In October Paul Gallagher brought Dangerous Minds readers an early peek at the provocative promotional materials for Nymphomaniac, Lars von Trier’s five-plus-hour movie in two parts, of which a shortened version (only four hours long) was released in Denmark and the United States on Christmas Day.

The posters featured attention-getting pictures of upwards of a dozen of the film’s actors, unclothed and in character (one assumes), in a pose suggesting sweaty post O bliss. The cast—and the posters—feature actors prominent and not-so-prominent, among them Uma Thurman, Christian Slater, and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

In this image you can see all of the posters all kind of jammed together:
 

 
A little before the Christmas release of the film several Danish film critics, all or most of whom can be presumed to like it, decided to use the necessity of promoting the Bodil Awards—Denmark’s equivalent to the Oscars—to pay homage to the movie by staging a bunch of orgasmic photographic portraits of their own!

The text in the poster reads, “This is what Danish film critics look like when they are enjoying good movies. . . . They are coming to the Bodil Awards. Are you?”

 

 
In a statement, Denmark’s National Association of Film Critics said, “Some may think that we all just sit in our ivory towers, looking down on the film landscape with critical eyes, having no fun at all. But just like anyone else, also we can be excited by great movie experiences—and we are not afraid to share the excitement with all of you!”

And then just a few days ago, several prominent Polish film critics banded together and did the same thing.
 

 
We in the United States of America await our own titillating posters with A.O. Scott, Harry Knowles, Dana Stevens, Rex Reed, Manohla Dargis, and J. Hoberman doing their best O-faces.

After all of those pics, I’m ready for a cigarette ...
 

 
Thank you Michał Oleszczyk!

 
George Lucas has managed to fashion one of the strangest careers in all of cinema. First, he created one of the biggest (if not the biggest) movie franchises of all time. Then, he took the legacy of that phenomenon and perverted it beyond all recognition. And as if contaminating the childhoods of a million nerds wasn’t enough, he became highly litigious, threatening to sue anyone who so much as referenced Star Wars in a fan parody—he even tried to sue lobbyists during the Reagan administration over the nickname of the Strategic Defense Initiative missile program! Yes, it’s fair to say that no one quite hates George Lucas as much as Star Wars fans hate George Lucas. The guy seems like kind of a dick.

But in the spirit of goodwill towards men, I think it’s only fair that we go back to a time when Lucas was an idealistic young film student, making movies to actually emotionally engage people. Freiheit is a short Lucas made in 1966, and it’s certainly not something you’d expect from the man who brought us Jar Jar Binks. In less than three minutes, a young man (played by—get this—Randal Kleiser, the future director of Grease) attempts to dash across the border from East to West Germany. He is shot after a near escape, and he dies with a rabble of narrations on freedom.

It’s a student film in every sense of the word—dramatic and heavy-handed, and arguably overly-literal in its messaging. It’s also really impressive. The action shots show amazing instincts. The pacing builds anticipation. The editing is crisp. Even the blue tint to the film gives a cohesion to the cinematography—what would have been a busy setting is now austere and cool. It’s almost enough to make me forgive him. Almost.
 

 
“Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)” (otherwise known as “Six Figures Getting Sick”) is a student film that David Lynch made in 1967 when he was attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. With a soundtrack of a blaring siren, “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)” is basically an animated painting/sculpture of six male figures with visible internal organs vomiting, a one-minute-long animation that was looped four times.

The film was shot in an unused room in a downtown hotel owned by the school. Lynch made a sort of 6 ft by 10ft canvas/sculpture that included plaster molds of his own face to give it extra dimensionality. He then painted over this as collaborator Jack Fisk shot the stop motion on Lynch’s 16mm camera. When the film was originally screened, I believe it was screened onto the canvas itself.

The film was created on a budget of $200, a sum Lynch called “completely unreasonable.”
 

 

 
For those of us who grew up during the golden era of VHS, the shelves at the local Mom & Pop video store were the equivalent to visiting some king of gloriously mutated version of Disneyland. The beauty of that era was that because the format being new, all kinds of movies came out of the woodwork. Films like First Blood or E.T. had a great chance of playing in theaters ranging from the metropolitan to box-shaped bergs in the smallest of corn-town America. But what about titles like Psychos in Love, Death Spa or Black Devil Doll From Hell? Forget it, but that was the beauty of VHS is that it truly made the movie going experience more personal and democratic.
 

