The White Reindeer (1952)

Posted on December 19, 2020 at 7:37 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Deep in the Arctic wilderness of Lapland, the young Sámi woman Pirita (Mirjami Kuosmanen), newly married to the kind but intimately remote reindeer herder Aslak (Kalervo Nissilä), takes drastic measures to relieve her sexual frustration. During one of her husband’s many extended absences, Pirita visits the shaman Tsalkku-Nilla (Arvo Lehesmaa), who initiates her into an occult rite that promises no man will be able to resist her, should she only sacrifice the first living creature she encounters on her return journey. That creature is a young white reindeer, which she carries off to an eerie antlered altar in the center of a reindeer graveyard carpeted with snowdrifts. Then – all is well, until she finds herself frequently wandering the wilds in a state of constant metamorphosis: prancing white reindeer with long antlers; Pirita, liberated and feral; Pirita, vampire-fanged. The hunters who pursue the white reindeer are dazzled by her sudden transformation, then destroyed by her. Rumors of a witch in the shape of a reindeer spread in the scattered snowy shelters and around those huddled over fires – wives warn their husbands not to chase the reindeer into Evil Valley, from which none ever return alive. And Aslak forges a spear and sets his mind on hunting the reindeer, while Pirita looks on in fear, her splintering identity compelling her back through the white hills.

Reindeer herding.

The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura, 1952), often classified by genre enthusiasts as an unusual twist on the vampire tale, was long available only through bootlegs and torrents before finally, in 2019, joining the Masters of Cinema line from Eureka! in the UK as a Blu-ray/DVD package. Produced from a 2016 4K restoration by the National Audiovisual Institute of Finland, the film can now be appreciated for both its incredible beauty – directed by Finnish documentarian and cinematographer Erik Blomberg (the star’s husband) – and the fact that it’s much more of a dark, primal fairy tale than something as narrowly defined as a vampire picture. Pirita is a witch – deep down, even before she makes her fateful decision that puts her body in flux. It’s something that’s recognized by the shaman, as his secret ceremony to cast his spell is unexpectedly co-opted by Pirita and the wild spirit that’s been shackled inside her. She takes charge of her own transformation, and the shaman is shunted to the side. What he only provides, perhaps, is the key to unlocking what she already had. Once she sacrifices the white reindeer, she becomes the creature that the men of her village herd over the horizon and wrestle violently by the antlers. The first hunter to encounter her chases her down trying to rope her, but when he seizes her antlers and twists her neck against the ground, she is suddenly Pirita, standing tall in the center of Evil Valley and grinning with a boldness that’s different than all her warm smiles in the film’s first act. Kuosmanen’s performance dominates the film – she effortlessly tracks Pirita’s evolution from a smitten and shy young woman to a confident, sexual creature, as well as the guilt, confusion, and hunted terror required as the plot advances toward its foregone conclusion.

Mirjami Kuosmanen

Blomberg’s style is captivating, with one foot in fantastic cinema and another in Robert Flaherty’s pseudo-documentaries about communities surviving in harsh conditions. One could easily enjoy the film without the fantastic elements; it’s dazzling enough watching hundreds of reindeer being herded through the hills, or a careening reindeer-driven sled race. These are the true special effects in the film. When Pirita shapeshifts, Blomberg simply cuts from reindeer to Pirita to exposed fangs. Similarly, whatever she actually does to her victims is never depicted. When one body is retrieved and inspected, we only see the horrified expressions of the community, as well as Pirita’s turning away in quiet revulsion. Blomberg also treats close-ups with the striking, isolated portraiture style of Carl Dreyer. The combined effect is that of viewing an ancient, vital piece of folklore as it might have actually happened, an aberration from reality in a landscape so naturally surreal that it’s possible to believe that spirits and witches might dwell in snowy burrows or outside the flap of the tent while everyone stacks atop each other intimately for body heat. In such a scene, we see Pirita clumped together among the bodies, looking completely alone. No wonder she escapes that false sense of comfort to hop through the snows and taste the crisp icy air as the white reindeer.

