Dark Sunday (1976)

          One can’t question the consistency of Earl Owensby’s earliest cinematic efforts. After scoring hits on the drive-in circuit by playing a righteous avenger in Challenge and its sequel The Brass Ring (both released in 1974), actor-producer Owensby went back to the well for Dark Sunday, in which he portrays a preacher who seeks vengeance after drug dealers assault his family. All three flicks are shameless rip-offs of Walking Tall (1973), so those seeking depth, nuance, or originality should look elsewhere. However, if the red meat of an aggrieved everyman wiping out scumbags stimulates your appetite, then consider Dark Sunday the equivalent of a fast-food meal—if you know it’s bad for you but you eat it anyway, then you have no one to blame but yourself for the indigestion you experience afterward. Crudely made in Owensby’s home base of North Carolina, Dark Sunday was nominally directed by Jimmy Huston, who helmed several projects for the actor-producer, and it was nominally written by Thom McIntyre, another E.O. Studios veteran, but every frame bears the crass fingerprints of the project’s main man, who built a fortune by peddling cinematic junk.

          Lest we forget, Owensby is among the most unlikely screen personas of the ’70s—despite regularly casting himself as a fierce man of action, Owensby was at the time of his box-office success doughy and middle-aged. To quote Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the king!

          In Dark Sunday, Owensby plays Reverend James Lowery, whose flock includes young people mired in drugs. When one of these youths dies of an overdose, Lowery vows to clean up the streets. This puts him in the crosshairs of drug lord Herbert Trexler (Martin Beck), who sends thugs to take out Lowery and his family. The reverend’s wife and one of his sons are killed, another son is paralyzed, and Lowery is rendered mute with a bum leg. Upon leaving the hospital, Lowery cruises a grungy downtown area until he finds drug dealers, then starts killing them until he discovers the identity of the man pulling the strings. And so on. Name a cliché you might imagine fitting this framework and you’ll find it in Dark Sunday. Lowery befriends a noble hooker and a blind street preacher. He beats up a black drug dealer named “Candyman.” Lowery exhibits superhuman stamina, enjoys absurd good luck, and somehow also manages to inconvenience a corrupt cop. All of this leads to a laugh-out-loud climax that won’t be spoiled here; suffice to say that Owensby and co. took a big swing and missed spectacularly. This unintentionally hilarious misstep is a perfect capper for 99 minutes of grindhouse sludge.

Dark Sunday: FUNKY

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

1980 Week: Defiance

          The sad decline of Jan-Michael Vincent’s career was well underway when he made this humane but unremarkable urban-violence picture. Vincent does passable work as a dude who stumbles into a war between ghetto dwellers and the savage street gang terrorizing them, and Defiance boasts slick direction by John Flynn as well as appealing supporting turns by Danny Aiello, Art Carney, and Theresa Saldana. Yet the story is predictable, and the action quotient isn’t high enough to satisfy the target audience. Furthermore, because Vincent reportedly spent a fair amount of the production inebriated, Defiance captures the moment just before too many ho-hum movies and too much booze depleted his movie-star capital. A few years after making this picture, Vincent took a job playing second banana to a helicopter on the TV show Airwolf, and things got much, much worse from there.

          In any event, Vincent plays Tommy, a seaman who temporarily loses his work license, forcing him to linger in New York City. He takes a tenement apartment and befriends neighbors including Abe (Carney), Carmine (Aiello), and Marsha (Saldana). These folks live in fear of the Souls, a violent gang led by Angel (Rudy Ramos). The Souls prey upon Tommy’s friends, but he says it’s not his problem until the villains cross a line, triggering Tommy’s violent intervention.

          Rare is the movie that deserves criticism for offering too much character development, but the first hour of Defiance meanders through one pleasant getting-t0-know-you scene after another, so it takes forever to get to the action. Had the picture gone deeper, for instance rendering Angel as a multidimensional character, this intimate approach might have worked. Alas, Defiance exists somewhere between the superficiality of a good B-movie and the substance of a proper dramatic film. Nonetheless, it’s a skillfully made project that benefits from extensive location photography, and Vincent conveys winning vulnerability as well as formidable physicality. He’s more of a presence than a performer here, but he wasn’t so far gone that his gifts had completely left him.

