In short: The Train Robbers (1973)

Aging, upright gunfighter Lane (John Wayne), his – also not exactly fresh - buddies Grady (Rod Taylor) and Jesse (Ben Johnson) and their new, comparatively young, hired help Calhoun (Christopher George) and Ben Young (Bobby Vinton) are hired by widow Mrs Lowe (Ann-Margret) for a rather interesting project. Mrs Lowe knows where her late husband hid quite a bit of gold he robbed from a railway company, and needs some experienced gun hands to get it for her. Or really, as it turns out, to accompany her to the gold, for she’s not that trusting. She’s not planning to keep the stuff, mind you, but wants to return it to the railway company to wash her husband’s name clean in the eyes of their son.

The gold is hidden across the border in Mexico, and obviously, Mrs Lowe and her men aren’t the only ones interested in it, making their little project rather dangerous. And that’s before you add the natural dangers of crossing the desert where the gold is hidden and the – pretty mild – tensions in the group to the mix of dangers.

This Burt Kennedy joint isn’t the kind of Western that goes terribly hard or terribly deep, playing a bit too nice with its characters for my taste. Everyone here resolves their conflicts a bit too easily and too pat, and apart from some leering at Ann-Margret and the usual Wayne bluster, there doesn’t seem to be a mean bone in any non-bandit’s body here. From time to time, there are some pleasantly off-handed moments concerned with the plight of being an old man in a young man’s job (certainly something gun hands and our actors have in common, exceptions notwithstanding) that add a bit of melancholy to the mix.

This doesn’t mean the film isn’t a entertaining time – Kennedy is after all an old pro with the genre and knows how to keep this more amiable style of Western far from the Italian style or the revisionist Western (some of whose predecessors were ironically enough scripted by Kennedy with rather more depth than this one) engaging and fun.

There are also some pretty spectacular nature shots, and – eventually – some fine action set pieces to keep the willing viewer diverted, again keeping The Train Robbers fun throughout, though seldom more.

In short: Whiskey Mountain (1977)

Married couples Bill (Christopher George) and Jamie (Linda Borgeson), and Dan and Diana (Roberta Collins) are going on a treasure hunt for a load of US Civil War era muskets one of the women’s grandfathers has buried somewhere around a place called “Whiskey Mountain”. But hiking gear and dirt bikes won’t be enough when they ignore the curious stuff that begins happening to them. Apparently, if you’re on a hike, and somebody steals your panties, it’s the local marijuana growers trying to warn you off.

Our protagonists are understandably not really getting the hint, so will eventually have to endure rape, death and killing, for the pot growers around a guy named Rudy (John Chandler) play hardball, with optional sadface.

I’m not sure why of all the local exploitation filmmakers available, it’s William Grefé who is getting the comparatively lavish BluRays (though still sourced from pretty damn beat up prints), when there are still actually good films in desperate need of better versions of their films. But then, every film digitized is a film saved from oblivion, so there’s that at least.

Like most of Grefé’s movies I’ve seen, Whiskey Mountain is a workmanlike effort with a couple of scenes that are rather better than that description suggests, but also the director’s usual problems with pacing and tone. The first half of the movie or so drags desperately, the director filling time with dirt biking sequences and pretty decent nature shots while the plot slowly, very slowly, starts rolling, the mysterious threat taking its dear time to actually become threatening. Our character trait-less protagonists (a waste of good acting talent) are really not terribly interesting to spend time with either.

Tonally, things permanently stumble around between 70s grimness, unfunny humour, hicksploitation clichés and moments of actual nastiness – all set to the sounds of the Charlie Daniels Band. The film never settles for long enough on any aspect to make much of an impression.

There are some clever touches buried among the dross, though: Grefé’s decision to portray the inevitable rape sequence in form of polaroids shot by the evil hicks underlaid with their giggling and shouting and some screaming by their victims is actually making that part of the film more uncomfortable to sit through than this sort of thing is anyhow, and certainly makes it pretty impossible to a viewer to side with anyone but the women here (one can imagine the Grefé shouting: “Try to get titillated by that, assholes!”). In less unpleasant moments, I rather enjoyed the completely over the top Old Man (Robert Leslie) our protagonists encounter repeatedly, a guy so crazy, Grefé actually makes a suspense scene out of the question if he’s going to cut our tied up heroes loose or cut their throats.

So there’s that, at least.

