Brand recognition

These two films have a huge plot point in common, but revealing it would be a spoiler of colossal proportions.

So instead, we'll note another resemblance: both movies explicitly invoke and subvert stereotypes -- though one does so a hell of a lot more effectively than the other. 

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I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now? (1975) 

Grade: F

Oh, Bob Dishy. Is there any name that flows off the tongue so nicely? Seriously, just try saying it right now, aloud to yourself: Bob Dishy.

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but Bob's moniker communicates so much in such a short time -- a model of efficiency. It connotes handsomeness à la Keeping Up Appearances's famous vicar, yet retains the down-to-earth-ness that comes with "No, not Robert, thank you, just Bob."

The improbability of his last name, why, it hints at the origin of the Semitic good looks that led him to later play a rabbi on one of Dick Wolf's endless shows about law and/or order.

And if you've only seen Bob in his mature years, you might not know that he was, as a younger man, rather good-looking. Sort of a poor man's Robert Redford, if you like, with a dash of Bob Geldof.

However, unlike the haughty likes of Redford, he's not too good-looking -- just good-looking enough. A dish, but not a high-priced entrée you can't afford. A modestly hot guy, to get you through the hard times, you know the kind. Not a throb, just Bob.

So Bob Dishy -- can I call you Bob, Mr. Dishy? -- has the lead role, you see, in this film, I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now?. How promising that it opens with an animated sequence involving gendered eyes and shoes! How intriguing that it has Angelo Rossitto, and Pat Morita "as Heshy Yamamoto": a seal of approval twice over!

And how unusual that the opening scenes show him at the grand piano, playing Chopin -- of all things! -- and quite well at that.

Except his character, Jordan Oliver, is no concert pianist, and isn't even playing. Instead, he's engaged in a bizarre pantomime while a little person -- yep, Angelo Rossitto -- is supposedly the one really playing. On a toy piano.

And now we begin to detect the first hint that I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now? will not, as we might hope, be a tale of knives into unsuspecting backs; of sweaty foreheads lit by streetlights coming through windows at night; of soft, panicked men running futilely from the pitiless, implacable hand of justice.

No, I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now? is a comedy. Or more correctly: an attempt at comedy. Or even more correctly: a really, really shitty attempt at comedy.

Take, for example, the last line of the first scene. Jordan tells his tiny pianist: "Come in through the doggie door! And watch out for the doggie doo!"

We are, one imagines, meant to laugh at this. But there is nothing to inspire laughter in the line's content, context, or delivery. Whose Line Is It Anyway? regularly improvises better material. For this, people bought a ticket?

So Peter Sellers was originally supposed to be the lead in this thing. Certainly, he would have had no trouble playing an incorrigible rogue who, faced with financial ruin, decides to kill his estranged wife for the insurance payout. (This is the plot of I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now?, more or less. But mostly less.)

But, Sellers became uninsurable after his heart attack. So they got Bob Dishy instead.

Do you remember that comedian who went to see Phantom of the Opera, and got Robert Guillaume instead of an ill Michael Crawford? Do you remember how he compared it to going to a Madonna concert, and having Tina Yothers come out on stage instead? The Umbrellahead Review remembers.

But how could we blame Bob Dishy for this? Say his name aloud and you'll find that you can't either. You'll see.

He tries gamely, throwing in bad accents and impressions (like Robin Williams on a bad day), strange tics and facial expressions (like Jim Carrey on a bad day), and himself through a window (like your local dive bar most days). None of this hits the mark, but is it really his fault?

No, the real problem is that the material is horrific. We've seen a few reviews claiming I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now? as a fine example of zany Woody Allen-esque comedy. Such a claim kicks Woody Allen in the shins, which he might well deserve, but not for this.

I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now? thinks having an art dealer walk on his knees is automatically funny. Because we mistook him for a little person, you see: silly us.

Or a Chinese restaurant with a Mexican waiter. Har-de-har-har, how incongruous.

Or a Japanese doctor (no points for guessing the actor) who "lost his contact rens". Yes.

Or a turban-wearing "Indian" conductor in bronzeface who waves a flute instead of a baton, buys lip gloss in bulk at garage sales, and says things like "Ahd you see-di-ous?"

Or an incompetent hit man who wears two different shoes.

Or an elderly barmaid draped in cobwebs, who plays a record of a loud party to deceive patrons into thinking the bar is lively.

