Die Sister, Die! (Randall Hood, 1978)

Die Sister, Die! is a quiet (except for a couple of nutty dream sequences), character-based, psychological horror/thriller that may disappoint you if you need the walls to be painted red, but the strong performances, aesthetically pleasing locations, relaxed pace, and complex and morally ambiguous characters really worked for me. I had a good time with this one.

For such a straightforward little movie with a small cast, Die Sister, Die! had a difficult, drawn-out production. Filming began in 1972, but financial difficulties and the cancer diagnosis of director Randall Hood slowed things down. More filming took place in the mid-'70s (the cars in the movie are mostly '75 and '76 models), but Hood died, aged 48, in 1976 before any post-production work could be done. One of the film's three leads, Jack Ging, made it his mission to turn the unedited footage into a finished product, and the movie was finally completed and released in 1978. Clint Eastwood, a friend of Ging's, is rumored to have helped with the film's completion, but that rumor has been neither confirmed nor denied. Despite the production troubles and Hood's health problems, the movie is consistent in tone and performance and doesn't look like a stop/start affair.

The movie opens with the wealthy Amanda Price (Edith Atwater) attempting suicide in her very distinctive-looking home (the Piru Mansion, more on that location later). Her doctor, Thorne (Kent Smith, Atwater's real-life husband), and her brother, Edward (Jack Ging), save her, which inspires only hatred from Amanda toward Edward. The doctor tries to get to the bottom of the siblings' enmity and the reasons for Amanda's multiple suicide attempts from an evasive Edward but fails. Dr. Thorne also fails to convince Edward to have his suicidal sister institutionalized, but Edward is open to the idea of paying for a live-in nurse.

A cocky Edward stops by a dive bar called Hank's to enlist the services of former nurse-turned-waitress Esther Harper (Antoinette Bower). Esther was a live-in nurse for an elderly millionaire whose family neglected him. Angry at his family and appreciative of Esther's help, the rich old man married Esther so she'd inherit his dough, but the family successfully stopped the will in court after the old man's death. The bad publicity forced Esther out of the nursing profession. Edward lets her know he knows all about her past and offers her the chance to make some big bucks. She's reluctant, but he leaves his card.

Esther shows up a few days later at Edward's office to get more information about the job. He gives it to her straight. He'll pay Esther a standard nurse's salary to look after Amanda and report back to him about whatever his sister tells her. There are some embarrassing family secrets he doesn't want the outside world to learn, you see. He then drops the bomb, though Esther already knows the score and is not surprised at what she's hearing. Edward tells her not to intervene when, not if, his sister attempts suicide again. Don't help her, don't save her, let her die. Once his sister is dead, Esther will get a $25,000 payment. She accepts the job.

Esther gets more of the family dirt from Amanda and the housekeeper, Mrs. Gonzalez (Rita Conde), once inside the mansion. The late Price patriarch, James Lendon (played in flashbacks and dream sequences by Robert Emhardt), still staring haughtily and imposingly down at his family from a huge portrait on the wall, doted on spoiled youngest sibling Nell (Peg Shirley) and despised his other two children, Amanda and Edward, who despised James and Nell right back. After the old man's death from a heart attack, Nell disappeared to Europe, never to be seen again. She even skipped the funeral. Not suspicious at all. Amanda inherited the mansion and gained control of the dispersal of funds, putting her brother Edward on a healthy but fixed income so he wouldn't blow the entire fortune. With Nell out of the picture, Amanda and Edward decided to despise each other, too, and Amanda became a depressive recluse, barely leaving the mansion.

This is where we're at when Esther meets Amanda. The two women don't trust each other, but a slowly growing oddball mutual admiration society eventually develops. Is Esther really going to help Edward let Amanda die, or is she going to form an alliance with Amanda? Maybe she'll double-cross both of them? What is Edward's real goal, and does he plan to do more than wait for Amanda to kill herself? Will he kill Esther, too? What really happened to Nell and James? We in the audience and pretty much every other character already know that Edward is a greedy and conniving guy who wants his sister dead, but we don't know what else he's up to, and Esther's and Amanda's motivations are also murky and unknowable. None of the characters trust each other, all of them have secrets, and the audience is never sure of anyone's motives or plans, other than Edward's obvious ones. I love these kinds of stories, and the cast members, made up of veteran actors with much theater, episodic television, and character actor and day player film experience, deliver naturalistic, understated performances that kept me invested.

