Wild Riders (1971)

Vile trash about soulless bikers brutalizing women, Wild Riders is unwatchable except for a few bizarre scenes featuring the great character actor Alex Rocco, who plays the film’s second lead. His offbeat behavioral choices give vitality to a handful of moments, as when his character freaks out because he thinks a woman has compared his appearance to that of an unsightly sculpture—watching Rocco scream, “Do I look like this shitty frog?” is about as close to enjoyable as Wild Riders gets. The film opens with Pete (Arell Blanton) and Stick (Rocco) molesting and murdering a young girl, whose body they leave strapped to a tree. Turns out she was Pete’s lady until she dallied with a black guy, which was enough to turn Pete homicidal. The killing gets Pete and Stick ejected from their gang, so they cruise the California highways looking for their next thrill, eventually discovering a house occupied by two women. Pete seduces one of them while Rocco rapes the other—as in, these actions happen simultaneously in adjoining rooms. Eventually the home invasion degrades even further, with the bikers murdering a neighbor who stops by to hit on the women. Later still, the bikers terrorize the homeowner, a classical musician married to one of the ladies. If cowriter/director Richard Kanter envisioned some sort of edgy close-quarters thriller, he missed the mark—especially during the gory, over-the-top climax, Wild Riders is a hateful mixture of softcore and ultraviolence.

Wild Riders: LAME

Brute Corps (1971)

          Prior to bestowing qualified praise on Brute Corps, it’s important to note that the picture shares a problem with most of its exploitation-flick brethren, namely a horrific portrayal of women. The beautiful hippie chick at the center of the plot is introduced as a sexual object, saying things like “I like to ball—it’s the thing I do best in the world” and “I should have been a hooker.” Later, once she falls victim to the bad guys after whom the movie is titled, the hippie chick endures hours upon hours of gang rape. The filmmakers try to empower the character in the story’s final moments, but that’s a case of too little, too late. Having identified this picture’s ugliest aspect, now we can shift to the qualified praise—as simple-minded exploitation flicks go, Brute Corps isn’t the worst. The premise is slightly offbeat, there’s a smidgen of actual character development, and there’s a reasonable balance of action scenes and thriller sequences bordering on outright horror. Holding the whole thing together is a lively performance by the always-interesting Alex Rocco.

          The picture begins by introducing a group of soldiers traveling through the desert, and, in a separate thread, a pair of young hippies who meet while hitchhiking and subsequently become lovers. Turns out the soldiers are mercenaries passing through Mexico on the way to a job in South America. Things don’t go well for people who cross the mercenaries’ path, so, naturally, the filmmakers put the hippies and the mercenaries on a collision course. Although the male hippie escapes to seek help from ineffectual cops, the hippie chick’s best hope is Ross (Paul Carr), a mercenary who rebels against his companions’ vile behavior. Vilest of all is Wicks (Rocco), who memorably tries to buy a woman from her father, then acts affronted when he declines the overture. Oh, and fair warning—this film’s rotten soundtrack includes lots of fuzz-rock grooves that are way too upbeat for the subject matter. Adjust your tolerance for dissonance accordingly.

Brute Corps: FUNKY

Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975)

          Along with the conspiracy thriller and the downbeat character study, the road movie is among the genres that are most crucial to the story of American cinema during the ’70s. The concept of rootless nobodies forming surrogate families while traveling through the heartland says volumes about disaffected national identity in the era of Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate. That’s why it’s tempting to cut a lot of slack for a picture along the lines of Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, even though the most objective critical assessment reveals Rafferty to be a travelogue of uninteresting people doing uninteresting things. The dignity and novelty of Rafferty and pieces of the same ilk can be found in the humdrum foibles of the unsophisticated characters. After all, some of the best New Hollywood movies broke new ground by giving voices to the voiceless. In other words, Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins contains many small pleasures for fans of a certain type of scruffy ’70s movie—while those seeking big laughs, heroic characters, and a memorable storyline should look elsewhere.

