Hail (1972)

          Toward the end of its scant running time, Hail resolves into a serviceable satire of Nixon-era political paranoia. Getting there, however, requires slogging through lots of meandering and unfunny material. Produced and released before the Watergate scandal, Hail imagines a presidential administration fraught with intrigue because the commander-in-chief is a nutter who thinks all his subordinates are out to get him. The joke, of course, is that they are out to get him, hence the main storyline about a cabinet secretary (Richard B. Shull) drifting from closeness with the president to conspiring against him. The main subplot illustrates why the secretary loses faith—amid growing demonstrations by longhaired young people, the president forms a nationwide police force and imprisons activists in concentration camps. The jarring integration of this heavy material means Hail is dark comedy at best, a tonal quagmire at worst. Yet there’s something almost nobly roughshod about Hail. One can admire what the film attempts while acknowledging how infrequently it succeeds in the endeavor.

          Hampered by an insufficient budget and a first-time director (this is Fred Levinson’s only movie), Hail is disorganized and sluggish. Sequences featuring officials either working with or scheming against the president are coherent in a blunt-instrument sort of way, which is to say the comic intentions come across even when jokes fail to land. Scenes of hippies planning armed revolt lack the same clarity, since it’s unclear whether the film means to celebrate or lampoon the peace-and-love crowd. Not helping matters is a tendency toward overly broad performances. While Schull does well expressing his ambivalent character’s queasiness and Dick O’Neill is appropriately craven as an opportunistic attorney general, Dan Resin is wholly forgettable as the president, and Gary Sandy—years before WKRP in Cincinnati—borders on camp while playing a hippie who masquerades as a soldier. (Watch for Carol Kane in a tiny nonspeaking role.) Still, even if the whole thing spins out of control with overheated allusions to Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar—it was the ‘70s, man—it’s possible to see how a stronger director could have done more with the script by Phil Dusenberry and Larry Spiegel. In flashes, Hail almost works.

Hail: FUNKY

The Pack (1977)

          Nature-strikes-back pictures were all the rage after the success of Jaws (1975), but most rip-off projects stretched credibility too far (killer bees, killer rabbits, killer octopi, and so on.). Therefore it’s great fun to find a Jaws-influenced thriller with a story that actually works. In The Pack, based on a novel by David Fisher, a tiny resort island gets overrun by stray dogs when summer people abandon their pets; the animals turn vicious after several days of exposure and starvation, and when their leader gets infected with rabies, the pack becomes a nightmare for the handful of locals left on the island. As written for the screen and directed by B-movie stalwart Robert Clouse (Enter the Dragon), The Pack is a no-nonsense shocker in the classic mode, keeping nettlesome details like characterization and nuance to a bare minimum while focusing on gruesome dog attacks.

          To the picture’s great credit, many genre clichés are avoided, so instead of a callous local official trying to keep a lid on the danger lurking in the woods, the townies do everything they can to protect people. Furthermore, there’s only one instance of characters stupidly wandering into a part of the island where they might be attacked, but even that scene is defensible because at the time the characters venture off, they’re not yet aware of how bad the puppy problem has gotten. (A bigger hiccup is the battle sequence during which the heroes miss obvious opportunities to take out their attackers with close-quarters gunplay.)

          The movie’s hero is fish-and-game guy Jerry (Joe Don Baker), a recent transplant to the island who is building a family with his girlfriend Millie (Hope Alexander-Willis) and her two kids. Jerry’s local compatriots are sardonic innkeeper Hardiman (Richard B. Shull) and crusty seaman Cobb (R.G. Armstrong). Enduring the ordeal along with the locals is a late-season tour group headed by a bank president (Richard O’Brien) who hopes his sad-sack adult son (Paul Wilson) will get laid with the good-time gal (Sherry Miles) brought along expressly for that purpose.

