This trash film is sooo funny. When reading about John Waters, you're often given stuff about Divine and nada about the others, when Mink Stole creates a character as strong as Divine's.
Horror :
George Romero's flicks; the opening of
Martin is creepy, before you find out that the bad guy is a naive romantic real monster.
The opening of Carpenter's
Assault is scary too.
Vampire Circus has a great plot; a vampire curses a little village before going to hell. Time passes. The villagers can't leave their town for villages from the neighbourhood don't want them to bring the curse along. So they're shot at. And a circus hits town. Beautiful images then, feet turning into panthers'legs in a staircase, bats in skulls, a head chopped by a... crossbow !
If you wanna track down the film's actors, one of them, English John Moulder-Brown, a couple of years earlier, played in
La Residencia (1969), which is one of my favorite films. It's a Spanish flick; directed by a guy from Uruguay; with a leading actress from Austria who had done some Sirk movies in Hollywood; the action takes place in France. A friend of mine summed it up as Dario Argento meets Ingmar Bergman. With all that (or in spite of), and the action of Franco's censorship, the film is miraculously coherent, and the camera moves are beautifully fluent.
Exploitation :
The Thing with Two Heads.
A rich and racist surgeon (played by Ray Miland, a guy it doesn't cost much to hate) understands that he'll soon die. He decides to plant his head on a healthier body, and trusts his partners to find the proper one. He (I mean his head) ends up on the body of a tall black convict whose head hasn't been cut off yet. And the convict escapes. So you've got the two of them on the same body, trying to control it and cursing each other.
The first part of the picture scares you (the operation is filmed with no music at all - the way Georges Franju did in
Eyes Without a Face), then, all of a sudden, the film turns into
The Dukes of Hazzard, with police cars joyfully chasing the odd body on a bike in the countryside ! Really funny picture.
