I suppose I've always had a soft spot for severed head movies, in the same way I still like to put on a comfy old cardigan, spin some Perry Como vinyl, and break out a box of Ritz crackers and a can of aerosol cheese. And for me, the golden era of severed head films overlapped neatly with my adolescence, kicking off with a bang in 1962 with The Brain That Wouldn't Die, then building to a frenzied climax ten years later in The Thing With Two Heads. The latter blended the cut and dry hand wringing over medical ethics with the racial tensions of the day, producing a glorious orgasm of stupid that would arguably not be challenged until Pink Lady and Jeff hit the airwaves in 1980.

Along the way, one such film may have escaped the attention of many, and undeservedly so, in my view. The Frozen Dead, filmed just twenty years after World War II, explored the possibility of Nazis being revived from a suspended state so that they might reorganize and finish their business. The premise seems a bit far fetched to me. After all, aside from giving Fox News a small ratings bump, I'm skeptical these reanimated Nazis would have much of an impact on the modern world once their juices were flowing. Their résumés would have a huge gap to explain, and they would have missed out on key technological advancements like the Russian sputnik and the Popeil Pocket Fisherman. Worse, outside of some parts of Idaho and Alabama, most people tend to look askance at Nazis, and not without good reason. Sure, they gave us Volkswagens and some of the worst swing jazz in recorded history, but just ask any 80 year old from the rest of Europe how they feel when a German tourist asks for directions.

But Dana Andrews, as Dr. Norberg, has no time to consider their assimilation potential before applying jumper cables to old frozen Nazis, because as Tom Lehrer observed:

"Once zee rockets go up, who cares where they come down? Zat's not my department," says Wernher Von Braun.

Dana's already got some organs wiggling around in glass jars, and even better, he's got a bunch of switch-activated, flopping human arms connected to a wall with wires and sheet rock spackle. He's also got a few Nazis that are sort of working, but the problem is getting their brains to run smoothly. For some reason, they all know how to do exactly one thing, and that one thing varies on a per Nazi basis. One Nazi just combs his hair and looks kind of sad, and none of them can do anything as complicated as a Sudoku puzzle. Sadly, there's little potential for a Fourth Reich in the existing crop. No, what Dana needs is a human brain to experiment with, so he can squirt the proverbial frosting on his Nazi reanimation theories. Enter his assistant, Karl, who is all too eager to help out. So when Dana's niece brings a college pal home for a weekend, Karl goes proactive and snuffs her before she's had her first cup of coffee, then blames one of Dana's reanimated Nazi zombies. Dana's not happy about it, but goddamn it, she's got a fresh brain in her head, and it's not like she's going to be doing anything with it. So Dana borrows her head, hooks it to a bunch of tubes and wires, props it up on a cribbage table, and then the real fun begins. It's not really clear why the head needs to be severed in order to study the brain, but who am I to question Dana Andrews? The Nazis gave him a few million Deutsche Marks to look into this, so he obviously didn't just fall off the turnip truck, assuming they ship turnips that way in Germany.

Eventually things go sour for Dana, but not before he blurts out loads of hilarious pseudo-scientific gibberish, with a German accent that wouldn't get him hired as a Three Stooges extra. And unfortunately he hadn't reached the most desperate point of his career, as anyone who has maintained consciousness through Hot Rods From Hell can attest. But The Frozen Dead stands turgid in the noble echelons of badfilm, predating They Saved Hitler's Brain by a couple of years, and actually seeming somewhat polished in comparison. If by some chance you've never spent a Sunday afternoon lying half asleep on a beer stained sofa, gawking at this with a bewildered stare, I'd say go for it, mach schnell.

As you probably know, the ethical issues surrounding scientific research are in the news again. J. Craig Ventner and his team have created a synthetic life form in their laboratory, reportedly by combining computer generated DNA strands with pre-existing microplasma cells, presenting the imminent possibility of manufacturing microbes significantly more complex than Wolf Blitzer. Arguably, I've done the same on any given morning after eating at Taco Bell, so I'm not particularly impressed. However, being just a layman, I suppose I'll have to defer to the scientific journals.

But more pointed questions are being raised by the Vatican, which has served as our moral compass for centuries as it has overseen the world's most prolific pedophilia racket. And even for non-theists there's a delicate balance worth pondering as humans cross this forboding cognitive threshold. If species with genomes fine tuned with computer software are to be produced, then who will produce them, and what will be the intent? Will the requirements be defined by the highest bidder, or by governments with dubious political agendas? And even with the best intentions, will there be unexpected catastrophic outcomes, like in that one Three Stooges episode where Curley saws a table in half while Moe is standing on it? I don't think there's any doubt that we're all Moe standing on the table. The question we must confront is: Who is Curley and what does he have in that toolbox?

Maybe man would be better served by drawing lines in the sand which simply cannot be crossed. For example, maybe we could decide that no technological research is allowed if it doesn't expand our cable lineup, induce spontaneous orgasms, or cause a million barrels of raw crude to be puked directly into the Gulf of Mexico. Everything else is gravy, which is fattening, and only keeps you from noticing little chunks of things in your meatloaf that you'd rather not eat.

I can't assume to hold the answers to any of these questions, but I can warn you that my recent viewing of Diabolical Dr. Z has only muddied the water, to the point that I'm much less sure how mankind ought to proceed. For example, what if there were a way to insert metal spikes into the brains and spines of hardened criminals, and with a few "Z-rays" applied at the appropriate frequencies, convert them into the cast from Eight is Enough? Wouldn't that be a good idea? And what if, instead of just flopping their bodies on a table before poking the spikes into their brains, you had this big complicated robotic contraption that grabbed them by the wrists and lifted them up, making a bunch of loud beeping noises, while you twiddled some knobs on an oscilloscope? Wouldn't that be an even better idea?

It may be that director Jess Franco wanted to unravel these conundrums in Diabolical Dr. Z, but if so, his objectives were irrevocably hijacked in the first fifteen minutes when the title character drops dead from a heart attack after being ridiculed by a panel of eminent scientists. With his dying gasp, he urges his daughter Irma to continue his work, and her interpretation of this request is to hunt down and kill every one of the motherfuckers who mocked his theories, along with some collateral damage in the form of a Dutch hitchhiker in a two piece bikini. Clearly, Jess Franco did not set out to make the case for leading edge scientific research, but he did succeed in producing one of his rare story lines that can be followed without the assistance of hash brownies or paint fumes. And anyone who has managed to sit through some of Jess's other films (e.g. Venus in Furs) will recognize that this is no small feat.

There's also a trippy soundtrack with lots of jazz trumpet and atonal treated piano, plus a protagonist scientist guy who resembles Sean Connery with a dash of Leslie Nielsen, and his girlfriend, Miss Death, who seduces a mannequin on a giant fake spider web in a tight see-through body stocking.

By Franco standards, it ranks low for gratuitous nudity and graphic violence, but I'd still recommend it for anyone who likes 60s women's hairstyles and experimental jazz, or who wants the unvarnished, worst case scenario for scientific hubris left unchecked. After all, these are difficult questions to grapple with, and we'd best enter into them with a full complement of tesla coils and paranoid hallucinations.

One of the endearing traits of late 70s American cinema was the unholy convergence of producers and directors with dubious talent, and aging Hollywood stars in the abyss of their careers. The fact that Ida Lupino wrapped things up with My Boys are Good Boys is almost as depressing as watching your own grandmother unable to reach her orange juice from a hospital bed. This fibrous cinematic stool, which recently floated to the surface of my stagnant perceptive swimming pool, serves as a pristine example of this convergence. A big shout out to my wife for noticing the Ida Lupino double feature during our recent visit to the Yankee Dollar store, and throwing it into our cart, along with our off brand strawberry scented shampoo and a tube of hydrocortisone ointment. One of dozens of quality releases from eastwestdvd.com, this disc also includes a made for TV crapfest with Lupino and Andy Griffith, Strangers In 7A. But I'll save that one for the prep night before my next colonoscopy.

My Boys Are Good Boys is directed by Bethel G. Buckalew, who previously had worked on assorted Harry Novak smut offerings, such as The Pigkeeper's Daughter and Country Cuzzins. What this one lacks in gratuitous sex and nudity it makes up for with its schizophrenic hesitation over whether it wants to be an Al Adamson movie or an ABC After School Special. And in addition to Ida Lupino, you also get Lloyd Nolan and Ralph Meeker, plus David Doyle from Charlie's Angels. Lupino and Meeker are irremediably awful, but Lloyd Nolan somehow manages to salvage his dignity from this mess by slapping a band-aid over a few of the dozens of problems in a script that makes less sense than a Scientology tract proffered by a grinning idiot on a public sidewalk.

And I haven't even mentioned the soundtrack, which much to my amazement is attributed to Joe Siracusa, a former drummer for Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Imagine the most annoying fucking sounds you've ever heard come out of an analog synthesizer, and then imagine what they would sound like coming out of your dog's ass, and you're getting close. And it's always there, like an ear infection that requires a triple round of antibiotics. The title theme is delivered by rockabilly asterisk Dorsey Burnette, and because there is no God, it's available on YouTube for your listening pleasure.




Oh yes, there's also a fat kid named "Chunky." He eats a lot. He likes candy bars. It gets funnier every time they mention it. And don't miss David Doyle's over the top rant near the end, in which he passionately defends the honor of the juvenile delinquents in his custody with the coherence of an Al Qaeda training video. Or the hilarious closing punchline, in which a teenage girl realizes that the cop who is arresting her is the guy who tried to rape her earlier in the movie. Really, does it get any funnier than that?

EastWest Entertainment has graciously unearthed this jewel and presented it after a painstaking restoration process. I would guess this involved ripping the video from a sharing website, converting it to the shittiest mpeg available, then blowing it up into a glorious, low resolution mess, with lots of compression noise anytime there's more on-screen action than in a typical Bela Tarr movie or a National Geographic documentary on snails.

