Quick Cuts

By J. C.

THE WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETE. In Carl Reiner's antic Where's Poppa? (1970), a football coach from a large Southern university admitted to recruiting his teams by kidnaping nine-year-olds and training them mercilessly until they came of competition age. One longs for the inspired insanity of such a notion during this slack and dreary comedy from Walt Disney studios. The idea here is that the coach of a smalltown college (John Amos) and his cretinous assistant (Tim Conway) stumble on a kind of peroxide Tarzan (Jan-Michael Vincent) and import him from Africa to bring athletic glory to the campus. The jokes are either raucously insipid or coyly racist (Africans and their quaint primitive ideas). Vincent seems very much in his element swinging from a vine. Conway sounds like Porky Pig after speech therapy.

BARON BLOOD--who is referred to by the hero with unconscious levity as "that ghoulish baron on my father's side"--is a long-dead nobleman brought back to life by some frivolous incantations. His visage is ghastly to behold, but he is crafty enough to disguise himself as Joseph Cotten for most public appearances. Director Mario Bava has made a great many other films of this sort (Black Sunday being perhaps the best known), each displaying a formidable interest in interior decoration matched by a lofty disregard for intelligence. Hitchcock has his staircases, Bertolucci his interludes of dance; Mario Bava likes to bring on the Iron Maiden as a particularly personal touch. Here, as always, he makes appropriately ghastly use of it.

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