Takers, The (1971)

Directed by:
"Carlos Monsoya" (Carl Monson)

After beating a guy to death with a chain wrapped around his fist, middle aged E.J. (Fred Bush) and his bearded buddy Willie Boy (Coe Bart, who wouldn't look out of place hanging out at Spahn Ranch with Charles Manson and company) decide to spread some more 70s biker movie joy elsewhere. While out riding around, they spot a couple of hippie girls, including sleaze movie workhorse Kathy Hilton, standing on the sidewalk in the rain. They pull up to them and offer them a ride. "You got any grass?" one responds. They sure do, along with some other stuff. Next thing we know they're back at someone's place smoking weed, dropping acid and having near hardcore sex in multiple positions in multiple places, like in the shower and on some puke green shag carpet. A cheap kaleidoscopic effect is added to show how much they're trippin. After the bikers have their fill, they head off for another adventure. We can assume they left the girls unsatisfied. While there's no scene of them actually leaving, we do hear a voice-over of one girls shrieking "You bastards! You bastards!"

E.J. and Willie now "need some bread" so they pull into a gas station, tell the attendant they want plugs for their bikes and then shoot him dead, pick his pockets and rob a cash box... all in broad daylight and with a bunch of other cars and people around them. They then venture over to a bus stop where aspiring lingerie model Barbie ("Susan Apple" / Anna Travers) is waiting for a ride. When her well-to-do married friend Laura ("Kim Kiya" / Vicki Carbe) picks her up, the bikers menace them for a little bit then let them drive off. But they haven't exactly let them go and instead tail behind them to their neighborhood so they can then locate their car at their own leisure. Getting burnt out on burnt out hippie chicks has made E.J. want more "classy cunts." You know, "some educated social type broads."

Soon after the bikers break in, they discover they're in luck: Laura's husband Jack is away on business and won't be back for an entire week. So why not just "take" what they want and take their sweet time getting it? Barbie and Laura are pushed, knocked down, slapped in the face, screamed at and stripped naked. They're called "bitches" and "sluts," are forced to drink booze, threatened with a gun and have their bare asses slapped. And, naturally, they also have to become sex slaves for the men, something that takes up most of the time here.

All things considered, Barbie is a good sport about what's going on and keeps her wits about her and her sarcastic sense of humor. She's even kind enough to remove her undies for one of the bikers before telling him to get on with it. Laura, on the other hand, is traumatized at first but Barbie encourages her to just play along until they leave and "keep taking your no baby pill" so she's doesn't get knocked up. Eventually, Barbie develops Stockholm Syndrome and actually starts liking sex with one of the goons. At night, both ladies have to cram their asses onto a small bed with their two attackers and have their ankles chained to the footboard.

Distributed theatrically by Harry Novak and his Boxoffice International Pictures, The Takers was likely filmed over the course of just a few days. It's scuzzy and cheap, the plot is bare bones, the camerawork is shoddy with lots of out of focus shots and the suspense and tension generated by the home invasion / hostage premise is pretty much nil. Instead, this focuses its energies on the nudity and sex. I suppose on those terms this does what it sets out do as everyone is naked nearly the entire time. A few of the one liners and the joke at the very end (featuring the director in a cameo) are actually pretty funny.

Co-star Vicki Carbe, who also acted as "Victoria Wales," was a September 1963 Playboy Playmate of the Month under the name Victoria Valentino. In 2014, she was in the news as one of many women to come forward accusing Bill Cosby of raping her. Her claims stretched back to a 1969 incident when she and then-roommate, actress Meg Foster, went to Cosby's home and had their drinks drugged. Watching her here playing a woman force fed alcohol to loosen her up by a sex predator shortly after the alleged incident with Cosby occurred adds an extra layer of discomfort to the proceedings.

The 2003 Special Edition DVD from Something Weird pairs this up with the same director's Booby Trap (1970); another Novak / Boxoffice International release.