Oh what the hell, maybe I'll go ahead and watch Strangers in 7A. Why wait for a colonoscopy?

My parents moved us around a lot when I was a boy, and for a couple of years we lived in a small town in Ohio, where I befriended another kid named Wyman. My friends were usually a bit weird, but Wyman's principle claim to abnormality was his father. About a couple of months after I met Wyman, I spent an afternoon that seemed like a geochronological eon listening to his Dad talk about his recent interest in a 19th century Polish opthalmologist named L. L. Zamenhof.

Zamenhof was the guy who invented Esperanto, a language which he intended to be a universal communicative bridge for helping mankind achieve mutual understanding. Even in my youth this seemed a bit of a reach, but I felt pressured to hear out the full sales pitch. Wyman's Dad always wore a turtleneck and glasses with thick, black frames. He'd puff on his pipe, blowing rancid tobacco smoke over us while aimlessly muttering in a low, reverential tone about his new idol. I was too young to pick up on the depth and breadth of the weirdness, but a few weeks later Wyman gave me some news that finally registered on my fruitcake meter.

Wyman's Dad had decided to create his own language, and Wyman told me that from then on, he wouldn't be able to talk to me unless I learned to use it. He told me it was going to be called Uvantitian, and that it would be based loosely on Romanian, and some alien shit that Wyman's Dad heard one time on The Outer Limits. I kind of liked Wyman, but there was no way in hell I was going to waste time learning his Dad's goofy language just so we could hang out at the drug store and look at smut magazines together, so I stopped going over to his house.

The next time I saw him was at the monthly neighborhood pot luck dinner. Wyman's Dad walked up with his smelly pipe sticking out of a broad grin, and a styrofoam cooler full of ice cold root beer. He set down the cooler and immediately started babbling some incoherent shit that nobody understood, then made eye contact with as many people as possible, as if anticipating a lively rebuttal. Everyone just looked around awkwardly for a few seconds, then began talking to each other as if they hadn't been listening. Pretty soon, some older guy with gray hair and a red flannel shirt walked up and introduced himself as Wyman's uncle, and told us that he was there to translate for Wyman's family so that we could carry on a conversation. About half of the people began moving to some picnic tables closer to the park exit, but my Mom was in an adventurous mood, so we had to stay there and strike up some banter. The first thing we noticed was that Wyman's Dad was only speaking in sentence fragments. He'd say something to Wyman's uncle, and Wyman's uncle would chew on it for a few seconds and then look at us and say "that blue car over there," or "hot charcoals," or "horse shoes," then wait for us to respond. It took her a few minutes, but eventually my Mom figured out that Wyman's Dad had forgotten to invent any verbs with his new language. When she told him this, he looked really pissed off, pretended to not understand what she was saying, and looked over at his uncle to interpret for him. But his uncle wasn't particularly bright, and wasn't even sure what a verb was, so he started mixing English with his Uvantitian, which only made Wyman's Dad even more furious. Pretty soon all of the other families started walking back over to our table and laughing at Wyman's family, and it all ended with Wyman's Dad throwing a bottle of root beer at one of our neighbors, and the high school English teacher yelling jokes about Uvantitian not having a subjunctive mood.

Wyman's family moved away to a suburb shortly after the lamentable pot luck episode, and I rarely thought about it again until by chance I ran into him at a hardware store when we were both teenagers. He confided that his Dad never really gave up his dream, but eventually loosened the familial prohibition against English. He also told me that his Dad had begrudgingly added verbs for mowing the lawn and telling the paper boy to not throw the newspaper in the bushes, but he refused to acknowledge that these were verbs and considered the matter closed.

But what about Esperanto? Would it be fair to judge it based on the fact that someone inspired by it ended up throwing a root beer bottle at one my neighbors? Of course not. That would be like blaming accordions for The Lawrence Welk show. And for that matter, The Lawrence Welk Show is pretty goddamned hilarious if you're drunk or stoned enough. Let he who is without embarrassing personal associations cast the first sxtono, as L. L. Zamenhof might have warned us.

Besides, there's really no need to make excuses for Esperanto. First of all, it has verbs for any occasion. For example, "Des gnomo glutas des gulasxon" means "The gnome swallows the goulash." But it doesn't stop there. You can also say "Mi fikis des gubernatoron", which means "I fucked the governor." With just those two sentences, you could probably get through a job interview at CNN.

The second thing that sets Esperanto apart from Uvantitian is that it has its own William Shatner movie, which is a claim that not even Chinese or German can make. And to be honest, it's not bad. Somehow they managed to get some actors to learn a script in a language that damn near nobody speaks, then drove them up to Big Sur to shoot it, and what popped out is actually kind of creepy in its own way, once you get past the obvious frivolity of Shatner speaking in Esperanto. On top of that, the camera work is inventive, and the score is better than most films being barfed out of Hollywood these days. Maybe the "Evil Has Never Been So Seductive" tagline is a reach, particularly for anyone who ever saw Julie Newmar on the old Batman TV series, but that's a minor quibble.

Given the subject matter, an obvious comparison would be with a later Shatner film, The Devil's Rain, but this is much more watchable despite being much less over the top. As in The Devil's Rain, The Shatmeister represents purity and goodness locking horns with the forces of evil, in this case personified by Milos Milos as The Incubus, and a blonde seductress who wants Shatner to get naked with her on the beach. Milos Milos turned out to be a good choice, because in real life he would later be involved in an adulterous murder/suicide with Mickey Rooney's wife.

By the way, do you know what Mi fikis Mickey Rooney means? That's okay, because his wife didn't know either.

This is a peculiar and ultimately laughable piece of mildly entertaining dreck directed by Anthony Mann, whose output ran the quality gamut from the nail scrapingly bad Glenn Miller Story to the solid and memorable gonad stomper The Naked Spur. Strange Impersonation lands somewhere in between, much more watchable than the former, but consistently dumb, unlike the latter. A misleadingly high billing for Lyle Talbot on the DVD case is what pulled me in, but his contribution is unfortunately brief. I'm mildly surprised that there must be other Lyle Talbot fans out there, since I would have estimated our numbers to be slightly fewer than those who claim to be Floyd Cramer groupies. I'm guessing this is due more to his appearance in Ed Wood films than his supposedly more legitimate work, but personally I've always been partial to his portrayal of an evil pornographer in a 60s Dragnet episode.

Brenda Marshall stars as a bespectacled blonde babe scientist working on a revolutionary anesthetic, after which she has promised to marry her fiancé (William Gargan). Another archetypal 40s blonde, Hillary Brooke, works in the same lab and, unbeknownst to Marshall, is also hot for William Gargan. This central plot premise is sneer worthy, since William Gargan has the looks and sexual charisma of a castrato Howard Sprague immersed in a month long Star Wars fan convention. In the opening lab scene, he sends Hillary Brooke down to the library to fetch a book on osmosis so he can grab some quick nookie from Brenda Marshall. After he slides his tongue into her mouth, she pulls back and admonishes him:

Steven! Remember! Science!

Well, why did I fall in love with a chemist and a smock?

Later, at her apartment, they peg the erection meter with this steamy exchange:

To begin with, I like your hair.

It's a woman's crowning glory. Did you know that hair grows at the rate of one fiftieth of an inch a day?

Amazing! (they kiss) You have wonderful eyes.

The eyes are a very interesting mechanism.

Oh, really?

The outermost coat of the eyes is sclerotic, a strong, white, fibrous structure, covering about four-fifths of the eyeball. And eyes are practically indispensible for seeing. They can also be winked.

Your nose is out of this world. (winking)

Now in mammals, the nose varies in size and shape. Take elephants. The nose is likely to be...

...as long as an elephant's nose.

Oh, Steven!

Ha ha ha. Leave the science in the laboratory. Ha ha ha.

Normally you'd have to find an 8mm stag reel at a garage sale to witness conversational foreplay of this caliber, but fortunately in this case it ends without any genitals being exposed, since Marshall needs to get rid of her beefcake boyfriend and experiment with her ground breaking anesthetic. Hillary Brooke shows up to help, but sabotages things by torching Marshall's face with a chemical reaction while she is sedated, rendering her undesirable and leaving Brooke with a clear path to Gargan's turgid phallus.

Eventually Marshall has her face fixed by a plastic surgeon, who miraculously makes her look exactly like another woman seen earlier in the film, who I won't get into for fear of giving away too much. But instead of having the other woman take over the role, they just stick a black wig on Brenda Marshall, and for the rest of the film nobody recognizes her, even though it's obviously her with a wig.

And then there's the dreadfully stupid "trick" ending that delivers the emotional punch of a protracted seventy minute squat on a whoopie cushion. Lyle Talbot also livens things up a bit toward the end as a dim witted and belligerent police inspector.

It's worth a look if you enjoy film noir with no brains, questionable casting, and awful writing. But you'd be much better off renting The Naked Spur.

No one loves America bashing more than me. Okay, that's probably not true. I'd probably get an argument from anyone who had their apartment blown up by a stray cruise missile or who had the misfortune of being collateral damage in Fallujah during a "legal" dispersal of white phosphorous. So what? Those people probably don't even own a DVD player.

Given that, if anyone is going to enjoy some laughs at America's expense, it should be me. Hell, I even thought The Smothers Brothers were almost funny, so it's not like I've set a lofty benchmark. That's why I was all over this one, particularly when I looked at the cast and saw Donald Pleasance as Doctor Freedom, Yves Montand as Captain Formidable, and Serge Gainsbourg as Mr. Drugstore. Throw in my naive assumption that Criterion would never waste time with a piece of frozen dog shit as ill conceived as Mr. Freedom, and all the dominos were in place for a wasted evening.

