Avere vent'anni (1978)

... aka: Being Twenty
... aka: To Be Twenty
... aka: Twenty Years Old

Directed by:
Fernando Di Leo

"I was 20. No one can ever tell me it was the best time of our lives." ~ Paul Nizan, French philosopher and writer

I sought this out because for a long time it was listed as a horror film on IMDb. It's really not, but does boast a super shocker of an ending right out of Last House on the Left, so I guess in that regard it qualifies. In either case, this is much better than the other films I've seen from director Di Leo, who also made the senseless sexed-up giallo SLAUGHTER HOTEL (1971) with Klaus Kinski and Rosalba Neri and the Last House-inspired 'terror' flick VACATION FOR A MASSACRE (1980) with Joe Dallesandro. Doe-eyed, pouty blonde Lia (Gloria Guida) meets hot blooded brunette Tina (Lilli Carati) on the beach and the two instantly hit it off. After all, they're both young, hot and pissed off... and neither has any clue what to do with themselves. Both girls are like many other young adults their age; first and foremost, life is about having fun. They're rebellious, carefree, aimless and not quite ready to completely grow up yet. They are, however, both fully aware of their attractiveness and know just how to use it to get their way. Clad in short shorts and flimsy tops minus a bra and without a dime to their name, the two young ladies hit the road looking for a lift. They pass on a ride and money from a moralizing lesbian in a sports car who tells them that "whores have more tact" than they do. Hungry, they decide to shoplift dinner from a supermarket. They also use their feminine wiles to get free coffee and offer an old man a blow job for a pack of Marlboro's. With the price of cigarettes these days, that's a bargain.

Lia knows of a group living commune called Piazza Dante where they can stay for awhile. An old lady tells them it's full of "queers, whores and druggies," but that does not deter them. Upon arriving, they meet the commune's owner Nazariota (Vittorio Caprioli), who's broke and wants the girls to pay their due by "communicating" with the men there. Tina is just fine with that arrangement. Unfortunately, most of the men there stink and stay zonked out most of the time from all the drugs they do. One tells her "Sex is for people who don't know how to love." Tina eventually finds a guy she's interested in; Rico (Ray Lovelock), who's also a druggie and drop out but more her type so she's willing to work with him. Also living there are Patrizia (Lucio Fulci regular Daniela Doria), a short-haired feminist mother of triplets, and Arguinas (Leopoldo Mastelloni), a pacifist in white face paint who supposedly hasn't moved from his meditative position in three months and keeps talking about the "Celestial Father." Though these people seem strange at first, you actually begin to sort of like them, especially when the police start hassling the group.

A documentary filmmaker shows up wanting to make "an analytical film on human relationships" and interviews the girls. Tina reveals that all her parents cared about was money and her maintaining her virginity until marriage, so she rebelled. Lia - who's quieter and more introspective than her outspoken friend - was raised in an orphanage run by unloving nuns and then was forced to become a housekeeper whose spinster boss made her have sex with her. The girls attempt to go straight by becoming door-to-door encyclopedia salesladies, which leads to numerous encounters with more colorful and / or lonely people. Tina starts masturbating for a professor and acts aroused when he mentions the world "culture" just to move some books, Lia turns down the advances of a rich lesbian when she tries to pay her for sex and both ladies decide to cheer up a lonely old widower the best way they know how. All things considered, things seem to be going alright... until police raid the commune and the two girls are ordered to leave Rome. If they don't return to their home towns by midnight the following day, they'll be put in jail.

Having no other real choice, Lia and Tina then hit the road and stop by a country restaurant for a bite to eat. There, they suggestively dance to some music from a jukebox... and inadvertently attract the attention of a dozen dangerous goons in the process. Everything leads up to a truly shocking finale telling the grim fate of the two girls, which is made all the more jarring because up until then we've just been following along with their (mostly) harmless and sometimes comical misadventures. Oddly, the much-lower-budgeted and less skillfully made American production The Young Cycle Girls (1978) from the same year also featured young women on the road trying to learn about life and love and all that and opted for the same style of ending. One wonders what the "message" of these two films may be. Is it that women should be punished for being independent, strong-willed or liberated, or is it that many men really, really resent women who are independent, strong-willed and liberated? Either way, the girls in both films pay the ultimate price in their quest for self-discovery at the hands of men who don't like their "teasing."