Or "Dr. Binay's Fat Farm", run by a walking, talking Béla Lugosi impression -- Jack DeLeon in whiteface -- who transplants old women's brains into young bodies, and whips his cross-dressing assistant.

Or a cross-dressing spy who acts out the Monty Python lumberjack sketch, but as a bricklayer.

I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now? believes these things are zany, absurdist humor. It thinks it has a memorable cast of characters that get up to endearing shenanigans. It imagines reviews that say things like "Uproarious!" and "A laugh riot!" 

It is, in short, a giant, relentless schmear of tiresome schtick, crude stereotypes, and recycled gags. It's humor, as written by a committee of people who aren't funny. It's a parade of Z-listers and Catskills has-beens who, even in their prime, only got laughs from drunk yentas and alter kakers.

It has maybe one gag that hits the mark, and that one's not even in English ("Come si dice dove in italiano?" "Dove!"). It rips off Wile E. Coyote, for God's sake, and yet it still botches the punchline.

I Wonder Who's Killing Her Now? is, in short -- let's be clear about this -- a worthless piece of shit of a movie. It makes you want to see the people who wrote and directed it punished. Or at least made to shine Mel Brooks's shoes and clean his bathtub, daily, in perpetuity.

But at least it's got Bob Dishy.

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Savage Weekend (1976, released 1979)

Grade: B-

If Savage Weekend is basically a slasher film -- and it is -- it's also the kind of movie that benefits from multiple viewings. That's not because its plot is especially complicated, but because it takes a while to understand the relationship between its characters. In the order we meet them, there's:

• Marie (Marilyn Hamlin), an aloof divorcée with a young son.

• Shirley (Caitlin O'Heaney), her hot-to-trot sister, and
• Nicky (Christopher Allport), Shirley's gay best friend, who's very out.

• Greg (Jeff Pomerantz), Marie's ex-husband, recently hospitalized after losing his job in a political scandal, with a massive chip on his shoulder about everyone and everything.

• Robert (Jim Doerr), Marie's new boyfriend, a middle-aged stockbroker whose kindness may be a liability.

• and Jay (Devin Goldenberg), a friend of Robert's, who just split with his wife and seeks fresh furrows in which to plant his seed. He's also a boatwright, and Robert bought a boat that needs wrighting.

Minus Greg (who has the kid this weekend), the remaining five pile into a station wagon and head for a rural getaway -- upstate New York in both reality and fiction, though all the banjos on the soundtrack subtly encourage us to assume it's somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. Either way it's redneck country.

Along the way -- in a sequence guaranteed to come up in any review of this film -- Nicky deliberately provokes a bar fight with the local yokels, only to hand them their asses: "I wasn't brought up in the South Bronx for nothin'," he notes.

Playing against stereotypes is a recurring theme throughout Savage Weekend. Are the locals conspiring against our city slickers? It sure seems like something is brewing when the local Marlboro Man archetype, Mac Macauley (David Gale), has an exchange with one of his employees:

Employee: "Me and Ryan's got plans for that bunch."

Mac: "You ain't gonna do nothing 'til you hear from me."

Employee: "Hell we ain't."

Mac: (strikes employee in stomach) "You watch your mouth with me, you hear?"

Is Mac the incarnation of the land itself, a Deliverance-like force seeking to punish urban trespassers foolish enough to disrespect his place and his people?

For disrespect they do, talking smack about dimwitted Otis Crump (William Sanderson, later of Newhart) within his earshot, despite Mac's warning that Otis is more dangerous than he appears: "Now there's a weird one."

Otis sure spends a lot of time looking through binoculars and disapproving. What's his deal, we wonder?

Well, Mac describes Otis's revenge on a cousin he fancied, but who fancied the local lads more. When Otis found her at "that tavern they got down there on Route 22" -- aka Oasis, the very place Nicky had his bar fight (continuity!) -- mayhem and maiming ensued:

Mac: "'Whore! Whore!' he kept yellin', and branded an H right in the middle of her chest."

Robert: "Why an H?"

Mac: "For 'whore'. Otis ain't none too bright. Clear forgot the word began with a W."

Robert: (cracks up laughing)

Another recurring theme in Savage Weekend: the interaction between metal and flesh. Brands branding? Fishhooks penetrating feet? Saws cutting through limbs? Nails pounded through a bat? One character intentionally grabbing barbed wire while he watches two others have sex? It's got all these and more!