Defiance: FUNKY

Deadbeat (1977)

Executed with more precision, Deadbeat could and should have come across as a youth-culture spin on Death Wish (1974), the quintessential urban-vigilante story about a man slaughtering criminals after loved ones were victimized. Alas, Deadbeat, also known as Avenged and Tomcats, can’t quite decide which path to travel, so the movie’s nearly halfway over before the main character begins his rampage. Moreover, the filmmakers linger on topless shots and stew in crude dialogue about sex, so there’s a vaguely pornographic quality to the picture. Add in the usual problems of vigilante pictures (namely the glorification of violence), and Deadbeat becomes a thoroughly distasteful experience, but not in a provocative way. Things get off to a sleazy start when four young thugs break into a remote diner, then rape and kill the only occupant, a pretty young waitress. Eventually, cops connect the thugs with the crime and arrest them. Later, the victim’s brother, Cullen (Chris Mulkey), watches in impotent horror as a legal SNAFU allows the thugs to escape punishment. This provokes Cullen to begin murdering the thugs one by one. Meanwhile, the local police chief, who happens to be the father of both Cullen and the dead girl, tracks the murders, soon realizing who must be responsible. The better version of this movie would have imbued Cullen with virtues unique to his age, putting generational ideas about law and order into conflict, but Cullen is such an old-fashioned character he could just as easily be in his 50s as his 20s. Therefore the slow-moving Deadbeat offers nothing but a weak recitation of grindhouse tropes.

Deadbeat: LAME

Gentle Savage (1973)

          Basically a riff on Billy Jack (1971) without the hippy-dippy speechifying and pretentions to political significance, Gentle Savage stars B-movie muscleman William Smith as “Camper” John Allen, an impoverished Native American who stumbles into a hassle with racist white people. Cheaply made and tonally inconsistent, the picture is little more than a brisk drive-in distraction, and the angsty leading role of pushes Smith’s limited acting abilities past their limits. What’s more, cowriter/director Sean MacGregor demonstrates only borderline competence, so the characterizations are stereotypical, the escalation of violence is predictable, and the oh-the-humanity pathos permeating the piece is trite. Yet taken for what it is, Gentle Savage (sometimes marketed as Camper John, hence the above poster) more or less gets the mindless job done. Naturally, those predisposed toward grooving on Smith’s singular screen persona, all growling primitivism and sinewy intensity, will get more out of the experience than others—even though his big crying scene is dodgy, Smith is interesting to watch whenever he expresses simplistic moods of anger, lust, and rebellion.

          John’s trouble begins one night at a dive bar, where hot-to-trot white girl Betsy Schaeffer (C.J. Hincks) propositions him. Initially refusing her advances, since he’s got a wife and kid at home, John unwisely accepts her offer of cash in exchange for a ride home on his motorcycle. Upon reaching her place, Betsy yanks John into bed, but then Betsy’s racist father, Kent (Kevin Hagen), arrives in time to swear vengeance against the escaping John. Later, Kent rapes his daughter and blames the crime on John, setting up a fugitive situation that enflames simmering racial tensions. Most of what follows is straightforward, excepting perhaps the “comedy” bits during which two white cops are stranded in the desert wearing nothing but underwear. Still, Gentle Savage hits the required notes of civil unrest, horrific violence, and martyrdom. Those seeking a race-relations drama with depth and relevance will be disappointed, but those seeking a straight shot of action-infused melodrama might find the picture adequate.

Gentle Savage: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Exterminator

Offering a glimpse of where action movies were headed in the ’80s—less nuance, more ultraviolence—this borderline incompetent exploitation flick was the second directorial effort from shameless hack James Glickenhaus. Stealing the basic plot of Death Wish (1974) and juicing the material with a crass Vietnam-vet angle, Glickenhaus tells the ugly story of John Eastland, a former soldier who turns vigilante after Mafia thugs paralyze his best friend. Dubbed “The Exterminator” by reporters, John  feeds a villain into an industrial meat grinder, and he leaves a pair of criminals tied up on a garbage heap so they can be eaten alive by rats. Yet the most horrific sequence is a prologue set in Vietnam, during which John and his best friend witness enemy soldiers committing atrocities including beheadings. The idea, presumably, is that “The Exterminator” became a monster because his overseas experience made him that way. But then again, ascribing psychological depth to this movie is unwise, because Glickenhaus—who also wrote the screenplay—seems unfamiliar with the human experience that the rest of us acknowledge as reality. In Glickenhaus’ skewed universe, violence justifies violence, so it’s okay that, for instance, the movie’s antihero murders a guard dog with an electric knife because he’s on a mission to steal money from mobsters. The Exterminator has a fever-dream quality, seeing as how many pieces seem to be missing; the story makes bizarre leaps forward, and it frequently appears Glickenhaus got only two-thirds of the shots needed for each scene. What’s more, whenever The Exterminator veers into a laughable subplot about a cop (Christopher George) romancing a doctor (Samantha Eggar), it’s as if pieces of another bad movie got spliced into Glickenhaus’ vile revenge fantasy. The Exterminator is brisk and eventful, but if this is your idea of a good time at the movies, seek help.

