We haven’t heard from Aaron Yap and his collection of back-catalogue rocks and diamonds for a while – but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been watching ’em! Read on for what sound like one of the best, one of the worst, and perhaps one of the badass-est Shelf Life titles yet… As well as the screen debut of one Christina Applegate.
JAWS OF SATAN
If you’re going to make a hybrid genre movie, why not fuse the best of the best right? That’s what Jaws of Satan, aka King Cobra, did, or at least tried to. As the title blatantly suggests, this rare theatrical outing from TV vet Bob Claver (The Partridge Family, Love Boat) merges two red-hot commodities of the era: Jaws and The Exorcist. But it does too little, a little too late (it was shot in ‘79 but didn’t make it out until ‘81), thus no one noticed, and has since been buried in history books as a cinematic footnote known for being Christina Applegate’s screen debut.
Even seasoned shlock fans might snooze through this thing; it lacks the solid stream of amusement that comes from technically inept trash, yet there isn’t much by way of sensational genre thrills to be had anywhere. One is left to sit there stupefied by its utterly perplexing plot about the return of Lucifer as a cobra wreaking havoc on a town in Alabama whose people are gearing up for the opening of a new dog track (!).
It’s all somehow connected to local priest Father Tom Farrow (Fritz Weaver), whose ancestors are Druids whom Satan has a beef with or something. Meanwhile, hospital doctor Maggie Sheridan (Gretchen Corbett), dumbstruck by the sudden rise of snake-bite victims, enlists the expertise of an out-to-town herpetologist (Jon Korkes) to figure out what the hell is happening.
Neither shocking nor scary, Jaws of Satan is at its most entertaining trying to engineer suspense from set-ups that are frankly, astoundingly stupid, like having priests outrun a cobra in a graveyard, or chucking in a random biker who’s been hired by the oily dog track developer (Bob Hannah) to knock off Dr. Sheridan because she’s causing too much noise. The snake action, largely shot (by Halloween DP Dean Cundey) in crash-zooms and close-ups, utilises both animatronic (or rubber/puppet?) and real snakes; considering the budgetary limitations, it works okay, bar the hilarious early goof where we can see, and hear, a snake bumping into a protective plate of glass placed in front of a character.
There are better snakesploitation movies out there, but if you’re a completist of the nature-run-amok subgenre, Jaws of Satan is worth hunting down for its narrative bizarreness and general idiocy.
THE LONELY LADY
The Lonely Lady might be my new favourite “Shelfie”. Directed by Brit Hammer horror guy Peter Sasdy, who’s clearly out of his element, this gut-busting, pleasurably stinky adaptation of Harold Robbins’ bestseller gave Pia Zadora her second Razzie in a row after 1982’s notorious, calamitous incest-fest Butterfly. And boy is she terrible, oscillating between doll-eyed precociousness and unchecked hysteria without a single moment which can be realistically deemed as “subtle”. She plays Jerilee Randall, an aspiring Valley Girl screenwriter who ultimately serves to expose the not-so-revolutionary revelation that Hollywood is a rotten, sexist cesspool. First she’s shacking up with her much, much older award-winning idol Walter Thornton (Lloyd Bochner), then hopping into bed with arrogant actors, sleazy nightclub owners and aging swingers, because this is what it takes to get her script produced.
I’ll give Sasdy this: he knows how to move things along, minimising any dull downtime for contemplation. Incidents happen quickly; 10 minutes in, and there’s young Ray Liotta, showing us an early example of the beastly creep he’s so chillingly good at portraying over the course of his career, ripping Zadora’s blouse and doing something cruel with a garden nose that will make your face pale. Jammed with awful, ear-bleeding songs, queasy lovemaking scenes and schmucky characters, The Lonely Lady is an absolutely staggering train wreck, a Tinseltown soap opera that makes Showgirls look perfectly sane in comparison.
TOP OF THE HEAP
Deserving of a spot among the best African-American cinema of the ‘70s, this amazing, little-seen one-shot wonder by actor Christopher St. John (Shaft) isn’t like any blaxploitation film ever made. I even hesitate to call it that at all. A personal project for St. John — who wrote, directed, produced and starred in it — Top of the Heap is the angriest movie I’ve seen in a while, so angry that I felt like I did something to piss him off after it ended. Aiming higher than lurid genre satisfaction, the film is charged with a feverish, unpolished immediacy that feels like the result of hammering away on a typewriter one night every racial ill he’s ever experienced. It makes for an incendiary, powder keg of a character exam, with St. John unleashing a volcanic performance as George Lattimer, a cop who’s struggling to keep it together amid an unhappy domestic situation (his 13-year-old daughter is having sex in the garage!), his mother’s passing, being looked over for promotion, and dealing with racist assholes on a daily basis.
Shot on chump change, almost guerilla-style, with lots of hand-held camerawork and wide angles, Top of the Heap alleviates its impassioned, overwrought voice with surreal Walter Mitty-esque daydreams in which Lattimer imagines himself as a respected NASA astronaut. These sequences are a distinct departure from the gritty blaxploitation action of the time, and demonstrate that St. John’s vision, as indignant as it may be, can also be inventive and free-wheeling. Top of the Heap communicates volumes about black identity, white privilege, racial profiling, and sacrificing your soul to The Machine — and resonates even louder in the wake of Michael Brown’s recent shooting and the Ferguson riots. Click here for an LA Times interview with St. John where he talks about getting the film off the ground.
(Note: viewed on VHS, but there’s a limited edition DVD available from Code Red now… if you can find away to purchase from them)
