Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection

Movies have always walked a fine line between art and corporate investment.  No matter how personal the story or culturally significant the subtext, films are designed to make money…plain and simple.  The “art” often lies in the ability to disguise that fact.  In the case of writer / director / producer Bill Rebane, whose Wisconsin-based low-budget genre pictures thrive on rubber-suited monsters and wardrobe malfunctions, there’s not much pretense involved.  These are movies designed to turn a profit; any resemblance to art is completely accidental.

Starting with 1965’s Monster a Go-Go (with supplementary footage and editing by the legendary H.G. Lewis), Rebane’s inspirations seemed to be whatever trendy and cheap.  A space capsule returns to Earth with a radioactive creature – played by 7 foot 6 inch actor Henry Hite – leaving a trail of scalded victims.  Just as flat and lifeless as the contemporary monster-on-loose flicks it rips off, Rebane’s film actually benefits from Lewis’ tinkering with campy additions of bikini clad vamps and egregious booty shaking POV shots.

 

1974’s Invasion from Inner Earth starts strong with an apocalyptic set-up as a group of scientists try to make contact with other survivors of a deadly plague.  Rebane’s first act ratchets up the tension as our protagonists fly to one abandoned airport after another before settling back into the safety of the Canadian woods.  But the film’s sci-fi element is badly mishandled, especially in the laughable 2001 inspired climax.

 

The Alpha Incident (1978) is a dramatic improvement on nearly every level.  Lifting most of his ideas from Crichton’s Andromeda Strain, Rebane stumbles into some actors who are a match for the material about a dangerous virus – transported via train – accidently released in a remote depot.  The exposed individuals must quarantine themselves while the government works on an antidote for the disease which causes immediate death when you fall asleep.  Surprisingly mature and confidently executed, it’s Rebane best film by a country mile and compares well with some of Romero’s homegrown epics like The Crazies.

 

After that the pickings get pretty slim.  The Demons of Ludlow (1983) is a bloodless ghost story about a haunted piano with tenuous connections to Roger Corman’s Poe and Lovecraft films.  The Game (1984) is a high-concept who-dun-it set at a Wisconsin resort.  And Twister’s Revenge (1988) tries to incorporate the monster truck craze into a Three Stooges-meets-Looney Tunes script that’s so painfully unfunny it’s best viewed at 1.5X speed.

 

Arrow did a phenomenal job with their William Grefe Collection, another regional filmmaker whose work has established a cult within a cult.  And they follow the same winning formula with Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection, with short intros for each film, trailers, shorts, critical analysis, collector’s booklet and a feature length (that’s two full hours) documentary entitled Who is Bill Rebane?  The package is tremendous, the films it collects (especially without The Giant Spider Invasion) not so much.  But a voluminous history focused on cinematic outliers is the kind of stuff Arrow does better than anyone else.

 

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