It’s Balladeer’s Blog’s semi-annual Mother’s Day post!
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! LOVE, GEORGE (1973) – Category: Bad movie elevated by kitsch value in the casting.
Directed by THE Darren McGavin and featuring his wife Kathie Browne in a small role, this hilariously bizarre film is also known as Run, Stranger, Run. “Run, Potential Viewer, Run” would be a more appropriate title.
Happy Mother’s Day Love, George (henceforth HMDLG) is often described as a psycho-sexual thriller but actually it is nothing more than a melodramatic soap opera with a few murders and VERY few scenes of blood and gore. Those blood and gore scenes are so over-the-top they are completely at odds with the low-key, almost made-for-tv mildness of the rest of the movie.
This was a theatrical release but is so subdued and slow-paced it seems like a telefilm. You and your friends can keep yourselves entertained making jokes about the recognizable cast members to kill time since the first murder doesn’t happen until we’re more than an hour into this flick.
Ron Howard IS Johnny, a teenager who has come to town to discover who his birth parents are but who mostly just stands around staring at people and ESPECIALLY at houses. He seems completely taken aback that the townspeople find this somewhat creepy. Johnny is intrigued by the rash of missing persons plaguing the small town and feels they are connected to the secret of his past.
Cloris Leachman IS Ronda (no “h”), Johnny’s real mother, as we learn very early in the film. Ronda is in such dire financial straits she had to hock the “h” in her name for rent money. (I’m kidding!) She never speaks to her sister, sleeps with a gigolo passing through town and serves up meals along with expository dialogue. Continue reading
Episode Title: THE CHIMES OF BIG BEN. In the ongoing debate about the exact numbering of the 17 episodes of The Prisoner I place this as the 3rd in the series. Any comments that I have regarding the Alternate Chimes of Big Ben will be made in this same post. 
Leo McKern’s character’s verbal fencing with Patrick McGoohan is as much fun to watch as Columbo’s cat and mouse games with the murderers on his show. (And yes, I know McGoohan was no stranger to Columbo, both the 1970s series and the later revival.) 
Leo makes it clear that the Village represents the model for the Earth of the future as pursued by highly-placed elements from both sides of the Cold War. He paints a picture of inevitability for the Prisoner in hopes that he can make McGoohan cave in while retaining his sense of personal honor. If a Global “Village” is inevitable there’s no shame in surrendering to it. 
Readers of Balladeer’s Blog asked for more May the Fourth material, so here’s an “encore presentation” as they used to call reruns, of my 2015 review of The Humanoid. In my view this is the worst of the Italian Star Wars ripoffs. 
Richard Kiel plays the title figure. His real name is Golob but the Darth Vaderish bad guy arranges for Golob to be the guinea pig for a treatment that transforms ordinary people into powerful “Humanoids”. As a Humanoid Golob loses his beard for some reason but – even more comically – the beard suddenly reappears when he is returned to normal late in the movie.
Golob in his amped-up Humanoid form has super-strength, is invulnerable to harm and can deflect energy blasts that the Rebel Alliance-style good guys shoot at him. The bad guys plan to use a warhead to expose every man, woman and child on Earth to the bio-treatment, thus creating an instant army of billions of super-powered Humanoids like Richard Kiel. (Good luck controlling them since the treatment will reduce them to mindless animals like Golob.) 
Corinne Clery portrays Barbara Gibson, the spunky Princess Leia pastiche. Barbara is a prominent scientist of Metropolis, which is what the entire Earth has been renamed now that it is just one big planet-wide city in the far future setting of The Humanoid. Barbara studies a gifted Asian lad who controls 
Ivan Rassimov plays the main villain Lord Graal, whose entire army dresses exactly like Darth Vader. He does, too, but to stand out from his underlings HIS black helmet and mask have cutouts that let his eyes, mouth and cheeks show. Lord Graal wants to create the aforementioned Humanoid army so he can conquer the entire Milky Way galaxy. He has magical powers like the Asian boy. 
Midnight Marquee, the renowned magazine devoted to horror, sci fi and cult films, returns after a long hiatus. 
It’s Alive from 1974 is a psychotronic classic. It Lives Again from 1978 features Frederic Forrest, the “I’m a saucier” guy in his second-worst onscreen relationship – the worst was with Teri Garr in One From the Heart. It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive is fairly lame but at least it has Michael Moriarty. 
FRIDAY FOSTER (1975) – Pam portrays the title character, a comic strip heroine from the 1970’s who was often called “the black Brenda Starr.” Friday Foster worked as a photographer for a national weekly and the comic strip figure was regularly involved in much grittier adventures than Brenda Starr (or Mark Trail for that matter) ever had. 
BLACK ROSES (1988) – This legendarily laughable attempt at a horror film belongs to quite a few niche sub-genres. It’s a Canadian horror movie, it’s one of the wonderfully campy Heavy Metal Horror productions of the 1980s and most importantly for trivia lovers Black Roses is one of the Big Three Canadian turkeys to feature Frank Dietz in a supporting role. (The other two are Rock’N’Roll Nightmare and Zombie Nightmare. ) 
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