It didn't take long for apprehension to plop its ass down next to me on the sofa and prop its feet up on the coffee table. Generally, the use of wall hangings in movies which imply political context is a signal that somebody didn't want to bother writing a script with more narrative heft than a Clutch Cargo episode. You know the routine. Rednecks have Bigmouth Billy Bass singing fish. Lesbian sculptors have have framed Frida Kahlo prints. In this case, Mr. Freedom is a sheriff with Playboy centerfolds and a photo of Lyndon Johnson hanging behind his desk. There's also a poster accusing JFK of treason, since we all know Kennedy had absolutely nothing to do with U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The sheriff opens a closet and reveals his Mr. Freedom costume, kind of like Yvonne Craig in Batman, only with hand grenades, daggers, and a rubber LBJ mask instead of a vanity and a wig. He puts on his uniform and then goes to an apartment where some black people are having a party. They have Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali posters, and they're listening to Aretha Franklin, so we can be sure that they're black. They also have a framed JFK in velvet, since he had nothing to do with Vietnam. Mr. Freedom jumps on the table, shoots their television, sings an annoying song about freedom, and kicks some soft drinks on the floor. Just then he receives a call on his television wristwatch from Donald Pleasance. He wants Mr. Freedom to go to France to save it from Communism, since they're white and therefore worth saving, even though they're French. Need I go on? To director William Klein, the word "subtle" is two syllables, one of which represents a sandwich, and the other containing three arbitrary letters which might someday be useful in other words if needed.

Donald Pleasance only appears on TV screens, which makes me wonder if he was even required to leave his apartment to participate in this cluster fuck. But to his credit, he doesn't just phone in a half assed performance, and manages to muster more enthusiasm for his role than is warranted. Serge Gainsbourg is completely wasted, and it's not even clear why he's called Mr. Drugstore, although the fact that he's called Mr. Drugstore is by far the funniest gag. Yves Montand receives approximately two seconds of screen time as a corpse. And oh yes, there are also loads of gratuitous tits to distract you from the fact that the script appears to have been constructed by a tenth grader with an addiction to shoe polish.

I suppose if I were to compare this to something, it would be Ray Dennis Steckler's Rat Pfink and Boo Boo, if you made it significantly less funny, tripled the costume budget, and stirred in a few gallons of the sort of knee jerk leftist drooling one normally encounters in the comments section on Huffington Post. It all makes me wonder whether Henry Kissinger really didn't sabotage the peace talks in Paris. Maybe he flew there to work behind the scenes, making sure this film was completed. Maybe he was crawling around with Irving Kristol in the giant inflatable dragon used to represent the Chinese government. Maybe I shouldn't have rented this movie. It's the kind of social protest that makes John & Yoko's bed-in for peace seem as ballsy as the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square, and if it's truly representative of the satirical wit brought to bear against America's foreign policy in the 1960s, then it's amazing that the Vietnam War ever ended.

Growing up has never been easy, but in the 60s, it carried some extra emotional burdens, what with persistent political turmoil, looming global annihilation in the blink of an eye, or unexplainable outbursts of extremely bad folk music. It seemed like everyone had an axe to grind, and everyone had somebody else to blame for the world's ills. So it's not surprising that, just as Orwell had given us Oceania and Eurasia, Quaker Oats unveiled "Quisp" and "Quake," then immediately fabricated their bitter rivalry as a ploy to market the two cereals. The absurdity of manufacturing your own competition was compounded by the fact that both were essentially the same recipe of baked corn, sugar and preservatives, differentiated only by their shapes and their eponymous spokesentities. In fact, they both had a flavor strinkingly similar to Captain Crunch, but a slightly softer texture, which took away the added thrill of shredded skin in the roof of your mouth.

Like any malleable American, I knew that I must choose sides. So without hesitation, I aligned with Quake. Admittedly this decision had more to do with Quisp, a bug-eyed alien with a propellor on his head who flitted about like an asshole, pestering the shit out of Quake, and yammering endlessly about the supposed superiority of his brand of extruded slop, with the piercing voice of a Jerry Lewis impersonator at an Elk's lodge. Quake, in contrast, had a booming yet reassuring presence, representing manliness, hard work, integrity, and the concerns and interests of the working man. After witnessing the frequent spectacle of Quake suffering the barbs and insults of his lesser adversary, the choice was clear. "Fuck Quisp," I said.

But just like the Vietnam War, this situation dragged on for years, and eventually Quaker Oats must have tired of having to mold corn paste into two different shapes. So they hit on the idea of a "contest" to decide which cereal would survive and which would join the DeSoto in the dust bin of consumer history. The promotional commercials made it clear that one of them would die, and that the decision laid partially in my hands. Dutifully, I whined at my mother to purchase boxes of Quake so that I could fill out an official ballot and mail it in, along with a proof of purchase seal for authentification, thereby doing my part to keep Quake on the shelves and send that smarmy little prick Quisp backpacking to hell.

Weeks later, on a trip to the store with my mother, I strolled over to the cereal aisle for my box of Quake. I think you can guess where this is headed. Multiple rows of Quisp lined the shelves, but Quake was nowhere to be seen. Quisp had won. It had never occurred to me that other kids could possibly choose Quisp over Quake, but the Piggly Wiggly cereal shelves were giving me a cold, hard slap of reality. I kneeled down and sobbed on the checkered linoleum floor, raised my tiny clenched fist, and resentfully vowed never to let a spoonful of Quisp touch my lips. I became cynical, and my life took a dark turn, during which I began to experiment with other breakfast foods such as plain yogurt and grape nuts. I began questioning whether one brand of laundry detergent was really better than another, or even if, when it did say "Libby's" on the label, I would truly like it on my table.

Now looking back with another forty three years of accrued wisdom, I realize that I was being played for a grade school chump all along. Quisp's eventual "victory" was pre-ordained, just as "Coke Classic" was planned long before President Eisenhower lied to us about the U2 incident. Lest you dismiss my rantings as paranoia, consider the early commercial in which Quake and Quisp compete for market share with bonus premiums. Quake is offering some crappy glow in the dark stickers, but Quisp trumps that measly hand with a working spacecraft equipped with a parachute. Sure, it requires 50 cents and two box tops, but this disparity only underscores the deficiency of Quake's offering, which was no doubt forced upon him by corporate fat cats at Quaker Oats. Yet even with the game so obviously rigged a priori, my faith in the clear moral superiority of Quake had not been shaken until it was too late. When that dark moment of Piggly Wiggly despair finally arrived, my childhood idealism, that inner spring of conviction that people are basically moral and empathetic, was doused in kerosene and set aflame with a single lit match, tossed by a jovial, rosy cheeked man in a blue Quaker hat.

But time heals, as they say, or more to the point, fresher wounds help us to forget the old scars. Aside from occasionally starting awake from deep slumber and bursting into tears, I've rarely given much thought to Quisp, until a recent visit to the Yankee Dollar Store in Plattsburgh, New York. Near the main entrance of Plattsburgh's best dollar store is a kiosk chockablock with dollar DVDs. And buried within this haystack of kung fu movies, Felix the Cat cartoons repackaged for the eight millionth time, and made-for-TV movies with Ed Asner, I found a copy of Colonel Bleep and Friends Volume Two.

The resemblance with Quisp was undeniable. The propeller. The oblong head. I couldn't try to gloss over my discomfort that I might be staring into the abyss of Quisp's origins. But still, this was different. Colonel Bleep lacks the clueless crossed eyes and wrecklessly idiotic arced brows of Quisp. Instead, he had piercing, thoughtful black ovals, placed at perfect thirty degree offsets from the earth's gravitational pull, and eyebrows that betrayed a profound wisdom beyond his years. And his mouth, while not menacing, lacked the mindless, grinning stupidity of Quisp, whose gullet suggests that he'd blow stray animals for spare change. No, Colonel Bleep was cut from another cloth. He hails from an era in which alien cartoon characters carried themselves with dignity, and would have never been caught flitting gaily around a breakfast table in Quisp's geekishly tasteless chartreuse turtleneck sweater.

I nervously handed the clerk a dollar plus the eight cents tax New York requires for funding gubernatorial whore house visits, then scurried eagerly back to the Québec border, where Canadian customs sized up my purchase and extracted another thirteen cents to subsidize seal beatings. The DVD was in the player before I had removed my coat, and after the first few minutes of Colonel Bleep's Arrival on Earth, I knew I had invested wisely. Colonel Bleep was darting around in front of backdrops that looked like Jim Flora album art. In The Killer Whale, a clan of happy, smiling frogs in the "Lillyfied Kingdom of Aqualand" are chased away from their pile of ocean pearls by Colosso the whale. Firebomb involves Bleep's arch nemesis Dr. Destructo threatening Bleep's Futurion robots by having his pet gorilla blow up their supply of Robolube. Bleep responds by having his caveman assistant Scratch don a flameproof suit and fly into the burning pipe with a can of Frigid Futonium 505. In Pirate Plot, spherical "Moon Mites" cultivate "tasty, tender moon mushrooms," until the Americans decide to test a nuclear missile on their planet. Colonel Bleep intervenes just in time by launching the Moon Mites, each straddling a mushroom, off into space by having Scratch whack them on the ass with a baseball bat. This is some seriously damaged shit. A hyperventilating narrator squeals anxiously with overstated gloom during each adventure, and never demurs from pronouncing "Uranus" as "your anus," thereby earning my respect.

My opinion of oval headed space aliens has bumped up a few notches, to say the least. I'd still like to see Quake disembowel Quisp with a rusty fence pole digger, but I no longer speak of his ilk with sweeping generalizations. Reportedly, over half of the Bleep oeuvre has been lost through neglect, which saddens me. Perhaps the missing treasures include the story of Bleep dislodging Scratch from an eighty kilometer wide pile of cow shit in the cross hairs of a Soviet warhead, using only a spray can of Futuro Ozone Foam and a soldering iron. Perhaps not. But for now, I'm pleased with what a dollar and twenty-one cents can still buy.

