ROLLERBALL (1975)

Director: Norman Jewison

Writer: William Harrison adapting his 1973 short story “Roller Ball Murder”

Producer: Norman Jewison

Cast: James Caan, John Houseman, John Beck, Moses Gunn, Maud Adams, Barbara Trentham, Pamela Hensley, Shane Rimmer, Ralph Richardson, Robert Ito, Richard LeParmentier, Burt Kwouk, Nancy Blieier, John Normington, (and uncredited cast members) Craig R. Baxley, Steve Boyum, Jimmy Berg, Tony Brubaker, Walter Scott, Bob Minor, Robert Dancel, Alan Hamane, Danny Wong, Eddie Kubo, Bob Leon, Burnell Tucker, Angus MacInnes, Dick Enberg, Bob Miller, Byron Morrow, Anthony Chinn, Sarah Douglas, Valli Kemp, Yasuko Nagazumi, Robert Lee, Mac MacDonald

In the future, the world is controlled by six major corporations. Each corporation has its own rollerball sports team. Rollerball is a brutal variation on roller derby that includes aspects of football, hockey, and motocross. The greatest champion in the sport is the captain of the Houston team, Jonathan E (James Caan). After ten years in the sport, the famous and celebrated Jonathan E. is being pressured to retire by Mr. Bartholomew (John Houseman), the CEO of the Energy Corporation that owns the Houston team. As Jonathan continues to resist retirement, the rules of rollerball are changed to increase the danger of the game.

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Rollerball is a dystopian science fiction film that speculates more about the trajectory of society than the advance of technology. It has concerns that are even more relevant today half a century after it was made. We not only are shown how the public mania for sports can devolve into mindless enthusiasm for barbarity, but also how that diversion can distract the masses from the corporate puppet masters pulling all of civilization’s strings.

Canadian director and producer Norman Jewison was struck by how the sport of hockey was being promoted on television in the United States. Jewison felt that “highlights” of the body checking and fights were being shown to promote the game as a blood sport. He found that emphasis repulsive and set out to make Rollerball a film condemning violence in sports. Jewison was just as offended when he was approached to get the rights to the game of rollerball for the development of an actual professional rollerball league.

The film’s thrilling rollerball action was performed by the actors and stuntmen on an actual track built in a Munich, Germany sports arena. The sport of rollerball was devised in its entirety with rules that make the scenes shot during the game seem to have a practical justification. Regardless of its brutality, this is a credible athletic competition being depicted. Since this bloodsport seems all too believable, we are not distanced by fantasy elements that give us a comfort zone to avoid grappling with the morality of such a nasty spectacle and its effect on society.

Director Jewison also had an even more valid concern: the ever more pervasive control of society by corporations. Fifty years later, we are seeing how a handful of CEOs are becoming ever more influential in every aspect of our lives. They provide our modern conveniences and infrastructure while exerting more control with their market pressures and monied political pull. Those concerns may be nothing new, but we seem to be accelerating into a business-as-usual mindset about such machinations.

In the world of Rollerball, corporate control has replaced politics and nationalism, which seems to have eliminated poverty and disease. Yet that corporate control must be maintained by dumbing down the masses and diminishing individuality. All human knowledge has been catalogued in a central computer. By either intent or incompetence, portions of that knowledge can be restricted or deleted. If only one corporate-directed entity is allowed to be the caretaker of humanity’s culture and history, how can people be sure that knowledge will be preserved? After all, keeping the masses ignorant makes them less independent and more easily manipulated.

As the captain of the Houston Energy team, Jonathan E. is this future world’s most revered rollerball athlete. He has distinguished himself as the greatest player of the game and is well provided for. He lives on his spacious ranch amidst beautiful scenery and is treated to a succession of lovely women assigned to him as live-in companions. Despite his fame and luxury, he is frustrated. Eventually, we learn that the only thing that ever meant anything to Jonathan, besides rollerball, was his wife, Ella (Maud Adams). She was taken away from him by a corporate executive who wanted her. Now, the only thing that Jonathan can feel any passion for is playing the game of rollerball.

