Near the end of his career, and with hardcore pornography having eclipsed his comparatively modest gains in the raincoat market, Novak put his money behind the occasional horror film, guaranteed money-makers in inner city grindhouses and on the Southern drive-in circuit. Novak produced a softcore remake of the Roger Corman killer plant classic The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) titled Please Don't Eat My Mother (1973) and stamped his imprimatur on such economy shockers as the Italian Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974), The Child (aka Zombie Child, 1977), the Canadian Deliverance (1972) ripoff Rituals (1977), and Rattlers (1976). One of many "animal revenge" movies produced in the wake of Willard (1971) and Frogs (1972), a horror subgenre then riding the tidal wave of Jaws (1975), Rattlers concerns the infestation of a small Mojave town with seemingly predatory vipers, whose murderous massing compels a university herpetologist (Sam Chew, Jr.) and a photojournalist (Elisabeth Chauvet) to suss out the source of the plague. Produced with a painful lack of wherewithal, Rattlers could not help but prove a money-maker for Novak, who distributed the film to more than a dozen foreign markets, among them the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, Greece, Egypt, Italy, Iran, Israel, and Portugal.
A long-standing guilty pleasure for the Psychotronic crowd, Rattlers boasts more than its fair share of unintentionally funny moments - as when the leads find themselves trapped in their desert tent by a rattler swarm and are saved from the death of a thousand bites by the last minute intervention of soldiers from a nearby army base, who spray the flimsy interior with M16 fire. Nonetheless, the script by director John McCauley and cowriter Jerry Golding reveals an occasionally sardonic edge, tipping its hat to a particularly relevant Alfred Hitchcock film by having an ornithologist character register his fear of snakes with the line "I think I'll stick to working with birds - they don't strike at all." Cast for affordability rather than marquee value, Rattlers' cast does offer up some retroactively notable names, among them Darwin Joston (who went from a bit as a snake victim here to the lead in John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 the same year), Don Siegel rep player Al Dunlap, and former child star (Island of the Blue Dolphins [1964], Wild Seed [1965]) Celia Kaye, who had shared a 1965 Golden Globe with Mia Farrow and, post-Rattlers, married writer-director John Milius and appeared in small roles in his films Big Wednesday (1978) and Conan the Barbarian (1982).
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema by Scott Von Doviak (McFarland & Company, 2004)
Sex in Film: The Erotic in British, American, and World Cinema by Barry Forshaw (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
Harry Novak obituary by Pierre Perrone, The Independent, June 3, 2014
