Meurtre à petites doses

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.

From Warner Brothers' Cult Camp Classics line, in the Women in Peril set, along with the excellent (and not at all campy) women in prison classic Caged and the truly (and hilariously) awful Trog. This is the least worth watching film in that set. I loved the ultra-stereotypical late '60s setting, and the first half hour is a bunch of fun with hippies tripping their balls off. This is kind of a Reefer Madness for LSD. Except there's more of a plot and a couple of famous actors. George Chakiris, Oscar winner for West Side Story eight years earlier, is a doctor who has been doing experiments with the drug. He's trying to marry a young girl who stands to inherit a fortune. Her mother is Lana Turner, and Chakiris plans to drug her with LSD until she goes insane. The latter two thirds or so of the movie are pretty much a bore. Turner's acid trips start off amusing enough, but grow old pretty quick. Unlike Reefer Madness, this was a major studio production (Warner Brothers itself). The psychedelic music is pretty good, if generic music of that type. Chakiris is actually a pretty good villain.

Lana Turner was four years off the big screen when she did The Big Cube. Unlike some of her other contemporaries from the Hollywood Studio years she never went the horror route. But The Big Cube was enough of a psychedelic horror show as it is.

Lana plays acclaimed stage actress and second trophy wife of billionaire Dan O'Herlihy. His daughter Karin Mossberg is jealous of her stepmother especially after O'Herlihy is killed in a boating accident and his will gives Turner control of the fortune until Mossberg reaches the age of 25 and she can only marry someone Lana gives consent to.

That consent will not be given to medical student George Chakiris and he works Iago like on Mossberg. Chakiris supports himself selling LSD and he acts as travel agent to give Turner a trip to the psychedelic loony bin.

I can't believe Turner who was still drop dead gorgeous in 1969 couldn't find a better vehicle than this piece of trash. Take out the LSD and it's really just a watered down version of some of the soap operas Turner did in her latter years.

Richard Egan is here to and he has little to do but stand around and catch Turner on the rebound from the psych ward. He's a playwright and the truth is exposed with a gambit from Hamlet.

But the Bard would not have been happy seeing his idea wind up in this freak show.

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.

Lana Turner on an acid trip - a bizarre thought, but this low-budget Mexican production, "The Big Cube," is about just that - you know, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," the "Sugar Shack" - LSD. And what a bizarre trip it is for all involved.

Turner plays a great theater star, Adriana Roman, who retires to marry Charles Winthrop (Dan O'Herlihy) and comes up against his angry daughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg). No one explains why O'Herlihy's daughter has some sort of foreign accent. Everyone else is American. Anyway, Lisa falls for a sleaze drug dealer and soon to be ex-medical student (George Chakiris) who is after her money. When O'Herlihy dies in a boating accident, the Chakiris character hints to Lisa that they can hurry along the inheritance by - and this is really not clear - either driving Adriana nuts with LSD or using it to kill her. It falls to the playwright with whom Adriana has worked (Richard Egan) to rescue her from the clutches of these two connivers.

The plot is beyond muddled. One day Lisa hates her stepmother, and then the next day they're best buddies. One day Adriana has an acid trip while in a car, and Lisa and her boyfriend take her to a cliff, presumably to throw her over, and Adriana gets away from them and doesn't die. The next day, Adriana goes on another acid trip and tries to throw herself out a window, and Lisa saves her. Why did she save her when she tried to kill her the day before? It's a mess.

The movie is filled with psychedelic parties and horrible acting, particularly from Mossberg, Pamela Rodgers, Lisa's friend, and Carlos East, who plays an overly made-up artist named Lalo.

Turner, approaching 50, does her "Portrait in Black," "Imitation of Life" acting number wearing some horrific wigs. With a simple upswept hairdo, those enormous blue eyes, and petite figure, she's quite beautiful and glamorous, though dressed like she's supposed to be 18; with her hair down, she's a way over the hill ingénue; and with those gargoyle wigs, she looks just plain awful. Her closeups are shot through linoleum. I hate that older beautiful classic film stars had so few alternatives that they turned to these trash movies, but many did.

Campy though not on the camp level of a "Valley of the Dolls" or another Lana Turner film, "Portrait in Black" but some might find it fun. It was fun, but also a little sad for those who enjoyed Lana in "Slightly Dangerous," "Green Dolphin Street," and the Ross Hunter glossy melodramas of the '50s.