Jonathan E. may have been resigned to his life of being a rollerball champion, but that personal distinction is being jeopardized by Mr. Bartholomew, the CEO of the Energy Corporation that owns his team. Mr. Bartholomew suggests it is time for Jonathan to retire. Jonathan resists this, to the growing aggravation of Mr. Bartholomew. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Jonathan is curious about how things are run by corporations. He wants to know why he is being pressured to give up the last thing in his life he is passionate about. Jonathan only finds secrecy and grows more wary about his own safety.

Aside from the camaraderie he has with his fellow rollerballers, Jonathan has no real relationships. He seems detached and frustrated when not on the rollerball track. As Jonathan, James Caan gives a performance that could be taken as disinterested, but I think that is the point of the film. Caan’s character, like all the other citizens in this future world, has been kept complacent with comfort and security. Like everyone else, he has been conditioned to accept the status quo of corporate control. It takes both the loss of his wife and the threat of being forced out of his sport to stir enough unrest in him to begin to question and resist corporate authority. I think Caan’s underplaying shows the damage that he and the rest of humanity have suffered far more effectively than a lot of snark and threats. Caan’s Jonathan E. does have a few outbursts, but these seem to take a while to build up. Jonathan is just one more victim of the mental and emotional neutering of people in this dystopia.

While there are some moments of humor and anger displayed in this film, there is a pervasive coldness to it all. The people are intellectually numb and incapable of truly engaging at an honest emotional level. This may make us have a more difficult time bonding with the characters, but I think it is a realistic indication of that loss of individuality that is the threat posed by corporate-directed conformity.

EYE OF THE NEEDLE (1981)

Director: Richard Marquand

Writers: Stanley Mann adapting Ken Follett’s novel

Producer: Stephen J. Friedman

Cast: Donald Sutherland, Kate Nelligan, Christopher Cazenove, Ian Bannen, Philip Martin Brown, Jonathan Haley, Nicholas Haley, Alex McGrindle, Faith Brook, George Belbin, Barbara Graley, Rupert Frazer, Stephen MacKenna, Arthur Lovegrove, Barbara Ewing, Patrick Connor, John Bennett, David Hayman, Sam Kydd, John Paul, Bill Nighy, Allan Surtees, Rik Mayall

During World War II, England-based Nazi spy Henry Faber (Donald Sutherland) is trying to deliver film to his German handlers. Faber’s information could jeopardize the allies’ D-Day invasion of Normandy. Fleeing the British authorities, Faber steals a boat, gets caught in a terrible storm, and is shipwrecked on Storm Island, off the coast of Scotland. He finds shelter with the family of David and Lucy Rose (Christopher Cazenove and Kate Nelligan) and their young son, Jo (played by twins Jonathan and Nicholas Haley). David is embittered by the loss of his legs in an automobile accident. Ever since, David has been romantically distant from Lucy. The only other inhabitant on Storm Island is Tom, the lighthouse keeper. The lonely Lucy is drawn by the interest that Henry Faber shows in her, and they begin an affair. While cold-blooded spy Faber begins to reveal some humanity to Lucy, he is still intent on his rendezvous with a German U-boat.

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Based on the bestselling novel by Ken Follett, Eye of the Needle is a terrific thriller that succeeds by becoming more intimate, and therefore more suspensefully intense, as it progresses. The fate of the Free World could be decided by just the chance meeting of two people on opposing sides of World War II who have a spontaneous affair. The story builds believably with plenty of intrigue and drama. One never gets the impression that any characters are doing “movie stuff.” The stakes are high enough without any heroic or villainous posing and outrageous stunts or pyrotechnics. Best of all, the engaging lead performances remind us that emotional needs can cause anyone to take risks.

Donald Sutherland was such an unconventional presence that he could play sympathetic leads, eccentrics, and villains. As Nazi spy Henry Faber, Sutherland affects a relaxed and pleasant facade while mingling with his British co-workers and neighbors. He will revert to his heartless efficiency to kill anyone who endangers his mission. Henry Faber’s codename of “The Needle” is earned by his weapon of choice, a switchblade stiletto. When Faber meets Lucy, we suspect that his initial decency is all just a part of his act. Yet, as Lucy has her first private conversation with him, we see Faber begin to express some genuine feeling. At this point, we realize Faber is starting to bond with someone as he may never have done before.

