The Rebel Rousers (1970)

Filmed in 1967 but shelved until 1970, The Rebel Rousers is a bland biker flick distinguished only by the presence of several actors who became famous after the picture was shot: Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton. Nicholson is barely in the picture, Stanton has a couple of amusing throwaway bits, and Ladd mostly shrieks or whimpers while playing a pregnant woman terrorized by bikers. Of the bunch, only Dern gets a part with dimension and size, though there’s not much he can do with the brainless material. He plays the chief of a scooter gang whose jackets bear Confederate flags (though none of the bikers sounds Southern). Yet his character’s behavior is befuddling, and one gets the sense of a rushed production inhibiting Dern’s ability to contribute his signature idiosyncratic flourishes—virtually every shot feels like a first rehearsal, or even a loose run-through, rather than a recording of fully developed performance. The threadbare plot revolves around portly architect Paul (Cameron Mitchell), who rolls into a dusty town and, by coincidence, encounters high-school buddy J.J. (Dern). Paul traveled to the town in search of his runaway girlfriend, Karen (Ladd), who fled during a rough patch in their relationship. Eventually, Paul’s car breaks down near a beach, at which point J.J.’s biker buddies menace Paul and Karen. J.J. tries to intervene, leading to power struggles within the gang. All of this is exceptionally boring to watch, especially when the plot degrades into a repetitive pattern of motorcycle races up and down the shoreline. There’s also a huge charisma gap separating Dern’s earnest performance and Mitchell’s drab work.

The Rebel Rousers: LAME

The Silent Scream (1979)

Shamelessly borrowing plot elements, stylistic tropes, and even musical flourishes from Psycho (1960), this modestly budgeted shocker is of a piece with the countless slasher films that kept teen audiences squealing with nervous delight throughout the 1980s. Like most of those interchangeable pictures, The Silent Scream combines a far-fetched storyline with nasty gore and predictable scares to create a lot of empty cinematic noise. As in Psycho, the story revolves around a pretty young woman picking the wrong place to stay. College student Scotty (Rebecca Balding) takes a room in a gothic-style boarding house overlooking the California shoreline. Despite bonding with fellow young tenants, she’s unnerved by the proprietors, a family including awkward twentysomething Mason (Brad Rearden). In classic slasher-film fashion, Scotty ignores various warning signs, because she’s more focused on dating a handsome young tenant than on noticing that several murders have occurred nearby. Unbeknownst to Scotty, disturbed Victoria (Barbara Steele) lives in the boarding house attic, and Victoria has a rude habit of venturing outside to kill people. You can figure out where it goes from there—each murder brings Victoria closer to Scotty, even as intrepid cops (played by Cameron Mitchell and Avery Schreiber) follow clues. Will Scotty survive? Whatever. The Silent Scream has a few demented moments, like the scene in which Steele dances around her attic with a corpse as her only companion, and the body count rises substantially in the third act. Yet nothing imaginative or surprising happens, so The Silent Scream is, at best, a somewhat competent recitation of the imperiled-innocent formula. If a smattering of sex and a splash of plasma speeds your pulse, indulge. If not, ignore.

The Silent Scream: LAME

The Andersonville Trial (1970)

          Calling this made-for-TV production of Saul Levitt’s Broadway play a movie is a bit of a stretch, seeing as how it’s essentially a videotaped recording of a live performance on a soundstage, but the cast is so colorful and the story is so arresting that The Andersonville Trial demands attention. Set four months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Levitt’s play dramatizes the real-life case of Captain Henry Wirz, the Confederate officer who oversaw a massive POW camp in Andersonville, Georgia, where 14,000 inmates died from abuse, deprivation, and exposure. In Levitt’s humanistic telling, Wirz was complicit in the deaths, but he also unfairly received the brunt of the North’s anger against the South following the Civil War, since he was the first Confederate officer tried for war crimes. Staging The Andersonville Trial for television soon after the My Lai massacre was undoubtedly a conscious choice on the part of the producers, because Levitt’s play explores the thorny issue of how conscientious soldiers struggle to reconcile military and moral obligations, a relevant consideration during the Vietnam era.