          Alan Arkin, working at the apex of his chilly oddness, stars as Rafferty, a former USMC gunnery sergeant now working a pointless job at a DMV office in Hollywood. Drinking heavily, living in squalor, treating his job contemptuously, and wallowing in regret after years of being a passenger in his own life, Rafferty is ready for a change. While on a lunch break one afternoon, he’s kidnapped at gunpoint by two drifters—grown-up Mac (Sally Kellerman) and teenaged Frisbee (Mackenzie Phillips). The ladies demand that Rafferty drive them to New Orleans. Rafferty manages to escape, but he soon realizes that he doesn’t want to resume his old life, so he rejoins the women as a willing traveling companion. Escapades ensue. Most of what happens in Rafferty is contrived in the extreme, even though some moments of gentle character work reflect sensitivity and thoughtfulness on the part of the filmmakers. A long sequence set in Mac’s hometown, for instance, feels credible thanks to the parade of rural dreamers and schemers who interact with the protagonists.

          Unfortunately, Arkin’s character never quite clicks as a believable human being, while Kellerman’s drifts in and out of realistic behavior. Grotesques played by Alex Rocco, Charles Martin Smith, and Harry Dean Stanton (who is especially wonderful here) resonate more strongly, perhaps because the filmmakers simply parachute into the lives of these low-rent fools for quick, purposeful vignettes. As for Phillips’ character, picture a second-rate version of the many precocious girls Jodie Foster played in ’70s movies, and you’re almost there—Phillips plays a one-note role well. From start to finish, writer John Kaye and director Dick Richards struggle to fill the movie’s slight 91-minute running time with a sufficient number of events, occasionally resorting to such filler as a chase scene and a musical number. Like the precious powder in its title, Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins is so wispy that it’s forever at risk of blowing away.

Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins: FUNKY

Bonnie’s Kids (1973)

          An all-too-common storytelling technique among ’70s filmmakers catering to the drive-in market involved taking elements that worked in other low-budget movies and jamming them together for maximum pulpy impact, even if narrative dissonance resulted. As a case in point, the action thriller Bonnie’s Kids includes ingénues, lesbians, mobsters, horny rednecks, sleazy photographers, a heist story right out of an old film noir, and lurid scenes that could be generously described as attempts at sex comedy. Based on sheer percentages of screen time, Bonnie’s Kids is a crime movie by default, but there’s a lot of cinematic wandering amid the film’s 105 undisciplined minutes. And yet as awful and sloppy as the preceding description makes Bonnie’s Kids sound, it’s not a completely terrible movie. The performances by leading lady Tiffany Bolling and supporting actor Alex Rocco are tasty, the plotting is relatively intricate, some scenes contain a modicum of wit, and there’s more than enough sex and violence to keep the viewer’s reptile brain engaged.

          The story starts in the deep south, where sexy sisters Ellie Mae (Tiffany Bolling) and Myra (Robin Mattson) live with their drunken lout of a stepfather because their mother, Bonnie, died two years previous. After the stepfather tries to molest Myra, older sister Ellie Mae unloads a shotgun into his chest, and the sisters flee to L.A., where Bonnie’s brother is a businessman. Before long, Myra gets romantically involved with a predatory lesbian, while Ellie Mae gets roped into transporting a package across state lines for gangsters, which brings her into the orbit of fellow courier Larry (Steve Sandor). Once Ellie Mae seduces Larry, she persuades him to open the mysterious package they’re carrying. It’s full of cash, so Ellie Mae talks Larry into running away with her—and the money. Predictably, the Mafia doesn’t the theft lightly, so gunmen Digger (Timothy Brown) and Eddy (Rocco) are sent to recover the loot.

          The first half of Bonnie’s Kids is scattershot, but the second half works fairly well as a lovers-on-the-run melodrama. There’s even some real tension toward the end, despite Ellie Mae’s annoying tendency to shout, “What are we going to do?” every five seconds. Writer-director Arhtur Marks, who cut his teeth directing episodes of Perry Mason and later made several lively blaxploitation flicks, keeps the pace brisk and seizes every opportunity to showcase the curvaceous figures of starlets. One can do a lot better in the world of tacky ’70s exploitation pictures than Bonnie’s Kids, but one can also do a lot worse, because hints of real filmmaking periodically emerge from the boobs-and-bullets muck.

