SATAN'S SADISTS (US - 1969) Directed by Al Adamson. Written by Dennis Wayne (Greydon Clark). Cast: Russ Tamblyn, Scott Brady, Kent Taylor, John "Bud" Cardos, Robert Dix, Gary Kent, Greydon Clark, Regina Carrol, Evelyn Frank, Jackie Taylor, William Bonner, Randee Lynn, Bambi Allen. (R, 87 mins) Last year, Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD renewed interest in the history of Spahn Ranch, the old western movie set where Charles Manson and his followers were squatting around the time of the Tate-LaBianca murders in August 1969. Severin's exhaustive, 14-disc, 32-movie mega-box set of the films of Z-list exploitation auteur Al Adamson (1929-1995) was secretly in the works before the Tarantino film was released (because physical media is dead), but it's an interesting supplement in many ways, as several of Adamson's schlocky drive-in hits of the late '60s into the early '70s were shot at Spahn Ranch, where Manson as well as his followers were often present during some shoots. Additionally, according to WEST SIDE STORY and THE HAUNTING co-star Russ Tamblyn in David Gregory's feature-length 2019 documentary BLOOD & FLESH: THE REEL LIFE & GHASTLY DEATH OF AL ADAMSON (also in the box), Manson was a disruptive enough presence during the making of THE FEMALE BUNCH (shot in 1969, unreleased until 1971) that Adamson's co-director John "Bud" Cardos had to physically remove him from the set. Tamblyn, a Best Supporting Actor Oscar-nominee for 1957's PEYTON PLACE (he lost to Red Buttons in SAYONARA) was in enough of a career slump by the late '60s that he wound up becoming a member of the Adamson stock company. His truly repugnant performance is one of the most memorable aspects of 1969's lurid biker shocker SATAN'S SADISTS, one of the key titles in Adamson's dubious body of work and one of the very few times when the director came within striking distance of technical competence and achieving the almost-professional appearance of a real movie.
It probably helped that SATAN'S SADISTS was one of the few Adamson joints from that period that wasn't a patchwork of several other already-released or long-shelved projects. It's not by any means a "good" movie, but relative to almost everything he did up to that point, it was fairly polished and the story was coherent. Scripted under the pseudonym "Dennis Wayne" by future B-movie director Greydon Clark (who would go on to direct SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS, WITHOUT WARNING, and THE FORBIDDEN DANCE, one of two competing "lambada" movies in the spring of 1990), who also co-stars as the partially deaf Acid, one of the titular outlaw bikers, SATAN'S SADISTS' opening half hour brings a disparate cast together at a roadside diner in the middle of nowhere in the California desert. There's vacationing Pittsburgh cop Charlie (Scott Brady) and his wife Nora (Evelyn Frank), picking up hitchhiker and Vietnam vet Johnny (Gary Kent), because he reminds them of their son, who's currently serving ("It's rough over there," Johnny gloomily says before adding, "eh, but he'll be fine!"). There's also waitress Tracy (Jackie Taylor) and diner owner Lew (Kent Taylor), and they're all soon terrorized by the Sadists, led by the appropriately sadistic Anchor (Tamblyn), who start with general obnoxiousness which soon escalates to violence when a fight breaks out. Johnny and Tracy run out the back after Johnny slashes one Sadist's throat in self-defense and drowns another in the men's room toilet. Meanwhile, the other Sadists take Charlie, Nora and Lew outside, where Anchor rapes Nora and informs Charlie "Hey, she's not bad!" before shooting all three of the hostages in the head.
