The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds
Dir: Bert Williams
1965 81min
Actually filmed in the Everglades amidst snakes and gators!” the sensational posters for Bert Williams’ “primitive art film” from 1965 exult. It’s one of the less exaggerated claims about the genre-blending Southern Gothic exploitation picture for years known mostly through what remained of its over-the-top posters and advertisements. With fans like The Cramps and apparently, The Ramones, the film was a legend, long deemed lost until a remaining print was discovered a few years ago by Liz Coffey, at the time a film conservator at the Harvard Film Archive, who noticed the low-budget jewel shimmering in a collector’s stash of films retrieved from the basement of The Little Art Cinema in Rockport, Massachusetts. The strange, scrappy film was given premiere treatment: it was restored, scanned and accorded a new digital life courtesy filmmaker and exploitation film enthusiast Nicolas Winding Refn.
A bit part character actor with a colorful past, Bert Williams embarked on an ambitious vanity project with this eccentric b-film phantasm—originally titled The Violent Sick. As writer, director and donner of many other hats, Williams also plays the lead, “an agent for the Liquor Control Department … dispatched to disband a gang of cut-throat still operators on an island in the everglades.” Chased through the swamp, he happens upon the Cuckoo Bird Inn and its strange inhabitants whose individual psychoses gradually—or immediately—reveal themselves. He is further besieged by fleeting appearances by naked, masked woman out for blood. The twists and turns of the bizarre plot are complemented by bad acting, shoddy lighting, weird make-up, uneven pacing and unpredictable—sometimes surprisingly expressive—editing. Bert’s wife, Peggy provides the unexpectedly delectable cherry on top with a soundtrack that adds a mesmerizing, dreamy edge and near pathos to this truly unique, mixed-up Floridian curiosity which amounts to, in the words of writer Bert Mehr, “part detective story, part regional exploitation flick, part Hitchcockian horror thriller, and part European art film, with a dash of psychosexual titillation thrown in for good measure.”