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Double Feature: The Naked Zoo (1970)/Mako: Jaws of Death (1976)

Posted on December 4, 2020 at 10:50 am by Jeff Kuykendall

The third disc in Arrow Video’s He Came from the Swamp: The William Grefé Collection matches a reconstructed director’s cut of Grefé’s druggy, campy melodrama The Naked Zoo (1970) with one of his best known grindhouse efforts, the sharksploitation feature Mako: Jaws of Death (1976). (I’ve previously offered looks at the first two discs in the box set: Sting of Death/Death Curse of Tartu and The Hooked Generation/The Psychedelic Priest.) Perhaps The Naked Zoo might have been better paired with The Hooked Generation, because it’s another attempt to graft a somewhat confused portrait of the counterculture onto a more traditional genre thriller. Steve Oliver, who had appeared in the TV series Peyton Place as well as Angels from Hell (1968) and Russ Meyer’s Motorpsycho (1965), plays a young writer in Miami hungry for success as a novelist while lording over small hippie gatherings and acting the boy toy for aging socialites. He’s a swinger, as the movie poster puts it, partaking in free love which is treated as the kind of harem fantasy familiar from countless youth exploitation films of the late 60’s. The parties Oliver’s character attends look like a cross between a B-movie beatnik club and the deliciously phony happenings of Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), where the scantily clad dance on tables to live music and caricatures engage in various bits of lustful or zonked-out comic business. Pills are popped, dope is smoked, hard liquor is poured by the gallon, and living room bonfires are merrily initiated.

Womanizing writer Terry Shaw (Steve Oliver) in The Naked Zoo.

But Oliver’s character, Terry Shaw, is also self-loathing, amoral and destructive, setting him on a dark path as he becomes mixed up with one Mrs. Golden, played by “The Love Goddess” herself, 52-year-old Rita Hayworth. When the wheelchair-bound Mr. Golden (Ford Rainey) catches the two of them locking lips, he immediately produces a gun and begins firing. (Terry jumps and tumbles over and under the furniture to avoid the incoming fire.) During the chaotic conflict, Mr. Golden accidentally knocks his head on the fireplace mantle and is killed. Terry maintains his likeability streak by immediately ditching the scene, leaving Mrs. Golden to clean up the mess. In fact, Hayworth doesn’t get quite as much screen time as you would think (suggesting her scenes were filmed very quickly); the film is more focused on presenting a character portrait of a man whose commitment to a consequences-free life eventually finds the walls closing in on him. The film’s most effective scene might be a lengthy, surprisingly nervy sequence, in which Terry invites one of his sugar mamas – who has pathetically dressed up in a hippie costume to impress him – back to his pad only to enact a kind of ritual humiliation. He parades his younger, attractive girlfriend before her, and when she objects that the woman is Black, he dopes her into unconsciousness. She wakes up in the middle of a wild party in which she’s being treated like a piece of furniture. In the theatrical cut of the film, this scene is accompanied by a (pretty great) performance by Woodstock vets Canned Heat. That filmed segment, as well as a hilariously irrelevant scene in which a buxom nude girl answers the telephone to tell a (not seen) Mrs. Golden that Terry isn’t home, were both added against Grefé’s wishes and without his involvement. The Arrow release includes the theatrical cut as a bonus feature, but the newer “Director’s Cut” restores cut footage and removes the nude scene and Canned Heat, meaning this Naked Zoo only feature fleeting nakedness and more generic rock ‘n’ roll. Either way, this is shamelessly entertaining trash and a welcome inclusion in the set. Grefé provides a newly recorded audio commentary.

Jennifer Bishop experiences the wrath of Mako: Jaws of Death.