Kate Nelligan’s Lucy Rose is such a sympathetic and decent person that we don’t resent her having a sexual tryst with a charming stranger behind her bitter husband’s back. She has tried to create intimacy with David Rose, yet he is unable to accept his disability in their relationship. After four years on the remote Storm Island in this hopeless marriage, her unreciprocated need for romantic love seems an understandable provocation for her infidelity. Nelligan’s tender beauty could convince me of anything, yet it is her understated sensitivity in her performance that has us rooting for her every second. She is both sympathetic and genuine.

The suspense in this thriller is both mortal and emotional. Beyond the concerns of whether the German spy Henry Faber can accomplish his mission, we have the intrigue of his affair with Lucy Rose that seems to be exactly what these two people need. However, Faber is concealing his true background from the woman he has very quickly become involved with. As the affair continues, the dynamic keeps changing because of Faber’s mission-related actions. This makes for some uncomfortable and harrowing moments for Lucy in their affair. Despite the gravity of Eye of the Needle’s espionage plot, Stanley Mann’s script and Richard Marquand’s direction zero in on the emotions of Henry Faber and Lucy Rose that drive the story to a conclusion that could decide the outcome of World War II.

Few movies have benefitted as much from a shooting location as this one. The Storm Island setting that the last two-thirds of the film centers on is really striking. It has a raw, pristine beauty with its expanses of green grass bordered by the magnificent cliffs above the restless ocean. It would seem to be a truly idyllic location for romance, but its isolation is also made very apparent and raises the risk for our heroine. This location was actually the Isle of Mull, an island of the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of mainland Scotland. The island was not as desolate as the selective camera angles would have us believe.

Director Richard Marquand also directed the horror film The Legacy (1978) and the thriller Jagged Edge (1985). George Lucas was so impressed with Marquand’s work in Eye of the Needle that he hired him to direct the third produced Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi (1983). Richard Marquand died much too young at the age of 49.

Eye of the Needle is a war film for people who don’t like war films. It has romance, intrigue, danger, and suspense that never strains credulity and challenges us emotionally.

HOWLING II ... YOUR SISTER IS A WEREWOLF (1985), aka HOWLING II: STIRBA - WEREWOLF BITCH

Director: Philippe Mora

Writers: Gary Brandner, Robert Sarno

Producer: Steven A. Lane

Cast: Christopher Lee, Sybil Danning, Reb Brown, Annie McEnroe, Marsha Hunt, Judd Omen, Ferdy Mayne, Jiří Krytinář, Valerie Kaplanová, Petr Skarke, Igor Smrzik, Jimmy Nail, Patrick Field, Ladislav Krečmer, Ivo Niederle, Hana Ludvikova, Jan Kraus, James Crawford, Steven Bronowski, the band Babel (Stephen W. Parsons, Chris Pye, Simon Etchell, Steve Young)

In Los Angeles, California, Ben White (Reb Brown) attends the funeral of his sister, television newscaster Karen White (Hana Ludvikova). There he meets occult investigator Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee), who tries to convince Ben that his dead sister is a werewolf, and that only a ritual Stefan can perform will give her soul peace. When werewolves attack to try claiming Karen’s body, Ben is convinced and, along with Karen’s co-worker Jenny Templeton (Annie McEnroe), joins Stefan on his mission to Transylvania. That is where Stefan hopes to find and destroy 10,000-year-old sorceress and queen of the werewolves Stirba (Sybil Danning).

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1981’s The Howling was the hit horror film very loosely adapted from the novel by Gary Brandner. Howling II was Brandner’s sequel novel that was also published before the first film adaptation. For the film sequel, Brandner was approached to do the screenplay. In fact, he did several due to ongoing budget cuts and shooting location changes. With each of his screenplay renovations becoming more unwieldy, Brandner finally left the project. The resulting film has even less to do with Gary Brandner’s source novels than the first film. What we are left with is the energetic and unfocused Howling II … Your Sister is a Werewolf.

