Bloody Sunday (The Marksman #21)

Bloody Sunday, by Frank Scarpetta

No month stated, 1976  Belmont-Tower

I would say that Lynn Munroe is once again correct with the theory that this volume of The Marksman was written by George Harmon Smith.* As Lynn notes, the style is identical to the series titles that have been identified (by Lynn) as ones by George Harmon Smith, like This Animal Must Die and Savage Slaughter. For once again we have a book that is wholly at odds with the typical Marksman yarn: 192 dense pages that are heavy with introspection and detail, with a literary flourish well outside the series norm. In past I’ve noted that George Harmon Smith was basically the John Gardner of the men’s adventure genre, and that is very apparent in Bloody Sunday; like Gardner (the American author who was briefly famous in the ‘70s, not the British author of the same name), Smith overwrites with abandon, making what is supposed to be a fast-moving novel instead come off like a laborious slog. 

Also, Bloody Sunday clarifies something I have long assumed: that George Harmon Smith was the author of Bronson: Blind Rage. In past reviews of Smith’s novels I was 99% sure of this; after reading Bloody Sunday, I’m 100% sure. I’ve only read a few books by Smith, including one non-series title (Bad Guy), but his style is unmistakeable, and all of his action stories feature a cold-blooded “hero” who tortures and kills without a thought and who is coupled with a headstrong, independent young woman who comes off as more human than the hero does. All these things are present in Bloody Sunday, just as they are in Bronson: Blind Rage, with the additional confirmation this time that here in Bloody Sunday George Harmon Smith uses the word “re-focussed,” instead of the more-typical spelling “focused.” Which is exactly how the word was (miss)spelled in Bronson: Blind Rage. I noted the unusual spelling of “focussed” in my review of Blind Rage back in 2012, hoping it would be a clue to the author’s identity…and Bloody Sunday was the payoff. When I saw the word “re-focussed” in this book it was the final confirmation of what I’d long assumed. 

But then, checking my review of Bad Guy from the other year, I see that I noted that “focussed” also appeared in that book, so it looks like even a few years ago I was 100% sure that George Harmon Smith was the mystery author of Bronson: Blind Rage. 

Also, I have a strong suspicion that Bloody Sunday started life as an installment of Bronson. That series ran three volumes, and George Harmon Smith only wrote the first volume. But I’m betting this Marksman book was originally going to be another Bronson offering from Smith. It has more in common with the Bronson series than the Marksman series, and just like Blind Rage was a lift of Death Wish, Bloody Sunday is a sort of proto-lift of the Death Wish sequels, in which Charles Bronson’s character Paul Kersey would dispense thugs in vengeance for wrongs done to others, not for wrongs done to himself. 

In other words, Philip “The Marksman” Magellan does not waste Mafia creeps in Bloody Sunday in his never-ending vendetta against the mob for the killing of his family. Rather, he spends the novel hunting down four wealthy men who, years ago, killed a young woman and got away with it, and Magellan, having met the young woman’s grandmother, has vowed to dispense bloody justice in the murdered girl’s name – even though he never even knew her. This storyline is much more at home in the Bronson series which, especially in George Harmon Smith’s Blind Rage, was concerned with “hero” Bronson taking out some wealthy “untouchables” who committed violent crimes with no reprisals. Bloody Sunday features the same storyline, only here the protagonist has not been affected by the crimes he is avenging. 

So my guess is, George Harmon Smtih wrote Blind Rage, then Len Levinson wrote the second volume and Joseph Chadwick wrote the third volume, but Bronson was cancelled while Smith was working on what would have been the fourth volume…and so he just turned it into a Marksman novel. It’s not even that preposterous of a theory; it’s not like this series is grounded in continuity or a theme that links all the titles. Just take a look at The Torture Contract, for example, which also comes off like an installment of an entirely different series, with Magellan reduced to secondary status, going about on the whims of a sadistic genius. The timing also works, with Bronson ending in 1975 and Bloody Sunday coming out in 1976, so George Harmon Smith clearly wrote Bloody Sunday shortly after he wrote Bronson: Blind Rage. 

Anyway, I rest my case. 

Only the opening of Bloody Sunday seems to come from your typical Marksman novel…sort of. Actually, it also serves as an indication of how George Harmon Smith just wasn’t suited to this genre…it’s an overwritten slog that, again, has more in common with something like John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogs than it does with an action series. We meet Magellan – only referred to as “he” for the first chapter – after he’s hit some Mafia creeps, but he’s been shot in the shoulder in the shootout, and he’s bleeding to death as he sits on a bus when the novel opens. Smith well captures Magellan’s plight here, but it’s way overwritten; even more overwritten than one of my reviews!! 

Here we’re informed of Magellan’s endless war on the Mafia, and how he just killed some of them in payback, though we didn’t get to see any of it…again, it’s like stuff grafted on to what was originally a Bronson plot. Magellan passes out in a dark alley (eventually we learn the city is Cleveland), and he’s found by an old woman named Zennie, a country-type who has a lot of Smith’s patented “headstrong woman” dialog. She nurses Magellan back to health if for no other reason than her country-born politeness, but more importantly there’s Zennie’s hotstuff young granddaughter, Janie (barely out of her teens, Magellan suspects), with her “small, jutting breasts.” 

Janie is from the same template as George Harmon Smith’s other female characters: very young, very independent, very outspoken. She goes on and on with a lot of dialog, but she’s got a lot of spunk because she’s just gotten out of juvie. She takes an instant “ownership” of the convalescing Magellan, and in fact soon learns who he is (“the badass of the badasses”). They start having sex, but as usual Smith keeps it off-page. Meanwhile Magellan has already decided to help out old Zennie, who has related in seemingly-endless exposition that almost all of her 11 sons (!) have died (and we get background detail on almost all of them!), but most importantly another granddaughter of hers, Wendy, died two years ago – and Zennie believes the girl was murdered by a quartet of wealthy businessmen who came into town and hired Wendy for her typing skills. 

On such shaky ground does Bloody Sunday stand: Magellan swears to avenge Wendy, if only because Zennie took care of Magellan and nursed him to health. Meanwhile he displays his bad-assery by taking out a black pimp-type who keeps scoping out Janie, pulling his silencered gun on him and later firebombing the pimp’s place with homemade napalm. It’s all crazy but this stuff too is written in Harmon Smith’s overwritten style, with the action less hard-hitting than it is overbearing. I mean it’s great writing, yes, but it’s not great for the genre. It’s inflated and ornate when it should be terse and fast. 

On page 64 the plot changes and here’s where I argue it is essentially the Bronson novel George Harmon Smith originally wrote. Magellan takes off in pursuit of these four men he’s never met, who never wronged him personally, to kill them one by one for Zennie. The first guy’s in New Mexico and Magellan scopes him out – he’s a laywer in a fancy building – and then goes in there on the pretext of a meeting and beats the guy around, causing him to have a fatal heart attack. But in the interrogation Magellan learns that Wendy was indeed killed by the four men, and from this lawyer Magellan gets the addresses of the other three he must kill. 

The next target takes up the majority of the narrative, if for no other reason than the motor-mouthed “chick” Magellan picks up: Cindy, a spaced-out Californian surfer girl who is turning tricks here in Topeka to get enough money to go back to California. She sashays up to Magellan while he’s scoping out target #2 and starts talking…and nearly a hundred pages later she’s still talking. George Harmon Smith does the same thing here that he did in Icepick In The Spine: namely, he replaces one “strong young woman” (Janie) with another “strong young woman,” and the issue is they both sort of run together for the reader. About the only difference I could tell was that Cindy was a little older, had bigger boobs, and talked a whole bunch more. 

In previous books I’ve really admired Smith’s penchant for bringing to life independent, fully-realized female characters in his men’s adventure novels, but I felt he really stumbled with Cindy here in Bloody Sunday, as she was more annoying than anything. And she has a lot of dialog and scenes here; there are endless scenes of her bumming a cigarette from Magellan or drinking beer – she informs Magellan she’d “only weigh seventy-five pounds” if she didn’t drink beer, and there are copious scenes of her buying a six-pack and downing it and “burping” afterward. Meanwhile the action stops dead as Magellan, a guy who in previous volumes could wipe out an entire Mafia squad in a handful of paragraphs, spends several densely-written chapters trying to figure out how to safely kill some rich businessman in Topeka!! 

Have I mentioned yet that I suspect Bloody Sunday started life as a Bronson novel? 

Because really, it’s fairly believable that a fromer architect, or whatever the hell Bronson was before he became a vigilante, might need endless chapters to figure out how to kill some random rich guy. But Magellan? Even in the previous volumes by Smith, the guy was essentially unstoppable. But man it’s kind of repetitive here in Bloody Sunday, with Magellan even getting Cindy in on the act, using her as bait for his target’s lesbian daughter(!?). Oh and meanwhile, the veteran men’s adventure reader will know where all this is going when Magellan goes from calling Cindy “chick” (among other names when she gets on his nerves)…to “darling.” Yes, Magellan and Cindy as expected become an item, with Smith as is his wont keeping all the dirty stuff completely off-page…usually just relayed, again as is his wont, via the female character’s never-ending exposition. 

