The Candy Snatchers - A definitive cult classicMay 22 '02 (Updated Aug 25 '02) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Sleazy, downbeat and depressing, The Candy Snatchers is a classic and conclusively typical example of the utter grime which issued from The Grindhouse in the early 70's.
Pros: Irrefutably, a cult classic, The Candy Snatchers did much to define grindhouse Film in 1973. Cons: Sobering, judgmental movie classically exploits the misery against which it perceives itself as arguing. Recommended: Yes ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ‘cult n. ...3.intense interest in and devotion to a person, idea or activity. 4. the person, idea, etc., arousing such devotion. 5. any popular fashion; craze.’ ‘I’m not a cu[l]t, you know?’ I recently read an article which defined ‘Cult’ as ‘a debased euphemism for ‘any film grossing less than its catering costs’’ and I’d concur with the view that to overuse words is to demean them. The word genius, for example, used to confer upon its subject an extraordinary and unique distinction, it now seems more like a tawdry metaphor for either mere financial success or individual eccentricity. As with ‘Cult’, a word, perhaps, whose meaning for film writers has become more than a little, if not cheapened, then certainly more vague. ‘Cult’ Film, etymologically, is that which inspires a cult of followers or advocates into appreciation and fandom. ‘Cult’ movies once enjoyed a rather vaunted status as a result of being perceived as esoteric in nature -to appreciate ‘Cult’ film is on one level to belong to a society or subculture- though in reality, to be a film cultist is nothing more than to share certain tastes with certain other people. Cult movies -such as Night of the Living Dead- may be extraordinarily important, seminal works which initiate entire cinematic traditions. Just as comfortably, -as with The Candy Snatchers- they may simply represent a classic staple work, which evokes a certain era. Cult movies can be great -Star Wars- or they can be really, really bad -Plan 9 From Outer Space. What and whichsoever a ‘cult’ film is, it distinguishes itself enough to accumulate legion followers of devout deference and -sometimes worryingly intense- obsession. Afterbirth of an Era As the seventies dawned everything had been blown wide apart. A three year orgy of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll vaporized in a bitter, apocalyptic explosion of political agitation, psychosis and brutal violence. The party was over and as the backlash began to bite in, hard, the corollary cultural explosion reflected a new and cynical mood. Just as surely as punk rock would come to replace folk and psych as the leading musical trend of the day, filmic appetites sought to be sated by an increasing profusion of extreme and hardcore material. Gone were the days of the lightweight nudie cuties, beach pics and head films, -the floodgates to the dark side had effectively been opened and an appropriate slew of degrading sleaze was about to pour forth. As stag-film penetrated the overground, a tapestry of increasingly extreme hardcore pornography -from the relatively tame; Debbie Does Dallas and Deep Throat, to the bizarre; Waterpower, Collie Sex, to the just plain worrying; Hard Gore, Forced Entry- back lit an unprecedented era in licentious film making. Perhaps, the most prominent talismans of this sea-change are 1971’s Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange -both works by major directors on correspondingly major budgets, these were the titans who ushered in a new era of unprecedented cinematic cruelty and violence. All envelopes on every kind of acceptability had evidently been shredded to pieces and the exploitation moguls and splatter-hacks were there in their thousands, ready as ever to make a fast buck off of the next big thing -which in this case was to provide more repulsion, more outrage and more gruesome thrills and spills for jaded audiences. The scene had come indoors from the drive-in; it was in the arena of the ‘grindhouse’ that the explosion would take place, and this cavalcade of depravity was to become manifest in many different ways: -The Zombie Movie saw a principally Italian contingent take George A.Romero’s premise and up the explicit gore quotient to provide us with such memorable works as Zombie and The Beyond. -The Il Sadiconazista (which is to my mind among the most objectionable of the virulent strands of filth that defined this era) took a staple exploitation mold of sex, violence, brutality and degradation and set the action within the confines of a WWII Nazi P.O.W. camp; among the more memorable examples of this genre are the Ilsa franchise, S.S. Experiment Camp and Gestapo’s Last Orgy. -The Mondo Film, effectively the offspring of Franco Prosperi’s seminal Mondo Cane took real and -more often than not- faked documentary footage of the weird, wonderful and macabre and deluded itself into thinking it provided viewers with educational content alongside the sleaze and horror on offer. This cycle becoming increasing morbid, issued in the Faces of Death series and perhaps reached a high watermark of tastelessness in Nick Bougas’ Death Scenes I + II and M. Dixon Causey’s True Gore. -The Cannibal Film, melded elements of the Mondo Film (invariably unpalatable animal cruelty footage and the exploitation of indigenous Amazon tribes) with tacky sex and violence storylines and brought us such respectively memorable and forgettable flicks as Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox. Last House on the Left - The First Film of Many Yet another substratum was film taking an unusually prurient and lingering look at abduction and rape. It was to this canon that two of the most