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Posted: |
Dec 12, 2019 - 9:37 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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At the end of the 1958 film THE BLOB, the alien substance is frozen and consigned to the North Pole. BEWARE! THE BLOB opens with a sequence in which a small section of the frozen substance is unwittingly thawed when it is taken from a geologist's freezer. The first to discover the revived blob (and live) are “Bobby Hartford” (Robert Walker, Jr.) and his girlfriend “Lisa Clark” (Gwynne Gilford). Seeing their friend “Joe” (Gerrit Graham) and his girlfriend “Leslie” (Carol Lynley), Bobby and Lisa describe the horrific monster. Although Leslie is convinced of their sincerity, Joe mocks them in disbelief and drives off in his dune buggy to investigate their claims.
Robert Walker Jr. and Gwynne Gilford in BEWARE! THE BLOB
The enormous success of THE BLOB led producer Jack H. Harris to try to do a sequel. Harris began negotiations with Allied Artists to make the sequel in 1964, tentatively to be entitled “Son of Blob.” Richard Clair had already written a script titled "A Chip Off the Old Blob," but the project was shelved for many years. In late 1970, Harris' son, Anthony Harris, who had just graduated from USC and was working with a music publishing company, expressed interest in working with his father. Looking for a project, they both agreed on the "Blob" sequel. Larry Hagman, who owned the beach house next door to Harris, mentioned that he had never seen the original film. Harris showed Hagman his personal 16mm print of the film, and Hagman showed such interest that he told Harris he would be able to assemble his friends for the cast, as he felt everyone wanted to be "Blobbed"... but only on the condition he would direct the picture.
Thus, Larry Hagman made his directorial debut with the film. Hagman also appeared onscreen as an unnamed hobo. In spite of having a stunt person on set, Robert Walker Jr. lobbied Hagman to do his own stunts for a rope climbing sequence in the finale. Walker had an acrobatic background, and was allowed to do the stunts.
Mort Garson provided the film’s unreleased score. In an interview in Fangoria magazine, screenwriter Anthony Harris stated that a good portion of the filmed material was improvised on the set and that the script was ignored. Although in THE BLOB the creature is identified as extraterrestrial, in the sequel the origin of the substance is not explained. In neither film is the substance actually referred to as "the blob." The film was originally released under the title SON OF BLOB.
After the film's initial release in June 1972, producer Jack H. Harris changed the title to BEWARE! THE BLOB. As with the 1958 original, BEWARE! THE BLOB ends with the words "The End" and a question mark, alluding to another sequel. While still in production on BEWARE! THE BLOB, writer and producer Anthony Harris was already preparing a sequel called "Curse of the Blob," but because of the poor reception to BEWARE! THE BLOB, the sequel was never made.
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Posted: |
Dec 12, 2019 - 1:54 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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HEX was a 1973 film set in 1919 in the fictional town of Bingo, Nebraska, during the years immediately after the First World War. A band of motorcyclists blows into town and messes with two sisters with psychic powers. This gets a hex cast on them by one of the sisters, whose father was a Native American shaman. The bikers soon depart this world in not so natural ways.
The opening credits of HEX introduce Mike Combs, Doria Cook, and Tina Herazo. HEX marked Combs's only film credit, and Cook previously had appeared only on television. HEX was Tina Herazo's only appearance billed under her real name before changing her professional name to Cristina Raines, as she was credited in numerous later film and television productions. Herazo and Hilary Thompson (billed as Hilarie Thompson) starred as the psychic sisters.
The members of the biker gang in the film were also in their early days as actors, but would soon become better known. They included Keith Carradine, Scott Glenn, Gary Busey, Dan Haggerty, and Robert Walker, Jr. A cast and crew list states that character actor John Carradine, whose son Keith portrayed "Whizzer," was cast in the uncredited role of an old gunman. However, he does not appear in existing prints.
Robert Walker Jr. in HEX
Director Leo Garen had only one short film and one TV episode on his resume, and was directing his first feature. Garen co-scripted the film with another first time writer, Stephen Katz, based on a story by Vernon Zimmerman and Doran William Cannon. Cannon was the writer of Otto Preminger’s 1968 disastrous acid trip SKIDOO and Robert Altman’s admirable 1970 post-M*A*S*H flop BREWSTER McCLOUD. Vernon Zimmerman had written and directed a more conventional exploitation film, the 1972 roller derby flick UNHOLY ROLLERS.