Violence is also minimal for the most part. Magellan only makes a few kills in the book, usually dispensing someone with his pistol in bloodless fashion. And also when he takes out his targets it’s anticlimactic, especially given the inordinate narrative time given over to the setup for each execution. Indeed, Smith overwrites to such an extent that Magellan’s third and fourth targets are essentially rushed through, with the third target having the greatest ramifications for Magellan – what happens to Cindy is what happens to every other “strong, independent woman” in a George Harmon Smith novel, and won’t be surprising to any reader. Especially after Magellan starts calling her “honey” and whatnot. 

But this does bring Magellan personally into the vendetta at least – and here we get a very extended sequence of George Harmon Smith’s other hallmark: the “hero” torturing someone. This one really goes to town and might be the most over-the-top instance yet, as if Smith were intentionally trying to outdo his previous torture scenes. Magellan gets target number three and first puts a hook in his back, then drags him along behind his car in a field. Then he ties him up and whips him with a barbed wire whip. Then he throws “brine” on the guy’s bloody, lashed body. Then he burns the guy’s testicles off. Then he whips him again! By the end, we’re informed that the guy’s intestines are hanging out and etc. 

As Magellan warned Cindy earlier in the novel, “It’s going to get gross.” This I believe is the first knowing instance I’ve encountered in one of George Harmon Smith’s installments; Cindy nearly pukes when she sees Magellan stomp on some guy’s skull, and Magellan tells her things will only get more “gross” as he goes along. But man, after this extended torture scene, victim number four is hastily dispatched, as Smith has nearly reached his word count. Actually, I’d say he’s well exceeded his word count, as Bloody Sunday is a lot longer (and more laborious) than the typical Marksman installment. 

The book is curiously constructed, again harkening back to Icepick In The Spine, in that Janie is introduced as the first girl, then disappears from the text for like a hundred pages, replaced by Cindy…and then Janie returns at the end, when Magellan goes back to Cleveland. What’s interesting is that Smith does not mention that Magellan will soon leave her, or whatever…in fact, earlier in the book, before leaving on his vendetta, Magellan promises Janie that he will come back to her. And he keeps his promise at book’s end, George Harmon Smith ending the novel with the two walking off together. It almost comes off like the end of Magellan’s saga, which is curious. 

And as hard as it is to believe, we are coming near the end of The Marksman. There are only three more volumes in the series, and Lynn Munroe seems to indicate that George Harmon Smith wrote at least one more of them. So I’ll be curious to see if that one too comes off like a lost installment of Bronson. 

*As Lynn further notes, Bloody Sunday was reprinted a few years later, this time by sister imprint Leisure Books and credited to Aaron Fletcher. I agree with Lynn that this does not mean that Aaron Fletcher actually wrote the book. For one, the style here in Bloody Sunday is identical to the style in the Marksman novels we know for certain were written by George Harmon Smith…because Lynn Munroe was actually in contact with Smith’s relatives. I too was in touch with them for a while, and in fact received several nice emails from Smith’s granddaughter (which is interesting in hindsight, given this novel’s focus on two granddaughters, Wendy and Janie). So we know that George Harmon Smith indeed wrote many of these novels, especially Icepick In The Spine, as it’s one he would apparently mention facetiously to friends and family. And also, Icepick In The Spine was later reprinted by Leisure (as Icepick), where it too was credited to Aaron Fletcher. 

Aaron Fletcher was a real person, apparently, and thus one might guess that he really was the author of Bloody Sunday and Icepick In the Spine, and Belmont-Tower/Leisure merely reprinted those books under his real name once Fletcher gained success with his novel Outback. 

But remember…Belmont-Tower/Leisure was the same publisher that also published The Terrorists as by “Nelson DeMille,” even though it was really written by Len Levinson! So then, this grungy little publishing house had absolutely no problem with mis-crediting a novel to a more-famous name, even if the more-famous name didn’t actually write the novel! So the fact that “Aaron Fletcher” was credited as the author of these Marksman novels in the Leisure Books reprints probably doesn’t mean a damn thing, other than Leisure/Belmont-Tower’s typical lack of giving a shit. 

So finally, at long last, I rest my case again.

Cuba: Sugar, Sex, And Slaughter

Cuba: Sugar, Sex, And Slaughter, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle

No month stated, 2018  New Texture

I’ve been meaning to read this installment of the Men’s Adventure Library Journal for a few years now. Bob Deis and his co-editor Wyatt Doyle consistently turn out high-quality hardcover volumes with excellent production standards, and Cuba: Sugar, Sex, And Slaughter is no exception. And as usual with these two, the theme of the book is very original: men’s mag stories dealing with Cuba, from the days of the Batista dictaroship to the days of the Castro dictatorship. 

In some ways the book is similar to a vintage men’s adventure anthology: Our Secret War Against Red China, but as ever Deis and Doyle are not limited to one “line” of men’s adventure magazines. The stories collected here run the gamut from “straight reporting” to the “sweats.” One thing I was surprised that was not featured was the story featured on the cover of the book, or at least a story with a similar setup: namely, a sadistic Cuban torture-babe, ie the jackbooted Cuban equivalent of a Nazi She-Devil. Rather, the female characters who appear in Cuba: Sugar, Sex, and Slaughter are either hapless hotstuffs who have somehow gotten caught up in the various revolutions of Cuba, or are hotstuff revolutioniaries who fight against Castro. So, there is no story here with a, uh, Commie She-Devil. But then maybe Deis and Doyle will do a Volume 2 someday. 

As I was reading the book I chuckled at the lofty treatment these stories and art were given by Bob and Wyatt. Not that I’m complaining, or “taking the piss” as the British would say (or once said). It’s just that…these old men’s adventure magazines were the epitome of disposable entertainment. They were read and thrown away, which no doubt is one of the reasons copies are so pricey today; more were destroyed than stored. Ruggedly virile vets of the mid 20th century weren’t concerned with plastic archival bags to store pristine-quality copies of their magazines in; they read the mags while enjoying a few drinks and smokes and then threw them in the garbage like real men. But here those once-disposable stories are, printed on high-quality paper and bound in hardcover and given a deluxe presentation that is well beyond their grubby roots. 

In the Men’s Adventure Library Journal books, Bob Deis gives a sole intro at the start of the book, rather than an intro before each story. Once again his intro is informative and gives succinct detail on the origins of the men’s mags and how these particular yarns were concerned with, first, the Batista regime and its sadism, and then later the Castro regime and its sadism. Bob astutely notes how Castro and his men were the “good guys” in some of the earliest stories, until he began his own progroms upon attaining power, after which he and his jackbooted minions were essentially the Nazis of the ‘60s in the men’s mags. 

First up we have “Havana’s Amazing Flesh Market,” by JL Pimsleur and from the June 1958 Sir. This one is an informative, “straight” reporting piece on…the various hookers of Batista-era Cuba! We get a thorough rundown, complete with costs and where to find them, of the lowly street whores on up to the deluxe “hotel” girls who cost a bunch. The author names names and places and one wonders if they are fictional or real; regardless, this one is written like a standard report with none of the pulp conceits more typical of men’s adventure mag stories. 

The story that gave this collection its title is next: “Sugar, Sex, and Slaughter,” by Joseph Hazlett and from the September 1959 Male. Despite being from one of the Diamond line men’s magazines, this one too is a mostly-factual piece done in a straight reporting style, and details the five centuries of revolution and dictatorship that has plagued Cuba since it was “discovered” by Spaniards. 

We get a bit of factual reporting mixed with the lurid escapism the men’s mags were known for next, with, “Bayamo’s Night Of Terror,” by Don Hogan and from the May 1958 Man’s Magazine. This is one of those stories where Castro is the good guy. We’re told he’s in the Sierra Maestra Mountains with his army, two thousand strong, and the story concerns the titular town of Bayamo which is wholly aligned with Castro. A sadistic Batista officer named Lt. Cowley wages a war on the town after he loses a few soldiers to the rabble – soldiers who were killed for murdering one of the townspeople. This one is also mostly factual-style reporting, but brings the plight of the characters to life by putting the reader there in the action. 

The next story in particular is very good, if overly grim. “Brotherhood of the Scar,” by Jim Greaves as told to Jack Barrows, is from the July 1959 Adventures For Men and is a long tale that is more brutal survival epic than escapist pulp fun. “Greaves” takes us through his harrowing tale of torture and eventual freedom; he’s an expat carpenter, a WWII vet per men’s mag tradition, and he falls in with a local gal who agrees to go in-country with him, despite the government’s stipulation that foreigners are not allowed to venture outside of Havana. For reasons not properly explored, Greaves goes anyway, and of course is captured and thrown in a prison by the sadistic Batista enforcers. But man this one is indeed grueling and just keeps going and going. It takes up pages 64-96 in Cuba: Sugar, Sex, and Slaughter, and the majority of those pages are dedicated to the various depredations Greaves endures in his imprisonment, up to and including losing some fingers and even getting the US flag branded on his back. But it’s no Russian epic or anything; it’s still the expected macho stylings of the men’s mag genre, to the extent that Greaves endures his torture with a grim fatality. That said, author Jack Barrows seems to know a bit too much about what it’s like to be tortured in captivity, to the extent that you hope the guy isn’t talking from direct experience. 

We’re back to the more factual vibe with “Castro’s Commie Blueprint To Take Over Latin America,” from the October 1961 Cavalcade and by George Vedder Jones. This one’s an interesting “What if?” sort of scenario about Castro taking over the Dominican Republic – and then the rest of South America, uniting the various countries into a Latin America USSR. 