This is a flick that is hard to defend. It is one of those missed opportunity movies that may never have lived up to that great first film, but, knowing its constant production difficulties and compromises, it is amazing that it was ever finished. It is also a film that no one would ever qualify as good, yet it certainly has its fans (including eccentric louts, like me).

So, just why the hell do I like Howling II … Your Sister is a Werewolf? Of course, we all know that I have bad taste. However, allow me to list the valid merits that I discern in this much-maligned fright flick:

• Fun cast, especially Sybil Danning
• Terrific, synthy, new wave soundtrack
• Sybil Danning
• And… uh… Sybil Danning!

There! Did you just see how many facets there are to appreciate in this cinematic gem? What more justification could I possibly need to turn off my brain and turn on with this salacious and sinister silliness? Did I mention that Sybil Danning is in this? Well, she is, so I am completely validated for fetishizing this funky fright flick.

Okay, I suppose that now you want some highfalutin film analysis of Howling II ... Your Sister is a Werewolf. Geez, you’re really barking up the wrong tree, but here goes…

I guess there is sort of a plot involving werewolves, werewolf attacks, shooting werewolves, and even werewolf orgies. Leading this cult of wanton werewolves is none other than Stirba, as portrayed by Euro film and B-movie goddess Sybil Danning, in a succession of crazed fashion statements just waiting to get torn off to reveal… more Sybil Danning! OWOOOOOO! Danning had appeared in several films starring Christopher Lee, but this crazy flick surely has their most memorable scene together.

Horror heavyweight Christopher Lee lends what little credibility this frantic and fearsome fluff can muster. We see him open the film by reading from some tome that is meant to impart biblical-styled legitimacy and dread about the supernatural shenanigans to come. Even more impressive is when his occult investigator Stefan Crosscoe is slumming at a punk concert while tailing the werewolf Mariana (Marsha Hunt). See the man rockin’ those new wave shades! During the filming of this scene, the punks in the concert audience were getting so out of hand that Lee had to wade through the unruly crowd to escort actress Marsha Hunt to safety. As Dracula, Lee had put the bite on Hunt back in Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972).

Reb Brown was another of Lee’s former castmates. Brown had starred as the superhero Captain America in two television movies. Lee was the chief villain in the second one, Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979). Brown is back in hero mode here alongside Lee’s Stefan Crosscoe. Once Brown’s Ben White gets past his mourning and angry skepticism, he spends the remainder of the film primal screaming while shooting werewolves. I have read that this is a Reb Brown habit in some of his other action movies. He also lends a bit of humor to the proceedings. My favorite line is Brown’s improvised reference to the werewolves as fuzzballs.

Apparently, Brown got on well with director Philippe Mora. He was cast the next year in Mora’s Australian true-crime drama Death of a Soldier (1986). Brown’s performance as a serial-killing soldier stationed in Australia during World War II earned him an Australian Film Institute nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

As journalist Jenny Templeton, Annie McEnroe tags along with Stefan and Ben on the werewolf search-and-destroy mission. She rather abruptly becomes Ben’s love interest and then a damsel in distress. It is a shame that her underwritten role never allows McEnroe to bring any of the quirky spunk and vulnerability she had back in the Oliver Stone horror film The Hand (1982).

Director Philippe Mora had already made the genuinely creepy The Beast Within (1982). This time around, once the production finally settled on shooting in what was then the country of Czechoslovakia, the locations provided a lot of production value and atmosphere. No doubt, the ever-dwindling budget dollars also went a lot further in the impoverished country. Further cost-cutting resulted in Mora being surprised in mid-production with a delivery of old ape suits, from either the Planet of the Apes films (1968–73) or the 1974 television series, to be used for his werewolves. Alterations to the faces of the suits, lots of dark night scenes, and some inserted closeups of separately made werewolf heads tried to salvage the disaster. An even more horrendous snafu occurred when the eager-to-please Czech locals assured the director that they could perform a fire stunt and demonstrated it by simply dousing someone in gasoline and setting him ablaze. At that point, Mora insisted that the production shell out for some professional stuntmen.