There are subtle touches to Savage Weekend that are not just easy to miss, but just about impossible not to miss on first viewing. For example, when we first meet Nicky he acts and sounds like a fairly ordinary straight man, yet in every other subsequent scene he's as out as a broken streetlight.

Now, he's helping to care for his best friend's nephew, so it makes perfect sense that he'd keep things under wraps. If anything he butches it up à la Charles Nelson Reilly, saying things like "C'mon, bustah, let's get it into geah!" and "C'mon, tiger, let's finish up".

But only in retrospect does this become clear: we don't know Nicky yet, so how can we appreciate the significance of his restraint?

In another scene, Jay and Shirley -- who have already had coitus al fresco once on the trip -- head off into the weeds for another assignation, whereupon Jay rips off Shirley's top and makes the following proposition to his bare-breasted companion:

"Listen, why don't we do somethin', uh...filthy? I mean something really...dirty and revolting?"

Then in their next scene together, they have this exchange:

Shirley: "I'm doing my nails."

Jay: "C'mon, you know you loved it."

Shirley: "Leave me alone."

Jay: "What'd I do? C'mon, tell me what I did!"

Shirley: "You're a real pig! I'm not surprised your wife left you."

Jay: "What's the matter with you all of a sudden?"

Shirley: "I'm surprised she stuck with you for three years. I'll tell you what's the matter. When you came to me in the woods, I thought, wow. Here's a man with some ima-a-agination. Later I realized you were just a silly jerk who gets all his ideas from girlie magazines." (storms off)

Jay: "Is that so?"

Let's analyze this: Jay proposes a sexual act he describes as "filthy" and "dirty". He does so spontaneously, while outdoors, and therefore without any...supplemental resources. And afterward, Shirley is repulsed by him, either because things didn't go well or because she can't believe what she did.

To paraphrase John Davidson on Hollywood Squares, "It must be...some part of the body. I wonder where it could be?"

Finally, there's the connection between the film's ending and its beginning. Start the movie over, and you immediately realize what was done and what's being said, or implied -- but watching it straight through, we lacked the context to make sense of it.

Does it reflect badly on us that this clever finesse went over our heads? Maybe, but it also underscores the chief flaw in Savage Weekend: the editing. It's competent, but a better editor might have ensured that certain key elements of plot and characterization were emphasized.

Or that we understood who the hell all the characters were.

Then again, speaking of editing, it's always possible something is missing from Mill Creek's copy, which runs about 86 minutes vs. IMDb's listed running time of 88 minutes. The sex all seems to be present -- just about every female character bares her breasts at some point, including a cow that very nearly becomes a prop in a sex scene. (No, we're not joking.)

However, one or two of the more violent sequences seem like they could be cut short. And who knows, the saga of Jay and Shirley might be clarified in an unedited copy. (There's a Blu-Ray out there, maybe we'll see it sometime.)

On the other hand Mill Creek's copy adds something, namely a whole lot of boom mic thanks to incorrectly matted shots. No way the makers of Savage Weekend intended these to be seen, as it's too pervasive.

Savage Weekend doesn't quite live up to its ambitions, and probably crosses the line from "leaving some things implied" to "not bothering to fill in important details". Its denouement isn't really satisfying, and it squanders its best character, Nicky, by not giving us enough to understand his psyche. Is he in love with Shirley? Attracted to Jay? Vice versa? Both?

We're left to wonder, and his long campy dance sequence with Shirley does nothing to clarify matters.

Still, Savage Weekend also crosses the line from "routine genre exercise" to "distinctive film well worth seeing". It has enough psychological insight to give bite to its observations, and avoids the trap of giving us warmed-over Deliverance or, especially, Straw Dogs (perhaps the film's real ancestor).

If ultimately the locals are hardly less opaque than the city slickers in their motivations, at least the soundtrack attempts to do right by them:

You can't blame upstate folks from getting crazy in the mind

You buy some land, you scratch the earth 'til midnight, moonlight makes you blind

You miss one payment on the farm, you watch the bank foreclose

You sell it to some city guy who needs help to blow his nose

An upstate man got ain't much for his time in this life

Little pride, little property, sometimes a little wife

To keep that little, he fights a lot of temptation and strife

And the pride's more important to him than life

A bit on the nose -- especially since we hear it twice -- but it ensures we get the point.

Polish my Helmut – or, more Cushing for the pushing

Violence -- sexual or otherwise -- has long been cinema's favorite excuse for bare breasts. And these films supply all of the above, plus other pendulous globes! 

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Mad Dog (1977) 

[aka Beast with a Gun, etc.]