My favorite yarn is next: “Terror! Cuban Hell-Cats Scare Castro’s Cutthroats,” by Miguel Gonzales and from the September 1964 Man’s Peril. This was one of the “sweats,” so the concern here isn’t so much relaying “fact” as it is delivering a fast-moving tale filled with t&a and sadism. Told in third person, this one’s unique though in that the titular hell-cats are the heroines of the piece; the short, fast-moving story is essentially devoted to the rebel women hitting a ship filled with Castro men and blasting the shit out of them. There’s no sex, but we are informed that the gals are “magnificently proportioned” and that they are led by a former high-class hooker who calls herself The Avenger. Also I got a kick out of the term “glamazon” being used to describe these gun-toting beauties. Gonzales also delivers some nice gore: “[The Castro soldier’s] brains spilled out in a jelly-like glob on the sand.” 

More sweat-mag sadism continues in the next story, “Squirm In Hell, My Lovely Muchacha,” by sweat vet Jim McDonald and from the June 1964 Man’s Story. Like the previous yarn, this one’s also in third-person perspective, and comes off like a hardboiled private eye story for the first half. It concerns lovely Roberta Trent, with her “high, impudent breasts,” who comes into fellow American Carmody’s place and begs him to escort her out of Cuba in his boat. McDonald really lays on the hardboiled stylistic touches, with Carmody immediately knowing the beauty is nothing but trouble, but ultimately deciding to help her – after a little off-page sex, of course. But then the story detours into sweat mag territory when Roberta is captured by a Castro sadist and is tortured with a cigar to her naked limbs, captured due to the preposterous premise that she managed to take a photo of herself and some Castro flunky with top-secret jets behind them, and she wants to get this photo to the American government. Who took this photo is curiously left unstated, unless that is Roberta was taking a selfie in 1964…which is about as believable as the premise of the story itself, what with how bulky those cameras were back then. 

Jim McDonald returns with “Kiss The Skull Of Death, My Beautiful Muchacha,” from the September 1965 New Man. Wait, technically it’s by “Linda Rogers,” this being another of those bullshit “as told to” yarns. Well, “Linda” tells us about her hot affair with some Castro supporter during the Batista years (“Our hips ground together in an expression of mutual need”), but upon Castro attaining power she finds herself on the wrong side, and is captured by a sadist called El Toro. This one has the most baffling WTF copout ending I’ve yet read in one of these stories; while torturing Linda and about to rape her, El Toro conveniently collapses from a drug overdose, dies, and Linda escapes in his car! 

“Castro’s Bacterial Warfare Chief Wants To Defect – My Job: Get Him” is by Robert F. Dorr and from the April 1971 Man’s Illustrated. It’s another “as told to” yarn, the person supposedly telling this fictional tale being a marine biologist named Hal Gorby. He’s heading to Cuba for some marine bioligy symposium, when he’s stopped by a CIA agent who tells him the top marine scientist there – who also happens to be Castro’s chief bacterial warfare expert – wants to defect, and Gorby’s to help if possible. This one’s more of a Cold War yarn and just as easily could’ve been set in East Germany. Gorby is unusual for a men’s mag protagonist in that he’s married, and indeed turns down the advances of the sexy native babe he’s set up with by the Cuban government – there to keep tabs on him, of course. The finale is also on the suspense angle, with Gorby being set up as a propaganda scapegoat by the Cubans and eventually making his escape on a hydrofoil. 

Overall I really enjoyed Cuba: Sugar, Sex, And Slaughter, and it left me wanting more; as ever Wyatt Doyle fills the pages with related men’s mag covers and interior art, and a lot of the stories sound really good – in particular, of course, the ones with the Commie She-Devils. So maybe one of these days we’ll have a volume 2. Otherwise, I’m happy with this one, and heartily recommend it, as I do everything else Bob Deis and his co-editors Wyatt Doyle and Bill Cunningham publish.

Phone Call

Phone Call, by Jon Messmann

May, 1979  Signet Books

After the men’s adventure market dried up in the mid ‘70s, Jon Messmann started turning out lurid one-shot mystery thrillers, this being one of them. Unfortunately for the most part these books are overpriced on the collector’s market, but I managed to get a copy of Phone Call for cheap. This one’s interesting because it’s actually a film tie-in, and indeed is copyright a pair of screenwriters, Michael Butler and Dennis Shyrack, though the film itself didn’t come out until 1982 and was titled Murder By Phone. But make no mistake, this novel is clearly the work of Jon Messmann, written in his unique style, even though the copyright page might fool you into thinking “Jon Messmann” was a pseudonym. 

I’ve never seen Murder By Phone and have no intention to. But it’s interesting that this novel came out three years before the film (a low-budget horror) was released, indicating that Messmann’s novel was based off the script and not the actual movie. In fact, online synopses and reviews of Murder By Phone describe an almost entirely different story, with different characters, but the same general setup. Whatever the background, the novel itself is all very much in-line with Messmann’s usual output, and one could just as easily assume it was an original story of his. It’s less horror than it is a thriller, though there are horror elements to it, particularly given the threat our hero must face: namely, that phones in New York City are randomly killing people by blasting them with a sort of white lightning. 

The novel is very much of another era, then, with the first kill happening at a phone booth, and throughout the novel there’s lots of mystery over whether the phone might ring, or who might be on the other line – things hardly anyone at all would worry about in our modern era. That said, Messmann does introduce answering machines into the narrative at one point, so at least these characters in the late ‘70s have that safeguard. But for the most part the victims in Phone Call are hapless losers who do nothing more than answer the phone and then are zapped into hell. 

At 214 pages of small, dense print Phone Call is similar to most other John Messmann novels in that it turns out to be a much longer read than the page length might indicate. This is because, as was often his wont, Messmann has turned in a sluggish tale that’s more deadening than thrilling. In fact the book was a chore to read at times, and I almost got the impression Messmann himself was struggling with what was, really, a lame setup. I mean “phones killing people” isn’t exactly Jaws, is it? 

Not helping things is the protagonist we’re saddled with, Nate Bridger. Sure, he’s the typical cantankerous Messmann “hero,” quick to anger and lashing out…but what really annoyed me was that the dude was a “crusading consumer advocate” per the back cover…whereas in reality he’s a an environmentalist. From his intro, where he’s listing off all these companies he’s pestering due to their various infringements upon poor old Mother Earth, I was ready to magically transport myself into the book to punch the guy in the face. He’s basically the ruggedly virile macho male version of that shrill modern-day teenaged Scandanavian eco-harpie who’s constantly telling us the world’s about to end. Hell, we even learn that Nate, as Messmann refers to his hero, doesn’t like air conditioners! But at least it’s because he prefers “fresh air,” so it’s not like he gives a speech in the book where he says air conditioning is more dangerous than ISIS or whatever. 

But then, the average Jon Messmann hero is supposed to be annoying, and generally argues with everyone. So then, in his very first scene, Nate is in his homestate of North Dakota and is being given a celebratory luncheon by local businessmen, who congratulate him on his tireless work for the environment…and then the absolute bastard gets up on the podium and says thanks, this is nice and all, but it would’ve been swell if you’d used all the money you paid for this shindig and instead funnelled it to environmental causes, or sent some money to my office, ‘cause we need it there. I mean point taken, but this is our hero, folks. 

And his involvement with the story, which occurs in New York City, is sketchy at best. Nate’s heading into New York for, good grief, an eco-forum or some shit, and while leaving he’s stopped by some slackjawed yokel whose young daughter recently died, under unknown circumstances, in New York. We readers know how, of course – she was the first phone victim, randomly answering a ringing payphone in the subway tunnel and getting zapped to hell for her politeness. Nate says he’ll look into it, and heads off to New York…and there really are frequent scenes where he’s at this week-long convention, getting up on the podium and making speeches about the environment, or listening to others talk about it. Not my thing, but interesting from a modern perspective in that Nate doesn’t want to hector businesses, but instead wants to teach them the benefits of “saving” the planet.  Which doesn’t seem to be the goal anymore. 

Meanwhile random deaths continue in the city – only we readers gradually learn they aren’t random. Messmann neatly introduces the killer by only referring to the yellow Adidas sneakers he wears as he rides his bicycle across the city. Basically if he runs afoul of someone, and the person is rude or whatever, this guy will go back home, find the person’s phone number through mysterious means, and then give him or her a phone call, zapping the victim over the phone line with his special contraption. In the course of this the phone receiver on the other end is fried, and Nate Bridger is the one who slowly discovers this – and also that the New York phone company is hiding it all, and keeping the murders under wraps. 

This elicits several scenes where Nate storms into the phone company main office and starts yelling at the prissy office manager…and, the way these things go, it’s also how Nate manages to pick up what will be the main female character in Phone Call: Beth, a pretty girl in the front office who seems to also believe her company is hiding something big. There’s also stuff with a hardheaded New York cop Nate keeps confronting, with a lot of tantruming between the two, the cop scoring most of the points with his witty put-downs of “cowboy” Nate. 

This brings me to one of Jon Messmann’s more curious authorial quirks: his strange tendency for bonkers dialog modifiers. By which I mean stuff like “he said,” or “she said,” or the like. I’m pretty sure these are referred to as “dialog modifiers,” and generally they are kept innocuous, so as not to distract the reader from the importance of the dialog itself. But Jon Messmann missed this lesson. Instead, he puts all the attention on his goofy modifiers. Rarely ever is it “Nate said,” or even “Nate yelled,” but something more showy like, “Nate threw out,” or, the greatest of all, “Nate slid out.” I mean that’s an actual tag at the end of a line of dialog in Phone Call, but otherwise the book isn’t sleazy at all. Indeed, the two sex scenes are entirely off-page, which is surprising for Messmann and indicates to me he was catering his manuscript to spec. 