The location shooting also contributes to the movie's flavor. The dive bar, Edward's office, a nearby Catholic church, a late-night diner, all these places are complementary to the film's tone, but the mansion itself is the star of the show. The Piru Mansion (also called the Newhall Mansion and the Cook Mansion) is a Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion in the small town of Piru, California, about 48 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The crazily distinctive home, built in 1886 by a wealthy fundamentalist Christian businessman from Illinois attempting to create a second Garden of Eden, sold to two more wealthy families over the ensuing years, entirely rebuilt in 1982-3 after a devastating 1981 fire, and currently owned by a private investment company that rents it out for events, corporate retreats, and vacations, pops up frequently in movies and TV shows. Before Die Sister, Die!, my most recent sighting of the mansion was in the absolutely bonkers 1973 drive-in exploitation movie Pets, and it's also appeared in Desert Fury, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Terror at Red Wolf Inn, and episodes of Charlie's Angels, Mannix, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, The Incredible Hulk, Highway to Heaven, Murder, She Wrote, Melrose Place, The X-Files, and Monk. A new Garden of Eden, indeed.

The hardcore horror nerds may not be wild about Die Sister, Die!, but I truly enjoyed its performances, '70s locations, morally dubious characters, and low-key charm. It's somewhere between a Columbo episode and a Tales from the Crypt morality play of comeuppance, and I like hanging out in that space.

   

Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death (James Wood, 1979)

I don't know what I was expecting from a 1979 movie about the great-grandson of Dr. Jekyll conducting experiments in his San Francisco mansion, but I was certainly not expecting a movie that mostly consists of long stretches of exposition and lengthy karate fights between Bay Area black belts. Seriously, this movie is mostly just Dr. Jekyll explaining what he wants to do in one of the biggest, hammiest performances I've ever seen punctuated by lengthy karate fights in his basement lab. Is it terrible? Yes. Are the karate fights pretty good, though a bit repetitive? Yes. Is the movie inexplicably set in the '50s despite all the women sporting long, straight hair or Farrah Fawcett feathered layers and the men sporting afros, curly shags, and porn 'staches? Oddly, yes. Was I glad I saw it despite it being mostly terrible? Of course.

The only non-porn film directed by James Wood in his brief movie career (his other two directorial efforts are the porn flicks A Game of Love, starring The Last House on the Left's Fred Lincoln, and The $50,000 Climax Show, a porn parody of game shows with the tagline "She came to hit the jackpot!"), Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death is a mystifying attempt to marry the long-out-of-fashion mad-scientist horror flick with the much-hotter-in-'79 martial arts movie on an extremely tiny budget. The cast is small, the story makes little sense, the period details are all wrong, and no one involved in the production seems to have read more than a one-sentence synopsis of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel or any of its film or television adaptations.

Dr. Henry Jekyll (James Mathers, who also wrote the screenplay), the great-grandson of the infamous Dr. Jekyll, continues his forebear's experiments in the basement lab of his posh San Francisco home, though unlike Jekyll's original experimentation, which attempted to separate the virtue and vice that exist within us all, '79 Jekyll just wants to create an army of unstoppable killing machines to fight America's battles. 

Young Jekyll dilutes and changes Great-grandpappy Jekyll's serum to such an extent that anyone injected with the stuff becomes a mindlessly enraged vessel of ass-kicking violence who is inexplicably excellent at karate. The only experiments Jekyll ever seems to run are karate battles to the death in his spacious basement. Stupidly, his serums and test tubes are set up right next to the karate-fighting area with no barrier between, though he does have a 'fro and porn 'stache armed guard, Malo (Tom Nickelson), at the ready to shoot the winner of the karate battles, just like we did it in the '50s.

