Monthly Archives: March 2021

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: One-Armed Boxer / The Chinese Professionals (1972)

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When I was 13, a friend of mine enrolled in Tae Kwon Do classes, and he immediately began trying to convince the rest of us to join him. At first I was resistant to the idea, which is weird because I enjoyed watching martial arts action movies. I loved Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee and the hugely popular ’80s ninja films. I also liked the idea of knowing how to do those fancy moves, and being able to defend myself. There were a lot of bullies roaming the halls of my junior high school – and they often roamed in packs, which made standing up to them seem like a bad idea for for anyone who didn’t savour the thought of taking on seven or eight guys at once. Chuck and Bruce and Sho Kosugi would do it in the movies, and it seemed kind of magical to me. It was almost like those guys had superpowers.

In light of all this, I’m not sure why I said no when my friend Doug urged me to sign up for Tae Kwon Do classes. Maybe because I knew that guys like Chuck and Bruce spent years studying martial arts, and I didn’t want to do that. So instead I took books out of the public library – books about karate and judo and generic “self defence” – and I hoped to learn some tricks from them. They tended to have comic-book-like panels of photographs showing the reader how to do the various moves. I remember looking at those pictures, but I’m not sure if I ever tried to copy the moves.

My other friend Doug had exactly the same reaction as me (minus the books). We talked about the pros and cons of taking classes with Doug and somehow agreed that we didn’t want to do it. I also talked to my Dad about it. I said really smart things like “Why would I need to take classes when I can simply watch the movies and read the books and learn how to do things that way?” My Dad explained to me in a very polite and reasonable way that I was an idiot. I don’t remember all of then finer points of his argument, but it included things like: “There’s a difference between reading about something and actually doing it.”

After a few weeks of deliberation, my friend Doug and I both decided to join our other friend Doug in studying Tae Kwon Do.

One of the weird side effects of studying a martial art was that it made me see the movies differently. I no longer thought that the spectacular moves of Chuck or Bruce looked magical. I started to understand and recognize what they were doing. Even though Tae Kwon Do was different than Karate or Kung Fu, I still felt like I was seeing some of the same techniques that I was learning reflected back at me from the TV/VCR and the big movie theatre screen. In some ways it was great. It made learning from the movies actually seem a little more possible. It also made me feel like I knew stuff; like I had inside information, or that I had joined an exclusive club that included people like Chuck and Bruce and Sho –

Okay, Sho was a little different because he was a ninja, and ninjas used all kinds of fancy weapons like throwing stars and nunchaku sticks (more commonly referred to as numchucks or nunchucks by the bullies at my school who would try to make them in shops classes). Weapons were not a part of our Tae Kwon Do training, and our instructor had no use for them whatsoever. When I saw them employed in a movie, they still seemed somewhat otherworldly to me.

On the downside, learning a martial art in real life made watching the movies a little less exciting. The magic was gone, and I could only see the science or the art of what the performers were doing. I could still be impressed by the years of training and the amazing skills on display, but it was kind of like I had been allowed to peek behind the curtain and I now knew what was going on back there.

Fortunately, as school started to demand more and more of my time, and I got involved with things like playing in a band, my years of martial arts training came to an end. By the time I was immersed in film and theatre at university, going to those brutal hour long workouts three times a week was a distant memory to me (and unfortunately, it was starting to show in my level of fitness). This meant that the magic of movie martial arts started to slowly creep back into my life. It was probably the North American rise of Jackie Chan in the latter half of the 1990s that finally cinched it. I loved Jackie and I watched every film of his that I could put my hands on. There were others, too, but Jackie was my new hero.

I may have seen Jimmy Wang Yu in a movie at some point, but it was most likely back in the really old days of renting crazy martial arts films on VHS and Beta. He was not someone I really knew much about in my adult years. I had heard of some of his films, but had no memory of ever seeing them. When I stumbled onto a nice set of four Jimmy Wang Yu films somewhere in my movie buying travels, I knew that I had to pick them up.

One-Armed Boxer (1972) is the first movie in the set, and I decided to give it a go last #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn. It brought back so many wonderful memories of the old school martial arts films that I used to rent with my friends when we were kids. It begins with a rivalry between two schools of martial artists, one of them honest and good (Jimmy Wang Yu’s) and the other one nasty and criminal at heart. I can’t name all of the other movies that feature this “rival schools” plot device, but I can tell you that my friend Ian and I spent many hours playing a video game called Rival Schools back in the ’90s – but that’s another story. Suffice it to say that this is a fairly compelling storytelling choice, and it works particularly well in One-Armed Boxer.

