Updating the IMDb

Instead of continuing to bitch about mistakes and omissions on the Internet Movie Database, we've decided to start a new column to collect research that can be used as confirmation when submitting corrections and additions to the IMDb. First up is a movie that's been an irritation to us for a few years now...

The IMDb entry for GIRLS ON THE ROAD (1973) should be changed to HOT SUMMER WEEK (1972). We understand that it opened on January 5th, 1973 in Bismarck, North Dakota under the title GIRLS ON THE ROAD, but it had already been in release since July '72 as HOT SUMMER WEEK and we have playdates in Arizona, Florida and Louisiana to back up this claim. As for GIRLS ON THE ROAD, that title's not even on file with the MPAA. The fact that the movie has only been on video and DVD as GIRLS ON THE ROAD doesn't matter -- the official title is HOT SUMMER WEEK, and the official release date is 1972.

THE LOSERS (1970) has never, to the best of our knowledge, been referred to as anything other than THE LOSERS in its country of origin (the United States of America). We have no idea how it came to be known as NAM'S ANGELS on the IMDb, but we're positive that no one who's seen the movie has ever called it by that name. We’ve read Alan Caillou’s first draft screenplay, and "The Losers" is on the title page. That's the name it had when it was announced in the trades. We’ve talked to at least 10 people who worked on the movie, and they know it only as THE LOSERS. It was THE LOSERS when it began production in Manila on Monday, January 19th, 1970. It was THE LOSERS when it had its simultaneous world premieres in Dallas, Kansas City, and Philadelphia on May 27th, 1970. It was THE LOSERS when it got reviewed in Variety, Boxoffice and newspapers across the country. It was THE LOSERS when it was still getting theatrical bookings at drive-ins 10 years later. It was THE LOSERS when it made its network premiere on The CBS Friday Night Movie on October 3rd, 1975. It was THE LOSERS a couple of years later when it was in TV syndication through Teleworld. It was THE LOSERS when it hit VHS in 1982 from Electric Video and again in 1988 from Academy Home Entertainment. The clips that were used in PULP FICTION are credited to THE LOSERS. When the DVD from Dark Sky came out in 2006, the title was still THE LOSERS -- yet with all of this and the Dark Sky DVD cover uploaded a tenth of an inch to the left, the IMDb insists on calling it NAM'S ANGELS. Oh, but click on the "Also Known As" link and you'll find THE LOSERS among a half dozen foreign language titles with the parenthetical note "undefined" next to it. Really? Undefined? How's this for a definition: It's the fucking title of the movie.

DEATH CURSE OF TARTU apparently opened in Sweden in 1968, but that's no reason to report 1968 as its primary release date. It's an American movie that began its theatrical roll-out in the U.S. in 1966, so the proper release date is 1966.

Every source we've ever seen for THE GLORY STOMPERS, from Variety to TV Guide to 25 years of Leonard Maltin's TV Movies, lists a 1967 date for this biker flick, yet one misinformed soul with an IMDb password has managed to lead an entire generation of online DVD reviewers down the garden path by typing "January 1968" as the release date. Yes, it was no doubt still playing drive-ins in January '68, but it began its theatrical life in Texas, Utah and a dozen or more states two months prior to that. Please change it back to 1967.

QUADROON may have opened in Chicago in March of 1972, but the ad above proves that its world premiere occurred eight months earlier. The IMDb entry should be QUADROON (1971).

GARDEN OF DEATH (a.k.a. SEEDS OF EVIL) carries a release date of October 1975 on the IMDb, but the ad above is from its Kansas City opening one year earlier, in October 1974. Also, the title THE GARDENER is "undefined" when it should be the primary title.

REDNECK MILLER carries a 1977 release date on the IMDb, but above is an advertisement for its world premiere in Florence, South Carolina on November 24th, 1976.

WELCOME HOME, SOLDIER BOYS sports a 1972 release date in every source we've ever checked, but it opened in San Antonio, Texas on December 10th, 1971.