Besides Malo, Jekyll is aided in his work by his mute, deranged sister, Hilda (Nadine Kalmes), who handles the servant and housekeeping duties and is constantly bugging out her eyes to show us just how deranged she is, and his assistant, Boris (Jake Pearson), a former colleague Jekyll was insanely jealous of who suffered brain damage in an accident. Boris is a lab assistant/butler who also kidnaps all of Jekyll's test subjects, presumably from a nearby karate school.

Another former colleague, Julia Atkinson (Dawn Carver Kelly), is chained up in Jekyll's bedroom until she'll consent to falling in love with him. (Jekyll also mentions having the hots for his own sister because she looks just like his mother, but this weird incest angle is dropped shortly after it's introduced.)

Jekyll tells Julia's father, Professor Atkinson (John F. Kearney), a former teacher of Jekyll's, that his daughter was killed after being thrown from a horse. The professor arrives as a guest at Jekyll's home to attend the funeral, unaware that his daughter is still alive and that her kidnapping is a blackmail tool Jekyll is planning to use to enlist the professor's assistance in his experiments (again, the only experimentation we ever see is post-injection karate fights). Jekyll has a chip on his shoulder about the old professor. Jekyll respects the elder man's scientific prowess but blames him for being one of the instigators of Jekyll's expulsion from medical school.

What we get from all this raw material until the ridiculous conclusion is Jekyll explaining his plans to his household staff, Julia, Professor Atkinson, and no one in particular in spectacularly hammy style (you've never seen someone do so much acting with his face, and that includes heavy competition from Nadine Kalmes) in between karate fights. It's a long 92 minutes, despite the plethora of unintentional laughs and excellently choreographed fight scenes. Wood the director is no great shakes, but Wood the cinematographer is pretty good with lighting and crispness of image.

Most of the cast didn't do much in movies either before or after Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death, but, surprisingly, walking ham sandwich Mathers, making his film debut here, had a lengthy career in film, television, and theater right up to his death in 2014. He was active in San Francisco and New York theater as both an actor and a playwright, and he popped up in many bit parts and small roles in movies and TV shows, including The Right Stuff, Guilty by Suspicion, MacGyver, L.A. Law, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, ER, Ally McBeal, Me and You and Everyone We Know, and Ray Donovan. Maybe he knew exactly what kind of movie he'd written/starred in here and amplified every move by 120.

The Smiling Ghost (Lewis Seiler, 1941)

The Smiling Ghost is both a charming and silly little movie with some excellent comedic zingers and another peek into the disturbed and contradictory psyche of the average white American. A horror-comedy-mystery-romance about an aw-shucks cornpone goodie-two-shoes living beyond his means and his black valet who are taken advantage of by a decadent wealthy family in an attempt to end a murderous ghost curse afflicting a string of fiancés of the family's granddaughter, the movie accurately depicts the wealthy as selfish, demented, careless, exploitative, cold, drunk, and/or living in their own little bubble. However, its treatment of the sole black character is racist and stereotypical, using him as a wide-eyed, knee-knocking, teeth-chattering, fast-running cowardly comic relief figure who's saddled with a subplot about an elderly member of the wealthy family wanting to collect and shrink the valet's head because he doesn't yet have a "Negroid" in his collection.

Lucky Downing (Wayne Morris) is a recent college graduate and aspiring engineer in an unnamed big city, though he's the kindhearted but naive small-town rube type. He's sort of like a composite of every character on Leave It to Beaver except Eddie Haskell. Despite his intense devotion to the study of engineering, he's unemployed and hiding out in his office/apartment with his pet cat, dodging the group of bill collectors who have amassed outside his door, waiting for him to step outside. Lucky's loyal valet Clarence (Willie Best), despite not having been paid for several months, continues to help Lucky by delivering provisions and correspondence through the window awning.

