Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) – Yeah, yeah, big B-movie guy who never watched this before, sue me.
It’s obvious that none of the people involved in creating this… thing (all marshaled together by writer/director/producer/star Harold P. Warren) had never made a movie before. It’s also a supportable contention that none of them had ever seen a movie before. Or any form of human interaction, for that matter. It’s truly a mind-boggling spectacle.
One overlooked feature which makes it all the more surreal is the almost complete lack of Foley SFX (i.e., the environmental and incidental sounds that are added back in in the studio when a film is shot without location sound, as this was). Aside from the occasional muted slam of a car door closing, there’s nothing — footsteps, doors, wind, cat-fight slaps… it’s all silent, punctuated only by inept vocal performances by non-thespians and a surprisingly competent (but utterly out-of-place) improv jazz score.
(But hey — I reconnected with an old friend on Facebook after I saw his name in the credits for having donated to the film’s restoration. What a weird world.)
The Big Gundown (1966) – The generic title is misleading, but it’s fun nonetheless: Lee Van Cleef is a former sheriff who hunts down bad guys in Texas out of the goodness of his heart, and Tomas Milian is a Mexican peasant on the run for raping and killing a twelve-year-old girl. Van Cleef tries to cut Milian off before he can get across the border to Mexico, and when Milian keeps worming out of his fingers… well, Van Cleef barrels right into Mexico after him.
The biggest problem is that the movie goes to great lengths to make Milian’s character sympathetic long before it calls into question his guilt for the rape/murder — it makes for some icky-feeling scenes: “Why’re the filmmakers trying to make me LIKE this guy?” But bonus points for including a clipped and buzz-cut Austrian baron (Gerald Halter) as a hired gun; his mechanical precision, along with waxed mustache and monocle, make a pointed contrast to the general grunginess of a spaghetti western.
It’s Alive (1974) – It’s been almost thirty years since I saw this last, and I’m glad to see my opinion stayed the same: Although it’s a mutant-killer-baby movie, it’s not really about the mutant-killer-baby. (And that’s a good thing, because the mutant-killer-baby FX — by a young, uncredited Rick Baker — are primitive, and best kept in the shadows.) It’s about the mother and father, especially John P. Ryan as the dad, dealing with the public humiliation and scrutiny while denying any kinship with this “thing” that killed everyone in the delivery room except its mom (good thing he was off in the waiting room smoking with the other fathers), then escaped through the skylight and went on a slaughter spree while trying to find its family. The movie’s set in Los Angeles, but Ryan is definitely a New Yorker, and I don’t think anyone but a New York actor could have pulled this off. (They always say, “Actors go to Hollywood to become movie stars; they go to New York to act.”)