Also known as The Chinese Professionals, this movie features another wonderful (and somewhat familiar) plot device: the “bad” school, unable to defeat their rivals in an honest manner, bring in martial arts masters from all over the world to help them – each one from a different martial arts tradition. There is a Yoga master from India, two mystic Tibetan lamas, two Thai boxers, Judo and Karate experts from Japan — AND a Tae Kwon Do master! As someone who has a particular interest in Tae Kwon Do, I can tell you that it’s pretty rare to see it depicted in an old school martial film (at least in my experience). I do have one movie in my collection called When Taekwondo Strikes (1973), which I’m pretty pumped about – but that’s another story. 

I can’t really call myself an expert on martial arts movies, or Hong Kong movies – certainly not on Jimmy Wang Yu movies – but for my taste, One-Armed Boxer (1972) is old school martial arts action at it’s finest. The fact that it includes so many different styles of martial arts makes it particularly wonderful to behold. I haven’t even touched on the whole “one armed” aspect of this movie, but suffice it to say that it’s a big part of what makes The Chinese Professionals a #NotQuiteClassicCinema classic. If you’ve seen any of the “one armed” movies out there, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen any of them, then this is the perfect place to start. There is a sequel of sorts called Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976) which is considered to be even better, but I would still say start with this one. It will punch up any #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn, and possibly kick-start a whole new cinematic obsession. 

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977)

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Greydon Clark is a name that I used to see on the backs of movie boxes in the 1980s, and in the credits of movies on late night TV. Unlike other names I recognized, like David Cronenberg or George A. Romero, I didn’t know anything about Greydon Clark – and watching a movie like Angels’ Brigade (1979) on TV certainly didn’t convince me that Clark was a great filmmaker. But somehow, over time, his name became a kind of second-string stamp of approval. It convinced me, on many occasions, that the odd looking film in my hand was worth renting – or buying. 

Greydon Clark made about 20 movies between 1971 and 1998 – and I have several in my collection: Black Shampoo (1976), Hi-Riders (1978), Angels’ Brigade, Without Warning (1980), Joysticks (1983) and now Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977).

I wasn’t too sure if I had seen Satan’s Cheerleaders before, and watching it last week I’m still not 100% sure. I recognized the opening sequence (perhaps the first ten minutes or so), but the rest of the movie seemed completely new to me. I suspect that I started watching it on TV at some point and, for whatever strange reason, I stopped. I can’t imagine that I would have given up because I didn’t like it. For starters, it’s fairly bad right off the bat – but I mean “bad” in the kind of way that my friends I would seek out; a campy comedy about cheerleaders having fun at the beach – what could be better than that?

Secondly, I’ve always been a stickler for finishing movies. I had a theatre professor at university who advised us that we should never walk out of a play because “you can always learn something from it.” His advice made sense to me, and I realized that I had already been practicing what he was preaching in the way that I watched films. I wouldn’t have articulated it in the same way, but I don’t think I ever stopped watching a movie on purpose. If you had asked me why, I probably would have said “because you never know if it might get better.”

If I had to guess, I would say that I probably saw the beginning of Satan’s Cheerleaders really late at night and I just couldn’t stay up to finish it. Maybe I had a class first thing in the morning. Maybe I didn’t think I could fully appreciate it when I was already dead tired. Maybe I figured I would track it down and watch it properly at some point in the future. Whatever the case, I stopped watching the film and never got back to it.

Satan’s Cheerleaders has one of those titles that you never forget – and it’s certainly been on my must watch list for a long, long time. I think that the main reason I didn’t get to it before now is that I somehow convinced myself that I had already seen it. I may have been mixing it up with memories of Satan’s School for Girls (1973), a pretty entertaining made for TV movie with two of my favourite Charlie’s Angels (Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd) – but that’s another story.