★1/2

Child, The (1977)

... aka: Kill and Go Hide
... aka: La casa degli zombi
... aka: Zombie Child

Directed by:
Robert Voskanian

Alicianne Del Mar (Laurel Barnett) decides to travel back to the small country town she grew up in to take a live-in nanny position at the Nordon home. On her way there, she runs her car off the road to avoid a barrel, decides to walk the rest of the way and crosses paths with elderly, gossipy widow Mrs. Whitfield (Ruth Ballen), who invites her inside for tea and promptly informs her that her new charge Rosalie (Rosalie Cole) is a strange, trouble-making little girl whose now deceased mother had spent much of her time in mental institutions. Mrs. Whitfield also insists Alicianne stay on the path and not wander into the woods since she's been hearing strange noises there and small animals have recently been discovered dead. Since the opening credits sequence shows Rosalie feeding a kitten to some kind of cemetery ghoul, we already known poor Alicianne's gonna have her hands full. Still, since she lost both of her parents at a young age and Rosalie has recently lost her mother, Alicianne figures they'll relate on some level.

Upon arriving at the Nordon home, Alicianne meets patriarch Joshua (Frank Janson), a cranky old prick who warns "I hope you're not a nervous woman," as well as Joshua's grown son Len (Richard Hanners) and, of course, young Rosalie (who actually looks like a teenager; not the little girl I was expecting). There's also an Chinese gardener (Slosson Bing Jong) who works there but his few scenes seem removed from the rest of the film and he's not once seen in the same shot with anyone else from the cast, possibly because his scenes were added later on. Alicianne discovers that Rosalie is a pouty, obnoxious little brat who hates other kids ("Aw, they're all dumb!"), grapefruit ("I hate grapefruit!") and donuts ("Donuts!?"), gets pissed at Alicianne for going horseback riding with her older brother and giggles at a story her father tells her about a bunch of boy scouts who got poisoned by oleander sap and died. Rosalie also enjoys drawing morbid pictures and makes frequent midnight trips to the cemetery to visit her "friends." Her "friends" turn out to be a bunch of zombies that she's summoned forth and controls to do her bidding. And her bidding is basically to kill anyone who rubs her the wrong way.

Why Rosalie even wants everyone dead is one of many muddled story points you'll encounter in this film. I've seen this advertised as a revenge picture, but I could never quite figure out just who exactly the little psycho was going after, or why she was going after them. We never learn for sure if the mother had actually been murdered or just died of natural causes. However, I'm willing to accept that Rosalie could just be mad about her mother's death and doesn't know how to cope. Or she's simply just evil. She basically just comes off like a whiny little beotch who uses her zombie pals to punish people who don't let her get her way. And her powers (vague and unexplained as they may be) extend beyond just the zombies, as she's also able to make inanimate objects move, including a scarecrow that she brings to life to kill when the zombies are too busy eating kittens.

What I can't accept is the horrendous acting and dialogue. It's difficult to blame the actors so much because it appears that their dialogue was all dubbed in later. Still, you'd be hard pressed to find more stilted, awkward and unnatural- sounding dialogue readings than you'll find in this film. Nothing that comes out of anyone's mouth is delivered with the least bit of believability or conviction. And I mean nothing. The editing is done with the same level of ineptitude, and it has a habit of switching from night to day back to night again in the same scene. The film has a early America period setting for some reason, which seems to be the 1920s, though not all of the clothing and home decor really bespeak that era.

It's not all bad news, though. The film does have some nice atmospheric, foggy moments here and there, and a couple of the dialogue-free sequences (such as when our heroine has a nightmare where she's dancing with Len and he turns into the scarecrow) are effective. There's enough gore to please (faces ripped off, an eyeball gouging, a head getting chopped with an axe, etc.), the zombie designs by Jay Owens (mostly saved for the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD-inspired finale) are pretty good and I quite liked the bizarre polymoog synthesizer soundtrack. It's pretty slow-going until near the end, when Alicianne and Len are besieged by a horde of zombies and try to barricade themselves inside a shed. Even these scenes are partially spoiled because our "heroine" proves to be utterly useless and just stands around shrieking the entire time, refusing to be of much help to poor Len as he tries to fight off the ghouls.

Released theatrically by Boxoffice International (and executive produced by Harry Novak), this title has been well-serviced on both VHS (Paragon, Best and Monterey were but a few of the distributors) and DVD (by Something Weird). The Canadian release title was Zombie Child.

★★