Lucky finally gets to leave his abode when he's summoned to a job interview at the office of the wealthy Bentley family's attorney. Grandmother Bentley (Helen Westley) wants to hire a handsome and strong young man who's willing to do "anything legal" for a mysterious purpose. Lucky says he's their man, but the old woman puts him through the paces, barking orders at him, telling him his haircut "was an inside job," looking him up and down, and making him turn around and walk back and forth like a movie producer auditioning an aspiring actress for the casting couch. After some negotiations about retaining the valet services of Clarence, Lucky gets the job, which consists of a month's work pretending to be the fiancé of Bentley's granddaughter, the heiress Elinor Bentley Fairchild (Alexis Smith), and staying at the Bentley family mansion a few hours from the city. He will be paid $1,000 for his trouble, which gets you a half a loaf of bread in our current Trumpconomy but is nearly $23,000 in 2026 bucks. Lucky doesn't bother to ask why the family needs someone to pretend to be Elinor's fiancé because he's a city version of a hick from the sticks and he's just happy to get some cash.

After a comedic misunderstanding at the train station leaves Lucky worse for wear, he meets Elinor and newspaper reporter Lil Barstow (Brenda Marshall), who covers the Bentley family as part of her beat. Elinor breaks Lil's camera and tells Lil to send her the bill, but Lucky apologizes and attempts to answer the reporter's questions before Elinor shuts it down. Lil takes an immediate romantic liking to Lucky, but he's too simple to realize it.

Elinor's private car delivers our gang to the Bentley mansion, where Lucky meets the rest of the family. Besides Grandmother Bentley, the only family member who's in on the ruse besides Elinor, the mansion's dwellers include Elinor's aunt Rose Fairchild (Lee Patrick), an acid-tongued seen-it-all type who is quick with a dryly withering putdown and jealous of Elinor, uncle Hilton Fairchild (Roland Drew), a cold man who immediately loses interest in Lucky when he finds out Lucky doesn't have experience owning and shooting guns, cousin Tennant Bentley (Richard Ainley), an alcoholic and nasty drunk, and great-uncle Ames Bentley (Charles Halton), a demented old freak obsessed with his collection of shrunken heads. To quote a Mr. Show sketch, what a collection of assholes. Helping Clarence in his valet duties is no-nonsense butler Norton (Alan Hale). Hale's son, Alan Hale Jr., played the Skipper on Gilligan's Island. Confusing Hale Sr. for Hale Jr., I spent the whole movie thinking, "My God, this is the oldest-looking twentysomething I've ever seen." In my defense, the Hales look very much alike and I'm a dumber man than I used to be.

Why would a rich and attractive young woman like Elinor need her grandmother to pay someone to pretend to be her fiancé? Lucky may not be curious about such things, or anything not related to engineering (Elinor: "What kind of a kiss do you prefer?" Lucky: "You mean there's more than one kind?"), but after he switches rooms with Tennant and someone attempts to murder Tennant in the night, he gets the inside dope from Lil, who's sneaking around outside the mansion trying to get a scoop. Lucky was so engrossed in the study of engineering that he failed to follow the hot local news, but Elinor's family fortune isn't the only thing bringing her local fame. She's known in the press as the Kiss of Death Girl because fiancé numero uno, Johnny Eggleston, drowned. Fiancé two, Paul Myron (David Bruce), is still alive but living in an iron lung after getting his chest crushed in a car accident he claims was caused by a creepy smiling ghost. Apparently, Elinor dropped Paul like a hot potato once he was disabled. The third time was not the charm for fiancé three, Alan Winters, who died after a cobra bit him on the 18th floor of a Boston hotel. Classic 18th floor Boston shit, am I right?

Lucky is the expendable bait, hired to lure the killer, possibly entrap him, and see if Lucky will be, to quote a Bob Dylan song title, the fourth time around. When Lucky hears this inside dope (that would have been outside dope if he'd read the damn papers), he decides he's going back to (unnamed) city, he do believe he's had enough. But ain't it just like Lucky's blues, Elinor tells him she's fallen in love with him for real, and he doesn't think twice, it's alright. He decides to stick around and give this thing a shot, but will he be knockin' on heaven's door before he can even cash that thousand-dollar check? It's not dark yet, but it's getting there. Oh mercy.

All kinds of shit goes down after this, including attempted murders, midnight crypt explorations, midnight weddings, love triangles, creepy smiling ghosts, iron lung bitterness, quality wisecracks, casual racism, hidden passageways, secret caverns, surprise twists, and more. I'm halfway shocked we didn't get a guy in a gorilla suit.

