Smash-Up on Interstate 5 (1976)

          Offering a slight twist on the disaster-flick formula, bland telefilm Smash-Up on Interstate 5 begins with the titular catastrophe—a 39-vehicle accident in Southern California—then rolls back to the clock 48 hours. This structure sidesteps the fact that a car accident, by its nature, precludes conventional narrative tension. After all, it’s impossible to anticipate a freak occurrence, whereas if an ocean liner is sinking, a skyscraper is burning, or an earthquake and its aftershocks are happening, characters have time to contemplate impending doom. Smash-Up at Interstate 5 makes a reasonable effort to contrive drama between the setup and payoff, and to create empathy for a spectrum of characters played by a typically hodgepodge TV-movie cast.
          The nominal protagonist is California Highway Patrol Sergeant Sam (Robert Conrad), an adrenaline junkie whose girlfriend, nurse Laureen (Donna Mills), worries she can’t build a life with such a reckless man. Laureen’s sister, Barbara (Sian Barbara Allen), is married to another cop, Jimmy (Tommy Lee Jones), and they’re expecting a child. You get the idea—per the template for this sort of thing, Smash-Up invents lots of ticking-clock plotlines to give the accident as much impact as possible. Other threads include an elderly couple (Buddy Ebsen and Harriet Nelson) dealing with terminal illness, a middle-aged woman (Vera Miles) swept off her feet by a younger man (David Groh), and a small-time crook (Scott Jacoby) taken hostage by a robber on a killing spree. It’s all quite pedestrian, of course, but the ensemble approach ensures that whenever a scene starts to drag, the film is just a cut away from something livelier.
          Directed by small-screen workhorse John Llewelyn Moxley, Smash-Up on Interstate 5 delivers the requisite mixture of romance, pathos, schmaltz, and tragedy. As with most such telefilms, whether any particular scene commands the viewer’s interest depends largely on the viewer’s enjoyment of particular actors—Conrad does his stoic bit, Ebsen provides folksy warmth, Miles lends a touch of elegance, and so forth. (Points to Herb Edelman for his brief but pungent appearance as a swinger.) Alas, the element the movie handles least effectively is the big accident—despite giving a solid blast of crashes and explosions and stunts, the movie rushes through the aftermath too quickly, denying viewers the carnage they’ve been promised for more than 90 minutes.
 
Smash-Up on Interstate 5: FUNKY

The Kid from Not-So-Big (1978)

          A harmless but unimpressive attempt at mimicking Disney’s family-friendly formula, The Kid from Not-So-Big is somewhat akin to Disney’s silly Apple Dumpling Gang movies—like those pictures, Not-So-Big is a gentle Western comedy involving frontier swindlers, goofy gunslingers, and saintly children. Deepening the Disney alignment, there’s even a tangential connection to theme parks. Six Flags briefly partnered in a production company that generated only two 1978 projects—Barnaby and Me, a koala-themed comedy that was broadcast on Australian television, and Not-So-Big, which probably reached its broadest audience through a Warner Bros. video release in the ‘80s. Given its close adherence to Disney’s style, Not-So-Big would have benefitted from some Mouse House overkill: name actors, posh production values, a zippy mixture of broad farce with cornpone plotting. Although Not-So-Big looks great thanks to the efforts of future A-list cinematographer Dean Cundey, the picture suffers from bland leading performances and script that goes slack in the middle.

          In the whimsically named town of Not-So-Big, precocious preteen Jenny (Jennifer McAllister) does most of the heavy lifting for a tiny newspaper owned by her grandfather, Hank (Don Keefer). When con man Sylvester Quick (Robert Viharo) blows into Not-So-Big with hype about making everyone rich by selling property to big-city investors, Jenny calls BS. First Sylvester torches the newspaper’s office, resulting in Hank’s death. Then Sylvester hires gunman Slowhand (Paul Tulley) to kill Jenny. Per the norm of such stories, Slowhand’s conscience gets in the way, as does his affection for Not-So-Big’s newly installed schoolteacher, Corinne (Veronica Cartwright). If you’ve ever seen a children’s movie, you can figure out how things go from there.

          The first stretch of the movie is fine, setting up a by-the-numbers plot and stock characters in an innocuous manner, and the final act has the requisite mixture of dopey physical comedy and sappy emotional payoffs. Alas, the second act is quite dull and repetitive because the script by Desmond Nakano (who later found a groove writing heavy dramas) grinds through uninteresting subplots. Exacerbating the vanilla storytelling are performances that range from adequate to less so. It’s a kick to see Cartwright playing a girl-next-door type, but McAllister is likeable without actually being charismatic and Viharo is overbearing without actually being menacing. It’s never a good sign when scowling trash-cinema stalwart George “Buck” Flower, playing one of his patented rural schemers, is the liveliest performer onscreen. 
 
The Kid from Not-So-Big: FUNKY

Milestones (1975)

