Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

... aka: Graveyard Tramps

Directed by:
Denis Sanders

A man with no previous history of heart trouble is found dead of a heart attack in his hotel room. Cause of death? Well, according to the coroner something like "extreme sexual exhaustion," or, in layman's terms, he's been screwed to death. And thus begins a series of strange events in a small California town called Peckham that will soon have a large body count attached to its name. Neil Agar (William Smith), a government agent with the U.S. Department of Security, shows up to investigate the death of the first victim (another government employee) and teams up with both local law enforcement officer Captain Peters (the always great Cliff Osmond, previous seen in the women-in-prison favorite Sweet Sugar) and meek, reserved lab archivist Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri aka 1968 Playboy Playmate of the Year "Angela Dorian," in her final film role) to get to the bottom of things. As more dead bodies turn up, clues eventually lead them back to the Brandt Research Facility, where mysterious, shade-wearing beauty Dr. Susan Harris (an incredibly enticing Anitra Ford) is up to some rather bizarre experiments.

This is a great example of a well-executed drive-in movie. It certainly doesn't qualify as a so-bad-it's-good film like some have stated simply because it's technically well-made and completely self-aware of what it is. The makers are certainly in on the joke and just decide to run with it; injecting humor whenever possibly without compromising the flow of the plot. I laughed a lot watching this and much of the dialogue is intentionally tongue-in-cheek and goofy. However, the primary objective here is sexploitation and this doesn't skimp on that either with the sultry, slinky and gorgeous Ford (a former showcase model on The Price Is Right), the voluptuous Vetri and nearly every other female in the cast losing their clothes at one point or another. Bee Girls pretty much nails its goal of being a silly, fun T&A spoof of horror and science fiction films and, surprisingly enough, even many "serious" critics like Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin have sung its praises over the years.

The bee girls themselves aren't really monsters in the traditional sense like, say, The Wasp Woman from the classic Corman film, so don't go in expecting it. Instead, these lethal ladies just wear sunglasses when they're about to kill because their eyeballs turn black. We never really get to see any of them in the act of killing one of their victims either, but we do get to see a hilarious and awesome conversion sequence toward the end that involves spreading a nude woman with some sticky white substance, putting her in a radioactive chamber, covering her with bees and then shooting her with a laser beam.

I also have to defend this movie on several other fronts, in particular frequent digs at the acting and cinematography. The performances are actually not at all awful like some out there will say. If you want awful, watch one of today's low budget movies and you'll quickly realize the people in this one are like Oscar contenders by comparison. I thought each of the leads did a good enough job with what they had to work with. Secondly, the film is also not as dark and poorly shot as some state. My guess is that they've watched the public domain print of the film and not the legit DVD version from MGM (part of their "Midnite Movies" line). The late Gary Graver shot the movie and did a competent job of it. I also loved the music score from Charles Bernstein, which is delightfully bizarre and perfect for the material.

The supporting cast includes lots of exploitation movie vets like Ben Hammer, Cliff Emmich, Beverly Powers and Ray Dennis Steckler and Ted V. Mikels alum Herb Robins. Some of the "worker bees" are played by sex film stars Rene Bond, Sharon Kelly (later hardcore actress Colleen Brennan) and Kathy Hilton. Writer Nicholas Meyer would receive a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination just a few years later for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) and went on to a fairly successful career as a director starting with Time After Time (1979).

★★★

Grave of the Vampire (1972)

... aka: Bébé vampire (Baby Vampire)
... aka: Die Gruft der Dämonen (Crypt of the Demons)
... aka: Die Gruft des Grauens (The Crypt of Horror)
... aka: La bara del vampiro (The Vampire's Coffin)
... aka: La tomba del vampiro (The Vampire's Grave)
... aka: Seed of Terror