          The Pack follows the standard creature-feature playbook, beginning with isolated attacks and escalating toward greater intensity as the animals become more brazen and their potential victims become more desperate, so there aren’t many narrative surprises. That said, The Pack delivers the goods with effectively staged scare scenes, and there’s a bittersweet undercurrent to the movie since the dogs are themselves victims. The movie is aided tremendously by the work of composer Lee Holdrige, an industry veteran with hundreds of credits for features and TV; his Jerry Goldsmith-style score uses taught strings and percussive rhythms to jack up suspense in a highly entertaining fashion. And while acting doesn’t matter a whole lot in a project like The Pack, everyone does just what he or she is supposed to do, and Baker cuts a reassuring figure with his easygoing demeanor and ever-present shotgun. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Pack: GROOVY

Dreamer (1979)

This sports drama features one of the most undercooked scripts in a genre known for undercooked scripts, to the point that easily half a dozen significant subplots are introduced and abandoned with no explanation or resolution. So, if you’re looking for a movie with satisfying storytelling, move along. That said, there are minor consolations: With the roguishly charming Tim Matheson playing one of his few leads and reliable character actor Jack Warden providing support, Dreamer explores the world of high-stakes bowling, which has not been the subject of many feature films. So there’s that. Matheson, fresh off his supporting turn in Animal House (1978), stars as Dreamer (yes, everyone in the movie really calls him by that name), a promising amateur trying to get into the Professional Bowlers Association. He works as a jack-of-all-trades in a small-town bowling alley, he’s involved in a tempestuous romantic relationship with Karen (Susan Blakely), and he has a loving father figure in Harry (Warden), a man who once dreamed of becoming a pro but now focuses on training his protégé. Given this set-up, you know the drill: Dreamer fights to get taken seriously by the PBA, Dreamer works through his relationship with Karen, and Dreamer overcomes personal hardship to win the big game. Dreamer is so lightweight that it nearly evaporates, but the actors are watchable; Matheson goes for a cocksure/vulnerable balance, though it’s hard to understand why his character is so angsty, and Warden provides gravitas, though the climax of his character’s storyline makes very little sense. As for Blakeley, she’s a bit on the whiny side, and promising supporting characters played by Matt Clark, Richard B. Shull, and Barbara Stuart are wasted. Inexplicably, the movie features its overly emphatic theme song three times; for most viewers, soft-rock band Pablo Cruise’s tune “Reach for the Top” will wear out its welcome the first time. The same, sadly, can be said of Dreamer, though watching the movie is tolerable if one has affinity for the leading actors.

Dreamer: LAME

B.S. I Love You (1971)

A pointless comedy about the romantic exploits of a TV-commercial producer, B.S. I Love You is the work of one Steven Hilliard Stern. As with Stern’s other ’70s endeavor as a writer-director, the Michael Douglas sports drama Running (1979), B.S. gets off to a bad start by asking audiences to root for a vacuous protagonist. Paul (Peter Kastner) screws up an expensive commercial shoot, and then compounds his insolence by skipping work for a long weekend that includes joining the mile-high club with a sexy free spirit (Joanna Cameron) during a cross-country plane ride. When he finally returns to his normal life, he’s rude to his boss (Richard B. Shull), whom he just let down, and standoffish with his girlfriend (Louise Sorel), to whom he was just unfaithful. Yet even though Paul is a self-centered twit who follows his bliss no matter the cost, Stern seemingly expects viewers to sympathize with Paul’s angst during endless montages of the character moping around while sensitive singer-songwriter tunes play on the soundtrack. Things get even less interesting when Paul leaves his agency to work for a company headed by beautiful older woman Jane (Joanna Barnes), with whom he promptly goes to bed—only to discover that his erstwhile mile-high partner is actually Jane’s daughter. Thus Our Hero finds himself torn between three attractive women, all of whom seem crazed to possess him, even though he’s a shit. As if this logic gap weren’t enough of a problem, B.S. I Love You is padded to the point of tedium (thanks to those endless montage sequences), and there’s no good reason for the film to be set in the advertising world since Stern misses every opportunity for satire. At least the first part of the movie’s title is accurate.

B.S. I Love You: SQUARE