Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Shack Out on 101!

Theme: Red Sharks - Crimson Glory

Even though 99% of movies are to the left of Lenin and always were, disingenuous dorks still wail and sob over the small and undistinguished run of low-budget anti-commie B-joints in the late 40s and 50s, most inexplicably infamous of which is guaranteed sleeping aid Woman on Pier 13, AKA I Married a Communist. Fortunately there was one kino noir in the set, which shares an oneiric oceanic opening motif with the 50s' best noir of all, Screaming Mimi:

The setting also reminds me of Tormented!. For some reason pairing curvy hotties with west coast beaches was a popular way to open 10/10 kinographs in the late 50s.

Terry Moore stars as Kotty, the waitress at a coastal diner whose unhappy lot consists in fending off the advances of rapey slimeball Slob (Lee Marvin) and the diner regulars. Sure, she could easily become the country's top model or movie star, or just marry any man with money, but shhh, if we pull on that thread they'll stop casting Sydney Sweeney in movies I'm never going to see too. Much of the runtime is actually chewed up in Clerksian vignettes of workplace banter and shenanigans, such as these two trying out scuba gear in the empty diner:

Movies could have been so good, you know.

But then the plot kicks in and the suspense begins to rise: IS everyone around our Ter Ter what they seem? WHOM can she trust, if anyone? WHO will survive, and WHAT will be left of them? Oh wait, that's the tagline from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, incidentally the second best tagline of all time, after A Nightmare on Elm Street's "if Nancy doesn't wake up screaming...she won't wake up at all!". CAN you remember a tagline from any post-80s movie? I can't.

Too soon?

There's just one other thing about this kino that makes it still relevant, though I imagine it's entirely incidental. There's no actual mention of communism, the USSR or any other specific identity for the enemy faction soliciting nuclear secrets from our cast of shifty fuckers, which makes one wonder whether some other foreign interest might just as well be behind it all. For obvious reasons, it's not a double meaning H*llywood would ever knowingly let slip into a movie, but it's grimly lulzy to consider all the same.

The way she then turned to camera and said "yeah, I'm talking about you, Ben Shapiro" was really ahead of its time.