Deathmaster (1972)

Director: Ray Danton
Writer: R. L. Grove
Stars: Robert Quarry, John Fiedler, Bob Pickett, William Jordan, Betty Anne Rees, Bill Ewing and Brenda Dickson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Roger Ebert gave this movie just one of four stars but clearly had a lot of fun talking about how bad it was and all that seems fair. It’s not simply a bad movie, though it is that. It’s a bad movie that surprises us, that confuses us, that we find we really have to ask questions about. Even now, I’m struggling to answer the pivotal one that lords over all the others: “Why?”

What makes sense is that it’s a vampire flick starring Robert Quarry. He’d had a big hit two years earlier with Count Yorga, Vampire, and he followed that up with a 1971 sequel, inevitably The Return of Count Yorga, then began 1972 with the wonderful Dr. Phibes sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again. He was suddenly a horror name and so why not make him Khorda, another vampire?

What doesn’t make sense is everything else. Yes, I realise that sounds like hyperbole but let me explain, because I’m at a loss to grasp any other decision made by the filmmakers. Maybe you’ll be able to figure it out. I hope so.

We start out on Santa Monica Beach, where a solemn black man, perhaps a voodoo priest, performs a ritual to welcome a coffin. It floats in from the ocean, which is a strange entrance for a vampire. The priest strangles the curious surfer who opens it, then loads it into the back of his pickup truck and drives away.

If that sets a scene, let me destroy it. Over in Topanga Canyon, a bunch of hippies hang out at some sort of market, readying for a fair that they’re hosting. Into their world ride a bevy of bikers, their leader right out of a Hell’s Angels movie, the rest weekend warriors. Clearly, this will soon turn into a brawl.

Except it doesn’t. It turns into a one on one between Monk the angry biker leader and Pico the nihilistic hippie over a disagreement about John Fiedler’s prices for “jewlery”. With Monk much larger and used to fighting, clearly he’s about to wipe the floor with the hippie.

Except he doesn’t. Pico’s white and seems to be Native American but knows kung fu, so he’s the dominant fighter. And, with a black cop on the scene in no time, they all hide behind the same tree and Pico has a solution: “Why don’t you come home and have dinner with us?”

Now, I know that hippies and bikers can get along, at least kinda sorta, because I watched the latter defend the former from cowboys in Angel Unchained, but they were hired by a biker turned hippie, so it made sense. Here, there is absolutely nothing to justify this odd amalgam of two separate counterculture genres.

At least there’s a cool location, because Pico and his girlfriend Rona live in a commune that squats in an abandoned mansion. How do I not find these abandoned mansions first? I can see so many things I could do with this space! This commune is lively, though, with a folk singer playing his guitar, a naked chick painting an abstract with the use of a mirror and a host of drugs circulating like air, so this is presumably intended to catch every subculture just in case one sticks. Oh, and it’s multi-racial, of course.

Would it help if I tell you that Kirkwood, the folk singer, is played by Bob Pickett, who we’re likely to know better as Bobby “Boris” Pickett, who sang Monster Mash with the Crypt-Kickers a decade earlier? No, probably not.

If you’re trying to guess how these strands of plot will merge, don’t even try. Monk pees outside and literally slides down the cliff into the plot. No, I’m not kidding!

There’s the coffin, now opened. There’s the ritual dude, who’s Barbado, calling a storm out of the sky to take down the commune’s lights. And there’s Robert Quarry, clapping his hands to bring them back on again. He looks like a guru—the working title was Guru Vampire—and he acts like one, with his confidence, erudition and English accent. Suddenly he’s in charge.

Clean, he tells them. Eat living food. “When you want me, I’ll be here.” And he walks away into thin air. Later, he’ll preach in monologues that hypnotise and only Pico and Rona don’t want to join his dance to life. Their attempts to leave are hilariously awkward. Bill Ewing is reminiscent of Dean Stockwell in Psych-Out but with even less depth. He even forgets that he knows kung fu, which doesn’t help.

Quarry does everything expected of him, in the only decent set of vampire teeth the film has to offer; they’re the same ones he used as Count Yorga. Nobody else does, unless it’s to die, and I’d include the writer in that. Why the Satanic procession? Why the leeches? Will we buy the voice of Piglet as Van Helsing? Why did they make this five years late, after these subgenres had died, yet find a “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” ending three decades early?

The only explanation has to be psychedelics and I foolishly did not take any to watch this, so the one worthy aspect is Robert Quarry and that’s good, because I’m watching for him.

He formed a theatrical troupe while serving in the U.S. Army in 1943, and started in film in a big one, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, albeit as an uncredited teenager, but it took a long while to establish his career.

After that film in 1943, he had no credits for eight years, then found bit parts on TV and a few uncredited film roles, like Soldier of Fortune and House of Bamboo. His first film credit was in A Kiss Before Dying in 1956 and, after the same year’s Crime of Passion, it was TV all the way to 1966 and Agent for H.A.R.M.

Things started to come together in 1970 in a series of genre pictures. He was uncredited in Colossus: The Forbin Project but the lead in Count Yorga, Vampire and suddenly he was a name, in The Return of Count Yorga, Dr. Phibes Rises Again and Sugar Hill. In Madhouse, he was credited as co-lead with Vincent Price and Peter Cushing.

Unfortunately times changed, as they have a habit of doing, his particular style of horror becoming passé, so he returned to supporting slots on television until he found a new home in straight to video genre films in the eighties, many of them for Fred Olen Ray, who reached out in 1987 when Quarry was in a wheelchair.

He’d been hit by a drunk driver some years earlier, leaving him facially injured, and while in recovery in 1982, was mugged and seriously beaten, bringing on his first heart attack. Ray put him to work again in Cyclone and cast him in dozens more films over the following years. I recall Alienator, Evil Spirits and Teenage Exorcist and enough others to fill a Blockbuster shelf.

His last film was Invisible Mom II in 1999, ten years before he died in hospital in California at eighty-three, leaving a highly varied legacy.