The capsule review: Oscar-nominated Hollywood legend Tony Curtis and Susan "Daughter of Lee" Strasberg fight forces of ancient evil manifested as a rapidly growing tumor on Susan's neck, which turns out to be the fetus of a 400-year-old Indian Shaman. Fellow Oscar nominees Burgess Meredith and Ann Sothern also star in this final film from the director of Asylum of Satan and Three on a Meathook.
Do I really need to go on?
Okay, I will.
Based on the 1975 best-selling novel by Graham Masterton, 1978's The Manitou is something of a Mad Movie Miracle. How was horror/exploitation filmmaker extraordinaire William Girdler, whose other output includes the demon-possession/blaxploitation opus Abby and killer omnivore epic Grizzly, able to assemble such a cast of Hollywood heavy hitters for a mashup of The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, and The Omen, with a healthy dollop of Dr. Who and Luigi Cozzi's Starcrash thrown in during the slam-bang finale? The world may never know--but that mystery should only intensify our gratitude for this film's existence.
I appreciate a slow-burn character-establishing build-up as much as the next guy, but there's also something to be said for a movie that drops the laundry and gets right down to business, and the latter is Girdler's approach here. We open on a series of x-ray photos showing a strange growth on the neck of Karen Tandy (Strasberg). Drs. Hughes (Jon Cedar) and McEnvoy (Paul Mantee) discuss the case in serious tones--apparently the "tumor" appeared only a few days previous, and has been growing at an alarming rate. The x-rays show not cancerous cells, but tissue, fluid, and even bone, flummoxing the specialists. "I've been through every chemo book," Dr. McEnvoy sighs. "I wrote the books," Dr. Hughes shoots back, "And I still don't know what the hell it is." Subscribing to the "When in Doubt, Cut It Out" philosophy, Hughes schedules an emergency WTF-ectomy.
Not comforted by her doctor's vague reassurances and in despair at her shocking lack of back-story, Karen looks up former flame Harry Erskine (Curtis), a tarot-reading charlatan who wears a wizard robe and fake pornstache to bilk wealthy old widows of their hard-won inheritances. Ever the trouper, Curtis really throws himself into the performance, wringing all the eccentricity he can out of his new-agey pronouncements, and every drop of comedy possible out of his post-work disco dancing to his reel-to-reel hi-fi. Words really cannot due justice to the beauty of his performance here.
Back at the hospital, Dr. Hughs tries to remove the lump, which he now admits "you could almost describe as a fetus!", but Karen goes all Regan MacNeill on his ass, causing him to cut his own wrist with the scalpel and forcing the cancellation of the procedure. Taking the (running) bull by the neck, Harry summons some friends for an honest-to-goodness seance (Sothern and Stella Stevens, who apparently taught Erskine all he knows), which summons a cigar-store Indian head out of the table's surface before ending in spinning chandeliers and French-door explosions, just as cinematic seances almost always do. Clues thus gained lead them to a book about Native American folklore containing the story of a medicine man who reincarnated himself through a lump on a young squaw's forearm. Could the same squamous squidginess be afoot in the City?
When I hold a seance, I usually hope to get a little head under the table.
"I crap bigger than you!"
A quick flight to South Dakota and Curtis is talking to John Singing Rock (a frankly excellent Michael Ansara, who delivers some astoundingly silly lines with such dignity and conviction you nearly forget to laugh). Initially unwilling to help "Mr. White Man" due to the whole genocide/land-stealing thing, John relents when Curtis admits he wouldn't help the Indian if their positions were reversed. His price: $100,000 for the Indian Education Foundation, and a couple of plugs of tobacco. Oh, John Singing Rock, you are so wise and colorful and not at all cliched!
At the hospital things have gone from worse to WTF, as Dr. Hughes ill-advisedly tries to remove the fetus using a high-tech laser scalpel that looks like it's on loan from a Pink Panther film. Unfortunately, as John Singing Rock informs them too late, all things have manitous--rocks, trees, even machinery, like the LASER--and a powerful medicine man can call upon these non-human souls to do his bidding. What does that mean in layman's terms? It means the operating room turns into the opening scene from Star Wars, with the powerful laser scalpel blasting lights, burning trails in the wall, and maybe even killing a couple of people, all while Karen stands in the corner laughing. Hang on, folks, it gets better.
That's a precise surgical instrument, people.
Once John gets Karen to himself, he becomes a Native-American Father Merrin and questions the demon inside her, learning the intruder is Misquamacus, the most powerful, eeevil medicine man who ever lived, a man who in his 3rd or 4th incarnation could move mountains and send pebbles up the asses of his enemies on a whim. One glimmer of hope is the fact that modern technology seems to bother the 400-year old medicine man--the x-rays cause him pain (Dr. Hughes helpfully explains that every time they take an x-ray, some cells die, and in a fetus this could cause all manner of deformity).
Where the movie goes from there is so awesomely, amazingly MAD it can only be detailed in bullet-list form:
"FEELINGS! Whoa-whoa-whoa, FEELINGS!"
"I'm as surprised as you are, folks."