The horror stuff is limited to one-off characters, each of whom are given inordinate set-up material, ultimately answering a ringing telephone and getting fried. There is though a great scene where the killer hits a live-on-the-air telethon, zapping the hapless volunteers at the phone banks, but this one’s handled with such melodrama that you can tell Messmann had his tongue in his cheek. In fact the feeling was clear to me that he thought the whole thing was dumb but gave it the old college try – but the only problem is, Messmann’s tone is as every dry and overly serious, making the story seem a lot more ponderous than it should be. The same of which could be said of his other horror paperback of the day, The Deadly Deep. 

Nate works with Beth and a few different cops to track down the killer before he can make another deadly phone call, but Nate Bridger is not the action hero of Messmann’s earlier series paperbacks. He doesn’t really do anything “action” at all in the novel, and doesn’t carry a gun. In fact he pulls one of the dumbest moves ever…he manages to figure out who the killer is and chases him solo, cornering the guy and actually roughing him up a little. The guy agrees to go along with Nate to the cops, but asks if he can change his friggin’ shirt before they go…and Nate lets him! Would you be surprised to learn the dude runs away? 

This at least sets up a goofy finale in which the phone company people come up with this reverse-engineered contraption that will fry the killer when he calls someone, which takes us into an overly suspenseful finale where Nate must call the killer at a certain time…and listen to his inordinate demands. Speaking of which, right before this we lucky readers have “enjoyed” Nate’s own inordinate demands, in a looong closing speech he gives to the eco-forum about man’s threat to the world and etc, etc, to the point you figure John Kerry must’ve read this book when it came out and took notes. Copious notes. 

Overall I found Phone Call middling and glacially paced, and the eco-sermonizing didn’t help matters much. But I only paid a few dollars for the book, so I can’t complain too much.

Depth Force #9: Death Cruise

Depth Force #9: Death Cruise, by Irving A. Greenfield

September, 1988  Zebra Books

How have I gone four years without reading an installment of Depth Force? The most shocking thing is I actually remembered most of what happened in the previous volume before starting Death Cruise; as we know, Irving Greenfield starts every volume en media res, picking up immediately after the previous volume, with zero in the way of background detail to catch up readers who might’ve forgotten what happened…or who might not’ve picked up the previous volume at all. 

So I wasn’t too out of sorts with the big action-rescue operation that opens this ninth installment; bearded hero Admiral Jack Boxer is on a new experimental sub and dropping off some commandos to take out a nuclear facility that’s guarded by Arabic and Russian soldiers, but as usual Greenfield writes the action scenes in outline format, with nothing in the way of the hard-hitting action one might expect from the genre. In fact, most of it is, as usual, relayed from the perspective of Boxer as he gets updates on the commlink on the bridge. But the novel opens on the same apocalyptic image that the previous one ended on, with the mushroom cloud of the destroyed facility off in the distance. 

The “rescue” portion goes on twice as long, and takes up a lot of the novel. As ever the Russians are there, under the command of Borodine, Boxer’s Russian enemy-slash-best friend. Borodine’s ship is destroyed, so Boxer follows the maritme code and rescues the Russians. There’s a lot of stuff about these guys toasting each other and etc. And meanwhile Borodine is in trouble due to hypothermia and frostbite. Then Boxer’s ship gets messed up and they’re stranded in frozen waters, sure to die. They’re rescued by an American vessel that transports cargo and is commanded by a guy named Captain Axelord, who is a “coward” and also an old enemy of Boxer’s…a real enemy, I should say, not an “enemy” like Borodine. 

Axelrod refuses to allow the Russians on his ship given that they are enemies, not even backing down when Boxer enforces his authority as an admiral and thus the true commander of Axelrod’s ship. So Boxer has to put a gun to the guy’s head, which ultimately will take us into the soap opera stuff we expect from Depth Force. Axelrod is the son-in-law of a senator who also has it in for Boxer, leading to a court martial charge. Humorously the back cover copy is as ever incorrect – I’ve long assumed the people at Zebra didn’t even read Greenfield’s manuscripts – and implies that Boxer is sent on a mission due to being court martialed. 

Rather, the soap opera stuff is central to Killer Cruise. And that’s another thing. There’s no “killer cruise” in the book! So again I think Zebra just came up with titles and back cover copy and if Irving Greenfield’s actual manuscript matched it, so much the better, but no big deal if it didn’t. So there’s a lot of stuff about Boxer getting ready for a rigged trial in a kangaroo court, orchestrated by political enemies on made-up charges for a jury that’s predisposed to find him guilty – which was real relevant and topical to read about in 2024, let me tell you – but there’s also stuff about Boxer adopting this 17 year-old kid who, we get confirmation this time, was indeed the son of one of Boxer’s men who was killed in a previous volume, and this time the adoption is made official. This was always a mystery to me because I was missing the earlier volume in which this subplot was set up. 

Oh, and there’s a fair bit about Boxer and his latest flame, an apparently hotstuff lawyer named Francine who is representing Boxer in the adoption. Francine was in previous volume so has been around for a bit, and she lives in DC with Boxer’s former commanding officer Stark, who is recuperating from a heart attack or something. Boxer and Francine get it on a few times in the book, Greenfield as ever delivering his patented explicit sex scenes (“[Boxer’s] cum exploded out of him,” etc – and yes, Greenfield spells it that way). But the veteran men’s adventure reader – or hell even the veteran Depth Force reader – will know this is not headed for a happy ending, if you’ll excuse the lame pun. Because friends, Boxer is in love with Francine, and even asks her to marry him. Hmm…what do you think might happen? I seem to recall Boxer proposed to some other chick earlier in the series, one named Trish, and she got shot in the head and then briefly turned into a vegetable, before dying off-page, and rarely mentioned again. 

Now that I think of it, the titular “death cruise” might refer to Francine’s grim fate…or I could just be reaching. Basically, Francine is abducted by a pair of Italians and eventually smuggled onto a ship in the Mediterranean (or something, I didn’t catch the geography), where she’s kept in a room beneath the deck and gang-raped and sodomized by a pair of swarthy brutes…like for days and days. So much so that, when Boxer finally finds her, Francine too has become a vegetable, raped and defiled so much that she has lost her mind. She’s sent off to a clinic at book’s end and Boxer spends about half a second hoping she’ll be okay, but is more concerned with the novel’s “main” storyline, ie the storyline promised on the back cover…which per series tradition doesn’t even come up in the book until the final quarter. 

But before we get to that, Greenfield spends most of the narrative in a political subplot, with characters who will likely feature in future volumes. For one, there’s Lori-Ann Collins, the sexy executive assistant to the head of the CIA, but secretly a deep-cover KGB agent; Greenfield clearly lays the groundwork for Boxer and Lori-Ann to “come together” in a future volume. Her subplot here sees her ensnaring various bigwig officers in US intelligence while fending off the advances of her sadistic control agent. Lori-Ann’s material was also unexpectedly topical in that it had her outing one high-ranking intelligence guy for being gay, the knowledge of which could ruin his career…! 

There’s also stuff with some rich Texans Boxer hobknobs with as part of his planning to thwart the court marial attemps, including visits with President Spooner. All this is treated with Greenfield’s usual disdain for creating drama or suspense; the president for example just appears without any setup. Greenfield does try to cater to the genre demand for action, with Boxer getting in random fistfights, some of them comically egregious…like when he’s called a “commie” for ordering vodka in a redneck bar and beats up his accusers. Then later he gets in a scrape while defending his adopted son, Chuck, from a group of racists who attack Chuck and his black friend. 

Even the finale has the feel of a soap opera as Boxer “quits” the Navy so as to go after the abducted Francine, working with a former enemy named Bruno Morelli to track her down; another old enemy, Julio Sanchez, is behind her capture (not to mention that he’s also Francine’s former boyfriend, in a confusingly unelaborated subplot). As mentioned Francine’s rescued, but in a vegetable state, and novel’s end sees Boxer commanding another sub while racing out to find out what happened to his normal sub, which has disappeared on the assignment Boxer turned down prior to quitting the Navy. 

The climax is a retread of the previous volume, with Boxer depositing a squad of SEALs somewhere and our hero standing around while newly-introduced characters handle the action. Greenfield’s action scenes are so half-assed, there’s one part where a SEAL blows away some enemy soldiers in revenge for killing a comrade, and the guy screams “Die, motherfuckers, die.” Greenfield doesn’t even give the line of dialog an exclamation point! I mean even his cipher-like characters are bored with it all. 

As usual we end here on the final scene, with the next volume inevitably picking up from this scene and then spending the rest of the narrative following up the various subplots Greenfield has introduced in Death Cruise. I’m missing that volume, as well as the volume after it, but you know what? I really don’t care. At this point I’m still just reading Depth Force to finish off the volumes I do have.

Duffy

Duffy, by Harry Joe Brown, Jr.

October, 1968  Dell Books

One of those movies that seems to be completely forgotten, Duffy was a caper film that tried to tap into the late ‘60s zeitgeist and starred James Coburn as the titular character. The only reason I ever heard of it was many years ago when I was into the work of Donald Cammell, who later wrote and directed Performance. I’ve still never seen Duffy, but now I’ve read the novelization – which was written by Harry Joe Brown Jr., who was the other writer of the script. 

