Massage Parlor Murders (Chester Fox & Alex Stevens, 1976) ****1/2

I suppose the best way to describe this movie, would be as some sort of Grindhouse version of ‘The French Connection’. Not only is there a strong emphasis on the whole cop business and do we get treated to an extended car chase, both movies share the same kind of loose script structure. In typical seventies fashion, instead of a tightly written scenario based on cause and effect, ‘Massage Parlor Murders’ offers almost random vignettes creating a wonderfully sprawling epic that clocks in at just under 80 minutes. In doing so, it has created a wonderful time capsule, which captures that seventies sensibility so well, with those instantly recognizable colors, the great music (which seems a cross between early Funkadelic and the Miles Davis of the period) and of course that truly awful and ubiquitous wallpaper. With a title like ‘Massage Parlor Murders!’ you’d probably expect a straight horror movie, but probably the exclamation mark (which is there on the title card) should give you a clue this is going to be something entirely else. So besides the wonderful sleaziness of it all, the movie is played more for comedy than horror, with some truly hilarious moments though there are some gore sequences as well. In the end, what’s most beautiful about this picture is its total refusal to be categorized and its willingness to go anywhere it pleases; what it may lack in coherence, it more than makes up for with poetic logic.

For only their second blu-ray release, Vinegar Syndrome couldn’t have picked a better title than ‘Massage Parlor Murders’. They not only rescued this gem from obscurity, somehow they’ve managed to make it look like a million bucks too. When I saw the trailer for this release, I was very much surprised at how good it looked, and fortunately this doesn’t limit itself to just the trailer. Sure, there is the occasional odd frame and the soundtrack isn’t always pitch-perfect, but this is one scrumptious looking blu-ray. Vinegar Syndrome is a new player in town (their Expectations/Confessions double bill is already one of my favorite releases of the year) and everyone who considers himself a exploitation genre nut owes it to himself to check out their releases and this one is a good a place to start as any.
 

Vinegar Syndrome Drive-in double feature

Anatomy of a Psycho (Boris Petroff, 1961) ***1/2

Hot on the heels of the release of Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront”, Fred F. Sears made “Rumble on the Docks”, which was basically a cheap juvenile re-imagining of the more famous film. This of course was only part of a larger, endearing exploitation pattern, because knocking off familiar properties surely is a whole lot easier than coming up with an entire original idea yourself. Judging by the title itself,  “Anatomy of a Psycho” does this one better and piggybacks on not one, but two famous movies: ‘Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”. So we get a court sequence and some vague sense of the inadequacies of the judicial system as in Preminger, at the same time as the movie delves into the troubled mind of an adolescent. Nobody would expect a movie as good as its two most famous predecessors, but there’s really a lot to enjoy here. The beautiful Darrell Howe makes for a truly fascinating psycho, even if he is obviously acting in the angst-ridden James Dean mode and it’s a shame this seems to have been his only claim to fame. Juvenile picture mainstay Michael Grange puts in an appearance too and everything is directed with more than some sensitivity by Boris Petroff. I’ve never seen one of those public domain releases that have been floating around, but they probably don’t even come close to this new Vinegar Syndrome release, which simply looks incredible. Of course there’s some damage here and there, but surprisingly little of it actually, because most of it looks almost brand new. The beautiful contrast gives the movie a whole lot more class than you’d normally expect from a movie like this. Cheaply shot as it may have been, it still had all the advantages of the Hollywood Studio System behind it and this really shows on this DVD release.  

The Lonely Sex (Richard Hilliard, 1959) ****

While “Anatomy of a Psycho” is far from a waste of  time, what makes this new drive-in double feature from Vinegar Syndrome truly worth watching is the second half of its double bill, the wonderful “The Lonely Sex”. The theme of lonely people trying to connect with other people has inspired so much of our greatest artists and artworks, from Paul Fejos’ “Lonesome” to John Cassavetes’ “Minnie and Moskovitz” and from Antonioni to Wong Kar-Wai. One of the reasons for this is obviously because it’s a theme very close to the heart and one that almost always seems to ring true emotionally – no matter how poorly executed, these films always are at the very least easy to identify with. On the most low-budget end of the spectrum comes “The Lonely Sex”, which is one of those movies that seems to give the dictum ‘less is more’ its true meaning. Beautifully shot in an impressionistic style with a minimum of dialogue, this obviously is much closer in spirit to an avant-garde short than a pure sexploitation (although these ARE naked tits in the beginning of the movie!), which probably makes it somewhat unsuitable for some people, but makes it all the more interesting for the more adventurous viewer. It’s a film loaded with moments that are at once poetical and recognizable, both haunting and sad. Especially the subplot with Mister Wyler (who, had the film been made 20 years later would’ve been played by Paul Bartel) has some true melodramatic zest in it and makes you realize his situation is really not that different from that of the criminal protagonist. We all have to stay sane inside insanity, as ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ would have it. The image doesn’t look nearly as good as ‘Anatomy of a Psycho’, but it’s certainly more than adequate. Just keep your expectations in check and let yourself be hypnotized by the beauty of the film itself.