 
This was never more true than for the horror genre, with the 1980’s being the apex decade for some of the most lurid, grue-filled, nudity-ridden and straight up crazy films in the field. Thanks to the fine folks at Headpress, there is a funhouse ride of a book dedicated to these films. The tome in question? Bleeding Skull: A 1980’s Trash-Horror Odyssey. Originally a website started back in 2004 by Joseph A. Ziemba, who was later joined by Dan Budnik, Bleeding Skull, both as a website and book, is a compendium of all the horror films that more academically minded or overall discerning writers would quickly bolt from. This is, naturally, a highly positive thing!

That fact alone makes Bleeding Skull worth noting, but the added bonus is how entertaining both Ziemba and Budnik are to read. They both have the whole “snark with love” vibe down to a fine art. There are some incredibly funny lines in this book, but they never override the overall reviews. There’s a sensibility to the whole thing of a guy sitting next to you at a bar,  telling you about this weird movie that he just saw that was directed by the guy that made The Giant Spider Invasion and stars Tiny Tim as a sweaty and depressed clown named “The Magnificent Mervo.” (The film in question, by the way, is Blood Harvest. and yes, it exists. Glory.) Who else is going to talk about obscure, made in Wisconsin horror films with Tiny Tim as a clown in them? Not many but that right there captures the essence of Bleeding Skull.
 

 
Another impressive thing about this book is that Ziemba and Budnik have truly combed the depths of ultra-obscure horror films for your enjoyment. This was an area of film that before reading this book, I was fairly confident that I knew more than the average bear. Which, while I still do, compared to these guys, I AM the average bear. If it was a no-budget, shot-on-video one day wonder from two guys in Duluth, Minnesota, then dollars to donuts, it is written about in this book!

Headpress continues to cement their already solid reputation as one of the finest purveyors of fringe culture with Bleeding Skull. So crack open your favorite libation, dust off your VCR that’s been gathering dust in your attic and be prepared to read about some of the best, worst, trashiest, sleaziest and gonzo trash-horror films from one of the darkest decades in cinematic history.

Below, for your viewing pleasure (?) Blood Harvest starring Tiny Tim as “Mervo the Clown”:
 

 
Special effects and animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen remains best known for his still amazing skeleton swordfight sequences in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, but he originally made his bones (sorry) on his own, animating fairy tales and nursery rhymes on discarded surplus film.

Ray decided he would make his own short films.  Using some out of date 16mm colour Kodachrome stock he had acquired, and with the help of his father and mother, he shot a series of nursery rhymes that included Little Miss Muffet, Old Mother Hubbard, The Queen of Hearts and Humpty Dumpty.

When he had completed all of these stories he lumped them all together under the title The Mother Goose Stories (1946), which he distributed to schools with great success.

 

 
He returned to the theme in the 1950s, around the time that he began to break in to the feature productions that would soon make him famous.

Ray returned to shorts with an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, which he called The Story of Little Red Riding Hood (1950).  Using the same methods as he used with The Mother Goose Stories the film proved another success with schools and so Ray set out to make what has since become known as the Fairy Tale series, although in fact not all were fairy tales. The series included The Story of Hansel and Gretel (1951), The Story of Rapunzel (1952) and The Story of King Midas (1953), the last of which was completed after his first feature film project.

It couldn’t be more clear from watching these that this was the work Harryhausen was meant to be doing. Though his only significant commercial animation work prior to the Mother Goose tales had been assisting George Pal on some Puppetoons shorts, his own films are expertly done, and stand up well to any animation of the era.
 

 
For more Ray Harryhausen on DM, see here and here. The 2011 documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan is available for viewing by Netflix streaming subscribers. I strongly recommend seeing it.

 
If you haven’t seen Alexis Madrigal’s excellent piece at the Atlantic parsing the inner workings of Netflix, you should definitely do it right away, it’s that good. You’ll learn that Netflix has 76,897 “micro-genres”—you know, “genres” like “Mistaken-Identity Feel-Good Suburban-Dysfunction Slashers Based on Books Set in Australia/NZ From the 1940s For Ages 0 to 2” and the like—so many of them, in fact, that their eventual scheme can only be nefarious. Madrigal and his Atlantic colleagues even generated a “Netflix-Genre Generator” so you can whip up your own (it generated the one I just mentioned). It’s all a lot of fun.

Madrigal also discovered the unusual centrality of the long-deceased actor Raymond Burr, who is known primarily for three roles: Perry Mason, Ironside, and the malevolent neighbor in Rear Window.