Al Adamson (1929-1995)
That's just the first half hour of SATAN'S SADISTS. After that, it slows down significantly as Johnny and Tracy flee in her dune buggy, with the Sadists in pursuit once they realize they're gone (they took off while everyone was cheering on Anchor's rape of Nora). While Johnny and Tracy try to hide, the Sadists encounter Tracy's three friends, who happen to be in the area collecting rocks for their geology class (!), but end up getting high and having a desert orgy with Anchor and some of the other bikers. A notable exception is the level-headed Firewater (Cardos, in cancellable brownface with a mohawk/bald cap that keeps peeling loose around his ears), who wants to find the two witnesses and is getting tired of Anchor's psychotic behavior. Tamblyn really sinks his teeth into this character (his mother thought this film would end his career), even writing much of his own dialogue himself, which gets pretty rough when he constantly treats his clingy, needy "old lady" Gina (Regina Carrol, billed as "The Freak-Out Girl" in the advertising and soon to be Adamson's wife) like shit, telling her "Go back to where belong before I replace ya, you dumb bitch," and "You're nothin' but a piece of dead meat" before before stuffing stew in her mouth and punching her in the stomach. But much of the last 50 or so minutes is a long waiting game, with characters more or less hanging out until Adamson has enough footage for a feature film. It's a scuzzy production, shot in 16mm in just 12 days, and it's still got some rough edges (at one point during what's become a tense scene in the diner, Brady and Frank can be seen breaking character and laughing at Carrol's maniacal dancing), but it gets the job done if you're looking for a really mean and nasty exploitationer. Audiences thought so, as SATAN'S SADISTS became a big hit at drive-ins and put Independent-International, a company formed by Adamson and producer Sam Sherman, on the map. With that success, the pair used the revenue generated by SATAN'S SADISTS to tweak and/or finish existing Adamson films that had been languishing in limbo for some time due to a variety of reasons, and to that end, SATAN'S SADISTS is a major turning point in establishing the legend (?) that is Al Adamson.
SATAN'S SADISTS opening in Toledo, OH on 9/3/1969
HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS (US - 1970) Directed by Al Adamson. Written by Jerry Evans. Cast: Broderick Crawford, Scott Brady, Kent Taylor, Keith Andes, John Carradine, John Gabriel, Robert Dix, Erin O'Donnell, Vicki Volante, Anne Randall, Jack Starrett, Emily Banks, Dan Kemp, Jerry Mills, Bambi Allen, Jill Woelfel, Carol Brewster, Leslie McCrea, Gene Otis Shane, Greydon Clark, Gary Kent, John "Bud" Cardos, Kent Osborne, Alice Wong, Colonel Harland Sanders. (PG, 90 mins) HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS, on the other hand, is a typical Adamson cut-and-paste patchwork that began life in 1967 as a spy thriller called OPERATION M, which became THE FAKERS at some point during production. John Gabriel starred as Mark Adams, a loyal underling to Vegas mob boss Joe Brimante (Keith Andes), who's brokering a shady deal for a syndicate partnership with Count Otto von Delberg (Kent Taylor), a wealthy German looking to create the "New Nazi Party" and finish what Hitler started. This alliance involves working with von Delberg associate Carol Bechtel (Vicki Volante), the go-between for Brimante to acquire some WWII-era counterfeit plates for phony $20 bills and to funnel other contraband through the Vegas syndicate. It turns out Adams is actually an undercover Fed, installed by FBI bureau chief Gavin (Broderick Crawford), who's also got agents Brand (Scott Brady) and rookie Jill (Emily Banks) on the case.
That was THE FAKERS, which was largely finished but abandoned during post-production in 1968 when Adamson moved on to other projects following the suicide of producer Rex Carlton--via self-inflicted gunshot wound--when he couldn't secure a distribution deal and was therefore unable to repay a loan he'd taken from alleged mob-connected financiers. Once SATAN'S SADISTS became a hit and biker movies were all the exploitation rage, Adamson and Independent-International partner Sam Sherman decided in 1969 to shoot a new subplot involving a neo-Nazi biker gang called the Bloody Devils, with Adamson regular Robert Dix as their leader Cunk. The Bloody Devils are being funded by von Delberg for unspecified mayhem and told to "keep up the good work" by Carol, with Vicki Volante the only cast member brought back to provide some connection with the two-year-old footage from THE FAKERS, even though it doesn't match with the new footage since she's got a completely different hairstyle and wardrobe. Cunk drops some far-out lingo like "What's a groovy chick like you doing in the spy racket?" but other than periodic cutaways to the Bloody Devils riding around and engaging in some random acts of violence, the new scenes serve no purpose other than pandering to the then in-vogue biker craze.