The Exterminator (1980)

Having survived the war in Vietnam thanks to his buddy Michael Jefferson (Steve James), PTSD-suffering vet John Eastland (Robert Ginty) is now working with Jefferson in a meat-packing plant, leading the kind of life so empty, it might as well not be one.

One day, Jefferson and Eastland prevent some members of a multi-racial gang known as the Ghetto Ghouls from stealing some stuff from their workplace. Later, the young assholes attack Jefferson in revenge, nearly killing him and leaving him paralysed, which, given his race, social status and the US medical system, adds financial strain to the emotional one, too.

Eastland pretty much loses it completely and hunts down the Ghetto Ghouls, killing them in gruesome ways. This clearly does awaken something in him, and he starts with a one man crusade against crime he happens to stumble upon, like putting the mob boss responsible for the protection racket at his place of work into a meat grinder (and stealing his money to pay for Jefferson’s medical bill), or destroying a child prostitution ring.

This is obviously not the sort of thing a guy can get away with forever. Veteran police detective James Dalton (Christopher George), who will turn out to be another Vietnam vet nearly as damaged as Eastland, is on the case. When he is not romancing a doctor played by Samantha Eggar, that is. And, weirder, the CIA also shows an interest in Eastland’s “work”, deciding that his vigilante killing spree is either a conscious attempt to show up the current powers that be’s promise to lower crime rates, or some sort of foreign ploy, which must make total sense to someone. Clearly, things can’t end well.

And depending on the cut of the film, they don’t,though the finale of John Glickenhaus’s magnum opus The Exterminator turns out differently depending on which version of it you watch. My favourite ending sees everyone die in a classic 70s US cinema fashion very fitting to a film that stands so clearly right on the border between the sort of film typical of the 70s and what would become typical for the early 80s. Consequently, things are a bit of a peculiar, yet always interesting, mix of post-Watergate grimness and pre-Reagan love for violent solutions, Glickenhaus trying and mostly managing to make a vigilante movie that isn’t trying to be as reactionary as possible, simply by virtue of Glickenhaus not attempting to take any kind of moral stance towards Eastland’s actions.

Glickenhaus treats this a bit like a documentary filmmaker of the more “objective” sort, showing us Eastland, showing us why and how he does what he does but never really assuming the “fuck yeah” attitude of many action films. In fact, there’s really little action shot to excite in the film – most of the violence is grubby, unpleasant and looks deeply uncool (so probably pretty close to actual violence), Ginty stumbles from one violent encounter to the next not so much with an expression of rage than one of tired resignation on his face, really expressing more his own inner damage than any sentiments towards the people he kills. Which is particularly ironic because his victims are as vile as they come and would certainly lend themselves to some semi-effective screeds about how much they deserve what they get, and all the other crap vigilante films like to spout. The Exterminator as a film seems just as tired and empty in affect as its titular character, breathing an air of desperation more than one of the violent excitement that’ll usually make you a grindhouse hit (though it certainly turned out to be one).

Ginty, in general not one of my favourite low budget movie actors, is perfect as Eastland here, his air of slight distraction and empty normality perfect for a guy who has been damaged so much, he feels compelled to kill but clearly doesn’t even derive satisfaction from the act, going through the motions of violence because at least when he’s killing, he doesn’t have to think anymore.

Dalton’s scenes do at first feel like filler to get the film up to a decent runtime, but eventually, it becomes clear that Glickenhaus is really trying to show us another man with the same kind of damage, our protagonist and the man hunting him not being two sides of the same coin as is genre tradition, but virtually the same, only divided by the luck of the draw, because that’s what America is in this film: a place where everybody loses, only some worse than others.

On this cheery note, it’s no wonder that Glickenhaus also adds the CIA and elements of the 70s conspiracy thriller usually absent from vigilante movies to the mix, the politics that broke Eastland and Dalton in Vietnam (and that arguably also broke the America they are now living in) still churning on like the empty machines their lives have become.


Which is rather a lot of interesting subtext for a grubby, New York vigilante movie, and certainly what makes The Exterminator a jewel in the crown of this particular genre.

Past Misdeeds: Day of the Animals (1977)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


It's the late 70s, and the ozone layer has become thin. So thin, in fact, that animals living in higher altitudes begin to act rather strangely. Our former furry friends become more aggressive, begin to hunt in packs even when they're not pack animals, and also develop the sort of fiendish intelligence that leads to things like dogs driving people into cars full of snakes, and what looks like a non-aggression pact between all non-human species. As further developments during the course of the movie will show, the phenomenon - except for the "becoming more intelligent" part - does not stop with animals; the lowest form of human life on the planet - ad executives - can be influenced by it too.