           A filmmaker deeply committed to expressing his far-left political ideology onscreen, Robert Kramer directed the awkward but impassioned Ice (1970), then codirected this sprawling hybrid of documentary and fiction—although Kramer participated in many other projects, Ice and Milestones are probably his most enduring statements. Codirected by John Douglas, Milestones explores the lives of myriad characters connected to Vietnam War-era counterculture. Most of the people who appear onscreen are hippies who’ve dropped out of mainstream society to live in communes and/or radicals who’ve had legal trouble stemming from activism. The picture also features perspectives from the preceding generation, courtesy of parents vexed by the choices of their adult children. Had a more disciplined filmmaker tackled exactly this material—picture an Altmanesque epic—it could have become the definitive cinematic record of its time. Alas, Milestones is a minor historical artifact that many viewers will find boring and pointless.
           Instead of using narration, onscreen text, or at the very least crisp introductory vignettes, the filmmakers spew a largely formless collage of conversations and moments, forcing viewers to intuit much key information through context. As the picture churns through multiple “storylines,” a term that’s only somewhat applicable here, viewers watch folks hang out, share experiences, and talk (endlessly) about their feelings. All of this stems from the queasy mixture of documentary and fiction. Some elements feel like real life caught on camera—particularly the pieces depicting a woman preparing for natural childbirth. Other elements are obviously staged, including two crime scenes. Viewers can make reasonable assumptions about when characters are presenting scripted (or at least prompted) dialogue, as opposed to speaking extemporaneously, because moments featuring “acting” are painfully amateurish.
           Still, a general theme emerges from the sprawl—what do antiwar radicals do once the focus of their activism disappears? Do they return to their families? Do they get jobs? Or do they try to live their counterculture ideals permanently? As one character suggests, “a revolution [is] not just a series of incidents but a whole life.” Unfortunately for all but the most sympathetic viewers, Milestones buries this worthy concept inside a series of drab scenes that span more than three hours. That’s a lot of time to spend watching grungy 16mm footage of hippies strolling naked through the woods, engaging in low-key rap sessions (plus the occasional argument), and so on.
           Excepting the aforementioned crime scenes (plus the climactic sequence of natural childbirth that unfolds in full view of the camera), the most engaging bits are conversations during which characters either speak directly to the movie’s theme or inadvertently capture their historical moment with Me Decade psychobabble. In a particularly absurd moment, self-involved Jimmy, identified as a onetime zoology professor who ditched academia for activism, expresses what a heavy trip it might be to participate in raising his preadolescent son: “I’m his father, and I have a very special kind of relationship. I mean, I dig other kids too, but I can’t brush away my feelings. I mean, maybe it’s just part of me that I have to get on top of.” As if parental obligations are some old-fashioned hangup.
           Kramer and Douglas had to do their own thing, but in retrospect they might have been wise to ditch the fiction elements and focus on capturing life among left-leaning young adults at a confusing time. Whenever the filmmakers try to get overt, they stumble badly, as with a silly dream sequence or the laughable cut from dialogue about a character with fragile emotions to a shot of that character dropping a piece of pottery that shatters.

Milestones: FUNKY

Johnny Vik (1977)

          Tucked into the deepest crevasses of the ’70s-cinema landscape are a few low-budget obscurities that are interesting because of their aspirations even though the films are amateurish and unsatisfying. Johnny Vik, for example, aligns with familiar tropes by centering an emotionally disturbed Native American who endures PTSD and socialization problems following service in Vietnam. Yet the picture differs in an important way from others that explore similar terrain—Johnny Vik is almost completely devoid of onscreen violence. Instead, the clumsily rendered picture tries to reveal the turbulent inner life of its protagonist, with writer-director Charles Nauman occasionally employing bizarre hallucination scenes to show viewers how the title character sees the world. The fact that you’ve never heard of Johnny Vik, together with the fact that Nauman’s only other credit is a documentary released in 1968, rightly indicates that Johnny Vik doesn’t achieve its goals. The movie is alternately confusing, dull, melodramatic, silly, and weird, without ever committing strongly enough to any of those sensibilities to make a strong impression. Nonetheless, Nauman and his collaborators deserve some credit for inverting the paradigm that yielded so many disposable flicks about crazed vigilantes.
          When we meet him, Johnny (Warren Hammack) comes across as a small-town simpleton who can’t hold down a job. Typical of the muddled first act is a scene of Johnny pointlessly watching two guys vandalize a cop car to the accompaniment of music that sounds like the Benny Hill theme. Eventually, circumstances compel Johnny to become a fugitive/recluse hiding in the forest outside his hometown, and once Nauman reveals the transformed Johnny—long hair, thick beard—the movie finds a bit more focus with scenes of Johnny experiencing visions in the wilderness. (In one vignette, he imagines a faceless figure of death sitting atop a pile of branches.) Meanwhile, Johnny befriends local teen Pola (Kathy Amerman), who takes horseback rides near Johnny’s hiding place. Hence her delivery of ponderous voiceover lines (“The emptiness followed him, haunted him, like a caravan of death”). None of the metaphysical stuff makes much sense, but one can feel Nauman grasping for profundity. Despite performances that range from inept to pedestrian, and notwithstanding his lack of cinematic prowess, Nauman conjures a handful of oddly soulful moments when he’s not distracted by nonsense including gratuitous nudie-cutie scenes.

Johnny Vik: FUNKY

The Great Masquerade (1974)

           Drag comedies have a long history in Hollywood, so it’s not as if low-budget farce The Great Masquerade was daring for its time—even though it eschews the homophobia that plagues most vintage movies about men dressing as women. Instead of getting doomed to cinematic oblivion by controversy, The Great Masquerade likely failed to get attention because of cheap production values, inconsistent acting, and sloppy direction. The script’s quality is roughly equivalent to that of some random sketch on a ’70s variety show, so if the material had found its way to producers with better resources and a director with a stronger feel for comedy, the picture could have been an amiable trifle. As is, The Great Masquerade—also known as The AC/DC Caper and Murder on the Emerald Seas—is a gentle comedy buried inside an exploitation flick.

          The silly premise is that for three years running, contestants in a Florida beauty pageant have become victims of unsolved murders, so the police recruit a male officer to pose as a contestant in the latest event, set to happen on a cruise ship. The main suspects are the pageant’s lascivious promoter and a pair of stereotypical Italian gangsters. The setup is mostly just a springboard for gags, the majority of which are duds. Concurrently, the wrongheaded impulse to feature salacious content leads to vignettes that resemble softcore porn. In the most egregious sequence, a little person persuades a pretty blonde to model for body art, but when the model falls asleep while the little person is painting her breasts, he starts licking. That sends her screaming into a hallway while still naked, at which point she’s chased by a psycho dressed as a clown. This kind of stuff doesn’t sit comfortably with scenes of lighthearted banter between the main characters.