The MPAA is to blame for this mistake. THE HEX MASSACRE is in their database as a re-release title for THE CHOSEN/HOLOCAUST 2000 and LUCIFER'S CURSE is supposedly another title for WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? (a.k.a. ISLAND OF THE DAMNED and TRAPPED), when the opposite is actually true according to this ad from Petersburg, VA (May 6th, 1979). LUCIFER’S CURSE is really the Alberto De Martino movie starring Kirk Douglas, while THE HEX MASSACRE is the Narciso Ibáñez Serrador shocker.

Movie Ad of the Week: "Four Times the Terror"

The previous Cannon four-pack movie ad that we ran -- The First Annual Chop-Saki Festival -- proved so popular with TOS readers that we decided to dig up another one. Here's "Four Times the Terror" from 1980, not long after Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus purchased the company from co-founders Dennis Friedland and Christopher Dewey. DRACULA'S LAST RITES (1980) is Dominic Paris' LAST RITES, the only film on the program that was acquired during the Golan and Globus regime. The second feature is Piers Haggard's BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW (a.k.a. SATAN'S SKIN), starring Patrick Wymark and Linda Hayden, first released by Cannon in 1971 on a double bill with BEAST IN THE CELLAR. Feature #3, BLOOD FEAST, is actually Emilio Miraglia's giallo THE LADY IN RED KILLS 7 TIMES/THE RED QUEEN KILLS 7 TIMES (1972), with Barbara Bouchet and Sybil Danning, which Cannon originally released in the U.S. in 1976 on a double bill with this program's final feature, BLOOD BATH (a.k.a. TERROR NIGHT IN THE CITY), a New York-lensed anthology horror flick by Joel M. Reed that co-stars Harve Presnell, Doris Roberts, Sonny Landham and P.J. Soles. Although this ad carries R ratings for all four features, the latter two were actually awarded PG ratings by the MPAA.

BOOK REVIEW: "The Consummata" by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins Revives

The Mick's Morgan The Raider...

...In A Hard Case Of Crime

Every Spillane Fan CONSUMMATA Have!

A Happy Birthday Mickey Spillane
Keeper in Krime

by Don K. Barbecue

Now that I've reviewed Quarry's Ex and found it one killer thriller, I'll give you a few minutes to run on down to the nearest bookstore for it. Either that or employ the usage of some on-line ordering service. Only don't tell Unk, who sez, whatever that means, that “After that 'Space Abhors A UniVACuum' Deal,' all I gotta do is stink abutt computers and IBM!”

Not to worry. Unk already provided me with his caption to The Consummata, which is Max Allan Collins' second Hard Case Crime in a row, as to grace the loverly McGinnis cover with a word balloon. According to Unk, for reasons you'll soon learn, it has to be said by an old partner in crime of the cover gal, some con, and it goes like this:

Con: “What's Summata you, lady, you keep playing with that gun down there, something's gonna GO OFF – and there'll be a whole Miss of blood Spillane around!”

In fact, Unk gave that line to me shortly after he saved my “sorry butt” from that little episode during the Temple of Schlock review for a new HCC in slay too long, Lawrence Block's Getting Off, wherein I was almost gotten off myself. Yeah, it really looked like the Charles Chips were down.

For those who missed it, come with me now to what was transpiring right at the end of that Getting Off review:

When, just as I was wrappping up, here comes this Charles Chips delivery truck from which people are firing guns at me. What thuh? Right in the middle of the street, from the surface of the street Unk's head pops up directly in the path of said vehicle, like 30 feet away from it. I don't believe it! And wuzzat on his friggin' head? Looks like a round piece of black cement grille or something, with a chinstrap! Not that I got much time to think about it, even as Unk let loose a few rounds of his own while shouting “Look out, kid, no matter whatcha think these guys ain't using Blanc's, the Mel. Get down already, I gotcha manhole covered!”

It doesn't last long. Truck car-roams to its side, and anyone scrambling out alive gets unalive fast and Fury-ous. I say that cuz, while Unk never said he worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., even to be comic, he still has one helluva A.I.M.

