DRIVE-IN SATURDAY
Imagine you've got a large zit on your back—right between your shoulder blades. Imagine it grows to the size of a golf ball. Jack Nicklaus is prepared to endorse it. Then, to make matters worse, your boyfriend is Tony Curtis and he reads tarot cards for a living.
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Double Feature!
DRIVE-IN SATURDAY
by Edouard Dauphin
Imagine you've got a large zit on your back—right between your shoulder blades. Imagine it grows to the size of a golf ball. Jack Nicklaus is prepared to endorse it. Then, to make matters worse, your boyfriend is Tony Curtis and he reads tarot cards for a living.
That's the plight of Susan Strasberg in The Manitou, a new schlocker that will have you reaching for the pimple cream—to rub in your eyes, or maybe to swallow. Anything to relieve the boredom.
Pretty soon Susan's lump has ballooned to tennis ball proportions. lie Nastase would like to give it a good swat. Susan is getting alarmed but Tony is unruffled. "Don't worry," he assures her, "it's nothing." So is his performance.
Susan disregards Tony's advice. After all, last time she saw him he was the Boston Strangler. She checks into the hospital to have it surgically removed. One look at its size and the nurses send out for a ten gallon tube of Clearasil.
Susan's problems are just beginning. Something is moving inside her growth. And from the feel of things, it's already mastered the pogo.
By now, the boil is not unlike a basketball. The Harlem Globetrotters are in the hospital waiting room to get in a little practice.
A doctor compares it to a fetus. You guessed it—Susan is about to give birth to something out her back. But Tony was right. It's nothing to be concerned about. The creature is only The Manitou, a400 year old Indian medicine man who looks like a shriveled-up Paul Williams wearing a Stevie Wonder wig.
This deformed pipsqueak is no fun at all. His idea of a good time is to kneel on the floor, roll his eyes and shriek hysterically. If he could play guitar, the resemblance to Ted Nugent would be complete.
Meanwhile, Tony has enlisted the aid of an American Indian named (are you ready?) John Singing Rock, played by Michael Ansara. John bitches a bit about how the white man stole his land but Tony wins him over with a promise of hard cash for some Indian mission. Let's hear it for forked tongues!
John goes to Susan's hospital room and spreads magic Indian dust in a circle around The Manitou, who now resembles Sammy Davis with dreadlocks. Some of the Times Square movie audience thought the redskin was laying out boric acid to prevent roaches and wondered aloud if he wouldn't be better off using Black Rag.
Eventually there's a showdown between good magic and bad. I kept looking for The Amazing Randi, but I guess he was working Las Vegas instead.
See The Manitou. And try snorting some Noxzema!
In Greelk mythology, Medusa was a monster capable of turning its victims into stone. In 1978 drive-in mythology, The Medusa Touch is a movie that turns its audience into victims unless they happen to be very, very stoned.
As the film explains it, the Medusa touch is the ability to use powers of the mind to create instant catastrophe via long distance—something the telephone company has been doing for years.
Richard Burton, playing a crazed, hate-filled misanthrope, finds himself blessed with the touch. "I seem to have a gift for disaster," he intones somberly—one look at Richard's personal life and you kinda have to agree with that assessment.
Burton delights in causing a car to run over his parents (bloody Limeys anyway), burning down his prep school (not cricket, that) and willing a jumbo jet to crash into a skyscraper, making The Towering Inferno look like a fire drill:
Burton can give no explanation for his disaster-making talent but you've got to think he's wondering what he could have done with it back when he was married to Liz Taylor.
Enter Lee Remick as a shrink who believes she can save him. Lee scoffs at his accounts of brain-induced catastrophes. After all, could they be any worse than some of Iggy Pop's records?
Also along for the ride is Lino Ventura, a Frog detective on loan td Scotland Yard. He's called into action when someone cracks Burton's skull open like a pineapple. Amazingly enough, Richard's still moving. Some guys will do anything for one more drink.
From his hospital bed, with more wires plugged into him than a Led Zep amplifier, Burton plots his ultimate revenge on humanity. (No, it's not another Sex Pistols tour.)
Does he succeed? Can the forces of medicine, psychiatry and the police thwart his evil plan? Do you care?
Skip The Medusa Touch and get stoned at home.