The Exterminator: LAME

Jessi’s Girls (1975)

          Discovering a watchable Al Adamson movie is a joyous moment for the ’70s-cinema explorer, so even though Jessi’s Girls is contrived and exploitive, it improves upon most of Adamson’s directorial adventures simply because the plot makes sense and the production values are relatively professional. For surprisingly long stretches of screen time, this low-budget Western is compelling thanks to a simple vengeance-mission narrative and the novelty, given the context, of a distaff protagonist. Redheaded beauty Sondra Currie stars as Jessica Hartwell, a Mormon woman traveling with her husband through the American frontier. A gang of thugs led by odious Frank Brock (Ben Frank) attacks the Hartwells, raping Jessica and killing her husband. Left for dead with a gunshot wound, Jessica finds her way to an isolated homestead, where grizzled loner Rufe (Rod Cameron) provides shelter and teaches Jessica how to use guns. Meanwhile, the film introduces several outlaw women, all of whom get captured by a marshal. In the story’s dopiest coincidence, Jessica stumbles upon the marshal’s wagon, kills him, and frees the outlaw women. That’s how they become participants in her vengeance mission.

          This movie’s obvious negatives are plentiful. Characterizations are trite, the plot shamelessly cops elements from the Raquel Welch movie Hannie Caulder (1971), and Adamson goes overboard with topless shots. This is hardly the sleaziest drive-in picture of the ’70s, but it was unquestionably designed to satisfy low appetites. Having said all that, the movie’s positives include qualities that are rare in the Adamson oeuvre. The story moves along at a good clip with virtually no glaring logic problems. The central character is interesting and sympathetic, with a fairly consistent behavior pattern. Supporting characters enter and exit the story when they should, so the picture isn’t bogged down with or derailed by pointless discursions. And the style is appropriate, from the dusty locations to the guitar-and-harmonica soundtrack. So even though Jessi’s Girls is ultimately nothing but a boobs-and-bullets cheapie, it’s palatable. For an Adamson movie, that’s saying a lot. You may now begin the Rick Springfield jokes you’ve been desperate to make since you first read the movie’s title.

Jessi’s Girls: FUNKY

Death Promise (1977)

A rotten martial-arts revenge flick set in the urban jungles of New York City, Death Promise concerns a young man who vows payback after someone kills his father. As an indication of how dopey this movie is, the young man cobbles together a list of suspects and then kills each suspect one at a time. Yet during the film’s climax, he learns that none of the folks he murdered was directly responsible for his father’s death, meaning that he killed a bunch of bad people, but for the wrong reason. Anything in the name of justice, right? Whatever. Charles Bonet, a skilled athlete but a not-so-skilled actor, stars as Charley Roman, a martial-arts student who lives with his father, Louis (Bob O’Connell). Together with his fellow martial-arts student Speedy (Speedy Leacock), Charley and Louis repel goons sent by slumlords to force the Romans and their neighbors out of their decaying apartment building. Turns out the slumlords, including corrupt Judge Engstrom (David Kirk), want to raze the building and make way for a lucrative development project. When Charley comes home one day to find Louis dead, he decides the developers are responsible—and then leaves town for six months to study deadly techniques with a martial-arts guru. Huh? After completing his training, Charley reconnects with Speedy and begins his rampage. (Death Promise takes place in an alternate universe where there are no police and where people like Charley don’t need jobs in order to live.) Shot in a haphazard fashion with a meager budget, Death Promise looks and sounds cheap from beginning to end. Every so often, there’s a glimmer of imagination—like the bit in which Charley ties a victim to the back of an archery target, ensuring that the man is mistakenly killed by his own underling. However, most of the movie comprises silly martial-arts fights during which participants scream so much they sound ridiculous. Again, whatever. Oh, and it sure looks as if comic-book legend Neal Adams drew the poster art. Not his best work.

Death Promise: LAME

Sunday in the Country (1974)

          A minor contribution to the early-’70s conversation about cinematic vigilantism that primarily revolved around Straw Dogs (1971) and Death Wish (1974), Sunday in the Country benefits from immersive location photography and a zesty leading performance by Ernest Borgnine. The filmmakers take a bit too much time setting their narrative trap, then end up spinning in circles toward the end while searching for the satisfying conclusion that they never find. Nonetheless, Sunday in the Country is very nearly a serious film questioning how far citizens are entitled to go while endeavoring to preserve public safety. Borgnine plays a farmer who learns that three escaped bank robbers have been sighted in his rural county, so he loads his shotgun just in case he needs to protect himself and his teenaged granddaughter. By the time the crooks inevitably reach his property, the farmer knows that they’ve killed two local residents, so he surprises the crooks by immediately shooting one of them down. Thereafter, he imprisons the other two and commences psychological torture, aggrieving his granddaughter’s more liberal notions of justice.