So far as I can tell, this is the only writing credit for Brown, and also Duffy appeared to be his only movie. He died in 2005, and was born into “Hollywood Royalty.”  But man, having read this book I can see why he didn’t do any other movies. Duffy is a dud, even in book form…and I have the suspicion that Brown wrote the original script before Donald Cammell was brought in to rewrite it. Further, I suspect that, like Paradise Alley, this novelization is a reflection of the author’s original screenplay…I’ve browsed online for reviews of the film, and have found mentions of scenes that aren’t even in this novel, so I’m guessing this was stuff added by Cammell that did not exist in Harry Joe Brown Jr.’s draft of the script. 

Essentially the novel is a basic heist yarn, only very drawn out, and made relevant with a “groovy” Eurotrash vibe. It’s a lot like the film version of The Adventurers by Harold Robbins, only without the saucy stuff. It’s short, too, coming in at 140 big-print pages. This is because there isn’t much story. Basically it’s about two half-brothers who decide to rip off their mega-wealthy father, and Duffy is an American expat they go to for help in the caper. There’s also a hotstuff American girl named Segolene who gets caught up in the mix. But it takes forever for anything to happen, and when it does, it’s not very memorable. 

One thing the novel seems to make clear that the movie might not is that the characters are all European, save for Duffy and Segolene…but then the latter is presented as one of those annoying American girls who goes overseas and starts acting “continental,” with a fake accent and etc. Plus her name is confusing; you’d never guess she was an American. The mega-wealthy father being heisted is named Calvet, an Onassis-type who was played by James Mason in the film (where he was renamed “Calvert”). The plotting half-brothers are Stefan, Calvet’s 20 year-old French son, and Anthony, Calvet’s half-British son of a previous marriage. The gist is that Stefan, as Calvet’s “main” son, has all the family wealth, whereas Anthony, as the “former” son, has nothing and must work. The two men hatch a scheme to heist Calvet’s ship, The Osiris, which will be hosting “currency transfers” around Tangier. Anthony needs the money because he has none, and Stefan wants to pull a heist just for the fun of it. 

It's through Stefan that we get most of those “groovy” period details. He likes to smoke joints and is prone to spouting New Age hippie philosophy, like how time is meaningless and whatnot. His girlfriend is blonde American model Segolene, but Segolene is a free spirit and not truly attached to him. This is another of those topical details, but the problem is Brown makes Segolene seem more like a narcisstic whore than a free-spirited, free-thinking woman. But then, perhaps that was precisely Brown’s intent. Susannah York played her in the movie, while future Performance co-star James Fox played “Stefane,” indicating that another name was changed from Brown’s original script. John Alderton played Anthony. 

Duffy meanwhile is described as a beach bum in his thirties, a former Navy man, who now makes his living as an artist in Tangier. Reviews of the movie have it that his pad in Tangier is decorated with tacky sculptures of the female anatomy, but none of this is present in the novelization. Rather, Duffy is a cipher with no real motivation…perhaps more commentary on the hippie mindset, for Duffy is clearly identified as a hippie. Dell Books was very intent on getting this across, with a headline announcing “Take a trip” on the first page of the book. Otherwise Duffy’s hippie-ism is mainly evident in how he has no real life intentions, other than lazing in Tangier and creating art. He doesn’t even display much of a libido. 

Brown is in no hurry to tell his tale. None whatsoever. There’s also no real drive to the heist. The two brothers want to hit their father’s ship, and go about their leisurely plotting of the job. Brown’s also in no hurry to introduce Duffy, who doesn’t even appear in the narrative until page 33. Here we are told he’s 32, with sandy brown hair and “Bogart-ish” looks. Duffy previously worked for Calvet, thus the brothers know of him, and ultimately they hit upon the idea of using him in the heist. Even the way Stefan and Anthony bring Duffy into the caper is lame; they essentially hang out with him for a bit and get into a “daydream” discussion about hitting a boat in the ocean and stealing four million bucks off it, and how such a job could be done. 

In the meantime there’s a lot of stuff with Segolene, who is more annoying than arousing, at least in the book. Stefan sort of puts her on Duffy, as a honey trap I guess, but even here it’s just more “hip” dialog, like her admission that “Stefan calls me a whore. I guess I am a whore.” How shocking! It takes a while, but Segolene does eventually give in to Duffy’s virility: “Slowly, fully, she let him enter her.” A clever thing here is how after their initial boink, there’s a part where Duffy and Segolene awake in bed and Duffy muses how, in books, sex scenes are often glossed over, with the author jumping immediately to the post-sex material…which is exactly what Brown does in Duffy. I thought this was funny, particularly given how I always note in my reviews if the sex scenes are off-page; Harry Joe Brown Jr. was noting the same thing in 1968, it appears. 

But Duffy’s still a bit of a square; when he wakes up next morning to find Stefan and Anthony standing over the bed, Duffy feels uncomfortable, given the fact that the two clearly know that Duffy’s been having sex with Segolene, ie Stefan’s “woman.” But man, it’s the late ‘60s! Get with it! And plus, as Segolene insists, she belongs to no one. In other words, she’s a “slut,” as Duffy calls her shortly before their sex scene. Now that’s how you get a woman! Anyway, at this point Duffy is as expected in on the heist, which sees him disguised as a Bedouin and the two brothers also disguised as they board their father’s ship and then rob it with “Israeli submachine guns,” clearly Uzis, though Brown never identifies them. 

The heist is bloodless and more on a suspense angle, but only takes up several pages and really isn’t much to get hung up about. Indeed, it’s the post-heist material that takes us into the climax, with a “shock twist” reveal that one of the plotters is actually working with Calvet…for reasons that aren’t even made clear. But Duffy gets the last laugh; having figured out the duplicity, he “finds” the money that’s been heisted and returns it in a public setting, ensuring plenty of media coverage and making himself look like a hero. It’s a clever ending, only undone by the fact that Duffy hasn’t done anything clever before this. 

All told, Duffy wasn’t so much a “trip” as it was a “bore.” I doubt I’ll ever see the film now, and if I want some Donald Cammell material I’ll just watch Performance again…or The Touchables, if I’m really desperate. That one’s only slightly better than Duffy, but at least has a super-mod look and features a cast of smokin’ hot swingin’ ‘60s babes.

The Doll

The Doll, by Gerard Gormley

May, 1977  Pinnacle Books

Unjustly obscure, this Pinnacle paperback original deserved a better fate. At least it got a great cover illustration, courtesy Bruce Minney (who is credited on the copyright page); it’s a stepback cover, as shown below. And to Minney’s credit, he clearly read the manuscript (or was given good direction by the art director at Pinnacle), as he faithfully details the two main characters in the novel, as well as the bronze statue the protagonist works on, even down to the expression on the statue’s face. 

Coming in at 211 pages, The Doll is interesting in how it melds two disparate tones: the first half of the novel is essentially a love story, one complete with ‘70s-mandatory explicit sex. But the second half of the novel is a dark and disturbing descent into madness. My assumption is Gerard Gormley, who proves himself a gifted author, must have shot for the hardcover leagues but for whatever reason ended up publishing the book through Pinnacle…possibly not the best outfit for this book. I mean a subplot here concerns “The Man,” a Mafia bigwig in Boston, and one keeps waiting for the protagonist to call in Pinnacle Books star Mack Bolan. 

Opening in November of 1969, The Doll concerns Mark Forman, a thirty year-old sculptor who makes a meager living turning out statues in his Boston penthouse studio-apartment. Gormley well brings the character to life; Forman sports a beard (as per Minney’s illustration), and he’s very serious about his work, living almost a hermetic life. He’s approached one day by his landlord, Lou Pacino, who has a plush job for Forman: Pacino’s acquaintance, a wealthy man, wants a bronze statue made of his woman, and price will not be an issue. 

We already have an indication of the way the novel will be going, given the opening note that the story begins “like most nightmares.” Which is to say, without any indication that it will become a nightmare. But Gormley well establishes the forbidden nature of the romance that will expectedly ensue between Forman and the woman he is to create a statue of: Anna, a smokin’ hot “chestnut haired” beauty with violet eyes in her mid-twenties who is delivered to Forman’s door one day like a package. Gormley also handles the groundwork of the romance well, with the chemistry between Forman and Anna naturally developing and not seeming forced. Both characters are given personalities, and despite being a goddess-level beauty, Anna is easy to talk to and they have a nicely-developed rapport. 

Gormley also isn’t one to focus on the exploitation, which makes the ensuing sex scenes so hard-hitting. For one, when Anna does strip down for some nude sketches, Forman focuses on the task at hand before briefly allowing himself to “marvel at the perfection of [Anna’s] breasts” (size 36, as we learn when Forman takes her measurements), noting further that she is a “visual delight.” But instead the focus is on the chemistry between the two, rather than the exploitation of Anna’s ample charms. That said, the lovin’ doesn’t take too long to happen; but then, the two of them spend full days together alone in Forman’s studio, and one quickly detects that Anna is enjoying her time away from “The Man,” which is how Forman soon comes to think of the mysterious man Anna is the mistress of. 

