The Farmer (1977)

          Despite being released by a major studio, The Farmer is a decidedly minor entry into the annals of ’70s revenge cinema. Starring and produced by Gary Conway, best known for his roles on the TV series Burke’s Law and Land of the Giants, this picture has a somewhat offbeat premise, inasmuch as the setting is the 1940s and the protagonist is a World War II veteran. (Vigilante flicks about Vietnam vets were more common in the ’70s.) Eventually, The Farmer tumbles into the familiar Death Wish rabbit hole, featuring sexual assault as a plot device and showcasing close-quarters ultraviolence. Those who enjoy grungy pictures in which villains get perforated by sawed-off shotguns will get their kicks from The Farmer. Those who prefer action stories that are grounded in believable characterization will find the film frustrating, because for its first hour, The Farmer tries to tell a relatively credible story, even though the filmmakers have a clumsy way of integrating subplots. Yet once the main narrative kicks into gear, The Farmer becomes a dreary compendium of brutality.

          Kyle Martin (Conway) returns from World War II as a decorated Army sergeant, only to discover his backwoods homestead in disrepair. Kyle’s father died broke, and the farm’s African-American caretaker, Gumshoe (Ken Rendard), isn’t up to the task of maintaining buildings and equipment. Kyle sets to work even as foreclosure looms. Then big-city gangster Johnny (Michael Dante) crashes his car near the farm. Kyle rescues him. After recovering and heading home, Johnny sends slinky moll Betty (Angel Tompkins) to deliver a gift of $1,500, which buys Kyle some time without fully covering his debts. Later, after a particularly nasty turn of events, Johnny sends Betty to hire Kyle as a hit man.
         The plot basically works in a contrived sort of way, but the execution is substandard. By lingering too long on peripheral scenes during the first hour, the filmmakers take forever to get the engine running, and thereafter they mostly adhere to trite formulas. Predicting which characters will die, for instance, requires little effort on the part of the viewer. That said, The Farmer has some interesting moments; not every revenge flick has both a grotesque rape scene and several playful Shirley Temple references. The Farmer also boasts a genuinely ridiculous ending, so there’s a treat in store for those who make it through the whole film.

The Farmer: FUNKY

The One Man Jury (1978)

          Judged by normal standards, the violent cops-and-criminals flick The One Man Jury is thoroughly pedestrian, yet another saga about policemen who perceive the Miranda ruling as an inhibition on their ability to use any means necessary while apprehending bad guys. Judged by the standards of the schlock that leading man Jack Palance spent most of the ’70s making, often in Europe, The One Man Jury fares much better. Instead of being incoherent junk with bad dubbing and heavy exploitation elements, The One Man Jury is an American production with a clear storyline and passable supporting performances. And while Palance sleepwalks through much of his performance, as was his wont in low-budget productions, he at least gets to participate in a fully rendered action climax complete with colorful locations, double-crosses, shootouts, and twists. If nothing else, The One Man Jury seems very much like a real movie for the last 30 minutes of its running time.

          Set in LA, the picture concerns Detective Jim Wade (Palance), a tough guy who still beats suspects and violates their Constitutional rights, even though post-Miranda laws mean that many of his arrests are voided by the courts. When a psycho starts murdering women, Wade becomes obsessed with catching the guy, so he makes a deal with gangster Mike Abatino (Joe Spinell), In exchange for giving Wade the name of the killer, who is associated with Abatino’s gang, Wade agrees to leave Abatino’s criminal operations alone. Half the movie explores the circumstances leading to the deal, and half the movie explores the consequences. Structurally, this is solid stuff, even though writer-director Charles Martin wanders into narrative cul-de-sacs. For instance, the whole business of Wade’s romantic involvement with a much-younger records officer, Wendy (Pamela Shoop), feels bogus from start to finish. Still, Spinell and actors including Andy Romano make fun hoodlums, and B-movie starlet Angel Tompkins gives the movie a shot of attitude with her brief role as a glamorous gambler. The main takeaway is that there’s a terrific concept buried inside The One Man Jury. In fact, the movie is something of a precursor to the much slicker Michael Douglas picture The Star Chamber (1983), in which a cabal of judges hires killers to take out crooks who get off on technicalities.