So, The Smiling Ghost. Willie Best is a talented performer, but he's stuck with another dumb racist part despite getting a few good comedic lines, though he and Morris have a genuine rapport. The rest of the movie holds up a lot better. It's hardly a classic, but the one-liners are funny, the killer is creepy, and the cast is charming and has good chemistry. I can't say this is a must-watch, but it's a fascinating curio of early '40s Hollywood.

   

 

Die Hard 2 (Renny Harlin, 1990)

In my Die Hard post last month, I urged all of us to get past the question of whether Die Hard is or is not a Christmas movie (it is and it isn't) and asked people to instead consider whether Die Hard is a slasher movie and, by extension, whether action movies are slasher movie subgenres in which the action hero is a version of both the slasher movie killer and final girl. Let's see how these questions apply to Die Hard 2.

Die Hard 2, like its predecessor, takes place during the Christmas season, and, also like its predecessor, was released in theaters in the summer (July 4, 1990), but Die Hard 2 looks a lot Christmas-ier than Die Hard. The setting changes from a skyscraper office party in sunny Los Angeles to Dulles Airport in snowy Washington, D.C., during a blizzard. The airport is covered in Christmas decorations, the luggage carousel is full of wrapped gifts, everyone wears winter clothing, eggnog is mentioned, and one of the action sequences involves a snowmobile chase. It's a freakin' winter wonderland over here. The Christmas spirit permeates Die Hard 2. On the other hand, most of the plot has nothing to do with Christmas, other than the holiday season making the airport and flight schedules busier. They could've done this same story on Thanksgiving or spring break or at any airport in any city that was hosting the Super Bowl or the Olympics.

My conclusion: Die Hard 2 is a Christmas movie, and Die Hard 2 is not a Christmas movie. Embrace the contradiction. You accept that this movie takes place at Dulles in D.C. even though it was filmed at various airports, military bases, and studio sets in Colorado, Michigan, and California. You accept that the terrorists shutting down the airport's communication system leaves the planes in the air helpless even though they could get information from hundreds of other nearby radio signals. You accept that John McClane faces a crazy madcap terrorist Christmas season showdown for the second time in two years in two completely different cities. Give that same leap of faith to a Christmas movie that is not a Christmas movie but is a Christmas movie but isn't a Christmas movie. Do it.

Admittedly, my slasher movie hypothesis is pretty shaky when it comes to Die Hard 2, despite John McClane (Bruce Willis) stabbing one of the baddies through the eye with an icicle and (accidentally) crushing another one. McClane does a hell of a lot less skulking around in this one, he gets a lot more help, and most of the villains are dispatched en masse in gun battles and explosions. Not very slasher-y, am I right? My larger point stands, but Die Hard 2 is not a shining example of action movie as bizarro-world slasher.

It is a shining example of the big-budget '80s/'90s Hollywood action movie. Despite repeating the first film's formula with a much stupider terrorist plot, the sequel is almost as fun. The action scenes are legitimately suspenseful and exciting, the returning actors retain their chemistry and charm, and director Renny Harlin (taking over for the first and third installment's John McTiernan, who was busy making The Hunt for Red October) has a real gift for handling big scenes in large locations with hundreds of individual moving parts. (I also love the scenes in all the weird airport nooks and crannies us passengers never get to see.) Especially in the hustling, bustling airport scenes, Harlin shows masterful skill at gracefully controlling a busy, chaotic visual space. It's thrilling stuff, enhanced by the shots of the empty, still expanse of the darkened runways after the landings are delayed.

Alan Rickman and his crew of Eurotrash hair-metal muscleheads are sorely missed, replaced in this installment with a gang of character-acting heavy hitters who don't get enough personality-defining moments, except for William Sadler's naked martial arts workout while watching the news. You know a guy's a coldblooded psycho in an '80s or early '90s movie when you get a scene of him exercising in the nude. While Die Hard's villains were thieves with vague ties to Communist revolutionaries, Die Harder's bad boys are an anti-Commie far-right ex-military militia planning to save their newly arrested anti-Commie drug lord boss from the plane transporting him to Dulles. Ah, Hollywood, always having it both ways.

