The Image (1975) - Review

When it comes to bondage and erotica in film, French director Just Jaeckin’s adaptation of author Anne Cécile Desclos’s The Story of O pretty much set the bar by which movies exploring this particular corner of human sexuality would be measured. Over in America, director Radley Metzger took note of what Jaeckin had accomplished and apparently wondered, “Is that what you call sadomasochism?” With that mindset, this American filmmaker, working in the considerably kinkier surroundings of Paris, brought us the film known simply as The Image.

Jean (Carl Parker), a suave but terminally bored writer, attends a wealthy literary party in Paris, where he spots the ravishing Anne (Mary Mendum). Hoping to learn more about her, he approaches Claire (Marilyn Roberts), an old flame, only to discover that she and Anne are lovers. Claire invites him to visit them, setting the stage for an introduction to a world considerably kinkier than the usual literary cocktail party.

 

The polite guest who took the host’s hospitality way too far.

Jean soon discovers that Claire is the dominant partner in a sadomasochistic relationship, treating Anne as her submissive plaything and subjecting her to humiliation and punishment. Rather than questioning his life choices, Jean becomes fascinated by their arrangement. Claire is cold, commanding, and seemingly in complete control, while Anne’s quiet obedience hints at desires that may be more complicated than they first appear.

 

Just your average, casual afternoon in the Bagatelle rose gardens.

Claire begins inviting Jean to participate, turning their private relationship into an increasingly elaborate threesome. She shares photographs of Anne that fuel Jean’s obsession, and together they explore their fantasies through bondage, sexual humiliation, and physical punishment. Jean moves from curious observer to enthusiastic participant, apparently finding inspiration in places his writing career never could have taken him.

 

Establishing a deeply uncomfortable, high-society hierarchy.

Divided into a series of chapters, the film follows their escalating games through private rooms and public settings, where exhibitionism and the risk of discovery add another layer to the proceedings. From bizarre restaurant antics to a lingerie-shopping excursion involving a salesgirl (Valerie Marron), the trio’s activities grow increasingly outrageous. Claire continues orchestrating the encounters, while Jean happily follows along, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he might be just as much a pawn as Anne.

 

The moment Jean decides to rewrite Claire’s rules.

As the punishments intensify, Jean discovers that Claire has been directing events with the precision of a filmmaker, manipulating both him and Anne to fulfil her own vision. Their carefully maintained hierarchy finally begins to collapse when Jean’s involvement threatens Claire’s authority. The brutal climax exposes the weaknesses beneath her commanding exterior, while Anne’s response suggests that the supposed submissive may have understood the power dynamics better than either of her partners.

 

A final act that delivers total psychological whiplash.

Stray Observation:

• Jean is supposed to be a writer, but his most significant contribution is narrating the obvious. His voice-over is so intrusive that the film occasionally feels like an audiobook whose narrator has wandered onto the set and refuses to leave. The imagery is already doing the work, Jean. Give it a rest.
• A public garden makes an unexpectedly memorable romantic destination. Claire’s idea of an enjoyable outing involves ordering Anne to steal a rose and conceal its thorny stem beneath her garter, followed by an act of public humiliation. Most couples settle for a nice walk and perhaps an ice cream. Claire clearly considers those activities insufficiently ambitious.
• Anne’s apparent helplessness deserves a closer look. She spends much of the film obeying Claire’s commands, but the occasional glimmer in her eyes suggests that she is getting something out of these encounters that her companions might not entirely understand. The film’s power dynamics are considerably more interesting when Anne is treated as a participant with desires rather than merely a beautiful victim.
• The Gothic Chamber sequence is not for the faint-hearted. By this stage, the film has abandoned any pretence of playing it safe, escalating the punishments into genuinely disturbing territory. Anyone who has spent the preceding hour wondering whether things might become a little more extreme can finally stop wondering.
• Jean mistakes access for authority. Being invited into Claire’s private world makes him feel important, but he never quite grasps that an invitation is not the same thing as control. It’s an expensive lesson in the dangers of confusing participation with power.
• Shopping for lingerie becomes an elaborate sexual escapade. Claire sends Jean and Anne out together, and a salesgirl becomes part of the proceedings. One can only imagine the customer-service training required for this particular boutique.

 

I would not be surprised if Mary Mendum turned women bisexual daily.

Based on Jean de Berg’s novel L’Image, the film makes no attempt to disguise its intentions, and anyone expecting a coy little exercise in suggestive glances and strategically placed bedsheets has come to the wrong party. This is graphic, uncompromising erotic cinema that pushes well beyond the boundaries of conventional softcore filmmaking, with a decidedly chilly examination of dominance, submission, humiliation, and the peculiar games people play when sex becomes a battle for control.