Truck's barely settled when Unk reachs up with his free hand and pushes a PIECES NOW! button on his helmet. Pavement around the truck disappears beneath it, taking dead assailants down with it, their guns still smoking.

Unk swivels, faces me square, shouts back to me “Hah, just cuz they use an old Charles Chip truck don't mean they're taking ME out with no snack attack!”

Last thing he hollers is something about “lost votes and rigged ballots down in Flori-DUH!,” and oh yeah, a cry of “You'll never successfully Bushwhack me and mine, suckers!”

I Coletown askt Unk onced about "Who WERE those guys, anyway?" and he just put his tattered old John D. Mac paperback down next to an old Lady from L.U.S.T. adventure that looked more like tittered.

Whereopon the man reached for that super-sub-atomic-whippy-poot-raygun thing he calls his "Walther PPKDick," got up with it like a shot and was outta the joint in no time.

Heedless to slay, Unk was gone so fast the place shook, and that John D. pback hit the floor so wide open flush it plumb broke and busted. Unk bitched about it later, but I told him that's what ya get when ya slam the big door ...

Yeah, suddenly I was the last one left.

Man, Unk had gone awful fast. But not fast enough that I didn't hear him off in the deepening distance, yelling something about how he was gonna "maul and MANGLE Chad," whoever that was, "down in" somewhere rhymes with "Gory Ma." Least that's what it sounded like to Miami.

Okay, reason I brought this up. The Temple's been swamped with people ... two of them, both old vamps of Unk's and Counting ... wanting to know what happened at the end of the Getting Off review, whether I GOT off'ed. Now they gnaw.

So, betcha that particular aside gotcha wondering about Unk's politics. Which brings us to Frank Morrison Spillane's politics via his own characters. Take Mike Hammer. In one of the later all-Spillane Hammer adventures, The Body Lovers, Hammer gets aslay with blowing up any number of movers and shakers and higher up schmucks. Leaves them all the politicold, cold ground.

Then there was Tiger Mann, Spillane's distaff answer to James Bond. And the answer was “What's the matter grue?”

Over the course of four 60's novels, bing bang boom!, Spillane Hammered out those Tiger tails at a superMannly pace. Mann was Mike Hammer with quasi-government sanction, and he liked his Cold War enemies a lot better dead than Red.

That said, those books are among Spillane's scary best. And whether, you decide, his enemies were actual Reds or not, when Mann took aim, like Unk, he never, ever Communist.

Of course, slay & hack when, we never doubted which were the good guys, and which the Cubad.

1967 ... about the time Unk sez I was “Ne-Hi to a pain in the gunbutt, so duh!” ... Spillane published The Delta Factor, the first and only adventure of Morgan The Raider. Morgan was a cross between, geez, who knows, some Tiger of a Mann and Hammer plus a new guy all his own manner of robbin' hood.

DELTA FACTOR's always been one of my favorite loose Spillanes. The oily 70's movie of same, not so much, even though I saw it once at the old, long-gone Mu-Way Drive-In in Pummeled Dwarf. At lust it starred Yvette Mimieux, who, even Unk admits, I was in Eloi-ve witch when I was a kid. Ah, to have a TIME MACHINE, all would be Wells ... he said all cagey and H. G.-ly.

Now I haven't time here to list all the Spillane Hammers or otherwise that involved a missing shipment of .... something! ... that everyone and his evil twin were hot to find, the truck. The Consummata lick thighs hinges upon one great big truckload of money that went .... somewhere ... at Delta's end. Book opens with Morgan outta stir, and everyone wants that missing forty mill, from our government to that of a certain island nation south of Unk's Flori-DUH. Don't wanna name names, but it's probably close enough ya could, all moist, take a small boat and Castro there.

So, Morgan wants his money, the Coms still hate they missed it, and our own government, yeah, U.S., is quite, regards our rebellious Raider, Fed up with him. Then there's the displaced islanders in the U.S., who could use that money to help their cause of winning back their homeland. Unless some Red bear has already liberate it.