Bonnie’s Kids: FUNKY

Rabbit Test (1978)

          Among the many impressive accomplishments in comedienne Joan Rivers’ long and multifaceted career, she was one of the few women to direct a Hollywood feature in the ’70s. Unfortunately, the significance of this professional milestone is largely symbolic, because Rabbit Test is an embarrassingly bad movie that flopped during its original release and has aged poorly. Starring Billy Crystal in his first big-screen starring role, the movie is about the world’s first pregnant man. Yet the picture, which Rivers also cowrote, never offers any explanation for how the lead character defies human physiology. In fact, there isn’t much of a storyline at all, because Rabbit Test mostly comprises sketches filled with rude jokes at the expense of every ethnic group imaginable.

          In the film’s nadir, Lionel Carpenter (Crystal) becomes a worldwide celebrity invited to meet various heads of state, so he ends up in the hut of an African chieftain. Men from the tribe entertain their illustrious visitor by performing an R&B version of “Frére Jacques” while wearing grass skirts—as other tribesmen stand around the room wearing jockstraps and holding basketballs. Then, to drag the scene all the way down into cringe-worthiness, ’70s TV star Jimmie “J.J.” Walker shows up in the hut to perform a ventriloquist act, and Walker’s “dummy” is played by little-person actor Billy Barty. In blackface. It’s like that for the movie’s entire 84-minute running time. The UN Secretary-General lauds Lionel’s achievement by saying, “Next to you, the moon walk was doo-doo.”  Lionel’s cousin Danny (Alex Rocco) makes a TV deal to broadcast the impending birth, and then says, “If the money’s up front, we can show Lionel’s gentiles.”

          Crystal struggles valiantly to give a humane performance while Rivers bombards viewers with clunky one-liners and laborious sight gags, but the shallowness and stupidity is stultifying. Rivers’ desperation shows in the way she crams in bit-part performances by second-rate celebrities including Norman Fell, George Gobel, Rosey Grier, Peter Marshall, Roddy McDowall, Tom Poston, Charlotte Rae, and, of course, Rivers herself. None of it generates so much as a chuckle, except perhaps for the outrageous line that flamboyant comic Paul Lynde delivers while playing an excitable gynecologist: “Call maintenance—I have sperm all over my desk again!”

Rabbit Test: LAME

Blood Mania (1970)

Representing a brainless union of horror and melodrama, this interminable flick depicts the nasty exploits of a young woman who uses deceit, extortion, seduction, and murder while trying to seize control of her ailing father’s fortune. Despite the lurid title, Blood Mania only occasionally lapses into plasma-splattered excess, because most of the screen time is devoted to lifeless dialogue scenes and to sexual interludes that feel quasi-pornographic even though they’re not the least bit explicit. Director Robert Vincent O’Neill has a pervy tendency to linger on breasts, so whenever he gets a woman naked, he contrives myriad angles and lighting schemes to showcase the anatomical features with which he’s clearly preoccupied. The only name-brand actor in Blood Mania is Alex Rocco, a fine character actor who appears briefly in an inconsequential role as a lawyer. Excepting Rocco, however, the performances in Blood Mania are laughably bad. For instance, stars Peter Carpenter and Maria De Aragon have such difficulty forming facial expressions that it seems as if they shot most of their scenes while heavily medicated. The drab story concerns Victoria (De Aragon), a twisted rich bitch who can’t wait for her loaded dad, Ridgley (Eric Allison), to croak. Victoria’s also a tramp who strips every time she sees a muscular dude, whether it’s the pool boy or Ridgley’s doctor, Craig (Carpenter). Speaking of Craig, he’s got bad money troubles, which makes him susceptible to Victoria’s overtures. Meanwhile, Craig’s dim-bulb girlfriend, Cheryl (Reegan Wilson), tries to save her man’s hide by sleeping with a lowlife (Arell Blanton) who’s blackmailing the doctor. Director O’Neill and his writers (including leading man Carpenter, who penned the story with as little skill as he brought to his acting) consider every narrative thread a mere prelude to a topless scene or a violent murder, if not both. Accordingly, Blood Mania is the kind of boring and misogynistic sludge that gives drive-in cinema a bad name, although the production values and technical execution are slightly above average for a grade-Z movie.