Leading the operation is Stuart (the aforementioned Sadler, of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Trespass, various Tales from the Crypt movies and TV episodes, and The Shawshank Redemption fame), and his crew includes Don Harvey (The Untouchables), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2), and a blink twice and you'll miss him John Leguizamo. '60s and '70s spaghetti western and giallo star Franco Nero, who's worked with almost everyone from Fassbinder to Tarantino, plays the drug kingpin Esperanza. The returning cast besides Willis includes Bonnie Bedelia (this time given a much better role with zippier dialogue despite being stuck on a plane), William Atherton (also stuck on the plane) and Sheila McCarthy (their journalist characters are both working in D.C. now in one of many plausible coincidences), and, in a cameo, Reginald VelJohnson. What about Argyle, man? Joining the cast as McClane's allies, foils, secret enemies, or eventual allies are Dennis Franz, John Amos, Art Evans, Fred Thompson, and Tom Bower. This is a solid group of character actors who have been in a dizzying array of high-quality (and low-quality) projects, and they get a lot more to do than Sadler and his boys.

Sadly, Die Hard 2 really drops the ball in the zinger department. John McClane in the first movie was loaded with action-movie quips that hit the sweet spot between dad-joke stupidity and screenwriter cleverness, and Willis knew how to deliver the goods. The quips in Die Hard 2 are so lame, tired, try-hard, and dumb-bad (as opposed to dumb-good) that even Willis can't get some of them over. Not even the return of "yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker" can save it. The best McClane dialogue is the simplest. When he launches himself out of an ejector seat into mid-air as a plane explodes underneath him, he drops a well-timed, humorously delivered "oh shiiiiittt." When "oh, shit" is your funniest quip, a dialogue punch-up is sorely needed. It's a minor complaint overall, but a missed opportunity to capture more of the first movie's flavor.

Die Hard 2 was director Harlin's first big Hollywood job and second hit. After making short films and TV commercials in his native Finland, he moved to the U.S. and debuted with low-budget action thriller Born American, followed by low-budget horror movie Prison (reviewed on this site many years ago) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. His other credits include The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (starring the insane lineup of Andrew "Dice" Clay, Wayne Newton, Gilbert Gottfried, Priscilla Presley, Morris Day, Vince Neil, David Patrick Kelly, Ed O'Neill, Robert Englund, Sheila E, Pamela Adlon, Kurt Loder, and Tone Loc), Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight with his then-wife Geena Davis, Deep Blue Sea, 12 Rounds (with John Cena), and The Strangers trilogy. 

The Body Shop aka Doctor Gore (J.G. Patterson Jr., 1972)

The Body Shop, retitled Doctor Gore in 1973 (Dr. Gore became my primary care physician after Dr. Butcher stopped accepting my employer's insurance), is a prime example of regional DIY '70s exploitation weirdness. Every scene is either hilariously nuts or boring as shit, nothing in between. If you can make it through those inert stretches and you share my love of underground regional wackiness, you'll have at least half of a great time.

Charlotte, North Carolina-based exploitation filmmaker J.G. Patterson Jr., born as (if IMDb isn't telling tales out of school) Jr Junius Gustavious Patterson and also known as Pat Patterson (not the pro wrestler/wrestling executive) and Don Brandon, was a jack-of-all-trades and clearly master-of-none drive-in/grindhouse Renaissance man and protégé of Florida-based exploitation king Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!, Color Me Blood Red) (all three reviewed on this site). In Patterson's relatively short life (he died of melanoma in 1975 at the age of 45), he had a hand in many low-budget exploitation movies in almost as many roles (director, producer, writer, actor, makeup artist, special effects artist, assistant director, production manager).