          Director John Trent does a fairly good job of creating mood and texture, contrasting the film’s ominous first act with peppy country songs, and it’s fun to watch Borgnine think on camera while his character contemplates where events might be headed; too often during the ’70s and subsequently, Borgnine was asked only to be crude and loud. Yet there’s only so much Borgnine and Trent can do with the overly schematic storyline. The criminals are one-dimensional, and there’s never any question of whether they’ll reach the farm. Therefore, after the film plays its one ace—the moment when Borgnine greets the criminals with a loaded gun—believable suspense gives way to silly contrivances, like a far-fetched sequence involving the criminals and the granddaughter. As for the picture’s third act, it starts strong but then spirals into nonsense. Also spiraling into nonsense is costar Michael J. Pollard’s annoying supporting performance as the most trigger-happy of the criminals—Pollard’s work is a compendium of pointlessly weird flourishes, right down to the pastel-colored briefs his character wears.

          FYI, this picture is sometimes marketed under the titles Blood for Blood and Vengeance Is Mine.

Sunday in the Country: FUNKY

Street Law (1974)

          An Italian-made vigilante picture informed by the same zeitgeist that produced Death Wish—which hit U.S. screens only weeks before Street Law debuted in Europe—this nasty little movie has gained a minor cult following. It’s an exciting thriller with tremendous forward momentum, and leading man Franco Nero gives a relentless performance that approaches self-parody, especially because the film’s dialogue was shot in phonetic English and then dubbed during post-production. Other significant flaws include the perfunctory and sexist portrayal of the protagonist’s wife, a greasy musical score shot through with disco colorations, and a fetishistic portrayal of violence. Nonetheless, energy is energy, and Street Law has plenty of that. Accordingly, even though Street Law is so simplistic from a narrative and political perspective that it makes Death Wish seem subtle by comparison, the picture has a crude sort of visceral power that cannot be denied.

          When the movie opens, straight-laced engineer Carlo (Nero) visits a bank for a simple business transaction. Three armed robbers enter the bank, beating anyone who stands in their way, including Carlo. While making their getaway, the criminals abduct Carlo as a hostage, beating him even more along the way and forcing him to endure a terrifying car chase. Eventually, Carlo gets away, only to discover that the police have little hope of catching the crooks and that Carlo’s wife, Barbara (Barbara Bach), expects Carlo to move on with his life. Ashamed and humiliated at the way the criminals treated him, Carlo vows to find and kill his attackers. Yet instead of taking the Death Wish route of annihilating random thugs like they’re symptoms of a disease, Carlo gets methodical. He uses deception and surveillance to infiltrate the underworld, eventually identifying the bank robbers. Later, in a plot twist that strains credibility, Carlo bonds with a crook named Tommy (Giancarlo Prete), who provides Carlo’s ultimate entrée into the world of the bank robbers.

          Street Law is almost a mood piece in the way it strings together larger sequences, some of which are aimless driving montages, and some of which are symphonies of suffering. Carlo gets his ass kicked repeatedly, somehow emerging more resolute each time. The movie offers very little in terms of characterization (Bach, for instance, is barely in the movie), and the whole narrative stems from the iffy notion that a man who won’t fight back isn’t a man. Still, some of Carlo’s resourceful moves are quite clever, and director Enzo Z. Castellari knows how to generate brutal excitement, so nearly every scene in Street Law feels as if it concludes with an exclamation point.

Street Law: FUNKY

Dixie Dynamite (1976)

          The rampaging-rednecks genre took a distaff turn in the mid-’70s, resulting in lowbrow pictures along the lines of Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976), ’Gator Bait (1974), and The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (1976). Like the other members of its dubious cinematic breed, Dixie Dynamite grinds together various drive-in signifiers, resulting in a meandering string of chase scenes, explosions, leering glances at curvaceous bodies, and—because apparently no B-movie party is complete without one—a rape scene. While Dixie Dynamite has meager pleasures to stimulate the viewer’s reptile brain, expectations of good acting, meaningful storytelling, and social relevance should be set aside. Although Dixie Dynamite is far less exploitive than other pictures of the same ilk (since there’s barely any flesh on display), one should not form the impression that the filmmakers substituted substance for sleaze—erotic content is simply another item on the long list of things the film lacks. Oh, and don’t be fooled by Warren Oates’ top billing, because the grizzled veteran of myriad rough-and-tumble movies has perhaps 15 minutes of mostly inconsequential screen time.