The One Man Jury: FUNKY

The Bees (1978)

While the most enduring pop-culture artifact stemming from widespread mid-’70s paranoia about killer bees is undoubtedly the recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live depicting the striped insects as Mexican banditos, Hollywood cranked out a few overheated horror pictures on the subject, as well. Disaster-flick titan Irwin Allen was responsible for The Swarm (1978), a big-budget flop starring Michael Caine, and Roger Croman’s low-budget factory New World Pictures was responsible for this dud starring John Saxon. In fact, according to a book about New World, Warner Bros. paid New World to delay the release of The Bees until after The Swarm passed through theaters. In any event, The Bees is just as silly as the Allen production, only without the redeeming values of a kitschy cast and a melodramatic narrative. The Bees opens in Brazil, where crossbred bees attack their keepers at a ranch owned by an international conglomerate. (The murky setup tries to involve both accidental and intentional blending of insect species, resulting in a super-aggressive hybrid.) Soon after the deadly incident in Brazil, a scientist named Sandra Miller (Angel Tompkins) smuggles killer bees into New York, where she reports to John Norman (Saxon), head of a company angling to get a monopoly on the world’s honey supply. Or something. The plot is so stupid and turgid that parsing details isn’t worth the effort, and even trying to watch the movie for the “exciting” scenes is pointless. Once killer bees start rampaging across the United States, director Alfredo Zacarías employs cheap animation to show massive swarms passing landmarks, and he uses grainy stock footage to illustrate the military response. Meanwhile, Saxon gives stilted line readings and John Carradine, in a supporting role, speaks in some amateurish hodgepodge of European accents. The whole pathetic enterprise concludes (spoiler alert!) with the protagonist realizing the bees have learned to communicate, then addressing a general assembly of the UN with this urgent message: “You have to listen to what the bees have to say!” Sadly, just when the movie reaches campy terrain, it ends instead of going full-bore into craziness.

The Bees: LAME

The Teacher (1974)

In the mid-’90s, Hollywood issued a slew of straight-to-video erotic thrillers featuring former child actresses (Drew Barrymore, Alyssa Milano, Molly Ringwald, etc.) in sexualized roles. The marketing copy for these flicks usually included the phrase “as you’ve never seen her before.” Go figure that one of the antecedents of this trend actually features a male ex-child star—The Teacher presents ’60s TV kid Jay North, onetime star of Dennis the Menace, “as you’ve never seen him before.” Having not grown up on that particular show, watching North simulate sex onscreen didn’t warp any of my childhood memories, but chances are The Teacher has that effect on some unlucky viewers. Which, as it happens, may be the only effect the movie has on anyone, because The Teacher is Insipid, slow, tacky, and weird. North plays Sean, a recent high school graduate who joins his pal, Lou (Rudy Herrera Jr.), for a dubious adventure—they visit the warehouse hideaway in which Lou’s older brother, tweaked Vietnam vet Ralph (Anthony James), uses binoculars to watch a beautiful woman sunbathe nude every day. The woman is Diane (Angel Tompkins), who happens to be Ralph’s former schoolteacher. An accident at the warehouse leaves Lou dead, with Ralph preoccupied by the false notion that Sean was responsible. Any tension promised by this scenario, however, is quickly dissipated by the filmmakers’ ineptitude. For instance, even though Sean knows that Ralph is out to get him, Sean passes days aimlessly by swimming in pools and working on his van. That is, until Diane all but rapes the young man, commencing a scandalous romance. Very little of what happens onscreen makes sense, the elements never cohere, and the film culminates in an absurd bummer ending. (A disjointed music score spanning sludgy funk and twee balladry adds to the overall oddness.) As for the actors, North is terrible, James goes way over the top, and Tompkins mostly just undresses. So, while it’s somewhat possible to embrace The Teacher as a so-bad-it’s-good atrocity, the wiser path is simply to steer clear.

The Teacher: LAME

Little Cigars (1973)

          Featuring a genuinely offbeat take on the romantic-outlaw genre, Little Cigars concerns a criminal gang comprising five little people—at least until a normal-sized woman with grandiose dreams raises the stakes of their larcenous exploits. Blonde knockout Angel Tompkins, working an appealing groove of seen-it-all cynicism, stars as Cleo, a gang moll who rips off a gangster and then flees the big city, hoping to live quietly under an assumed identity in a small town far from the scene of the crime. Alas, the gangster sends goons to chase her down, so Cleo realizes she’ll never be far from danger.
          One day at the restaurant where she’s working as a waitress, Cleo meets a pair of smart-aleck little people who invite her to see their traveling sideshow. She does. During the show, while three members of the little-people troupe distract onlookers with a stage performance, the remaining little people sneak out to the parking lot and pilfer belongings from cars. Among the stolen items is the pistol Cleo keeps in her car for protection. After discovering the theft and figuring out the little people’s scam, Cleo confronts Slick Bender (Billy Curtis), the leader of the gang, to demand the return of her gun. Quickly realizing that Cleo must be on the lam, Slick Bender calls her bluff—thus beginning an unlikely flirtation. Although unmatched in size, Cleo and Slick Bender are simpatico in terms of chutzpah. Happy to leave the small town behind and return to the excitement of criminal enterprise, Cleo joins the gang and becomes Slick Bender’s lover. As his desire to impress Cleo grows, so too does the ambition of the jobs the gang attempts—which drives a wedge between Slick Bender and his buddies, who prefer sticking to petty larceny that doesn’t attract much attention.