 

1970s foreplay, disguised as a book club.

Radley Metzger was hardly a stranger to sophisticated erotic cinema. Working under the name Henry Paris on some of his adult productions, he had developed a reputation for films that combined explicit sexuality with polished cinematography, carefully composed images, and more narrative ambition than the genre’s less distinguished offerings. The Image benefits enormously from that experience. Shot in Paris, the film surrounds its characters with elegant interiors, fashionable settings, and an atmosphere of privileged decadence that makes their increasingly disturbing activities feel like an extension of their social environment rather than an intrusion from another world.

 

Kink, but make it high art.

Metzger also understands the importance of visual composition. Anne is repeatedly framed as an object to be observed, photographed, displayed, and manipulated, reflecting the way Claire and Jean perceive her. The camera’s interest in her physical appearance mirrors the characters’ fascination, making the viewer uncomfortably aware of the relationship between erotic imagery and objectification. This is not an especially subtle film, but its visual intelligence gives it more substance than a collection of increasingly outrageous sexual episodes might otherwise possess.

 

This film is not for the faint of heart.

The chapter structure provides a sense of progression, with each new episode extending the established power dynamic and pushing the characters further into their respective roles. Metzger allows the encounters to unfold at a deliberate pace, building an atmosphere of ritual and repetition. The repetition is intentional: the characters are not simply pursuing pleasure but reinforcing a hierarchy through routines that gradually become more elaborate and more disturbing. There is something almost clinical about the way these activities are presented, as though the director were documenting an experiment in human behaviour.

 

Claire and Anne redefine the term “power couple.”

Unfortunately, Metzger’s most obvious miscalculation is Jean’s narration, which repeatedly explains what the audience can already see, interrupting the carefully constructed atmosphere rather than adding any meaningful depth. There are moments when I wanted to reach through the screen, confiscate Jean’s microphone, and let the pictures speak for themselves. Still, Metzger deserves credit for balancing the film’s explicit content with a coherent dramatic framework, as the escalating encounters and growing tension between Jean, Claire, and Anne give the story a purpose beyond the next sexual escapade. The deliberate pacing may test viewers looking for a conventional narrative, but those willing to look beyond the graphic excesses will find a surprisingly compelling exploration of desire, manipulation, and control.

 

Peak Radley Metzger elegance.

The cast is central to the film’s success, particularly because the characters could easily have become little more than exaggerated stereotypes. Carl Parker’s Jean is so bland that he occasionally threatens to drain the life out of the film, while his intrusive narration explains things the audience can already see. Marilyn Roberts fares much better as Claire, delivering a cold, commanding performance that makes her character’s authority entirely convincing. Roberts also reveals the insecurity lurking beneath Claire’s carefully maintained composure, particularly when her control over the people around her begins to slip.

 

Even the architect gets lost in the maze.

is the film’s real revelation. Her performance gives Anne a fascinating ambiguity, with fleeting expressions and subtle changes in demeanour suggesting that her apparent helplessness conceals a more complicated inner life. Mendum makes Anne feel like a person rather than simply an object of desire, leaving us wondering how much of her submission is vulnerability and how much is a choice of her own. Alongside Roberts, she provides the psychological tension that elevates The Image beyond a succession of increasingly outrageous sexual encounters.

 

Stunning. Ethereal. Unforgettable.

Just Jaeckin’s 1975 classic The Story of O established an important benchmark for erotic films exploring sadomasochism, submission, and sexual power, but Radley Metzger’s The Image takes a more intimate, psychologically unsettling approach. Rather than concentrating on elaborate rituals and established hierarchies, Metzger focuses on the twisted triangle between Jean, Claire, and Anne, using photography and carefully staged encounters to explore how desire can turn a person into an object. The film also occupies an interesting position between the art-house erotica of the early 1970s and the increasingly explicit adult cinema that followed. Its graphic sexual content pushes well beyond conventional theatrical erotica, yet Metzger retains the polished visuals, deliberate pacing, and psychological ambitions of his more sophisticated work.

 

A very literal interpretation of “hard work.”

That combination makes The Image both compelling and decidedly unsuitable for casual viewers. Its sexual humiliations and physical punishments make Fifty Shades of Grey look like an adventurous weekend at a luxury spa, but the film offers more than shock value. It explores control, dependency, and the gap between the person and the image others construct of them, although its own fascination with the human body sometimes blurs the line between artistic ambition and exploitation. That uncomfortable tension is part of the film’s appeal, even if its relentless explicitness and Jean’s godawful narration occasionally get in the way.

 

Who needs narration over stuff like this?