Directed by:
John Hayes

College girl Leslie Hollander (Kitty Vallacher) and her boyfriend Paul (Jay Scott) pick the wrong night to go to the graveyard to make out. After he proposes to her (aw, how romantic!), undead-looking vampire Caleb Croft (Michael Pataki) comes crawling out of his tomb, breaks the boyfriend's back against a gravestone, feeds on him and then pulls Leslie into an empty grave and rapes her. She's taken to a hospital to recover, while police officers Lieutenant Panzer (Eric Mason) and Sergeant Duffy (William Guhl) are put on the case. With a missing corpse, one dead body completely drained of blood and a hysterical sexual assault victim on their hands, the officers have their work cut out for them. Panzer, however, isn't above thinking something supernatural may be at play, especially after Leslie responds in horror to a photo of Caleb (who's been dead and buried for three years) he shows her, but he's decapitated before he can get too involved in the investigation. Before leaving the hospital, Leslie's doctor informs her that she's pregnant and recommends an abortion. According to tests, what's inside her womb "isn't a human being" and somewhat parasitic. Thinking she's carrying her dead fiance's baby, Leslie refuses and takes off with Olga (Lieux Dressler), her roommate at the hospital who'd helped to take care of her.

Baby James is born 9 months later. Sickly and with a grey complexion, Olga keeps suggesting Leslie take the boy to the hospital because he won't drink milk. By accident, they discover that the baby will however drink blood. And that's what Leslie feeds it. Instead of a blood pump, she uses a syringe to drain her own blood to put into baby bottles. She somehow manages to raise James to adulthood; passing away soon after, a withered old lady from the hell she's put her body through. A now-grown James (William Smith) has vengeance on his mind; wanting to eliminate the man who raped and impregnated his mother and abandoned them. Knowing he likes to be around fresh young blood, James manages to track pops to a college, where he teaches an extremely popular night class on the occult under the alias Professor Adrian Lockwood.

James ends up enrolling in his father's class, where he meets a pair of much-different roommates; Anne Arthur (Lyn Peters) and Anita Jacoby (Diane Holden). Both James and Caleb are drawn to Anne; Caleb because she resembles his late wife Sarah and James because she's intelligent, compassionate and mature (plus he knows it'll piss off dad if he gets her first). Anita gets put on the back burner, but she's OK with that and has other objectives in mind. She's been doing her research and realizes that her professor is actually a centuries old vampire named Charles Croydon. Interestingly, she just wants him to turn her into a vampire. He slashes her throat instead and leaves her in the shower for her terrified roommate to find her. Charles / Caleb / Adrian finally decides to hold a séance with some of his favorite students (James and Anne included), where he attempts to put his dead wife's soul into Anne's body, leading to a face-off between absent father and bastard son.

Clearly very low-budget and hampered somewhat by such, this still offers enough creepy moments and does enough interesting things with standard vampire mythology to keep it feeling at least somewhat fresh. The vampire baby and half-vampire offspring angles have been done numerous times since this was made, but they were actually novel and quite unique concepts in 1972, and this really should be given credit for that. It also gives its two lead actors; both regular presences in exploitation and horror films, a chance to shine. Pataki makes for an excellent, classy-yet-cruel and very cold-blooded vampire, and this is one of the better actual roles and performances for Smith, who seems somewhat miscast but still does an acceptable job. The screenplay is credited to both the director and David Chase and was (supposedly) based on Chase's novel "The Still Life." It was filmed in just 11 days for about 50,000 dollars.

Hayes also made numerous soft and hard core films (using the alias "Harold Perkins" for the latter) and the genre films Dream No Evil (1971), Garden of the Dead (1972), which played on a double bill with Grave, and End of the World (1977) starring Christopher Lee. Chase went on to mostly TV work; writing numerous episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker before graduating to writing and directing such acclaimed shows as I'll Fly Away and The Sopranos. Grave has slipped into the public domain, so primarily subpar prints of the film are floating around. A restored, high definition print (which I clearly didn't watch!) was released earlier this year by Retromedia. Regardless of what shape you find it in, it's worth a look.