infamous, feared and universally reviled films in modern cinema were to be entered: I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Wes Craven’s influential debut, 1972’s Last House on the Left. While such revered critics as Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were each naming and shaming these respective works in the most vituperative of terms, the public held their arms wide open. Grossing $1,553,392 within six months and shooting to No. 3 on the Variety chart for December 1973 -as a double-feature with S.F. Brownrigg’s Don’t Look in the Basement- Last House on the Left was making a lot of money - the double-bill itself took over a million in two weeks. For 1972, its financial success was staggering and unsurprisingly it was not long before a raft of imitators was trying to ape its winning formula. If the seventies exploitation barons were prepared to go to whatever lengths necessary to rip off their ardent public, that’s nothing compared to instantaneity with which they were prepared to rip off each other. The most blatant of the ripoffs was the Italian (yes, they got everywhere) 1974 remake Last Train of the Night. Lifting every major plot point and transferring the action to a trans-Europe express train Aldo Lado’s shocker distinguishes itself as really nasty material by the gratuitous inclusions of a knife-rape and -arguably yet more painful- a god awful Denis Roussos drivelling, saccharine theme song. While some of the imitators seemed ‘inspired’ by the premise -Ruggero Deodato’s House on the Edge of the Park, and TV movie Death Weekend, for example, many followers were just as content to cash in on the legendary title and poster artwork. Offenders included, 1977’s Last House on Dead End Street, and Prosperi’s Last House on the Beach. The most audacious though, especially considering neither film bore even a passing resemblance to Last House on the Left, had to be Mario Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve -retitled Last House on the Left part II- and Sean MacGregor’s Devil Times Five -retitled Horrible House on the Hill and which helped itself to the promotional artwork, replacing ‘It’s Only a Movie!’ with ‘It Can’t Happen To Me!’. Another example, among many, of the films to steal this idea (Last House.. itself was not even the first: the tag line having been adapted from HG Lewis’s Color Me Blood Red and William Castle’s Straight Jacket both 1964) was The Candy Snatchers. Released in 1973, less than a year after the premiere of Craven’s movie this sweaty and disturbing film helped itself to a little of its forbear’s action by unceremoniously duping the latter film’s promotional typography and artwork and providing what was deemed to be the appropriate measure of cynicism for its time. The end result is a film not wholly dissimilar, in tone and content. The Candy Snatchers - A Cult Classic The Candy Snatchers, -a deeply grime-ingrained, downbeat bummer of a flick- earns its special place in the hearts of thousands of grindhouse cultists by its unrelentingly bleak and sordid worldview. Rehashing the abduction angle and providing a typically depressing vision here is arch exploitation which as much defines the grindhouse mold as enjoin with it. Candy is a sixteen year old Catholic schoolgirl. On her way home one sunny afternoon she is abducted by a gang -siblings Alan and Jessie and big Eddy- and bundled into a van. They blindfold, bind and gag her and take her to a hilltop where they bury her alive, a pipe supplies her only oxygen. Unbeknownst to this gang of hoodlums their deeds have been witnessed by a local mute boy. As he tries to alert his mother to what has happened, the boy is hailed around, beaten and generally terrorized. The plot thickens: Candy’s stepfather is a successful jeweller and it is in ‘ice’ that the kidnappers want the ransom paid, the only trouble, is that he won’t pay up. The gang then exhume her and stash her in a derelict house. There are nasty scenes in which the kidnappers argue over who gets the privilege of slicing Candy’s ear off -to show they mean business- and a slavering Eddy comes close to raping her -while the other two bribe a morgue attendant for a dead ear, after all. Incestuous undertones are evinced in Alan and Jessie’s relationship and following a malicious, verbal emasculation by the shrewish Jessie, Eddy rapes her instead. In a bone-chilling turn of events Candy’s adulterous stepdad curtly enlightens the kidnappers as to their domestic situation; that her millionaire father died only two years hence, leaving Candy as the sole heir to his fortune and it is because of this that he has taken up with Candy’s booze-addled mom. Should anything happen to Candy, half of those millions will belong to him and so it with all the best wishes in the world that he sends them on their way to kill her. Tiffany Bolling, as Jessie, is supremely attractive. An effective juxtaposition of the archetypally beautiful chiselled blonde in a role of malicious and irrevocable turpitude; Jessie shocks not so much by her actions in themselves, but that they are perpetrated by an example of the paradigm of superficially accepted American beauty. Brad David, as Alan, comes across as weaselly and snide yet remains largely ineffective -perhaps in obeisance to Jessie’s sexually original power and Eddy’s physical might. The sweating, sadistic lunk of gristle that Eddy represents is awful and is powerfully played by Vincent Martorano. An indubitably convoluted role, Eddy, reprehensible beyond doubt in view of his raping, nevertheless expresses what seems like real concern over the welfare of Candy; in this respect he is the only character -other than the sympathetically portrayed mute child- who evinces but a fraction