Growing up in the 70s was pretty amazing; the music was incredible, world events were pretty crazy, the trends were unforgettable, and it was absolutely the finest decade for film in the medium's history.
Classic movies were released every week, and major studios were producing films like "Dog Day Afternoon," "Taxi Driver," "Five Easy Pieces," "Rolling Thunder," and "Badlands," the kinds of movies that, if made today, would have to be independently produced and would be barely get made, let alone distributed.
It was a renaissance period for great films, but it was also a time for dreck.
For every auteur-created masterpiece released in the 70s, there were a bunch of low-budget, grindhouse, or slapped-together pieces of crap thrown onto screens across the country.
Now, don't get me wrong, I paid to see almost every one of those pieces of crap in the theater and probably loved most of them.
Independent studios with weird names and even weirder histories would pop up all over the place in the 70's and unleash hordes of goofy garbage upon the public to make a quick buck and get attention.
One of the most notoriously weird independent studios of the 70s was out of Utah and —not kidding— was funded by Schick razor company.
Schick started a studio that would go on to make all kinds of films, but it specialized in family fare and documentaries. They called themselves Sunn Classic Pictures, and that extra "n" in the word "Sun" was added to differentiate the studio from a publisher of popular porno books at the time.
That should have been a tip-off right there.
I hadn't thought about Sunn Classic Pictures for decades until the other day while watching that strange new Abraham Lincoln-might-have-been-gay documentary. It made me remember the ridiculous Sunn Classic "classic" from 1977, "The Lincoln Conspiracy," a pseudo-doc that dramatized many conspiracy theories concerning Lincoln's assassination.
Then the Sunn Classic memories came rushing back.
There was a period between 1974 and 1980 when Sunn Classic was making a ton of money releasing ultra-low budget weirdo-documentaries that were created by spending a ton of money on research (conducting phone surveys and interviews with potential viewers) and targeting working-class families who rarely went to the movies more than twice a year.
The movies played at tons of local theaters. My friends and I saw all of them, and most were trash, but they kept coming out, and we kept seeing them, I'm still not sure why. Maybe because there was a specific mesmerizing awfulness to them that made them irresistible, or perhaps we just kept getting sucked in by the marketing and the strange subject matter.
The Sunn Classic Pictures lineup of the 70's included:
THE MYSTERIOUS MONSTERS
The first big Sunn Classics release was narrated by Peter Graves. It covered the subjects of ghosts, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, psychics, and other things you might be interested in if you were 6 years old, stupid, or high.
THE OUTER SPACE CONNECTION
Like the trendy paperback book of the same era, "Chariots of Gods," this hilariously inept documentary speculated that aliens have visited Earth and built a bunch of stuff so that when they return in the future, they could get around quickly. This one was the blueprint for almost every other Sunn Classic that followed.
IN SEARCH OF NOAH’S ARK
This film put Sunn Classics on the map if you don't count the "Grizzly Adams" movie and TV series with Dan Haggerty. It started the stretch of box office hits for the razor blade manufacturing studio.
It was an unbelievably stupid documentary loaded with unproven theories (Sunn Classic's claim to fame) about the final resting place of Noah's Ark.
This hilariously inept, self-important nonsense introduced the world to Brad Crandall, a one-time radio host from New York, who would become the face, voice, and narrator of the Sunn Classic films.
He had a deep voice, wore glasses, and was bearded and severe, therefore legitimate. I remember laughing my ass off at this guy every time he showed up on screen.
In Search of Historic Jesus and More
Then came the stretch of "The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena," the aforementioned "The Lincoln Conspiracy," "The Bermuda Triangle," "In Search of Historic Jesus," "Encounter with Disaster," and "The President Must Die."
But nothing prepared the unsuspecting public for:
BEYOND AND BACK
This unbelievably stupid and hilarious "documentary" from 1978 explored the subject of near-death experiences by combining stories from people who claimed to have died briefly, only to return to tell their tales.
The tales themselves ALL consisted of the same stupid scenario.
There is some kind of horrible accident, attempted murder or attempted suicide. The person then floats above their body, usually on an operating table or at a crime/accident scene, and looks down to see themselves.
They talk about how they traveled down a black hole until they saw a bright light at the end, calling to them. They reluctantly traveled toward the light until they felt an overwhelming need to return, and suddenly found themselves back in their body, returning to the real world (except for the suicide attempt, who ended up in hell, not kidding).
The stories were mind-numbingly repetitive, recreated with the lowest budgets imaginable, the worst actors on the planet, and special effects that looked as though they were created in a neighbor's basement (which they probably were).
The results were unintentionally hilarious, often dull, and certainly offensive. The scariest part of the entire film was the image of that bearded-wonder Brad Crandall, wandering around a cemetery looking as if he is about to desecrate a grave.
Embarrassing filmmaking at its worst and most insulting, and, as far as documentaries go, it's about as well-researched and believable as a Looney Tunes cartoon.
And the thing made MILLIONS of dollars! (??) It was, without question, the biggest hit in Sunn Classic Pictures history, and helped keep the crappy little studio at the top of the box office charts for a few years during an era in which everybody wore leisure suits, thought Mood Rings were cool, listened to Andy Gibb, and had Pet Rocks.
So, yeah…it made sense.
Eventually, Sunn Classic Pictures lost its luster as the public finally caught on to the hustle, and the company almost went out of business until it got some financial backing.
With help, Sunn Classic morphed into Taft International Pictures. It ended up producing and helping to distribute major movies like "Cujo," "The Monster Squad," "The Running Man," "Light of Day," and "Ironweed." Unbelievable.
Whatever legitimate success the company would go on to have, it just never compared to that insane stretch of popularity they had in the late 70’s, when the future of a low budget movie studio run by guys who manufactured cheap razor blades, and prayed a lot, seemed endless.
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