Deliberately
Lost SF Classics
by K. A. Laity
LLAMA
RIDERS OF THE SEVENTH MOON (1953)
Despite a cast that
included several purebred llamas and enthusiastic
jockeys, the film failed to take off—perhaps
for the same reasons. Rumour had it that producer
Alana Perez refused to work the llamas for the
grueling shifts that director Jimenez Arlberg
demanded, citing the concerns of the Quechua
handler of the beasts who claimed they were never
used as mounts at all. Indeed throughout the
production it is possible to see llamas doing
their best to dislodge riders with bucking,
rolling and lying down on top of them. By the end
of the shoot, the disgusted breeder took off with
his llamas and it became necessary to shoot
several key scenes with large dogs. It is to the
credit of editor Roberta Santiago that in most of
the scenes the change is hardly obvious. However,
with the majority of the budget spent on
acquiring the llamas, the sets were rushed and
poorly constructed. In fact during the infamous
crater scene, it is possible to glimpse the
surprised crew revealed as one panel of the set
falls away. Arlberg’s attempts to connect
the script to a Ray Bradbury story for publicity
purposes backfired when the angry writer sent him
a fake vicuņa scarf in retort.
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VAMPIRE WOMEN (1957)
Despite the public’s
seemingly bottomless desire for sexy bloodsucking
dames, this film not only failed to find an
audience, but was singled out for scorching
ridicule by an unexpectedly large number of
professional critics, who had been led to believe
that they were seeing an Otto Preminger film. One
might hazard a guess that lead actor Barbara
Titanium could be singled out for her poor acting,
terrible timing and apparent inability to
remember her lines even though, as the Times
critic Langdon Aulder sniffed, she seemed to be
moving her lips as she read them from cue cards,
painfully sounding out each syllable. Yet worse
than the ludicrous plot (the women had become
vampires after being stung by radioactive wasps)
and the tedious dialogue (allegedly Truman Capote
had been begged to act as script doctor on the
project but claimed ‘Even Gina Lollabrigida
couldn’t resurrect that corpse’) was
the confused direction from first-time director (and
multi-millionaire) Roderick Bingley. Bingley had
only the vaguest notions of how to make a film
and seemed to actually believe that actors made
up their dialogue as they went along. His first
pass at the script with his polo team buddies was
refused acceptance by the Writer Guild of America.
Their letter acidly suggested that he find a
native speaker of English to adapt the script.
Yale University denied he had in fact graduated
from their august institution after the leaked
letter made the rounds of the Harvard Club.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
THE
UNICORN’S FAIRY (1961)
The idea of the last of two
legendary creatures teaming up certainly must
have seemed like a fantasy sure to provide a
magical screen sensation. However, the film
suffered from two obvious defects, perhaps most
disastrously that writer/director Derek Heath
thought it would be exciting to have the unicorn
speak with the voice of former child star
Mercedes Benevolent and to have the fairy be
played by the 6’5” actor and notorious
libertine, Jacques San Cruste. Benevolent had
suffered through years of alcoholism after her
fall from grace (see “The Child Star and her
Pony” which had nothing to do with horses)
and was well onto developing the lung cancer that
would end her life. Consequently her voice
sounded, in the words of Pauline Kael, like
‘wheels on gravel.’ San Cruste, who had
outraged television audiences with his single
appearance on ‘What’s My Line?’
and forever condemned live broadcasts to somber
news and sports coverage, was said to have
encouraged Heath the most outrageous elements of
‘lavender sporting’ or what we now call
‘homoerotic subtext’ although to be
fair there was nothing subtextual about it,
particularly when one considers the ‘Fairies
at the Bottom of the Garden’ sequence. While
other films in this vein have been rescued as
camp gems from the blinkered past’s
restrictions, ‘The Unicorn’s Fairy’
deserves obscurity. There is nothing even vaguely
resembling wit in Heath’s script or San
Cruste’s performance which mostly consists
of single-entendres and attempts to fondle the
unicorn’s tender parts. Nonetheless he seems
to have enjoyed inflicting the film on guests to
his home for decades afterward.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
PSYCHO
MOTORCYCLE DOLLS (1966)
Would it be too cutting to
refer to Buford Helaine as a low budget Russ
Meyers? The cleverest thing about this film was
its title, a hasty change before printing the
reels for distribution. The film originally
called ‘Witches on Wheels’ seemed
doomed from the start by the director’s
cavalier attitude toward story, dialogue and
perhaps most unfortunately, focus. While his
nominal star, Agatha Plenty, certainly enjoyed
herself with the abandon of a small child playing
in mud, she could not seem to stay upright on a
motorcycle long enough for even a brief road
sequence. Inserts patently show her on a
stationary motorcycle, leaning over to show off
her primary assets which the director always
encouraged. Alas, the elaborate ritual sequence
allegedly designed by Marjorie Cameron had been
so poorly lit that it is possible now only to see
some flickering candles and hear the women
giggling. While tales of the orgy sequence
scandalized Hollywood during filming, it is not
possible to see whether Helaine and Plenty were
actually performing the act in question amongst
an array of fornicating cohorts because he did
not actually check to see that the camera was in
focus. Perhaps we are lucky it is so.
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