The film’s most intriguing idea is ultimately contained in its title. Anne is not merely a woman desired by Jean and controlled by Claire; she is also an image created by the people around her. Claire photographs her, arranges her, and attempts to dictate how she will be perceived. Jean becomes fascinated with the version of Anne that Claire presents to him, gradually confusing his own fantasies with the person standing in front of him. Yet Anne’s performance suggests that the image is never entirely complete. There is always something about her that escapes the other characters’ control, whether it is a fleeting expression, a hint of amusement, or the possibility that her apparent submission conceals a more complicated form of agency. The film’s conclusion gives that idea its greatest dramatic force, exposing the limitations of the very hierarchy that has governed the story.

 

The End.

In conclusion, The Image isn’t exactly ideal family entertainment unless you’re looking for an efficient way to empty a room. Its graphic sexuality, humiliation, and escalating violence make it a challenging watch, but Radley Metzger’s direction, Marilyn Roberts’ commanding performance, and especially Mary Mendum’s riveting portrayal of Anne elevate it beyond mere erotic provocation. Jean’s dreadful narration and thoroughly bland personality are frustrating distractions, but the film’s exploration of dominance, manipulation, and the fragile boundary between control and dependency gives it unexpected depth. It’s certainly not for everyone, but The Image remains a fascinating, frequently uncomfortable, and undeniably memorable entry in 1970s erotic cinema.

The Wandering Earth (2019) – Review

I’ll make no bones about disaster films being a genre I’m particularly fond of — something about national landmarks exploding or massive tidal waves engulfing whole cities being a great backdrop for both action and drama — and Hollywood has done much to fulfill audiences' desire to see such massive catastrophes in all their glory. From way back in 1933 with Deluge, where massive quakes and tidal waves almost wipe out civilization, to 2015’s San Andreas, which gave us Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson pitting his biceps against shifting tectonic plates, we now have The Wandering Earth, China's entry with a premise so insane that one can’t help but be impressed.

Directed by Frant Gwo, The Wandering Earth is an epic disaster film in every sense of the word, based on the novella of the same name, by award-winning author Liu Cixin, it tells the thrilling tale of mankind’s greatest achievement in the face of ultimate disaster as it tries to save itself from extinction. The basic premise to The Wandering Earth is that the sun has reached the point in its lifecycle where it is about to become a red giant, which means that sometime within the next hundred years, the Earth will become a charred cinder, so mankind must put aside their differences if the human race is going to survive. Now, that’s not even the crazy part — Danny Boyle’s science fiction film Sunshine dealt with a similar threat (with the sun dying and mankind’s last ditch effort being to jump-start the thing with some well-placed nuclear bombs), which was pretty crazy, yet maybe somewhat plausible — but with The Wandering Earth, the plan is to construct 10,000 enormous thruster engines across the planet, running on fusion power, to propel the Earth to another solar system.

The Wandering Earth is China’s first real science fiction blockbuster, one with a good deal of money spent on an array of stunning visual effects that will surely make many a viewers' jaws drop, but with all that money spent on making this the most impressive-looking science fiction action-packed disaster epic, it would have been nice if a little more time and money had been spent on the screenplay. The first few minutes of the movie throws a ton of information at the viewer — the doomed destiny of the Earth, the Sun already wreaking havoc on the global climate, the plan to build massive engines to halt the planet’s orbit and then propel it out of the solar system on its 2,500 year journey to a new home in Alpha Centauri, the massive tsunamis caused by the stopping of the Earth’s rotation, wiping out 75% of the Earth’s population, and giant underground cities constructed below each of these colossal engines to keep what's left of humanity safe — all of this is before we get to learn anything about the film’s group of protagonists.

 

"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip."

We are first introduced to Liu Peiqiang (Jing Wu), an astronaut who will be part of the flight crew aboard “The Navigational Platform International Space Station,” which will be guiding the Earth on its long journey to Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, Liu’s first shift is seventeen years long, so this means abandoning his young son Liu Qi to the care of his father-in-law Han Zi'ang (Man-Tat Ng). When the film jumps ahead seventeen years later, we find his now grown son (Chuxiao Qu) has become a rebellious, resentful young man, furious with his father for not only leaving him, but also blaming him for the death of his mother — her dying of some undefined illness and thus not being eligible for the lottery that picked people to occupy the underground cities. So one day Liu Qi decides to take his adoptive sister Han Duoduo (Jin Mai Jaho) to the planet’s surface, which requires getting a black market environment suit from nefarious criminals, and it’s after getting arrested for joy-riding in his grandfather’s massive truck, that disaster strikes.

 

"Tonight on Ice Road Truckers."