★★★

Memorial Valley Massacre (1988)

...aka: Memorial Day

...aka: Valley of Death

Directed by:

Robert C. Hughes

Here’s a spirited little low-budget movie from the late 80s, coming from complete video obscurity to wide release on many horror DVD multi packs. It's far from sheer slasher perfection and is pretty forgettable overall, but it's entertaining while it lasts, there's plenty of energy and an adequate massacre. A parade of cars, trucks, RVs and campers signal the opening of the new Memorial Valley Campground and Wilderness Area, cut deep the California wilderness and spearheaded by ruthless developer Allen Sangster (Cameron Mitchell, in a cameo), who has sunk a huge chuck of change into transforming the once tranquil area into a place of big business, with a shopping center, ski lodge, condos, etc. The construction crew decides to bail when a crewman mysteriously dies and a dead dog turns up in a well, but they open the place up to the public anyway, with no running water or restroom facilities. Allen's college-age son David (Mark Mears) shows up out of the blue for a summer job and gets on the bad side of harried head ranger George (John Kerry, no not that one), who's already stressed out enough as it is. So anyway, a variety of different people roll in... and start dying one by one. The murderer responsible turns out to be a filthy, long-haired, spear-chucking primitive cast-off dressed in animal furs who's been surviving out in the woods all by himself ever since he was a child.

It's pretty obvious the makers of this movie were very pro-environmental conservation and in a strange way the cave-dwelling killer is the walking, grunting personification of mother nature fighting back. One of the first victims is an obnoxious, obese kid who refuses to abide by the "no motorcycles or ATVs allowed in the park" rule and takes his four-wheeler out for a pollution-spilling spin. He's clothes-lined off his bike with a vine and has his neck snapped. Hope you enjoyed it because it's the only on-screen death for about the first hour. But there's a wide variety of other characters waiting around who are ripe for the picking off; the tacky suburbanite parents of the slain kid, three loud death-metal listening horny teens, six bikers (refreshingly two are black, three are women and most of them are pretty cool), a pretty female college student (Lesa Lee) who gets hooked up with David and many others. William Smith has a funny role as grizzled, booze-swilling ex war vet General Mintz, who's blown up inside his camper with his bubbly wife Pepper (Linda Honeyman).

Some victims are killed with various booby-traps, like a pit of spears a guy gets impaled on. There's an axing, some stabbings, a torching, three people crushed when a bulldozer pushes a truck down a hill on top of them and more. It's not all that gory per se, but the body count is high enough. I don't see anybody in this cast going on to win an Oscar anytime soon, but I still liked most of the amateurs they used. Especially good are Mears, who is genuinely talented and appealing in the lead (can't understand why he didn't do anymore film work after this) and Jimmy Justice, who's pretty charming as the camp caretaker. It was also a nice surprise to see 80s-90s cheese movie vixen Karen Russell (from MURDER WEAPON, TENEMENT and many others), using the alias "Dusty Rose," as a biker chick. Like I said, it's silly, flawed and far from a genre classic, but I still liked it.

★★

Maniac Cop 2 (1990)

Directed by:

William Lustig

After token pre-credits flashback footage, ex-policeman Matt Cordell (Robert Z'Dar) returns from the grave to get revenge on some of New York's finest, starting with those who put an end to his killing spree in the first film (Bruce Campbell and Laurene Landon). This time there's a cover-up subplot as Cordell's facially-scarred, ghostly avenger is after the corrupt cops who wrongfully sent him to prison where inmates slashed him up. His partner in crime (sort of) is a talkative, bearded serial killer (Leo Rossi) who is strangling strippers, while understandably perplexed officer Robert Davi, police psychiatrist Claudia Christian and others are hot on their trail. Larry Cohen's script gleefully stretches credibility to the limit, taking entertainingly wacky turns left and right, the cast (also including Michael Lerner, Clarence Williams III, Charles Napier, Claude Earl Jones, James Dixon, Sam Raimi and Danny Trejo) is good and director Lustig has a firm grip on the material, piling on the fast-paced action, violence, stunt work and pyro FX with engaging enthusiasm for his target audience. It also has one of the best car chase scenes I've ever seen. I haven't seen the original yet but I'm hoping it's at least half as fun as this one.

★★★