          George C. Scott, who played the leading role on Broadway, slipped into the director’s chair for this production, and William Shatner somewhat improbably inherited the part. Save for their flamboyance, it’s hard to imagine two actors who are more different. That said, Shatner attacks the part of prosecuting JAG Lt. Col. Norton P. Chipman with ferocity and passion. In fact, The Andersonville Trial may well contain the best visual record of Shatner’s capacity as an actor. Many of Shatner’s excesses are present here, but so, too, are his sometimes underrated gifts—he orates well, mostly eschewing his famous dramatic pauses, and he shifts nimbly from anger to anguish. If not a remarkable performance, it’s certainly a robust one.

          As the title suggests, Levitt’s play tracks several episodes during a long trial, with each act comprising an extended real-time vignette. The defendant, Wirz (Richard Basehart), is an oddity, a physically impaired European immigrant so proud of his blind service to Confederate orders that he finds the whole trial offensive and ridiculous. He represents the familiar notion that following orders absolves a soldier of personal responsibility for atrocities. Conversely, Shipman represents a higher form of justice, since his prosecution asks whether Wirz should have defied orders in the name of mercy.

          Levitt’s exploration of these complicated issues within the framework of an exciting courtroom duel makes for compelling viewing even though The Andersonville Trial runs two and a half hours. It is also to Levitt’s and Scott’s credit that so many mid-level actors deliver excellent work here. Jack Cassidy is smooth as Wirz’s exasperated defense attorney, Cameron Mitchell conveys an interesting mixture of condescension and dignity as the head of the military tribunal, and folks shining in smaller roles include Michael Burns, Buddy Epsen, and Albert Salmi. Attentive viewers will even spot a young Martin Sheen in a glorified walk-on role toward the beginning of the piece.

The Andersonville Trial: GROOVY

The Toolbox Murders (1978)

Allegedly based upon true events, the ugly serial-killer flick The Toolbox Murders mixes three things the world didn’t need to see: overly detailed and lengthy murder scenes, tawdry sexual scenarios including a long vignette of a young woman masturbating before she’s slaughtered with a nail gun, and a showy performance by the familiar character actor Cameron Mitchell. Also featured are interminably long dialogue scenes, plus weak supporting performances by inconsequential actors. Part of a vile tradition of movies seemingly made about, by, and for men who savor the notion of brutalizing attractive women, The Toolbox Murders has undoubtedly curried some favor among horror fans because the gore is fairly extreme. However, uless you enjoy watching people get burned, drilled, hammered, and stabbed, you should give The Toolbox Murders a wide berth. Set in dreary sections of southern California, the picture opens with several ghastly murders, during which a mystery figure carrying a metal toolbox kills women with instruments from inside the toolbox. Director Dennis Donnelly lingers on homicide, savoring images of, say, a bloody drillbit bearing chunks of viscera. Yuck. Then the story proper, such as it is, begins. A dippy teenager named Laurie (Pamelyn Ferdin) reacts with fright to the news of murders in her neighborhood, only to realize she’s the next victim—sort of. Laurie gets abducted by a doughy landlord named Vance (Mitchell), who went crazy after his own daughter died. Vance binds and gags Laurie in his home, pretending she’s his dead daughter, even as clues suggest that someone other than Vance is the toolbox murderer. Meanwhile, Laurie’s brother, Joey (Nicholas Beauvy), searches for his sister because the police assigned to the case prove incompetent. Toward the late middle of the picture, Vance delivers several weepy monologues to his captive, and Mitchell is spectacularly bad in these scenes; watching him croon “Motherless Child” is cringe-worthy. Amateurish, dull, and gruesome, The Toolbox Murders somehow made enough of an impression to earn a remake directed by Tobe Hooper, Toolbox Murders (2004).

The Toolbox Murders: LAME

The Midnight Man (1974)

          Like farce, the mystery genre is a space where convoluted plotting is not necessarily a detriment. Consider The Midnight Man, a twisty thriller starring, cowritten, coproduced, and codirected by the venerable Burt Lancaster, who adapted the picture from a novel by David Anthony. Set on a college campus, the movie features an offbeat leading man—a former cop turned ex-con who becomes a night watchman on the campus of a small college because his old police buddy runs the school’s security detail. Shortly after beginning his new job, Jim Slade (Lancaster) responds to the discovery of a dead coed. Thereafter, Jim battles with an obnoxious small-town sheriff, Casey (Harris Yulin), who determines that a creepy campus janitor was the culprit. Unsatisfied with Casey’s hasty resolution, Jim investigates further and discovers a complex web of conspiracies, lies, and secrets involving a United States Senator and several people connected with the college. Before long, Jim becomes a target, even as he begins a romance with his parole officer, Linda (Susan Clark), who may or may not be connected to various prime murder suspects.

