing.

  The Flesh and Blood Show (1972) and Frightmare (1974)

  Originally published 24 March 2014

  Pete Walker had a pretty great run from the late 1960s through the 1970s in British cinema, although in the States he has been more of a cult figure. In the UK, Walker made a name for himself directing and producing exploitation films of two distinct stripes: sex films such as School for Sex (1969), The Dirtiest Girl I Ever Met (aka Cool It Carol, 1970), and The Four Dimensions of Greta (1972), and horror features like Die Screaming Marianne (1971), House of Whipcord (1974), and Schizo (1976). Kino Video and Redemption Films previously released a boxed set of four of his horror films (the previously mentioned films and 1978′s The Comeback) on Blu-ray, much to the delight of Walker’s fans. Not only were these new releases of much better video quality than previous releases, but many of Walker’s films had been out of print or otherwise unavailable in the States for quite some time. Now they have released two more, providing an impressive upgrade to the versions previously available in the States: The Flesh and Blood Show (1972) and Frightmare (1974).

  The Flesh and Blood Show is a sort of proto-slasher film that follows a group of actors who have been hired to perform in a musical at an abandoned theater. The theater was closed after a production of Othello ended in real-life bloodshed years earlier, and the theater is thought to be cursed. Unsurprisingly, before too long each of the actors begin disappearing, making rehearsals exceptionally difficult for the remaining cast, although they’re mostly too busy taking their clothes off to notice. True to his exploitation film reputation, Walker delivers on promises of both flesh and blood, although it takes a while to get going. Fans of UK horror and exploitation film will find plenty of familiar faces here to keep them occupied, though: Robin Askwith (of Confessions of a Window Cleaner fame) appears along with Luan Peters (Lust for a Vampire, Twins of Evil), Judy Matheson (Percy’s Progress, Scream… and Die!), Penny Meredith (The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, Confessions of a Summer Camp Councillor), Ray Brooks (Walker’s House of Whipcord and Tiffany Jones) and Tristan Rogers (Frustrated Wives, Walker’s The Four Dimensions of Greta). The pacing of the film is a bit of a problem, though, and overall The Flesh and Blood Show is more of an interesting footnote in horror history than anything. One huge score for this new Blu-ray release worth noting is the restoration of a 3D flashback sequence that has been restored to the film (although the viewer will need either a 3D television or blue and red glasses to watch it properly), not shown in 3D since its original theatrical run!

  On the other hand, Frightmare is a genuine classic of British horror, mostly thanks to a spectacular performance by Sheila Keith. Jackie Yates (Deborah Fairfax) lives with her younger stepsister Debbie (Kim Butcher) in a London flat. Lately, Debbie’s behavior has been more and more erratic and dangerous, and Jackie is worried for her. Jackie’s boyfriend Graham (Paul Greenwood), who is studying to be a psychiatrist, takes it into his own hands to investigate the situation. Unfortunately for Graham, the Yates family has more problems than juvenile delinquency in their history: their parents Edmund (Rupert Davies) and Dorothy (Sheila Keith) spent a long stint in a sanitarium for murder and cannibalism. Recently released as being “cured,” Dorothy has taken up reading tarot cards to make a little extra money. And although Jackie tries to tamp down Dorothy’s murderous urges by bringing her raw meat, occasionally Dorothy still hunts and kills the clients who come to her for a tarot reading. Edmund does his best to cover for Dorothy, but as Debbie’s behavior starts to spiral out of control and Dorothy becomes more and more unhinged, it seems like only a matter of time before the Yates are found out again.

  Frightmare is a gruesome film, occasionally flirting with black comedy. However, even as the story constantly threatens to pitch into complete lunacy, Sheila Keith’s performance as Dorothy keeps the film from getting too cartoonish. Keith also appeared in Walker’s House of Whipcord and House of Mortal Sin, but Frightmare is the film where she was allowed to really show what she was made of. Dorothy genuinely seems like a sweet (if mildly confused) old lady up until she has an implement of murder in her hand, at which time she becomes a seriously unsettling and very real threat. The rest of the cast is mostly great, although Kim Butcher gets a little out of control (not always in a good way) as young murderess-in-training Debbie. Still, this is absolutely Sheila Keith’s show, and the film is worth watching for her brilliant performance alone. Gore fans will not be disappointed, as Walker keeps the body count ticking up and the blood flying. Frightmare is one of the best British horror films of the 1970s, and arguably Pete Walker’s finest hour as a director.

  Kino Video and Redemption Films released The Flesh and Blood Show and Frightmare on Blu-ray 18 March 2014. It goes without saying that the video quality of these discs are vastly improved over the previously-available DVDs released in the States by Shriek Show. The Flesh and Blood
Show features an interview with director Pete Walker by Elijah Drenner, the film’s original theatrical trailer, and a 10-minute 3D sequence presented in both stereoscopic format (requiring a 3D television system) and anaglyph format (requiring red & blue 3D glasses, not included). Frightmare features a full-length commentary by Walker and director of photography Peter Jessop moderated by author Steve Chibnall (author of Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker) an interview with Walker by Elijah Drenner, “Sheila Keith: A Nice Old Lady?” featurette, and the film’s original theatrical trailer. For diehard fans of British horror, picking these up is a no-brainer. Here’s hoping we see more of Walker’s films on Blu-ray in the near future!

  Friday the 13th Parts IV (1984), V (1985), and VI (1986) on DVD

  Originally published on Film Monthly 10 June 2009

  The release earlier this year of the “reboot” of the Friday the 13th series led, inevitably, to the re-release of the original film series on DVD. No studio in their right mind is going to let a prime excuse to double-/triple-/etc.-dip go by! While Paramount did a great job with the first film– finally releasing the uncut version on DVD in North America for the first time was an auspicious start– their reissues of parts 2 and 3 left something to be desired. Perhaps reacting to the fan uproar, the next round of Friday the 13th reissues are a nice return to the example set by the first DVD.