Blood Mania: LAME

Detroit 9000 (1973)

          During his Pulp Fiction afterglow, Quentin Tarantino created a short-lived Miramax subsidiary called Rolling Thunder, which distributed handful of indie movies and re-released faves from Tarantino’s days as a grindhouse habitué. One of the obscure ’70s movies that benefited from Tarantino’s largesse was Detroit 9000, a racially charged action thriller set in the urban wasteland of the Motor City. Yet while the picture has a lively cast and solid action scenes, it’s strictly a run-of-the-mill endeavor, so Tarantino’s imprimatur should not unreasonably raise expectations. Yes, Detroit 9000 is relatively unique in the way it blends elements of blaxploitation and mainstream action movies, and yes, the movie flips a cliché by portraying a black guy as the book-smart half of a buddy-cop duo—but novel elements can’t compensate for the lack of a memorable story. Detroit 9000 begins with crooks stealing millions from a fundraiser for a black gubernatorial candidate. The cops assigned to the case are street-smart white dude Det. Danny Bassett (Alex Rocco) and college-educated African-American Sgt. Jesse Williams (Hari Rhodes). Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t fully exploit the culture-clash potential of this dynamic, even though Rhodes and Rocco are both interesting performers.
          Rhodes, best known for his role on the TV adventure series Daktari (1966-1969), was a man of letters offscreen and, accordingly, brought eloquence and poise to his acting. Therefore, it’s a shame that Detroit 9000 give Rhodes one of his only leading roles, since he’s got nothing to do here but strive to retain his dignity while running through gutted urban locations and/or spewing bland dialogue. Rocco, a versatile character actor whose filmography includes everything from The Godfather (1972) to a string of sitcoms, provides a totally different flavor of authenticity, although he, too, is handicapped by an underwritten characterization. Among the supporting cast, Scatman Crothers does some energetic speechifying as a preacher; Vonetta McGee classes up a trite hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold role; and Herbert Jefferson Jr., later a regular on the original Battlestar Galactica series, shows up in full pimp regalia. The problem is that everyone involved in Detroit 9000, including second-rate blaxploitation director Arthur Marks, did better work elsewhere—so why this mediocre flick lingered in Tarantino’s memory is a mystery.

Detroit 9000: FUNKY

Voices (1979)

          Had it received the benefits of a careful script rewrite and a more germane selection of musical elements, Voices might have worked, because its simple premise could have been the seed for a sweet romance. Instead, Voices is a well-intentioned but forgettable misfire that, in its worst moments, becomes nearly laughable. Michael Ontkean stars as Drew Rothman, a struggling singer who makes ends meet running deliveries for his grandfather’s dry-cleaning business. While out and about one day, he spots a pretty girl, Rosemarie (Amy Irving), then longs for the day he’ll run into her again. Meanwhile, he wrestles with family dramas—Drew’s dad, Frank (Alex Rocco), is a compulsive gambler, and Drew’s little brother, Raymond (Barry Miller), is getting hassled by school bullies. Then, when Drew finally finds Rosemarie again, he discovers that the dreamgirl he’s been admiring from afar is actually deaf. To the picture’s credit, writer John Herzfeld and director Robert Markowitz aren’t out to make the cheap tearjerker implied by the set-up of a musician falling for a woman who can’t hear. Instead, they’re more interested in the heartening love-conquers-all story of Drew leaving the safety of the hearing world in order to understand Rosemarie’s challenges.

          In the picture’s best scenes, the filmmakers address those challenges through sharp exchanges between Rosemarie and her concerned mother (Viveca Lindfors), who advises Rosemarie to embrace a marginalized lifestyle rather than risk emotional pain in the big, bad outside world. Unfortunately, this sort of interesting material is smothered by promising subplots that aren’t resolved in a satisfying manner; it’s as if the filmmakers can’t decide which path to follow. Furthermore, the arc involving Rosemarie’s dream of becoming a dancer pirouettes too far into the realm of contrived irony. And, much as it pains me to say this since I’m a fan of both men, the music composed by Jimmy Webb (the songwriter of “MacArthur Park”) and sung by Burton Cummings (of the Guess Who) doesn’t work. These two collectively give Ontkean’s character his voice, and their colorations are far too precious to spring forth from a Hoboken street kid trying to make it in grimy nightclubs. So while Voices isn’t a total wash by a long shot—it’s brisk and filled with sincere performances—the movie comes off like a sloppy rough draft. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Voices: FUNKY