Satan’s Cheerleaders is a weird cross between a cheerleader movie (a kind of sexploitation comedy, I suppose) and a Satanic horror film. It’s a fairly gentle, and almost tasteful (if you can use a word like tasteful to describe a movie about cheerleaders and Satan), example of those genres. It’s sexy in a silly way, and does have a few brief glimpses of nudity, but for the most part it’s about cheerleaders (and their teacher) in bathing suits, underwear, and skimpy outfits. As far as the Satanic “horror” goes, it’s pretty campy and low key. As I said to someone on Twitter: there may have been better cheerleader movies, there may have been better Satanic horror films – but there has rarely been a film that combined BOTH of those things.

Honestly, I can’t think of a single other cheerleader exploitation comedy/Satanic horror film. I may be forgetting something, but I’m going to suggest that Satan’s Cheerleaders is a fairly one of a kind film. This doesn’t exactly make it a cinematic triumph, but it certainly makes it interesting.

When I wrote about Greydon Clark’s Angels’ Brigade I noted the fact that he’d assembled a really amazing cast of old TV/film stars. He did the same thing for Satan’s Cheerleaders. John Ireland (Red River (1948), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)) plays a small town Sheriff who may be more sympathetic to Satan than cheerleaders in distress. His wife is played by Canadian actress Yvonne De Carlo, who is perhaps best remembered for playing Lily Munster on The Munsters (1964-66). Genre royalty John Carradine plays a bum who tries to warn the cheerleaders. Sydney Chaplin (Charlie’s son) plays a monk (of Satan). And Jack Kruschen, a character actor who I’m sure we’ve all seen appearing on numerous TV shows (some of my favourites include Barney Miller (1973-82), WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-82), The A-Team (1983-87), Remington Steele (1982-87) – the list goes on and on). He was also in movies like The Apartment (1960) and The War of the Worlds (1953). He has a face that is instantly recognizable to anyone who watched TV in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. I could not have told you his name, but I knew him as soon as he appeared onscreen in Satan’s Cheerleaders. – as Billy the school Janitor, who procures victims for the local Satanic cult to sacrifice. My mind was completely blown, however, when I looked him up on the IMDb and discovered that Jack Kruschen was born in Winnipeg, my home town.

Jack Kruschen and his family apparently moved to New York when he was still a young child, and then to Los Angeles where he was discovered performing in an operetta at Hollywood High School.

Canadians are bad at celebrating our own success stories, and Winnipeggers can be even worse. Sure we hear about Monty Hall, Deanna Durbin, and David Steinberg. But over the years, I have learned about many born in Winnipeg people who went on to great success in Hollywood and elsewhere – who never get mentioned as former Winnipeggers. Gisele MacKenzie, Marjorie White, Ted Rusoff, Joanna Gleason… Jack Kruschen is just the latest (and possibly greatest) example, and knowing who he is will forever change the way I react when I watch one of the over 220 TV shows and movies in which he appeared. 

Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977) is classic Greydon Clark – which means it’s 100% Certified #NotQuiteClassicCinema. People with low or no tolerance for “bad” movies will probably want to give it a wide berth. People who are looking for seriously scary Satanic horror will not find what they are looking for here. But those who appreciate the finer things in life, like Ed Wood, Al Adamson, and that low rent sex comedy you saw back in junior high school but can’t remember the name of, will find Satan’s Cheerleaders to be a welcome ray of sunshine on a rainy #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn.  

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: 13 Frightened Girls (1963)

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William Castle never fails to entertain me. I’ve enjoyed movies like House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Tingler (1959) for many years. And his legendary gimmicks are always an added plus to the experience (not that I’ve ever actually EXPERIENCED the gimmicks, but reading about them – and imagining what they would have been like -always adds to my enjoyment of his movies).

In the case of 13 Frightened Girls (1963), the gimmick is a little less visceral than, say, a giant skeleton flying over the audience (Emergo from House on Haunted Hill) or electric buzzers wired to theatre seats (Percepto in The Tingler). This time the gimmick was a world wide talent search for teenage girls to play the daughters of diplomats who attend a special school. So, presumably, this would mean that people from 13 different countries could take pride in one of their own being selected to appear in this movie. I’m not sure if this actually increased ticket sales in the winning countries, but I understand the spirit of the idea.

On the downside, this gimmick seems more like a pre-movie publicity stunt than something that would actually enhance the experience of watching the film. Still, it’s a fun idea.

Judging by the title and the poster, a person might be tempted to think that 13 Frightened Girls is a horror film. It clearly seems to have been named after Castle’s successful 13 Ghosts (1960) and, going in, I almost wondered if I was about to see some sort of sequel to that movie… but no.