For all Girdler's low-budget pedigree, he actually makes a fairly well-crafted film here, at least on the technical level. Interesting low- and high-angle shots, a non-stationary camera (frequent but not distracting uses of tracks and zooms), and some striking visual compositions go a long way toward keeping the viewer's interest, which is good, since certain sections of the movie admittedly tend to drag. The sets and settings are all lovely, and the shots of San Francisco simply gorgeous. Girdler had come a long way from Asylum of Satan--unfortunately the director died in a tragic helicopter accident before he could see his best film on the big screen.
But story-wise, there's no two ways about it, friends and parishioners--The Manitou is a megadose of movie madness from one end to the other. Watching Tony Curtis and the other talented actors struggle with the cheesy dialogue ("Harry, you don't call [supreme deity] Gichi Manitou!" "Oh yeah? Well he's going to ge a person-to-person call from me. COLLECT!") and the challenge of taking it all seriously gave me no end of joy, and the slam-bang finale just piled on the nuttiness until my cup was overflowing onto my lap tray. I don't know if the wild plot is entirely faithful to Masterton's novel, or if Girdler added his own amazing flourishes of insanity, but this is definitely one of the MADDEST stories I've seen in a while, and it never failed to entertain.
Susan Strasberg in Barbarella 2: 20 Years Later
Dwarf sorcerors, laser battles, shameless Exorcist rip-offs and has-to-be-made-up American Indian folklore, plus Tony Curtis in a wizard robe...really, you couldn't ask for more. In short, The Manitou is highly recommended, and garners an easy 3 Thumbs from your ever-lovin' Vicar.
Also recommended: the excellent and exhaustive website WilliamGirdler.com, where webmistress Patty Breen has compiled with loving care the definitive retrospective of Mr. Girdler's career and work. Don't ask why--just go and enjoy a fan's-eye-view of Girdler cinema. Tell her the Vicar sent you!
A few more images from The Manitou (1978):
Attempted Nape
"Hello, is this my agent? Maury, you are so fucking fired."
"Forget the tarot cards. Come fiddle with my planchette, IYKWIM."
Tony Curtis in Parasite
He represents the Fuck You Up League
PEW!
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
The Manitou (1978): or, Native-American Exorcist is a Pain the Neck
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Nurse Sherri (1978): or, This Nurse Possessed
What is it about the 70s nurses' uniforms that just exuded sex? The easily unzippable white minidress, just barely covering the tops of those coquettish white stockings, promising but not quite delivering a glimpse of garter belt? The traditional cap, clearly influenced by that sexiest of sexy-stern headwear, the nun's wimple? Was it the tied-up hair, ready to be whipped down when the doctor was away, loosing the wildcat that the professional woman must keep in check? Was it the clipboard? The horn-rimmed glasses? The sensible shoes?
Whatever it was, shlockmeister Al Adamson recognized the potential in the figure of the Woman of Healing, and in a your-chocolate's-in-my-peanut-butter moment, put it together with the horror rage of the day, possession. The result: Adamson's 1978 grindhouse cheapie Nurse Sherri, aka The Possession of Nurse Sherri, aka Terror Hospital. Hoping to cash in on the likes of The Exorcist, Carrie, and Ruby (all of which are name-dropped in the largely unrepresentative trailer), Adamson pulled out all the stops and threw the throttle open. But did the crash result in a delicious Reese's Cup, or something more sinister, like a Mr. Goodbar?
After some incongruously sci-fi opening titles (glowing letters and heavy theremin music reminiscent of the Outer Limits or Dark Shadows theme), we find ourselves in the presumably Californian desert, where a small cult is doing its cultish bidness under the guidance of spiritual leader Reanhauer (Gary Busey-lookalike Bill Roy). The cult is indeed a motley bunch--though Reanhauer and his right-hand man Stevens (J.C. Wells) wear business-casual sport coats and ties, other cult members model everything from hippie-print muscle tees to construction-worker chic to a rather amazingly colorful flower-print muumuu...which all goes to show how people from all walks of life have fallen under Reanhauer's hypnotic spell.
The main item on the cultish agenda just now is to heal one of their members of his diabetes using only their faith and the guru's limitless powers--a project Reanhauer insists is going well, despite the fact that the boy in question is three weeks dead! Stevens is having a crisis of conscience ("You convinced that boy and that boy's mother he didn't have to take insulin to save his life!" "He doesn't!" Reanhauer replies. "Not NOW he doesn't!" Stevens shoots back), but the cult leader puts it all down to a poisonous lack of faith and expels Stephens from the fold. When the nearly-rotten corpse seems to move during a particularly intense chant-o-thon, Reanhauer experiences such a rush of personal vindication that he collapses on the spot with a massive coronary!
