Thursday, September 22, 2022

Podcast: The Astrologer (1976)


 Direct download.

Your Stupid Minds releases a bonus second episode in two weeks to make up for being a week late last week. In any case, now we’re caught up. This time around we review a movie that was basically lost until 2013 when it turned up in a batch of 1,000 pornographic 35mm prints donated to the American Genre Film Archive. It’s 1976’s (or 1975, depending on who you ask) The Astrologer!

Alexander (played by writer, director, and producer Craig Denney) is a con man at a carnival who goes to Kenya to steal some diamonds with an oil baron and his wife. He gets captured and imprisoned (possibly more than once, it isn’t clear), gets out and steals some cursed diamonds.

Eventually he’s able to sell them in Tahiti and heads back to Southern California to find his fortune the traditional way: by starting an entertainment empire of a hit movie and six hit television shows all about astrology. Everything starts to unravel eventually and it ends with a quote from King Lear. Also starring Denney’s cousin Darrien Earle (named Darrien in the movie), who was also Lee Iacocca’s third wife.

Some Notes:

  • This movie never got a home release because it has a number of unlicensed music (mostly from the Moody Blues) they never got the rights to. And also because the movie is really bad. Paramount took it down from YouTube, but it's on archive.org for the time being
  • I could provide an avalanche of trivia in this section, but you'd be better off reading the history of this film on Paste and Matchbox Cine. These are some excellent write-ups for this truly bizarre piece of vanity outsider art.
  • Not to be confused with James Glickenhaus's The Astrologer, the also low budget movie released around the same time.
  • Watch the purely insane dinner scene and tell me you don't want to watch this.

No comments:

Post a Comment