Here’s a list of Netflix’s top actors—it won’t quite be the list you expect.
 

Raymond Burr
Bruce Willis
George Carlin
Jackie Chan
Andy Lau
Robert De Niro
Barbara Hale
Clint Eastwood
Gene Autry

 
Note that Barbara Hale is mainly known for her work as Della Street on Perry Mason. Hm.

Of those 76,897 micro-genres, Netflix includes the following:
 

Mysteries starring Raymond Burr
Movies starring Raymond Burr
Dramas starring Raymond Burr
Thrillers starring Raymond Burr
Suspenseful Movies starring Raymond Burr
Suspenseful Dramas starring Raymond Burr
Cerebral Thrillers starring Raymond Burr
Cerebral Dramas starring Raymond Burr
Cerebral Suspenseful Dramas starring Raymond Burr
Cerebral Mysteries starring Raymond Burr
Cerebral Suspenseful Movies starring Raymond Burr
Cerebral Movies starring Raymond Burr
Murder Mysteries starring Raymond Burr
Understated Movies starring Raymond Burr
Understated Suspenseful Dramas starring Raymond Burr
Understated Suspenseful Movies starring Raymond Burr
Understated Mysteries starring Raymond Burr
Understated Thrillers starring Raymond Burr
Understated Dramas starring Raymond Burr

 
It’s enough Raymond Burr to last you a lifetime—or at least one snowy weekend.

Madrigal asked Todd Yellin, identified as “Netflix’s VP of Product and the man responsible for the creation of Netflix’s system,” why Raymond Burr is such a central concept in the Netflix universe. As Madrigal writes, “On the other hand, no one — not even Yellin — is quite sure why there are so many altgenres that feature Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale. It’s inexplicable with human logic. It’s just something that happened.”

My theory? It’s kind of obvious when you put all the pieces together: Skynet is addicted to Perry Mason!

Here’s Raymond Burr’s screen test for Perry Mason with another actress playing the part of Della:

 
Mike Vraney, founder of the underground/exploitation film distro concern Something Weird Video, died yesterday after a long struggle with lung cancer. He is survived by his wife, artist Lisa Petrucci.

Something Weird (warning: boobies) was founded in Seattle in 1990, and has kept thousands of filmed oddities alive and available that almost certainly would have lost were it not for Vraney’s curatorial ministrations. From SW’s about page:

Here on your screen is a whole world of film that just a few short years ago was considered lost or worthless. The industry that produced and distributed these films had long since vanished and there was no sign of the men who actually created these bottom of the barrel celluloid wonders. That is until now.

In 1990 (roughly), we started Something Weird Video with the idea of releasing films that had never been on video. In my mind, the last great genre to be scavenged were the exploitation/sexploitation films of the 30’s through the 70’s. After looking into this further, I realized that there were nearly 2,000 movies out there yet to be discovered. So with this for inspiration, my quest began and wouldn’t you know, just out of the blue I fell into a large collection of 16mm girlie arcade loops (which became the first compilation videos we put together!) Around the same time I received an unexpected phone call that suddenly made all this real - my future and hands-down the king of sexploitation Dave Friedman was on the other end of the line - this would be the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship for both of us. Dave’s films became the building blocks for our film collection and he has taught and guided me through the wonderful world of sexploitation - introducing me to his colleagues (Dan Sonney, Harry Novak, H.G. Lewis, Bob Cresse, and all the other colorful characters who were involved during his heyday) and they’ve been eager to dive into the business again. (And initially, most are shocked that anyone is even interested in this stuff to begin with!)

 

 
Anyone—everyone—interested in strange cinema owes Mike Vraney a debt. The video shop that I mentioned in a DM post just yesterday carried so a huge a selection of his wares that they ultimately wound up simply giving him his own Something Weird wall, so much of worth did he preserve. Very little of SW’s stock is work safe—sleaze was the order of the day—but this relatively tame trailer imparts the kitschy, campy, sexy, goofy fun of the films he rescued from oblivion. We salute you and your legacy, Mr. Vraney, and we’re very sorry to lose you.
 

 
In an amusingly fifteen-years-too-late effort to ride the crest of the Blair Witch wave, Christian “comedian” Rich Praytor has made a found footage style scare movie about a porno magazine unleashing a demon into a church youth group’s overnight lock in. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the film’s press release is happy to help:

During the lock in, members of the youth group are “locked in” the church to have fun, play games, and get to know one another. In spite of the youth pastor’s attempt to intervene, the boys must come to terms with the pornographic images themselves in order to be truly freed from the demon.