The Earth was supposed to use Jupiter’s gravity to assist her exit from our solar system, but when a gravitational spike from the gas giant causes devastating earthquakes, which disables many of the thrusters located across the globe, it starts to pull the Earth towards it. With mere hours to get those thrusters back online, or see the Earth collide with Jupiter, all truckers are recruited to transport a lighter core (an engine component to restart the nearest planetary thruster engine). Joy-riders Liu Qi and Han Duoduo are basically press-ganged into the mission — with Liu Qi being a selfish dick about it long enough for us to really come to hate him — until eventually it comes down to just this one plucky group standing between the Earth’s survival or its utter destruction.

What follows is an action-packed thrill ride that is as fun to watch as it is impossible to believe, and if the whole premise of a “Wandering Earth” seems ludicrous to you — which, to be fair, will mostly likely be everyone watching this thing — the complete lack of actual science in this science fiction movie will break you. If you start questioning things like “How does the Earth retain its gravity while traveling through space?” or “Can a frozen planet, one that is hurtling through space, retain an atmosphere?” you may find yourself being yanked out of the narrative, but director Frant Gwo does his best to keep the action flying fast and furious so as not to give the viewer too much time to think of how ridiculous it all is.

 

"We're in the Suck Zone!"

The Wandering Earth does get major points for being balls-to-the-wall crazy with its premise, which I have to admit, I find wonderfully insane, but it also owes a lot to many science fiction and disaster films that have come before it; the look of the underground cities is very reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the Sun being a threat is, as mentioned, very similar to Danny Boyles Sunshine, the team of heroes racing across a frozen and exploding landscape is  reminiscent of the comet sequence in Deep Impact, and a lot of the snowy aspects will remind one of The Day After Tomorrow and Snowpiercer. But one of the more surprising elements is the inclusion of a HAL 9000 evil robot from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, this last point comes along while our heroes scramble across arctic landscapes, which are constantly being torn apart by quakes. Above all this, on the space station, Liu Qi’s father finds himself in a battle with a computer hell-bent on writing off the Earth so as to preserve its back-up cargo of frozen embryos, and who will kill anyone who stands between it and its objective.

 

"Let the Earth die, Dave."

While viewing Frant Gwo’s The Wandering Earth, you may lose track of how many times our heroes should have died — I gave up at around twelve — but strangely enough, that didn’t affect my enjoyment of this movie, and maybe that has something to do with just how crazy the central premise was, for if you have signed on to the whole “move the planet through the galaxy” premise, then every other crazy moment will just pale in comparison. This isn’t to say there weren’t genuine problems with some of the film's elements; an obnoxious Australian-Chinese comic relief, whose every moment on screen made my soul die a little more, and Liu Qi’s adoptive sister could easily have been written out as her sole character trait is "Hi, I’m female, and that’s about it," but the real killer for me was Liu Qi himself, as his change from selfish idiot to self-sacrificing hero comes with no real organic progression of character. It’s as if the writers reached a certain point in the script and realized they needed a hero, so they just flicked a switch.

 

"Sis, it's time for me to stop being a dick."

Simply put, The Wandering Earth is a beautiful dystopian science fiction disaster film, one that puts its visual splendor ahead of such petty concerns like having three dimensional characters — the closest we get is the moments with Liu Qi’s father aboard the space station — but I couldn’t help but put aside most of my qualms while being carried away with this particular adventure tale, which highlighted mankind’s indomitable spirit and can-do attitude. The Wandering Earth is the type of film that must be looked at as a tapestry — while not looking too closely at the individual parts — as it tackles clichés and tropes at levels never dreamed of before, making many of its Hollywood contemporaries pale in comparison. The Wandering Earth is well worth checking out, even if you are normally opposed to foreign films and reading subtitles, you won't be disappointed.

 

You'll be hard pressed to find a more visually stunning film out there.

Gemini Man (1976) – Review

In 1975, NBC released an Invisible Man series created by television legends Harve Bennett and Steven Bochco. Sadly, poor ratings saw the end of that show after only one season, but apparently the network had faith that a show about an invisible agent was a viable idea, and that they just needed the right mix of action and adventure to make it work, so Bennett and Bochco were given another shot. Thus the Gemini Man was born.

A year after NBC pulled the plug on the adventures of scientist Daniel Westin in The Invisible Man, creators of that show decided to do away with that whole namby-pamby scientist hero bit — who needs a hero that uses his brains along with his invisibility to thwart various villains? — so enters Sam Casey (Ben Murphy), an ex-intelligence field agent more comfortable in his faded denim jacket and jeans than he’d ever be in a lab coat, a man of action who solves most of his problems with a roundhouse kick or a right cross. The pilot episode introduced Casey as your standard "fly-by-the-seat-of-your- pants" type hero, now working for a high-tech government think-tank called Intersect (International Security Techniques. When a salvage job to recover a downed Russian “weather” satellite leads to sabotage, Casey finds himself caught in a radioactive explosion that turns him invisible.

