Big Bad Mama (1974)

          In his autobiography Up Till Now—well, one of his many autobiographies, that is—the incomparable William Shatner derides this Roger Corman-produced action flick as Big Bad Movie, which isn’t fair. Sure, Big Bad Mama is yet another Corman rip-off of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), but it’s a hoot. Campy, funny, sexy, and violent, the picture has just about everything you might want from a silly drive-in flick. Set in the Depression era, the story follows tough Texan Wilma McClatchie (Angie Dickinson), who’s having trouble paying the bills with her small-scale bootlegging operation. When she meets a charismatic bank robber, Fred Diller (Tom Skerritt), she embarks on a new career as a machine-gun-toting thief, abetted not only by Fred but also by her two sexy daughters and, eventually, by dandy-ish con man William J. Baxter (Shatner).

          The plot meanders because too many characters are involved, and it’s odd that Wilma’s the lead character but not actually the leader of her gang, but this sort of picture is all about creating a badass vibe and presenting exciting events. Wilma gets to spout power-to-the-people propaganda while she’s robbing wealthy people—yes, this is one of those soft-edged crime pictures in which the heroine just wants to make enough money to care for her family—and the movie offers a steady stream of sex scenes and shootouts.

          Regarding those sex scenes, one of the reasons Big Bad Mama has enjoyed a long life on home video is that Dickinson appears in the altogether during a pair of scenes, including a yowza full-frontal reveal. Since Big Bad Mama was released the same year Dickinson’s TV series Police Womandebuted, the movie captures her beauty at just the moment she enjoyed her greatest notoriety. Corman has speculated that Dickinson did the risqué scenes because she had reached her early 40s and wanted to prove she was still sexy, a classic Corman justification for exploiting an actress if ever there was one.

          As to why Shatner considers the movie a stinker, one can only speculate that he didn’t like getting upstaged by Dickinson’s body or that he didn’t like playing a ridiculous coward of a character. In any event, Corman and his cheerful accomplices, including reliable B-movie helmer Steve Carver, deliver the goods in Big Bad Mama, but not gracefully—the story sputters through awkward rhythms even as the screen fills with vivid vignettes. FYI, Dickinson reprised her Wilma McLatchie role in the poorly received sequel Big Bad Mama II (1987), also produced by Corman but helmed by sleaze-cinema hack Jim Wynorski instead of original director Carver.

Big Bad Mama: FUNKY

Chariots of the Gods (1970) & The Outer Space Connection (1975) & Mysteries of the Gods (1976)

          The notion that space aliens visited Earth in the distant past was the stuff of science fiction (and Scientology) until Swiss author Eric Von Däniken published his blockbuster book Chariots of the Gods? in 1968. Utilizing a sexy mix of conjecture, factoids, and pseudoscience, Von Däniken argued that because ancient civilizations accomplished seemingly impossible tasks (for example, building the Pyramids), “ancient astronauts” must have provided extraterrestrial assistance. Although considered a joke by the scientific community, Von Däniken’s book was quickly adapted into a German documentary movie, which was then re-dubbed into English and released in America as Chariots of the Gods—without the question mark, a telling detail. While it’s easy to imagine the movie thrilling audiences during an era rich with drugs and existentialism, Chariots of the Gods is thoroughly ridiculous, and quite dull, when viewed today.

          Comprising National Geographic-type footage of various locations around the globe, the movie is driven by wall-to-wall narration and cheap-sounding electronic music. The following excerpt from the narration captures the movie’s loopy perspective: “Hardly more than a thousandth of these ancient sources has given up its secrets. Moreover, what has been decoded calls for careful study to determine just what verifiable facts they contain. We should no longer permit ourselves to dismiss accounts of sky vehicles and traveling deities as sheer imagination.” In other words, who needs proof when we’ve got exciting theories? Things get really silly when literal interpretations of the Bible are offered as evidence of alien technology—what if Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by the world’s first nuclear bombs? At its worst, Chariots of the Gods succumbs to childish mental exercises: “If you multiply the height of the pyramid by 1 billion, it equals almost exactly the distance from the earth to the sun—a mere coincidence?”

          Chariots of the Gods was re-edited, and given a new Rod Serling narration track, to become a 1973 TV special called In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and Serling also narrated the 1975 theatrical documentary The Outer Space Connection. Dry and meandering, the movie rehashes ideas from Chariots of the Godsand wanders into other puzzlers that captured the popular imagination in the ’70s, including the Bermuda Triangle. Serling’s vocal work is as robustly eerie here as it was during his Twilight Zonedays, but the parade of unanswered questions and vague insinuations gets boring. At its goofiest, The Outer Space Connection features an interview with some beardy scientist who claims “It’s very possible that pyramid energy could be used to preserve tissues over extended periods of time, such as long space travel or cloning purposes.” Following The Outer Space Connection, yet another Chariots-inspired doc hit screens later in 1975, titled Mysteries from Beyond Earth and hosted by Hollywood actor Lawrence Dobkin, but that picture has mostly disappeared, probably for good reason.

          In terms of sheer kitsch, the most enjoyable “ancient astronauts” doc is Mysteries of the Gods—or, to cite the full title that reveals the movie’s secret ingredient—William Shatner’s Mysteries of the Gods. Yes, our beloved Captain Kirk leads the search for evidence that little green men once bivouacked on Earth. Originally filmed as a German documentary titled Botschaft der Götter (which was based on a Chariots sequel book by Von Däniken), the picture was refurbished for American audiences by adding Shatner’s narration and several long scenes of Shatner interviewing “experts” about life beyond our planet. The combination of Shatner’s campy performance style and the film’s low-rent electronic music makes Mysteries of the Gods entertaining despite the movie’s dubious assertions. Wearing tacky ’70s fashions, Shatner strolls around places like the Kennedy Space Center, listening to outlandish claims that alien visitations explain the Big Bang and the development of the human brain.

          In the movie’s most unintentionally hilarious scene, Shatner visits a woman who discovered a “crystal skull” among Mayan ruins. “We’ve used the modern airplane to come and see something very ancient, the crystal skull—it’s ominous, it’s awesome,” Shatner intones dramatically. Then, once he’s got the artifact in his hands, he says, “I’m trying to put myself back in time and space, back to when the skull was used for religious ceremonies. Can you describe to me [dramatic pause] how it was used?” By the time Shatner’s chatting with psychic Jeanne Dixon—who says that absolutely, definitely, for sure aliens will visit Earth in August 1977—Mysteries of the Gods has achieved liftoff as a masterpiece of reckless bullshit. Although the “ancient astronauts” genre is still going strong, with projects including occasional revivals of the Chariots of the Godsfranchise, nothing will ever capture the sheer ’70s-ness of the fad better than Shatner’s stupefying spectacle.

Chariots of the Gods: LAME

The Outer Space Connection: LAME

Mysteries of the Gods: FUNKY