Night of Evil (1962)

Night of Evil is an American low-budget film that is part exploitation movie and part moral scare melodrama with a bit of film noir thrown in as well.

Dixie Ann Dikes (Lisa Gaye) is a sixteen-year-old girl living with foster parents in a small town. She is raped by a couple of local boys. Her foster parents blame her and she is dumped in the Holland Home for Girls. Which isn’t too bad. When she’s eighteen and leaves the home she moves in with Linda Dietrich (Lynette Bernay) who was brought up in the Holland Home as well and likes to help the girls when they have to make their way into the world. He tries to offer Dixie Ann motherly advice, which Dixie Ann sometimes listens to.

Everything goes great for Dixie Ann. Linda’s boss, an advertising exec, suggests that Dixie Ann should enter a beauty pageant. She might even become Miss America but at the very least it could be the start of a modelling career.

Dixie Ann has a boyfriend, Kent, a really nice boy who stood by her when she was raped. But when he discovers she’s entered a beauty contest he decides the townspeople must have been right about her after all. Any girl who would enter a beauty contest must be no better than a whore.

Then Dixie Ann meets charming lounge lizard Chuck Logan (William Campbell) and he sweeps her off her feet.

After a couple of dates he suggests they should get married straight away and she agrees, even though this means that technically she can’t enter any more beauty pageants (they’re only for single girls). But Chuck is so charming and handsome. How is an innocent girl like Dixie Ann supposed to know that he’s a gangster? And not just a gangster but a psycho.

Chuck gets himself involved in a kidnapping case. Kidnapping a cop is really dumb even if the cop does have a rich wife who might pay a big ransom. It’s a bad idea and with Chuck’s psychotic tendencies coming to the fore it could turn out to be a spectacularly bad idea. And it’s not just that Chuck is a hoodlum and a psycho. He’s as dumb as a rock as well.

Dixie Ann feels that her life is over. It’s not just that she’s no longer eligible for beauty contests. She how finds she’s married a hoodlum. She’s taken the first steps on the road to ruin. She might as well take the next step so she becomes a stripper. The next step after that is prostitution. She’s not prepared to do that so she looks for an alternative and she finds one that is even more disastrous.

It looks like Dixie Ann’s life is going to end in squalor and degradation but then comes the ending. Which presented writer Louis Perino with a challenge. This was 1962. Bad girls had to be seen to be punished. Usually in a movie like this the punishment was likely to be pretty drastic. But is Dixie Ann a bad girl or a victim? Is there a viable way in which justice can be done while saving her at the same time? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out if he came up with a solution or not.

On the surface this is just another good girl gone wrong movie but you have to remember that she was raped and then after that she was taken advantage of by Chuck. Any audience is going to regard her as a sympathetic character and the movie’s sympathies are with her as well. She’s been dealt a series of bad hands by fate. She hasn’t played them very well but would any eighteen-year-old small town girl have done any better? Would any of us? So it’s a movie with at least some serious intentions, suggesting that social problems can be complicated and guilt can be difficult to assign.

There’s a definite film noir element, with Dixie Ann as the noir protagonist brought to degradation partly by bad luck and partly by understandable errors of judgment due to youth and naïvete. Chuck Logan is the femme fatale equivalent, the good-looking charmer who leads her on to disaster.

Of course it’s an exploitation movie as well, which makes for an interesting combination of sensationalism and sensitivity.

Much depends on Lisa Gaye’s performance which is pretty good. She plays Dixie Ann as a confused character for whom life is just much too complicated and that’s the right way to play it. She’s also attractive enough to be a convincing beauty queen. The other performances are also better than you expect in a Z-grade cheapie.

The Alpha Video DVD is OK by Alpha Video standards. Image quality is mostly quite good. Sound quality is mostly OK.

I don’t want to sell this movie too highly. It’s a low-budget flick and it’s melodramatic and contrived at times. It is however a much better movie than it has any right to be.

Night of Evil is no masterpiece but it combines noir and exploitation extremely well and it works surprisingly well. Recommended.