Consequently a merry little - unarmed, foodless - hiking trip of professional hiking trip leader Steve "let's send the hurt woman and her husband alone to the ranger station" Buckner (Christopher George) and a whole load of disaster movie fodder characters through the Sierra soon turns rather unpleasant. Steve really should have known better than to make a trip with a bunch of city slickers consisting of a couple going on an extreme hiking trip to fix their marriage, a freshly divorced woman from Beverly Hills (Ruth Roman) and her son (Bobby Porter), a former professional American Football player dying of bone cancer (Paul Mantee), a professor of exposition (Richard Jaeckel), a TV anchor-woman (Lynda Day George), a racist asshole of an ad executive (Leslie Nielsen shortly before he transformed himself into a deadpan comedian forever), and a random young couple (Andrew Stevens and whoever that actress is). Even with the tempering influence of Native American - of course wise to the ways of the woods and the heart - Daniel Santee (definitely not Native American Michael Ansara), it wouldn't need raving animals to lead these people into a disaster.

But as it stands, disaster in form of raving animals does strike soon enough, with animals attacking in the least typical manner, the group splitting up, bickering and then splitting up some more, and the people in the best position to help having their own animal troubles. It's the sort of thing that can only climax (in what is the film's actual climax even though the film's nominal one comes afterwards) in a shirtless Leslie Nielsen mud-wrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting and raving about "Melville's god" and having tried to rape a woman.

Ladies and gentlemen, even though Day of the Animals may not conform to many people's concept of a good film, it very well may be director William Girdler's magnum opus. While all Girdler films recommend themselves to people of taste with moments of utter lunacy (see for example the Grizzly versus Helicopter fight in Grizzly, or the indescribable finale of The Manitou), the sympathetic viewer usually has to cope with quite a bit of boredom and scenes without much of a function beyond bringing a film to feature length to get to them. Here, however, Girdler has found his sweet spot of all nonsense all the time. The director provides his audience with every 70s eco horror shenanigan he could think of, only to stop from time to time for always amusing classic disaster movie non-characterisation  with a side-line of the most horribly wrong "romantic" dialogue this side of the 50s. Regarding the latter, let's just say that Buckner's way of romantic banter is based on inviting the TV anchor into his "woodsmen course".

Girdler could of course not afford the ménage of Hollywood has-beens and nearly-beens a disaster movie usually needs so had to go with actors with a bit or a lot of TV experience instead, but as it turns out, TV actors are just as good at eating up the scenery as Michael Caine when he needs to pay for his yacht.

As is probably quite clear by now, sensible pacing and plot logic are completely out of the question for Day of the Animals. I don't think there's any need for me to go into the film's plot holes, nor the idiocy of all characters involved, nor the bizarre logic of the way the animals act. However, a logical or well-structured movie could not contain (and I have to repeat that) a scene of middle-aged, shirtless Leslie Nielsen mudwrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting about "Melville's god", nor various scenes where our heroes are outwitted by dogs, nor one where Walter Barnes's Ranger Tucker is attacked by what can only be described as flying rats, which provides further fuel for my theory that logic and structure are just terribly overrated.


However, this kind of 70s cheese is not the only thing that makes Day of the Animals worth watching. To my great surprise as someone who has never had anything good to say about Girdler as a director, the film also features a handful of scenes where it actually works as a horror film. Those among the animal attack scenes that aren't completely ridiculous (so about half of them) are actually quite tense to watch. Even better, whenever the film puts its mind to treating its animal attack story as an apocalyptic event, it develops some of the bleak and pessimistic air so typical of 70s horror, with some effective scenes of disturbed characters wandering through a deserted small town. It is quite possible, not to say probable, that Girdler arrives at the points where his apocalypse actually works despite of himself, just because that sort of thing was in the air at the time. For my tastes, every even just slightly effective moment of world-ending doom in a movie is to be treasured, for whatever reason it comes to pass, so Day of the Animals provides me with double the joy.

On WTF: Day of the Animals (1977)

If you ever wanted to see a shirtless Leslie Nielsen mud-wrestle a bear, you've come to the right film. Also making an appearance are flying rats, the snake/dog-gang, the 70s, and some rather bizarre characters.

My column on WTF-Film will inform you exactly how much I loved William Girdler's greatest achievement.

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