I don't know if it's an official Natural Law or not, but fellow aficionados of the weirder side of trash cinema know it to be true: Anything That CAN Be 'Sploited, HAS Been 'Sploited--Probably in the 70s, and most likely by Italians. These wildly disturbed and mercenary filmmakers really left no stone unturned, no taboo unsexified. The laundry list of dirty sheets includes such topics as Nuns, Nazis, Black Culture, Bikers, Dwarfs...it just goes on and on.
Thanks to the controversial 1975 drama Mandingo in which James Mason and Susan George took on the atrocity of American Slavery in the insightful manner only a couple of Brits possibly could, the Italian Exploitation machine smelled a new historical period ripe for sexing up and cashing in on. One year later, they had their result: Mario Pinzauti's 1976 Slaverysploitation effort, Mandinga.
A Whip in the Hand, The World By the Tail
Into this White Supremacist Amusement Park comes Rhonda (Paola D'Egidio), sister of the dead Elizabeth--a money-grubbing city-dweller and all around eeevil bint. Her decision to visit her former brother-in-law is not fully explained, but soon it's clear that she was probably kicked out of her East Coast home town for rampant perversity. When she witnesses Richard whipping a muscular new slave into broken submission, the gleam in her eyes and the way she bites her lip leave no doubt as to her favored selection from the Special Needs menu.
But the Italians of the 70s were never big on letting suggestion do when IN YOUR FACE ACTION is a viable alternative, and so later that night Rhonda sneaks into the stables where the buff, handsome slave has been bound to a crossbeam in a borderline Christ-pose. Having this towering, powerful, godlike body completely in her power, Rhonda takes full advantage by doing an extended striptease, bumping and grinding against the helpless, sweating slave, and finally climbing him like a live oak and having her wicked way with him! This scene just goes on and on--I'd be surprised if any footage Pinzauti shot found its way to any editing room floor.
'Sploited
So basically what they've done here is prefigure the "Your Name is Toby" scene the monumental Roots TV mini-series, only played it for BDSM titillation rather than moral outrage. I don't think you have to be a resident of the racism-scarred American South to feel dirty after watching this scene, but I am one, and let me tell you, it helps. Also helpful: the Italo-porn music that plays over the whole thing, naturally.
Not to be outdone, Mr. Hunter takes center stage next, playing out almost the same scene in reverse with a new female slave, "a princess of the Mandingo tribe in Africa" who betrays a little too much royal pride for the Master's tastes. Hunter's sexual joy in beating the proud woman is so apparent, the actual rape is almost an afterthought. Like the previous whip-and-fuck scene, this one goes on much longer than is comfortable, and may occasion the need for a quick shower among the more sensitive and/or perverse in the audience.
It's not long before Rhonda and Mr. Hunter discover just how much they have in common sexually, and Rhonda wastes no time turning this to her advantage. Following Hunter to a secret shack in the woods where he usually brings his slave mistresses, Rhonda grabs Hunter's whip (iykwim) and says, breathlessly, "Who knows how many girls here have trembled and cried...and liked it!" Fewer than you'd think, I'd wager. When Hunter demurs, Rhonda comes on even stronger, baring her breasts and saying, "I want to be your White Slave...something Elizabeth never was! Whip me!" Shower time again? I think so.
"And over *there* is where we can hang the Love Swing!"
So Rhonda becomes Hunter's mistress and has her sights set on inheriting the plantation when the older man checks out, but he refuses to marry her out of respect for his wife's memory. Also messing up Rhonda's plans: the child Hunter has sired on the slave princess. After the Mandinga dies in childbirth and the other slaves spirit the babe away, Hunter shows some uncharacteristic (read: contrived by script necessity) humanity and orders his foreman to find the baby, leading the moustachioed ruffian to murder 2 or 3 more slaves trying to get information. It's all for naught however--the baby is gone, perhaps with the Wind.
So things have been pretty hot and heavy and very very dirty up to this point. The production values have been all bottom drawer, and the dubbing typically awful, particularly the embarassingly sub-Amos n' Andy "Yassa Massah!" dialog from the slaves. That said, the "life on the plantation" scenes aren't bad (leading me to wonder if they were cribbed from another, better movie), and D'Egidio is arrestingly evil and believably perverse in her role, pretty much committed to being as unlikable and strangely sexy as possible. And the costuming isn't bad either.
Things are about to come to a screeching halt, however, as Hunter's England-educated son Clarence (Antonio Gismondo) comes home to help his father run the plantation. About 20 years have passed in the jump-cut between the baby-hunt and Clarence's arrival--our only real clue is the baby powder in Mr. Hunter's mutton chops. Clarence's dubbed voice provides some LOL entertainment, as he sounds like Little Lord Fauntleroy all grown up. Otherwise, though, Gismondo's role could have been played with more depth and profundity by a cardboard cut-out of Lou Costello. Dire.
