Five Minutes To Live (aka Door to Door Maniac) was a 1961 thriller starring Johnny Cash and Vic Tayback. They hatch a scheme to rob a bank by taking the branch vice president's wife hostage and giving him five minutes to hand over the money or she'll get it. Only hitch? He was about to ask her for a divorce, throwing a monkey wrench into the plan. It's a well paced, fast little potboiler, and Cash is great in his first acting role as a cold blooded killer with a guitar. He performs the title song and is shown pickin' and singin' a few times in the film.
Tayback is suitably sleazy as his partner in crime, and the movie also stars Donald Woods as the bank executive and Cay Forester, who also wrote the screenplay, as his wife. Director Bill Karn previously did a lot of tv work, most notably Gang Busters, and also helmed Ma Barker's Killer Brood the previous year. Sutton Pictures handled the original 1961 release, but AIP got a hold of it in '66 and gave it the Door to Door Maniac title.
I'm bringing the PSYCHOTRONIC MOVIE OF THE WEEK back to the Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban blog and I'm kicking off version 2.0 with my own favorite Thanksgiving cinematic tradition, Brad F. Ginter's BLOOD FREAK.
Ginter's filmography as a director includes just five titles, and it's three that he's primarily remembered for today - the awful biker flick DEVIL RIDER (1970), the bizarre Veronica Lake swan song FLESH FEAST (1970), and today's feature, BLOOD FREAK (1972).
Steve Hawkes, whose previous acting resume was highlighted by two low-budget, shot in Florida Tarzan movies, co-wrote the screenplay with Ginter and stars as Herschell, a Nam vet biker who gets invited to a party by a beautiful young lady and well, one thing leads to another and before we know it, Herschell is addicted to the pot! He ends up eating some chemically altered turkey and when he wakes up he's become a monster with a giant turkey head who needs to feast on the blood of drug addicts to satisfy his cravings. In the end, the only thing that can save him is turning to God - the film was described by Shock Cinema's Steven Puchalski as "the world's first Christian, anti-drug splatter movie!" And if that plot wasn't enough of a trainwreck, wait until you get a load of Ginter himself as the narrator, sitting at a desk in front of faux wooden paneling, talking about "the human body as a mixing bowl," spewing Reefer Madness-style anti-drug rhetoric while smoking a cigarette. At one point he breaks into a coughing fit that only adds to the delicious (unintentional?) irony. You would think they would have done another take, but I guess it wasn't in the budget.
BLOOD FREAK was released on VHS in the 80s by Video Treasures, which promised "A Dracula on Drugs!" Something Weird Video released the ultimate special edition DVD in the early 2000's which is now out of print but can be found on Amazon and eBay. I highly recommend seeking it out, but in the meantime, here's the entire movie as posted on YouTube, DIG!
EDIT: YouTube has already removed the video I originally posted, but you can still watch it broken down into six parts.
1968 - Paramount Pictures - D: Otto Preminger S: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Alexandra Hay, Groucho Marx, Frankie Avalon, Fred Clark, Michael Constantine, Frank Gorshin, John Phillip Law, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, George Raft, Caesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Arnold Stang, Slim Pickens, Richard Kiel, Harry Nilsson.
Now here's something completely different. And by different, I mean different compared to,... well, just about anything I've ever seen. Long left stashed in the Paramount vaults and only wondered about by those who missed it in its initial run, this is Otto Preminger's misguided attempt at one of those "generation gap" films that were becoming more and more prevalent around 1968. The plot is comedic mash-up of hippiesploitation and a gangster movie. Jackie Gleason is a retired mobster living a legit life with his wife (Carol Channing) and their hippie daughter. One day, a mob boss (named "God" and played by Groucho Marx!) sends a couple of guys over to pull Jackie out of retirement for one last hit on a snitch (played by Mickey Rooney). Resistant at first, he eventually relents and gets put in the same prison as Mickey so he can do the hit. But before that can happen, someone slips "the Great One" some LSD, Gleason trips balls, and his whole worldview is blown away. In a sense, it almost becomes a PRO-drug movie if you can believe it! While he's in the slammer, his house becomes a playground for his daughter's hippie friends, and eventually Carol Channing, dressed in full pirate regalia leads the kids in a siege of God's boat. Oh, and did I mention there's musical numbers? Or that it was endorsed by Timothy Leary? Yeah, this is one strange piece of celluloid - worth watching for its jaw-dropping absurdity, the parade of famous Hollywood actors who somehow signed on for this, and its time-capsule quality, but mostly because the scene where Jackie Gleason trips in his prison cell is positively epic.