          Robert Perault’s work in the lead role helps make The Great Masquerade palatable. He’s amateurish, handsome, likeable, and he strives for a frothy tone. Meanwhile, supporting players including John DeSanti, Frank Logan, and Lee Sandman try for broad-comedy caricatures—they’re as clumsy as Perault, but they put in the effort. Regarding more familiar players, it’s novel to see Roberts Blossom play a verbose sophisticate instead of his usual creeps and crooks, but good luck figuring out why The Great Masquerade has cameos from Johnny Weissmuller and Henny Youngman. Behind the camera, the most noteworthy figure is director and cowriter Alan Ormsby, who wrote and directed the seedy horror flick Deranged (1974), which stars Blossom as an Ed Gein type; wrote My Bodyguard (1980); and cowrote Cat People (1982) and The Substitute (1996).
 
The Great Masquerade: FUNKY

The Gamblers (1970)

          The public’s zeal for smooth-criminal movies was on the wane by the time The Gamblers passed through cinemas in early 1970. Yet diminishing enthusiasm for a genre is hardly the only reason the movie failed to make an impression. Although respectably made from a technical point of view, the cast is underwhelming and the script is underdeveloped. Don Gordon, a fine character actor who presumably got this gig after being featured prominently in Bullitt (1968), plays a card shark who learns that con men are planning to fleece a European investor during a river cruise through the area then known as Yugoslavia. Setting aside the usual crime-movie challenge of getting audiences to care about craven people who prey on innocents, The Gamblers suffers because its central scheme is simultaneously too opaque (how did the card shark learn about the con men?) and too obvious (the ending requires viewers to accept that our intrepid protagonist can’t detect duplicity and that the real villains are masterminds).

          Rooney (Gordon), accompanied by goofy henchman Goldy (Stuart Margolin), works his way into the orbit of Broadfoot (Kenneth Griffith) and Cozzier (Pierre Olaf), who have their own goofy henchman, Koboyashi (Richard Ng). Upon discovering that Rooney is a slick card player, Broadfoot and Cozzier enlist him to help rip off Del Isolla (Massimo Serato), who is in possession of a bank note for $250,000. During the cruise, Rooney also meets attractive blonde Candance (Suzy Kendall), so he uses her as a lure to get Del’s attention. None of this is particularly interesting to watch, but the filmmakers try at various times to emulate the styles of similar movies. Add in some jaunty theme music, a few scenes of Kendall in barely-there swimsuits, plus weak attempts at comedic banter, and the result is a simulacrum of light entertainment. 
          Even devoted fans of the smooth-criminal genre will have difficulty getting excited about The Gamblers. It’s not a chase picture or a heist movie, so the adrenaline level is low. Meaning no disrespect to the former Yugoslavia, the locations don’t have the flair of England, France, or the Mediterranean, the customary settings for ’60s flicks of this ilk. And the star power just isn’t there. Kendall provides the requisite sun-kissed loveliness, but Gordon has such a menacing quality that he can’t muster the charm required to put something like this over. Margolin is both miscast and saddled with demeaning moments including a ridiculous dance scene, and—no surprise, given the cultural climate of the time—Ng’s characterization is problematic. 

The Gamblers: FUNKY

The Trackers (1971)

          Apparently Sammy Davis Jr. spent some time looking for a project in which he could costar with John Wayne, leading to development of The Trackers. Somewhere along the way, the project lost Wayne, director Burt Kennedy, and the potential for a theatrical release, instead becoming an inexpensive telefilm directed by small-screen workhorse Earl Bellamy and costarring Ernest Borgnine. It’s probably for the best a glossier version of this project never materialized for two reasons: 1) Davis seems way out of his element playing a formidable lawman, and 2) the plot follows the familiar formula of Black and White characters who overcome racial animus when thrown together by circumstance. As a brisk TV movie with household-name actors, The Trackers makes for a pleasant 74 minutes of disposable entertainment—but stretching this content out to feature length would have brought its shortcomings into sharp focus.
          Sam Paxton (Borgnine) is an amiable rancher with a wife and two adult children until one day when raiders attack his property, kill his son, and kidnap his daughter. Initial efforts to find the evildoers prove fruitless, so Sam writes to a lawman friend who specializes in tracking. Unable to help because of an injury, the friend sends Ezekiel Smith (Davis), which aggravates Sam’s racism. (He fought for the South.) Nonetheless, once Ezekiel demonstrates his prowess, Sam agrees to ride with the Black lawman even as the trail leads closer and closer to the Mexican border. Since there have been roughly a zillion movies about men from different worlds forced to work together, you know how things go from there—Sam and Ezekiel vacillate between bonding and squabbling. In reflective moments, they share stories and find common cause. In combustible moments, they physically assault each other. A few beats are played for mild comic relief, but for the most part The Trackers aims for a serious tone.
          It’s tricky to buy Davis in his role, not just because he seems so modern but also because he’s so physically slight—in one particularly eye-rolling moment, Davis’s character holds his own in an extended brawl with Borgnine’s character even though Borgnine looks as if he could snap Davis’s spine like a twig. Related, Davis’s performance feels artificial and bland compared to the believable intensity Borgnine brings to nearly every scene. As always, Borgnine’s performance style is more about blunt force than nuance, but his animalistic approach suits the role and the storyline. He’s actually quite engaging here, so it’s moderately satisfying to watch his character describe an emotional arc, however predictable and trite.

