Tito Davison

"The Big Cube" is an histrionic drugged-out melodrama that sees the wealthy disciplinarian Charles (Dan O'Herlithy) marrying actress Adriana (Lana Turner) much to the annoyance of his beautiful but spoiled daughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg). After Charles dies in an accident Lisa and her sleazy student boyfriend (and part time LSD cook) Johnny (George Chakiris) decide to get their hands on the family fortune by driving Adriana insane by dosing her medicine with liberal doses of high-powered acid. Writer William Douglas Lansford serves up a luridly melodramatic plot and a script full of puzzling inconsistencies, narrative swerves and drug culture clichés - so plenty of wild and freaky drug parties, far-out drug trips and lashings of faux hipster, hippy language. Tito Davison gives the outrageous script an appropriately overwrought directorial approach with plenty of gaudy visuals, liquid-light drug freak-outs and a wildly colourful approach to set décor and costumes. The cast all chip in with sincere but confused acting performances that add to the not-quite-right feel of the movie: Lana Turner goes at it with an earnest seriousness; George Chakiris is handsome, but gloriously slimy and Pamela Rogers is great ditzy fun as Lisa's free-lovin' pal Bibi. Bibi trots out lines like: "Sweetness, baby. Float with the tide, that's my bag. This is a pop art world, baby!" Only Karin Mossberg as Lisa adds a slightly jarring note with her weird and out-of-place cut-glass European accent. "The Big Cube" is an incoherent mess but that simply adds to the hysterical campiness of it all. It's rubbish on multiple levels, but it has a real camp and wacky style that's enjoyably hysterical.… (més)