Grade: C

Oh, Helmut Berger. A cautionary tale of wasted talent, or an example of someone who got the most out of what was predestined to be a limited shelf life? A charismatic chameleon and a born star, or a passaround boy who lucked into the infatuated gaze of fawning directors?

Well, probably the former (in each case). Berger exudes magnetism and danger, like the proverbial caged tiger, and you can't fake that with clever cinematography. He must have been part of what made Visconti's The Damned so striking, though the present writer mostly remembers the Night of the Long Knives scenes.

Such a shame when bad things happen to...people.

Clearly the makers of Mad Dog -- aka Beast with a Gun, The Human Beast, Mad Dog Killer, or La belva col mitra if you want the original Italian -- knew Berger was their star attraction. So they give him just the kind of role in which he shines, as Nanni Vitali, an absolutely ruthless, sexually voracious criminal who escapes from prison and is hell-bent on revenge.

No doubt they had Berger at "ruthless", his forte.

And they give him plenty of screen time, including a protracted shot of his bare backside if you're into that sort of thing, and pretty much all the best lines. More than once it borders on camp, intentionally or not, as when a detective (seemingly) meets his end in a fiery crash:

"That was a nice sight! A well-done dick."

You don't say, Helmut Berger! You don't say.

That detective, one Commissioner Santini (Richard Harrison), has one thing going for him: dude is absolutely jacked. Unlike a lot of policeman protagonists, you get the feeling that this cop could literally overpower the villain. He's got muscles and brains, so what's not to like?

Well, as opposed to (for example) Dirty Harry, Santini is too much of a straight hero to get the good lines. I suppose you could count his Smash Mouth moment about 12 minutes in -- "Vitali's like a mad dog!" -- but that only works on a meta, presentist level.

Actually a bunch of Santini's dialogue hits very strangely in 2023, in that he'll be saying something fairly routine but finishes off with something that sounds like a low-karma Reddit post. See, for example, when he excoriates Vitali for his cowardice:

"You're a filthy hyena. And you have the courage of one. You're only brave as long as you've got that gun, so you can terrorize helpless females."

Oh, hey, I got a work call and have to go home early but it was great meeting you!

Or how about when he, uh, excoriates Vitali for his cowardice again?

"You're a coward. You think you're a genius but you're just a common killer. There's a whole race of people like you, Vitali!"

That's...that sure is a thing you just said, that was said, by you.

On the other hand, we cracked up when a perfectly reasonable request from his Kim Clijsters-looking hostage, Carla (Marina Giordana), got this nasty reply from Vitali:

"I'm thirsty."

"So have a drink, twat!"

Once again, the bad guy gets all the good lines.

Of course this also betrays the fundamentally mean-spirited attitude of Mad Dog. Sure, modern viewers aren't likely to be bothered by its violence -- a bit of which was trimmed out of the Mill Creek print, though the only significant cut we identified actually improves the movie.

(The guy was face-down in a puddle and looked dead as a doornail, so bringing him back to have him cry out in agony? Not a good idea.)

But the "sexy man rapes woman, kills mate to demonstrate alpha status, and may have induced Stockholm Syndrome with his mighty phallus" angle of the film is uncomfortable. Arguably Mad Dog tries to have its cake and eat it too, though we can't communicate how without spoilers, but it's clear the film wants us to think she was ambivalent.

A subtler and more provocative moment comes in the homoerotic subtext between Vitali and the young criminal he picks up (Alberto Squillante). The way Helmut Berger looks at this Bimbo -- no, really, the character's name is Bimbo -- is tough to pass off as merely a kind of paternal affection.

Perhaps Berger put a bit of his authentic self into the role, since it's hard to imagine "Act like you want to bang the delinquent someday" was in the script.

It's also refreshing that Vitali isn't a Criminal Minds-style genius or master karateka, but someone who gets by strictly on his looks, ruthlessness, and cunning. He fumbles an attempted hit on a witness, keeps getting cornered like a rat, and even fails to perform in one fight scene, when a botched swing has him missing the victim entirely: "Bruno! Punch him!" he shouts.

Playing it off was cheaper than a reshoot, I guess.

Oh, and the print looks good enough, but very occasionally something gets cropped to comic effect, like this entrance:

Anyway, Mad Dog has multiple plot holes -- the one at the beginning, involving an unloaded gun, is comically obvious -- and a nasty streak. Even with lines like "I'll be in town...making hamburger out of the motherfucker!", is Helmut Berger enough to carry this one?

