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!

Remembering

In our last entry we made some noises about "unfinished business with a few films" in our mammoth Horror Collection box set from Mill Creek. A careful count of our viewing habits would reveal that, of the Horror Collection's 250 films, we'd only watched 247 from the actual box set (counting the two halves of the The Lost City separately).

Will we be reviewing Night of the Living Dead -- a film we skipped in our first pass through the Nightmare Worlds portion of the box set, since we watched it on public TV on (gulp) Halloween 2009?

No, we won't -- though at least we finally watched the version on the box,. Even in Mill Creek's middling transfer it remains a taut, effective film.

Its only major flaw is a bit too much of the "hysterical/helpless woman" act from Judith O'Dea -- the film's decoy protagonist, so to speak. (Duane Jones is the true protagonist, obvs.)

Or will we be covering Metropolis, the 1927 epic that launched a thousand film studies classes -- and which we also skipped over, since we figured Mill Creek's print was probably crap?

No, we won't, though we realized neither of us had ever actually seen the film (K. thought she had, but hadn't), and so here too we watched the Mill Creek product. And even in a cut-down, grainy version that can't bring itself to fit the film's title on screen --

-- we enjoyed Metropolis and would like to see the restored version sometime. That said, the cuts in the 118-minute version we watched weren't at all obvious to us: it's hardly a hack job like some we've seen. (Looking at you, Planet Outlaws.)

No, the real unfinished business we have is with a third movie -- one that, in at least two different senses, is the thing that started this whole project. Of all the films on the box, it's the first one we ever watched together; of all the films on the box, it's (almost certainly) the first one either of us ever saw.

So, without further ado (and just shy of 2019), here's #250 of 250:

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Warriors of the Wasteland (1983)
[aka The New Barbarians, I nuovi barbari]

Grade: C-

In retrospect, the 1980s seem like the transitional decade -- the period where we went from the way things were to, basically speaking, the way things are now.

For instance, take entertainment: in 1979 you probably had a rooftop antenna, and you watched what was on TV or in the theaters. You read what you owned, or what the library had, or what a buddy would lend you.

Come the early 1990s, we had cable TV, video rentals, and services like Prodigy that weren't so different from the modern Internet, where you could chat with other people interested in all the weird stuff you liked.

OK, it cost money (and charged per minute), and it was your friend's father that had it, not your family. But at least you got to try it once or twice for a few minutes, whereupon you saw the future. (And hopefully your friend's dad didn't flip his shit.)

Nowadays, almost nothing is out of reach. Nearly every childhood memory can be dialed up somewhere on YouTube; nearly every movie, song, video game, book you were ever curious about can be bought online, or even downloaded for free.

Heck, even people can be found, if you're resourceful enough. One classmate's dead from suicide or smack, another has detestable political views, and that little blonde you had a crush on in 5th grade? She's happily married with a couple kids. Good for her.

But back in the late 1980s, such things were still on the horizon (except video rentals, we had those). 

And so, enter a childhood friend of P.'s: let's call him Dog Pound, though that wasn't his real nickname. Dog Pound was at least 5 years older than P., probably more, but only a couple years ahead of him in school.

Picture greasy black hair, wide eyes enlarged by Coke-bottle glasses, thick lips, and a subtle limp. Now add to that shitkicker boots, a Canadian tuxedo, and a trucker hat.

If you're imagining this guy as a redneck with mild special needs, you're exactly right.

Dog Pound was awkward and a bit "off", but willing to be a friend when few others were. It was Dog Pound who stood with P. at the bus stop, and never once made a cutting or nasty remark about him, ever. It was at Dog Pound's house that P. first played Intellivision, and where he ate a dog biscuit on a dare from a mutual friend.

And the first pornographic movie he ever saw? That was Dog Pound's VHS tape, which featured the sordid tale of an android who learns about sex by watching...well, you know the rest.

And speaking of VHS, Dog Pound used to wax lyrical about a movie he called "The Templars". All these decades later it's impossible to recall exactly what he said, but it probably amounted to his version of "This movie is really bad-ass."

So sooner or later, we sat down and watched it together. And not too long after that, Dog Pound and his family decamped for parts unknown (the rumor was Alaska).

Even just a few years later, P.'s impressions of the movie would have been vague: something about a post-apocalyptic landscape akin to The Road Warrior, with a roving band of men determined to kill everyone, everyhere. And that was about it.

Yet it stuck, somehow -- maybe because it felt like some bit of underground knowledge, of a piece with the Intellivision and the porn tape and everything else. Something illicit, hidden, and at risk of being forgotten.

(He was interested in roots and beginnings..."There must be great secrets buried there which have not been discovered since the beginning.")

The impression remained long enough to prompt P. to look it up in the Leonard Maltin book years later, and learn that it was named Warriors of the Wasteland and/or The New Barbarians. Cool.

Then in 2008, in the course of chasing down a DVD of the haunting TV movie I, Desire (aka Desire: The Vampire), we start thinking about B-pictures, and Ed Wood, and Warriors of the Wasteland comes to mind again. (If you're keeping time, that's about 15 years later.)

So we do our research, and find out about the Mill Creek 250-pack. In the weeks before it arrives at our door -- or the months before we order it? -- we download a copy of Warriors of the Wasteland  from Archive.org, and watch it on an iBook sitting on our coffee table, in our little apartment.

For sound, we have the boombox P. salvaged from a dumpster, running off a car stereo adapter in one of the tape bays (which doesn't even spin), and which had the nasty habit of erupting into horrible static now and then.

The audio is about a second ahead of the image, so we route it through a program that adds delay. Later, the sync error gets worse and worse, and we add more and more artificial lag, until we're processing it with about 4 seconds of delay just to keep the dialogue in sync.

Maybe somewhere around that time, P. finds himself thinking about Dog Pound. So he looks him up and, sadly, finds out that someone with Dog Pound's (fairly common) name died about a decade ago. 

Not definitive evidence, to be sure...but on some level he wants to believe things ended there. It makes a better story than a sad existence in some group home, with little to show for the past decades but a history of custodial jobs -- or, all too plausibly, a permanent place on the sex offender registry, thanks to some clumsy and utterly inappropriate attempt at seduction.

(Sorry, Dog Pound, but that kind of thing does happen on the regular: just ask Brian Peppers.)

And now, ten years later, we have a big flat-screen TV and a whole house to ourselves. We're watching Warriors of the Wasteland, the very last film in this box set that we haven't actually cued up yet (Disc 46 notwithstanding, and that'll come in time). With the click of a button, we could watch a hi-res transfer on Amazon Prime, but somehow that would defeat the purpose.

You'll forgive us if we don't bother to opine on whether Warriors of the Wasteland is good, bad, or indifferent (it's all three), or talk about how it's really a Western in homoerotic Road Warrior clothing (which it is). Somehow, those things seem irrelevant right now.

("All the 'great secrets'...had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering.")

Instead, we'll think about where we are: right on the cusp of a new year -- the very year in which Warriors of the Wasteland is set -- and at the end of a decade-long journey. And we'll think about Dog Pound, who turns out to be alive and well as far as we can tell, living just a handful of miles from where he and P. grew up.

(And, we're pleased to note, he's not on the registry.)

So here's to you, Dog Pound. You'll forgive us if we don't seek you out to reconnect, in what would almost certainly be a series of one-sided interactions made awkward by occasional flashes of bitterness -- or, worse, obvious signs of lust for some proximate woman whose kindness confuses you.

But you were there at the beginning of many things that still matter. And you, too, still matter -- especially from a comfortable distance.