The Trackers: FUNKY

Hardcase (1972)

          In the great 1966 Western The Professionals, mercenaries enter Mexico to rescue an American’s wife, who was supposedly kidnapped by a revolutionary, only to discover the wife has become romantically involved with the revolutionary. A twist on that premise drives the agreeable made-for-TV Western Hardcase, starring former Cheyenne star Clint Walker and Stefanie Powers. Ex-soldier Jack (Walker) returns from POW incarceration to discover that his wife, Roz (Powers), not only ran off with revolutionary Simon (Pedro Aremendáriz Jr.) but, thinking Jack dead, sold his ranch to buy supplies for Simon’s rebel band. Hardcase, titled for a nickname someone hangs on the stoic protagonist, dramatizes how Jack responds to this conundrum. This telefilm is so light on plot that it resembles an episode of some generic Western anthology; similarly, the piece has the over-lit aesthetic and unimaginative camerawork of vintage episodic television. Yet Hardcase boasts a reasonably intelligent script, by Hollywood veterans Harold Jack Bloom and Sam Rolfe, and the narrative successfully ensnares its protagonist in a fraught moral dilemma. As a result, the movie is simple without being wholly simplistic.
          Anyone who has encountered a Walker performance knows better than to expect nuance from his acting—his towering physicality and granite features lend so much visual impact that he if he aims in the general direction of a dramatic texture and doesn’t exert himself, he’s able to put across something adequate. Powers is similarly limited in her abilities. Perhaps that’s why they make a compatible duo in Hardcase—the boundaries of his skills suit a character who has difficulty expressing emotion, just as the boundaries of hers fit the character of a woman torn between conflicting loyalties. Meanwhile, Aremendáriz Jr. capably offers a frontier riff on the Paul Henreid role from Casablanca (1942) and former NFL player Alex Karras, in his first proper movie performance, lends a mix of amiability and grit. The dramatic beats these actors perform get plenty of screen time because the movie doesn’t have much action—or, for that matter, much tension. It’s tempting to guess that Hardcase is so gentle because it was the first live-action movie from kiddie-animation specialists Hanna-Barbera Productions. 

Hardcase: FUNKY

Cactus in the Snow (1971)

          It’s unsurprising this low-budget dramedy failed to make noise during its original release because even though the core of the piece is a tender exploration of friendship, the premise is so lurid that it promises viewers something quite different. Moreover, there’s a reason why A. Martin Zweiback only directed one movie despite enjoying a moderately successful screenwriting career—beyond his inability to conjure evocative visuals, he frequently loses control of tone. It’s also worth mentioning that the narrative of Cactus in the Snow is deliberately anticlimactic, so it would have been a tough sell even in the anything-goes ’70s. Viewed with the perspective of time, Cactus in the Snow is no lost classic, but it’s a gentle little picture with a brain and a heart.

          Richard Thomas, appearing a year before his breakout role in TV’s The Waltons, plays Harley, a young Army soldier on the verge of his first deployment. Hoping to lose his virginity before that happens, Harley gets drunk and propositions teenager Cissy (Mary Layne), who takes pity on Harley and brings him home while her parents are away. What ensues is best discovered by watching the picture, but the gist is that Cissy and Harley fall into what might be described as deep liking for each other—she’s as mature beyond her years as he is naïve, but they synchronize in unexpected ways. Interactions with supporting characters are fairly minimal since the focus is on dramatizing Cissy’s desire for new experiences and on revealing Harley’s lonely backstory.

          Despite Thomas being the more familiar actor, Layne’s performance drives Cactus in the Snow—her complex role allows Layne to convey empathy, toughness, vulnerability, and wit. (That said, Zweiback hit plenty of false notes while crafting the Cissy character, but false notes come with the territory here.) Thomas effectively blends wounded angst and youthful eagerness, in other words working very much in his comfort zone, though the stilted quality that impacts a lot of his early performances is quite evident here. As for the picture overall, Cactus in the Snow achieves a certain degree of poignance despite a handful of scenes that simply don’t work and a garish musical score that often strives, intrusively, to lighten the mood. Cactus in the Snow is also the sort of picture that hums along in one direction before pivoting hard at the end—depending on your sensibilities, the final scene will either edge the experience into a more substantial realm or tip the experience into melodrama.

Cactus in the Snow: FUNKY

Blood on the Mountain (1974)

          After the successful release of A Thief in the Night (1972), the Rapture-themed drama that launched his evangelical production company Mark IV Pictures, producer/director Donald W. Thompson continued his cinematic proselytizing with Blood on the Mountain, a mild-mannered thriller during which a prison break compels several characters to wrestle with faith. Shot in and around scenic Canon City, Colorado, the movie has competent production values and, at least during scenes featuring escaped convicts, acceptable pacing. Yet the usual problems associated with low-budget faith films manifest here. Narrative momentum takes a backseat to sermonizing, the plot sacrifices believability on the altar of heavy-handed religious symbolism, and the acting is weak. That said, appraising Thompson’s evangelical movies by normal standards misses the point—inasmuch as these pictures sometimes circumvented traditional exhibition by playing the church-and-mission circuit, generating conventional entertainment was never the primary goal. And since I can’t speak to whether Blood on the Mountain effectively spreads the gospel, I can only appraise whether it holds interest for those outside the target audience. The short answer is “probably not.”
          I say “probably” because Blood on the Mountain scratches a few ’70s-cinema itches thanks to location photography, period costuming, and so forth—the movie offers plentiful views of the Me Decade aesthetic in its raw form. Combined with the inherent zest of any story featuring an extended chase as its primary narrative engine, the ’70s-ness of the picture ensures a measure of watchability. Moreover, several scenes were filmed at Royal Gorge, a tourist-trap canyon, and one sequence takes place at an Old West re-enactment, so watching the movie is a bit like hopping in the family station wagon for a road trip to the Centennial State. As for the plot, set expectations low. After a killer strongarms an innocent convict into helping him escape, the killer tracks down a recently paroled accomplice in order to get revenge. (The accomplice’s wife found religion while her husband was incarcerated, so she spends the movie persuading him to embrace Jesus.) Meanwhile, the innocent convict finds God after the killer drags him into several dangerous situations. There’s also some business involving a cop with a vendetta chasing the killer, and everything resolves in a moderately violent climax at Royal Gorge.