1964 - Industria Cinematografica Apolo (Brazil) - D/S: Jose Mojica Marins
Today's selection marks the occasion of its creator's 78th birthday. Jose Mojica Marins, better known to the world as Coffin Joe, was born on March 13, 1936, and is still alive and kicking, frequently seen on tv in his native Brazil. He created the Coffin Joe character in 1963, for this film, possibly his greatest work, At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul. Marins described the conception of Coffin Joe in a 2006 interview:
"In a dream saw a figure dragging me to a cemetery. Soon he left me in front of a headstone, there were two dates, of my birth and my death. People at home were very frightened, called a Priest because they thought I was possessed. I woke up screaming, and at that time decided to do a movie unlike anything I had done. He was born at that moment, the character would become a legend: Coffin Joe. The character began to take shape in my mind and in my life."
This was the first Coffin Joe film. It was followed by This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967), and, forty years later, Embodiment of Evil (2008), completing what is known as the Coffin Joe Trilogy. He revived Coffin Joe many times over the years, though not always as the central character, in films including Awakening of the Beast (1970), The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974), and Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (1978).
And now, our feature presentation.
Special bonus feature, Damned: The Strange World of Jose Mojica Marins (2001 documentary)
1971 - A South Street Production - D: Michael Levesque - S: Stephen Oliver, D.J. Anderson, Duece Berry, Billy Gray, Barry McGuire, Severn Darden
The Psychotronic Movie the Week is back and this time I've got a real doozy for 'ya, a one of a kind classic brought to you by the king of the biker flicks, Joe Solomon. A biker gang called The Devil's Advocates come across a cult of Satanic monks in the California desert. One of the gang's "mamas" is cast under a spell in her sleep and led into an occult ritual that weds her to the Devil. When she returns to the Advocates she bites her old man and turns him into a werewolf who rips apart another gang member and his woman who had split from camp to go get it on. The gang buries the dead the next morning and move on, but every night more grisly attacks follow. This one drags a bit in the middle, but the first and final acts are pure psychotronic bliss and it features a great guitar soundtrack by Don Gere, enjoy!
1963 - Fairway International Pictures - D: James Landis - S: Arch Hall, Jr., Richard Walden, Marilyn Manning, Don Russell, Helen Hovey
Arch Hall, Jr. only appeared in a handful of films in the early 1960s, all produced by his father, Arch Hall, Sr., but his star will shine forever in the psychotronic universe for his turns in The Choppers, Eegah!, Wild Guitar, and this, perhaps his greatest moment. He plays the sadist of the title, Charlie Tibbs, who, along with his mute girlfriend Judy, terrorize a trio of teachers who stall out in the desert on their way to a ballgame at Dodger Stadium. Hall is a man possessed in this film - a sneering psycho ready to snap at any moment. If you notice some sharp camera work while you're watching, there's good reason for that, as the cinematographer was none other than a young Vilmos Zsigmond, who had previously worked on Ray Dennis Steckler's The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, but would go on to do award winning work on films such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encouters of the Third Kind, Blow Out, and The Deer Hunter.
1965 - Allied Artists - D: Robert Gaffney - S: Marilyn Hanold, James Karen, Lou Cutell
In The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon's review of Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster said it all in the first two sentences: "Don't miss. It's the worst." The plot is about a Martian princess and her flamboyant dwarf assistant coming to Earth in search of women to help repopulate their planet. They both have hilariously un-subtle homoerotic undertones. There's an android astronaut named Frank (the "Frankenstein" of the title), who ends up fighting the Martians' giant monster they keep chained up in their spaceship (played by an uncredited Bruce Glover). There's also some groovy soundtrack music, including "That's the Way It's Got to Be" by the Poets. And that's pretty much it. All in all, a mindless but fun flick that cruises along and delivers plenty of laughs. This was Gaffney's only credit as a director, but he later showed up as the DP on Superfly T.N.T. in 1973. Enjoy!