Gismondo: English As Fuck
Knowing the old man is going to kick the bucket any day now, Rhonda sets about trying to seduce the young heir to the estate, hoping to get her hands on the plantation *that* way. Unfortunately Clarence has fallen in love with pure-as-the-driven-snow Mary (Maria Rosaria Riuzzi), daughter of the village priest, and Rhonda has her work cut out for her trying to lure the stuffy Englishman-cum-Southerner away from his virginal girlfriend.
Lucky for her nuts don't fall far from the tree, and Clarence's nuts are made just as tingly by slave-whipping as his old man's. This leads to a rather amazing scene in which Rhonda orders a male and female slave tied to that tried-and-true crossbeam, and she and Clarence take turns whipping and raping their victims before falling on each other in a filthy frenzy! Far from revelling in this, though, Clarence is disgusted with himself ("I allowed myself to get carried away with your perversions!" If I had a nickel...) and goes back to Mary, to whom he quickly proposes--leading, of course, to a lengthy post-engagement/pre-nuptial shagging of the sort we've come to expect from our filmmakers by now.
But the path of true love never did run smooth in the miscegnation-ophobic South, and after another jump-cut spanning at least nine months Mary gives birth to a black baby boy, setting Clarence into a murderous frenzy egged on by the gleefully bloodthirsty Rhonda. Mary swears her innocence, but is not believed (strangely), and the explanation for the mis-conception is one that I'll leave you to discover for yourself should you be moved to watch this film (it's part of the grab-bag of fun and filth known as The Grindhouse Experience, Vol. 1), as it's one of the few WTF-entertaining things about a dire second half of the movie. Suffice to say it ends with a lot of tragedy and bloodshed and an almost Shakespearean coda from the surviving family members, that would be kinda cool if it weren't so amazingly out-of-nowhere and unearned.
Tied to the Rapin' Post
As far as "make you feel grimy" exploitation flicks go, Mandinga has to be considered a rousing success. However, the movie does drag pretty significantly in the second half, with a lot of Clarence-learning-to-run-the-plantation stuff that stops the movie cold in between outrageousnesses. The cultural disconnect of the Italian take on American Slavery is moderately interesting, but again, the movie's WTF-ery is interspersed with so much boring dramatic stuff as to lose its effect. Not that it isn't a ripe subject for drama--rather that drama is obviously NOT Pinzauti's forte. And the characters are all either so reprehensible (Rhonda, Mr. Hunter, Clarence) or so powerless and naive (Mary, her father the Priest) that it's hard to care about their intrigues for very long--certainly not as long as the director seems to want you to.
If ever there was a "your mileage may vary" movie, this is one. If you came out of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS with a smile on your face, you might find something to like here. On the other hand, if that's the case, you might also want to stay on the other side of the room from me. :) The wild wrongness of the opening and the BDSM-obsessed evilness of Rhonda gains a little jaw-drop score for the movie, but it commits the unforgivable sin of getting boring as it drags on, and I can't really say I feel better or more educated in history or exploitation movies for having watched. Therefore, I'm staying neutral on this one with a 1.5 Thumb rating.
Rhonda: Dreamin' 'Bout Screamin'
Monday, April 6, 2009
Mandinga (1976): or, Help Me Rhonda
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The Executioner, Part II (1984): or, Just Say No to Drugs
As you might well imagine, the quest of a trash movie fanatic is frought with danger. For every nugget of 70s Eurotrash gold you unearth in a 50-movie budget pack, you're likely to suffer through a dozen or more movies so terrible that even laughing at them is impossible. For every candy-colored goretastic brain-burner from the 80s you stumble upon, you trip over that many more shot-on-video disasters with all the technical skill and enjoyment potential of a public-access broadcast of the local school board meeting. Sometimes you spend weeks and many dollars slogging through pile after pile of cinematic excretia, until the very hope of actually enjoying a movie again starts to look like an impossible dream.
But then the magic happens: you come across a thing of such gleeful, over-the-top batshittery that it bypasses your brain's logic- and taste-containing crenelations and strikes deep into the movie-watching pleasure centers, flooding your system with trash-movie endorphins and reminding you why you put in all that time in the first place.
So thank you, Executioner, Part II. Thank you for reminding me what it's all about.
By 1984 the heyday of the grindhouse phenomenon may have been well past, but thank God nobody told director James Bryan (Don't Go in the Woods, Lady Streetfighter) before he turned out this gritty, low-budget, and completely INSANE paean to vigilante justice. From its hamfisted stabs at social relevance ,to its earnest but clubfooted acting, to its sometimes shocking displays of slimy deviance, The Executioner, Part II is a movie that succeeds by getting everything WRONG. If you can't understand the zen truth cocooned in that little exploitation koan, well then, this is not the movie for you.