It depends on what you want from your hour-and-a-half of entertainment. It was probably bracing in 1977, but hard to predict people's reaction now. Maybe it's got a bit of the "too much of this, not enough of that" syndrome.

Quentin Tarantino seems to like it, prominently featuring the film in Jackie Brown. As for whatever Berger thought, he seems to have given it his all. Or makes us think he did.

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Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1973)

[aka The Satanic Rites of Dracula]

Grade: D

Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride relies upon the premise that a bunch of high-ranking British muckety-mucks are in a secret society engaging in unspeakable, depraved acts with vulnerable persons. I mean, how gullible did Jimmy Carreras think we are, to toss a vile notion like that at us?

This wasn't quite Christopher Lee's last appearance as Dracula -- there's a horror comedy (shudder) yet to come -- but it's his last with Hammer. To be honest, the only other time we've seen Lee don the cape was in Jess Franco's Dracula (which we're not reviewing, as we'd have nothing interesting to say), so we don't have lots of context for his work as the Count.

This time around, his charisma is undiminished, his accent silly, and he just doesn't get all that much to do.

Meanwhile Peter Cushing is Professor Lorrimer Van Helsing -- one of the many fictional descendants of that fearless vampire hunter, who take to the job like an orphaned beaver that instinctively builds dams. (And they do!)

No marginal old man, Van Helsing holds his own and plays his part -- despite repeatedly engaging in the vice of announcing what you're about to do instead of just doing it. And he even shows off some pendulous globes!

So why is Drac back? Just to frolic with mid-tier extras whose agents convince them going topless will help their careers?

No, he wants to kill everybody with a new strain of bubonic plague that kills "within seconds". Septicemic plague can take less than a day (once symptoms present), but the modern vampire is in a hurry!

If anything Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride seems to think that evil for its own sake is enough of a motivator. Van Helsing tells us it can be "more addictive and more potent than heroin, I assure you, and the end result is just as fatal". Paging Dinky Hocker.

And we get a speech from one Professor Kelsey to that effect -- someone who was apparently "awarded the Nobel Prize for science and humanity" (er, sure), yet now has thrown his lot in with the infernal:

"Evil rules, you know. It really does. Evil and violence are the only two measures that really hold any power."

As we get older, and see more things happen, the temptation to reply "Well...you're not wrong!" grows stronger.

In any event Dracula has two persecutors, as he's also harried (indirectly) by Inspector Murray (Michael Coles), a specialist from Scotland Yard.

Inspector Murray also has the hots for Van Helsing's granddaughter Jessica (Joanna Lumley), for whom we do not have the hots.

Coles has one of those creepy old-young faces (like Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones), a big part of which is the way his haircut inspires cognitive dissonance (also like Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones).

(Not to mention the guy mentioned in red above: seriously, how could the world not twig Jimmy "Jim'll Fix It" Savile as a creep? That weird-haired burly man-child gave us the jibblies the first time we saw him.)

On the other hand, Coles is very good at projecting that "boxer who just took a hard hit to the end but is going to keep on fighting" thing, which is a lot more convincing than the usual impervious action-hero crap.

...speaking of which, Van Helsing (the elder and handsomer one) gets shot in the head, yet they don't bother to explain his immediate recovery or why he's not dead. Would one line about "Somehow, it ricocheted off my skull" really go amiss?

Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride is pretty phoned-in, more so as it goes on. The first 30 minutes or so are moderately entertaining but before long, the plot and pacing are in danger of falling below "Sega CD FMV game" standards. It relies too heavily on people doing stupid things, and needed more pulchritude to keep its audience too titillated to notice its flaws.

(Our understanding is that we're not missing any significant footage vs. the original release under the Satanic Rites of Dracula title, but we could be wrong. Correct us if we are, since a "Well, actually" comment would at least indicate that someone's reading!)

But is it watchable? Sure, it's watchable: what movie with T and/or A isn't, one might ask? (Some entries hence, you'll get an answer to that, courtesy of Ed Wood.)

And some of those action scenes get pretty funny at 4x speed, which is how you play them back if you're reviewing a movie a couple years after you first watched it. As one does.

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Obviously, we haven't been able to post much lately. That happens sometimes -- but far be it from us to allow 2023 to pass without an entry.

Perhaps this will mark a renaissance at the Umbrellahead Review, as we catch up on our backlog and start going steady again? We look forward to that day!