Note: At no point in this series is he ever called the Gemini Man, he’s not even given it as some kind of codename like Daniel Westin being called The Klae Resource in The Invisible Man, and what exactly does the zodiac symbol for twins have to do with invisibility anyway?

The producers of the Gemini Man were also given instructions to use a much more cost-effective form of invisibility for their protagonist; this time around, there would be no costly chroma key technique to be found here — that being the special effect technique which gave us those cool visuals of headless shirts floating around a room — because in this show, Sam Casey isn’t simply invisible, he actually generates a small field of invisibility that encompasses whatever clothes he is wearing as well. In the pilot episode, we learn from Intersect chief Leonard Driscoll (Richard Dysart), and scientist Abby Lawrence (Katherine Crawford), that the radiation distorted his molecular field structure, but with an atomic powered wristwatch — designed by Abby and which works as a molecular stabilizer — he is able to turn on and off his invisibility with the mere press of a button.

Note: Like in The Invisible Man series, the role of the heroes’ boss gets an immediate cast change; Richard Dysart only appeared as Leonard Driscoll in the pilot, the part was then taken over by veteran television actor William Sylvester for the remaining episodes.

As with The Invisible Man series, the Gemini Man borrowed much of its plot structure from The Six Million Dollar Man, with Leonard Driscoll (William Sylvester) giving Sam Casey whatever super-secret mission he must undertake in that week’s particular episode. But where The Invisible Man utilized the husband and wife dynamic, in a very Nick and Nora Charles way, Gemini Man mostly had Casey working alone in the field, with Abby and Driscoll giving him technical support from the bowels of Intersect.

The show threw in a bit of extra tension by adding an interesting wrinkle to Sam Casey’s invisibility, that he could only be invisible for fifteen minutes per day, and if he remained invisible beyond that allotted time, he would die, as Abby explained to him, “You pass out, you fade away, and you never come back.” He can remain invisible five seconds, a minute, ten minutes, as long as it adds up to no more than fifteen per day.

Note: The show never explains when this magical reset of the day occurs; does his fifteen minute limit reset at midnight, when the sun goes down, or maybe after he has dinner?

Gemini Man only lasted eleven episodes, plus the pilot, with only five of those episodes even airing in the United States, which is a shame as the show was a lot of fun to watch. We got to see Sam Casey pitted against a variety of dastardly villains; a corrupt scientist (Alan Oppenheimer) conning Intersect with his supposed miracle fuel — 70s' television shows always had a few episodes dealing with the energy crisis — Casey had to do battle with a look-a-like who had infiltrated Intersect to steal vital information, he worked undercover as a rookie to learn what a certain police officer (Richard Jaeckel ) had to do with a planned political assassination, and poor Sam even had to go on the run from his friends after being framed for killing a fellow Intersect agent. Best of all, however, was when he went up against a disgruntled mad scientist (Ross Martin ), who had built a robot with the power to level a skyscraper.

 

You weren't a true 70s action hero if you didn’t fight a robot.

The charismatically engaging performance by Ben Murphy was easily the best part of the show, death-dealing robots aside, as Murphy gave the character of Sam Casey a nice surfer guy charm, mixed with just a dash of chauvinism, which somehow worked for this particular secret agent. This invisible man series was supposed to be more action centric than the previous incarnation, and Sam Casey does kick a lot of butt while visible and invisible, but the key factor of its low budget roots tended to rear its ugly head from time to time. This lack of funds led to such moments as Casey, having been tasked to put an African dictator back into power, wandering around an Africa that looked a lot like Bronson Canyon, and the tendency to recycle plots from The Invisible Man, which if you remember, had only aired a year earlier.

• In The Invisible Man episode “The Klae Resource” Daniel Westin had to uncover a plot that dealt with villains impersonating an oil tycoon, while the real man was kept locked away in his own hotel, so that they could sell his new efficiency fuel process to Middle Eastern concerns.
• In the Gemini Man episode “Escape Hatch,” a shipping tycoon is held hostage aboard her own ocean liner, while the villains have an impersonator offering to sell her fleet of super oil tankers to hostile foreign parties.
• In The Invisible Man episode “Barnard Wants Out,” Daniel Westin had to help a man re-defect back to West, but things were complicated by the fact that the man’s daughter had fallen in love with a villainous Russian officer.
• In the Gemini Man episode “Targets,” Sam Casey must help a woman re-defect to the West, but things are complicated by the fact that her daughter has a crush on her archery coach, who just so happens to be the head of the Secret Police.