Blood on the Mountain: FUNKY

A.W.O.L. (1972)

          Vietnam-era movies about young Americans illegally avoiding military service tended to be angsty dramas, so A.W.O.L. is an oddity not just because it has comic elements, but because it blends drama, farce, political violence, pornography, racial strife, romance, and even sci-fi. Given the film’s obscurity, it’s unsurprising to discover this patchwork approach doesn’t work. There’s a wispy central storyline, but after about 30 minutes the movie seriously loses its way. Although the main character’s journey is central to nearly every scene, the filmmakers lack a guiding aesthetic or a thematic destination—so despite some moderately distracting moments, the whole thing has the vibe of a freewheeling brainstorming session. This project badly needed a sure hand at the helm, which is ironic given that it bears a truly hubristic credit: “Entire Production Under the Supervision of Merrill S. Brody, Executive Producer.”

          After finding his way to Sweden, boyish redhead Willy (Russ Thacker) feels lonely until visiting a porno shop, where he’s recruited to act in a skin flick. This lands him in the orbit of fellow expat Mohammad G. (Glynn Turman), who’s part of a group of lefty radicals that includes lissome blonde Inga (Isabella Kaliff). After several heated exchanges about Che Guevara and the like, Willy and Inga become lovers. They also attend protests that devolve into brutal clashes with authorities. Meanwhile, CIA agent Cupp (Dutch Miller) lurks around the edges of Willy’s life, alternately cajoling and threatening the young man to return to the States. (In one of the movie’s broadest sight gags, Cupp tempts Willy by revealing a briefcase full of American candy bars and soft drinks.) Eventually, the story becomes absurd when the CIA uses futuristic technology, and then the story makes a whiplash turn into bogus heaviosity with a fashionably dark and ambiguous climax.

          Tonally, the movie is a mess, but minor amusements reside in this disjointed hour and a half. In terms of low pleasures, Kaliff has an extended topless scene and some of the CIA-related gags are jarringly goofy. As for incrementally more sophisticated elements, Turman has a couple of monologues in which he blends emphatic ’70s urban slang with counterculture-era political rhetoric, allowing him to chew scenery agreeably. The movie also provides a minor ’70s footnote inasmuch as the score was composed by Rupert Holmes, later to achieve soft-rock immortality with “Escape (The Pina Colada Song).” Alas, none of that tune’s smooth melodicism is evident here.

A.W.O.L.: FUNKY 

Brother of the Wind (1972)

          To the best of my knowledge, innocuous outdoor adventure Brother of the Wind was the first production from Sunn Classic Pictures, makers of such memorable low-budget ventures as the ’70s Grizzly Adams franchise and countless sensationalistic documentaries about pseudoscientific topics. As such, it’s interesting to note how many signature tropes were present at inception. The subject matter fits the back-to-nature ethos of the early ’70s, so that checks the box for pandering to popular trends. The picture combines competent imagery with dubious sound work (goopy music, wall-to-wall voiceover), so that checks the box for keeping production costs low by leaning on post-production flourishes. And Brother of the Wind stretches a threadbare story across nearly 90 minutes of running time, which checks the box for padding content to merit theatrical exhibition. At their best, Sunn made harmless schlock, and at their worst, they made embarrassing dreck. Brother on the Wind falls somewhere between those extremes, and it established the critter-centric pocket that proved so lucrative for Sunn throughout the ’70s. Like the company’s Adams adventures, Brother of the Wind has roughly the vibe of an overly earnest John Denver song.
          When the movie begins, aging mountain man Sam Monroe (Dick Robinson, who also directed) takes custody of four wolf cubs after their parents are killed. Sam nurtures the wolves until, with his guidance, they embrace their instincts by learning how to kill prey. Per the familiar Sunn style, audio was added after filming, so we never see Sam speak onscreen; instead, we hear folksy voiceover that functions like an aural diary. Some of the picture’s episodes go down smoother than others. It’s impossible not to be touched when the mother wolf crawls into her den so she can die with her offspring, and many shots of animals and nature are beautiful. Flip side, the sequence of the cubs interacting with a weasel—accompanied by musical quotes of “Pop Goes the Weasel”—seem designed to vaporize viewers’ brain cells. Open to more subjective appraisal are elements such as the cutesy names Sam gives to the cubs: Fire Eyes, Shy Lady, Sunkleep, and Timber. (He also names a raccoon Cheeky.) That said, applying critical rigor to something like Brother of the Wind is a pointless endeavor—discriminating viewers won’t and shouldn’t seek this out, while sympathetic viewers probably know what to expect. If you’re willing to endure mawkish presentation so you can look at animals and forest scenery, this is for you.

Brother of the Wind: FUNKY

Pets (1973)

          Not too many T&A-driven grindhouse flicks stem from legit theater, but Pets has exactly that pedigree. However, it’s useful to note that the stage experience upon which Pets is based premiered in 1969—if not the white-hot center of the Sexual Revolution, then close enough—and that “legit” had an expansive meaning at the time. After playwright Richard Reich debuted an evening of three one-act plays called Pets at the Provincetown Playhouse, filmmaker Raphael Nussbaum directed (and co-wrote with Reich) a film adaptation converting the stage show’s thematically linked stories into a contiguous narrative. All of this is somewhat novel, but the movie of Pets suggests the source material was titillating at best, trashy at worst. The film’s first vignette concerns sexy hitchhikers robbing a dude with a little dog; the second vignette depicts a lesbian artist who becomes jealous when her female model gets hot for a man who breaks into the artist’s house; and the third vignette centers an art collector who lures women into his basement and keeps them as, you guessed it, “pets.” The connection between the first two sections is tenuous. Worse, because the third section is the most unusual, the movie should have gotten to the spicy stuff faster—and gotten more out of it than one extended scene.