Patterson's showbiz career started in the late '50s, when he hosted local Charlotte television's late-night horror show Shock Theater as the Mad Daddy. This is not to be confused with Cleveland's late-night TV horror show Shock Theater, which was hosted by Ernie Anderson (Paul Thomas Anderson's dad) as Ghoulardi. To make things even more confusing, one of Cleveland's most popular rock radio DJs at the time, Pete Myers, also went by the name Mad Daddy and had a brief and unsuccessful run of his own as a late-night TV horror host a few years before Ghoulardi hit the scene to much greater success. (Myers would go on to radio stints in San Diego and New York City before committing suicide in 1968 at age 40, though some people think it was a murder. I'm digressing now.)

At some point after Shock Theater's demise, Patterson befriended Herschell Gordon Lewis and learned the ropes of exploitation filmmaking as assistant director on Moonshine Mountain, Lewis's personal assistant on She-Devils on Wheels, Just for the Hell of It, and How to Make a Doll, and assistant producer on The Gruesome Twosome. Through his association with Lewis, he met other indie exploitation filmmakers and helped them out, too, acting in and producing Albert T. Viola's Southernsploitation Preacherman, editing and producing Frederick R. Friedel's Axe (aka California Axe Massacre aka Lisa, Lisa) (reviewed on this site), and doing makeup effects for William Girdler's Three on a Meathook. The ill-fated Girdler, probably the most talented of everyone mentioned so far, cranked out a dizzying array of drive-in/grindhouse movies while still in his twenties, including Abby, 'Sheba, Baby', Grizzly, Day of the Animals (probably the only movie in which a shirtless Leslie Nielsen gets into a fistfight with a grizzly bear), and The Manitou before dying in a helicopter crash in the Philippines at the age of 30 while scouting locations for his next film.

Patterson kicked off his own short-lived directing career with The Body Shop, a low-rent Bride of Frankenstein-ish tale of a mad scientist creating his ideal woman from the body parts of multiple women and reanimating the results in his lab. Patterson plays the lead role, Dr. Don Brandon, under the name Don Brandon, or, as the opening credits bill him, "America's No. 1 Magician: Don Brandon," which is hilarious for all kinds of reasons, a few prominent ones being Patterson aka Brandon was not a magician and does not play one in this movie (though he does hypnotize some of his victims), a small supporting character in the movie is a magician, and Don Brandon was the real name of a well-known magician (billed as Brandon the Magician) who was halfway through his career when this movie was made.

The movie begins with a wistful Dr. Brandon gazing into a lake, listening to a DJ on a transistor radio announce the death of his beauty queen socialite wife in a plane crash before segueing into weepy country ballad "A Heart Dies Every Minute" by local band Bill Hicks (not the comedian) and the Rainbows. Hicks and the Rainbows perform the song live in its entirety in a nightclub scene near the halfway point. (Speaking of music in The Body Shop, the film's score was composed by the aforementioned Girdler and is a creepy variation on "My Favorite Things" with new lyrics.) After the funeral, feminist icon Dr. Brandon gets to work assembling the perfect woman, one even more beautiful than his late wife, to become his lifelong companion. He's aided in his mad scientist lab by his hunchbacked assistant Greg (Roy Mehaffey) who cannot speak, communicating through grunts, moans, and various other mouth sounds.

The first half of the film mostly takes place in the lab and involves test runs of the equipment, deliveries of a woman in a crate (the doctor to the enormously hunchbacked Greg when delivery men knock on the door with the crate: "Put your coat on so they don't know you're a hunchback"), and various women drugged or hypnotized by Dr. Brandon because he likes their arms, legs, hands, torsos, etc. As the doctor explains to Greg, "Hands on a woman are most important. It's the delicate feminine hand that brings out the true femininity." I'm always saying this. The doc then gruesomely removes the desired body part, Greg puts it in frozen storage, and the rest of the body is dissolved in an acid bath. An attempt to reanimate a whole, intact dead woman by covering her in tin foil, taping the foil down with Scotch tape, and then blasting her with the mad science equipment for a ridiculously extended stretch of time ends in failure and the acid bath, but by the time the assembled ideal woman is ready to be zapped with the science, Dr. Brandon has upgraded to a glass and metal tube.

