At the curtain call of her latest play, acclaimed, yet over-the-hill stage actress Adriana Roman (played by former Madame X, the legendary Lana Turner) announces her retirement. As the prologue for The Big Cube, the scene could stand in for the uneasy career transition Turner and her Tinseltown peers experienced when New Hollywood pushed boundaries and buttons, and in doing so, shoved Old Hollywood’s melodramas and musicals out of the way. The elderly white men who ran the studios sought to capitalize on the youthquake they never understood, resulting in supposedly “with-it” pictures that succeeded only in demonstrating how sorely out of touch said studios were.
At least their failures put some choice cuts of camp on our plates, The Big Cube included.
Adriana trades the theater for playing the part of well-to-do wife of über-wealthy Charles Winthrop (Dan O’Herlihy, Halloween III: Season of the Witch). The news doesn’t sit well with his daughter, Lisa (Swedish actress Karin Mossberg, The Uninhibited), whose accent is explained away by Daddy having shipped her to a Swiss school following her mother’s death. Lisa leads a life of Riley, partying with airheaded pal Bibi (Pamela Rodgers, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine), who suggests things like, “Hey, large idea! Let’s call half a dozen guys and have an orgy!” and ditches her dresses when she gets sky-high.
At one groovy soirée, Lisa catches the eye of slimy med student Johnny Allen (George Chakiris, West Side Story), who manufacturers LSD in the university lab for his social circle. And when Johnny learns Lisa’s loaded, well, she catches his other eye, too. Just as Lisa warms to her new stepmother, her father dies. Per the sizable Winthrop will, Lisa is set to inherit a trust of $1 million unless she gets married and if Adriana consents to the union. Which she does not. Being human sleaze, Johnny hatches a scheme: Dose Adriana with enough LSD to drive her crazy — and perhaps even to her death.
Here is where the title of The Big Cube comes into play, priming viewers for its craziest sequences as Chilean filmmaker Tito Davison, helming his first and last Hollywood film, attempts to portray LSD trips, both from an insider’s and outsider’s POV. Johnny mansplains acid to Lisa with the you-don’t-say words of “You see sounds. You hear colors,” and Davison tries his damnedest to put that way-out feeling onscreen. I’ve never touched the stuff, but something tells me it’s more like the kaleidoscope of primitive special effects and less like the shot of Chakiris chunking a rock at your car windshield.
Anyway, the kids’ attempts to gaslight the ol’ bag give Turner the green flag to emote histrionically, as if she broke the glass marked “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, JOAN CRAWFORD.” And that comparison is apropos because The Big Cube nearly qualifies as “hagsploitation” — if only it weren’t quite so colorful, dressed in puffy shirts and weighted down with horoscope medallions. It’s like the soap bubbles of Valley of the Dolls as filtered through the clutched pearls of Reefer Madness, but not as fun as either. —Rod Lott