In a way it’s all sort of like a rom-com or something; on their first day Anna asks Forman if he’s got a lot of girlfriends, but Forman claims he’s more of a shy type and wouldn’t even know how to hit on a woman as gorgeous as Anna, which leads to some role-playing that becomes serious quick for both of them. This leads to them thinking of each other all weekend, complete with Anna making surprise calls to Forman. Some of it is funny, like when Anna gives a tired Forman a massage, which gives him an immediate hard-on. But boy when the sexual shenanigans transpire, no sleazy stone is left unturned; it goes on for a few pages, complete with Anna’s explicit descriptions of her orgasms (“Darling, I’m coming again. Deep inside this time!”) and TMI detail like Forman “gloriously gushing” into her upon his own orgasm. Actually, “gloriously gushing” is used again in the novel; personally I think it should’ve been the title of the book. 

Here's where the “nightmare” angle comes into play, because – you won’t be surprised to learn – Anna’s boyfriend is clearly a high-ranking Mafioso. Anna is tight-lipped about him, but we learn he is not the expected old and ugly guy who could afford such a beauty as Anna, but rather a young and attractive man who happens to be in an unhappy marriage arranged by “the families.” So Anna’s in two secret relationships: one with “The Man,” which is kep secret from the Man’s wife, and one with Forman, which is kept secret from the Man. 

But the relationship with Forman is where Anna’s heart is, and Gormley does lay it on a little thick with Anna and Forman expressing love for each other, even down to ridiculous “foreshadowing” stuff where Anna proclaims how “even death” wouldn’t keep her from Forman. I mean let’s telegraph it a little more, huh? Also, Forman knows he’s getting in hot water because his landlord, Pacino, is becoming increasingly nervous on the project, saying how his friend thinks the statue should be done already – I forgot to mention, but Forman never even meets the Man, the entire project handled through Pacino. And it’s clear that the Man is starting to suspect Forman of intentionally taking his time. 

Gormley also well captures the artistic mindset and the laborious process of making a bronze statue. It’s not overbearing and is handled well, letting us see Forman in action. His goal is to capture Anna’s beauty – and also we learn that her body is so incredible that Forman decides to make it slightly less gobsmacking, so the statue will be more believable! He struggles over the expression for the statue, finally deciding on a yearning, gazing-into-the-distance expression Anna had on her face on that first day, when Forman was doing sketches of her; Forman had asked her to think of her childhood, and that was the expression on Anna’s face when she talked of being a child. This is also the expression Bruce Minney has tried to convey in his cover illustration, so again he either read the book or read this section to do a faithful job of it. 

The nightmare portion of The Doll develops just as naturally as the rom-com portion. Anna is quickly removed from Forman’s life, the Man calling her back – and having Pacino kick Forman out of his studio apartment, as the Man clearly suspects Forman of having screwed Anna. Even though Forman and Anna have no way of contacting each other, Forman not even knowing Anna’s last name, our industrious protagonist figures out a way to track her down…with devastating results. The ensuing sequence is out of a Pinnacle novel, complete with Forman getting beaten near to death by a pair of Mafia stooges. 

But whereas the hero of a typical Pinnacle book would recuperate and then train himself in the fine art of killing, Mark Forman instead tries to get his hands to work again so he can get back to sculpting. The novel gradually becomes more of a sick descent into a damaged mind, as Forman’s brain was injured in the beating, and gradually he loses any connection between fantasy and reality. This is how the titular “doll” comes into the story; Forman kept the wax mold used to create the bronze statue of Anna, meaning Forman has a perfect likeness of Anna…and he creates a life-size latex doll of this likeness. And soon enough he’s shopping for wigs of real hair, gemstone eyes of the same violet color as Anna’s eyes, using spare hair from the wig to create eyebrows and pubic hair, etc. Just a crazy descent into sickness, with the interesting gimmick that Gormley writes it all casually, given that Forman himself doesn’t think it’s sick – he’s just a man determined to get Anna back. 

So yes, the latter half of The Doll concerns a guy in love with a lifesize latex doll, even hollowing out a section in the crotch so that he can “gush gloriously” into it. And the madness is well handled, with Forman coming up with a complete alternate reality of what happened to Anna…sometimes the doll is really her, other times he realizes it’s just a simulacrum he’s made of her, etc. That said, I did find the reveal of what really happened to Anna a little underwhelming, and had wished for more insight into her story, even if Forman had to get it from someone else, like perhaps his landlord Pacino – again, I wanted more of your standard Pinnacle hero, more of a man of action who would’ve gotten the answers he wanted. 

Ultimately The Doll left me with a sick feeling, Gerard Gormley doing a great job of documenting a man’s slipping hold on sanity, but I felt that it was too hard of a punch after the easy, naturally-developing chemistry of the opening half. The book essentially delivers an unexpected uppercut to the reader, and I can’t say I enjoyed the experience…perhaps it would have been more palatable if it had built to a more satisfying climax. But Gormley is determined to tell a dark tale, and clearly his ending is more realistic than the one I would’ve wanted – say, Mark Forman buying himself a shotgun and doling out some bloody payback. 

That said, the finale itself is pretty nuts, dark, and twisted, with a pair of young hoodlums breaking into Forman’s studio and discovering the doll and, uh, having a little sick fun with it. When Forman gets back from an art show and discovers the transgression, he goes ballistic, and given that he’s now a psycho he has psycho strength, smashing out brains and whatnot. It’s crazy and all, but again just so out of sync with the vibe of the first half of the novel. But then as mentioned the novel is really two stories in the same book: a romance for the first half, followed by a hundred pages of a guy falling in love with a lifesize doll and screwing it a bunch. 

But on that note, I guess this element of The Doll was a lot more shocking in its day. Lifesize latex sex dolls are fairly common today; I think I have a couple in my downstairs closet. Just kidding. But didn’t I read a news story a few years ago about some dude marrying a latex sex doll? Crazy, but in retrospect I guess it’s no more crazy than marrying a real woman, is it? I mean at least the doll won’t nag you to death. 

As promised, here’s Bruce Minney’s interior illustration – as you’ll note, my copy has writing on it, but that’s cool. I don’t mind that sort of thing nearly as much as I once did. In fact I think it’s cool that someone named “Lottie” once owned this copy, and liked it so much she even wrote “please return” on it. Sorry, Lottie – I’m keeping it. 

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 18

Grindhouse/Drive-in movies: 

Invasion Of The Bee Girls (1973): Bringing the vibe of ‘50s paranoia sci-fi like Invasion of The Body Snatchers to the drive-in ‘70s, Invasion Of The Bee Girls follows the same path as those earlier drive-in flicks but adds in ‘70s-mandatory boobs. Burly William Smith is cast against type as an amiable, even-tempered State Department agent who spends the entire movie wearing a three-piece suit and smiling; you get the impression he’s dying to tear off the suit and start swinging his fists. Despite being somewhat miscast, he’s still good in the role, and like the same year’s Wonder Women this one almost comes off like the film adaptation of a men’s adventure series that never was. 

Written by Nicholas Meyer, there’s a bit more to the movie than the standard drive-in fare of the day, with various “readings” of the film possible. To me it seems a clear reaction to the women’s lib of the day, though spoofing it to a certain extent. The gist of the story is that men in smalltown Peckham, in California, are dying of massive heart attacks, apparently caused by lots of sex. Though the film never outright states it, the implication is clear: they’ve been fucked to death. But then, the movie is interesting in how it’s never too R-rated; while there is copious boobage, there’s little cursing and hardly any violence. It’s essentially a mainstream take on drive-in pulp, and perhaps it’s for this reason that Invasion Of The Bee Girls is relatively unknown: it’s too timid for the hardcore grindhouse fans and it’s too saucy for mainstream movie fans. 

Truth be told, it is a little slow-paced, operating more on a long-simmer mystery angle than the slam-bang sci-fi action one might expect. Smith’s character is called in because the men dying happen to be employed at a secret governmental research base in town, and the State Department is concerned of threats and whatnot. Safe to say, there’s never been a State Department officer who looked like William Smith (especially not in today’s “intersectional” era), but for a guy who spent the previous decade busting heads in various biker movies, Smith acquits himself well as a nattily-attired agent who’s just trying to do his job. There isn’t even the expected antagonism with the local cops; indeed, there’s a part midway through where the local police chief loses his cool over the “Fed” pushing in on his territory, and Smith just grins and apologizes for stepping on his toes. It’s way against type for Smith, but one imagines he enjoyed the opportunity to play less of a hot-head. 

While the movie spends most of its time focused on Smith trying to figure out what’s going on, the viewer already knows that sultry Anitra Ford, who plays a researcher at the secret base, is basically turning the town’s women into the titular Bee Girls. Now one thing to note is that the awesome poster for the film is misleading: the Bee Girls never wear costumes. 

But then, they don’t wear anything. One of the humorous bits about the movie is that all of these Peckham women are total babes: there’s a laugh out loud part where we meet the widow of one of the men – a heavyset bald guy who looks like Colonel Klink – and she’s a mega-stacked babe who goes topless throughout a practically endless sequence in which we see how the Bee Girls are created. But then, Smith’s character spends the entire movie working with a research assistant at the base who wears glasses and dresses conservatively, and late in the novel she too is captured and almost given the Bee Girl treatment, topless and showing off a body that’s straight out of Playboy…not surprising, given that the actress is Victoria Vettri, who was a famous Playmate in the late ‘60s. Indeed her centerfold picture even made it to the Moon, courtesy the rowdy Apollo 12 crew. Even here Smith’s character shows special consideration; he doesn’t even make his interest in her known until the end, when he throws her on a bed and climbs on top of her. Given that the camera pans over to a bee and we hear “Thus Spake Zarathustra” on the soundtrack as the two get with it, the implication is clear that Vettri’s character might have indeed become a Bee Girl. 