          Pets is neither admirable nor awful. The scenarios mostly hinge on lengthy scenes of leading lady Candice Rialson displaying her breasts, so it’s difficult to perceive higher aspirations beyond the leering. Concurrently, the dialogue (credited to three writers!) is so arch and obvious and stilted that that the film’s sociocultural elements receive clumsy treatment. The movie primarily expresses a theme of people trying to possess other people, and only the first vignette—with the hitchhikers and the little dog—has anything resembling surprises and subtext. Adding to the general blandness of Pets is lethargic pacing, which makes the movie feel much, much longer than its 103-minute running time. Still, those who can’t resist should be advised what awaits them. Rialson, though charming in other B-movies (such as 1977’s outrageous Chatterbox!) is largely decorative here, while swaggering costar Teri Guzman flits in and out of the picture too quickly. Occupying the showiest role is prolific film/TV actor Ed Bishop, who plays the perverse collector—his performance approaches camp but always seems a bit too reticent, even when he’s abusing Rialson’s character with a whip.

Pets: FUNKY 

The Daredevil (1972)

          Watching The Daredevil, it’s tricky to parse whether the people involved with the project thought they were making a real movie. On the surface, the story of a stock-car racer whose life unravels after his involvement with a crash that kills another racer is a compendium of high-velocity episodes, from daytime races to nighttime chases. Yet the picture also tries, weakly, to present a character study of its self-destructive protagonist, a nasty jerk who treats everyone he meets with contempt. As a result, it’s hard to determine the intended audience for this thing. By the time this picture was made, the drive-in demographic’s appetite for stories about hard-charging rebels sticking it to the man was well-established, and The Daredevil does not scratch that itch. Similarly, downbeat tales of everyday people meeting grim fates for the temerity of expressing individualism were familiar to devotees of arty counterculture cinema, but The Daredevil lacks the sophistication needed to satiate that appetite. And while some distinctive flicks found a sweet spot between these extremes—the previous year’s Vanishing Point comes to mind—that’s yet another niche into which The Daredevil does not fit. For all these reasons and more, The Daredevil deserves its obscurity. Bad ’70s cinema gets much worse than this, but The Daredevil neither tries to do enough nor excels at what it actually attempts.

          Faded ’40s/’50s he-man actor George Montgomery plays Paul Tunney, an asshole with a winning record on the Southern stock-car circuit. Returning to his home track, he faces off for the first time against a Black racer, who dies during the event. (Adding to his charm, Paul is casually racist.) The dead man’s sister, Carol (Gay Perkins), puts a sort of hex on Paul, who starts losing races not long after the fatality. Then Paul starts a distasteful involvement with Julie (played by ’50s pinup Terry Moore) even though Julie is dating Paul’s friend Huck (Bill Kelly), a one-armed mechanic. Once Paul’s racing career hits the skids, he takes a gig running drugs for a local crime boss. These slender threads intertwine predictably as the picture zooms toward its bummer climax. Had the premise of Robert Walsh’s script found its way to a more adept filmmaking team and stronger actors, The Daredevil could have become something interesting—not only is the downward spiral of the leading character a serviceable plot device, but developing the idea of Carol employing supernatural means to exact revenge could have lent novelty to the endeavor. As is, the picture is a cheap-looking affair riddled with flat dialogue, stilted performances, unpleasant characters, and way too much stock footage.

The Daredevil: FUNKY

Hollywood 90028 (1973)

          Some grungy movies are such prime fodder for cultural analysis that their actual cinematic merits (or lack thereof) are inconsequential—the serious-minded viewer consumes the film as an appetizer for the rhetorical feast. So it is with Hollywood 90028, which at various times has been called The Hollywood Hillside Strangler, Insanity, and Twisted Throats. As those lurid monikers suggest, the folks responsible for selling this picture to an unsuspecting public attempted to brand it a straightforward shocker, when in fact Hollywood 90028 is something very different. At the risk of making this crudely rendered flick sound too grand, Hollywood 90028 is partially the character study of a sociopath and partially a rumination on the link between voyeurism and violence. On good days, Mark (Christopher Augustine) is a soft-spoken cameraman paying his dues by shooting stag films while he dreams of going legit. On bad days, Mark picks up women and strangles them to death. Writer-director Christina Hornisher lacks the skill to properly realize this premise, so most of the film comprises dull passages of Mark wandering around Los Angeles, visiting porn stores, and trying to develop a relationship with Michele (Jeannette Dilger), a stag-film performer who has issues of her own. (Sidenote: The picture’s most believably human moment is the vignette of Mark listening to a phone message from Michele in which she explains her reasons for ending their relationship and then presents music by her sensitive new boyfriend—ouch.)

          To get a sense of how little happens in Hollywood 90028, more than 45 minutes elapse between the first and second kills, and the movie is only 76 minutes long. Yet the picture has four noteworthy elements. First, it’s somewhat rare as a female-directed psychosexual story from the early ‘70s. Second, the leisurely pacing allows viewers to luxuriate in shots of sleazy vintage LA. Third, all that moody piano music on the soundtrack is courtesy of Basil Poledouris, who became a major Hollywood composer in the ’80s and ’90s. Fourth, the final scene of Hollywood 90028 is genuinely arresting, a nasty distillation of metaphorical and thematical concepts the rest of the film struggles to articulate. The content of the final scene won’t be spoiled here, but for those willing to slog through the film’s grimy tedium (ogling nude scenes, meandering dialogue, questionable editing), there are conversations to be had about Hollywood 90028, even though similar chats could just as easily get prompted by better movies exploring related subject matter, from Peeping Tom (1960) to Body Double (1984) to 8mm (1999) and beyond. There is something to be said, however, about using a film from the cinematic gutter as a means of considering the medium’s darker aspects.