The Naked Road (1959)

The Naked Road, made in 1959, is featured in Something Weird Video’s Weird Noir boxed set. It’s a very low budget production and it really is weird. Weird in a bad movie way but weird in an interesting and entertaining way as well.

The movie opens with sleazy advertising man Bob Walker (Paul Judson) and model Gay Andrews (Jeanne Rainer) necking in his Cadillac. Bob then makes what seems to him to be the perfectly reasonable suggestion that they should head for a motel where they’ll be more comfortable. Gay is outraged. She’s not that sort of girl. Bob is annoyed. After all, he did get Gay some modelling jobs and he just expects some gratitude. If she’s going to make a federal case out of it he might as well go home to his wife. The mention of his wife upsets Gay even more. She had no idea she was necking with a married man!

Bob, really annoyed, agrees to drive her home but gets pulled over for speeding. Unfortunately they’re in a rural area, the kind of place in which the local authorities prey on unwary city slickers. Bob gets dragged before a Justice of the Peace and hit with a hundred-dollar fine, he doesn’t have the cash on him, but he says he can get the money that night. While he’s off getting the money Gay will be held in custody. 

It looks like poor Gay will be spending the night in custody but then she gets a break A very nice man, a Mr Wayne Jackson (Ronald Long), agrees to pay the fine. He offers to drive her home. He even stops off on the way so she can have a cup of coffee. But Gay doesn’t know that he’s drugged the coffee.

Gay wakes up in Jackson’s apartment, rather confused, with a sore head and (curiously) a sore left arm. Jackson offers her a job, doing public relations. Gay doesn’t know anything about public relations but he tells her it’s easy - all she has to do is go out with a client, have dinner and take in a show, and then show him a good time afterwards. Now the truth begins to dawn on Gay - she’s fallen into the hands of a while slavery racket!

Of course Gay is a good girl and refuses to go along. It is explained to her that if she doesn’t co-operate they’ll give her the Full Treatment - they’ll get her hooked on drugs. So we get the drug racket and white slavery in this movie.

Meanwhile Jackson is having problems with one of his other girls and she may have to be disposed of. That will be a job for Mark (Art Koullias), Jackson’s secretary and henchman.

The acting is pretty bad, but it’s bad in a good way. Ronald Long plays Mr Jackson like a melodrama villain. Jeanne Rainer is very pretty and her performance is so amateurish that it’s deliciously entertaining.

The budget was clearly absolutely rock bottom. The movie looks like it was shot in somebody’s house, which it probably was, with the office of the Justice of the Peace looking like someone’s living room with a picture of George Washington on the wall to make it seem vaguely official.

Producer-director-writer William Martin had a very brief career and it’s easy to see why. He knows nothing of the mysteries of pacing or creating dramatic tension. He just gets his cast together and starts filming. 

This is really more of an exploitation movie than a crime movie or a film noir. It has the same wonderful vibe as 50s exploitation classics such as Girl Gang, The Violent Years or Ed Wood’s Jail Bait. You just can’t stop watching because you have no idea what they’ll come up with next.

While the subject matter is sensational it’s treated in a rather coy manner. There’s no nudity, no bad language and practically no violence, apart from one scene which, like everything else in the movie, is handled oddly. It relies on the idea of the terrible things that are going to happen to Gay but we never see any of them.

The climax does give us some action and a chase scene, oddly staged of course.

Something Weird’s Weird Noir boxed set (which is rather cool and great value-for-money)  also includes such gems as the psychiatry noir Fear No More, the odd women’s noir/psycho thriller Stark Fear and the truly bizarre carny noir Girl on the Run.

Something Weird’s Mike Vraney had an amazing knack for finding good prints (or even the negatives) of incredibly obscure movies. The Naked Road actually looks pretty good. Given the ultra low budget, it probably didn’t look much better when it was originally released. It’s not like William Martin was the kind of guy to spend time getting the lighting just right when shooting a scene. He was happy if the camera was in focus. 

Judged by any kind of conventional standards The Naked Road is a terrible movie but it’s fascinating in the way that only 1950s low-budget American movies can be when they’re trying desperately to be shocking and sensationalistic. For all its faults I must confess I enjoyed it. Recommended, if you have a taste for amusingly bad Z-grade movies.