Low Budget Trilogy

 

 (imdb)

ENCOUNTER WITH THE UNKNOWN-1973-Very low budget trilogy of tales involving the supernatural much of it narrated by the great Rod Serling. In the first, 3 smart ass college kids set up Johnny, a naive guy with a phony date. When he's accidentally shot and killed, his spooky mom (Fran Franklin) puts a curse on the 3. One of guys tells the story to a priest who gets upset when the curse seems to come true. In the second story, after a kid loses his dog, he and his father discover a mysterious giant hole in the ground. The father is lowered into the hole. When they bring him up, he's gone crazy. What he saw is never revealed. Annabelle Weenick (DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT) is his wife and (Larry Buchanan regular) Billy Thurman is a hillbilly. The third is based on “the legend of the girl on the bridge”. After a car drives off a bridge, a dude picks up a mysterious young woman (Rosie Holotik) who says she wants to go home. In a flashback we find out that the girl Susan had a fight with her father (Gene Ross) over a guy she wanted to marry. Of course, it turns out Susan is dead and her ghost is trying to get home. Holotik and Ross had also been in DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT the same year. 

 (imdb)

Another narrator sums up everything at the end with a kind of condensed version of the movie shown again. Filmed in Little Rock, Arkansas by Harry Thomason who filmed another movie SO SAD ABOUT GLORIA simultaneously with this extremely low budget anthology. Thomason (still alive at the time of this writing) was a close friend of Bill & Hilary Clinton and later worked on the TV show “Designing Woman”.

                                  Rosie Holotik on the cover of Playboy magazine in 1972!

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Serious Buchanan

HIGH YELLOW-1965-17 year old Cindy (Cynthia Hull) is the new maid for Hollywood producer Harry Langley (Bob Brown), his freaky wife (Anne MacAdams aka Annabelle Weenick), his hip flirty daughter Judy (Kay Taylor) and son George (Warren Hammack), thrown out of college for being a “queer boy”. No sooner does she get there when gardener Major Bates (Bill Thurman) kills a rabbit in front of her. Then Harry and George have a confrontation over George’s “queer-ness” and Harry's war record. The butler/chauffeur Joseph (Bill McGhee) lectures Cindy about her light skin (High Yellow is a Southern term for a light skinned black person; now considered a racial slur) because she believes she could pass for white and then he shows her how to set a table. The family seems more like some decadent out of touch Southern white trash than one living in the heart of Tinseltown. 

Judy takes Cindy to the Disc A Go-Go where everyone frugs violently. She successfully passes for white but again Joseph lectures her. Later George relates in heart wrenching detail to Cindy his run in with a transvestite that labeled a “queer boy”. They have sex. The next morning Judy is found dead. The investigating detective suspects the major and uses Cindy to help catch him. She's nearly killed though. Cindy and George declare their love but Cindy knows they can never be together. She leaves now content with herself. 

This interesting thought provoking low budget black and white drama from writer/director Larry Buchanan is well done and kind of ahead of it's time though it suffers from some preachy dialogue. It's too bad he's mostly remembered for his cheap incompetent direct to TV remakes for AIP.

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Back in Larryland...

COMMON LAW WIFE-1963-Old rich guy Shugfoot Rainey (George Edgley) is tired of his mistress of 5 years Linda (Annie McAdams aka Annabelle Weenick) and throws her over for his young niece Jonelle aka Baby Doll (Lacey Kelly). However because of the state’s common law marriage Linda and dirty old man Rainey are actually husband and wife. Meanwhile Jonelle rekindles an affair she had with her brother in law Sheriff Jody and they plot to get rid of Linda but at a bar where patrons are “nerd twisting” they have a fight and Jonelle takes to the dance floor (she's a dancer anyway). While she’s doing her thing a dullard moonshiner Bull shows up and whups Jody in a fight. Slutty Jonelle takes off with him. They go to his secluded still in the swamps but she denies his advances and flees into the dark. Somehow she winds up in bed at Jody’s place. Her sister Brenda (Libby Booth), Jody's wife convinces her to give up on Jody and she agrees, once again hooking up with Bull, going back to the still and plotting murder. 

After Jonelle and Bull have a fling Jody goes to the still but they run away. Somehow Jonelle winds up at Jody's house with with him and they insult each other. Then Brenda discovers them kissing fully clothed on their bed. She takes hubby's gun and forces Jonelle to leave. She gets arsenic laced moonshine from Bull and gives it to Linda who gives it to Rainey. Before he drinks it Linda becomes very emotional spilling her guts out to Rainey. It almost seems he might take her back but he drinks the poisoned hooch and dies. Linda finds Jonelle at a bar and says Rainey wants to see her. Linda shoots Jonelle to death (and a bloody mess) then drinks the poisoned booze and dies. 

Sleazy, funny redneck nonsense, this movie was started by Larry Buchanan (his first) and later had scenes added by a guy named Eric Sayers.

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