Overall Invasion Of The Bee Girls is fun, but one must think of it more as a hybrid of sci-fi and mystery, as it never goes to the action levels one might hope for. Production values are certainly high for the genre, with Anitra Ford’s high-tech secret chambers being especially cool. But the pace kind of plods at times and one wishes William Smith had been given more to do than just ask questions. That said, the movie scores points for featuring the guy who played the Mafioso in Black Belt Jones as a “sex researcher” at the base. Also, Charles Bernstein’s jazz-funk score is very nice, with an effective main theme featuring a wordless “la la la” melody that almost sounds like it could’ve come off an Italian picture of the day. 

Speaking of men’s adventure, there’s a part toward the very end where the Bee Girls lab is blowing up and William Smith watches the action through a window in a door, and he looks just like the profile portrait of Adrano on the Adrano For Hire covers: 

Seizure (1974): Back in 2016 I bought the Trailer Trauma grindhouse/drive-in trailer compilation Blu Ray, because it was the only new release of its kind after the awesome 42nd Street Forever series came to an end with its fifth volume in 2009 (save for a special Blu Ray release in 2012, which I of course got as soon as it came out, but while cool it was just a compilation of the first two volumes of the original standard disc releases). Trailer Trauma is now also up to its fifth volume – 2020’s 70’s Action Attack, which might be my favorite trailer comp of all time given that it focuses, as you might guess from the title, on ‘70s action – but I never got into the Trailer Trauma series much due to its focus on horror. I’m not a fan of ‘70s and ‘80s horror movies, really. Well anyway I was recently watching my Trailer Trauma Blu Ray…only to realize midway through that I never even watched all of it back when I got it. I think I just watched the first half. Well, hell, there was still a predominance of horror stuff on it, but toward the end of the disc there was this crazy trailer in French with people in a cabin in the woods and a long-limbed girl in panties and halter top fighting some guy with a knife, and the title was “Tango Macabre,” so I figured it was just some goofy ‘70s French horror flick. 

But then I happened to read the review of Trailer Trauma at DVD Drive-In, and was surprised to learn that the trailer was the French promo for a Canada-US film from 1974…a film directed, of all people, by Oliver frigggin’ Stone!! So needless to say I had to see it. It’s now out on Blu Ray and that’s how I saw it, but to tell the truth it would’ve been just as well if I hadn’t. Curiously listless, Seizure has a lot of potential, concerning a horror author/artist (Jonathan Frid, from Dark Shadows) hosting a weekend getaway (or something) at his cottage in the verdant French Canadian countryside. But man, for a movie that features the credit, “Herve Villacheze as The Spider,” Seizure never makes much use of its crazy setup. Basically our hero – such as he is – fears that his dreams are becoming reality, and three freaks crawl out of the woodwork and start making hell for him and his guests. Or maybe they’re escaped lunatics from an asylum…or maybe it’s all just a dream! Stone tries to have his cake and eat it, too, but the only problem is he doesn’t spend enough time preparing either (hopefully that lame analogy made sense). 

The movie is lethargically paced, and not helped by the fact that it takes itself too seriously…but then, it is an Oliver Stone picture! He does aim above his minimal trappings with staging that’s unusual for the genre, particularly using a handheld camera at times. So I guess one could see the makings of a future cinema heavyweight here, this being Stone’s first directing credit. And yes, Herve Villechaize is in the film, a few years before Fantasy Island and two years before The Man With The Golden Gun (according to IMDB the movie was filmed in late 1972). His part here seems to be a trial for that latter role, as he essentially plays the henchman of the lunatic chick in charge of the trio (there’s also a hulking black man with a horrifically-scarred face). But man, Stone saddles Villechaize with most of the movie’s dialog, and I had a helluva time understanding what the hell he was saying! It didn’t help that it seemed Stone (who by the way co-wrote the script as well) seemed to have penned this dialog after ingesting the poetry of Jim Morrison. It’s just way over the top, but at least Villechaize acquits himself well. 

The humor comes unintentionally, like the disperate group of “friends” who congregrate here…they spend most of the time fighting and bickering, to the point that you wonder what the hell they’re even doing together. Genre regular Mary Woronov (who appears elsewhere on this review round-up) shines as the young wife of a loudmouth; the two nearly steal the picture. Woronov though gets the honor; she is the aforementioned long-limbed babe in panties and halter top from the trailer, and she appears this way in the final quarter of the film, forced into a knife fight with the Dark Shadows guy. This scene here again shows Oliver Stone’s attempts at getting outside his contraints, with the camera going handheld again and close to the actors; Woronov looks like she’s trying out for the Conan picture (which by the way Oliver Stone also wrote! At least the first draft!), like a sort of ‘70s barbarian babe. She should’ve been the star of the movie. 

Seizure is curiously tame in the sex and violence departments; other than Wornov’s skimpy clothing, there is zero in the way of sex appeal, and no nudity whatsoever. Violence is also minimal, with only occasional bits of blood, and a gruesome bit toward the end where the hulking black villain crushes a guy’s skull (off-camera) with his bare hands, and we get a closeup of his hands afterward and there’s all this chunky goup on it (ie, the brains he just crushed out!). Oh, we also get some animal violence, with a quick cut of a poor dog hanging in the woods. “Quick” is the key word, though; Stone goes for a lot of “shock shots,” with super-quick hits of violence, but they’re so quick that the shock is ruined – like the aforementioned horrifically-scarred face. The first time it’s shown, it’s on-camera so fast you barely even register it. 

Another interesting thing from a modern perspective is that Seizure, like Hollywood Boulevard below, could almost be the work of a modern-day director trying to cater to an old genre form. And not just due to the lack of nudity – see, for example, Rodriguez and Tarantino’s 2007 Grindhouse movies, which slavishly catered to the form but somehow missed the key ingredient of female nudity and were set in the present day for some inexplicable reason – but also due to the film artifacts that occasionally pop up. By this I again refer to Grindhouse, with Rodriguez’s Planet Terror in particular having all kinds of “bad film damage” digitally overlaid. We get almost this same thing in the “horror scenes” in Seizure; there will suddenly be film damage, like bad splices, when characters scream or react to something shocking or whatever. 

Otherwise Seizure was only interesting in that it showed the beginnings of a legendary career. But even “Herve Villechaize as The Spider” couldn’t save it, nor could Mary Woronov in her panties and halter top. 

Death Race 2000 (1975): I remember hearing about this movie all the time as a kid (I was born the year before it came out), so clearly it made some impact on the cultural radar. But, other than seeing bits and pieces on TV over the years, I never actually watched the movie until fairly recently. I’m not sure how well Death Race 2000 is considered now; the trailer does not appear on any of the grindhouse trailer comps I’m familiar with (which is a lot), and this implies to me that genre fans consider it too mainstream. Or maybe no one wants to talk about it due to the lame remake of several years back. (I assume it’s lame; of course, there’s no way in hell I ever intended to watch it.) But man, Death Race 2000 might just be one of the greatest grindhouse/drive-in movies of all time, featuring plentiful action, lots of nudity, and even horror effects courtesy the proto-Darth Vader garb “hero” David Carradine sports as “Frankenstein.” Plus it co-stars Sylvester Stallone!! (And it also features Mary Woronov – who will appear yet again in this review round-up!) 

The movie performs way above expectations and just gets better with age, though I bet it was a helluva lot of fun to watch in a drive-in back in ’75. It’s also a great reminder of how Hollywood once churned out fast-moving pieces of entertainment that didn’t wear out their welcome (the flick’s not even 90 minutes long), and featured plenty of nudity and violence. While the boobs and butts (and bush, in Woronov’s case) are real, the violence is spectacularly fake – the blood is this garish reddish-orange, and the outrageous gore effects are more comical than gut-churning. Limbs getting ripped off, heads getting crushed, etc; it’s all here, and it all looks more slapstick than violent, lending the film even more of a wonderfully dark comic vibe. 

This appears to be mostly due to director Paul Bartel, who cameos (uncredited) in the film as the doctor who attends David Carradine’s character Frankenstein in the beginning of the film. Bartel was known more for acting than directing, and indeed appeared in the following year’s Hollywood Boulevard (below), where he played a pretentious director – a film that included clips from Death Race 2000, adding even more self-referential comedy to a movie already filled with it. His direction here is great, with a rapid pace, steady shots on the big racing scenes (none of the shaky cam or cgi bullshit of today’s movies here), and the droll, blackly comic vibe seems like just the thing his character in Hollywood Boulevard would have done, again giving these two movies a cool sort of in-joke vibe. 

Carradine is very good in his role, underplaying it; he spends most of the movie in a leather costume and cape complete with full face mask. There’s a proto-Darth Vader element to the Frankenstein look, but unlike Vader this guy actually has a libido, so we have the required T&A when Frankenstein gets busy with his navigator, a blonde babe with a brick shithouse bod (Annie, as played by actress Simone Griffeth). Good grief these ‘70s women had it going on. The producers knew their audience; in addition to Griffeth’s frequent nudity, we also have a bit where she, Woronov, and Roberta Collins (as racer Matilda the Hun) get full-body massages in the nude…Woronov’s Calamity Jane and Collins’s Matilda get in a catfight, and we get a half-second confirmation that Woronov is indeed fully naked when she gets up off the massage table to confront Collins’s character. Stallone is also present, seeming quite the calm professional surrounded by all this bare female flesh. 