Despite the obstacles of compromised scripting, budget cuts, foreign-language barriers, and communist surveillance, director Mora managed to give us a good-looking and lively film, even if the story is a bit loopy and characterizations are scant. At times there seems to be a what-the-hell frivolity at play with extraneous bits of goofy humor. We even get a throwaway trick-or-treat scene. Mora would also direct the next film in the series, Howling III: The Marsupials (1987).

The soundtrack, composed by Stephen W. Parsons, is a vital ingredient for my enjoyment of this film. This was Parsons’ first film soundtrack assignment, and it is he that fronts the band Babel in the punk rock club scene. We see them performing the “Howling” theme that will be reworked a few different ways during the film. Best of all, as the closing credits roll, we see Babel performing the complete song in the punk club while there are various snippets of the film characters intercut from preceding scenes seemingly reacting to the shot of Sybil Danning’s Stirba tearing open her dress repeated 17 times. Believe it or not, that same breast-baring bit was originally repeated even more times until Danning complained to the producer. I surely hope that all these years later the magnificent Ms. Danning can appreciate that her repetitious and ravishing reveal perfectly complements what amounts to the greatest music video of all time. MTV, eat your heart out!

It is puzzling why a film as popular and respected as 1981’s The Howling gave way to such a disreputable series of movies. Beginning with Howling II … Your Sister is a Werewolf, each installment would go its own way and must be judged on its own merits. In many ways, this second film suffers the most as it is always compared to its classic predecessor. The only thread it shares is the reference to the Karen White character of the first film. Otherwise, this is an entirely standalone film, as all the others in the series would be. 

This second film was generally dismissed by most yet still revered by those of us looking for a hedonistic horror experience. We get to indulge in that Christopher Lee gravitas and that Sybil Danning radiance resonating with Stephen Parson’s synthy, new wave tuneage. That’s all a cult film needs and all I need to join in this lupine lunacy. OWOOOOOO!

NIGHTMARE (1981), aka NIGHTMARES IN A DAMAGED BRAIN

Director: Romano Scavolini

Writer: Romano Scavolini

Producers: John L. Watkins, William Milling

Cast: Baird Stafford, Sharon Smith, Mik Cribben, C.J. Cooke, Danny Ronan, John Watkins, William Milling, Tammy Patterson, Kim Patterson, Kathleen Ferguson, Scott Praetorius, Christina Keefe, William S. Kirksey, Tommy Bouvier, William Paul, Geoffrey Marchese, Candese Marchese, Michael Sweney, George Kruger, Lonnie Griffis, Tara Alexander, Danielle Galiana, Ray Baker, David Massar, Carl Gifford

Psychiatric patient George Tatum (Baird Stafford) is tormented by a recurrent nightmare involving a young boy (Scott Praetorius), a couple indulging in sadomasochistic sex games (Christine Keefe and William S. Kirksey), and a woman’s severed head. Tatum had been committed to a psychiatric hospital for the killing of a Brooklyn, New York family. Tatum’s treatment involved experimental drug therapy sanctioned by the U.S. government. It seemed that the behavior-altering drug had rehabilitated Tatum and he was released. However, as an outpatient, George Tatum continues to have nightmares and seizures. A visit to a New York City peepshow prompts a psychosexual fit in Tatum. He goes on a southbound road trip and commits murder. Now that Tatum has gone missing and begun to kill, his handlers are trying to track him down before more killings occur and they are exposed.

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According to Italian director and writer Romano Scavolini, Nightmare was based on some articles detailing the CIA using psychiatric patients and prison inmates to experiment on with behavior-altering drugs. In the course of this film’s story, these experiments do not seem to be the reason George Tatum becomes a dangerous schizophrenic. He has already been implicated in violence that has rendered him suitable as a subject for experimentation by the U.S. government. It is the negligence and ambitions of Tatum’s doctor (William Milling) and government project supervisor (John L. Watkins) that allows Tatum to be considered “rebuilt” and safe to enter society again. We never find out the endgame for this project as it applies to Tatum, only that the military may have some further use for him. Once Tatum gets out of control, all that the people involved in his case are concerned with is finding him and covering their asses.