13 Frightened Girls is unusual and unique – hard to classify or put into a category. As I watched the first few minutes of it I found myself wondering what Castle had thought he was creating. Did he imagine that this was his version of… a James Bond film? It did come out one year after Dr. No (1962) – and there certainly were a lot of James Bond knockoffs in the 1960s (including some spoofy comedies), but it seems unlikely that this one could have been a direct decedent. Let’s face it, a story about teenage schoolgirls doesn’t quite seem like an obvious riff on Bond.

As the movie wore on, I decided that Castle must have been thinking of Alfred Hitchcock when he made this one. Picture it: a suspenseful story about an ordinary person, in this case a teenage schoolgirl, who gets mixed up in a dangerous game of espionage when she accidentally stumbles upon a murder. That could be a Hitchcock plot – and Hitchcock certainly knew how to use humour in his films…

…which brings me to the point that while 13 Frightened Girls is sort of a suspense thriller, it’s also a fairly silly teen comedy. In fact, I’d say it’s more of a comedy than a thriller. It also contains a potentially uncomfortable Lolita-like sub-plot: Candy, our 16-year-old schoolgirl heroine, is in love with 40 year old Wally Sanders, an intelligence agent who works at her father’s embassy. Wally is in love adult woman named Soldier, so it’s not actually a Lolita story. Still, Candy’s feelings for Wally make her decide to “help” him by using her school connections to spy on other counties and pass the information along to Wally. She does this under her nom de plume, Kitten. 

As you can probably imagine, there is much silliness and humour in 13 Frightened Girls. There are also a few suspenseful sequences. It’s by no means William Castle’s best movie, but it’s quite a bit of fun. It’s also a fairly unique movie, as I can’t think of many (or any) others that are exactly like it. Some viewers might take exception to the cultural stereotypes that are on display. As a nearly 60 year old movie that deals with characters from 13 different countries, it’s almost inevitable that much of it would seem outdated now. For maximum enjoyment, it should be viewed as an artifact of it’s time.

Some reviewers have pointed out, quite correctly, that there are in fact 15 girls in this movie – not 13. I’m not sure how to explain that. Perhaps Castle was originally going to call it something else (The Candy Web perhaps), but then decided to cash in on his earlier hit movie, 13 Ghosts. Who knows? I suppose it should also be pointed out that most of the 13 (or 15) girls don’t ever appear to be particularly frightened, either.

No matter how you look at it, 13 Frightened Girls (1963) is #NotQuiteClassicCinema. I had no idea what to expect from it – and if I had, I might have thought twice about screening it on a  #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn. After all, it’s not a horror movie, or a monster movie, or any other kind of typical drive-in movie. It’s certainly not an exploitation film… or is it? Maybe what William Castle was exploiting this time, was the national pride of 13 (or 15) different countries. Maybe he was trying to start a whole new kind of exploitation. Or maybe he was just making a PG schoolgirl comedy. Someone suggested that it might pair well with an old Gidget movie (Gidget (1959) or Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) anyone?). And actually that might not be a bad way of understanding this film. Perhaps 13 Frightened Girls was William Castle’s Hitchcock meets Gidget movie. It may have failed to spark a whole new genre, but it’s a fascinating relic of another time. 

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: Sheba, Baby (1975)

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In all likelihood, the first place I ever saw Pam Grier was on The Love Boat (1977–1987). I watched that show every Saturday night when I was a kid. I wouldn’t have had any idea who Pam Grier was at that point, but it was probably my first glimpse of her. Flash forward a few years and I rented a movie called Women in Cages (1971). This could have been the first time I saw Pam Grier knowing that she was Pam Grier, but I’m not sure. The movie that I remember specifically renting because Pam Grier was starring in it was Coffy (1973). Coffy was the first of what could be called the Big Four Pam Grier Blacksploitation Pictures: Coffy, Foxy Brown (1974), Friday Foster (1975) and Sheba, Baby (1975). All four of the movies were named after the character that Grier played in the movie, and all four were available to rent in matching VHS boxes. I don’t think I realized that Coffy was the first one in the series. Somehow it just found its way into my hand on that day and I took it home. 