Furthermore:

The demon is a metaphor for the true damage pornography can have in the lives of youth. There are never graphic or pornographic images shown in the movie. The producers of the film felt that it was important to tell a Christian story about real issues but to keep the images family friendly so anyone could be entertained without fear of exposure to questionable pictures.

THE DEMON IS A METAPHOR YOU GUYS! And THAT’S how you know this film is going to be smart. In keeping with the pimp-it-like-it’s-1999 theme, the film’s site has an about page that jacks (heh) Blair Witch‘s fake viral angle:

In the spring of 2010, a church lock in at First Baptist Church was organized by Pastor Chris.  In the first hour of the lock in, one of the students, Justin, had an unusual “incident” and was “inconsolable.”

It was reported that he calmed down and kept to himself for the remainder of the event. 

Two days after the lock in, Justin reportedly broke down to his parents that he experienced something “evil” at the lock in.  He also claimed he captured everything on tape.

After watching the footage, the parents met with church leaders to discuss criminal charges they were considering filing against the church for child endangerment, neglect and torture. 

A special hearing was immediately organized to find out what was on the tape. 

Two pastors, six elders and an unknown number of overseers met at an undisclosed location to view the footage of the tape.  It was reported that two of the elders resigned their duties immediately after viewing the footage.

Pastor Chris, after viewing the footage, turned in his immediate resignation to the church board. 

A undisclosed settlement was made between the church and families involved. 

The footage was officially released in May of 2013 in full cooperation with the families and individuals involved.

Holy Moly Pictures would like to thank the families and the First Baptist Church for their cooperation in releasing the footage to the public.

This is starting to seem like a lot more work than is merited just to keep teenaged boys from touching their penises—it merits mentioning that The Bible contains no prohibition against masturbating. Also, a porno magazine? Isn’t that more than a little quaint? Anyone who wants to look at pictures of naked people can do so for free on his or her phone.

Praytor has a more than glancing familiarity with beating (heh) dead-horse tropes. Here he is keenly observing, perhaps in homage to the comedy stylings of the early 1980s, that white people and black people are OMG LIKE TOTALLY DIFFERENT!
 

 
Tell me you laughed once during that.

And so here we see, as we do time and time again, that American Christianity’s great power lies not in spiritual redemption, but in turning every unique and powerful cultural expression it appropriates into a lame and bathetic puddle of insipid goo. These are the people who claim sole possession of the spark of the divine, and yet they can make nothing that doesn’t utterly blow. You’ve waited long enough for the money shot (heh) - here’s the trailer, in all its lookin’-like-it-was-shot-on-VHS glory. Smart money bets that the totally predictable morphing effect at the end ate about 90% of the film’s budget, as it costs very little to get kids to run through hallways and yell a lot.
 

 
You can avoid seeing The Lock In and just go on with what you were already going to be doing anyway starting on January 9th.

Via Film Drunk

 
Sean Connery quit the role of James Bond after You Only Live Twice, having “grown tired of the repetitive plots, lack of character development and the general public’s demands on him and his privacy (as well as fearing typecasting).”

With a new Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, imminent, director Peter Hunt compiled a long list of potential replacements for Sean Connery. This was then reduced to a shortlist of five actors, who were all given screen tests for the role of James Bond in 1967.

The five asked to audition were:

John Richardson, who was then best known for his performance as Tumak in One Million Years B.C.. At the time, he was considered a potential favorite, however, he did not win the part, and went on to star in On A Clear Day I Can See Forever, before having a long career as an actor in Italy.

Anthony Rogers a character actor who appeared on the verge of achieving stardom. However, his career never quite recovered from failing to win the Bond audition.

Robert Campbell an unknown actor/model, who seems to have vanished after his screentest for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Hans De Vries had already appeared in You Only Live Twice, and had a string of roles in TV and films behind him. Unfortunately, it was not enough, and De Vries went on to work with Connery in the western Shalako, and Michael Caine in Ken Russell’s The Billion Dollar Brain, before having a career as a character actor in film and TV.

George Lazenby a former car salesman and successful model (reputedly the highest paid in the world at that time), who best known for appearing in the Big Fry Turkish Delight adverts, had been spotted by Bond producer Cubby Broccoli when getting their hair cut at the same barber. Though he was not an actor, Lazenby impressed at his audition, in particular with his skill at fighting. Lazenby later recalled:

“I had no acting experience, I was coming from the male model point of view. I walked in looking like James Bond, and acting as if that’s the way I was anyway. And they thought, ‘All we have to do is keep this guy just the way he is and we’ll have James Bond.’”

