Bad Taste

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There is a reason for watching bad movies, apart from the fact that they’re often found streaming for free.  Sometimes that reason is that they’re so bizarre that they’re almost surreal.  And sometimes the circumstances surrounding them are equally strange.  Michael Findlay’s Shriek of the Mutilated was included in the set of movies I bought for Zontar: Thing from Venus.  Not one to be wasteful, I’m finally dutifully watching these before allowing myself to purchase new fare.  Given the fact that this had a theatrical release, I’m surprised that it’s not compared more often with Ed Wood’s oeuvre.  In any case, this is a very convoluted story and spoilers will follow.  You’ve been warned.

An international group of demon worshipping cannibals have a member who’s a professor that takes students on a “yeti hunting” expedition every few years.  The students are all killed but one, so that the yeti story can continue.  Viewers (if any) aren’t clued in to this until the last few minutes of the film but early on you can spot the cannibal theme.  So four students in the professor’s Mystery-Machine-like van, go on a hunt while staying with a “colleague.”  Naturally the students start getting killed.

Using some of the worst dialogue ever written, the clueless coeds keep allowing themselves to be led into situations no sane person would.  The chosen “survivor” discovers the plot and is amazed that the creature was (blindingly obviously) a guy in a suit trying to scare them to death.  The cannibals prefer their meat with no bruises.  Much more could be said about the ineptitude of the movie but it ends up having an interesting, if tragic, coda.

Michael Findlay, who made exploitation films with his wife Roberta, was actually sliced to death in a helicopter accident on top of the (then) Pan Am Building in Manhattan.  This happened three years after this movie was released.  In those three years he’d directed eight more films, so his last movie before being mutilated was not the one in my Beast collection.  Quite often when I watch bad movies I have trouble finding any discussion of them at all.  Shriek of the Mutilated is discussed at some length in two books—not surprisingly published by McFarland (they have great pop culture titles).  Until I discovered this movie, in with ten others in a collection, I’d never heard about it.  Of course, the theatrical release was for drive-ins and was limited to Texas, Florida and California.  There can be a lot of information to dig out when people stoop to talking about bad movies.

Littlefoot

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A film is an object.  Just like a book, a film exists and waits for someone to discover and promote it.  The vast majority of both don’t make the cut and exist in obscurity.  The Legend of Bigfoot by Ivan Marx is one of those obscure films.  I only knew of it because it was included in the DVD pack called “Beast Collection,” which I’ve already mentioned a time or two.  This set of movies is united by a few different themes which have little to do with one another.  The “Bigfoot Terror” disc includes Marx’s Legend although there’s no terror here and it presents itself as a documentary.    Interestingly, this movie actually had a theatrical release.  Of course, the mid-seventies were a high-water mark for Bigfoot interest in general, prior to the current phase.  Marx followed up his movie with a couple sequels and to his dying day claimed that his Bigfoot footage was authentic.

As far as the movie goes, it is just plain bad.  The wildlife footage, shot by Marx, is actually impressive a time or two.  Most critics dismiss his Bigfoot footage as a hoax, a view supported by the fact that the bona fide Bigfoot researchers he worked with eventually distanced themselves from him.  The movie is rambling and dull but intriguing at the same time.  It’s amazing, for example, that he was able to get this into theaters at all.  But what drove the producers of “Beast Collection” to include it, beyond it perhaps having been cheap and bit of filler on a disc claiming “approx. 5 hours of yeti scares”?  Well, it’s an object.  And it fits the theme of “yeti” but not really that of “Terror.”

There’s not a ton of information on Ivan Marx online.  IMDb has a mini-bio of him, noting the others who worked with him.  Even his wife, Peggy, who appears in the film, gets a little IMDb notice.  Such movies as this are hopeful artifacts.  Those of us who struggle against obscurity can take heart that, although probably a hoax, a movie that would otherwise likely have been forgotten made its way into a schlocky collection of horror movies to be purchased by the gullible and the hardcore.  As I mentioned in my post on Search for the Beast, I bought the collection to see Zontar: Thing from Venus, which, at the time, was available nowhere else.  I got what I wanted, and oh so much less.

The Search Continues

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This movie’s so bad there’s a backstory.  Years ago I was really wanting to see Zontar: Thing from Venus.  This was before streaming, and I found it as part of the “Beast Collection,” a set of 11 movies for less than the price of one regular first-run DVD.  I watched a few other movies in the collection, but before long it got shoved to the back of a shelf and forgotten.  I remembered it recently because another collection I have was missing a movie, Snow Beast.  I wondered if it might be part of this otherwise forgotten set.  It was (this really encouraged me because maybe my memory is still much better than I sometimes suppose).  In any case, one of the other movies—one I’d never seen—was Search for the Beast.  I figured, why not?  This is a film that fails on every level.  And I mean every single one.  It really should merit a Wikipedia page, just for being so bad.

So, a professor in Alabama goes in search of the beast in the Okaloosa mountains.  The budget for the movie must’ve been a matter of pocket change.  Anyway, the beast has been “killing” anyone who ventures into the mountains and the professor wants to prove it exists.  He’s backed by a guy with money, who isn’t explained at all, and his university office is less well equipped than an average undergrad’s dorm room.  He takes a female grad student with him but his financier, unbeknownst to the benighted professor, hires a bunch of beefy guys with assault rifles to go along, although they’re only going to take pictures.  Of course the professor sleeps with the grad student but then the head of the tough guys kidnaps her as the beast kills off the tough guys’ heavily armed posse.  Turns out the local hillbillies are, apparently, trying to mate the beast with the women who come into the woods.  It’s worse than I’m describing it.

There is some chatter on the internet about this groaner, so I’m sure that I’m not the only one who’s seen it.  Someone recently asked me how such movies even get made.  Well, anyone with a camera can shoot a movie.  Of course, getting paid screen time (or video distribution) is another story.  I doubt the makers of this film made much money off of it, but since other suckers like myself have discussed it online, the producer, director, writer, and actor Richard Arledge, has the last laugh.  His work is being talked about, no matter if nobody has a good thing to say about it.  Of course, I wouldn’t have ever seen it at all, if I hadn’t had a hankering for Zontar: Thing from Venus all those years ago.