What, ya think I'd forget to men shun Morgan's old lady friend, who gave him a heave-ho like nobody's fuzz nest? And could that home-grown in the U.S. revolutioness want Morgan for more than himself, or for freeing her still captive to non-capitalism country? Hah, like isle ever tell!

So what do these molls and this all have to do with something or someone involved called The Consummata? Churns out she's this legendary dominatrix ... he said, trying knot to give things all a'flay.

And who knows, unless Morgan hurries and loins who The Consummata is quickly, the author of the very next Hard Case Crime novel might ... HOLD on! CHOKE! get there Faust!

There ya have it, fear reader, the running with guns low down on Max Allan Collins latest. And when ya finish these, don't forget to check out his first three Hammer wrap ups, The Goliath Bone, The Big Bang and the incredible in a good slay Kiss Her Goodbye. Should prepare ya quite well for the 2012 release of number 4, Lady, Go Die! Be great if that book features another Robert McGinnis cover like this one does. Like Unk always sez, “Hell, kid, ALL books consummata have 'em.”

And ya know what, I don't think he's “kid”-ding me a femme fatall!

THE DELTA FACTOR (1970)

Reviewed by Tim Ferrante

The Delta Factor is a 1967 Mickey Spillane novel featuring the debut of Morgan the Raider, an escaped con and modern-day opportunist whose expert criminal background is put to use by the US government. Spillane originally intended Morgan as an ongoing character and crafted 108 pages of his next adventure, The Consummata. He never finished the manuscript, instead telling his wife that it be left to fellow scribe Max Allan Collins to do so upon Spillane’s death. The author died in 2006 and Collins fulfilled his wish five years later -- The Consummata was at last published (by Hard Case Crime) in 2011, some 44 years after Morgan’s introduction.

THE DELTA FACTOR movie (hereafter TDF) is nearly as heroic as Morgan’s bravado when facing the impossible. Its overuse of sub-plots and parenthetical characters are harmful and counterweight the likeable primary players and their purpose. There is a genuinely good movie lurking beneath it all, one that’s sorted out upon reflection. Less would have been more, but this is Spillane’s world where nothing is ever easy.

Christopher George (post-THE RAT PATROL and pre-THE IMMORTAL) is cast as Morgan who’s alternately smug, tough and vulnerable behind his ever-present smile and arresting charm. It was a shrewd casting move; George’s medium, yet toned physique and cutely-handsome looks are immediate winners. Regardless of his intentions with ladies or foes, you’re firmly on his side. Another casting plus is Yvette Mimieux who portrays Morgan’s Fed assigned partner (and temporary spouse), Kim Stacy. She is a beautiful actor who is expert at conveying hot and cold running passions through perilous encounters with antagonists and Morgan’s sly and overt advances.

The film’s opening car chase through rain-soaked streets utilizes a clever technique for the introduction and apprehension of the recently escaped Morgan who’d been wrongly convicted of a $40 million currency heist … a fraction of which has been recovered by the Feds. Agent Ames (Ted de Corsia), recounts to the apprehended Morgan how no one else could have pulled off such a robbery especially since Morgan associate, Sal Dekker (Joseph Sirola), was also involved. Surprisingly, the Feds couldn’t care less about the money. Instead, Ames proffers our escape artist antihero a truncated jail sentence in exchange for help in breaking out a political prisoner, Victor Sable, on the corrupt island of Nuevo Cadiz. It’s a convenient coincidence because Nuevo Cadiz is also the location where the Feds suspect the stolen money is hidden.

Morgan briefly gives his captors the slip and pays a visit to Valerie (Yvonne De Carlo) who runs a high end brothel. The minutes long sequence does little to advance the narrative as it serves as nothing more than providing a helpful contact name, Art Keefer (Ralph Taeger). It’s one of TDF’s needless tangents before Kim Stacy’s brazen apartment intrusion on a barely towel-clad Morgan. The pair embarks on their undercover assignment with new names, a quick wedding ceremony and covert arrival in Nuevo Cadiz.