Unlike Jonathan Winters, Canadian Winters have a way of lingering past their welcome. By the time March rolls around, you know there's still a month to go, but your inner naive optimist is latching onto any signs of Spring. In Montréal, one of these signals of false hope is the scattered garbage season, when the days occasionally drift above the freezing point, the banks of gray and yellow snow begin to melt, and three months worth of discarded Quebecois consumerism appear, like bones peeking through the hide of a rotting mule. Cardboard beverage containers. Old shoes. Dry cleaning bags. An astounding array of condom boxes. Even entire rusty bicycles. All of this detritus is damp with a layer of murky sludge, forming an urban landscape that makes a Bela Tarr movie seem like Singin' in the Rain.

What better antidote to this seasonal gloom than a quick escape to sunny Florida, courtesy of one of its most overlooked auteurs, William Grefé? Why not a ninety minute dose of sunshine, women's butts, swimming pools, pink transistor radios, women's butts, beach towels, patio furniture, Neil Sedaka, and lots of close-ups of jiggling women's butts? Why not a pack of insufferable assholes pretending to be teenagers, and raising obnoxious frat boy behavior to a level worthy of a mass drowning in a silo full of goat urine? Sound great? You bet it is, and I haven't even mentioned "Egon" yet.

Egon has some issues. He's an assistant to a marine biologist named Dr. Richardson. The doctor has a bump on his head that looks like an advanced stage melanoma, and he's a bit condescending toward Egon. To be honest, everyone is condescending toward Egon, which isn't very nice since there's something wrong with Egon that's never really spelled out. His face is a little weird and he walks around crouched over a lot of the time, scaring women by sneaking up on them. This unfortunate social isolation causes Egon to wear a scuba suit smeared with raspberry preserves and festooned with mardi gras beads. That would be okay, but he also likes to sneak up on women at the dock while they're sunbathing, pull them into the water, and tote their corpses back to his underground laboratory, where presumably they play some role in his human/jellyfish evolutionary hybrid experiments. We've all been there.

Grefé offers none of the usual curve balls in Sting of Death. It's immediately obvious that Egon is the swamp creature even though his face isn't shown when he's killing people. This makes you suspect there'll be one of those dumb surprise endings like with Tiny Tim in Blood Harvest or Joan Crawford in Strait-Jacket, but nosirree Bubba, none of that shit here. That's not to say there aren't surprises, but Grefé's are more like what you'd get at a frat house full of dadaists.

For example, Dr. Richardson invites his daughter Karen and all of her hot girlfriends out to his remote island laboratory for some spring break revelry. While they're all enjoying a glass of orangeade on the patio, Karen asks him about the creepy bump on his forehead. He says something fell out of a cupboard and hit him. It never comes up again, dousing my expectation that it's part of some evolutionary sealife experiment gone amiss. Dr. Richardson has another assitant who isn't a carnival freak, who announces that he's invited a group of biology students over for a big pool party. Egon walks up, scares some of the women, then gets scolded. He later shares a private moment with Karen, the target of his affection, and expresses concern that the biology students will make fun of him. She assures him they won't.

When the biology students show up, they jump off their boat and begin dancing like spastic rejects from an Annette Funicello movie. One of them looks like Sean Hannity and has a shirt that looks like it was made from a red mylar balloon. As soon as he sees Egon, he rallies his biology pals to chase him and make fun of him. How cruel! And Karen promised this wouldn't happen. Egon runs away, and the horde of biology lab bullies laugh and form a conga line to the swimming pool.

This is when things get really fucked up, because if you've never heard Neil Sedaka sing ska music, this is your chance. Neil's ode to the jellyfish is presented, providing Grefé an excuse for an endless montage of gyrating, dorky white guys, and women's asses from every conceivable camera angle.

Monkey, don't be a donkey

It's nothing like the Monkey!

It isn't funky or anything that's junky!

It's something swella!

The jilla-jalla Jellyfish!

Mercifully, Egon shows up and starts killing people, although under the circumstances, a bit more punctuality would be appreciated. One of the insufferable partying assholes is badly injured, so Dr. Richardson tells the rest of them to put him on their boat and take him back to the mainland for medical attention. This turns out to be a bad move, because Egon has enlisted an army of Man-of-Wars that look like colostomy bags stuffed with cotton candy, but which are capable of flipping over large boats and killing annoying people by merely bumping into them. This provides the film's most compelling moment of terror, and it seems more than reasonable that after the boatload of douchebags is massacred, nobody notices or ever mentions them again.

Eventually Egon expresses his unrequited love for Dr. Richardson's daughter, drags her to his laboratory to impress her, shows her how his head turns into a dry cleaning bag when he mutates into a jellyfish, then suffers her rejection. Karen's boyfriend shows up, setting the stage for a tense standoff between a guy with a bag on his head and another guy parrying a scuba flare. I won't spoil it by telling you what happens, but I will tip my hat to Bill Grefé for providing a wonderful Florida getaway for less than the cost of a tube of suntan lotion or a blow job from Anita Bryant.

And strangely, my all too brief recliner chair sojourn to a warmer clime has helped me to appreciate all the more what I already have. Now I can stop to savor a storm drain clogged with jettisoned condom boxes, all redolent with the urine of a hundred passing dogs. After all, inspiration can be found wherever we choose, and as Egon and I have both learned through experience, the kingdom of heaven is within.

It was Thursday. I heard the morning traffic coming through the window when I woke up, but that day it seemed different. There was a persistent squeaking coming from the laundry room. At first I thought the washing machine must have been out of balance, but the noise lacked the usual rhythm of the spin cycle, and was more like a Riddle and Phelps interlude on Hee Haw. I crawled out of bed, put on my robe, and walked down the stairs to see if anything was wrong. When I opened the washing machine, a guy dressed up like a pirate was staring up at me. He was eighteen inches tall, had no teeth, and smelled like goat cheese. He had been rubbing two pieces of styrofoam together, but he stopped and yelled up at me:

Whoa, hey, goddamn. You startled me!

What are you doing in my washing machine?

Oh hell, I don't know... Hey, listen to this noise I can make with these two pieces of styrofoam!

Yeah, I heard it, but what the fuck are you doing in my washing machine? How did you get in there?

Oh, is this YOUR washing machine?

Yes. It's my washing machine.

It's very nice. I like it. Say, would you like to have sex?

What?

You know. Sex. And then maybe we could watch a movie?

How did you get inside of my washing machine?

Hey, do you like Ted V. Mikels?

Who?

Ted V. Mikels. You know, that guy who made "The Corpse Grinders" and "Blood Orgy of the She Devils".

Sure, I guess. What was that you said about having sex?

Never mind that. Let's watch this movie. It's called "Mark of the Astro Zombies." It's the dumbest pile of shit since ABC let Paul Lynde host that Halloween special.

What's your name?

Name's Peaches. Happy to make your acquaintance!

I reached down to pull Peaches the Pirate from the spin drum, and carried him over to the ottoman in front of my 15" Sylvania with the matchbook wedged under the tuning knob. I went to the kitchen to get a bag of Doritos and a couple of cans of Schlitz, and Peaches yelled something about antibiotic ointment. When I returned to the living room, I pretended I hadn't heard him, gave him a beer and patted him on the head. Fortunately, he hadn't moved to my recliner, so I settled in for a morning of cinema. Peaches let out a nervous giggle as the FBI warning ended and the DVD menus appeared. We had the choice of playing the movie, or watching a brief documentary on the making of Mark of the Astro Zombies. We decided to watch the movie first. Peaches grabbed a handful of Doritos, and I noticed that his fingers were caked with scabs. I had hoped his lack of teeth would discourage him, but he could salivate prolifically, quickly reducing the chips to a nauseating, crumbly paste that projected from his diseased gum tissue. After rolling it around on his lips for an uncomfortable duration, he choked down the starchy mess with little effort. I fetched him a damp towel and moved the bag to the other side of the recliner.

I knew we were in trouble right out of the chute, because the set-up for the plot began rolling from the bottom of the screen toward the horizon, like that stupid introduction to Star Wars that has since been copied ad nauseum by every idiot in their first video production class. In this case, it was explained that there are asteroids that are much larger than earth. Some of them are inhabited by beings far more advanced than humans, while others are inhabited by Republicans. Unfortunately, some of the more advanced beings have decided to "force their intentions upon us." It turns out these advanced beings have plastic lizard heads and wear black robes like monks in Monty Python movies. Since the film is from 2002, Ted opted to use the kind of special effects you used to see in Coca Cola commercials in 1983. The aliens arrive aboard a plastic Happy Meal toy landing in the desert. They announce their evil intentions through some sort of flange/distortion device so that you can't understand a fucking thing they're saying, and they have a machine that drains blood from their victims and replaces it with green fluid. These victims in turn are reincarnated as machete wielding killers who look a little like the Intel Blue Men after a six month Krispy Kreme binge. They are unleashed on strip malls and sterile suburban office complexes to slaughter innocents in front of Starbuck's, after which their corpses are returned to the U.S.S. Happy Meal to be converted into the next crop of mindless machete wielding butchers, perpetuating a vicious cycle of terror not unlike a never ending PBS pledge drive.

Meanwhile, at a local television newsroom, Brinke Stevens is busy putting together her nightly broadcast. It must be a slow news day, because she seems genuinely elated that random mutilation murders are taking place in front of places like Appleby's and Circuit City, so she summons a camera crew to go get some live footage and interviews. Her FBI agent boyfriend does not share her enthusiasm, and immediately suspects terrorists. And Tura Satana, reprising her role as Malvira from the original Astro Zombies, eagerly watches it all with her emotionally retarded assistant Zokar, and a pair of binoculars, hoping to parlay the carnage into a lucrative extortion plot.

Peaches spat out some Doritos sludge and squealed something about "kicking some ass" and "taking names," but I pretended I didn't hear him and checked my watch nervously.