That is pretty damn lazy, and from the likes of Harve Bennett and Steven Bochco, it’s even more surprising, but I guess back in the 70s they weren’t too worried about viewers remembering what they saw on television a whole year ago. Aside from dodgy writing, and a budget that seriously limited what action they could depict, the show was pretty darn solid, and it handled the concept of the “invisible agent” a little better than its predecessor, with Sam Casey more than willing to use his invisibility to kick some serious butt. Fans of the genre will find Gemini Man to be a harder show to track down, never having gotten a North American DVD release, but if you do manage to stumble across this particular sci-fi adventure show, it’s well worth the watch.

Note: Both Gemini Man and The Invisible Man credit their show as being “Based on a Novel by H.G. Wells” while almost nothing in these shows, aside from the obvious invisibility aspect, had anything to do with the plot or characters from H.G. Wells’ book.

Razorback (1984) – Review

When Spielberg’s monster hit Jaws arrived in theaters the summer of ’75, the onslaught of rip-offs to follow was staggering, with such notable entries as 1977's Orca,1978's Piranha, and 1984's The Last Shark , but such rip-offs were not relegated to creatures of the sea, and thus we got such “classics” as 1976's Grizzly and the film we are looking at today, Razorback.

“There's something about blasting the shit out of a razorback that brightens up my whole day,” and it’s these immortal words, spoken by a man Hell-bent on vengeance against the wild boars of Australia, that really sets the tone of the film Razorback, and this statement is provided by Jake Cullen (Bill Kerr), who in the film’s opening minutes has his life destroyed when a giant razorback boar attacks him in his home, making off with his little grandson — who he'd been babysitting — to devour the poor tyke alive. That is certainly a dark opening, but it's only the beginning of director Russell Mulcahy's descent into the abyss of despair, blood and pain.

 

Not only did it run off with a little kid, it also burned his bloody house down.

You’d think having your grandson carried off into the night by a murderous beast would be pretty terrible, and as traumatic experiences go, that would be a hard one to top, but things go from bad to worse for poor Jake as he is then accused of murdering the child. He is put on trial, with a lawyer doing his best to float the idea of this particular razorback being a hybrid species — “a freak, an aberration” — and though most of the locals take his account of the events with a considerable amount of skepticism (I mean, who wouldn't doubt such a story?), he is acquitted due to insufficient evidence to support the charge. It's with this moment that we have our “Quint Analogue,” the one who will provide grizzled assistance to the hero before meeting an untimely death during the film’s third act.

 

“From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!”

The movie jumps ahead two years and introduces us to American wildlife reporter Beth Winters (Judy Morris), who exposes industries that abuse and kill animals, and her latest assignment takes her to a small outpost in the Australian outback, where a particularly nasty company is guilty of slaughtering kangaroos to make dog food. To say that she isn’t too popular with the locals would be a massive understatement, but things get downright ugly when she runs across Benny Baker (Chris Haywood) and his brother Dicko (David Argue), a couple of psychos who are the Australian equivalent of the rednecks from Deliverance, and whose dog food factory looks to have been designed by the family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

 

They also drive a castoff truck from The Road Warrior.

How about some attempted rape to spice things up? The Baker brothers use their four-wheel death machine to run Beth off the road so that they can have a go with a little “ultra-violence” as Benny attempts to rape the poor woman, and it was at this point that I was sure that either Jake or the giant razorback was going to show up in the nick of time to spare Beth from this particular indignity, but I was only half right. The rampaging giant hog does show up, sending the Baker brothers running for the hills, but this was no rescue from a fate worse than death, unless you consider being eaten by a giant razorback some kind of rescue.

 

Animal rights activist killed by irony.

Beth is declared missing, assumed to have fallen down an abandoned mine shaft, which means that the Australian authorities somehow failed to notice the blood all over her car during her struggle with the boar — I guess they don’t have a CSI: Outback edition down under — and so the missing American is pretty much forgotten. Enter Beth’s husband Carl (Gregory Harrison), who travels to Australia to find out the truth behind what happened to his wife, and for some reason this involves him going undercover as a Canadian tourist, which then leads to him convincing the Baker brothers to take him along on their next kangaroo hunt. Needless to say things don’t go well for good ole Carl, for his inability to keep his stomach contents down during the slaughtering of kangaroo results in him being abandoned in the middle of nowhere, and the hits keep on coming as Carl is then attacked by a herd of wild pigs, spurred on by the giant boar, which then chases him through the night and forces him to take shelter atop a windmill. It’s at this point that the movie takes a hard right turn into surrealism, as Carl’s trek across the Australian outback causes him to suffer from dehydration-induced hallucinations.

