Meurtre à petites doses

This was made during an age when old-time Hollywood stars were destroying themselves in film and it would have been better if many had just retired instead of making god-awful films like Joan Crawford, Jennifer Jones and Lana Turner did late in their careers. BUT, these bad films are enjoyable, as they are so bad you can't help but enjoy them for their camp value.

The film begins with Turner marrying a rich guy (Dan O'Herlihy). However she tries, Turner is not able to get the man's daughter (Karin Mossberg--who was an odd choice to play the daughter, as her command of English seemed rather poor) to accept her. However, Turner doesn't realize just how deep the step-daughter's resentment of her is. When the father dies in a boating accident and Turner is left in charge, Mossberg and her freaky boyfriend (George Chakiris) decide to drive the woman crazy--that way they can get their hands on all that money. So, combining LSD and recordings weird suggestions, they drive her towards the deep end. What happens next (other than lots of crazy psychedelics), you'll have to see for yourself. Just be prepared--it's embarrassing and amazingly silly.

While there is some shock value (with all the boobies scattered throughout the film), the writing is just awful. Characters behave in insanely inconsistent ways and the ending is just dumb (you've GOT to see the play--it's amazingly dopey). A bad film but a strangely enjoyable one.

Man, what a mess.

Yes, another example of old-line Hollywood attempting to deal with the pop culture youthquake of the late 1960's, and failing miserably. This thing lurches back and forth between a Douglas Sirk like melodrama and an LSD exploitation film. Jarring changes in pacing and tone abound. Even the accompanying background score shifts disturbingly from string-drenched light orchestral goop to fuzz-laden rock and roll freak-out.

Somehow I get the feeling that both Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert yanked a lot out of this film for their own delirious happening, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," released a couple years later. Fans of that craziness should be right at home here.

Lana Turner overacts appropriately here, and I am not going to blame any of the actors here (except for Mossberg -- this was her last film credit, probably appropriately), but I will take the writer, director, and the entire crew to task for their dubious contributions.

The fact that this film was actually produced in Mexico with a Mexican crew (though all American actors and shot in English) tells you a lot of the background. The set design has the over-the-top qualities of Mexican production design has in spades. The homes of the wealthy main characters are drenched in overdone luxurious furnishings. The freaky psychedelic club overflows with more colored lights and oil projection lamps than Bill Graham's storage room. The fashions worn are of the most extreme examples available at that time. These were clothes that might actually be worn by real people you might see on the street (maybe if you lived in Beverly Hills) but, just barely.

The Swedish accent of lead actress Karin Mossberg also throws another off-kilter element into the highly unbelievable proceedings. Explained away by the fact that she's been in boarding school in Switzerland for years, the fact that she looks nothing like the actor portraying her father is another example of the ongoing cognitive dissonance that makes this film a laugh riot. (I would also like to point out the ironic fact, that she did not recognize LSD laced into a sugar cube when exposed to it, due to the fact that she had been sheltered all these years in a boarding school in Switzerland. This conveniently ignores the historical fact that LSD was discovered by Dr. Albert Hoffman in a laboratory...wait for it....wait for it....in Switzerland).

To sum up, if you are ready for a ride into high camp, a film that screams to even the most submissive viewer, "Don't take me seriously," then you will be in a heaven of arranged artificiality. If you liked "The Trip," or "Skidoo" or "Beyond The Valley of the Dolls," and can appreciate all of them on the level of laughing at the fact that anyone could possibly take this kind of foolishness seriously, then you will have a riot of a time with this film.

Being a Lana Turner fan, and having seen most of her films, "The Big Cube" had always been amazingly allusive. It's not an easy movie to find, but once I got my hands on it, I was like a little kid at Christmas. I had read reviews on it and seen the disdain for this film over and over again, but I wasn't as horrified by it as most reviewers had me expecting to be. And, strangely enough, that was both a disappointment and a relief.

Lana plays a supposedly great stage actress (though you wouldn't know it based on the horrendous play the film opens with) who retires to marry a wealthy man whose witchy teenage daughter resents Lana's intrusion into their lives. This diva daughter, meanwhile, begins to date a sleazy drug pusher whom neither her father nor Lana approve of. The daughter (played oddly enough with an Eastern European accent of some sort) teams up with her boyfriend to drive poor Lana mad by lacing her medication with LSD.

"The Big Cube" is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. Many of the lines and scenes are laughably bad. Lana's LSD-induced hallucination scenes are beyond campy. And seeing Lana in the same film with bare breasts and naked rear-ends is a little disconcerting. But the film will suck you in and have you hooked - much like LSD itself. And in an oddly appealing way, there is a dash of awkwardness thrown in when you see how seriously Turner takes herself in this film. For a woman who was on the verge of 50, she still acted like a young vixen in her 20's.

This vehicle is one of pure exhibitionism. Truly only for Lana fans or those who like trippy '60s flicks. But I have honestly seen much worse. "Valley of the Dolls" is from the same era and in the same vein, but much more ridiculous and tedium inducing. "The Big Cube", strangely enough, resembles a drugged-out version of Turner's 1959 hit "Imitation of Life". Between Lana's successful stage actress character and the conflict she experiences with her step-daughter, plus the on screen reunion with Dan O'Herlihy (who plays her husband here), the similarities are striking enough for me to imagine that the director of this bizarre film must have been a fan of Lana's older melodramas. Having said that, "The Big Cube" is also about as far away from "Imitation of Life" or "Peyton Place" as one can get.

Lana Turner plays Adriana, a stage actress who retires to marry wealthy widower financier Charles (Dan O'Herlihy). Charles has an adult daughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg) who resents this and takes up with the hippie types. One of those, med student Johnny (George Chakiris), finds out that Lisa is rich, and takes Lisa for his girlfriend.

Then Daddy dies, leaving Adriana as executor of the will. There's a clause about her having control over disbursement of the estate and her approval of any husband for Lisa (at least before she turns 25), and when Adriana doesn't approve of Lisa and Johnny getting married, Johnny comes up with a devious plan to drive Adriana crazy by spiking her sleeping pills with LSD! The basic plot, that of a parent not approving of a child's marriage, and the two young lovers deciding to do something about it, isn't a bad one. With the right script, as in Pretty Poison, it can be quite good.

Unfortunately, The Big Cube doesn't have the right script. And it certainly doesn't have the right acting. Mossberg is wooden; O'Herlihy is wasted in a bit part; Adriana's playwright Lansdale (Richard Egan) plays the guy who just knows he knows more than all of the doctors; and then there's Lana, who has to play bad acid trip scenes. Oh my.

There are also the other hippies, and the Travilla-designed gowns Lana has to wear. Parts of the movie wind up in "so bad it's good" territory, but too much of it winds up in the realm of just being tedious.

Bad movie lovers rejoice. Craptastic mess from that unfortunate time period when the studios were trying to connect with a youth audience that just wasn't there. Poor Lana, looking dreadfully gaunt, and her terrible two tone hair are stuck in this tripe with nowhere to hide. Her costarring with Dan O'Herlihy reminds the viewer that they were in Imitation of Life together and makes you wonder why you're not watching that instead! The rest of the acting is of the seriously wooden variety and the direction inept. Trash but if you are in the mood for something to make fun of or a Lana completist than give it a chance but one view will be more than enough.