The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (30 page)

Bela Lugosi is best remembered for bringing Bram Stoker's literary creature Dracula to blood-curdling life on the screen. It was his first North American role, and it branded him for life as a movie creature of the night. At his best he was spine-tingling, at his worst (unfortunately there are too many examples to mention them all) he became a caricature of himself, grimacing into the camera like a madman with a day pass.

Most people under the age of 25 only know about him via Martin Landau's Academy Award-winning portrayal of him in Tim Burton's bio-pic
Ed Wood
. It is a shame because, while Landau gives an impressive performance, the real Lugosi was nothing like the foul-mouthed, pathetic drug addict seen in the movie. “I particularly found it appalling because he was a real European gentleman,” Lugosi friend, and editor of the legendary
Famous Monsters of Filmland
Forrest J. Ackerman told me in 1995. “I never heard him say so much as a ‘damn' or a ‘hell,' and they had him saying absolutely scatological things about Boris Karloff that he never would have uttered in real life.” The depiction of Lugosi in the film is bittersweet and very effective, despite bordering on parody and not giving him his due. He was a classically trained actor, who, like Boris Karloff and Vincent Price, found a niche in horror.
Dracula
is his towering achievement, but he made several other chillers that deserve to be remembered before his debilitating morphine habit dulled his on-screen presence. Chief among them was a low-budget thriller shot after the filming of
Dracula
.

In
White Zombie
(yes, rocker Rob Zombie cribbed the name) Lugosi played the charismatic Murder Legendre, the leader of a legion of zombies on a Haitian sugar plantation. He makes a zombifying potion for Monsieur Beaumont (Robert Frazer), a neighboring plantation owner who has coaxed a young couple to be married on his property. Beaumont lures the couple to his spread because he is secretly in love with Madeline (Madge Bellamy), the soon-to-be wife of the young couple. He slips the bride the evil brew, and after drinking it she appears to die, and the wedding is called off. Actually she has simply been transformed into a soulless zombie spouse for Beaumont!

As an emotionless zombie, she's no barrel of laughs, and Beaumont soon tires of her, asking Legendre to change her back. He refuses, and instead adds Beaumont to his zombie army. When Madeline's “widowed” almost-husband is tipped by a local priest that his beloved might not be dead, but rather
undead
, he seeks her out.

By today's standards
White Zombie
moves v-e-r-y slowly, but the movie just drips with atmosphere, and for a low-budget quickie, looks great. To save money, sets from
Dracula
,
Frankenstein
, and
King Kong
were recycled to create the creepy Haitian landscape where zombies rule and people foolishly trust a guy named “Murder.” The scene in which Beaumont is led through an old mill surrounded by blank-faced zombies cranking a huge wooden wheel particularly resonates, makes great use of the sets, and is as effective as any image from
Dracula
or
Frankenstein
.

Snail-like pacing aside,
White Zombie
holds up because of the terrific performance from Lugosi (with amazing makeup from Jack Pierce, who created the looks for Frankenstein, the Mummy, and the Wolfman). His spellbinding Legendre is a hypnotic presence — noble and threatening — who commands attention when he is on screen. On a historical note,
White Zombie
was the first zombie movie, and set the template for virtually all that followed.

Wild in the Streets
is a quirky, low-budget film based on the 1960s ethic of never trusting anyone over 30. Darker than the usual teen fare, this satire poked holes in the peace and love ideals of the hippie generation.

This is one of those movies that was released at just the right time to cash in on the Zeitgeist of a generation. Released in the hot summer of 1968, when more than half of the population of the United States was under 25 years of age, the movie exposed the collective power of the young.

James Dean lookalike Christopher Jones plays the charismatic Max Frost. Jones was a rising star in Hollywood, having already played the lead in the television series
The Legend of Jesse James
for 20th Century Fox. Studio publicists reported at the time that his smoldering good looks attracted more fan mail than any actor since Tyrone Power.