From alien landscapes to bizarre manifestations these are some seriously trippy moments, and we owe much of this to cinematographer Dean Semler who was hired on the strength of his work on Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, and it is some of the most breathtakingly haunting imagery you'll ever see. It’s touches like these, provided by Mulcahy and Semler, that makes Razorback stand apart from the countless other Jaws rip-offs. Sadly, the brilliance of Carl’s delusional journey is never repeated, and once Carl staggers into the homestead of Sarah Cameron (Arkie Whiteley), a young woman studying the wild boars as part of some government grant, the film dovetails into the standard “hero must avenge his woman” trope … well not too standard, as there is still a giant razorback boar to contend with.

 

“Squeal like a pig!”

Stray Observations:

• Jake had managed to tag the razorback with a tracking dart, which leads to all the locals whooping and hollering as they scramble into their vehicles to hunt down the killer boar, a scene that clearly mirrors the fishing armada sequence from Jaws.
• Jake finds Beth’s wedding ring in a pile of boar feces. Yikes.
• Carl doesn’t have the stomach to actually kill either Benny or Dicko, though they still both die horribly, but that Carl isn’t able to “properly” avenge his wife is a nice character moment.
• A romance between Carl and Beth seems to be in the offing, which is weird considering he just lost his wife, a pregnant wife, I must add.
• The razorback is hardly visible in this film, we only get quick glimpses of it during the attacks, much in the way that Spielberg did with his unworkable mechanical shark.
• The final showdown takes place in the dark confines of the dog food factory, with smoke and mood lighting that wouldn’t be out of place in a Dario Argento film.

 

All this film needed was a Goblin soundtrack.

Russell Mulcahy is mostly known for directing The Highlander, a film that has achieved some serious cult status, but his film Razorback is easily one of the more interesting entries in “Nature Attacks” and is quite superior to most of the Jaws rip-offs. If one had to point out a failing in this film, it would be that not all the actors bring their best to the roles — especially the two American actors — and some of the Australian dialogue and slang could leave some viewers in the dust, but overall this is a horror film that I highly recommend simply for how beautifully the thing was shot.

 

This is one pig you need to hunt down.

The Invisible Man (1975) – Review

The idea of an invisible secret agent is certainly an enticing one — what could be better than a spy that no one can see — and it's such an obvious premise that it had already been explored during the Universal Pictures run of Invisible Man movies, where in the 1946 movie Invisible Agent, the grandson of the original Invisible Man, was utilized by the American government to track down Nazi and Japanese spies during WWII. Then, later on in a 1958, there was a British television series where a scientist developed the invisibility formula and was then quickly recruited by the British Intelligence Service. Today we will look at the second attempt at bringing the H.G. Wells inspired story to the small screen,  this one starring Man from U.N.C.L.E.'s David McCallum as the titular Invisible Man.

Created by Harve Bennett and Steven Bochco, this series dealt with brilliant physicist Daniel Westin (David McCallum), who had been trying to develop a teleportation system for a company called the Klae Corporation, and though aided by his equally brilliant wife Dr. Kate Westin (Melinda O. Fee), they hadn't quite managed to crack the secret of matter transportation via demolecularization, but one of the side effects of their experimentations was the discovery of an invisibility process. This is probably one of my favourite aspects of the show, because we know for a fact that some of the greatest scientific discoveries have happened by accident, and so having our hero discover the secret of invisibility while working on something completely different, is all quite believable. Also quite believable is the reaction of their boss Walter Carlson (Jackie Cooper), who immediately sees the military aspect of such a discovery, and the money from Pentagon contracts that it would inevitably bring in.

Note: The character of Walter Carlson is only played by Jackie Cooper in the pilot episode, a much more avuncular and friendly Walter, played by Craig Stevens, joins our heroes for the rest of the season.

Of course, Daniel has no desire to see his work being used as a weapon, informing his boss, “You gave me your guarantee, I came here because you said I wouldn’t have to work on weapon systems anymore, I want to use invisibility in positive ways,” and after a bit of shouting, Carlson eventually concedes to Daniel, allowing him to proceed in whatever manner he sees fit. Because our hero is of the naïve, altruistic sort, he actually believes his boss, thus he is blindsided by a meeting with Pentagon Brass a few days later. Realizing that destroying his invention is the only way to prevent it from being used for military purposes, Daniel sneaks into his lab late one night, turns himself invisible, triggers an overload of the system, and destroys all of the apparatus in the process. With him being invisible, escaping Walter and his security goons was no problem, but plans have a way of not always working out as well as one would hope.

Science Note: An invisible person would be completely blind as light would pass right through the retina without resistance, so unless your invisibility was based on a magic ring like in the Hobbit, don't count on being able to see.