The dark comedy is perfectly handled and I love that the movie doesn’t play it safe, though I am glad the producers didn’t go all the way and show kids getting run over by the racers – kids and the elderly affording the most “points” when run over during the trans-continental race. That said, there’s none of the pandering a modern-day flick like this would stoop to; Frankenstein, even though he’s our hero, still runs over men and women without even looking upset about it. I’m sure if this movie were made today the hero would be fighting back tears everytime he had to run over someone, or he’d go out of his way to not run over anyone. (Oh, and of course “he” would be “she” if the film were made today!) I also enjoyed the political satire afoot with the guru-like president who openly lies to the populace (loved the running gag that “the French” are behind the attacks on the race, a government cover-up of the resistance movement) and the easy-going government officials who casually tell the racers they can have them killed. 

A year before he became famous for life, Stallone shines as Machine Gun Joe, and I got the impression he was ad-libbing his lines. Being a writer himself, I think it’s very likely Stallone was coming up with his own lines. There is a natural delivery to his performance and he’s clearly having a lot of fun, and from a modern vantage point it’s also fun to see him playing a bad guy for once. Also, where else can you see slender David Carradine beating up burly Sylvester Stallone? Plus there’s a hilarious part where Machine Gun Joe blasts a tommy gun at the audience before the race starts, and Stallone pulls a proto-Rambo grimace while blasting on full auto. There are also hidden storylines in the film for the viewer to ponder, like what exactly is going on between Machine Gun Joe and Frankenstein’s navigator Annie…who, by the way, also seems to have something going on with one of the resistance leaders. 

There’s also a cool postmodern vibe in play with the proto-reality TV element of the race, complete with gabby newscasters giving frequent updates or voiceovers, a la Survivor or The Amazing Race or other such bullshit. One of the newscasters is a pitch-perfect spoof of Walter Kronkite, and the other appears to be a spoof of a Rona Barrett type, a gossip-focused woman whose recurring joke has it that she is a “dear friend” of practically every important character. The entire movie is funny, with really no missteps, but manages to also pack a punch in the frequent action scenes. I mean I know many years ago Vanishing Point was proclaimed as the best of those ‘70s “car movies,” but really Death Race 2000 is better than any of them, and is probably the epitome of a drive-in movie. 

Hollywood Boulevard (1976): I only recently saw this movie for the first time, and couldn’t believe how much I loved it. Previously I was only familiar with the poster for it, and knew that it starred the blonde and lovely, should-have-been-a-huge-star, Candice Rialson. What I did not know was that Hollywood Boulevard was the first film of future heavyweight director Joe Dante (who co-directs with Allan Arkush), who had been cutting trailers for New World (in fact he cut the trailer for Death Race 2000) and who managed to convince Roger Corman to allow him to direct an entire picture. As mentioned above, there is a strange post-modern feeling to this movie…as if it had been made by someone who watched all of the 42nd Street Forever grindhouse trailer DVD compilations and tried to both spoof and pay tribute to the entire drive-in aesthetic. In other words, Hollywood Boulevard is everything Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse wanted to be, with the additional coolness factor that it was actually produced in the ‘70s. 

This one’s an actual comedy, but still manages to pack in action and the required nudity. Surprisingly Rialson isn’t the one showing off the most flesh; surprising because the lady had perhaps the nicest rack in film history. Good grief! Her topless scenes are for the most part tame, usually while quickly disrobing before some off-screen lovin’ (a fun element about the movie is that Rialson’s character “Candy” is more wholesome than promiscuous, and spends the movie with just one guy). Then of course there’s the rape scene. Actually, the rape scenes. Hollywood Boulevard is so “1970s” that a gang-rape is played for laughs twice: first when Candy must act out being raped by a bunch of enemy soldiers in a movie she’s shooting in the Philipines, and later in the movie when the “real” Candy is almost raped by a film projectionist and an audience member who get overly excited watching the aforementioned “fake” rape scene on the big screen. 

Dante and Arkush recycle footage from other New World movies, like the aforementioned Death Race 2000, complete with Candice Rialson wearing David Carradine’s leather Frankenstein costume. Meaning there’s even a cosplay element to the damn movie…that’s how ahead of its time it was! True, the humor is a little slapstick at times…the plot hinges on mysterious deaths plaguing the shooting locations of Miracle Pictures productions (“If it’s a good movie, it’s a Miracle!”), and the flick opens with a parachutist falling to her death – complete with a big Loony Tunes type bodyshaped hole in the ground where she hit…and moments later the producer, lothario P.G., is talking how most actresses would “die” to get in Hollywood. That said, Paul Bartel shines as a pretentious director, with a running gag of him giving “motivation” to the actors for the scene they’re about to play. But Mary Woronov steals the film, playing a bitchy diva and clearly enjoying every minute of it. 

Rialson as ever shines, but her role is limited to basically just being adorable; she is the naïve beauty who just wants to break into pictures, so she doesn’t get much opportunity to steal scenes like the others do. That said, there’s a great meta-fictional bit where her character goes to see her “big debut,” only to have to drive way outside of L.A., where the movie is playing on a triple-bill at a drive-in, and Candy gets progressively drunk and dispirited as she watches herself on the big screen…leading to that aforementioned rape scene. Oh, and Dick Miller also steals the show as Candy’s agent Walter Paisely (a character name Dick Miller often played), complete with running gags about former clients – the movie rewards multiple viewings, as in Dick Miller’s first scene he’s complaining that he’s just lost one of his big clients, a friggin’ elephant, and in a later scene, while Candy’s waiting in the car for a bank robbery that she thinks is a movie scene but isn’t, you can hear the commercial for a movie starring an elephant on her car radio. 

There’s actually a lot of meta humor throughout Hollywood Boulevard; when Candy gets her first gig with Miracle Pictures, Walter gives her directions and tells her to “take the Slauson Cutoff.” Anyone who watched Johnny Carson will get that one. Former Monster Kid Dante also inserts a lot of references to the old horror flicks, with Rialson even posing over the Hollywood star of Bela Lugosi in the opening credits. The direction is miles beyond typical drive-in fodder, with a lot of visual gags; the plot gradually concerns a killer stalking the Miracle Pictures crew, and in one memorable sequence the masked killer slashes a victim with a blade, and we cut immediately to barbecuse sauce dripping off Walter’s chicken onto a newspaper headline about the murder. Another part has P.G. about to get it on with two lovely actresses at the same time, and we get a quick cut to the foam erupting from a beer can someone’s popped the tab on. This is in addition to the visual cues to genre films, like for example the clear tribute to Mario Bava in a late scene where the killer stalks prey on a darkened, fogswept movie lot. I’m not as familiar with the work of Allan Arkush, but one can clearly see the seeds of Joe Dante’s future work here; the movie is just as much a tribute to the genre as his later unsung piece Matinee was to its genre. 

Almost all drive-in genres are spoofed: women in prison, women with guns, car races, giallo-type thrillers, etc.  Godzilla is even here, courtesy a guy who randomly enough is wearing the costume during one of the shoots – leading to another of those goofy gags, where Godzilla gets up off a toilet (which for some reason is sitting in a field in the middle of a shooting location) and throws the script he’s reading into the bowl. Again, the movie is very much both tribute and spoof of the stuff one thinks of when one thinks “drive-in movie,” spoofing the exact sort of thing you see in the various grindhouse trailer compilations out there; indeed, I recall reading that Joe Dante was involved with the Alamo Drafthouse’s 2012 compilation Trailer War, which is one of the best drive-in compilations out there. 

But whereas Matinee was a love letter to a long-gone time, Hollywood Boulevard is a time capsule of a long-gone time; when Candy, her boyfriend, and Walter go to the drive-in theater to see Candy’s movie, we have a long sequence of the experience. It’s obviously done for comedy, with most of the audience drunk, rowdy, and horny, but at the same time it allows us in the modern day to experience what it might have been like in the era. This for me is the highlight of the film; you almost feel like you are there with the three characters. It’s a fun scene, complete with Candice Rialson apparently getting drunk for real. One part that really cracked me up was the sound effects on the film playing in the background; when they watch Candy’s Philipines-shot flick “Machete Maidens,” there’s a quick shot of the movie screen, showing a girl being whipped by another woman; a scene taken from The Big Doll House. The camera cuts back to the trio in the car, but you can still hear the movie in the background, and the girl getting whipped sounds like she’s enjoying it. It’s been years since I saw The Big Doll House (I plan to watch it again soon), but I suspect this audio was newly added by Dante and Arkush. 

There’s also a lot of great dialog in it, most of it again genre-referential. Like when one of the characters is killed in the Philipines and someone says to call the cops, and Mary Woronov (who plays “Mary,” just like Candice Rialson plays “Candy,” adding more of a meta nature to the flick) deadpans: “This is the Philipines. There are no police.” One could clearly come to that conclusion after watching the Philipines-shot action movies of the ‘70s. My only complaint is that sometimes the comedy gets too broad, at least in the callous played-for-laughs reactions to various deaths. There’s also a curious bit a little over halfway through where the crew is about to shoot a 1950s film, but it’s just as abruptly dropped; one gets the impression it was inserted for time. I read that Hollywood Boulevard was shot in a mere ten days, for under sixty thousand dollars, but you’d never guess it, as it’s genuinely a quality film, and I enjoyed it a lot.