Hollywood 90028: FUNKY

The Hoax (1972)

          Featuring a plot so thin it could barely power a sitcom episode, jokes so anemic they mostly elicit indifference, and a musical score so overzealous that cues land like the rim shots nightclub comics use to juice lifeless routines, The Hoax strains viewer patience throughout its 85-minute running time. About the only things that make the picture tolerable are an outlandish premise, an early-career performance by someone who later became a familiar face on TV, and the choice to keep things in a family-friendly lane even though the storyline focuses on two grown men, one of whom is portrayed as a bachelor with a vigorous sex life—while nothing in the story invites R-rated treatment, innumerable low-budget comedies have used course language and nudity to compensate for missing laughs. All of which is a means of saying that while The Hoax is not a good feature comedy, one gets the sense the folks involved put forth a measure of sincere effort. Accordingly, the movie gets whatever meager credit one awards for vaulting a low bar.
          Set in LA (of course), the movie follows two wiseass friends, Clete (Frank Bonner) and Cy (Bill Ewing), who make a wild discovery while exploring a tidal pool—an American hydrogen bomb washed ashore completely intact. Upon confirming via news reports the bomb is legit, the dudes blackmail the city by threatening to explode the device unless citizens send $1 each to a Swiss bank account. The plot doesn’t involve much more than that, excepting inevitable scenes of bumbling authorities trying to identify the blackmailers, plus slightly more imaginative scenes of Southern Californians wrangling with the prospect of impending doom. Given that you’ve never heard of The Hoax, it should come as no surprise to learn the filmmakers failed to exploit the comedic potential of their central concept—instead of a satire exploring greed and paranoia, the filmmakers deliver silly farce powered by amateurish performances and dopey scripting. (Example: After the lads remove part of the bomb’s tailfin to prove they’ve got the device, Cy moans, “I’ve never worked so hard for a piece of tail in my life!”)
          As for the aforementioned TV notable, that would be costar Bonner, latter to achieve fame as sleazy salesman Herb Tarlek on WKRP in Cincinnati. Calling him the movie’s standout would be exaggerating, but he’s sufficiently comfortable on camera that he at least seems like a professional actor, whereas his primary scene partner, Ewing, mugs and over-emotes to a tiresome degree. Ewing later found success as a studio executive.

The Hoax: FUNKY

A Great Ride (1979)

          Amazingly, ten years after the release of Easy Rider, indirect knockoffs of that seminal film were still getting made. A Great Ride, which presumably zipped through theaters before landing on home video sometime in the ’80s, borrows basic elements from Dennis Hopper’s iconic film, particularly the trope of two dudes traveling America via motorcycles while on a search for—well, A Great Ride never makes that clear, but since so many aspects of the picture’s storytelling are vague, the absence of a thematic concept is to be expected. In lieu of a big idea (really, even a small idea would have sufficed), A Great Ride has colorful episodes, a peculiar antagonist, and strong cinematography. For some viewers, these bits and pieces might be enough to warrant a casual watch, though nothing in A Great Ride truly demands or rewards attention.

          When the movie begins, experienced professional biker Steve (Michael Sullivan) and his hot-tempered young buddy Jim (Perry Lang) set out from the Mexican border for a long journey to the Canadian border, fully intent on illegally crossing federal land along the way. Viewers learn nothing about these dudes before their journey begins and very little afterward. Following a few inconsequential vignettes, Jim agrees to an off-road race against an obnoxious young biker who accidentally dies during the race. Steve and Jim flee the scene, but the dead kid’s father (Michael MacRae) vows to hunt and kill them. To aid his quest, the dad uses a souped-up truck complete with a scorpion painted on the side and a fantastical onboard computer that spews such data as “estimated range to target.” (It’s always a kick to see dopey ’70s movies giving computers the equivalent of superpowers.) Unaware of impending danger, Steve and Jim continue their adventures, at one point hooking up with two ATV-driving hotties who service the lads in a quasi-softcore sequence replete with arty star-filter shots and goopy soft rock.

          Excepting David Worth’s muscular cinematography, none of the craft contributions are of note beyond one item of trivia—the film was edited by none other than Steve Zaillian, who cut several exploitation pictures before commencing his storied career as an A-list screenwriter. As for the cast, by far the most familiar face belongs to Lang, whose many acting credits (1941, The Big Red One, Eight Men Out, etc.) precede his extensive work directing episodic TV from the 1990s to the late 2010s.

A Great Ride: FUNKY

The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973)

          Even though The Horror at 37,000 Feet is a terrible made-for-TV supernatural thriller distinguished by a dumb storyline, a motley cast, and sketchy production values, the movie provides enjoyable viewing for a certain stripe of ‘70s crap-cinema masochist. To put an even finer point on things, the emotional center of the movie is William Shatner’s portrayal of a former priest seemingly determined to drink himself to death until a faceoff with otherworldly forces compels him to test whether he’s got anything left in the tank, spiritually speaking. If that sounds appealing, then you’ve got the stuff to power through this silly picture’s dull stretches and laughable excesses. However, if you find the prospect of Shatner wrestling with angst unattractive, then you would be wise to forget you ever heard of The Horror at 37,000 Feet. Speaking now to those brave and/or foolish souls willing to learn more, it’s time to meet some of the other miscellaneous actors who wander through this flick. We’re talking Chuck Connors as a square-jawed pilot who delivers this actual line: “We’re caught in a wind like none there ever was!” We’re talking Buddy Ebsen as an obnoxious millionaire who thinks he knows more about planes than a flight crew. We’re talking the strangely cast Paul Winfield as an upper-crust British doctor. And we’re talking Russell Johnson—the Professor from Gilligan’s Island—in a small role as a flight engineer. The picture seems as if was cast by someone opening an old TV Guide to random pages and pointing at names.