Morgan’s luck at the hotel craps table is sidetracked by a distracting sub-plot of helping jetsetter Lisa Gordot (the supremely lovely Diane McBain) off of the island, she an unwillingly girlfriend to one of its several crooked lawmen. Complications ensue when Morgan and Kim endanger night club singer Rosa (Spillane’s real life wife, Sherri Spillane, in her feature debut) who also works as a portal for obtaining a radio transmitter and informant confidant. Betwixt attempts on their lives with booby trapped television sets, eavesdropping devices and outright gun battles, the duo manage to set up a plan to extract the imprisoned Sable.

The entire mid-section of TDF is rife with sometimes confusing motivations and implausible moments thanks to the aforementioned weighty screenplay. All the while Kim and Morgan grow closer and, for better or worse, know they’re facing overwhelming odds. Nevertheless, Morgan is driven by reconciling who really stole the $40 million and more so, perhaps, the challenge of rescuing Sable from the notoriously secure prison.

As a ruse, he convinces prison security he can deliver over a pound of heroin that will be administered to prisoners, rendering them into cooperative and dependant addicts. It’s a complicated compound, but Morgan manages to extract his target with the help of a turncoat guard. A plane with Kim waits, but not before an ensuing car chase and fire fight gets in their way. It’s not until the final moments when Morgan learns who masterminded the robbery (somewhat telegraphed early on). How, though, will he escape the clutches of the Feds once airborne? Oh, fret not dear friends. Morgan will find a way!

TDF was directed by Hollywood veteran Tay Garnett who also wrote the overloaded screenplay, a man whose career dates back to the silent era. Garnett spent the first half of his profession directing A-list talents such as Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, John Garfield (THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE) and dozens of other name above the title stars. In the mid-‘50s he switched almost entirely to directing television shows and amassed a huge resume in that medium. TDF was the aging auteur’s exclusive return to feature films. He’d direct two more low budget efforts, Pacific International’s CHALLENGE TO BE FREE and Howco’s TIMBER TRAMPS, before retiring. In TDF it’s plainly obvious he understood the visual necessities and coverage required, but one can’t help sensing he probably wished he was back on an MGM soundstage with Harlow, Gable and Wallace Beery filming CHINA SEAS. Credit is due for the final reel car chase that hints at the comedic. The relentlessly fast and silly pursuit in some ways gives us a glimpse at Garnett’s earliest movie days as a gag writer for Mack Sennett and Hal Roach.

TDF’s music score is shared by veteran Raoul Kraushaar and Howard Danziger. It’s mentioned here as this is Danziger’s sole film music work. While deciphering who wrote what would require extensive research, the resulting cues and pre-title theme are generally pluses throughout.

The completed TDF landed at Continental Distributing, the theatrical distribution arm of the Walter Reade Organization whose most notable release is NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Its domestic playdates were scattered and unnoticed and was eventually relegated to a Continental television syndication package carrying the company’s Medallion TV logo. Happily, it retains the WRO logo’s musical signature, an all-time fave of yours truly.

TDF struggles to keep as much of Spillane’s storytelling style intact. Alas, its pinched budget couldn’t possibly allow all of its intricacies to be adequately played out. Why an experienced writer and director like Garnett didn’t streamline the narrative is anyone’s guess. He had to have known there were too many spoons trying to stir in the same bowl. Along with Spillane, the Internet Movie Database lists the great Raoul Walsh(!) as an uncredited writer. If true, it’s a stunning revelation I chose to ignore.

Still, TDF moderately succeeds as an entertaining movie thanks to its non-stop spirit and thoroughly invested cast. Even with is overall rocky cadence and self-disruptive attempts for sinister intrigue, we can still cheer that Morgan the Raider is somewhere out there making other’s lives difficult…including his own.

Happy Birthday

Mickey Spillane!