Normally I wait three risings of the sun to take on a review of this magnitude,but Misquamacus will have it no other way.We ring the weekend in here at the Wop with William Girdler's ninth and final film,his personal Star Wars,if Star Wars had a topless Jewess on a hospital bed floating in space shooting laser beams out of her hands at an Indian midget in front of a blue screen in it.Huh???Oh yeah,The Manitou asks the viewer to take in a whole helluva lot before it's over.Adapted for the big screen from a novel by Graham Masterson,the film boasts of quite a cast of characters,including Girdler regulars Jon Cedar and Michael Ansara,who turns the Indian up to eleven here,free of the ethnic jabs he faced from Leslie Nielsen in Day of the Animals(1977),Burgess Meredith,Stella Stevens,50's tv sweetheart Ann Sothern,Susan Strasberg,Tony Curtis as a psychic(!!),and Felix "Twiki" Silla as a reincarnated Indian medicine man foetus(!!!).Girdler's largest budgeted picture was also a big hit in theaters,apparently.I didn't go to see it back then,I wouldn't have appreciated the monumental levels of hokum found here the way I currently do.Make no mistakes,this movie sucks,but in ways no movie has ever sucked before or eaten the big one since.
See you in the fall,Mrs. Herz!
Harry Erskine(Curtis)is a two bit psychic chiseler with a fake moustache and Merlin robe who cons gullible old ladies with his Tarot deck,fifty bucks at a time,when he's not boogieing to disco,pouring beers incorrectly,or butchering the tongue of native American tribes.An ex-flame,Karen(Strasberg),calls him with a problem she's recently developed at the base of her neck.Well,it's less of a problem and more of a malignant tumor.Actually,it's not a tumor,it's a foetus.But it ain't just your average,ordinary,everyday neck foetus,it's a four hundred year old Indian medicine man trying to be reborn into the world.Erskine finds this out after Karen whispers "Pana witchy salatu!" in her post-coital sleep,and one of Erskine's geryatric rubes repeats the same phrase before doing a makeshift raindance,levitating herself down the hallway,and doing a head first flopper down the steps,killing herself.Karen's doctor,Hughes(Cedar),finds this out when he tries to surgically remove the lump which psychokinetically forces him to slice his own hand with the scalpel in the operating room.Erskine holds a seance with his occult buddies,and an Indian head rises out of the coffee table,speaking through Mrs. Karmann(Sothern),a medium."Pana witchy salatu!" again,or panny witchy solutu,if you listen to Erskine.The psychic and gang then turn to anthropological expert Dr. Snow(Meredith) for answers,and the scatterbrained old gent points them towards hiring an authentic Indian medicine man to fight the red-skinned burden growing on his lover's neck.
After seeing rushes of the final effects sequence,Karen(Strasberg) screams her fool head off.
Erskine turns to John Singing Rock(Ansara),who normally waits three risings of the sun to do a job like this,but signs on immediately after berating the white man with the Brooklyn yiddish accent,and the promise of tobacco.After sprinkling sand around Karen's hospital bed and knocking some feathery bones together,the foetus tells Singing Rock through Karen that he is indeed Misquamacus,the most powerful medicine man ever,or Mixmaster,if you listen to Erskine.After pulling himself out of some latex on Karen's back,we see that not only is he the most powerful shaman to ever live,but he's an adorable midget with two different colored eyes,just like David Bowie!No wonder Shorty's got such an attitude.Through ancient Indian rear projection techniques,the mixmaster calls forth a giant lizard/man-in-a-lizard-suit-on-all-fours demon to bite Dr. Hughes on the hand,which he rushes to wrap in gauze,and looks moderately painful.That'll fucking show him who he's fucking with,huh.The pint-sized Pocahontas is just warming up though.He freezes the whole hospital floor(and a nurse),tears the skin off an orderly,then turns Karen's room into a sort of groovy seventies planetarium with some psychedelic throbbing plasma projected behind him.Oh yeah,that's the Devil.When Singing Rock's feathery bones prove no match for the little guy,the "Holy Fuck!" sequence of the movie kicks in.Erskine's love for Karen causes the manitous, or spirits of all the computers and man-made machines in the hospital to attack Misquamacus through Karen,who happens to be floating topless on her hospital bed.Indian magic and the Devil just don't measure up when they're up against kosher bobblers and hand-emitted laser beam effects.Titles then tell us that a boy grew a foetus on his arm somewhere in Asia back in 1969.Arm-foetus?Big fuckin' deal.
Misquamacus(Felix Silla) and his powerful Shamanic blue screen magic.
Strasberg,the daughter of theater director Lee Strasberg, enjoyed a long career in movies and television before succumbing to breast cancer at age sixty in 1999.Her genre films include the incredible Psych-Out(1968)and The Trip(1967),Rollercoaster(1977),and Bloody Birthday(1981).Curtis fathered genre Queen Jamie Lee during his marriage to Janet "Psycho" Leigh,and is still an active painter,no longer interested in movies.The soundtrack by maestro Lalo Schifrin isn't one of his more memorable works,in my honest two hundred lira worth.As always,Girdler accomplishes an entertaining creation,albeit a pretty horrendous one.Check it out,and you'll be laughing out loud during the finale,yourself.Believe me.One unintentionally funny BW on the scale for tonight's entry,but you'll have to excuse me,I've got surgery in the morning.They're removing what looks to be an Olivia Newton John foetus growing out of my armpit that gets bigger everytime I see roller skates or hear disco.The indians say it's a Xanadu manitou.Hey,at least it ain't Gene Kelly.
Seriously,I got no words for this one.
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