Obviously, HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS is a jumbled mess, filled with mismatched film stock and scenes where people stare at each other waiting for Adamson to yell "Cut." It's got a great title track by Nelson Riddle (he didn't work on the movie; it was an existing cue that Carlton and Adamson licensed), and the end result ends up strangely watchable. That's due in large part to the curio value of its bizarre cast, including a cameo by Colonel Harland Sanders inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a trade-off when he supplied the cast & crew with KFC during the shoot. In addition, you get the usual motley crew of slumming Hollywood vets who've fallen on hard times: John Carradine drops by for about 45 seconds as a syndicate-connected pet store owner (!); Taylor, a sort-of third-string Clark Gable/Errol Flynn-type in the '30s and '40s, found a lot of work in Adamson movies, as did JOHNNY GUITAR co-star Brady, whose fortunes would improve with appearances in films like 1979's THE CHINA SYNDROME and 1984's GREMLINS, his last before his death in 1985; and Crawford, a Best Actor Oscar-winner for 1949's ALL THE KING'S MEN, was mainly doing B-movies and TV guest spots by 1967, and Adamson managed to get his scenes shot in one day. Other than a visit to see a hospitalized Agent Adams, all of Crawford's scenes take place in an office that Adamson probably commandeered during a used car salesman buddy's lunch hour. Crawford participates in the climactic showdown from afar, standing in front of a map of Los Angeles county, marking on it with a pencil as he barks "Car 1, proceed to point 9...Car 2, proceed to point 27" into a dispatch mic in a competely-disconnected-from-the-action-but-still-appearing-to-be-the-star kind-of way that probably inspires Bruce Willis to this day. According to the exhaustively-researched, 116-page booklet in Severin's Adamson set, written by Bill Ackerman and Amanda Reyes, THE FAKERS (also included in the set) did eventually surface on syndicated TV in 1972 as SMASHING THE CRIME SYNDICATE, apparently without the biker subplot unique to the HELL'S BLOODY DEVIL'S cut.
DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN, ANGELS' WILD WOMEN and
HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS: Al Adamson conquering Toledo, OH's
drive-ins on 10/25/1972 (along with FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY
TERROR, another Independent-International release)
THE LAST MOVIE (US - 1971) Directed by Dennis Hopper. Written by Stewart Stern. Cast: Dennis Hopper, Julie Adams, Daniel Ades, Stella Garcia, Don Gordon, Tomas Milian, John Alderman, Michael Anderson, Jr., Donna Baccala, Toni Basil, Rod Cameron, Severn Darden, Roy Engel, Warren Finnerty, Peter Fonda, Fritz Ford, Samuel Fuller, Henry Jaglom, Clint Kimbrough, Kris Kristofferson, John Phillip Law, Ted Markland, Sylvia Miles, Jim Mitchum, Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Chuck Bail, Tom Baker, Michael Greene, Toni Stern. (R, 108 mins) The kind of film that can only result from everyone involved tripping balls, 1971's THE LAST MOVIE almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy for Dennis Hopper, completely quashing the momentum he had going from 1969's landmark EASY RIDER and effectively killing his career for the better part of the next decade and a half. Sure, there were high points during that time--Wim Wenders' THE AMERICAN FRIEND in 1977, Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW in 1979, and OUT OF THE BLUE in 1980, a low-budget film Hopper was co-starring in and took over directing early in production--but THE LAST MOVIE began a downward personal and professional spiral for Hopper, who would continue to be mired in alcoholism and substance abuse and would soon be working almost exclusively in low-budget European productions after being deemed an unemployable pariah in Hollywood. Hopper would occasionally find work in a bonkers cult movie like the 1976 Australian adventure saga MAD DOG MORGAN, or he'd temporarily behave himself enough to get a respectable gig like Coppola's RUMBLE FISH or Sam Peckinpah's final film THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND (both 1983), but much of his work from these lost years (BLOODBATH, REBORN, LET IT ROCK) has fallen into obscurity or was never even released in the US. He hit bottom when he was fired from the trashy 1984 West German/Mexican-produced fashion models-in-prison potboiler JUNGLE WARRIORS when, coked out of his mind in Mexico, he wandered naked into a village 20 miles from the set, ranting about people trying to kill him, and was promptly put by the producers on a flight back to Los Angeles, where he had to be restrained after freaking out and trying to open the plane's emergency exit. It was his meltdown on JUNGLE WARRIORS that finally served as a wake-up call to Hopper to get his shit together and get clean and sober, and within a couple of years, he was the Comeback Kid with the likes of BLUE VELVET and HOOSIERS, finally exorcising his demons and shaking the career self-immolation that began 15 years earlier with THE LAST MOVIE.