Witchcult Today
Rushed to Our Lady of Cinderblocks City Hospital, the cult leader is toiled over by a group of crack surgeons and one extremely well-endowed nurse. It's not quite clear at this point what happens to the old man, though, as we soon start following Nurse Sherri (Jill Jacobson) and her day-to-day life around the wards. This consists mainly of flirting with her surgeon boyfriend Peter (Geoffrey Land), who seems to get off on sneaking up and shoving biohazard-encrusted gloves in his girlfriend's face. (Sample flirtatious dialogue: "You look so nice when you shake like that!" "Oh, go take a shower in formaldehyde!") She also passes the hours making innuendo-laden small talk with coworkers Tara (blaxploitation star Marilyn Joi) and Beth (Mary Kay "No I Didn't Sock It to the Harper Valley PTA" Pass).
Nurse Tara is our secondary focal point in the flick, as she develops a love/hate/REALLY LOVE relationship with NFL star Marcus Washington (Prentiss Moulden), whose free agent prospects have been lessened by his catching two eyes-full of windshield glass in a freak car accident. While Tara struggles to get through his wall of self-pity and crushed dreams via tales of her own super-fandom, Marcus can't seem to tumble to the fact that she's not a red-haired blue-eyed white woman, leading to some near hilarity and Tara exasperatedly labeling him a "bigot." They get over it later, however, and pair up as American viewers in the 70s had come to expect thanks to The Isaac Rule.*
*Established by the influential TV series "The Love Boat," The Isaac Rule (named for Ted Lange's character, Isaac the Bartender) stated that if an attractive woman of color boarded The Love Boat, it meant Isaac (the sole African American on staff) would be involved in a romantic subplot that week. The non-Love Boat corollary held that whenever two (non-villain) people of color of opposite sexes appeared in a movie of the era, they either were a couple, or would become one over the course of the narrative.
Love is Blind, and Needs a Fresh Bedpan
Al Adamson makes some questionable directorial choices here, not the least of which is withholding information from the audience until several scenes AFTER it becomes important. For instance, we don't find out for another half hour or so that Reanhauer refused care once he regained consciousness ("The powers of SCIENCE are FINITE! Mine are LIMITLESS!"), but that the chief of surgery opted to operate anyway, at which point the cult leader expired on the operating table. We also learn at that point via flashback that Reanhauer had struck up a strange relationship with Sherri, telling her she was "the one" or some other mumbo jumbo meant to explain why she'd be the target of his post-mortem attentions. At any rate, it comes out later that the green mist is Reanhauer's spirit, possessing Sherri to get revenge on his enemies from beyond the grave.
Possessed by the Need to Boogie
Also on the enemies list for some reason never made clear is Marcus Washington--but as luck would have it, the half-back's grandma was a voodoo priestess, and gave him a silver bracelet with the power to ward off evil spirits. Thwarted, Reanhauer turns his noncorporeal attentions to Stevens, who's become a drunken hobo since the cult went belly-up and is now pestering Peter for the location of Reanhauer's grave, so he can exhume the cult leader and burn his body, thus putting an end to his powers, somehow. Stevens manages to get the info (after a car chase/interrogation in which Stevens jumps out of a cliff-bound car Dick Tracy-style at the last minute!) and tosses a sheet-wrapped body into a smelting furnace downtown, which is clearly his only corpse-immolating option. Unfortunately in his drunken stupor he's dug up the wrong body, and takes a ghost-assisted nose-dive into the smelter himself, which given his blood alcohol level allows him to go out in a blaze of Mad Dog 20/20.
That Ain't Hay
Nurse Sherri is a movie that puts me in a strange though not unique position review-wise: I have a great time talking about all the wild and crazy stuff that happens in the movie, which might give readers an inflated idea of how much I enjoyed the movie as it was actually rolling across my screen. Put simply, it's NOT a good film. The aforementioned narrative shuffling is a real problem, and robs the proceedings of the already small amount of menace they might have had if things had been presented in the order they happened. The acting is high school play level at best--Geoffrey Land as Dr. Peter is particularly atrocious--although Joi acquits herself the best of anyone, and Bill Roy is entertaining enough as the scenery-feasting villain. The effects are laughable, the gore mostly of the "you got some ketchup on your face there" variety, and certain plot elements just don't make a lick of sense, even considering the budget. (For example, a body pops up out of nowhere in Sherri's apartment just before the Final Confrontation, and I'm damned if I know who she was supposed to be our how she ended up dead behind the sofa.) Despite Adamson's rather lengthy filmography by this point, the term that kept springing to mind as I watched was "fucking amateurish."
The Romance is Gone
Still, if you like sexy nurses (who doesn't?) and low-grade cinematic cheese (ditto?), have a thing for possession flicks or a fetish for super-ugly 70s wallpaper, you might get a few yuks out of Nurse Sherri. As for me, I'll settle on a slightly more entertaining than average 1.75 thumbs and call it a day. And for all my diabetic parishioners, remember: it's okay to have faith in your local cult leader, but you might want to keep monitoring those glucose levels just in case. Believe me, I know.
A few more images from Nurse Sherri (1978):
Sherri and the Girls
"So, have you ladies had your yearly exams?"
"Say...whatever DID happen to Randolph Scott?"
Not covered by his HMO
There is no escape from the Horror of 70s Wallpaper
One too many Ho-Hos
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