          Although The Midnight Man is unquestionably too complicated for its own good—since it’s occasionally difficult to keep track of who’s doing what to whom and why—the movie is enjoyably melancholy and seedy on a moment-to-moment basis. Lancaster underplays, always a relief given his usual tendency toward grandiosity, and he generates an easygoing vibe with veteran supporting player Cameron Mitchell, who plays Slade’s boss/friend. Each of the significant performers in the cast delivers exactly what’s needed for his or her character, lending the whole piece depth and tonal variations. Clark is tough but vulnerable as the seen-it-all parole officer who fights to protect ex-cons from being needlessly hassled; Yulin is formidable and oily as the shoot-first/ask-questions-later sheriff; Catherine Bach, later of Dukes of Hazard fame, is intriguing as the sexy but troubled coed whose tragic fate drives the story; Charles Tyner is believably squirrely as the Bible-thumping, porn-reading janitor; and Morgan Woodward oozes smug confidence as the senator with one too many dirty secrets. Furthermore, Dave Grusin’s moody score, which is dominated by buttery electric-piano melodies, is as comfortingly smooth, warm, and unmistakably ’70s as a V-neck pullover.

          So, even if the story gets stuck in the mud of double-crosses and reversals and surprises, the vibe of the piece and the seriousness with which actors play their roles carry the day. The Midnight Man isn’t a superlative ’70s noir on the order of The Long Goodbye (1973) or Night Moves (1975), but it’s an interesting distraction with plenty of pessimism and a smattering of sleaze.

The Midnight Man: GROOVY

Medusa (1973)

Good luck deciphering the plot of Medusa, a jumbled mystery/thriller shot in Greece with two American leading actors accompanied by a European supporting cast. Perpetually tanned pretty boy George Hamilton, who also produced this disaster, stars as Jeffrey, some sort of debauched jet-set type who flits around Europe looking for a good time. The picture opens with a scene of Jeffrey dying on a boat and then, in voiceover, promising the audience an explanation for his demise. The rest of the picture is an extended flashback, but clarity surrounding Jeffrey’s circumstances—or, for that matter, his characterization—never emerges. Instead, Medusa grinds through one seemingly unrelated vignette after another. In one scene, Jeffrey crashes a party while dressed in an Elvis-style white jumpsuit, then jumps onto a table and sings until he’s dragged away. In another scene, he reacts with horror upon discovering that his gangster acquaintance, the sadistic Angelo (Cameron Mitchell), has murdered someone. And yet in the scene following that one, Jeffrey himself commits murder, since it appears that he’s either a serial killer or the accomplice of a serial killer. (The last thing this dunderheaded flick needed to do was play perceptual games.) Worst of all, Jeffrey chews up long periods of screen time by spewing bargain-basement philosophy, suggesting that, on some level, Hamilton envisioned Medusa as a character study of a playboy in decline. Whatever the intentions, the culprits behind this absolute mess of a movie (including director Gordon Hessler and screenwriter Christopher Wicking) can’t lock into a coherent storyline or a consistent tone for more than a few minutes at a time. After all, the same movie containing the frivolous scene of Jeffrey crashing the party also features an extended sequence of Angelo torturing some poor guy to death by pumping his stomach full of water until the guy drowns.

Medusa: SQUARE

Haunts (1977)