          Rather than Oates, the picture spotlights forgettable starlets Jane Anne Johnstone and Kathy McHaley as, respectively, Dixie and Patsy Eldridge, the adult daughters of a moonshiner named Tom Eldridge (Mark Miller). When the picture begins, morally conflicted Sheriff Phil Marsh (Christopher George) escorts IRS agents to Tom’s homestead, where the agents try arresting Tom for tax evasion. Tom makes a run for it, and Phl’s overzealous deputy, Frank (Wes Bishop), opens fire on Tom’s car, causing an accident in which Tom is killed. Tom’s daughters, who were away from home at the time of the tragedy, initially respond by accepting help from family friend Mack (Warren Oates) and by seeking jobs. Yet local crime lord Dade McCrutchen (Stanley Adams) ensures the girls can’t catch a break. In fact, he’s out to displace every smalltime moonshiner in the county so he can gain a monopoly, and he was behind the IRS raid on the Eldridge place. Out of options, the Eldridge girls become robbers, distributing most of their loot to poor people, and they contrive a plan to get revenge on McCrutchen. Trigger-happy deputy Frank becomes a target as well, especially after he forces himself on Patsy.

          Even with colorful actors including R.G. Armstrong, George, and Oates in the cast, Dixie Dynamite fails to generate any real interest, though it’s borderline watchable thanks to an adequate number of action scenes. The movie even has some enjoyably ludicrous moments, such as the vignette of Oates’ character teaching the girls to ride motorcycles while a singer on the soundtrack croons, “There’ll be a sunshine highway if you’re going my way.” Also worth mentioning is the scene in which a villain gets launched into the air like a rocket when a bundle of dynamite explodes. Eagle-eyed viewers not lulled into submission by the general monotony of the movie might be able to spot Steve McQueen during a sequence depicting a dirt-bike race, because the actor plays an unbilled cameo.

Dixie Dynamite: FUNKY

Johnny Firecloud (1975)

          Borrowing elements from Billy Jack (1971) and Death Wish (1974), this Native American-themed revenge flick is equal parts goofy and gory, but it’s also undeniably entertaining, in a trashy sort of way.

          The plot couldn’t be simpler. When he was younger, Native American Johnny Firecloud (Victor Mohica) used to cavort with a white woman, June (Christina Hart), whose father, Colby (Ralph Meeker), holds all the power in the small Southwestern town where they live. Now that he’s an angry adult who learned a few nasty tricks while serving in the military, Johnny spends all his time getting into hassles with the local sheriff, Jesse (David Canary), who does Colby’s bidding. But when Colby’s thugs accidentally kill Johnny’s grandfather, tribal chief White Eagle (Frank DeKova), all of Johnny’s rage explodes into a vigilante campaign. Johnny murders his victims in colorful ways, invoking clichés familiar from previous Hollywood depictions of Indians. He buries one fellow up to the neck in a desert and cuts off the fellow’s eyelids so he’ll go blind while he cooks in the sun. He ties another dude to a post and then ties a bag full of rattlesnakes around the dude’s head and torso. Naturally, one of the victims gets scalped.

          Johnny Firecloud is exactly the movie you’d expect, filled with overheated performances, slow-burn action scenes, and thunderous music cues underscoring money shots of carnage. There’s also a little sex thrown in for good measure, including—as per the norm for ’70s revenge pictures—a brutal rape scene. (Playing the rape victim is lovely Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather, best known as Marlon Brando’s controversial Oscar proxy.) Most of the elements in Johnny Firecloud are ordinary, but the sum effect is satisfying for fans of a certain type of sleazy cinema. The widescreen images are filled with robust colors, the pacing is strong, the storytelling is clear, and the violence is suitably excessive.

          While most of the acting is florid and/or robotic, with Hollywood veteran Meeker delivering a particularly tepid performance as a bad guy who stops just short of moustache-twirling, future soap-opera star Canary does respectable work in the picture’s most nuanced role. Playing the sheriff who wrestles with his conscience upon realizing the true scope of his employer’s evil, Canary registers a few decent moments of manly angst. Providing a counterpoint is frequently bare-chested leading man Mohica, who plays to the cheap seats whenever he gets the opportunity. Johnny Firecloud also features one of the oddest threats in ’70s cinema. At one point, a thug named Ned (Richard Kennedy) barks the following remark to Johnny: “One of these days, you and me are gonna tangle assholes!”