Now earlier, we learned that the invisibility process was only temporary — test rabbits would revert to being visible after a few hours — and Daniel had even developed a serum that could reverse the invisibility instantly, and because Daniel is your typical science fiction doctor, he of course tries the invisibility process on himself, much to the chagrin of his wife. His reversal serum seemed to work fine at first, yet on the night of his industrial sabotage, the serum worked, but only briefly, and soon Daniel found himself once again to be an invisible man. The process turns out to be unstable, and the serum pretty much ineffective, so he tracks down the plastic surgeon Nick Maggio (Henry Darrow), who had developed special material called Dermaplex, which has the same properties as skin and can be used to make a mask for Daniel to wear.

Note: Nick also provides special contact lenses and dental caps, so that Daniel will have visible eyes and teeth, but in later episodes we see that the mask actually incorporates eyes and teeth, which makes no functional sense.

Daniel returns to the Klae Corporation to inform Walter that he is willing to bend on his principles, but only if he can rebuild his lab — apparently being permanently invisible can soften ones moral center — and Walter agrees, after warning Daniel that what he has discovered has most likely already leaked, and that many interested parties will be looking for him, stating that, “Everybody wants you now, and if they can’t have you alive, they will settle for you dead.” Walter is immediately proven right when Klae executive Rick Steiner (Alex Henteloff), who Daniel had considered to be a friend, shows up with some goons to kidnap Daniel and Kate. Things don’t go well for the traitorous friend and his pals — they die in an inferno when Daniel causes their van to crash — and when the dust is settled, Daniel declares his independence by punching Walter in the jaw and going home with his wife. As they walk off together, Kate remarks, “I’ve never spent the night with an invisible man before,” to which Daniel responds, “With the lights out you will never know the difference.”

Note: The pilot episode is much darker in tone than the rest of the season, with Daniel’s invisibility treated more as a curse than an awesome super power, while the following episodes take on more of the aspect of a comedy/adventure show.

That last bit of dialogue exchange marked this shift in tone, and as for the rest of the season, Daniel and Kate become sort of a “Nick and Nora” type couple from The Thin Man movie series, with their flirty banter being the highlight of the show, giving us a married couple who are clearly madly and deeply in love with each other. They now eagerly work alongside Walter Carlson (Craig Stevens), who inexplicably no longer has designs on making money through military applications. We get a quick hand wave to explain Daniel and Kate’s return to the Klae Corporation, that they will work as “secret agents” when not trying to cure Daniel’s invisibility, but in the following eleven episodes, we barely see them in the lab as the happy couple seem quite content to jet around the world solving a variety of problems.

A show's new opening would explain the show’s basic premise, with narration explaining, “Machine Malfunction…Westin Permanently Invisible…Klae Corporation Will Finance Recovery Effort...Westin Will Render Aid as a Secret Agent. His Codename: The Klae Resource.”

The series takes on many of the aspects of one of its chief contemporaries, The Six Million Dollar Man, with Walter becoming this show’s version of Oscar Goldman and Daniel's invisibility subbing in for bionic powers. Daniel would become something called “The Klae Resource,” which governments could call on for aid in sticky situations, but only Daniel, Kate and Walter would know that this mysterious resource was just Daniel running around invisible.

Note: Some religious groups protested the series, claiming it was obscene because it featured a "naked" man.

Our heroes would frequently deal with “international threats” of which we often saw Steve Austin encounter as an agent of the OSI — sadly Daniel and Kate never meet a robot bigfoot — and thus, during this single season, before being cancelled due to poor ratings, they’d come across a variety of foes; a nefarious art thief (Ross Martin), a fake spiritualist (John Vernon), a corrupt prison warden (Pat Harrington Jr.), a crooked small town judge (Roger C. Carmel), and an escaped mental patient (Monte Markham) who would demand the secret of The Klae Resource. This last example was easily the shows best entry, as the self-proclaimed psychopath wanted to use Daniel’s invisibility to take over the world — Markham’s performance in this episode was masterfully chilling, you actually felt our heroes were in danger — and this was the only time the show veered close to the source material of H.G. Wells's book, with a madman trying to use invisibility for nefarious purposes.

The show utilized the same chroma key technique that weather forecasters of the time used when standing in front of a blue screened weather map, and this at times resulted in some less than convincing invisibility moments, but most often the show relied on point-of-view shots of Daniel wandering around while invisible, with the occasional wire used to hold up telephone receivers or bolt cutters. As a whole, the show was certainly not breaking ground in the area of visual effects, and these less than effective techniques may have attributed somewhat to the show’s drop in ratings, but star David McCallum has since stated that the majority of the episodes were too tongue in cheek, in his opinion, and lacked the tension of the pilot episode, which he believed to be the real downfall of the show.

This 1975 version of The Invisible Man may have only lasted one season, where its visual effects could at best be described as adequate, but overall, it was a vastly entertaining outing, mostly due to the charismatic chemistry between the two leads, and it makes this adventure/comedy something worth seeking out.