Part low-key psychological thriller and part over-the-top slasher picture, Haunts fails to generate or sustain much interest, despite the best efforts of director/cowriter Herb Freed to spin a complex thread of mystery and tragedy. Aside from the most fundamental problem, which is that the story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, Haunts suffers from an amateurish lead performance and schlocky production values. Moreover, Freed lacks the sophistication to make his most provocative flourishes work. For instance, when the lead character, a tormented farm girl, dreams of sex while manipulating the udder of a goat, the shots of her hands covered with milk seem pornographic instead of suggestive. One gets a sense that Freed was after something a bit more than mere shock value, but he’s hamstrung by his own artistic limitations. When the story begins, heroine Ingrid (May Britt) discovers the aftermath of a brutal murder in which scissors were used as a weapon. Thereafter, Ingrid becomes a pariah among locals who suspect she was involved in the crime, and she experiences hallucinations that cause her to doubt her own innocence. So, even as an intrepid sheriff (Aldo Ray) tries to identify the real killer, Ingrid worries about the potential for violence in everyone she encounters, from lovers to neighbors to relatives. Alas, viewers are likely to be even more confused than the protogonist, because Freed creates such a jumble of delusions, fake-outs, and twists that it’s hard to follow what’s happening. (The film’s last 30 minutes feel like a succession of rough-draft endings, each of which contradicts preceding story material.) Moreover, the constant wobbling between atmospheric scenes and blunt vignettes creates tonal dissonance. The only element of the film that feels coherent is Pino Donaggio’s eerie score, which is so assertive as to become distracting. Leading lady Britt is forgettably attractive, though her Scandanavian accent lends some novelty. Besides Ray, the other notable actor in the cast is Cameron Mitchell, who normally plays villains but essays a sympathetic role in Haunts, as Ingrid’s uncle. Alas, he’s misused—since Mitchell is the wax-faced heavy whom cheap producers hire when they can’t afford Jack Palance, why not exploit his innately creepy qualities?

Haunts: LAME

The Hanged Man (1974)

          Borrowing a gimmick from the Clint Eastwood Westerns High Plains Drifter (1973), this enjoyable telefilm was designed as a pilot, although no series resulted. Starring square-jawed Steve Forrest (later of S.W.A.T. fame), the movie includes a pulpy mixture of pop-psychology existentialism and Saturday-matinee violence. Forrest plays James Devlin, a gunfighter condemned to die based on sketchy evidence. Resigned to paying for past crimes even if he’s innocent of the current charges, Devlin endures his hanging with dignity—but survives because of faulty execution equipment and the dosing of his last meal with laudanum by a sympathetic doctor. Given a second chance at life, Devlin stumbles into the affairs of Carrie Gault (Sharon Acker), a widow being preyed upon by avaricious businessman Lew Halleck (Cameron Mitchell).

          The twist of the story is that because Devlin was legally “killed,” he’s got a blank slate as far as the law is concerned—at least until he commits a new crime. Therefore, Devlin must mete out justice without reckless gunplay. This is a solid setup for escapist entertainment, even if the filmmakers make the obvious mistake of portraying Devlin as a saint—despite the lip service given to past misdeeds, he’s never shown doing anything less than noble. Nonetheless, because The Hanged Man runs only 73 minutes, the one-dimensional characterization gets the job done.

          It helps, of course, that Forrest cuts an impressive figure, with his booming voice and imposing frame. Furthermore, director Michael Caffey lends more visual pizzazz to key scenes than one usually finds in workaday telefilms of the era. Caffey’s best flourishes occur during the final showdown between Devlin and Halleck, which is set inside a darkened foundry. By having Devlin drift in and out of clouds of smoke, and by having Halleck linger in the glow of blazing yellow and red lights, Caffey conveys the strong sense of a supernatural avenger delivering a damned man to hell. In fact, theological allusions appear throughout The Hanged Man. When this aspect of the picture doesn’t work, clumsy scenes such as the bit of Devlin screaming “Why, God?” result. Yet on several occasions—for instance, the scene when Devlin shows his noose scar to the widow Gault’s incredulous son—The Hanged Man approaches questions about what obligations people have to spend wisely the time they’re given by larger forces.

          That said, I freely acknowledge my occasional tendency to give movies credit for what they almost achieved, and The Hanged Man is a beneficiary of this generosity. In other words, consider these laudatory remarks to be praise for the better film lurking inside The Hanged Man, since the actual movie is in the most important regards quite ordinary.

The Hanged Man: FUNKY

The Klansman (1974)

          For those who enjoy charting the outer reaches of bad cinema, the title of The Klansman looms larger than that of most ’70s movies. Featuring an inexplicable combination of actors—Richard Burton, Lee Marvin, O.J. Simpson—and a lurid take on incendiary subject matter, the movie promises a feast of jaw-dropping wrongness. And sure enough, The Klansman is both uproariously terrible and consistently distasteful. It’s also, however, quite tedious.