EASY RIDER was part of the post-BONNIE AND CLYDE "New Hollywood" movement, and Hopper found himself in the bizarre position of being both a counterculture hero and an unlikely toast of the town. As a result of the film's success, studios began giving the green light to artistic, auteur-driven projects to capture the youth market. Paramount backed Haskell Wexler's politically-charged, X-rated MEDIUM COOL and MGM brought trailblazing Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni to America for ZABRISKIE POINT, but Universal went all-in, giving a handful of notable independent filmmakers carte blanche to make whatever they wanted to make with no studio interference, most notably Monte Hellman with TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and John Cassavetes with MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ. THE LAST MOVIE was part of this push by Universal, and the primary reason why the studio's enthusiasm for the avant-garde indie craze ended almost immediately after it began. Hopper spent almost all of 1970 on location in Peru going over budget on THE LAST MOVIE, a project he conceived with screenwriter Stewart Stern, best known for scripting 1955's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, which was also Hopper's film debut. He brought an entourage of friends from the movie and music industry with him and shot over 40 hours of footage that he spent nearly a year in holed up in his New Mexico home trying to corral into a releasable, two-hour film. He even scrapped an initial, relatively mainstream-ish cut completely when he showed it to EL TOPO director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who derisively mocked it and advised Hopper to rearrange the story in a non-linear and more experimental fashion. THE LAST MOVIE found significant acclaim at the Venice Film Festival, where Hopper took home the Critics Prize, but Universal execs were much less impressed, especially since his final cut was several months overdue (they wanted it by the end of 1970 and he kept working until April 1971), and the end result was impenetrable and unsellable. It ended up opening in the fall of 1971 to largely blistering reviews from American critics, and it was soon yanked from distribution, never coming close to the zeitgeist-capturing success of EASY RIDER. Without Hopper's involvement, THE LAST MOVIE was re-released on the drive-in circuit a few years later in a shortened, recut version rechristened CHINCHERO (which was actually Hopper's original title), but beyond that, it was extremely difficult to see for many years, even with a 1989 VHS release from the exploitation outfit United American Video, likely to capitalize on Hopper's major career resurgence in the late '80s and into the 1990s.
Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)
Its relative obscurity did much to bolster its reputation as a "lost" classic, and Hopper would frequently do Q&As at screenings once he reacquired the rights to the film in 2006. But Hopper died in 2010, before he was ever able to oversee a DVD/Blu-ray release, though thanks to others, THE LAST MOVIE finally made the restoration rounds in 2017 and 2018. It's now out on Blu-ray and is widely accessible again after 47 years (because physical media is dead), but minus L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller's THE AMERICAN DREAMER, a 1971 documentary chronicling the making and editing of THE LAST MOVIE and serving as its own BURDEN OF DREAMS and HEARTS OF DARKNESS. When something is out of circulation as long as THE LAST MOVIE has been, there's always a tendency among cineastes to mythologize it, as if its long absence is a sign of neglect or unacknowledged greatness. It's interesting that its Blu-ray debut has virtually coincided with the Netflix release of Orson Welles' THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (in which a LAST MOVIE-era Hopper has a small role), another much-ballyhooed film whose legend stems primarily from it being unfinished and unseen for over 40 years. Like WIND, THE LAST MOVIE is now a curio at best, a disjointed, largely improvised, self-indulgent misfire in which Hopper doesn't capitalize on EASY RIDER as much as he buys into the hype surrounding him.