of virtue: that it transpires this is pursuant to his seduction of the poor girl only serves to slather yet another hefty dose of black hearted cynicism all over the piece. It is cynicism, after all, in which this dark movie is steeped. From first reel to last, the unforgiving world into which Candy -not even reluctantly- must grow up, is painted as utterly mean and needlessly cruel. Candy is the quintessential symbol of utmost purity, her aggressors the embodiment of evil. Comparison to Mean Streets -contemporaneous and perhaps the most essential work of, arguably, America’s greatest living director, Martin Scorsese- illumines the trash origin, nature and ultimate end of The Candy Snatchers; it is in those exact terms however, that a fruitful evaluation must be realized, to place this curious work in the ‘Cult’ tradition. Grindhouse Cultism - An Incongruous Juxtaposition? How then, does a cinematic tradition founded on and perpetrating badness -of spirit, of quality and of intention- acquire a ‘cult’ following? My feeling is that it, in part at least, derives from nostalgia; if retrospect is always 20.20, hindsight is often viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. Just as the drive-in movies of the fifties have earned a fond reception by film cultists harking back to ‘better times’, so it is with the ‘grindhouse’. Urban decentralization has meant that the inner city fleapits have gradually been ousted, replaced by sixteen screen behemoth multiplexes in unreal developments populated by factory outlet stores and supermarkets the size of aeroplane hangars. An analogous transition is to be found in the current tidal wave of DVD Video, -which the cigar chewing profiteers no doubt hoped would come to replace everybody’s video collections- there are now fervent collectors of original release VHS. Exactly because it’s old and may one day be outmoded, it’s collectibility and cult favor has soared -as, of course, in some cases has its commercial value, in Britain especially where the advent of the Video Recordings Act has made it practically impossible to ever obtain some of the titles. A curious co-incidence sees many of the rarest and most valuable of these videos, as having violated audiences throughout the seventies in its exploitation boom -Grim Reaper, Last House.., Island of Death and theCannibal and Il Sadiconazista cycles representing but a fraction. If this appreciation can be accounted for by cosy nostalgia I believe it can be reckoned by a cultural index too. Never before, nor since was there such an era of cinematic liberalism. Times were, that minimal funding could be received by a couple of unknown goons to make a genre film, which in all likelihood had the potential to make everyone involved a whole heap of dough. The reason for this ease of facilitation...? The distribution companies (distribution is the costliest aspect of film making by long way) were the companies financing the production of the films, so if you managed to receive enough money you couldn’t go wrong: the distribution deal was incorporated into the production deal, so if they liked your idea you were in business from the get go. The system these days could not be more antithetical: you have to pitch your idea to a major producer who has total authority over final cut and whose millions are not going to be risked on an edgy idea. If somehow your pitch, like a needle in a haystack, manages to capture someone’s imagination you then must surmount the nightmare of compromising every one of your heartfelt ideas and ideals. If you can withstand all this without going insane then it isn’t even guaranteed that anyone will get to see your film anyway, because the distribution deal is a separate issue (chances are not having a deal stymied your pitch in the first place). The end result of this monstrous way to run an industry -founded on greed and battery production of bland, homogenized pap- is a glut of empty, formulaic, derivative films branded by Jerry Bruckheimer and a world in which the science of merchandizing a movie like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace comes before the simple convention of hobbling together a semi-coherent script. Glimmers of hope are evinced every once in a while, -recently notable are the works such as Memento, Magnolia and Requiem for a Dream- but far too often great artists such as Martin Scorsese are trammelled by overbearing philistines like Harvey Weinstein, while talentless hacks such as Russel Crowe take all the glory for, frankly, mediocre performances. Meanwhile in the more extreme arena, video chancers like Max Raven and Hugh Gallagher persist in trying their luck, but it’s just not the same. When the now is as abysmally grim as this, is it any wonder we look back to where we once belonged? © Alexander Moss May 22nd 2002 Topicality Disclaimer: Though in the above review I have tried to identify the criteria which determine the placement of this film within the ’cult’ tradition, this is not meant to read as a substantive answer to the query ‘What is a Cult Movie?’... It is merely a review of one movie which enjoys cult status among devotees of a specific time in American cinema. Contribution of a prior film review precludes my entering this review in ‘Suggest Products’ and thus, as this item is not currently listed elsewhere in the Epinions Database; I have submitted it here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ REFERENCES - FURTHER READING -Wes Craven's Last House on the Left by David A. Szulkin - ISBN 0-952926-00-8 -The Psychotronic Video Guide by Michael J Weldon - ISBN 1-85286-770-1 -Killing for Culture by David Kerekes and David Slater - ISBN 1-871592-20-8  |
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