movies

KANSAS CITY BOMBER MGM

Kansas City Bomber is a movie full of great faces. Raquel Welch, of course, and Helena Kallianiotes, who was also in Five Easy Pieces, plays the former Roller Derby champ whom Raquel replaces here, and radiates a total bad sensuality reminiscent of Anna Magnan at her steamiest. Perhaps the best faces of all, though, and the best moments in the movie, are seen when the camera cuts from the derby track to the bleachers for sharp closeups of rank and file Derby fans: they are the poor trash of all colors of America, the sweaty, shirtsleeved members of the lower middle class who come to get their rocks off by screaming at a bunch of people tripping and jabbing each other in the ribs for a couple of hours.

The movie isn’t a “social drama” pounding at you with relentless moralisings. It is about hqw lives are bought and sold in America, but it doesn’t press the point farther than necessary for the context of a rousing old-fashioned GP (not enough skin, not enough violence, just enough slowmotion) tale of a girl with stars in her eyes. Yeah, it’s time once again for the fading star to be bounced by the talented kid who is so talented and beautiful that nobody likes her, and you can write the rest of the script. Which is just fine.

Raquel proves for all time that she can carry her weight as an actress; she kicks ass on Jennifer O’Neil (to name only the most beautiful no-talent of the current venue), and demonstrates that with this type of non-demanding role , which after all is probably not so far from her own story, she can provide a dimension that fills the screen with more than tits. And whatever the reason, it’s certain that when she’s up there, you really can’t see anyone else. Kevin McCarthy is fine, too, as the blandly manipulative team owner, although he’ll never top his performance in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He delivers a great speech when Raquel accuses him of buying and selling her and all the other members of the team. “Yeah,” he says, “I buy ’em and sell ’em. We’re all bought and sold in this life. That’s your American Pie, baby!”

Kansas City Bomber is not the definitive or most exciting Roller Derby movie. Last year’s Derby was much better in spite of being a documentary, and the classic fictionalization of the event was made over 20 years ago. Mickey Rooney’s The Fireball will bash your brains out in a way that Kansas City Bomber tries for but never quite achieves; you can catch it on the Early Show for free if you just watch your TV Guide, and besides all that it’s got Marilyn Monroe in it. But too much hindsight is just another anal neurosis, Raquel is good on her own terms, and Kansas City Bomber is as good a drive-in movie as we’re going to get this fall.

Lester Bangs

DOCTORJEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE AIP

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB

This has gotta be the best double feature so far this year. The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Yog — the Monster from Space was 1971 and that’s the only recent pairing that could give this one a run for the money and what’s more this is the finest limey double feature since Jesus fuckin Christ knows when and while limeys aren’t known for their cinematic excellence they will be now. The only thing that’s gonna stop them from getting the Best Foreign Language Film award next time around is English don’t happen to be a foreign tongue — too bad cause these winners deserve something besides financial success.

Well anyway Jekyll has Martine Beswick who’s supposed to have been in Thunderball and she’s the best thing since Yvette Mimieux. When Jekyll drinks that stuff and turns into Sister Hyde the hair grows all the way out and the beard disappears. An explanation is that while women don’t have beards if they did it would keep their hair shorter. In other words facial hair is connected inside the head to top-of-thehead hair so if you pull it from one end it shortens at the other. That’s the best explanation I’ve heard and it sounds okay to me cause whenever she changes back to Jekyll his beard is back and her hair’s all gone except down to his original length. And his original length is kind of like early Beatle length, a sign that all of limey culture has caught on to the grooming end of the mod, mod world of rock and roll.

And speaking of Jekyll, where’d R. L. Stevenson dig up a name like that? Could it be he was fond of jackals? Cause there’s a jackal in Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, a fuckin hell of a lot better than Hammer Films’ last mummy effort (it’s name has been totally forgotten) and it has two different kinds of jackal in it. One is a dead jackal’s skull (head bones) and the other is the shadow of a live jackal, live stuff shows up all over the place whenever the dead relic is being transported by cosmic means. like when the cobra sculpture has to get from the nutso’s room in the loony bin to the basement of where the girl has to get hooked up with the well-preserved (!) mummy, a live cobra gets to bite the guy dead so he can’t interfere. No, actually he just gets his throat cut from an unknown source and that happens another three times or so and from the ad you’d think it was the severed hand that’s doing it but no it isn’t cause the severed hand is in a box and doesn’t get out until the end.

And speaking of ends, Valerie Leon’s got a nice end herself! Real fine knobs too and they look even better on her than they do on the mummy who is also played by her and there’s even a FUCK SCENE but you don’t get to see any nip on her (too bad). The guy she fux is called Todd Browning in the picture and here’s why: Todd Browning I is the guy who directed the original Dracula and Freaks and the original-original Dracula (the book) was wrote by Bram Stoker and Bram Stoker happened to of wrote this one also but under a different title so they wanted to amuse the knowers with some references to old shit cause this is a new movie.

And speaking of old and new this movie is PG instead of R which is real good so everybody can see it unlike some flickers I don’t care to mention where you gotta be some incredible age just to get a peek at an asshole. Ann Samachson of Jersey, who is one of these young people who is too young to see those moving pitchers incidentally, would like to know why these terrible laws exist which prohibit her from seeing cinema and which keep the boys away cause if they pop their tarts in her toaster they get sent up the river indefinitely so they stay away. She’d like these anachronistic laws repealed and I agree but what would Dr. Jekyll say?

For instance in his picture he’s looking'for the secret of eternal life (he was looking for a cure for diptheria before that but he got talked out of it cause it was dull). So he gets some female organs from off the street by means of knives in the guts of whores and then he tries it out on a fly and the fly lives a long time. So he drinks it himself and then he turns into a female himself but why was he using them female hormones to begin with? He was using them cause he believed that the secret of smooth skin was equivalent to the secret of eternal youth so he used female hormones (how do you make a hormone? ans.: kick her in the cunt!). Well but there’s still another question worth asking and that is how come he drank it himself, what did he expect to prove since he wasn’t gonna find out if he was eternally youthful for a whole lot of years to come? A fool is what he was but movies about fools are the best kind (e.g. Ship of Fools, The April Fools) but if everybody was eternally youthful then you might never get to be old enough to see X movies and that would be REAL SHIT!

R. Meltzer