          The story is appropriately florid. In a small southern town populated by poor Black folks and foaming-at-the-mouth racist whites (narrative restraint is not the watchword here), a young white woman (Linda Evans) is raped, leading revved-up locals to terrorize Black citizens including Garth (Simpson). This culminates with the murder of an innocent Black man while Garth, now a fugitive from the bloodthirsty mob, watches helplessly. The town’s sheriff, Track Bascomb (Marvin), improbably a voice of reason and tolerance, tries to protect Garth, who expresses his rage by picking off white people with an M-16.

          Meanwhile—there’s always a “meanwhile” in overcooked bad movies—local landowner Breck Stancil (Burton) invokes the ire of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter because he won’t let Klan soldiers search his property for Garth, who may be hiding with Stancil’s predominantly Black workforce. Soon, the various forces in the story converge in a violent climax. All of this should be trashy fun, but as lifelessly directed by 007 veteran Terence Young, the movie just kind of happens; it feels as if the production team showed up every day and shot the appropriate screenplay pages without any regard for what came before or what might follow.

          Reportedly, one reason for the movie’s flatness is that it’s the faint echo of a potentially more interesting project: Original writer-director Samuel Fuller conceived the piece, using William Bradford Hule’s novel as a foundation, as a full-on KKK story in which the hero would be a Klan member who learns tolerance. Instead, the studio asked for something less provocative, and Fuller walked. The project was further damned by unwise casting: Burton and Marvin were falling-down drunks at this point, and Simpson, whose character is supposed to come across as a justice-dispensing revolutionary, is, to be generous, not an actor.

          Compensating somewhat for the lackluster work by the leads, Character player Cameron Mitchell livens up the picture with his cartoonish villainy as a hateful deputy. Better still, the priceless David Huddleston gives the best performance in the movie (which is admittedly not saying a lot) as the town mayor, who moonlights as the “Exalted Cyclops” of the local Klan chapter. Yet even Huddleston can’t do anything with hopeless dialogue: “Don’t look at me like I’m the heavy. You want to know who the heavy is, I’ll tell you. It’s the system. And we’re all of us caught up in it.”

          Unbelievably, the dialogue gets even worse later. Lola Falana plays a young Black woman visiting her mother, one of Stancil’s employees, so the rednecks presume she’s sleeping with Stancil and therefore rape her to make a point. “They think I’m your brown comfort,” she says. “They wanted to foul your nest.” Yet perhaps the most (morbidly) fascinating aspect of this whole disastrous enterprise is Burton’s excruciating performance—he’s exactly this awful in plenty of other movies, but The Klansman features his spectacularly unsuccessful attempt at a Southern accent, which sounds different in almost every scene.

          Given how punishingly bad every frame of this movie is, it’s a wonder no one thought to chop it down to a 90-minute highlight reel, because if The Klansman moved faster, it would at least have the quality of a fever dream. Instead, it lumbers along for 112 bludgeoning minutes, forcing viewers to soak up every nuance of its terribleness. In this case, more is less.

The Klansman: FREAKY

Buck and the Preacher (1972)

A film that only seems odd when compared to the lily-white stories that comprise the majority of its genre, this mildly groundbreaking black Western casts director-star Sidney Poitier as a classic American archetype: the gun-toting savior. Playing a wagon master who escorts groups of African-American pioneers from the (barely) free South to the wide-open spaces of the West shortly after the Civil War, Poitier matches his signature traits of dignity and poise with the X factors of a hot temper and an itchy trigger finger. Thrown together with a con man posing as a preacher (Harry Belafonte), Poitier’s Buck cuts a swath through the pale-faced monsters out to kill his people for the sin of wanting to live free. The mix of righteous indignation and badass gunplay is no more peculiar than similar juxtapositions found in a hundred other films with white casts, but the novelty of this film’s particulars gives Buck and the Preacher a strangely compelling energy. It helps (a lot) that the lurid story rushes along at a fast clip, one brisk scene after another strung together by a funky score dominated by a countrified mouth harp. Belafonte is entertainingly demented in his role (check out the way he hides his gun in a hollowed-out Bible), genre stalwart Cameron Mitchell contributes an odious presence as the picture’s main villain, and Civil Rights-era stalwart Ruby Dee offers a grounding presence in her smallish role as Buck’s perpetually endangered significant other.

Buck and the Preacher: FUNKY