Johnny Firecloud: FUNKY

Rage (1972)

          Inspired by a real-life incident during which the U.S. military accidentally released nerve gas onto a civilian sheep ranch, Rage offers an unusual spin on the ’70s vigilante picture. Instead of seeking revenge against criminals, the film’s lead character attacks anyone and everyone associated with an accident that claimed the life of his young son.

           George C. Scott, who also marked his feature directorial debut with this picture (having previously helmed the 1970 television play The Andersonville Trial), stars as Dan Logan, a Wyoming sheep rancher and widower. One evening, Dan camps on his ranch with his preteen son, Chris (Nicolas Beauvy); Chris sleeps outside while Dan slumbers in a tent. When Dan wakes the next morning, Chris is bleeding from the nostrils, convulsing, and unconscious. Meanwhile, many of Dan’s sheep are dead or dying. Dan rushes Chris to a nearby hospital and summons his family physician, Dr. Caldwell (Richard Basehart). Before Caldwell arrives, two other medical professionals—Dr. Holliford (Martin Sheen) and Dr. Spencer (Barnard Hughes)—assume control over the Logans, separating father and son while examining Dan for symptoms. Turns out the Logans were exposed to an experimental nerve agent, and Holliford and Spencer are government operatives tasked with keeping the incident quiet. When Chris dies, Holliford and Spencer persuade Caldwell to hide the truth from Dan until an “appropriate” time. Sensing that he’s being manipulated, Dan escapes from his hospital room, slips into the morgue, and discovers Chris’ body. Then he snaps, unleashing death and destruction on his enemies.

          Although Scott’s direction is far from perfect, given the presence of bizarre slo-mo flourishes and a distasteful focus on cruelty to animals, the basic story is powerfully simple. Not only is the nerve-gas incident frightening, the ensuing government crackdown is wholly believable. And if Dan’s skill at gathering resources while evading capture sometimes seems a bit far-fetched, it’s useful to remember that a fugitive could hide from public view with greater ease in the days before cellphones and the Internet.

          Rage has its share of unintentionally funny moments, a hazard common to movies that try to sustain an unrelentingly grim tone, but Scott is 100 percent the right guy for the job, at least in front of the camera. Playing an unsophisticated everyman who needs medical jargon translated into plain English, Scott credibly personifies the murderous anger that would fill any parent’s heart under the circumstances. Similarly, Hughes and Sheen (who later played father and son in the 1988 drama Da) capture the chilly efficiency of men who place the needs of the state over the rights of individuals. Holding this taut little picture together is a fantastic score by Lalo Schifrin, who keeps the tension flowing from the deceptively peaceful opening scenes to the bitterly tragic finale.

Rage: GROOVY

’Gator Bait (1974)

          A grimy revenge picture set in the swamps of the American south, ’Gator Bait is one of several ’70s B-movies that upended exploitation-cinema tropes by featuring sexualized leading ladies as formidable avengers. Interestingly, the picture was also written, coproduced, and codirected by a woman, Beverly Sebastian, who shared producing and directing chores with her husband, Ferd Sebastian. Claudia Jennings, the sexy redhead B-movie queen who began her career as a Playmate of the Year in Playboy magazine, stars as Desiree Thibodeau, a Cajun wild woman who lives deep in the wilderness. She supports herself and her two younger siblings by poaching animals and selling hides. One day, idiot deputy Billy Boy Thomas (Clyde Ventura) and his redneck pal, Ben (Ben Sebastian), track down Desiree and threaten to arrest her unless she provides sexual favors. Desiree outfoxes her pursuers, eventually tossing a bag of snakes into their boat—at which point Billy Boy accidentally shoots and kills Ben while trying to fend off the snakes. Ashamed of his stupidity, Billy Boy lies to his father, Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman), by saying that Desiree killed Ben. When Joe Bob shares this false report with Ben’s father, T.J. (Sam Gilman), T.J. swears vengeance. Accompanied by T.J. and his psychotic older son, Leroy (Douglas Dirkson)—whom Desiree castrated years ago during an attempted rape—the cops head into the swamp to find and kill Desiree. Bloodshed and tragedy ensue.