Guida and Carati were both mainstays of 70s and 80s soft-core and exploitation flicks and amassed dozens of credits apiece. Both look great in and out of their skimpy clothes and are featured in a number of sexy scenes (including a mild lesbian one with each other), but this movie goes beyond your usual sex flick. With its strong counter-culture youth rebellion mindset, I can even dub it 'The 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' of 70s sexploitation' whilst almost keeping a straight face. Most of the sex and nude scenes are at least plausibly worked in to the plot, there's a lot of sociopolitical commentary, name dropping of various famous politicians, philosophers and artists and much mention of the gender gap and the war of the sexes. At one point, three women even read from Valerie Solanas' deranged feminist ranting, "Scum Manifesto." The free-spirited weirdos, pacifists, whores, artists, runaways and druggies at the commune are portrayed as dancing to the beat of their own drummer only to have their party crashed by figures of authority (the police) and power (the gang). There's enough here for this to work on multiple levels, and with perhaps even multiple interpretations depending on the viewer.

Avere vent'anni first saw light on home video in the U.S. on the Private Screenings label; an outfit that specialized in erotica but most especially in imported Euro smut. Their release of the film (under the title To Be Twenty) is, as per their usual, cut, has terrible English-language dubbing, features a model on the box who is not in the film and has a new music score. In 2011, Raro Video released a decent 2 disc version of the film containing both the cut and uncut versions and in its original Italian language with English sub options.

★★★

Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)

... aka: And Frankenstein Created Woman
... aka: Frankenstein Made Woman

Directed by:
Terence Fisher

After THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN (1964), Hammer returned for a fourth go at their lucrative mad doctor series... but what could they do to mix things up? Why, make a female "monster," of course! A virtual unknown named Susan Denberg ended up with the part. Denberg was born in Germany under the name Dietlinde Zechner and raised primarily in Austria. In her late teens, the voluptuous green-eyed blonde became sick of the "provincial ways" of her home country and went to the UK; quickly finding work as a chorus dancer with the Bluebells of London. The group toured Europe and the U.S. and Susan decided to stick around once she came to Las Vegas and met her first husband; actor / singer Anthony Scotti (the union lasted just six months). From there, she migrated to Hollywood in an attempt to start an acting career. Warner Bros. was interested and tried to make her happen; giving her a supporting role in a film and holding a nationwide contest to choose a new stage name for her; all of which were rejected. The same month her debut film See You in Hell, Darling (aka The American Dream) premiered, Susan appeared in a pictorial in Playboy magazine, becoming the August 1966 Playmate for that month. She landed the lead role in this Hammer production shortly thereafter. It ended up being her final role and she was dubbed by another actress (Nikki Van der Zyl - who also dubbed Jenny Hanley in Hammer's SCARS OF DRACULA [1970]) in the final product due to her inappropriate accent.

Denberg celebrates her 22nd birthday at a London's Playboy Club.
Pictured (l-r): Denberg, Cushing, Fisher, Walters and producer Anthony Nelson Keys.

Denberg's Playmate data sheet tells of a young hopeful looking forward to a long acting career and enjoying the beach, the discos, the parties and fast cars while she's at it, but Denberg quickly burned out on drugs and the fast-paced show biz lifestyle. She had several affairs with co-stars that frequently made the tabloids (she was romantically linked to director Roman Polanski, singer / actor Sammy Davis Jr., actors Stuart Whitman, Trini Lopez, Charles Bronson, Sidney Poitier, Jim Brown and numerous others), developed bad drug and alcohol problems and sank into a deep depression after several years and had to spend time in a mental institution, where she received shock treatments. By 1968, at the age of just 24, her modeling and acting career was all but over aside from unflattering tabloid exposure and nude appearances in European adult magazines. In 1972, she emerged yet again with dyed black hair and was working as a topless bartender and nude dancer in a porno movie theater in Vienna. A 1974 suicide attempt landed her back in a mental asylum and she returned less than a year later to another institution, this time pregnant with child. Rumors circulated for years that she had committed suicide. In reality, she's still alive and still living in Austria to this day, where she apparently prefers the quiet life and doesn't like to grant interviews.

