The Big Cube (1969)

(On Cable TV, June 2022) If you ever wanted to experience a late-1960s soap opera-style drug melodrama, then The Big Cube is your otherwise indescribable pick for the evening. Headlined by Lana Turner, the film was shot in Mexico and heightens its inheritance-thriller foundation with LSD-infused sequences. Turner plays a widowed actress gaslit by her stepdaughter and no-good boyfriend through drug ingestion and spooky recordings at night. The same drug-less plot would have been perfectly viable Hollywood fare in earlier decades, but this being the late 1960s, we get a lot of LSD talk and semi-trippy visuals as bonuses. Turner here turns in one last role for the big studios, while George Chakiris is deliciously slimy as a deceptive LSD-dealing medical student. The Big Cube often feels like a period case study of how pre-New Hollywood desperately tried reheating old formulas with new 1960s elements – there’s a comfort in well-worn plotting, with a spicy dare of the forbidden in roundly denouncing drugs. Not necessarily a classic, but something that has some interest even today.