The nominal plot has Hopper, looking a lot like he would as a pre-Matt Damon incarnation of Tom Ripley six years later in THE AMERICAN FRIEND, as Kansas, a disillusioned stuntman and horse wrangler working on a Hollywood western being shot in a small Peruvian village outside of Chinchero. It appears to be a formulaic bit of moviemaking, with an old-school, cigar-chomping director (Samuel Fuller), and starring an aging, John Wayne-esque cowboy actor (Rod Cameron) as Pat Garrett and a young up-and-comer (Dean Stockwell) as Billy the Kid. Once shooting wraps (other cast members in the film-within-a-film include familiar faces and Hopper buddies like Peter Fonda, John Phillip Law, Kris Kristofferson, Henry Jaglom, Severn Darden, and Russ Tamblyn), and the cast and crew head back to Hollywood, Kansas stays behind and shacks up with Chinchero local Maria (Stella Garcia) and is in no hurry to return home. His idyllic getaway, where he spends his days lounging about and having waterfall sex with Maria, is interrupted by the village priest (Tomas Milian), who informs him that the locals, led by "director" Thomas (Daniel Ades), are re-enacting the production of the movie and imitating what they witnessed--even constructing film "equipment" like cameras and cranes out of wood and sticks--and are so taken with their Hollywood experience that they can no longer differentiate fantasy from reality. Kansas also gets involved in role-playing sex games with Mrs. Anderson (Julie Adams), the horny socialite wife of an Peru-based American businessman (Roy Engel), and goes off on a hunt for gold with skeezy American expat Neville Robey (Don Gordon). That's before he's coerced back on the still-standing movie set by Thomas and the villagers and forced to re-enact his stunt work all over again in what seems to be shaping up as a proto-WICKER MAN but, like the rest of THE LAST MOVIE, goes nowhere.
There's some shallow statements about the artifice of cinema and the way Hollywood cynicism poisons a heretofore peaceful village populated by largely isolated people--note the way they production just packs up and leaves, leaving its large set of old-west building facades behind for the locals to deal with--but it's all much too muddled and meandering. It's beautifully shot by the great Laszlo Kovacs, Hopper gets a surprising performance out of Adams (THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON), and the themes he explores have some merit, but THE LAST MOVIE is awfully pretentious and full of itself, from the random intentional placement of "Scene Missing" cards, to the credit "A Film by Dennis Hopper" appearing 11 minutes in and followed a full 15 (!) minutes later by the title card, to Hopper paying homage to himself with a climactic restaging of the EASY RIDER campfire scene with Kansas and Neville. As the film grows increasingly abstract in its off-the-rails last half hour, Hopper simply loses the thread and gets lost up his own ass, as a long sequence with a drunk Kansas in a bar brawl is interrupted by cutaways to Hopper in a makeup chair stating "I never jerked off a horse before, ya know?" and another shot of Hopper lying down and a close-up of a lactating breast squirting milk into his face. Its chaos continues as Hopper breaks the fourth wall by smiling at the camera near the end as a LAST MOVIE clapboard is left in the shot. I suppose it's something do to about the blurring of film vs. life or illusion vs. reality, but the whole meta deconstruction/destruction of cinema thing was done much more succinctly with the unforgettable last shot of TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (also of note is that both films feature Kris Kristofferson's own version of his oft-recorded "Me and Bobby McGee"). THE LAST MOVIE is an insufferable mess, though it does have historical value as a document of its era and perhaps as "New Hollywood" taking a wrong turn prior to the age of the blockbuster ushered in by JAWS in 1975. It's certainly required viewing for fans of Dennis Hopper, but mileage may vary. It's either a hellraising artist's ultimate masterpiece and a defiant "Fuck you!" to the industry or a textbook example of the dangers of being handed too much money and too much freedom when your ego's running amok and you're high AF. In the years after he was in rehab, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler often quipped that in their hedonistic heyday, the band "probably snorted up all of Peru." Well, yeah, perhaps...or at least whatever was left after Dennis Hopper and his cast and crew were finished with THE LAST MOVIE.