Although Scavolini states that he did not conceive of Nightmare as a genre piece, it surely must have gotten green-lit to become yet another bloody reveler in the slasher film craze of the early 1980s. It is one of the most simplistic and nasty of the lot. We are provided with protagonist George Tatum who we know from the very first scene is deranged. As we follow Tatum’s journey, we see him commit murder. There will be no whodunit intrigue in this film. Perhaps this movie should be considered a “whydunit.” There are only a handful of continuing characters to follow in the story, yet we know very little about them. We simply see them going about their routines for the six days that this film’s story unfolds. Along the way, there are moments of sexual titillation and bloody murder. If ever a movie seemed designed for the early ’80s grindhouses, it was Nightmare. Fittingly, an early scene shows George Tatum wandering around New York City’s once infamous Times Square sex shops, peepshows, and movie theaters that probably exhibited this film.

Baird Stafford stars as the murderous George Tatum. His nightmares seem linked to a psychosexual hangup that can induce epileptic fits and homicidal acts. He is not romanticized, stylized, or glorified in anyway. Tatum is not a mythic menace in the Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees manner. George Tatum is just one very pathetic, anguished, and dangerous person. We learn very little about him, and it is perhaps that remote aspect of this character that lends his presence a bit of extra power. His anonymity also provides a payoff in the end.

Sharon Smith plays single mother Susan Temper whose Florida household becomes the focus of Tatum’s attention. She displays the frazzled emotions of parenthood very honestly. The focus of her life seems to be the relationship she is having with mellow and supportive Bob Rosen (Mik Cribben). Like all the characters in this film, we only learn anything about her from the way she behaves. There are no backstories or character arcs provided. This may not qualify as great drama, but there is a humdrum intimacy here that may make the horrific events feel more disturbing.

Susan Temper’s homelife had its share of stress long before the psychotic George Tatum started making creepy phone calls. Her son, C.J. (C.J. Cooke), is a morbid, little brat who delights in pranks that scare the shit out of his family and babysitter (Danny Ronan). As a result, he becomes a classic case of the boy who cried wolf when he tries to tell anyone about seeing creepy George lurking about.

The interplay between George Tatum’s nightmares and reality is well done. His nightmares drive him to acts of violence, and many things can trigger his sporadic nightmare visions. Neither Tatum nor his doctor was able to understand the significance of the nightmares that might reveal the root of Tatum’s psychosis. This provides some intrigue as a replacement for the usual mystery killer element in many other slasher horror films. Once Tatum’s nightmare fully plays out, it completes the film’s most notorious scene. It is also used to suggest an unsettling “passing of the torch” for further potential maniacal mischief.

Director Scavolini refused to make cuts to his naughty and nihilistic flick for any major film distributor to release it in the U.S. Nightmare received an X rating for its New York release, which kept it grinding away for 24 hours in the New York City grindhouses before getting some regional releases in other states. At the height of the “video nasties” hysteria in the United Kingdom, Nightmare had the distinction of being the one film that resulted in criminal prosecutions for those distributing it on video cassette.

Among horror buffs, Nightmare achieved a controversial status due to the film’s promotional credit of “Special Effects Director” given to makeup artist Tom Savini, the ’80s king of splatter. Savini denies involvement with the film and resents the movie trying to cash-in on his name and reputation. Others involved in the production say that Savini was involved in an advisory role for some of the film’s gore effects. There is one famous photo of Savini on the set seeming to demonstrate just how an axe should be handled in a scene. To judge from the bloody results, I would say it appears that the splatter maestro’s coaching paid off.

Nightmare is a very minimalist horror film that keeps things simple, sleazy, and gory. Its directness contributes to the grittiness that helps to distinguish it from the rest of the slasher pack, and Tara Alexander’s peepshow penetration demonstration is an unexpected horror film highlight making the bloody Nightmare a wet dream in more ways than one. George Tatum ain’t the only one drooling.