The working title of HEX was “Grasslands.” The MPAA website also lists “Charms” as an alternate title. A major portion of the film was shot in South Dakota on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation. HEX was produced by Max L. Raab Productions for Twentieth Century Fox. Executive producer Raab was a former clothier turned filmmaker. He had executive produced 1971’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
A crew listing for HEX indicates that Pat Williams was originally assigned to compose, arrange and conduct the score, but the onscreen credits list only Charles Bernstein for music. According to Gergely Hubai’s book Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores – A Selected History, Pat Williams had been recommended to director Leo Garen by Fox music director Lionel Newman. But “Garen was unsatisfied with Williams’ score, preferring music that was not so traditional, not so genre-bound.” As Charles Bernstein recalls: “I came in and supplied a less conventional score using odd percussion, women’s voices, harmonica, as well as regular instruments recorded over at Fox. Pat’s score was more conventional in the orchestral sense; it played more of the elements of the old West in a traditional manner than it did the sort of oddball, anachronistic time-travel factor where you had elements from the 1960s mixed with the 1800s.”
HEX completed production in 1972, but Twentieth Century Fox delayed releasing the film until its screening at the 1973 Atlanta Film Festival. The 93-minute, PG-rated film went into general release in November 1973. In 2006, Trinity Home Entertainment released a DVD of the film under the title CHARMS, and under that same title the film is available for rental or purchase as a download from Amazon.
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Posted: |
Dec 13, 2019 - 11:31 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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THE PASSOVER PLOT was a dramatization of a controversial best-seller that put forth an alternate version of the birth of Christianity. In this version, Jesus planned for His crucifixion by taking a drug that would simulate death. After His unconscious body was placed in the tomb, a religious sect known as the Zealots would secretly steal Christ's body from the tomb, then spread the rumor that He had risen, thus fulfilling Biblical prophecy.
Zalman King played Jesus, called "Yeshua" in the film. Scott Wilson played Judas ("Judah" in the film). Judas gets as much of a radical make-over as Christ himself: part of a warring rabble (led presumably by Barabbas, though he is never actually named), Judas is asked to join Jesus' peace-mongering throng in order to bring the two parties together. Robert Walker Jr. played Bartholomew the Apostle, called “Bar Talmi” in the film.
Michael Campus directed the 1976 film, which had an unreleased score by Alex North.
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Posted: |
Dec 13, 2019 - 11:46 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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Curtis Hanson’s 1973 film “God Bless Grandma and Grandpa,” a darkly comic horror thriller about the elderly using the bodies and blood of the young to live forever, was shot in Mendocino, CA using roughly 120 local people, mostly elderly, as actors and extras. The film was taken out of Hanson's hands by producer Peter S. Traynor, who ordered more scenes to be filmed in 1974 on a Hollywood studio set with actor Dean Jagger, who played a new character named "Dr. Shagetz." A 1974 release of the film was canceled when the production company, Centaur Productions, went under. Although the film may have had some theatrical showings in 1977 under the title GOD BLESS DR. SHAGETZ, Traynor eventually served prison time for defrauding those who invested in the production. Director-producer Mardi Rustam acquired the film in 1983. He shot new footage for a 1987 video release of the film called EVIL TOWN.
EVIL TOWN starred James Keach, Dean Jagger, and Robert Walker Jr. When a group of four friends on a camping trip have car trouble, they pull into town for repairs, but parts are scarce and will take a few days to arrive. “Chris” (Keach), a pre-med student, and his girlfriend “Julie” (Michele Marsh) along with their friends “Mike” (Walker) and “Linda” (Doria Cook-Nelson) make the best of their situation.
Robert Walker Jr. and Hope Summers in EVIL TOWN
Hanson and three other people ultimately received directorial credit. Charles Bernstein and Michael Linn provided the unreleased score.
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Posted: |
Dec 14, 2019 - 12:33 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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The 1980 television mini-series BEULAH LAND focuses on the titular Georgia plantation in the Antebellum South, starting in 1827 and proceeding well past the Civil War. Lesley Ann Warren stars as the emerging matriarch, "Sarah," who takes over the plantation after marrying the likable, but feeble "Leon" (Paul Rudd). "Meredith Baxter" is Sarah's older sister while Michael Sarrazin plays "Casey Troy," Sarah's 'knight in shining armor' from the North.
Eddie Albert and Hope Lange play the elders of Beulah Land. Dorian Harewood, Franklyn Seales, Grand L. Bush and Jean Foster have important black roles. Paul Shenar plays a literal slave-driver with Jenny Agutter as his woman of dubious morality. Don Johnson appears as "Bonard Davis," a rash young man from a neighboring plantation and Madeline Stowe is his maybe (or maybe not) wife. Allyn Ann McLerie is his mother, "Edna Davis" and Robert Walker Jr. is his brother “Bruce Davis.”
Virgil W. Vogel was the original director of the three-episode mini-series, but when he suffered a heart attack during production, he was replaced by Harry Falk. Allyn Ferguson's score for the film has not had a release.
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