Wild, Wild Billy

I finally got around to seeing the 1951 sci-fi downer Five, by playwright/screenwriter/novelist/ producer/director/radio host Arch Oboler -- the film which I mentioned in blog posts past that someone on Kindertrauma insisted was the film that I must have seen as a kid that's haunted my memory based on the final scene of the picture. To recap, back in the late 70's I saw the tail-end of a movie about some kind of nuclear apocalypse where a woman wandered aimlessly across a scorched earth carrying a baby until she kneels in exhaustion in the dirt, and when a bearded man approaches her (apparently the only other person living on the planet besides herself) she tells him "My baby... is dead." and they have a funeral pyre made for the body. Pretty much roll credits. Well, this movie has that scene. But, it seems.... different somehow. I remember the kneeling woman looking up at the man as if he were hovering over her, and she looking towards the left of the screen instead of the right. I also could have sworn that they burned the baby's body, but in this picture they merely bury it. Also, more importantly, I could have laid money on it that the movie I saw as a child was in color. Was their a more modern-day remake of this movie, perhaps in the 70's and made for television? Or is my memory merely colorizing it Ted Turner-style? So far I'm finding no evidence of a remake of this specific picture, but it's difficult to determine given the sheer volume of nuclear apocalypse flicks pumped out in those fleeting forty years of cold war wackiness. In fact this is often sited as one of the first of that genre (I think even Kiss Me Deadly came out four years later) and although the acting by some is achingly over-the top, it was still pretty intriguing as far as last-people-on-earth pictures go, an I am a big fan of those in particular. (trivia: the house where the movie is filmed belonged to Arch Oboler, and was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.)

While on the subject of movies, once again I'm soliciting the help of anyone within proverbial earshot if they can recall a particular horror movie -- and one of particular 1980's cheesy goodness -- that if I remember correctly involved a wooded swamp with a couple of people tormented by a civilization of little hooded(?) little squatty humanoid types. I used to want to think that the movie was called Dwarves or something like that but I am showing no other movie by that name. It was some kind of one-named thingamabob, and was the kind of bad that makes you keep checking for the little robot silhouettes in the bottom right corner. But more importantly -- or maybe just distinctly -- the song playing over the ending credits was "Defiance" performed by former Hampton Roads southern-rock outfit Snuff.

Snuff's self-titled debut album was released on Elektra-Curb in 1982, and the single "Defiance" dominated the southeastern Virginia 80's AOR airwaves in a way that few other local bands outside of the Waxing Poetics ever achieved. More than likely helped along by the major label release. In fact the single to "Defiance" was released on Warner Bros. which leads me to believe that the movie that I'm looking for was probably a Warner Bros. release as well. It's just when I tell friends and family that I was flipping channels one night years ago and caught the last 20 minutes or so of a laughably bad drive-in quality horrorshow with "Defiance" playing over the end credits they first refuse to believe me, THEN demand to know the name of the picture so that they can track it down themselves. My uncle Billy was old friends with the band, particularly Cecil Hooker, he of the the long-haired Asian persuasion violinist that I always remembered from the photo on the back of the album I had (pictured above) which Billy gave me back when it was released. I wonder if I still have it somewhere in my collection. Gettin' pretty out of control when I haven't bought any serious new vinyl in years and I still have no clue what I own anymore.

Anybody got a clue? Cuz I sure could use one!

(About the movie, I mean!)