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972)

          Despite having been in movies since the heyday of the studio era, Robert Mitchum delivered several of his most interesting performances in the ’70s, probably because his don’t-give-a-damn acting style meshed comfortably with the naturalistic filmmaking methods that were in vogue at the time. One of the best examples of this synthesis between the right actor and the right moment is The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a soft-spoken crime picture about a sad-sack Boston hoodlum faced with the awful choice of going to prison for an interminable sentence or snitching on his lowlife friends.

          Utilizing the actor’s hangdog face and world-weary carriage to great effect, director Peter Yates employs Mitchum as the visual foundation for a rich portrait of going-nowhere criminality. Character actors Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, and Alex Rocco surround Mitchum with vivid performances laced with ambition, avarice, paranoia, and sociopathic violence; Boyle is particularly good as an operator working several self-serving angles at once. So even though the storyline meanders through beats that are familiar to fans of the crime genre, deeply textured acting gives the piece dimension and humanity.

          In one of the best scenes, Mitchum meets with a cocky gun dealer (Keats) in a coffee shop to discuss an illicit arms deal. Bruised by a lifetime of bad experiences, Mitchum brandishes his deformed mitt and explains that making a deal with the wrong guy in the past led to getting his hand broken, thus explaining his reluctance to accept Keats’ overconfidence at face value. Yates shoots the scene simply, with long lenses angled over the actors’ shoulders, creating a level of docudrama realism that’s emulated throughout the picture. As a testament to Yates’ focus on meticulous dramaturgy, the film’s quiet conversation scenes often have as much punch as its highly charged bank-robbery sequences. The action stuff works just fine, however, like the bits in which hoodlums use their favorite trick—holding a bank manager’s family hostage so he doesn’t get heroic ideas during a robbery.

          The Friends of Eddie Coyle has a subtle power that isn’t immediately evident on first viewing, since the plot isn’t clever and the payoff is more logically inevitable than inexorably tragic, but it’s hard to think of another crime film from the same period with as much artfully rendered nuance.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle: GROOVY

Hearts of the West (1975)

One of several nostalgic ’70s movies set during the early days of Hollywood filmmaking, Hearts of the West is a flawed but charming romantic adventure boasting clever characterizations and a terrific cast. Jeff Bridges stars as Lewis Tater, a naïve Iowan obsessed with becoming a Western pulp writer in the mode of Zane Gray. Through convoluted circumstances, he ends up making his way to Los Angeles circa 1930-ish, where he falls in with a group of crusty cowboy types who make their living doing stunts for a low-rent production company. The rangy story involves an avuncular veteran stuntman with a mysterious past, an eccentric book publisher, gun-toting con men, a hot-tempered studio boss, a wisecracking secretary, and other colorful types. Even with such an overstuffed plot, writer Rob Thompson and director Howard Zieff try to give every character unique flavor, like the unlucky stuntman who always takes the first bullet in onscreen gunfights. As was the case in many of his early pictures, Bridges is powered by enthusiasm and raw talent rather than refined skill, and it’s unfortunate that the dorky vocal style he adopts makes his work feel contrived in comparison with the naturalistic acting of the other players. Blythe Danner, at her liveliest and loveliest, is endearing as the secretary, and Alan Arkin connives and shouts his way through a funny performance as the mood-swinging studio boss. Donald Pleasence contributes memorable weirdness in his brief turn as the publisher, and the rest of the cast is filled out by impeccable character players including Matt Clark, Herb Edelman, Burton Gilliam, Anthony James, Alex Rocco, and Richard B. Shull. Topping all of this off is the venerable Andy Griffith, giving a loose and authoritative performance as the veteran stuntman; in a series of plot developments reflecting this picture’s surprising depth, Griffith’s character takes Tater under his wing but then grows to occupy an unexpected role in the young man’s life. Hearts of the West has big problems (the cartoonish music score is awful, the pacing is inconsistent, and the story relies on overly convenient plot twists), but it’s thoroughly appealing nonetheless. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Hearts of the West: GROOVY