Occasionally, the doctor gets out of the lab to hypnotize attractive young women at the country music and live magic nightclub, the beach, or an office's reception desk and bring them back to the lab for body part extractions and acid baths. At the nightclub entrance, he's hit on by an attractive, age-appropriate woman who was a friend of his wife's. He brushes her off and makes a disgusted grimace and exhaled sigh of relief when she goes inside. I don't mean to be rude, but the good doc should look at himself in the mirror. He's in his early forties and looks 62 (this may have something to do with the chain smoking and lack of hydration that was the style of the time), sports a ridiculous combover, has an aggressively large head and crazy eyes, and has the charisma of Pat Sajak on Quaaludes, and he has the audacity to reject attractive women and/or most of their body parts? This guy just might be #problematic.

Anyway, physically ideal woman (Jenny Driggers, former Miss Pro Am Dragway at the Rockingham, NC, Dragway) assembled, the doc and Greg zap some more science into her, and it works. She's alive! She's alive! The doc names her Anitra and tells Greg he will never gaze upon her again, with punishment of death. The only man she will ever see from now on is Dr. Brandon so that he can mold her into the perfect companion. We hear his thoughts in voice-over as he hypnotizes her. He wipes her past memories ("she won't even remember how to drink a glass of water") and re-educates her to cater to his every whim. They have a few laughs, he tells her how to drink water (for a guy who looks like he never drinks water, he's sure obsessed with the stuff), she finally understands that he's the man and she's the woman after some madcap misunderstandings, he introduces her to sex, they have sun-dappled good times in the woods near the lake, and the future is golden.

Unfortunately for Dr. Brandon, he makes some bonehead plays. Anitra easily wanders into the lab unsupervised and hugs Greg ("you're a man!"), which is bad news for Greg. Then, the doc decides to run some errands even though a water heater is being delivered, leaving Anitra on the couch in a bikini reading Hot Stuff magazine (I'm a subscriber but only for the articles). The delivery driver gets an eyeful of Anitra, she tells him he's a man (his response: "Boy, you sure ain't!"), and he invites her to his truck, leading to our exciting (?) denouement.

I live for this kind of trash, but there are long stretches where not much is happening or too much is happening or the same thing happens for way too long. If you're a fan of regional DIY lunacy, you've probably developed a solid strain of immunity and can handle it. The freakishly nutty scenes and time-capsule local color moments are the reward. If your main jam is the Marvel Cinematic Universe or middlebrow Oscarbait or prestige TV, this ain't gonna light you on fire, but the worst of the worst of these movies is worth more than 100 Avengers movies to me. Each one is such a reflection of the flawed and unique human person who made it and the local flavor of the area where it was filmed and has its own weird energy even when the goal is to make a quick, cheap buck. Part of that local flavor includes the Overlook Castle, a famous mountaintop mansion in Asheville. The castle is the exterior location of the lab, and Patterson somehow got permission to do some filming inside the mansion, making excellent use of the large picture windows.

Despite creating the occasional memorable scene or image, Patterson was the filmmaking equivalent of a carny grifter and was not a man for retakes or too much attention to detail. In one of the final scenes, the clapperboard is fully visible. He needed the dialogue and didn't have a replacement shot, so he just left it in. Accidentally meta, brother. In a hilarious scene, a good ol' boy Southern patrolman knocks on the door. Even though the scene takes place at night, every shot of the patrolman is in blinding daylight. The conversation proceeds as follows: "What the heck is goin' on in here? You boys makin' 'shine?" "No, officer, I'm a doctor." "OK, sorry to bother ya." I love it. Patterson directed two more movies after The Body Shop, the last one hitting theaters a year after his death. The followup, Boots and the Preacher, a crime thriller about a murder at a radio station, was presumed lost for years until Vinegar Syndrome got their hands on an elusive print, restored it, and released it on Blu-Ray last year. His final film, The Electric Chair, is an eccentric courtroom drama.

I'll leave the last word to whichever genius created the copy for The Body Shop's local poster when the movie played the Tryon Hills Shopping Center in Raleigh: "(picture of a blonde bikini babe who does not appear in the movie) She's the monster in 'The Body Shop' and it's X rated! You won't believe how they make her! It is gorrific. . . .  That is why it's rated X. Filmed entirely in North Carolina! Maybe one of her parts came from your street."