Director Peter Hunt thought Lazenby a natural for the role, and said:

“I aim to make people forget Connery as James Bond once they see Lazenby.”

Alas, this was not to be, for although George Lazenby was one of the best James Bonds, he did not make the audience forget Connery, who had made the role very much his own. However, Lazenby presented a “much more human Bond” with his frailties and inner conflicts.

However, what could have been a highly lucrative and very successful Bond career for Lazenby was soon over, as he announced he would quit the role after the filming of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This when Lazenby had already signed-up to film four Bond movies over a seven-year period. As the site MoonrakerBondStation explains, “The big dispute between Lazenby and Bond co-producer Cubby Broccoli was over the rules in Lazenby’s contract.”

He actually could be fired for something as simple as not shaving every day while not even filming a Bond movie. There was even a clause in his contract that stated that he had to get his dinner guests approved by Cubby Broccoli before he could be seen dining out with them in public. There were numerous clauses of this nature in his contract and none of them sat well with Lazenby.

The Bond producers finally realized that they had to let Lazenby out of his contract because he was not going to behave as they wanted him to unless they did so. For example, Lazenby’s wearing a beard and long hair in public, hanging out at nightclubs and bars, and saying he was quitting the role numerous times. This sort of thing was done by Lazenby so that he could get the 7 film deal he wanted, but minus all the Draconian rules it had contained within it. In order to do that he first had to get out of the original contract that he had signed.

You can read about the whole background to the dispute here.

Other actors who had been considered for the role of James Bond include Stanley Baker, Rex Harrison and David Niven, who all lost out to Connery.

Terence Stamp was said to have too many radical ideas; while Michael Caine, did not want to be typecast.

Oliver Reed came very close to winning the role, but his off-screen reputation frightened producers.

Timothy Dalton turned down the role twice before accepting it in 1986.

The unlucky Jon Finch turned down Live and Let Die, and would later lose his role as Kane in Alien after taking ill on set, being replaced by John Hurt.

Lewis Collins, best known as Bodie in the TV series The Professionals was considered to be too aggressive.

James Brolin was set to play Bond, before Moore agreed to return in Octopussy.

There was also Richard Burton, Cary Grant, James Mason, Patrick McGoohan, Rod Taylor, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Adam West, Liam Neeson, Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor, who all turned the role down. A full list can be found here.
 

Composite photograph of the actors who auditioned to play James Bond in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’
 
For your eyes only, more pix of the other potential Bonds, after the jump…

 
Director Michael Reeves started making films when he was just eight years old. It was the beginning of a passion that lasted his whole life, until his tragic and untimely death at the age of 25 in 1969.

When Reeves was sixteen he he flew from England to Los Angeles, where he turned-up on Don Siegel’s doorstep and asked the veteran director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers for a job. Siegel was impressed enough to offer the teenager a job as his assistant. Reeves used his time with Siegel to learn the director’s craft and make the contacts he would later use to help finance his own films.

Returning to Europe, Reeves wrote and directed his first feature film Revenge of the Blood Beast (aka The She Beast), which starred Barbara Steele and Ian Ogilvy. Reeves’ collaboration with Ogilvy began at school, and lasted throughout the director’s career. Ogilvy then starred alongside Boris Karloff in Reeves’ next wonderful and weird movie The Sorcerers. He was just 23. But it was his last film, Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) again starring Ogilvy, but this time with Vincent Price, that established Reeves as one of the most talented, proficient and startlingly original directors of the decade.

Witchfinder General should have been the beginning of Reeves’ career as an international film director, but within months of its release he was dead from an accidental alcohol and barbiturate overdose

In 1961, when Reeves was seventeen, he directed and appeared (under the name “Martin Reade”) alongside Ogilvy as two criminals in the short, silent film Intrusion. It’s the earliest existing film by Reeves—strange, and unnerving, with jump-cuts, bizarre editing, and violence. Intrusion was dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard, and it certainly appears to have been influenced in its style by the great French director’s Breathless (À bout de souffle). More of a curio now, Intrusion is the earliest known film by Michael Reeves, which only gives a small hint of the talents that would blossom during the sixties.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Witchfinder General: The Life and Death of Michael Reeves