Of course the name here of most interest to horror fans will be top-billed Peter Cushing, in his fourth appearance as the well-intentioned albeit morally-challenged Baron Victor Frankenstein. At the end of Evil, Cushing's mad doctor was trapped in a cellar along with his monster creation as a lab fire engulfed the entire room and caused the castle to explode. At the beginning of this entry, the Baron is in some kind of primitive cryogenics chamber waiting to be resurrected, and that's just what his associate Doctor Hertz (Thorley Walters), who functions as sort of an alcoholic Jiminy Cricket throughout this tale, and troubled young assistant Hans Werner (Robert Morris) are about to do. With a jolt of electricity and some smelling salts, the Baron returns to life and he has such deep probing questions on his mind when he does, like why he'd been dead for an hour yet his soul never left his body. Though this entry is part of a series, the Baron here isn't the same Baron as in the previous films. His name does not proceed him. He isn't on the run from the law. It's almost as if he's playing the same guy but with a completely clean slate, which, of course, doesn't stay clean for too long.

The Baron's experiments are still essentially the same: to achieve immortality ("We have conquered death!"), though in this entry he goes about it in a completely different way that involves separating the soul from the body and transplanting said soul inside a new body. While the Baron is fine tuning his technique, Hans is having problems of his own. He has fallen in love with the local innkeeper's daughter Christina (Denberg), a meek girl with low self-esteem who walks with a hobble and keeps her mousy brown hair over half her face to conceal a hideous disfigurement. Hans doesn't mind any of that. He still loves her and vice versa. Troubles arise in the form of three obnoxious, though well-bred, local hooligans; Anton (Peter Blythe), Karl (Barry Warren) and Johann (Derek Fowlds), who frequent the tavern and get their jollies tormenting poor Christina. Hans gets into a brawl with all three that has to be broken up by the police. The thugs later sneak into the tavern and beat Christina's father (Alan MacNaughton) to death. Hans is blamed for the crime, goes to trial, is found guilty and is sentenced to death by guillotine; a fate that also befell his drunk father (Duncan Lamont) years earlier. Upon learning of her beloved's execution, Christina jumps off a bridge and drowns herself. Now the Baron has plenty of raw material to work with.

Blackmailing the jail keeper, the Baron and Hertz are able to acquire Hans' body. Townspeople also conveniently deliver the dead Christina right to their doorstep. The Baron extracts Hans' soul, puts it into Christina's body and then spends months operating on her face and body to restore her to pristine condition. When the bandages are removed, Christina is a beautiful blonde with partial amnesia who can't remember who she or anyone else is, or how she got there. She does however have vague memories of the past; enough to feel compelled to get revenge against the three thugs responsible for the deaths of Hans and her father. Using her newly-acquired beauty and seductive charms, she's easily able to lure all three men to their deaths. The film is, technically-speaking, well-crafted all the way around, with adequate production values and fine performances from everyone involved (despite the dub, Denberg herself shows definite signs of talent)... and yet I still couldn't help but be disappointed.

What I felt was a major letdown with this one was that a genuinely interesting premise goes completely to waste. The idea of a man's soul trapped inside a woman's body is an intriguing one rife with potential subtext, but this movie is having none of that. The male soul is interested in one thing and one thing only: revenge. There's no exploration of any kind of gender / sexual or identity war going on inside the new Christina. She is overtaken by the Hans part (sometimes even speaking in his voice) long enough to do the dirty work and that's it. In other words, potentially rich subject matter is cast aside in favor of a standard, predictable plot. The film certainly had time to do more with this idea but the soul-to-body transfer doesn't even occur until the last half hour and by then too much time has already been wasted. I suppose the script by "John Elder" (Anthony Hinds) is ultimately what's to blame for all of that. Perhaps I was expecting too much from this one. I just don't like seeing good ideas go to waste.

