Screen icon Lauren Bacall, circa 1952. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her an honorary Academy Award yesterday during a private ceremony at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles. Other deserving honorees included B-movie legend Roger Corman, and cinematographer Gordon Willis.

When Pam Grier goes bad, she goes all the way bad. In the Roger Corman produced Women in Cages, she’s the head matron of a hellhole prison somewhere in the Philippines and spends the movie permanently covered in a sheen of sweat as she sneeringly tortures her beautiful female convicts. The girls endure every manner of humiliation—the rack, rats, snakes, the hole, leeches, electric shocks, and some really harsh words. Oh, and the whole prison is basically a racket to sell the women into sexual slavery, so there’s that problem too. After enough of this treatment, the jailbirds finally decide it’s time to escape into the jungle, but unforeseen circumstances result in them taking Grier hostage, leading directly to her death via gang rape and strangulation. The audience is supposed to feel she’s gotten what she deserved, but all we felt was our lunch coming up. Women in prison movies are misogynist by definition, but there is still a line somewhere and, though it’s difficult to know exactly where it is, it isn’t difficult to know when it’s been crossed. Anyway, once Grier has been disturbingly dispatched, the escape takes a few more twists and turns which we won’t give away. We’ll just sum up by voting thumbs down on this one, and footnote by adding that we’re glad Pam went on kill so many men in her later movies. Women in Cages premiered in the U.S. today in 1971.     

Thirty-eight years ago today in Hollywood, sexploitation producer Roger Corman premiered a film based on H.P. Lovecraft’s macabre story The Dunwich Horror, and it was almost good. Wait, did we really just say that?

*sigh*

Not to get all self-pitying here, but us Lovecraft fans have been so desperate for so long for a truly great HPL movie, we’ll see merit in virtually any lame attempt. But when we are honest with ourselves—really truly brutally honest—we have to admit this movie is a stinkbomb. Lovecraft is simply difficult to adapt. So difficult, in fact, that if you remove Stuart Gordon from the discussion, virtually all the movies based on his material have been awful.

But even if The Dunwich Horror disappoints, the poster is rather interesting, with its implied violation by a hydra-like monstrosity. Incidentally, of special note here is the presence of writer Curtis Hanson, who would go on to direct the great L.A. Confidential. Nice comeback, Curtis. As for us, we’ll just plan on seeing the low budget Dunwich remake slated for release later this year, and hope Guillermo del Toro’s big budget At The Mountains of Madness actually films sometime this century.