          As for the dopey plot, here goes. Rich architect Alan O’Neill (Roy Thinnes) pays to have a passenger flight carry the altar from an English druidic temple because he plans to use the altar for a project in America. As the flight proceeds, strange phenomena manifest until the crew believes claims from strident activist Mrs. Pinder (Tammy Grimes) that the cargo hold is filled with evil energy. Who will live? Who will die? Who cares? Using the familiar device of fusing the disaster-movie formula with supernatural-thriller elements, The Horror at 37,000 Feet is so drably made, so mechanically written, and so slowly paced that it’s unlikely to elicit frightened reactions. Instead, the picture generates a mildly eerie vibe that occasionally captures the imagination because one of the actors does something committed or earnest or flamboyant. Shatner is unquestionably the center of attention given his signature overwrought acting style, but Grimes gets points for playing her harbinger-of-doom role so fervently, and Winfield classes up the joint even with his stilted attempt at a British accent. For those who make it through the movie’s sluggish first 45 minutes or so, the reward is a climax filled with goofy special effects, from giggle-inducing shots of green goo seeping through surfaces to the laugh-out-loud staging of the Shatner character’s final confrontation with the forces bedeviling his fellow passengers. 

The Horror at 37,000 Feet: FUNKY

Stunt Rock (1978)

          Delivering in a big way on both elements of its title, Stunt Rock is an Australian oddity depicting the adventures of an Aussie stuntman who visits the U.S. and hangs out with members of a flamboyant rock band, so the nearly plotless flick combines wild stunt footage with extensive concert sequences. As the cult-cinema equivalent of background noise, Stunt Rock is palatable because leading man Grant Page does lots of outrageously dangerous things, from climbing the sides of buildings to driving at insane speeds to setting himself on fire, and also because the gimmick of rock band Sorcery is that each of their shows features an onstage battle between good and evil wizards—lots of silly costumes, lots of magic tricks, lots of pyro. The movie also goes heavy into that oh-so-’70s gimmick of split-screen imagery. While I can’t say Stunt Rock held my attention particularly well as an adult viewer, I can’t help but imagine how an American version of the same movie would have blown my preadolescent mind—the notion of Evel Knievel costarring with Kiss sounds indescribably awesome (even though the actual movies Knievel and Kiss made in the ‘70s were indescribably awful). Setting aside enticing “what if” scenarios, Stunt Rock is sufficiently unique to merit attention from the cinematically adventurous. It’s not a good movie by any measure, but it stands alone.
          Page, already a veteran stuntman and TV personality by the time he made this picture, stars as a fictionalized version of himself. The premise is that he travels to America for work on an action-oriented TV show, then spends time with Sorcery since he’s related to one of the band’s members. That’s virtually the entire storyline of Stunt Rock, excepting Page’s interaction with the actress starring in the TV show—frustrated that her most exciting scenes feature stunt doubles, she pressures Page to train her in the art of doing dangerous things safely. To state the obvious, viewers already interested in movie stunts will find that aspect of the movie more compelling than others; unlike the same era’s Hooper (1978) and The Stunt Man (1980), this flick lets stunt footage unfurl without the burden of narrative import, so the vibe is very much ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Similarly, fans of Alice Cooper and Kiss are more likely than others to groove on what Sorcery throws down. The band’s heavy-metal tunes are melodic, but their onstage shtick is goofy. That said, some details in Stunt Rock are memorably weird, for instance the fact that Sorcery’s keyboard player never appears without a mask covering his entire head. What’s more, reading about the making of Stunt Rock reveals that director Brian Trenchard-Smith put the whole thing together—from concept to finished product—in six months, so that explains a lot. At least the Stunt Rock team found time to assemble a spectacular poster—why that key art failed to draw kids into theaters is a mystery.

Stunt Rock: FUNKY

The Loners (1972)

          If it’s possible for a movie to be completely forgettable and deeply weird, then The Loners is such a movie. On the surface, the picture is yet another downbeat late ’60s/early ’70s melodrama about a longhair in conflict with the Establishment, centering motorcycles and swirling toward a bummer climax—in other words, a typical Easy Rider knockoff. Details, however, bring the aforementioned weirdness into focus. The protagonist is a half-Indian drifter named Stein (you read that right), allowing the film to address then-hip issues of Native American persecution. One of the villains is a comically heavyset cop who shields his eyes behind sunglasses, meaning he looks very much like Jackie Gleason did in Smokey and the Bandit a few years later—and if that allusion feels like a reach, note that many scenes featuring cops are played for broad laughs even though the overall picture aspires to heaviosity. Also featured is faded Oscar winner Gloria Grahame as an alcoholic who claims she works as a nightclub dancer (viewers never see her on the job) despite being well into her fifties. Oh, and here’s the capper—the protagonist’s sidekick is a hulking simpleton prone to accidental violence, meaning the script poaches from Of Mice and Men.

          The actual plot is painfully simple. After Stein (Dean Stockwell) escapes a road-rage incident that leaves a cop dead, Stein and Alan (Todd Susman) decamp to a small town where they meet Annabelle Carter Jr. (Patricia Stich), who wants to get away from her dysfunctional mom (Grahame). Stein nicknames his new girlfriend “Julio,” and the couple embarks on a crime spree with Alan tagging along. Multiple tragedies ensue. A contrived but cogent yarn might have been spun from this material, but The Loners is bogus, episodic, and tonally erratic. Still, certain elements may appeal to viewers with high tolerance for ’70s oddities. Stockwell brings his signature offbeat vibe to the leading role, and it’s fascinating to contemplate whether he’s reacting in character at any given moment or simply marveling at the narrative malpractice happening around him. Meanwhile, director Sutton Roley and cinematographer Irving Lippman, both of whom have long TV resumes, render lively images—for example, part of a scene is shown as a reflection on a VW Beetle’s hubcap. In fact, the disconnect between arty visuals and ultraviolence contributes to the peculiarity of The Loners.

The Loners: FUNKY