This was originally conceived as And Frankenstein Created Woman (titled to recall Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman [1956] starring Brigitte Bardot) and was going to be the follow-up to Hammer's second Frankenstein entry THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1958) but the project was shelved for awhile. In theaters, it frequently played on double bills with The Mummy's Shroud (1967), and was followed several years later by Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! (1969). Well-served by frequent TV showings and VHS and DVD releases over the years, Created received a Blu-ray release earlier this year from Millennium Media. Their release contains several episodes of the "World of Hammer" TV series, a documentary and a commentary track with actors Morris and Fowlds moderated by Jonathan Rigby.

★★1/2

Line of Fire (1991) [copyright 1988]

Directed by:
Bruce Cook

Never heard of this one? Well, that's probably because the only VHS release appears to have been on the Canadian label Astral Video. Another likely reason for this film's obscurity is that it's pretty much a huge misfire and can never quite decide just what kind of movie it wants to be. There are elements of survivalist film, teen comedy, redneck action, backwoods horror and quirky black humor, but none of it quite gels either together or apart. Terrible dialogue, long, boring stretches where nothing much happens and mostly awful acting don't help matters any either. World-famous botanist and professor Dr. Ian Cook Finch (Jerry Lee) organizes a trip into the California wilderness with five students. Graduate assistant Ed ("Steve" / Stuart Quan) is a short, nerdy Asian-American who knows karate, is used for annoying comic relief with his obsession with animal droppings and goes by the nickname "Dorf." Jason (Bobby Sands) is an alpha jock with a bleached mullet, April (Tracy Hatton) is a big-haired, big-breasted slut, Jamie (Brenda Vance) is a cheerleader with a morbid sense of humor and Freddie (Eric Bishop) isn't given much of a personality at all. The six stop by a gas station, get into a fight with a couple of rednecks and finally meet Sheriff John Hardash (Bob Walker), who pretty much tells them they're not wanted there and that he doesn't want any of their "preversions" up on his mountain.

The professor takes the students into the woods, where they walk around, collect water, soil, plant and scat samples, camp out, wash up in a creek and do other boring things while talking about nothing much in particular. This goes on for the entire first half of the movie and it's all utterly useless and boring. While all of that is going on, we get to see glimpses of deranged biochemist Omar Capulet (Manuel Alvarado) in action. Omar lives in a secluded cabin in the forest where he's attempting to create a new kind of cocaine and tends to cocoa plants in a lab / greenhouse while listening to "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" and watching It's a Wonderful Life on TV. Omar doesn't like intruders, so he sends out his huge, muscular idiot manservant Lummis (played by professional bodybuilder and 1980 Mr. America winner Gary Leonard) out to spy on the campers. Being the bumbling moron he is, Lummis destroys their car with a wrench and sledgehammer and attempts to shoot one of the ladies with a crossbow. She freaks out, falls and hits her head on a rock. The group splits up, with some going into town for help and the others setting out into the forest to find out what's going on. Eventually everyone clashes together at Omar's house.

There's a long karate fight between Lummis and Dorf (Quan is a trained martial artist who also had small roles in Big Trouble in Little China, License to Kill and numerous other action films), death by crossbow bolt, POV stalking camerawork, puking, the slutty girl in a wet t-shirt and a scene where the sheriff crashes a live TV broadcast with a polka band and dancers. At the very end, there's finally a tiny amount of blood when one of the students is tortured by getting his finger cut off, face drilled and teeth grinded down with a sander, and is shot in the head. Based on how light and goofy the majority of the rest of the movie is, this scene seems completely out of place, and therein lies another huge problem: This film is completely unable to find the right tone. It was filmed in North Fork, Bass Lake and Fresno, California in the Fall of 1987 and carries a 1988 copyright date, though the film wouldn't make its VHS debut until 1991. I have no idea whether it was screened theatrically or not but I seriously doubt it.

Though listed as different people on IMDb, I'm pretty sure this director is the same Bruce R. Cook who directed the bizarre Nightwish (1989) since several of the production people worked on both of those as well as Brian Yuzna's SOCIETY (1989). Executive producer Randolph Cohlan went on the make his own low budget genre movie: the werewolf film NIGHT SHADOW (1989). It also wasn't very good either (though better than this one), was barely released and also starred Vance and Quan.

★