Mako: Jaws of Death (aka The Jaws of Death), as the title implies, was rushed into production to cash in on the success of Jaws (1975), although Grefé says he already had his script ready, awaiting sufficient interest and funding. Indeed, Grefé was accustomed to working with sharks, having wrangled one as far back as Death Curse of Tartu (1966) before coordinating the shark sequence in Live and Let Die (1973), and Mako plays more like a Shark Week take on Willard (or Grefé’s previous Willard riff, 1972’s Stanley) than a Spielberg knock-off. An extremely game Richard Jaeckel (Grizzly) plays Sonny, a loner with a mysterious bond with the sharks he retains on his small island. (Despite the title referencing shortfin mako sharks, these are tiger sharks.) Athletic and single-minded in his protection of the sharks, he’s perfectly willing to murder anyone who would do them harm – or let his sharks do the killing for him. As he eventually reveals to Karen (Jennifer Bishop, Impulse), who swims in an aquarium at a local bar, he swore an oath to protect the creatures after they saved his life from some bandits while he was working as a salvage diver in the Philippines. A monk made him an honorary member of a “shark clan” and gave him a mystical medallion. “As long as I wear my medallion,” he says, “I’ll find friends everywhere among the sharks.”

Harold “Odd Job” Sakata gets hooked.

Among the cast are Grefé veterans John Davis Chandler (The Hooked Generation) and Goldfinger‘s iconic Harold “Odd Job” Sakata (as the credits name him, and who had previously appeared in Grefé’s Impulse), both playing sleazy shark hunters. The fishing-themed revenge Sonny takes on the two of them carries the film straight into proto-slasher territory. Sonny, improbably beset on all sides by people who want his sharks, must also contend with a sinister marine biologist as well as the owner of the aquarium bar, “Butter,” played by another Grefé regular, Miami radio personality Milton “Butterball” Smith, who wants to purchase the sharks for his aquatic entertainment. Jaeckel is a lot of fun to watch as he takes his character through desperation and deepening psychosis, and he gets right into the water to swim alongside the sharks. Grefé, as usual, is eager to put his actors next to the animals to capture the most exciting possible footage, here accompanied by gallons of fake blood to simulate frenzied shark attacks. It’s fabulous. Supplements include interviews with Bishop and screenwriter Robert Morgan, a look at sharksploitation films with author Michael Gingold, and the Super-8 condensed version of the film.

And there’s more – He Came from the Swamp also includes a fourth disc with Grefé’s take on Deliverance, Whiskey Mountain (1977), and a feature-length documentary on the filmmaker’s career, They Came from the Swamp (2020). A highly recommended box set from Arrow Video on a unique regional multi-genre filmmaker.

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Double Feature: The Hooked Generation (1968)/The Psychedelic Priest (1971)

Posted on December 1, 2020 at 5:06 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

The second disc in Arrow Video’s box set He Came from the Swamp: The William Grefé Collection switches focus from pulpy horror to the briefly thriving genre of hippiesploitation. (The first disc, containing Sting of Death and Death Curse of Tartu, is reviewed here.) The judgmental title of The Hooked Generation (1968), however, is a bit misleading. Although on the whole the film delivers a message that drugs will lead you to degradation and death – a frequent ingredient in this subgenre, such as with the camp classic Psych-Out (1968) – the case study here is far from typical. Set, of course, in Grefé’s Floridian stomping grounds, the story ostensibly charts trafficking from Cuban drug runners to rock clubs and finally a decrepit plantation occupied by free-loving hippies and catatonic addicts. Yet any sense of verisimilitude is washed out to sea quickly. A raw opening credits sequence depicts the unhinged Acid (John Davis Chandler, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid) preparing to shoot up heroin on the boat belonging to Daisey (Jeremy Slate, The Born Losers), before soldiers of Fidel Castro arrive with a cache of drugs. Deciding that their price is too high, Daisey allows the Cubans to lower their guard by asking them to join him for a smoke, then shoots their leader with a spear gun. Slaughtering the rest of the soldiers and leaving their bodies to burn on the Cubans’ boat, Daisey and his men take their loot downriver only to encounter the Coast Guard. A shootout ensues, the Coast Guard officers are slain, hostages are taken, and a flight begins through swamps and drug dens while police cast their dragnet.

Jeremy Slate does his best White Heat-era James Cagney in The Hooked Generation.