In the film, following a hell-raising youth, Frost becomes a multi-millionaire rock star. Convinced that he will not live to see age 30, Max hatches a plan to take over the government. Asked by Senate hopeful Jerry Fergus (Hal Holbrook) to sing at a political rally, Frost uses the opportunity to preach youth empowerment in a song called “14 or Fight.” Demanding that the voting age be lowered to 14, he calls for a demonstration on Sunset Strip.

A colorful cast of characters supports Frost in his crusade. His entourage included Sally LeRoy (Diane Varsi), described as “former child star and acidhead”; drummer, anthropologist, and author of
The Aborigine Cookbook
Stanley X (Richard Pryor in his first film role); Fuji Elly (May Ishihara), “Japanese typewriter heiress and beach bum”; a one-handed horn player, The Hook (Larry Bishop); and Billy Cage, a 15-year-old Harvard Business School graduate. Together they form an alliance to act on Frost's mad scheme.

Frost solidifies his relationship with Fergus after thousands of kids show up for the Sunset Strip demonstration. To end the riot the California legislature agrees to lower the voting age to 15, and with the newfound teen support Fergus wins his seat in the Senate. Soon an emergency election must be held to replace a dead 84-year-old senator. It is decided that Sally LeRoy will run for the coveted seat, but unfortunately senators must be at least 25 years old. Sally turns 25 the day before the election, and is eligible to run. Max becomes her campaign manager, penning a song with the memorable couplet, “Sally LeRoy / She's old enough for Congress, boy.”

Of course, she wins; there'd be no movie otherwise. Her first order of business is to get the age limit for all elected offices lowered to 14. To insure the passage of the law, the entourage lace Washington D.C.'s water supply with lsd. High and hallucinating, D.C.'s powerbrokers pass the law, smoothing the way for Frost to run for president.

Frost wins the Oval Office, and immediately imprisons everyone over 30 in concentration camps where they wear dark robes and are perpetually stoned on lsd. Max is victorious, but all is not well. The next generation has a new slogan, “We're gonna put everybody over 10 out of business.”

Wild in the Streets
was American International Pictures biggest budget picture to date. Normally specializing in fast and dirty exploitation and horror flicks, aip upped the ante with this one, achieving the mainstream success that usually eluded them. The theme song, “The Shape of Things to Come” (credited to Max Frost and The Troopers) became a Top 30 hit, and the film even earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Editing (it lost to
Bullitt
).

The thing that impresses me about
Wild in the Streets
is how skillfully the director Barry Shear and screenwriter Robert Thom pegged the anarchic feel and excitement of the baby boomers' youth movement. If you weren't around in the '60s (or can't remember them), this film is a fascinating time capsule of the decade's mores, clothes, and music. There is a sense that anything could happen, and in this film, it does. To modern eyes
Wild in the Streets
seems campy, in particular a scene in which a hospital gown-clad Shelley Winters, as Frost's overbearing mother, is high on lsd, scaling a chain link fence, screaming, “Feathers! I must have feathers!” Certainly not the most dignified moment in Ms Winters' career, but it does display the drug paranoia that was rampant in the late '60s. With Timothy Leary's mantra of “Tune In, Turn On, and Drop Out,” burned into the public's consciousness,
Wild in the Streets
was seen as an update of
Reefer Madness
, with groovy camera angles and cutting edge graphics.

Even though the film is played as a satire, its message was taken seriously by some in the “establishment.” During the 1968 Presidential Convention the Mayor of Chicago hired security to protect the water supplies of the city from being laced with lsd. Crazy man, crazy.

John Boorman is an ambitious filmmaker. He spikes his films with high-minded ideas, examining the issues that lie at the very core of human existence. His films create new worlds, where outside forces — sometimes natural, sometimes supernatural — collide with the lives of ordinary folk. When he is good, as in
Deliverance
, he hits all the right notes, pitting people of different cultures against one another with unpredictable and entertaining results. But when he is bad, he is very, very bad.

Well intentioned though they may be, movies like
The Exorcist II: The Heretic
and
Excalibur
were noble failures. Filled with interesting mythology, these films, like many in the Boorman canon, collapse under their own weight. Pretentious and just a bit loopy, they are unintentionally funny, although not nearly as bizarre as his 1974 space opera
Zardoz
.