          While Little Cigars feels a bit fleshy because the filmmakers forgot to develop a central villain, the movie is consistently entertaining and novel. The gang’s heists are predicated on the crooks’ size—for instance, they sneak into a laundry facility by hiding inside laundry bags—and Cleo’s Lady Macbeth-style machinations credibly suggest an opportunist run amok. Curtis, a Hollywood veteran with credits ranging back to the late ’30s, makes the most of his role, one of the few fully dimensional characterizations he got to play in movies; he’s edgy and funny and sympathetic. Similarly, the actors playing his pals contribute unexpected colors, clearly savoring the chance to move beyond demeaning “midget” clichés. Tompkins sells the whole outlandish story by playing her scenes straight, treating Curtis as a scene partner with equal footing; she also comes off looking like a goddess whenever she parades around in underwear surrounded by admirers who are barely as high as her rib cage. And if Little Cigars is ultimately little more than a routine crime flick with an unusual angle, the movie gets points for a highly satisfying ending and a thoroughly ingrained sense of humor.

Little Cigars: FUNKY

Walking Tall (1973) & Walking Tall Part II (1975) & Final Chapter: Walking Tall (1977)

          The Walking Tall franchise provides an object lesson in diminishing returns. The first picture has a certain crude but undeniable power, meaning follow-ups were inevitable. Yet critical lashings and meager box-office returns for the second and third pictures did not deter the films’ producers from generating a TV movie, titled A Real American Hero, about the same real-life historical figure who inspired the franchise. Later, a different company picked up the reins by creating a short-lived Walking Tall TV series in 1981. And then, decades after it seemed as if the Walking Tall brand was exhausted, a remake of the original film was released in 2004 (with Dwayne Johnson as Pusser), and the remake begat straight-to-video sequels (enter Kevin Sorbo). What gave the series its staying power? Well, if you believe the self-mythologizing of the late Buford Pusser, the subject of all of these stories, he was a real-life action hero. A former wrestler who became the sheriff of Tennessee’s McNairy County, Pusser took on organized crime and won, purging McNairy of moonshiners, prostitutes, racketeers, and so on. Yet justice came at a terrible price. Pusser’s wife was murdered, and he died under mysterious circumstances just a year after the first Walking Tall movie was released.

          Or at least that was the perception until a 2025 investigation unearthed evidence suggesting Pusser killed his wife. One imagines the next cinematic treatment of Pusser’s life, if there ever is one, will bear little resemblance to the pulpy sagas of the ’70s.

          The first movie, simply titled Walking Tall, was based on a nonfiction book about Pusser. At the beginning of the story, Pusser (Joe Don Baker) gives up wrestling for a quiet life in his native McNairy County, only to discover the area is overrun with crooks. Idealistic and stubborn, Pusser gets into hassles with the area’s criminal element. Before long, he’s beaten, mutilated, and left for dead. Unable to exact justice via the legal system after his recovery, Pusser runs for sheriff and wins, becoming a one-man vengeance squad. The title relates to his signature weapon, a four-foot wooden club that he uses to beat evildoers (as in, “Walk tall and carry a big stick”). One of the most interesting elements of the movie is Pusser’s gradual education about things like search-and-seizure laws and suspects’ rights; he evolves from recklessly kicking ass to slyly trapping bad guys through their own misdeeds. Meanwhile, he tries to build a stable home life with his wife, Pauline (Elizabeth Hartman), and their two kids.

