![]() Teenagers getting ready for a pool party (and “The Jellyfish Song”). (The director would later apply his skill at working with live animals on the sets of Live and Let Die.) When an actress splashes around while fleeing a jellyfish monster, you half expect her to emerge covered in leeches before Grefé calls “cut.” Much of the pleasure in watching them now is Grefé’s insistence on using real predators and shooting the vast majority of footage in authentic locations. But taken together, they’re oddball triumphs of low-budget gung-ho filmmaking, as Grefé literally throws his actors into the deep end – and, after them, snakes, sharks, and alligators. The acting is amateurish, the editing crude, the spontaneous eruptions of teenage dancing downright hilarious. The second film is more unusual: deep in the Everglades, an Indian spirit turns into various animals to kill those who venture onto his land. The first film is a standard-template monster feature with outré value provided primarily by its choice of monster: a human who mutates into a Portuguese man o’war – a jellyfish – albeit one with groping hands and diver’s flippers for feet. Who else winds up on the wrong side of the law will surprise you and you will keep guessing until the end.Arrow Video’s new box set He Came from the Swamp: The William Grefé Collection, celebrating the career of the Floridian indie exploitation filmmaker behind such films as The Wild Rebels (1967), Willard knock-off Stanley (1972), and Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976), kicks off with a swampy splash with its first disc, Sting of Death and The Death Curse of Tartu, which were released as a double feature in 1966 to take a gator-chomp out of drive-ins across America. Best scene in the film for action fans is his escape from those Deliverance types who capture him and are awaiting instructions. ![]() Some of the results will surprise you and what I like about the film is that Lancaster probably could have covered for a couple of the perpetrators, but his own sense of integrity wouldn't let him do that. Burt's son Bill Lancaster is in the cast as another college student who also winds up a murder victim. Note the following roles besides those I've already mentioned: Morgan Woodward as a southern senator and father of the first victim, Susan Clark as a faculty member who takes a romantic interest in Lancaster, and Ed Lauter and Mills Watson as a pair of Deliverance type inbreds who are working for someone who really wants Burt out of the way. Lancaster and co-director/writer Roland Kibbee put together a very good cast. The Midnight Man is a good and complex tale of murder and blackmail and was shot on Clemson College campus on location for a good ring of authenticity. Of course they all arise out of the initial incident. Of course this is the job of the local sheriff Harris Yulin, but Lancaster's instincts just take over and before long three other murders occur. No sooner does he arrive there than the murder of a pretty and popular coed occur and an incriminating diary she kept goes missing. Now released from prison and on parole, he gets a job courtesy of an old police buddy Cameron Mitchell as a campus security guard at a small southern college. In The Midnight Man Lancaster plays a former police detective who did a stretch for homicide himself, he killed his wife's lover. Why it was panned by so many critics is as big a mystery as the one Burt Lancaster has to solve. I was lucky enough to catch it theaters back in the day and a few times on television. ![]() Burt Lancaster's last attempt at directing was in this sadly neglected film, The Midnight Man. ![]()
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