THE MONSTER AND THE STRIPPER

1968/Director: Ron Ormond/Writer: Ron Ormond

Cast: Ron Ormond, Tim Ormond, Peggy Anne Price, Sleepy LaBeef, Georgette Dante, Ronald Drake,  Jack Horton,  Pauletta Leeman, Harris Martin

AKA: THE EXOTIC ONES

As hard as it may be for the uninitiated neophyte to conceive there is a class of “cult”* film makers whose technical skill and dubious vision are on a lower rung of the film making ladder than even Ed Wood, Jr.. In fact the title “worst filmmaker of all time” has never really been suitable for Ed Wood, Jr. since there are moments in his films that show some degree of craftsmanship. Of course I am talking apples and oranges here, okay. Tim Burton made an embellished biopic of Wood’s life and career of the technical nature Wood himself could never imagine and I could not imagine myself trying to argue that Woods is a better film maker than Burton. But better does not mean more fun in a kooky sense of course.  Burton could make a film that is an homage to bad film making but could never make a film as genuinely bad as Jailbait . Why you ask? Okay, maybe you didn’t ask but pretend you did. Because when Ed Wood, Jr. made Jail Bait or Plan 9 from Outer Space he was trying to make a good film and fell short of the mark. It is the failing to reach the lofty goals of a mediocre film maker that makes Plan 9 so wonderful. I still find most of Wood’s catalog pretty deserving of being watched over when there is nothing else to do with life. I can dust the house or watch Bride of the Monster again. Not a tough decision for me folks.

But in an even more remote and frozen orbit from the world of conventional film making are a band of true outsiders that churned out what are often called Z-Films. If B-Movies refer to films made outside the normal system of film production, distribution and politics of Hollywood on super low budgets with less known actors then Z-Films represent a world even outside the rules and codes of B-Movies and their arcane creators and unknown casts constitute a veritable sub-culture of film making. I doubt anyone sets out to make a “Grade Z Classic” the way Ted V. Mikels did with The Astro -Zombies or Al Adamson did with Dracula vs. Frankenstein but somewhere events beyond reasonable human control (such as the collective lack of any film making talent on the part of the entire cast and crew) come into play. And yet there is something genuinely entertaining about the films of folks like Ray Dennis Steckler, aka Cash Flagg, and even Herschell Gordon Lewis that can provide a certain portion of the population a sound evening of pseudo-surreal film watching. One could argue that this same said portion of the population is in desperate need of shock therapy or even lobotomies but that brings the subject matter a little too close to home to make me feel comfortable. So lets move on and discuss a truly odd film I had the masochistic pleasure of watching recently called The Monster and the Stripper, aka The Exotic Ones by the eccentric Ron Ormond.

* I do not like the term cult movie much lately as it is overused these days but is still most applicable at times. It has become a way to sell unsalable DVDs is all and the term has lost some of the categorical usefulness it once possessed. I long ago removed it as a category description here at the Cafe.

Like many other film makers of his selective ilk Ron Ormand’s personal and professional life followed a course much like one of his eclectic films.  If you are really interested there is a ten page write up on the man and his films from an article that appeared in Michael J. Weldon’s Pyschotronic Video Magazine. One of these days I am going to begin some posts that provide mini-bios of the lives of influential Uranium charged film makers and I will use info from the above essay to give an overview of Ormond’s life. I know you can’t wait that long and ten pages is way too much to read of the cuff so I will try to give a very rough sketch from the info I have lying here next to me. He was born in 1910 as Vittorio Di Naro and changed his name to Ron Ormond because of the influence of mystic Ormand McGill on his life. Ron Ormond had a fascination with things mysterious or religious and even spent nearly a year in India with McGill researching and writing the book Mysteries of the Orient. McGill and Ormand would collaborate on some other books, that would probably be found in the occult section of a bookstore, with titles like The Master Method of Hypnosis, The Art of Meditation and The Magical Pendulum of the Orient. Later in life Ormand’d religious leanings would take a more Southern Evangelical slant when, after surviving a plane crash, be became born again and followed the hell fire and brimstone preaching of the Reverend Estus W. Pirkle.

Ormand’s contributions to the world of film began to be more substantial when he began working with cowboy star Lash Larue (so named because of the bullwhip the black clad good guy used in his buts with bad guys) in the late 40’s and 50’s. He produced and wrote many of the Larue and other B-Western films of the time for his Western Adventure Inc. production company. He married June Carr and later little Timmy Ormand was born. The times changed and so did Ron and June Ormand’s film making ventures. In the mid to late sixties they churned out a handful of low budget exploitation style films that seem to belong in a little niche all their own. While most people may have never heard of Please Don’t Touch and Untamed Mistress I hope that they will be a little familiar with Mesa of Lost Women, featuring some of the old Ed Wood Jr. entourage such as Delores Fuller and Lyle Talbot (doing the narration).

Ormand’s film direction took still another bizarre twist when after the aforementioned near fatal plane crash he began making Christian propaganda films for Estus W. Pirkle with titles like The Burning Hell and If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? He died in 1981 and like many exploitation style film makers his work remained lost until VHS and DVD brought them to a level of popularity he never knew, nor expected to receive,  during his living years. I have seen Mesa of Lost Women a couple times and am trying to download If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? (Jeremiah 12:5) and Please Don’t Touch Me but the film I just watched and the one this post is about is The Monster and the Stripper and seems to be the film he is most remembered for, alongside Mesa of Lost Women. The title is certainly enticing and it is also known under the less provocative title The Exotic Ones. The film is like that line from Ghost World when the character Rebecca says “Its so bad its good” and the totally cynical Enid responds with “Actually it so bad that’s its gone past good and back to bad again”.

