Watch The Big Cube (1969) Online
Saturday, March 15, 2014 by watchstream
The Big Cube (1969)iMDB Rating: 4.5Date Released : 30 April 1969
Genre : Thriller, Drama
Stars : Lana Turner, George Chakiris, Richard Egan, Dan O'Herlihy
Movie Quality : BRrip
Format : MKV
Size : 700 MB
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Renowned stage actress Adriana Roman, the muse of playwright Frederick Lansdale, is retiring to marry tycoon, Charles Winthrop. The marriage does not sit well with Charles' daughter, Lisa Winthrop, who dislikes her new stepmother if only because she is the other woman for her father's affections. However, on her father's urging, Lisa tries to get to know Adriana, to who she slowly warms. Meanwhile, Lisa attracts the attention of Johnny Allen, a womanizing, fortune hunting medical student who uses the school lab to produce and sell acid among the hip, mod crowd he hangs around. He romances naive Lisa who falls under his spell. After an incident with Charles, Johnny, sensing an opportunity to abscond with at least some of the Winthrop fortune by using Lisa's mistrust of Adriana, manipulates Lisa into trying to make Adriana go crazy, in large part through the lacing of her sedatives with acid. Adriana begins to hallucinate that Lisa and Johnny are trying to kill her, which is what they ...
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Review :
Oh Lana--How Could You?
So many of the great film actresses from the Golden Age were driven hard by their own ambitions and the maintenance of stardom: they seemed unable to gracefully leave the screen and their considerable achievements, and would rather be horrors than has-beens. Joan Crawford's last film was the dreadful Trog, Bette Davis appeared as the Wicked Stepmother, and even Mae West, at age 85, creeped her fans out in the tedious Sextette. I thought of Mae West especially, and her attempt to be sexy while watching Lana Turner negotiate her way in the exploitation film The Big Cube.
If you want to understand how mainstream America envisioned the 1960's counterculture and all that it implied--psychedelic colors, heavy drugs and trippy music--the first 30 minutes of this nutty camp classic have it right: a visit to a San Francisco nightclub is a complete hoot, full of coeds dropping sugar cubes (LSD) into their beer, a freak out in the center of the dance floor so bad the police arrive (rather quickly, as if they had been waiting offstage) to drag the poor victim to rehab--and even, however briefly, a topless dancer!
But to return to Lana Turner, trapped in a bad situation when her husband drowns unexpectedly and she's left with an avaricious stepdaughter whose malicious boyfriend (George Chakiris, who should have fired his agent for casting him in this turkey) decides the two of them should drug mama and drive her slowly mad; Lana hasn't a clue why she's having psychedelic hallucinations, and one hopes she wasn't secretly hoping this was her final chance for an Oscar as she screams and wails and carries on like Godzilla on a bender.
This wild immersion in off-the-wall exploitation is entertaining fun for the first half, and then gets bogged down in the melodrama; Lana's co-star, the young Karen Mossberg, competes with her mother for worst blonde wig, but her wooden acting style and bizarre accent makes her hard to understand, and she never made another film; watch instead for her redheaded BFF, played by Pamela Rodgers, whose perky personality enlivens the screen with a totally zany sex kitten. TV star Richard Egan maintains a stoic attitude throughout the film, a steady if stolid presence.
This is a fun romp "of a kind," and succeeds at that level. For Lana fans, it's probably fairly horrifying to see the persuasive actress of the excellent Bad and The Beautiful and The Postman Always Rings Twice stuck in such a turkey, but in spite of fairly fuzzed-out lenses and a slightly anorexic appearance, the lady does her best and soldiers on.
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