          As directed by competent journeyman Phil Karlson, Walking Tall moves along at a good clip even though it runs 125 minutes; call it the Citizen Kane of fascistic southern-fried vigilante pictures. Plus, by the time the movie slides into its final act—during which Pusser metes out bloody justice while half his face is masked in bandages following a near-fatal assault—Walking Tall becomes just a little bit deranged. (How deranged? The plaintive theme song is performed by, of all people, Johnny Mathis.) Baker is in his natural element here, exuding badass ’tude and cornpone charm, so it doesn’t really matter that the rest of the cast is largely forgettable; only crusty character actor Noah Berry, Jr., as Pusser’s papa, makes an impression. The aesthetic is pure Me Decade garishness, the FX team is generous with the fake blood, and every narrative point is made with the subtlety of a hammer to the forehead. The amount of sweat pouring from actors seems to reflect how hard they're working to generate lurid entertainment.

          The real-life Pusser’s death cast a morbid pall over Walking Tall Part II, in which the statuesque Bo Svenson assume the leading role. Lacking Baker’s charisma, Svenson struggles through emotional moments and relies on his intimidating physique to sell action scenes. Further, he seems too gentle to play a man who’d rather crack skulls than read suspects their rights. It isn’t giving much away to say the original Walking Tall ends with Pusser killing the men who murdered his wife, or that Walking Tall: Part II dramatizes his attempts to arrest the crooks who ordered the hit. The sequel adds swampy flavor, with supporting characters bearing names like “Pinky Dobson” and “Stud Pardee,” and the caliber of the supporting players is a slight improvement on the first film. Reliable actors including Luke Askew and Richard Jaeckel add energy, though leading lady Angel Tompkins is largely decorative as a temptress hired to ensnare Pusser. And while periodic car chases and shootouts keep things lively, there’s too much aimless yakety-yak—not exactly Svenson’s strong suit as a performer. Worse, the way the movie addresses the real Pusser’s death is highly unsatisfying.

          The last of the ’70s Pusser flicks, the oddly titled Final Chapter: Walking Tall, is as interminable as it is unnecessary. Fabricating a thin story to depict what happened to Pusser between the climax of the previous film and his death—while, of course, presenting a wholly unsubstantiated conspiracy theory in order to name Pusser’s killers—Final Chapter: Walking Tall mostly features Pusser (Svenson again) fretting about his troubles. A long scene of Pusser weeping over his wife’s grave represents the nadir of Svenson’s acting in the series; he tries mightily but can’t conjure anything genuine. Weirdly, the makers of Final Chapter: Walking Tall often forget they’re cranking out an exploitation flick, instead trying to generate wholesome family drama. Pusser saves a kid from an abusive father, romances a girl-next-door secretary, and generally tries to set a positive example for his kids—yawn. Literally an hour of screen time elapses before serious action occurs.

          Anyway, one last item for trivia buffs—two performes who appear in all three ’70s Walking Tall movies are teen idol Leif Garrett, as Pusser’s son, and character actor Bruce Glover, as Pusser’s deputy. Best known for playing a gay hit man in the 007 romp Diamonds are Forever (1971), Glover also sired oddball actor-director Crispin Glover.

Walking Tall: GROOVY

Walking Tall Part II: FUNKY

Final Chapter: Walking Tall: LAME

The Don Is Dead (1973)

Even as Italian-American auteurs Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese reimagined the gangster genre in the early ’70s, other filmmakers cranked out perfectly serviceable mob thrillers of a more conventional nature. The Don Is Dead is a good example, since it’s a brisk potboiler that lacks much in the way of artistic ambition but still gets the down-and-dirty job done with a florid mixture of intrigue, sex, and violence. Anthony Quinn, overripe as always but effectively cast, stars as Don Angelo, leader of a powerful gang. When his mistress (Angel Tompkins) is murdered, Don Angelo orders his soldiers to go on a killing spree, sparking a war among various factions angling for power. Eventually, as the title suggests, Don Angelo gets caught in the crossfire, and the most effective stretch of the picture depicts the crime lord scheming from a secret hiding place while his enemies think he’s been taken out of commission. Based on a novel by Marvin H. Albert and directed by versatile workhorse Richard Fleischer, The Don Is Dead offers acres and acres of tasty ’70s texture. The clothes are all big lapels and synthetic fabrics, the locations are gritty, and the action is nasty. Fredrick Forrest stands out among the cast as an enforcer-for-hire who works alongside his brother; his energetic performance captures the melodramatic spirit of the piece. Robert Forster, working a nice blend of seething and suave, is good as well, playing an ambitious junior mobster trying to climb the organized-crime ladder no matter who gets hurt along the way. There’s even some crossover with The Godfather, which hit theaters about a year and a half before The Don Is Dead, because character actors including Al Lettieri and Abe Vigoda appear in both films. The Don Is Dead doesn’t break any new ground, but it works.

The Don Is Dead: FUNKY