I enjoyed Coffy very much, and I eventually bought a copy on VHS that looked exactly like the one pictured to the left. I rented Foxy Brown and Friday Foster fairly quickly after watching Coffy, but I did not rent Sheba, Baby. This is because I had read reviews that suggested that Sheba, Baby was the weakest of the Big Four Pam Grier movies. In fact, I had read reviews that said Sheba, Baby was downright bad. I guess I didn’t want to tarnish the experience of the other three movies by watching this one. 

Years later, I found a copy of Sheba, Baby for sale in a bargain bin. I had already collected the other three movies, as well as The Big Doll House (1971), Women in Cages, The Big Bird Cage (1972), Scream Blacula Scream (1973) and Bucktown (1975). As a completist, I figured that I had to have Sheba, Baby in my collection as well – even if it was a disappointment – so, I bought it and took it home. 

When I finally watched it, I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe my expectations were so low that I had perfectly prepared myself for this movie. It was the weakest of the Big Four in a lot of ways, but it struck me as a darn entertaining movie. Sure, it was basically a PG film rather than the hard R-rated fare that we had come to expect from Pam Grier. Sure, the violence was majorly toned down. Sure, there was only a brief glimpse of partial nudity instead of the eye-popping exploitation on display in many of the other films. Truth be told, Sheba, Baby was actually pretty tasteful – which is why some appreciators of the other three Big Four movies dismissed it. But I watched it KNOWING all that stuff and I was prepared to hate it… but somehow I just couldn’t.

From the very first frame of the film I knew I was in for a good time. The music, by Monk Higgins & Alex Brown, instantly grabbed my ears and held on tight. By the time we got to the opening titles of the film, and Barbara Mason began to sing, I knew that I had to have this soundtrack in my collection. Since then, I have listened to it countless times as I walk around the city streets wearing my iPod – much the way Pam Grier walks around the streets of Chicago during the opening credits of Sheba, Baby. (minus the iPod, of course). It’s a simple sequence in the movie, but for some reason it really spoke to me. And now I tell anyone who’ll listen that the soundtrack of Sheba, Baby is the perfect walking music. 

I also loved the fact that Pam Grier plays a private detective in this movie. I’ve always been partial to private detective stories; movies like The Maltese Falcon (1941), of course, but also the TV shows of my youth, like Remington Steele (1982–1987). Remington Steele is about a brilliant female private detective who has to create a fake male detective boss in order to get hired. Surprisingly, Sheba Shayne also has a male detective partner/colleague, and he seems to be the less competent member of the team. We don’t learn very much about him, because Sheba almost instantly finds herself travelling to Louisville to help her father, who has run afoul of some nasty gangsters.

Sheba’s father’s business associate is played by Austen Stoker, whom I have liked since first seeing him in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). And since he is in the opening scene of Sheba, Baby, this might be another reason that I found myself instantly enjoying the movie. We eventually learn that Stoker’s character, Brick Williams, shares a bit of a romantic history with Sheba – and the two of them wind up working together to defeat the bad guys.

There is plenty of action in Sheba, Baby. It’s just not the edgy, extremely violent kind of action that is present in films like Coffy. I suspect that the producers must have been interested in reaching a more general audience with this film. I’m not sure if it worked. Some have suggested that this movie marked the end of Pam Grier’s reign as Queen of Blaxploitation movies – even going so far as to blame this movie for ruining the winning formula (extreme violence and exploitation). I’m not sure that the filmmakers made the right choice in toning things down for Sheba, Baby, but I have found that the movie has grown on me more and more every time I watch it. In fact, I may have watched it more times than any of the other Big Four Pam Grier films. Not because I think it’s the best. Objectively, I know that it’s not the best. But somehow I find it irresistible. 

Sheba, Baby was directed by William Girdler, who is best known for making Grizzly (1976) and The Manitou (1978). He also made another not quite classic Blaxploitation film called Abby (1974) – and probably could have gone on to make many more cinematic delights –  but, sadly, he died two years after completing Sheba, Baby, at age 30. 

D’Urville Martin plays Pilot, one of the main bad guys. He was in many great Blaxploitation films, such as Black Caesar (1973), Five on the Black Hand Side (1973), and the legendary Dolemite (1975). Sadly, he died in 1984 at the age of 45.

Sheba, Baby (1975) is not the greatest Blaxploitation film; it’s not the greatest Pam Grier film. It’s probably not even the greatest William Girdler film. But for some reason, it’s one of my personal favourites. It’s the kind of #NotQuiteClassicCinema that I could watch – and enjoy -on any #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn.