MGM MOD DVD of the Week: Queen of Blood / The Ambulance

BLOGGER'S NOTE: Kudos to MGM for following Warner Bros. lead by starting to offer some of their more obscure gems available through their Manufacturing-On-Demand (MOD) Platform. You’re essentially getting a very high quality DVD-R and with these new editions, fans can finally throw away their pan-and-scan VHS copies.

Released in 1966 as part of a double bill with fellow American International Pictures B-movie Blood Bath, Queen of Blood was assembled by director Curtis Harrington with footage from the Russian films, Mechte Navstrechu and Nebo Zovyot. It certainly has a distinctive look and atmosphere that suits its blend of horror and science fiction.


The opening credits play over a series of unsettling psychedelic paintings of what appears to be an alien landscape while appropriately creepy atmospheric music by Leonard Morand sets just the right mood of dread. Queen of Blood is set in 1990 where traveling to the Moon is no problem, space stations exist there, and the powers that be are looking into exploring Venus and Mars for signs of intelligent life. Cue cool looking shots of matte paintings depicting life on these planets and footage of an alien race in shadows, which gives an ominous teaser of what’s to come.

We soon meet our hero, Allan Brenner (John Saxon) as he has lunch with his girlfriend Laura James (Judi Meredith) and two fellow astronauts, Paul Grant (Dennis Hopper) and Tony Barrata (Don Eitner). This gives the filmmakers a chance for some wonderfully cheesy banter but you can tell that Dennis Hopper and John Saxon aren’t taking it all that seriously. Their lunch is interrupted by an announcement by Dr. Farraday (a slumming Basil Rathbone). He informs our heroes that they’ve finally received communication from an alien race that plans to send an ambassador to Earth.

The ambassador’s craft crashes on Mars and sends an SOS to Earth. So, Farraday sends Paul and Laura to check it out. When Paul and his crew run into trouble and find a dead alien on Mars, Alan and Tony fly there to help in the search for another alien craft. They find it and inside the sole survivor – a green-skinned female alien (Florence Marly). While the first two thirds of Queen of Blood is all set-up, in the last third all hell breaks loose when alien queen wakes up.

It’s wild to see Dennis Hopper play such a straight-laced role, especially during this period in his career when he had been blacklisted in Hollywood and was relegated to doing American International Pictures (AIP) films for Roger Corman. Just two years later, he would direct, co-write and star in Easy Rider (1969). John Saxon, god bless him, does his best to play the square-jawed hero of the film without a hint of irony. Florence Marly has such an expressive face, which is good because as the alien queen she has no dialogue and uses her creepy smile to captivate the male astronauts. In a nice touch, she also sports a fantastic beehive hairdo that also resembles an onion!

The 1960’s representation of alien beings looks great and oddly more “alien” than a lot of contemporary alien invasion films. It may be due to the fact that the style of that decade looks so foreign to us now. There is a simplicity to their look that is refreshing and the unsettling music really helps sell the otherworldly nature of these beings. The interior of the alien spacecraft evokes the style of Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, released a year earlier in 1965. I love the wonderfully clunky-looking astronaut gear – their helmets are huge and don’t move at all, restricting movement in an awkward way. There’s something great about knowing that all the special effects in Queen of Blood were done by hand. It gives everything an authentic quality. It doesn’t have the unreal artificiality of a lot of CGI – no matter how good it looks you know that what you’re seeing doesn’t exist. The hand-made sets and special effects have a clunky charm all their own and this is one of the pleasures of this film.

Eric Roberts has had an odd career that never reached its full potential. In the early 1980’s, he was part of an exciting generation of up and coming actors that included the likes of Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn and Gary Oldman, and delivered intense, powerful performances in films like Star 80 (1983) and The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984). But then a combination of substance abuse problems and bad career choices soon found Roberts burning many bridges in Hollywood. He became a staple of direct-to-video dreck, popping up in the occasional mainstream film in a supporting role. Roberts ushered in the 1990’s with the cinematic oddity known as The Ambulance (1990), an offbeat thriller written and directed by cult film director Larry Cohen.


Josh Baker (Eric Roberts) is a comic book artist infatuated with a beautiful woman named Cheryl (Janine Turner) that he spots on the streets of New York City at the same time every day. In the middle of trying to sweet talk her into a date, she faints. An ambulance arrives and takes her away. After work, Josh goes to several hospitals in the area but they have no record of her. It turns out that she’s being held against her will at some secret facility that looks like it was lit right out Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). It turns out that Cheryl is being tormented by a creepy doctor (Eric Braeden) who likes to touch human skin through surgical gloves. Meanwhile, Josh seeks help from Lieutenant Spencer (James Earl Jones) and so begins a series of crazy misadventures that rival Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) – albeit through Larry Cohen’s gonzo B-movie sensibilities.

Eric Roberts has dabbled in almost every film genre and played all kinds of roles but he’s known mostly for playing heavies. The Ambulance is a refreshing change of pace as he plays an idealistic romantic (who sports a spectacular mullet ‘do I might add). Josh is willing to go to great lengths to track down this mystery woman and Roberts portrays him as a genial motormouth type that Robert Downey Jr. has perfected over his career. It’s interesting because Roberts brings his customary intensity to the role but channels it in a way that is fascinating to watch. This character allows the actor to play a wide spectrum of emotions as he keeps up with the film’s wild, tonal shifts from romantic comedy to thriller. It is also fun to see him bounce off all sorts of oddball characters, like James Earl Jones’ angry police detective or Red Buttons’ sarcastic hospital patient or Eric Braeden’s creepy yet suave doctor. In a nice touch, Josh works at Marvel Comics (?!) and so we are treated to a cameo from Stan “The Man” Lee himself.

It is also interesting to see how Cohen slots a romantic character like Josh into this, at times, sinister thriller. And yet, the filmmaker subverts genre conventions with constant absurd flourishes that reflect Josh’s increasing (and warranted) paranoia. Cohen injects all sorts of inventive plot twists to keep us guessing just how The Ambulance is going to turn out. Will Josh find the girl of his dreams and rescue her from the evil doctor?
 

Best Seller

Best Seller (1987) is an example of an odd convergence of talent with a screenplay penned by B-movie schlockmeister Larry (It’s Alive) Cohen, directed by journeyman crime film director John (Rolling Thunder) Flynn, and starring A-list talent like James Woods and Brian Dennehy. The key to enjoying this film is if you can swallow Cohen’s pulpy B-movie nonsense: a slick, corporate hitman convinces a hard-boiled police detective, and sometimes author, to write his memoirs. Once you get past this rather odd premise, Best Seller is quite enjoyable to watch, especially the interplay between the two lead actors who do their best to sell the film’s set-up.

James Woods had quite a run in the ‘80s with intense performances in films like Salvador (1986), Cop (1987) and True Believer (1989). He’s in fine form here as an ultra-confident killer. His best moments are when he tries to convince Brian Dennehy’s cop of some of the people he murdered for Kappa International. Woods brings his customary intensity to these scenes and a certain reptilian charm as a corporate assassin. Cleve really isn’t a nice guy – in fact’s he’s an arrogant prick – but Woods manages to get us to like him anyways because the actor is so charismatic in his own right.

Cleve’s crusade against his former corporate handlers is Larry Cohen’s blatant attack on corporate greed so prevalent in the “Greed is good” decade. Cohen wrote the screenplay, reportedly based loosely on Los Angeles cop Joseph Wambaugh, who tried to remain on the police force after several of his novels became best-sellers, in 1981 for Columbia Pictures but it was stuck in development hell due to a change in management. Orion Pictures eventually picked it up. Flynn rewrote Cohen’s script but was unable to get credit because he failed to prove to the Writers Guild of America that he had written 51% of it. The film was originally called Hard Cover but was changed to Best Seller in post-production as the former title didn’t test well with preview audiences. At the time of the film’s release, Cohen said, “I think the idea of being a killer for a major corporation was a little bizarre seven years ago. But time has caught up with the story when we’re reading all these stories about corruption in big business and corruption in Wall Street and the craziness in Washington.” Cleve’s ruthless tactics for Kappa International are meant to show just how far corporations are willing to go to exert their influence and power. It is this commentary that elevates Best Seller above your typical crime thriller – that, and the performances of Woods and Dennehy.

Best Seller was backed by Orion, an independent studio that pushed through all sorts of fascinating cinematic gems in the ‘80s, from efforts by auteurs like Woody Allen, to genre fare like RoboCop (1987). None of the major studios would’ve touched pulpy material like this and it’s a shame because a film like this has become scarce in the 2000s. The film does a good job delivering the requisite genre conventions under John Flynn’s workman-like direction and the television cop show production values only add to the tawdry B-movie vibe. Best Seller is certainly no masterpiece but it is a solid piece of entertainment and one of those underappreciated gems from the ‘80s waiting to be rediscovered.

Flynn’s no-nonsense, self-assured direction quickly establishes itself in the film’s prologue set in Los Angeles circa 1972 with an ill-fated bank heist. There are some nice touches in this sequence, like the lone bum sleeping on the steps of the building that is about to be robbed, and all of the crooks wearing Richard Nixon masks (anticipating the Ex-Presidents in Point Break). A cop named Dennis Meechum (Brian Dennehy) barely survives the heist (although, a couple of his fellow officers aren’t so lucky) and goes on to write a best-selling book about the incident.

Fifteen years later, Meechum has graduated to undercover work, despite being a high-profile author in his spare time (?!), busting bad guys. During one case he’s almost killed if not for the last minute intervention by an enigmatic stranger. We are given a little insight into this cop. He’s a widower raising a teenage daughter (Allison Balson), facing lots of unpaid bills, and has missed the last four deadlines on his latest book. He’s not quite the burn-out cop that Nick Nolte was known for playing in the 1980s but he’s stuck in a rut.

Meechum finally meets the mystery man known as Cleve (James Woods) who proceeds to pitch an idea for a new book about his life and the dirty work he did for tycoon David Madlock (David Shenar) and his company Kappa International. During one of their meetings, Cleve lays it all out for a skeptical Meechum: “Corporations deal in two things, period: assets and liabilities. I removed the liabilities and I provided some assets.” It turns out that Cleve was in on the bank heist back in ’72 and helped Madlock get his start. However, he’s had a falling out with the businessman and wants to expose his corrupt enterprise with Meechum’s help. And so, Cleve and Meechum form an uneasy partnership that is volatile at best as the hitman attempts to back-up his wild claims to the understandably wary cop.

Woods plays well off of Dennehy’s variation of the cop he portrayed in F/X (1986). He’s not as rumpled and still has his issues but there’s the same sharp intellect. Meechum plans to string Cleve along until he gives him enough evidence to bust him and get some much deserved payback for the ’72 bank job. While Woods is all wiry intensity, Dennehy is a solid, imposing figure with his stocky figure. Most of the film’s best scenes involve watching these two top notch actors bounce off each other.

This is evident in a scene where Cleve tries to pick up a woman at a bar and gets into it with her date only for the guy to be put in his place by Meechum. Just one look by Dennehy makes the man back down. I know I wouldn’t want to mess with someone like Dennehy. Cleve demonstrates his considerable willpower (and threshold for pain) and, in doing so, reveals a part of his past that sets off Meechum. The tension between the two characters in this scene is tangible and ups the ante in their relationship.

Best Seller was not well-received by critics to say the least. Chief among them was Roger Ebert who felt that the film was “light on plot, real light. It doesn’t have a compelling story at its center ... This is a case of a movie that has too much content, but not enough subject.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe found that the film’s premise was “flimsy” and only existed to support Wood’s “trademark intensity. He flits about the screen like an edgy sprite in search of a story.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby was particularly harsh in his assessment of the film and felt that the filmmakers worked hard to create a “movie totally without suspense, humor, plausibility, charm, excitement, wit and substance.” The Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen was a little more forgiving in his review: “Thanks to a couple of gifted saviors, Best Seller is alive if not well; it breathes but doesn’t thrive.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen was even more generous in his review as he wrote, “watching Woods and Dennehy work out their tense, kinky love-hate relationship is a treat. An adroit, sardonic little thriller.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington wrote, “Though the story seems insane, the actors ground it in psychological reality: Woods with sullen pouts, cold seductions and bursts of terrifyingly automatic violence; Dennehy with his watchful, steady-backed dependability.”

Best Seller was backed by Orion, an independent studio that pushed through all sorts of fascinating cinematic gems in the ‘80s, from efforts by auteurs like Woody Allen, to genre fare like RoboCop (1987). None of the major studios would’ve touched pulpy material like this and it’s a shame because a film like this has become scarce in the 2000s. The film does a good job delivering the requisite genre conventions under John Flynn’s workman-like direction and the television cop show production values only add to the tawdry B-movie vibe. Best Seller is certainly no masterpiece but it is a solid piece of entertainment and one of those underappreciated gems from the ‘80s waiting to be rediscovered.

SOURCES

Chartand, Harvey. “Interview with John Flynn.” Shock Cinema. 2005.

Van Gelder, Lawrence. “Why Best Seller is Plausible Now.” Los Angeles Times. October 1, 1987.