Over in Washington, U.S. President Ward Pennington has assembled a team of experts at his office, which for some reason resembles the U.S. Capitol building from the outside, and a San Bernardino La Quinta Inn from within. Although no one has any idea what's happening, an FBI agent, a medical researcher, and an asteroid tracking specialist are included in the blue ribbon commission, which convenes in a meeting room with ugly office furniture and a ten foot wide painting of the Cascade Mountains. The general from the U.S. Army who has called the meeting explains that the Oval Office "wasn't available" that day, successfully tying together any loose ends in the narrative that more discriminating viewers might have flagged. They then launch into a stilted exposition, trading lines like local news co-anchors at an NBC affiliate in Waco, Texas, about how the spate of random machete murders reminds them of that time back in the 60s when John Carradine tried to control the world with zombie experiments, and almost succeeded except that he fucked up and used defective brain tissues. The President asks whether implanting computer chips in corpses might produce super zombies, and the medical specialist says "My department would certainly be interested in knowing about that." They discuss it some more, and the President says he doesn't want any of this information getting leaked to the public, since other countries might want to buy the technology, leading to a zombie technology arms race. The asteroid specialist says the possibilities are endless, and then the medical specialist says "My department would certainly be interested in this," as if she hadn't just said that. The President orders the FBI to bring in the CIA, probably since they did such a bang up job with that Bay of Pigs deal, then tells everyone that he's available around the clock.

Peaches' mood switched from giddiness to concern, and I noticed he was scratching his butt a lot. I regretted not picking up a can of Scotchgard the day before.

To keep the story moving, Ted uses screen crawl text to explain what's happening, kind of like when MSNBC gives you breaking news that babies have been switched at a hospital in Iowa, or that Barack Obama is a shitty bowler. I don't recall seeing this plot advancement method in any film before, but it does spare us ten more minutes of dialogue, and quickly gets us up to speed with what John Carradine's been up to since the original Astro Zombies. Dr. Mikacevich, a "mad scientist" who is an arch enemy of Tura Satana, is played by Ted "Multitasking" Mikels. He has kept John Carradine's head alive with wires and vacuum hoses, hoping to extract the secrets of zombie-humans who can kill everyone in the world except Ted, and then be controlled by "signals sent through cyberspace." He cross-examines the fake rubber John Carradine head:

"Come come, DeMarco. As a fellow scientist, I thought your information would be more forthcoming."

"Perhaps you're right. I suppose I could give you some little clues about the heart flow valve."

"The true spirit of camaraderie must prevail here. You have the knowledge. I need the knowledge. Now let's approach this man to man. Or man to head."

"Very well. Set the frequency boost at five, and the induction coil at 0.2, first of all. And about the memory circuits. You'll need to update that."

"But what about the thought wave transmissions? The radium control units will be overloaded!"

"Radium is useless. You'll need to use my formula for encapsulated thallium. Seven thousand grankins will do it. And pay close attention to the electrolytic limitator. Set it at 12.2 amps."

This brain dump of the Scientific Holy Grail is rudely interrupted by Tura Satana and her sidekick Zokar, who have located Ted's laboratory with Google Maps and the white pages. Tura bursts into the laboratory from an exterior shot that looks like an office furniture warehouse, shoots Ted in the chest, then laughs as she pushes her high heel into the wound. An exchange of schoolyard sarcasm with the fake rubber head ensues. How this furthers her plan isn't clear, but the plot involves convincing world leaders that she holds the secret to Carradine's zombie technology, and scamming them into paying millions of dollars for it.

After some really stupid shit involving a remote visioning psychic being brought in to assist the federal government, there's a wonderful scene at Tura's apartment. Emissaries arrive from Germany, Hungary, Cuba, Romania, Italy, along with a black guy who's using a fake accent that renders his one line indecipherable. The "Cuban" guy looks like he's from Wisconsin, and the "African" guy is wearing a red polo shirt and Reeboks. Zokar points toward the living room and tells them "There's some booze and snacks back there. Don't eat 'em all". Tura has kidnapped a couple of people and bound and gagged them in chairs. Her presentation involves dressing up Zokar as an alien, then using a TV remote control to make him slit their throats, thus demonstrating her complete mastery of alien zombie technology. The emissaries are duly convinced of her legitimacy, and begin bidding for her services.

I looked over at Peaches and noticed that he had nodded off. His enthusiasm had apparently waned, but to be honest, I was now completely immersed in the compelling chronicle that Ted was weaving. Thankfully, some good aliens from some other asteroid showed up and dispatched the evil aliens with some weapons purchased at Dollar Tree. President Pennington thanked them and sent his psychics and asteroid specialists back to their day jobs. The End.

The bonus documentary unraveled the mystery behind the eye catching special effects used in the film. Wires and plastic hoses were attached to a rubber head to present a convincing portrayal of a rubber head with wires and hoses attached to it. Cheap plastic machetes with neck-sized indentations were used in conjunction with red food coloring and a case of Karo pancake syrup. Who would have guessed? One of Ted's sycophants explains that Ted "taught half of Hollywood how to do what they do." Presumably this includes editing scenes such that the ends of sentences get cut off, but forgotten and mumbled lines remain intact.

Peaches rolled off the ottoman onto the carpet, leaving smudges of pus and saliva. I fetched some rubber kitchen gloves and poked at him, but when he didn't respond, a wave of dread swept over me. My little Peaches the Pirate had suffered a fatal stroke without my noticing, and had remained propped up in a deceased state until a draft from the window knocked him from his perch. Compounding my grief, I would have to spend the day explaining to a coroner and to the police how a spunky, malodorous pirate named Peaches had changed my life for the better. It took a few hours, but eventually their suspicions faded, and I was left in peace to reassemble the broken pieces of my life. Looking back on that day with a bittersweet regret, I will always treasure Mark of the Astro Zombies, but I will also know the heartache of a lost opportunity for incredible sex.

I spent a small part of my childhood in Southern Louisiana, and even at eight years of age I suspected that something was askew, to put it mildly. In the late 1960s, my family lived in Baker, a stagnant crotch of a town immediately north of Baton Rouge. The chemical industry prospers in Louisiana, and the stretch of despair between New Orleans and Baton Rouge has been called "Cancer Alley," due to its unusually high rates of sickness. In those days, Baker was distinguished by its drinking water, which literally reeked of sulphur when it came out of the tap. It had a nauseating, rotten egg aroma, and my parents had to boil it on the stove to get it to a state where we could drink it without triggering a gag reflex. Better yet, the region is home to extremist religious nuts, virulent racism, and a political climate that rivals Illinois and Zimbabwe for unmitigated sleaze.

This is my personal frame of reference for the bayou country, and it probably enhances my enthusiasm for Monster and the Stripper, a film I've basked in on at least a half dozen occasions. It's one of those protuberant landmarks in exploitation cinema that delegates mere perfection to the dust bin, with its tasseled pobucker skanks, insane bulldada dialogue, bad haircuts, and hilariously naive references to 60s psychedelia. It is a masterpiece, belonging near the summit of any badfilm pyramid, written and directed by Ron Ormond, producer of numerous white trash gems from the late 1940s until his conversion to Christianity in the late 60s. Ron worked with his wife June, a former singer and dancer who he met in the 1930s while doing his magic act on the vaudeville circuit. His most noted effort is probably Mesa of Lost Women, but for my money, Monster and the Stripper is his Citizen Kane, La Strada, and Blood Freak rolled up into one delicious little dayglo yellow Moon Pie.

Ron plays Nemo, a strip club owner and drug trafficker with sunglasses, a Moe Howard haircut, and sport coats that would win sneers at a Porter Wagoner fan club reunion. He cooly auditions a parade of cajun strippers while his goons are downstairs dumping the contents of a spitoon into the gullet of Marty, a toothless hillbilly freak on Nemo's payroll who has pocketed 60 grand of Nemo's profits in a Slidell, Louisiana bank account. Slidell, you may recall, was recently in the news for the murder of a woman who showed up at a Ku Klux Klan rally, then tried to opt out of an initiation ceremony. It's also known as the place where Jayne Mansfield was nearly decapitated in a car accident. Screw Switzerland or The Bahamas. People in Ron Ormond movies drive to Slidell for their banking needs.

Nemo's drug and prostitution racket does not go unnoticed by a local cop, who loiters around during rehearsals and shares this priceless conversation with one of Nemo's garçons:

How's it going?

Same old grind. Wife had an operation a couple of weeks ago. Goin' much better now though. This morning the kid fell down and broke his doggone elbow.

Who's the chick?

Ah, some idiot dame tryin' to break into this rat race they call show business.

One of Nemo's goons, a guy who looks like Chuck Woolery from The Love Connection, shows Nemo a newspaper story about a mysterious swamp creature that has been killing off hillbillies and leaving their entrails for the crocodiles to slurp out of the muck. One of Nemo's premiere dancers excitedly describes how, if the swamp creature could be captured and brought back to the club, it could rip off her clothes onstage after which she would presumably shoot boiled eggs or commemorative snow globes out of her vagina. Nemo is immediately sold on the idea, so he sends Chuck Woolery and a couple of rednecks out into the swamp to fetch the monster and bring him back to the French Quarter for a big stage show. One of these rednecks is named "Stud," and looks a little like James Coco, and the other is sort of a Paul Lynde/Jethro Burns hybrid with a yachting cap. The swamp monster is played by rockabilly obscurity Sleepy LaBeef, made up to resemble the love child of Richard Kiel in Eegah and Andre the Giant, had Phil Spector been available to donate sperm.

With Ron Ormond's son Tim as their tour guide, they eventually snare LaBeef, but not before lots of suspenseful campfire chat, punctuated by the disembowelment of James Coco and the second redneck having his arm ripped from the socket, then slapped across his head a few times for good measure.

Along the way there are also furnishings "graciously provided by Harvey's Department Store," Nemo's head getting squashed like a honeydew, a 70 year old stripper, plus an absolutely gonad stomping rendition of Dance of the Hours, performed by The Mulcays, a husband and wife harmonica duo who also appeared in a couple of other Ormond films. If you comb the fifty cent bins at any decent vinyl store, you'll be likely to turn up at least one Mulcays LP, and trust me, they rarely disappoint, given a few mimosas, a bag of Cheetos, and good company.

Shortly after Monster was released, the Ormonds had a near death experience in a plane wreck and converted to fundamentalist Christianity. They went on to produce a couple of bat shit crazy Christian scare films, which are worth a viewing, but which don't quite meet the standard set by Monster and the Stripper. This is one of those rare films in which Divine would have merely blended in like Norman Fell in a Rat Pack movie. I can't recommend it more highly.

As best as I can tell, some guy named Paul Aratow directed a movie in the mid-70s called Lucifer's Women. It was your usual Satanist booga booga exploitation fare, with the requisite goat heads, pentagrams, and catatonic women in negligees, seduced into offering up their poontang to the dark overlord of Americans for Tax Reform. A few years later, along came Al Adamson and Sam Sherman with their uncanny business savvy, ready to scoop up this wheelbarrow of dung and give it an Independent International Pictures makeover, transforming the wheelbarrow into a steam powered rickshaw with a broken axle, and tossing in more dung to fill it out to feature length.

The additional dung is in the form of an undeveloped vampire subplot stapled awkwardly to the pre-existing devil sacrifice storyline, along with some crap about a reincarnated Svengali thrown into the metaphorical commode. If I seem to be overusing the feces metaphor, it isn't without trepidation, and the nagging sense that I owe an apology to feces.

To pull off this striking cinematic facelift, Al brought in John Carradine, looking absolutely terrible with sunken eyes and hands withered by arthritis, and some veterans who had previously worked with Al in churning out excruciating messes like Blazing Stewardesses. To lend a shred of continuity, Larry Hankin appears in both the original footage, and the additional scenes tacked on by Adamson, possibly because he had a day off from playing "Biff" on Laverne & Shirley, and wanted to meet John Carradine. Finally, to eliminate any reason whatsoever for watching Dr. Dracula, Adamson inexplicably edited out all of the nudity in the satanic ritual idiocy, as evidenced by the original trailer which accompanies the DVD release.

What that leaves is Hankin as "Wainwright," a hypnotist who looks like John Turturro made up like Frank Zappa. Since he is demonically possessed by a reincarnated Svengali, Wainwright has a split personality issue. He hangs out with a multitasking Satanist book publisher named "Sir Steven," who prefers Svengali, and worries that Hankin's Wainwright persona is falling in love with Trilby, a titty bar dancer whom Sir Steven has decided is "an elemental energy source," meaning he'd like to have sex with her and then kill her. This is what can happen when bad film directors read the occasional novel.

Over dinner with Trilby, Wainwright explains with an air of intellectual depth usually found at Deepak Chopra book signings:

Life itself is so strong that it defies the bounds of petty logic and mere causality. Human life can transcend the individual and partake of the universe through an intense crystalization of form, and that is how reincarnation is possible, if the spirit is strong.

What makes the spirit strong?

The incorporation of souls. (dramatic pause) Human sacrifice.

I've heard about such things, but you don't mean to say that they go on today. I mean, it's murder.

Murder. Well, murder is a very hard term to define. People who are participating in a sacrifice don't look upon it as murder. Merely part of a process.

Exchanges like this may have inspired many of Dick Cheney's appearances on Meet the Press, and coincidentally, Anton LaVey was credited as a "technical consultant." What this meant isn't clear, but one could only pray to Beelzebub that it didn't include the choice of wallpaper in a scene involving Sir Steven, tormenting a blood stained prostitute slave. A yellow and white lattice pattern, behind what appear to be fried eggs over easy, each embellished with a green bow tie, provides an appropriate backdrop for the hooker kissing Sir Steven's feet while he laughs and pours his beverage in her hair. One can imagine the possibilities spinning through Adamson's head as he visualized the fruition of this untapped reservoir of film history.

There's also Adamson's wife in her obligatory scene, shoved into the middle almost randomly, but causing no discontinuity for the same reason that a comatose patient can't be annoyed by nurses chattering in a nearby corridor. She sports blue eye shadow applied with a spatula, and blotches of makeup on her cheeks that invoke incidents of domestic violence. As usual, she lowers the bar even further with her obnoxious delivery, providing one of the few remotely entertaining moments before being snuffed out by Dr. Dracula.

As you may know, Al Adamson's real life ended in a manner just as fucked up as most of his movies. After a couple of decades of churning out profitable yet insufferable refuse like this, he switched to real estate and was considering returning to filmmaking when he gained VHS cult status in the 1990s. But those plans came to an abrupt end when he had a run-in with a house contractor, who decided to murder Al and embed him in concrete beneath his own whirlpool. A few weeks after Al had been reported missing, the cops decided to jackhammer away the newly laid tiles, correctly surmising that they'd find his corpse. After he was tracked down, Fred Fulford explained that the murder was not a murder, but merely part of a process. Since the Church of Satan's variant of Sharia law is not recognized in California, this didn't fly in court. Fred was convicted and jailed, leaving us with dozens of Adamson/Sherman titles, and nagging questions about what sort of soft core pornography Al would have produced, inspired by 90s phenomena like The Teletubbies, Monica Lewinsky, and the Taco Bell chihuahua. Ah fate, you cruel bastard.

I can always have some appreciation for a movie with a moronic premise, but when it's played straight and without a trace of intentional camp, it's all the better. This oddity comes from a Hammer Film Noir box set, starring Paul Henreid as a brilliant surgeon, and Lizabeth Scott in two roles: an American concert pianist, and a criminal slut with a cockney accent. It's directed by Terence Fisher, who is probably better known for trash horror flicks like The Devil Rides Out, and this one straddles the line between horror, film noir, and a bad round of stomach cramps brought on by British pub food.

Henried has been burning the midnight oil, providing free medical services to the poor (didn't Britain have socialized medicine in the early 1950s?), and the inmates at a nearby prison. One case involves a woman whose face was disfigured, leaving her right cheek looking like one of those volcanoes you used to see at junior high school science fairs. Paul promises to make things right, and the warden is convinced that tidying up mangled faces turns hardened felons into model citizens. But on the drive home, Paul falls asleep behind the wheel from fatigue and almost drives into a truck. His partner convinces him it's time for a vacation.

Checking into a rural hotel, Paul's sleep is immediately interrupted by some mucus saturated sneezing in the adjacent room. After exchanging a couple of notes under the door, Paul knocks on the door to offer a bottle of scotch and discovers Lizabeth Scott, down sick with a cold. Being a doctor, Paul nurses her back to health, using the opportunity to check out her cleavage. Of course they immediately fall in love, since nothing induces romance better than germs, airborne snot, and a guy who introduces himself as a doctor and launches into some enthusiastic chest groping.

Lizabeth Scott has always seemed kind of creepy to me, her sultry image notwithstanding, and her role as a concert pianist is a bigger stretch than Charlton Heston as a Mexican. But after a few days of her oozing sinus fluids and banging out etudes and pub favorites, Paul is obsessed and asks her to marry him. But she can't, since she's already engaged. Quel dommage!

Paul returns to his career, embittered by rejection. Lizabeth Scott returns to her passionless fiancé, and rips into one of those banal montage sequences with concert posters from all across Europe, adoring crowds, and newspaper headlines that blare about a topic that real newspapers wouldn't mention at all. Paul hits on the idea of reconstructing the female inmate's face to look exactly like Lizabeth Scott's, then proposing marriage to her. Meanwhile, Lizabeth realizes that she has made a horrible error and must call off her marriage and beg for Paul's forgiveness. Obviously, this sets up an awkward situation, and an unintentionally hilarious sequence in which Scott shows up at his office, emotes profusely, then notices that the picture on his desk looks exactly like her. Amazingly, she doesn't find this really fucking creepy.

Eventually, they manage to get back together, through idiotic circumstances, but by that time, an ending that actually makes sense would only be a letdown. It's not one you'll go back to for repeated viewings, but it's a decent enough distraction if you can get a laugh from watching the crap that blacklisted actors had to sink to in the 1950s in order to pay the rent.

Completely unrelated, but worth more than a mention is Multiple SIDosis, a homemade short film from the 1960s produced by Sid Laverents, a guy who I think should have his face carved into Mount Rushmore after they dynamite away all of those other assholes. The reason I bring it up is that Sid recently turned 100 years old, and is still alive and, last I heard, doing well. He began with a career in vaudeville, and eventually ended up working as an engineer in California. On the side, he has made numerous short subject films on a peculiar array of topics, and in my opinion this one may be the best short subject film ever produced. I won't try to explain it, but stick with it even if you find the first few minutes a bit dull (I don't, but some people tire of post-modern irony, even when it actually predates post-modern irony). And if you know anything about film making, you still might be hard pressed to explain how the hell he did some of this using 1960s home movie equipment. Technical details aside, this is the sort of thing that gives me the will to live.

Happy Birthday, Sid. May you have as many more as you care to have.

Doesn't it seem like a lot of movies feature the disembodied head of John Carradine? I can think of at least three: Frankenstein Island, Mark of the Astro Zombies, and this one. Maybe that's the complete list, but still, have you seen even one movie with the disembodied head of Richard Dreyfus or Wallace Shawn? Okay, maybe you wanted to see Richard Dreyfus's disembodied head if you sat through five minutes of Mr. Holland's Opus, but unfortunately it remained stubbornly contiguous with his spinal cord for the nonce. Maybe someday, somebody will have a life even more pointless than mine, and they'll research which movie stars have appeared as disembodied heads with the greatest frequency. Until then, I'm comfortable in asserting that John Carradine is the king of the disembodied head.

There are two general approaches to the cinematic disembodied head. First is a decapitated head, such as Virginia Leith in The Brain That Wouldn't Die or whoever that guy was in They Saved Hitler's Brain. In this case, the head is typically connected to tubes and wires, and rests on a card table or the dashboard of a Buick station wagon. Second is a more paranormal variation of head/torso separation, with the head suspended in the ether in the vicinity of a low budget reverb unit. Director David Hewitt chose this technique for Carradine's appearance in The Wizard of Mars, which was later retitled Alien Massacre, presumably to cash in on the popularity of Attorney General Edwin Meese. Expenses were obviously spared during the retitling, since Carradine's credit reads: "John Carradine as... Alien Massacre." This turns out to be misleading on multiple levels, since nothing as interesting as a massacre ever occurs, making it impossible for Carradine to portray one, even if actors could be cast as abstract nouns.

But to get to that detached Carradine head payoff, you have to be in the mood for a nap. This is one of those 60s sci-fi offerings that plods along aimlessly with eye straining, desaturated color, evocative of a day spent in bed chugging DayQuil Sinus Formula and listening to Seals & Crofts albums. Even when something weird happens, it has the emotional impact of a new L. L. Bean catalog showing up in the mailbox, due in part to the somnambulatory reactions of the principle characters, the four astronauts on "Mars Probe One." But a persistent indifference to logic in the narrative also helps bring things to a crawl.

Crappy sci-fi movies usually aim to fill in ninety minutes, give or take a few, so more often than not you get an opening sequence of character development, during which the principles are introduced, and fake scientific jargon is tossed around like death threats at a Sarah Palin rally. Inevitably, one of the astronauts is an attractive woman, biding her time with an unfulfilling career in space travel until the day she can settle down with a man and cook delicious meals with mushroom gravy and pineapple rings. Then there's the wise-cracking comic relief guy who's never funny and always irritating. Alien Massacre fits the mold, so feel free to go evacuate your bowels during absorbing exchanges such as: "Be sure to correlate your cameras, Dorothy, we don't want any overlap." and "Stand by, we are entering free orbital trajectory.". But do return to the sofa in time to see "Doc" stare through a telescope that has a fixed wind vane indicator in the lens. In space, "west" is always to your left.

Predictably, as the unfortunate viewer teeters on the precipice of a coma, something begins to go wrong for Probe One. Cheesy thunder bolts show up in the telescope lens, and more nonsensical jargon is bandied. Wide angle reception becomes "negative." The scanner is adjusted to "maximum magnification." For laymen, that means that if you want to scan, you won't be able to magnify whatever you're scanning any more than it already is, and this should worry you. Meters "convulse," and poking at them randomly in a panicky fashion doesn't remedy the situation. Smoke appears in the cockpit, then comes and goes with each cut, indicating a strange, fourth dimensional smoke which can only be viewed from specific angles, or a film editor recovering from an extended drinking binge. Charley, the comic relief, belts out with a hammy wryness: "We had to go to Mars. We couldn't go to the moon like everyone else!". Fasten your safety belts for space laffs.

Making our way through the plot checklist, the crew then crash lands on Mars. Survival becomes their chief concern, and to accomplish that, they will need to locate the main stage of their space craft. Since it has also crashed on Mars, it's not clear how that will help them, but it does provide a premise for them to leave the cockpit and find new ways to bore the living shit out of you.

First there's the question of oxygen. They only have about a four day supply, and there's no telling how much time they will need to reach the main stage. If only the oxygen supply could be stretched out. "Doc," being the scientific point man, hits on the idea of using the Mars atmosphere as an "oxygen booster" by cracking the intake valves on their helmets. This seems like a swell idea to everyone, even though the atmosphere on Mars is over 90% carbon dioxide.

When you plan a space mission, you have to worry about your payload. Space flight involves precision, and the weight of the space craft and its contents has to be factored into the fuel budget, with a sufficient margin of error to maintain high confidence in the success of the mission. This is why on any flight to Mars, rubber rafts and firearms are always carried. These prove essential for the Alien Massacre crew, when they inflate their raft with thin Martian air, jump into one of Mars' ubiquitous creeks, and aimlessly set sail in search of the main stage, all the while sucking in oxygen rich Martian air through the cracks in their intake valves. If only Curt Gowdy and Phil Harris could have come along for the ride.

But things soon turn sour when the raft is attacked by rubber spinal cords with tiny leaf hands. These rubber spinal cords, common in Martian rivers and trout creeks, drape themselves over the edge of fishing rafts, then lay there like, well, rubber spinal cords, motionless unless they are wiggled from off camera. After a tense exchange of gunfire and jiggling rubber, an oar is used to push the raft twenty yards up the creek, salvaging Probe One's important work. The horrifying encounter won't soon be forgotten, but God bless the National Rifle Association for their lobbying efforts with NASA.

The river leads to caves, and since they're looking for a crashed rocket stage, it makes perfect sense to steer the raft into the caves. Besides, the atmosphere in the cave is completely different, noticeably better than the immediate vicinity of a cow's ass or Los Angeles, so it's okay for them to open up their space helmets, making it easier to say stupid shit to each other. Like when the cave leads to a volcanic cavern, and they reason that they should risk death by walking along the edge of the fiery pit if that helps kill a full hour before the encounter with John Carradine's disembodied head. Later, when they reach the other side of the cavern, they become concerned it's about to blow up, even though nobody mentioned that possibility when they inexplicably decided to walk around a pit of molten lava. This provides an excuse to set off about twenty-five dollars worth of cheap fireworks at the mouth of the cave, risking the entire special effects budget.

Having consumed a couple days of oxygen fighting off spinal cords and walking next to lava pits, they saunter around the desert for awhile, complaining and wisecracking. Just as the oxygen is about to expire, they see a glowing dome on the horizon, and a golden brick road in the sand. Oh, and have I mentioned the woman astronaut's name is Dorothy. Capiche? Wizard of Mars? Sad that this couldn't have been "The Mars Chainsaw Massacre" instead. "Doc" concludes that this golden path, buried beneath about a quarter inch of sand, "must have been buried for millions of years, similar to Troy on our own planet." Doc's dating techniques would probably ruffle some feathers at The Institute for Creation Research. The purists would argue that the universe is six thousand years old, but the free thinkers might counter that dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years ago, frequently mixing it up with the Trojans, then aligning themselves with the Greeks when politically expedient. Neil Cavuto could moderate.

The crew follows the path, enters the domed thingy, and discovers it has the same atmosphere as Earth. Not only that, there are aliens trapped in cylinders along the walls. One of them explains telepathically that John Carradine's head wants to rendez-vous. Conversation is difficult at first, but after a couple of iterations, John's head figures out English, and explains in the most tiresome and pedantic way imaginable that Earthlings are too goddamned stupid to ever understand that time has been stopped, and can't be started again, because, if he didn't mention it before, people from Earth are a bunch of fucking dumbasses. After ten minutes of condescension, he tells them that they need to insert a sphere into a universal time symbol, and that he needs to go because he's tired of talking to idiots. Then they notice a sphere sitting on a pedestal that looks like a snow globe or one of those four dollar Home Depot light covers. There's also a big room with a big ass pendulum thing, which it turns out has a hole about the same size as the snow globe. Their self esteem soars as they connect the dots.

Upon inserting the sphere, the giant pendulum begins moving, time recommences, and John Carradine and his race of super intelligent life forms resume their inexorable march toward their destinies. This causes the guy running the camera to jump around, and pea gravel to fall from the walls, signaling the crew to flee for the head of the golden path. There they collapse, vanish into thin air, then wake up on board their ship, where a transmission from earth informs them that only two minutes have gone by since I made the mistake of hitting the "Play' button. John Carradine pulls it all together with an observation that will resonate with anyone who has ever owned a Ford Maverick:

"Upon unraveling the last mystery of the universe, this we learned. As without birth, there can be no life. So without death, life itself is meaningless. For without death, life cannot begin ... again."

I'm not sure why I didn't hate this movie. It might be because I enjoy meandering, sleep-inducing 1960s science fiction movies that look like one of the color guns on my television isn't working. It might be the mildly entertaining soundtrack by Frank Coe, a Ray Dennis Steckler collaborator who is also credited with "Electroneffects." The whole gestalt is an uninteresting, monotonous blob, but sometimes I like that. And I like movies with disembodied heads. You'll probably want to avoid it though.

More often than not, people generally don't appreciate it when somebody goes all Ingmar Bergman on their asses. And really, who can blame them? Don't people have enough problems these days, what with the financial markets imploding, skyrocketing food prices, and the Palin family? Who really wants existential despair or contemplation on the meaning of death? Worse, who wants it when it's served up by Larry Buchanan?

Many directors have gone all Ingmar Bergman on our asses before. There was actually a time when it wasn't all that uncommon, that is to say, the 1970s, when there were also plenty of reasons to be bummed out. Woody Allen used satire to soften the edges in Love and Death, but no one could deny that he was still going all Ingmar Bergman on at least some of our asses. Larry, in contrast, saw no need to sugar coat our inevitable mortality when he cooked up Strawberries Need Rain. Because while Woody Allen used laughter to make our deaths more palatable, Larry Buchanan used a spatula, smeared with vegetable oil, maybe with some burnt residue on the edge from some sausages that had to be scraped from a cast iron skillet. It was Larry's refusal to take steel wool and detergent to that spatula prior to serving up my eggs that I most respected in the man. And that held true whether those eggs were over easy, scrambled, or fried with broken yolks, such that they didn't ooze onto the adjacent toast, muffin, or bagel.

That's not to say there aren't obvious parallels between Woody Allen and Larry Buchanan, even beyond their Bergman influence. Consider that both of their surnames end with 'n'. And for that matter, so does Bergman's. The skeptics among you may write that off as mere coincidence, but consider that their first names both end with 'y' and have five letters. Oh sure, "Ingmar" has six letters and ends with 'r', but that's to be expected, if you know anything about Nordic mythology, as I obviously do. Do you see my point? Is that your doubt I see receding like a panoramic Swedish sunset?

Okay, maybe the comparison isn't perfect. For example, Buchanan had no idea how to write a coherent script, keep his viewers in a non-comatose state, or use elementary lighting techniques to keep his films from looking like a hunt for jarred tomato preserves in grandma's basement, but isn't that just nitpicking? And didn't grandpa sometimes remember to replace that basement light bulb? And I'll admit that, while Allen is a non-practicing Jew with a reputation for nurturing enough neuroses to put the offspring of a dozen psychiatrists through grad school at NYU, Buchanan came from East Texas Baptist stock, and channeled his neuroses more creatively. Woody Allen never would have suggested that Richard Nixon personally ordered the murders of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrisson. But Buchanan did this proudly, providing no explanation for why I should not have wanted Jim Morrisson to be killed. Larry connected the dots, even when those dots couldn't have mattered less. And anything that saves me time I can certainly appreciate.

Perhaps more importantly, while Allen often skews his Bergman influences toward Chaplin or The Marx Brothers, Larry opted for more of a Harry Novak aroma, with loads of gratuitous sex, nudity, and heaving mammaries. The mammaries of note in Strawberries Need Rain are provided by Monica Gayle, a soft core porn actress noted for her appearances in films like Switchblade Sisters and The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio. The opening sequence provides a generous view of Monica's massive, flopping casabas, as she skinny dips in a river while a guy whacks off in the bushes. Right out of the gate, Larry is giving Ingmar a run for his krona. Yumpin' Yiminy! Is there room for one more submission at Cannes?

After heading back to the farm, Monica notices a guy with a black robe and a scythe approaching the house, obviously looking for a chess opponent. Unfortunately, chess is a little beyond Monica's reach, so the reaper chases her around for a little while before realizing that she's "special." What qualifies her as "special" isn't spelled out, but I can only assume he's caught view of the aforementioned casabas through Monica's cow milking dress. In a display of unprecedented magnanimity, Father Time grants her one more day on earth to allow her to find a guy she can mount to achieve an orgasm. No doubt a lesser endowed woman wouldn't receive the same consideration, and rightfully so. What follows is Larry's melding of Goldilocks, The Seventh Seal, and The Pigkeeper's Daughter, if you substitute sexual promiscuity for chess, and the emissions of a pull string toy for the faintest glimmer of interesting dialogue.

First stop is the house of the guy who was jacking off in the bushes when Monica was skinny dipping. His name is Franz. He's the obvious choice, since nothing turns on women more than masturbating voyeurs. Turns out he's in bed looking at girlie magazines with a flashlight and licking the pictures. What luck! He's already fluffed! Problem is, he's awfully shy. Go get a beer, because what follows is about fifteen time stopping minutes of "sexual tension," Buchanan style. The poignancy is given a boost by actors who look 25 pretending to be pubescent teens. Eventually, Monica takes off her top and triggers a humiliating premature ejaculation from Franz. Oops. Good thing Father Time gave her a full day to get laid. Or maybe not.

The next morning, Monica does some shopping in town, plays on a swing set and listens to a Texas polka band in the park. Then she meets Bruno. He's a biker. He wears sunglasses and has hair like Burton Cummings. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there's something about Bruno that seems unsavory. At first she doesn't want to go for a ride with him. But once he explains that cows are giving milk and sheep are eating grass and that it's a beautiful day, she decides, what the hell. She's going to be dead tomorrow, so saddling up for a ride on Bruno's one eyed trouser snake might be just the ticket. So off they go, accompanied by a Paul Mauriatesque arrangement of the movie's insipid title theme. Stopping in the country by a mill, their foreplay is heightened with provocative exchanges such as this one, when Monica dips her hand in a creek:

The water. It goes on and on forever.

What?

The water, it just goes on and never stops, does it?

I don't know. I don't suppose. Did you ever see the inside of a mill?

Not surprisingly, Monica has never seen the inside of a mill. Bruno wants to show it to her. Unfortunately, Bruno likes raping women in the mill and beating them with leater straps. Things turn a little sour and Monica has to run away. Bruno tries to run her down on his bike, but Father Time steps in and decapitates him with his scythe. He warns Monica about men who have hair like Burton Cummings, then sends her off on her next adventure. But first, we're treated to another song as she skips through a field, spins around with her arms outstretched, and plucks flowers. It's folksy, it's whimsical, it smells like Judy Collins, and it could tear the skin off a hamster:

Yellow and green and blue, are they colors, or are they feelings?

Or could they be tomorrow's painted memories stealing through?

Yellow and green and blue.

I'm jealous of yellow's daffodils. I'm jealous of the golden sun. etc...

With the film's runtime successfully extended, Goldilocks is off for her third slutty encounter. Golly, do you suppose it'll work out? This time, she happens across her old school teacher. He's sitting by a pond reading Don Quixote. They talk. She refers to the pond as a lake:

Did I hear you call that pond a lake?

Yes, it is a lake. Sometimes it's an ocean. It's whatever I want it to be.

You remind me of a certain gentleman I know.

Who's that?

Don Quixote.

Can you feel the magic? They laugh. They love. They share their feelings. They feed each other strawberries. They run laughing in the rain. They sit by a fireplace. They fuck. And it all seems like an eternity, even though it's really no longer than a Keith Emerson solo or a colonoscopy.

Monica returns to the farm, realizing she is now fulfilled and can confront death with no regrets. But Father Time has a surprise for her. He came for only one soul, and now there are two! Yes, you guessed it, it's a glorious, Phyllis Schlafly inspired dénouement, wherein Monica has earned the right to live by serving as a semen receptacle to anything possessing sideburns, functioning testicles, and a pulse.

Life. What a beautiful choice!

She tilts her smiling face toward the warm sun, a freeze frame captures her reproductive ecstasy for the ages, and the title theme envelopes her, like a quinoa recipe demonstration at an organic grocery:

Bluebirds need wings and a dream needs a dreamer.

Cornfields need golden grain.

And I need love like the dawn needs the sunrise.

And strawberries need rain.

Butterflies need to be free or they never will fly

And they'll die.

Apples need autumn like April needs springtime

Summer, a shady lane.

I need to love to be young to be living

Like strawberries, strawberries need rain.

Hot damn. Now this is the shit. Johnny Cash as a remorseless criminal thug, working with Vic Tayback on a bank hold-up. And when I say "Vic Tayback," I do mean "Mel," sex king from the 70s sit-com Alice, but back when he still had hair. Granted, it's not the Paul Lynde Halloween Special, but damn it, are you going to sit around moping, or are you going to get on with life?

Right out of the chute, you get Johnny mowing down a cop with a machine gun, his frazzled hair draped over his forehead, followed by a killer title theme by Johnny and Merle Travis over the opening credits. Then Johnny's holed up in a crappy motel room with his annoying girlfriend when he gets a phone call. Vic Tayback wants to meet with him to talk about a bank job. They meet at a bowling alley. It has overhead score displays, which is pretty snazzola for the early 60s. Real class. The joint is owned by Merle Travis, who is great as a slimy sycophant, trying to curry favor with Vic Tayback for a cut of the action. Vic is having problems with his game. He misses the seven on a nasty 1-7 split, so he's pissed and generally unpleasant to Merle Travis. Merle is his redneck bitch slave.

Johnny shows up with his slutty girlfriend, and him and Vic don't hit it off at first, so they figuratively compare penis sizes and toss out empty threats. After strutting their egos for a bit, the girlfriend is told to go wait in the car, and Vic reveals to Johnny that he wants to hold up the Harpers Federal Trust Bank. Johnny is skeptical at first, but Vic convinces him that if they kidnap a bank executive's wife, they can get a pass from the tight security, which purportedly is a notch or two beyond your typical Burt Mustin/Don Knotts scenario. Johnny is elated with the brilliance of Vic's plan, so he goes back to the shitty motel room, tells his girlfriend he's going to be rich, plays his guitar for her, and then shoots her. The corpse disposal isn't explained, but it's not like she was adding anything to the story anyway.

Vic and Johnny stake out the Wilson family's house. It's a suburban ranch affair, and Johnny talks about how much he hates the suburbs. Inside the house the Wilsons are bickering about their dismal lives. Mrs. Wilson is wearing curlers. Their son, played by Ronnie Howard, is eating whatever slop she's set on the table, and Mr. Wilson is getting ready for work. One of Mrs. Wilson's friends calls to try to railroad Mr. Wilson into heading up the PTA. Mrs. Wilson can't take Opie to baseball practice or some shit, because she's busy doing suburban Mom stuff. All is not well in the land of post-war kitchen convenience.

Mr. Wilson has been screwing around behind his wife's back, with a woman even more wretched than her, and he's chosen this morning to tell her, but the hectic drum beat of their deadening existences gets in the way, and he has to leave it for another day. They walk outside for him to leave, and Vic and Johnny, watching from down the street, notice that they have a kid. Johnny doesn't like that. Apparently he had some kind of incident with a kid, but no specifics are given. Vic still doesn't seem to realize that he's recruited a mental case for his master plan. Of course when you're using a bowling alley proprietor named Max for your job referrals, there are likely to be a few speed bumps.

After Mr. Wilson and Opie leave, Johnny walks up to the house and pretends to be selling guitar lessons. He works his way into the house, and the party begins. Most of the rest of the movie is Johnny abusing and tormenting Mrs. Wilson, and waiting for phone calls from Vic that will determine whether he kills her. He makes her take off her curlers and dress up real purty for him. He takes her to the bedroom and tells her "I like a messy bed," with his low, grumbling Mr. Ed voice. Johnny wants him some sweet stuff while he's waiting. He dances around the living room and smashes vases. He screams a lot when a buzzer goes off on the dishwasher. He's the nastiest sumbitch you will ever see in a movie with this kind of budget.

Eventually, Opie comes home unexpectedly, and Johnny freaks out, because he doesn't want to hurt any kids. Of course, that doesn't stop him from using Opie as a hostage and pointing a gun at his head. I guess everyone's ethical boundaries can be compromised in a pinch.

Not to give too much away, but in the end, the Wilsons reconcile, and they're shown in their convertible on their way to Vegas for a second honeymoon. Mrs. Wilson, fresh off a day of beatings and rape threats, promises her husband lots of hot sex. Best of all, she promises to wear the furry negligee that Johnny forced her to wear at gunpoint. Better stop off for lubricants, kids.

"Honey, remember that time the sociopathic redneck sexually assaulted me and then we rutted like teenage meth freaks into the night?" Ah, memories.