She Built This City
Against this seedy background, a vigilante dressed in black stalks the night. Actually he stalks broad daylight too, rescuing women from rooftop bandanna-gang rape by cutting the punks' throats with broken bottles and sticking grenades down their pant legs! Dubbed "The Executioner" by gadfly German-American reporter Celia Amherst (Renee Harmon, the model on which Ariana Huffington must have based her entire personality), the vigilante is bringing the crime rate down in LA through outright terrorism, much to the dismay of Mr. Cassalis and his pet Police Commissioner (a never-been-more-blustery Aldo Ray). While Celia sings the Executioner's praises on television and urges the police to leave him alone and let him keep blowing punks up, O'Malley is assigned by his corrupt boss to bring the Executioner in, dead or alive. But when Mike starts displaying increasingly erratic behavior, the lieutenant wonders if his old friend has found a novel way of dealing with his absolutely monstrous case of PTSD.
"Mike! That's NOT the chocolate gun!"
The joy in this movie lies more in its individual parts than in the overarching whole. For instance, early on Mike and Roger are having a beer at the garage when they notice a gang of thieves stripping down Mike's Executionermobile outside. The leader of the gang is a smartly dressed thug rocking the blond hair/black beard look, dressed in tight jeans, a white button-up shirt knotted at the navel, a black leatherette vest and the required red neckerchief. (Only in the early 80s could THIS guy be the gang leader; the lowest Shark or Jet would laugh him out of the rumble for his fashion sense.)
The Vets run the gang off after a lengthy and moderately exciting brawl, and you'd think that'd be the end of it--but no, the Necker-Chief returns later--alone--to rob the garage, this time putting up a good fight against Mike before getting his head slammed in a car door and giving Mike the goods on Mr. Cassalis. Not enough yet? Well, your favorite gangsta and mine returns yet again later for a final confrontation with Mike in the abandoned building where the gang has its HQ. I don't know who played this role, but he lights up the screen every time he appears, so kudos.
Baddest Man in the Whole Damn Town
A lot of odd details flesh out the characters and add to the overall strangeness of the movie. For instance, Pete has a predeliction for Jimmy Buffet-style shirts and 60s doo-wop, and his apartment looks less like a drug den than like the set of Three's Company. He enlists the help of two of his hookers to break Laura into the business (he can't do it himself since he wants to preserve her valuable virginity for his boss), crooning to them, "Girls, meet my new CHICKAY!" However, when they find out Laura is a virgin, the whores rebel and hold Pete down while she makes her escape. His cries of "Get back here! You're letting my virgin get away!" while rolling around with the two call girls could be the end of a John Ritter sketch, the way it's staged. And his bedroom, adorned with a movie poster for Hot Teenage Assets, samurai swords, and a Black-and-Decker drill on the bedpost (?!) just amps up the weird.
Reporter Celia Amherst is another strange character--despite frilly, flower-print grandma dresses and her almost impenetrable German accent, she gets a lot of on-mike interview time for the LA Television station. She gets almost as much attention from Roger, who puts on the moves while she pumps him for information at a local bar. (The entertainment at said bar is a single dancer in a sequined top and white spandex pants, accompanied by a tinny piano--I guess the Weimar vibe makes Celia feel at home.) Celia also seems irresistible to one of Cassalis's goons, who late in the movie ties her down, pumps her full of smack, and molests her as she trips.
Pete the Pusherman: Nothin' but Class
However, my FAVORITE character in the whole movie has to be Laura's friend and fellow dope-addict, Kitty. Blonde, giggly, irrepressible, and gloriously stoned throughout, Kitty is a bright spot whenever she's onscreen. She's introduced while smoking pot with Laura at Roger's apartment. "I wish this were coke," she snickers, toking a joint. "Oh, heavenly coke!" Then she proceeds to sing the praises of the hustling-for-drugs lifestyle, using peer pressure to convince Laura it's okay. "Kitty, I don't think I can go through with it!" Laura demurs. Kitty sympathizes: "Yeah, that's what I said at first. But as soon as the first sleazeball comes along and slips you a $20, it's a breeze!"
This last sentiment is part of the aforementioned hamfisted social relevance portion of the show: the message is, apparently, that once you're on drugs your life is hopeless and bereft of value. Early on Pete tells Laura she should go ahead and be a whore herself out: "Dope, sex--you already screwed yourself anyhow!" Kitty echoes this thought later on, in her typically mirthful style: "Listen, Laura's on drugs, like the rest of us! Once you're on drugs, just SCREW the rest!" It's actually a rather bleak point of view, meant to bolster the film's other argument: that in a world full of drug addicts and Tattoo Men, the Executioner's methods are really the way to go.
Find a new tattooist.
I fully understand that BATSHIT CRAZEE is not a high recommendation for everyone, but if it is for you, then The Executioner, Part II has everything that you want. Sure, it's inept and poorly put-together, but it's also as strangely gleeful and enthusiastic as Kitty on a coke-binge. Works for me! I give The Executioner, Part II a satisfied 2.5 thumbs. Check it out. And just say no to drugs.
Unless Kitty's with you. Then, what the hell--go for it.
"Oh, Heavenly Coke!"
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