"Stephens recalls that Harvey and his first wife, actress Margaret Leighton, made a peculiar couple: "They drank an awful lot, but they never ate anything, just sucked the juices from steaks and spat out the meat...."
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Sometimes the story behind a horror film is much more horrifying than the film itself. Take this flick...made by an actor whose career took a nasty nosedive, one who was dying of horribly painful stomach cancer, and who knew this shabby, shoddy film would be the last thing he left to posterity. It's just goes to show you that...
By HARVEY F. CHARTRAND More than a decade before Hannibal (The Cannibal) Lecter made his film debut in Manhunter (1986), there was Jason Henry--the silver screen’s first flesh-eating hero. Jason is the protagonist of Welcome To Arrow Beach (1974)--also titled And No One Would Believe Her and Tender Flesh. This low-grade horror flick was actor/director Laurence Harvey's swan song. (He edited Welcome To Arrow Beach by telephone from his deathbed, succumbing to stomach cancer in 1973, a full year before the picture opened in theatres.)
This lurid potboiler that Warner Bros. barely released held a strange appeal for Harvey, whose odd dietary habits are described by Sir Robert Stephens in his autobiography Knight Errant: Memoirs Of A Vagabond Actor. Stephens recalls that Harvey and his first wife, actress Margaret Leighton, made a peculiar couple: "They drank an awful lot, but they never ate anything. At home, or even if they went out to the old Caprice, they would have the finest food and spit it out. Steaks would be chewed and juices swallowed, and then the meat spat out into a napkin. God knows what restaurant staff made of all this carry-on. I’m convinced that it accounts for his cancer … and her debilitating illnesses."
In a plot set-up reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Harvey once again plays a man whose life is warped by his experiences in the Korean War. Jason Henry’s backstory is revealed in a series of quick flashbacks. After his plane is shot down in a remote area of Korea, military photographer Jason and the crew evade the enemy but slowly die of starvation. Jason must eat human flesh to survive and develops a taste for it. Years after the war, he has an incessant craving for peopleburgers that not even his gorgeous sister/lover Joanna Pettet can discourage.
The movie opens with Robbin (Meg Foster), a runaway hippie girl who hitches a ride with a hotrod driver (Jesse Vint). There follows a high-speed chase and crash, in which the driver is killed and Robbin emerges unharmed. After being dismissed by the clueless local cops (John Ireland and Stuart Whitman), Robbin wanders into the town of Arrow Beach. Camping out on the sand, she meets the polite-yet-seedy Jason, who invites her up to his darkly lit seaside mansion for dinner and to stay the night. Robbin has no idea that she will be the main course. She meets Jason’s curiously zonked-out sister Grace, who insists that Robbin lock her bedroom door during her overnight stay. Jason is frustrated in his plan to chloroform the hippie chick and chop her up for dinner.
Later that evening, feeling restless, Robbin decides to explore the house, and ventures downstairs to Jason’s basement studio, where she opens a door that reveals a scene of total carnage — Jason, his expression crazed and blood streaming from his lips, brandishes a meat cleaver, which he is using to hack up a corpse. Robbin barely escapes with her life and is hospitalized. She tells the police that Jason Henry is a butchering cannibal maniac who murders stray women, but the cops don't believe her. They think she was spaced out on the drugs found in her knapsack, planted there by Jason.
Confident that he is above suspicion, Jason lures an older babe from the beach back to his place, ostensibly to take some cheesecake photos. During the shoot, Jason slaughters the lady with his meat cleaver; all this savagery is seen in gory close-ups through a camera viewfinder. The murder scene is quite gruesome, especially by 1974 standards. Indeed, the older woman’s ugly demise while being photographed by a motor drive camera is the high point of the picture, the only scene that shows any directorial flair. (No doubt Harvey was influenced by Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), in which sicko Karl Boehm bore down on his female victims with a camera while murdering them. In fact, Harvey was an early choice for the role of the killer in Peeping Tom.)
Welcome to Arrow Beach ends with Robbin and Alex Heath, a lovestruck medical technician she met at the hospital, returning to Jason's house in search of the truth, leading up to the final confrontation. There is something very odd about that ending. The final close-up of a dying 'Laurence Harvey' (after he's been shot by Joanna Pettet) isn't Laurence Harvey at all but a lookalike. I've never heard of a stand-in being used for a tight close-up. It’s likely that Harvey was too sick to film the scene and used a "double."
Harvey had once been an A-list star, appearing in such blockbusters as The Alamo, Room At The Top and Butterfield 8. By the late sixties, his career was flagging, with one flop after another. Had death not claimed him, Welcome to Arrow Beach would hardly have been a proper comeback vehicle. Even with such great potential for true horror, Welcome To Arrow Beach falls flat, mainly due to uninspired direction. Had Harvey not learned anything from the great directors he worked with through the fifties and sixties? In 1959, Alfred Hitchcock directed Harvey in Arthur, a particularly grisly episode of the Master of Suspense’s TV anthology series.
In John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, Harvey portrayed a soldier captured during the Korean War and brainwashed by the Red Chinese into becoming a political assassin. This unsettling performance was the best of his career. In the late sixties, Orson Welles directed Harvey in his unfinished thriller The Deep, which is only now being completed, 33 years after shooting wrapped. Sadly, the genius of these great directors failed to rub off on Harvey. What kind of twisted muse would select a banal love song by Lou Rawls as the theme music for a horror movie? This pretty much sinks expectations for the picture from the git-go. And the cheesy, revved-up soundtrack by Tony Camillo falls prey to the worst excesses of seventies electronica — lots of echo-chamber effects, beeps and reverb.
The cinematography of Gerald Perry Finnerman is often sloppy and slipshod. (Yet he did fine work on Star Trek and Night Gallery!) Scenes are lensed too casually, with little imagination or attention paid to proper framing. Despite its horrendous subject matter, Welcome to Arrow Beach is about as drab an uninvolving as an exploitation film can be. B-movie aficionados may enjoy seeing the ice-eyed Meg Foster in an early role, but even her most ardent fans will lose interest before the end credits roll up. (The real scene-stealer is Gloria LeRoy as Ginger, the down-on-her-luck forty-something stripper who is lured to Jason Henry’s studio/slaughterhouse.)
Like the cheapest of seventies exploitation flicks, Welcome To Arrow Beach meanders through stilted dialogue and meaningless scenes until it gives the viewer a few minutes of passably interesting footage. Throughout the film’s 99-minute running time, I asked myself why an excellent and respected actor like Harvey would be drawn to such schlock--especially if he knew it would be his last picture.
Harvey surrounds himself with a good cast, but doesn’t give them much to do. Stuck in dull scenes with too much expository dialogue, dependable players like Pettet, Ireland, and Whitman aren’t able to help this slow-moving thriller. Yet Welcome To Arrow Beach rates a footnote in the history books as the first major studio film to deal with the taboo subject of cannibalism. Thanks, Harv! It's pretty bad when the star has to use a stunt double to film a stationary scene, but that's just about par for this flick. If any production mirrors the Seventies blood-and-gore-for-bucks approach, this one does. And it fails miserably. Once again, when it comes to exploitation, the major studios were rank amateurs compared to callow pros like Tobe Hooper. Article copyright © Harvey Chartrand |