          ’Gator Bait is as grisly as any other rape-and-revenge picture of the ’70s, featuring at least one stomach-turning scene (the horrific fate of Desiree’s sister), and the way women’s bodies are showcased makes it impossible to forget that ’Gator Bait is a lowbrow endeavor. (Jennings wears a series of barely-there costumes, her legs and midriff on constant display.) Nonetheless, there’s a smattering of local color amid the sleaziness. Nearly every scene was filmed outdoors, so the verdant locations are like characters in the story, and the score features a saucy mix of harmonicas and other rootsy instruments. Jennings also gets to do a bit of acting, which was more than was usually asked of her, and she has a couple of decent moments brandishing a shotgun and spewing tough dialogue in a Cajun accent. ’Gator Bait isn’t quality filmmaking, to be sure, but it’s periodically exciting in a grotesque sort of way. More than 20 years later, the Sebastians returned to the swamp for the straight-to-video sequel ’Gator Bait II: Cajun Justice (1988), but none of the original actors returned.

’Gator Bait: FUNKY

Hit! (1973)

          Absurdly overlong given its slight storyline, the crime thriller Hit! somehow manages to sustain interest even though leading man Billy Dee Williams delivers one of his patented laconic non-performances, and even though the contrived plot gene-splices elements from the vigilante genre with tropes from The French Connection (1971). Directed by Sidney J. Furie, who has proven time and again that he’s allergic to logic and subtlety, Hit! thrives on texture. Extensive location photography in Canada, France, and the U.S. fills the movie with vibrant images of diverse places; the sizeable ensemble cast allows Furie to cut back and forth between subplots to ensure narrative variety; and some of the supporting actors, including Richard Pryor, deliver excellent work.

          The story begins in Chicago, where federal agent Nick Allen (Billy Dee Williams) attends the funeral of his teenaged daughter, who died of a drug overdose. Nick finds the pusher who supplied his girl with dope, then nearly kills the guy until the pusher says he’s just a street-level nobody. This plants the idea in Nick’s head of traveling to Marseilles, the headquarters of the heroin syndicate that feeds Chicago’s street trade. However, because Nick doesn’t have official sanction for his crusade, he tracks down criminals who have grudges against drug dealers and manipulates these folks into joining his team. This is where Hit! locks into a groove, because Nick’s operatives include a cold-blooded killer (Paul Hampton), an emotionally unstable mechanic (Pryor), an old Jewish couple (Janet Brandt and Sid Melton) whose son died of an overdose, and a sexy junkie (Gwen Welles). In other words, Nick’s team is forever on the verge of self-destructing.

          The middle of Hit! is an enjoyably unruly sprawl during which Furie lets his cameras roll while actors simply behave, instead of doing the rigid work of communicating story information. As such, the picture benefits from scenes of Pryor ad-libbing comedy bits, of Williams seething so quietly that he reveals the intensity beneath his supercool façade, and of key supporting players, especially Brandt, articulating anguished emotions. As for the film’s actual thriller elements, they’re derivative but effective. Furie shoots action scenes—as well as long sequences of Nick’s team training for their mission—with the loose verité style that William Friedkin employed for The French Connection. The resulting jittery camerawork invests the movie with tension and urgency, even during passages when the  story is treading water.

          Holding the whole thing together is the simplicity of Nick’s scheme—he doesn’t want arrests, he wants bodies. His team’s brazen goal is to slip into France, kill as many drug kingpins as possible, and get out. Watching Hit!, one can easily imagine a more rational treatment of the same material—a terse 90-minute thrill ride with an assertive badass like Fred Williamson in the lead. And while that version would have worked, the wide-open spaces of Hit! make a tale that should have seemed trite come across as fresh and visceral. The trick to enjoying the picture, of course, is surrendering to its leisurely rhythms.

Hit!: GROOVY

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

          American movie theaters of the ‘70s were so overstuffed with ultraviolent revenge movies that some of the films even emanated from foreign countries, including this elegantly made but otherwise repulsive Swedish picture. Originally titled Thriller: eyn grym film and running 107 minutes, complete with hardcore-porn insert shots and a notorious image that may or may not feature the mutilation of an actual corpse, the movie was re-edited and re-titled many times. The version most familiar to American audiences is an 82-minute cut released to U.S. screens as They Call Her One Eye, carrying an “R” rating and bereft of the nastiest bits from the original cut. Unsurprisingly, given his penchant for grungy stories about the sexual abuse of women, Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of Thriller, and the character Daryl Hannah plays in Tarantino’s Kill Bill pictures was based on the protagonist of Thriller, who wears an eyepatch through most of the narrative.