Despite a psychedelic rock score by Chris Martell and the Odyssey, frequently The Hooked Generation feels more like a psychopaths-take-hostages crime drama than a counterculture exposé. But when Grefé (who co-wrote the screenplay) turns his sights to our protagonists’ ultimate chaotic fates, the film becomes much more interesting. A pit stop in an Indian village sees Acid chasing a young woman to a riverside, where the drug-addled young man holds her head underwater just to teach her a lesson – then becomes distracted by a bird flying overhead. For the first time in the film, Grefé allows a moment of stillness and peace, all while a woman is accidentally drowned. Acid proceeds to rape her (off screen), still oblivious to the scale of his crime when he returns to his companions. His final shoot-out in the plantation drug den is accompanied by a lysergic mental fracturing, as Grefé nightmarishly replays the last minutes of his life from different angles, bouncing back and forth in Acid’s head while he bleeds out. The film concludes with a sustained hostage stand-off in the swamps as Daisey and his partner Dum Dum (Willie Pastrano) – the latter nicknamed for the dumdum bullets he carves – try to hold back the police. But, apart from Slate’s sweaty and committed performance, nothing really gels until the final moments when Daisey, jabbed in the neck with a needle by one of his hostages, OD’s while stumbling face-first into the water. Grefé mirrors the drowning of the Indian girl by studying Daisey’s submerged face while he silently dies.

John Darrell takes some acid-spiked Coke to become The Psychedelic Priest.

The Psychedelic Priest (1971), originally entitled Electric Shades of Grey for a (quite good) song that features prominently on the soundtrack, is a more authentic slice of hippiesploitation. As Grefé tells it, he was summoned to California by producer/director Stewart Merrill to make a film about a priest experiencing youth culture, at which point Merrill revealed he had no screenplay. Grefé indulged him by proceeding to improvise the entire 16mm film alongside an inexperienced, often plucked-from-the-sidewalks cast. Yet all this effort was for naught; after Merrill burned a bridge with a distributor, the film went unreleased for decades, until at last Something Weird resurrected the movie for a 2001 DVD release. The priest in question (John Darrell) is introduced lecturing some college kids who are skipping class and smoking pot on the campus lawn. They offer him a Coke laced with LSD, and during his bad trip he takes shelter in a church that becomes nightmarish. This leads to Darrell promptly dropping out of society Timothy Leary-style, driving to Los Angeles and picking up a hitchhiker who eventually falls in love with him. They travel the country, but his rejection of her proclamation of love, her subsequent tragic death, and the murder of a Black traveling companion at the hands of racist small town cops, lead the priest to hard drugs and disillusionment. Eventually, he finds his way back to God after receiving inspiration at a church revival.

Travelling companions in The Psychedelic Priest.

The Easy Rider template is obvious, from the cross-country road trip to the brutal encounters with prejudice (including against long-haired hippies), but the improvised dialogue and amateur performances are front and center. On the one hand, they saddle the film with tonal inconsistency from beginning to end, such as when our protagonist comes across as almost indifferent to the hate crime murder of his friend just one scene prior. The late film introduction of a sleazy private detective feels just as random. But The Psychedelic Priest has plenty of appeal as a time capsule of a specific time and place, namely southern California in the early 70’s, as the culture of peace and love became increasingly disillusioned with the violence of Altamont ’69 in the rear view mirror. With the plot being hardly more than a shrug, it’s easy to settle in and enjoy the people watching, particularly with shots stolen at music festivals and some remarkable footage of confessions given by microphone at the climactic church service. You also get to see our psychedelic priest wandering past roadside dives and vintage scuzzy massage parlors. This is a slight, often crudely assembled little movie, but it’s also a window into a fascinating, fleeting American moment. As with the previous disc reviewed in Arrow’s box set, this is not reference quality material: the sound for both films is rough, with The Hooked Generation‘s dialogue bearing the brunt of the abuse. Instead, the appeal is the preservation of a pair of exploitation items that could otherwise be easily overlooked. A pair of interviews with author/film historian Chris Poggiali provide additional context (intriguingly, he compares Psychedelic Priest to the Billy Graham-produced films of the 50’s and 60’s), and the older audio commentaries with Grefé and Frank Henenlotter are ported over.

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