As writer and director of
Zardoz
(Wizard of oz, get it?) Boorman has to shoulder the blame for the overblown philosophy behind the film. He set the movie in the year 2293, on an Earth where most of mankind has devolved into “Brutals.” They live in the Outlands and worship a giant floating stone head named Zardoz, who spouts a message of hatred toward humans and vomits weapons from his large gaping mouth to arm his mindless followers. “The gun is good,” he says. “The penis is evil.” During one of the visits a Brutal named Zed (Sean Connery) climbs aboard the huge head only to discover a man (Arthur Frayn) in a robe. Zardoz isn't an omnipotent being, but simply a man pretending to be a god. Confused, frustrated, and looking ridiculous in his racy red loincloth, Zed kills the head's aviator.

He rides the head to the Vortex, an area Zed believes to be Heaven. He soon learns that the Vortex is not Heaven, but a land inhabited by the Eternals who are protected from the Brutals by an invisible shield. The Eternals are a race of genetically superior, but sexually impotent people who live forever within the boundaries of the shield. They are hard-hearted and bored of life, so filled with ennui that many of them have become Apathetics, who reject all life activities. Zed is taken prisoner by the Eternals, one of whom, May (Sara Kestleman), wants to breed him with the women of the Vortex, to bring much-needed new life to their barren existence. Another woman, the beautiful Consuella (Charlotte Rampling), is both attracted and repulsed by Zed, and wants him destroyed.

The pace picks up at this point, with Zed making love to May, being blinded by Consuella, wowing the Eternals with an erection, wearing a bridal gown, and finally bringing the Apathetics to action while goading the Eternals into seeking death.

I think Boorman meant
Zardoz
to be a comment on the social ills plaguing America in the years following the Second World War. Instead he packs the movie with broad, unfinished ideas without filling in the fine print. Is he suggesting that we are drifting away from the traditional morality of religion and worshiping false gods? Perhaps he's concerned about a nation that is turning more violent, literally becoming “Brutals.” Or could it be that we have become apathetic layabouts? Are the elderly Apathetics, shipped off to an out-of-the-way structure and ignored, an allegory for the aged in our society? There is something to be said for all these themes, but Boorman doesn't take a point of view, he simply layers one hypothesis on top of another until they become a jumbled mess. In the hands of a better storyteller some of this might have worked, but Boorman goes for substance over coherence.

Now for the fun part. Viewed through today's eyes
Zardoz
seems hopelessly dated, like a particularly cheesy episode of
Battlestar Galactica
. Connery is a sight with his perfect 1970s porn-star hair and red diaper-cum-hot pants. With his large moustache and an ammo belt crisscrossed around his bare chest he looks like a gay mercenary, or maybe the sixth member of the Village People. The women fare a little better, particularly Consuella. In her see-through top she looks fit for a night on the dance floor at Studio 54.

If the costumes (or in most cases the lack of costumes) are unintentionally hilarious, the dialogue is downright side-splitting. Of course the famous line, “The gun is good. The penis is evil,” is ripe for ridicule, but there are many howlers, always delivered with great significance, that invite laughter. “An old man calls me,” says Zed. “The voice of the turtle is heard in the land.” Woody Allen would have a hard time topping the comedic lines in
Zardoz
. In fact, 20th Century Fox was so concerned that people wouldn't know what to make of the movie's unintentional humor they forced Boorman to add a prologue suggesting that
Zardoz
is a spoof.

Zardoz
would have destroyed the career of a lesser actor, but Sean Connery good-naturedly romps through this material, and to this day counts it as one of his favorite movies. It seems like a strange role for the former “Bond,
James
Bond” to take on, but Boorman remembers that “Sean was so desperate for film work at the time that he actually agreed to do this movie.” It is a testament to Connery's charisma that his career survived
Zardoz
, but his mugging and overacting provide several truly entertaining moments.

If you want to see great serious '70s science fiction, rent
Slaughter-house Five
,
Silent Running
, or
The Andromeda Strain
, but if you're in the mood for an overblown, hilarious mock-serious space drama, you can't do any better than
Zardoz
.

THE END . . . FADE TO BLACK