Like I said, the title is enticing and sounds pretty sleazy but the movie had me using the fast forward often, which is something I seldom do. I was aghast to discover that some people to churn out posts on a daily basis actually fast forward through the film just to get to a review on it. I actually enjoy the fare I watch and tend to do more rewinding and if the film is unwatchable I eject it. The problem with TMATS is that some scenes are fairly watchable Z-Grade material, at least for people to prefer root canals with little anesthesia or think Ed Wood Jr. may have actually been possessed of some sort of genius. The problem really is the dance sequence that are too many and go on too long, sometimes one after the other just filling up reels. They are of the Tease-o-Rama type variety and in small doses could be fun but after a while they really become simply way too boring. What I want to see in a film like this is lots of cheesy acting and corny dialog and goofy monsters. And yes, plump, pastie teasing dancing girls in a sleazy strip club as well of course but it is all just filler here obviously.

The film opens up with shots of New Orleans and the type of over the credit narration that is supposed to give the film a sort of mondo, true life feel. That’s you are about to be exposed to the sights and sounds of some hidden under belly of life in America that few people even know exist, much less have ever witnessed. Soon however we are transported into the less than murky and grimy interiors of Nemo’s Strip Club, run by said Nemo who is played by shade wearing Ron Ormond himself and billed as Vic Narno. His business partner is played by June Ormond and some of the dialog exchanges between consist of them staring into the camera and mouthing a line then cutting to a scene where the other, looking into the camera, reacts. June Ormond sometimes keeps slipping glances into the camera as she is talking and even seems to wink or nod to the camera and it is a little odd. Nemo’s business is slowing down due to competition on the strip he is working and in one scene he has his goons pour a spittoon over the head of a toothless rival who owes him some money. He is watched constantly by what must be a vice cop (Ronald Drake) who wears a goofy straw hat and spews out patronizing advice to one nice girl, Effie, who, in his opinion, does belong in this ratty business. She is played by Peggy Anne Price and she simply wants to be a singer and we are treated to a couple performances of her doing a sort of poor man’s Pasty Cline that are pretty hayseed sounding and do not seem to fit in a burlesque type club. His main dancer is the garishly eye-lined Titania (Georgette Dante, a real live exotic show girl who stayed friends with the Ormands long after the film) who is rotund and arrogant and becomes jealous of good girl Effie stealing a little of the lime light from her.

But Narno needs more to draw in customers and on the suggestion of his right hand man Marty (Jack Horton), who looks like he owes every Elvis record ever made, they decides to go into the swamps and bayous around New Orleans and capture the “Swamp Thing” that has been recently killing off hillbillies (or swampbillies) and ripping the heads off livestock. They figure this is just the sort of thing people will money to come in and gawk at. They hire a swamp kid named Timmy (Timmy Ormand and I ahve a picture on my hard-drive of this kid in the wildest high-waters you have ever seen and will  get that up when I do my Ron Ormond post someday) as their guide and the group of four men are soon whittled down to two by the Swamp Thing, a cave man looking brute played by rockabilly singer an guitar player Sleepy LaBeef (some MP3 samples at the end of the post) who lives under piles of Spanish moss. One of the best scenes in the film is when the Swamp Thing rips the arm off one of the hunters and beats the man to death with his own arm. Okay, I thought it was one of the best scenes anyway. There is some irony to this scene actually since the man beat to death was Cecil Scaife who was a PR man for Sun Records and at the time working with Columbia Records. So happens Sleepy LaBeefe (called Sleepy because of his droopy eye lid) was a Columbia recording artist. The dialog and acting in this sequence are simply the “best’ in the film. Anyway, they catch the Swamp Thing, with a hypo-gun I think, and take him back to the Strip Club. The local police seem to have no interest in the fact that a murderous swamp beast has been captured and soon he is on stage rattling the cage bars as the audience stares in shock. Timmy is the only person the monster connects with, for some reason we never understand, and as well he has a monster style crush on good crooner Effie. Naturally the bad girl Titania gets on his bad side when she does her fire act and torments him with fire. In one scene the Swamp Thing bites the neck of real chicken and lets the blood drain over his body. Some trivia here is that the 6’7 Sleepy did not have the heart to actually kill the chicken and so Georgette Dante (Titania in case you forgot) wrung it’s neck off camera and flung it back to Sleepy.

After a pretty disappointingly non-sexy cat fight between Effie and Titania the monster escapes and kills Titiana then terrifies a bunch of dancing girls who all look like they’re laughing at the lumbering, loin cloth wearing Sleepy LaBeef, who is supposed to a pretty funny and hospitable good ol’ boy in real life. The beast then squishes the skull of Narno while the vice cop in the straw hat just watches, with gun in hand, and winches. In the next scene we are told that the monster escaped and no ones knows where it is. Guess it just walked down Bourbon Street and back to the swamps without causing any commotion. The film ends with another Russ Myersesque narration about life in New Orleans. The film actually did rather well meaning it probably broken even) on the drive-in circuit where June Ormond arranged autograph sessions with the dancers (including of course Titania) and other cast members in the concessions area. Not that the Ormonds saw much of the returns on this or any of their  60′s  films and soon the shady dealings of the exploitation film business, along with his near fatal plane crash (he may have been the pilot of the small private plane),  all contributed to his conversion to Southern style Christianity and his very bizarre film work with the Rev. Estus W. Pirkle. Happy to report that I finally got in a watchable copy of the apocalyptic If Footmen Tire You What will Horses Do? More on that stuff another day. And lastly I have included a couple MP3 tracks from country swamp rocker Sleepy LaBeef himself, taken from his own website.

MP3 SAMPLES FROM SLEEPY LABEEF

JAMBALAYA

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 7:53 am and is filed under American Horror, Camp and Cheese Classic, Exploitation, Music-MP3s . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.