          Writer-producer-director Bo Arne Vibenius strikes a peculiar balance throughout Thriller, because even though he fills the screen with grotesque images of murder, mutilation, and rape, Vibenius employs stately pacing and stylish slow-motion effects to create a beguiling style. Combined with twitchy flourishes on the soundtrack, including dissonant electric noises and surreal audio filters, the aesthetic of Thriller vaguely resembles that of Werner Herzog’s films. Additionally, the performances in Thriller work well by way of severe understatement—leading lady Christina Lindberg is arresting because she receives and renders violence without betraying emotion, and supporting players including main villain Heinz Hopf occupy a soulless place befitting a story about kidnapping and sexual slavery. For all of these reasons related to cinematic texture, Vibenius’ film is striking.

          That said, the content of the movie is simultaneously trite and vile, an ode to the perverse public interest in nubile young women being subjugated by monstrous men.

          Thriller begins with a prologue depicting a schoolgirl’s rape. Years later, the girl has become a beautiful young woman, Frigga (Lindberg). Living and working on a farm, she has been mute since her childhood trauma. One afternoon, she accepts a car ride from smooth-talking Tony (Hopf). He slips her a sedative and then, while she’s unconscious, pumps her so full of heroin that she becomes addicted. Naturally, he controls her supply of dope. Tony informs his new prisoner—whom he renames Madeline—that she must work as a prostitute in his brothel. When Frigga/Madeline attacks her first would-be john, Tony punishes her by poking out her right eye with a scalpel—a violent act featured in a loving closeup that has been a source of controversy for decades, since rumors persist that a real human body was used for the effect. Once Frigga/Madeline “settles” into her routine, she uses her days off and her paychecks (both of which represent inexplicable plot contrivances) to pay for training in combat driving, martial arts, and sharpshooting, because she’s methodically planning revenge. The movie’s epic finale, which stretches across a solid 30 minutes, features the protagonist’s systematic payback.

          Excepting perhaps the sheer severity of the thing, the plot of Thriller fails to generate many surprises, and the film’s emotional content is limited to sympathy for the protagonist’s unthinkable situation. As such, watching Thriller is a clinical experience, especially since full-length original version includes full-penetration insert shots during sex scenes and lingers endlessly on shotgun-blasted victims tumbling to the ground. It’s all quite horrible and ugly, and yet strangely lyrical, too. Make no mistake, Thriller is the worst kind of cinematic misogyny, a symphony of hate disguised as empowerment. Still, it’s no wonder Thriller lingered in Tarantino’s imagination.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture: FREAKY

Kid Vengeance (1977)

          Go figure that B-movie tough guy Lee Van Cleef made not one but two cheap European Westerns costarring ’70s teen idol Leif Garrett. And while Garrett was merely a supporting player in God’s Gun (1976), he’s more or less the protagonist of Kid Vengeance—despite billing suggesting that either Van Cleef or blaxploitation badass Jim Brown plays the main character. Confusion about who’s more important to the storyline notwithstanding, Kid Vengeance is on the low end of passable, but at least that means it ‘s a hell of a lot better than the abysmal God’s Gun. Among other noteworthy differences, Kid Vengeance has a plot that makes sense. At the beginning the violent story, honest prospector Isaac (Brown) trades gold for cash, thereby catching the attention of thugs including McClain (Van Cleef), who leads a posse of savage men. After his first skirmish with would-be robbers, Isaac flees into the sun-baked wilderness and encounters the salt-of-the-earth Thurston clan, including Ma and Pa plus two kids. The kids are nubile Lisa (Glynis O’Connor) and wide-eyed Tom (Garrett). Once Isaac leaves them, the Thurstons get menaced by McClain’s gang; the thugs kill Pa, rape Ma, and kidnap Lisa for sale to slavers. Tom witnesses all of this and begins picking off the baddies with his bow and arrow. Eventually, Tom hooks up with Isaac, and the two join forces.
          The first half of the picture is sluggish, even with lots of bloodshed, partially because of lax storytelling and partially because Garrett’s an ineffectual screen presence as he lurks in high rock formations and watches bad things happen. Meanwhile, Brown is mostly kept offscreen for a good 40 minutes. On the brighter side, Van Cleef renders one of his signature phoned-in performances, but he plays evil so enjoyably that his lack of commitment doesn’t really matter. As for the other key players, O’Connor brings her customary sincerity and costar Matt Clark gives good varmint, as usual. (It’s a mystery why the producers bothered hiring John Marley, who plays McClain’s second-in-command, since his voice was replaced in dubbing to make him sound Mexican.) Kid Vengeance—which is also known by the titles Vendetta and Vengeance—isn’t the worst film of its kind, but no one will ever mistake it for a quality picture. And even though Kid Vengeance is occasionally described as a sequel to a previous Brown-Van Cleef flick, Take a Hard Ride (1975), the films are unrelated.

Kid Vengeance: FUNKY