In short: The Nickel Ride (1974)

Former carny man Cooper (Jason Miller) is working as lower middle-management for the LA mob. He’s mainly taking care of warehouses used for stashing stolen goods, but he’s also fixing boxing matches, threatening someone here or there, and so on. He is a bit of a local celebrity on his home block, and has is married to Sarah (Linda Haynes), who’d probably catch a bullet for him if she’d see it coming. Right now, Cooper is working on a project that might very well get him one step up the criminal ladder. He is trying to procure a whole city block of warehouses, legally if you ignore the bribes, which would make things much easier for criminals around the city, or so he believes.

But as the film starts, things begin to go slowly unravel. The officials he’s trying to bribe become evasive, boxing matches aren’t as easily fixed as they should, and his boss (Tony Hillerman) is sending him a weird Southern guy (Bo Hopkins) he is supposed to take care of. Though you don’t need to be a genius to realize the man’s actually supposed to keep an eye on Cooper. Once things start slipping, Cooper deteriorates fast, exacerbating his problems with rash decisions that’ll only make them bigger, and beginning to fear a quick, sudden death by his associates.

While certainly being a noir-ish gangster movie, what mainly resonates for me about Robert Mulligan’s quiet and atmospheric noir-ish gangster movie is its deep sense of paranoia. This isn’t just the portrayal of a man who built his life on violence seeing age taking some of his abilities away, or that of a man trapped in the gangster version of a job without much perspective. Most of all, it is the portrayal of a guy who wakes up one morning and starts to realize that the world is slipping around him, that the things he once thought secure are anything but, and that his safety is an illusion. Cooper is quickly slipping into the paranoia that naturally must come with this sort of realization, seeing enemies everywhere – where they are and where they aren’t and slowly realizes that his hopes for the future have brought him inevitable doom.

Miller’s portrayal of this process is highly nuanced, avoiding any kind of hyperbole, instead finding a very precise way to show Cooper losing his grip on a world that’s all too willing to get rid of him.

Precision is an important word for the whole of the film: before we even realize we are already witnessing Cooper falling, Mulligan has created the social world of dark and grimy streets and people of dubious jobs and morals around him slowly and carefully, making very clear what’s at stake for Cooper and why.

The Nickel Ride is full of clever decisions. A nice example is its use of Bo Hopkins’s patented Southern folksiness, or rather, how Mulligan and Hopkins (in a really clever performance) suggest an abyss of menace lurking just beyond a corny exterior, turning a Hopkins standard character into a perfect focus for Cooper’s paranoid (and not so paranoid) nightmares.

In short: Sweet Sixteen (1983)

Freshly arrived in a small town in Arizona with her archaeologist father (Patrick Macnee) and a mother (Susan Strasberg) who is actually from the area, Melissa (Aleisa Shirley) has the hearts – and certain other organs – of the local boys all atwitter with her rather provocative behaviour (at least for a fifteen year old as played by an actress who most assuredly isn’t that age anymore), and her strange city ways. Alas, someone is killing off her beaus with a nasty knife, though the otherwise highly conscientious and pretty smart Sheriff Dan Burke (Bo Hopkins) doesn’t really seem to read the murder spree running through his town quite this way.

Dan, sometimes “assisted” (cough) by his murder mystery mad daughter Marci (Dana Kimmell) and his son Hank (Steve Antin), does have quite a mystery to solve. His job isn’t made any easier by the racist element of the town wanting to blame everything on “the Indians” – something that pisses him off righteously – nor by Melissa’s tendency to lie to gain attention.

Marketed and often treated as a slasher online, Jim Sotos’s Sweet Sixteen is in actuality a small town murder mystery with a couple of elements of exploitation cinema added for saleability. In practice, this means the murders are a bit bloodier than in your traditional mystery, and there’s some gratuitous nudity. Otherwise, this is very much a film about a small town sheriff having to find out whodunnit.

It’s not a terribly complicated or convoluted mystery either, but rather the sort of film whose killer is obvious once you’ve copped to the general tone of the whole affair. Which turns out not to have been much of a detriment to my enjoyment of the film, for what it lacks in slasher virtues and a head-scratching mystery, it mostly makes up for in likeability of characters and cast, for most of the time getting by on charm quite well.

Sotos must have understood where the strengths of this project were quite well, for Sweet Sixteen spends nearly as much time in the kitchen of the Burke household as on the case, showing off the charming and often wryly funny interactions of a very nice family, Hopkins as well as Kimmel and Antin actually coming off as a proper family without much of a sense of hysterical melodrama, the kind of people you enjoy spending screen time with even when a given scene doesn’t do much to develop the plot. This tone runs through all of the film’s human interaction, a genuine warmth and sense of humour that is pretty much the opposite of how actual slasher movies do their thing.


Even though this tone dominates most character interactions even outside the Burke family, the film doesn’t pretend small town life to be completely idyllic. It suggests there’s a sense of family in this small town population, but sometimes being part of a family means hitting your racist shithead relation's head against a wall for a bit, or you find yourself becoming the victim of a knife attack. And isn’t that a lovely thought for any film to leave us on?

Nightmare at Noon (1988)

aka Death Street USA

The picturesque US small town of Canyonland (not to be confused with population centres like Deserttown or Dustcounty) has a bit of a problem: an evil foreign – this being the jingoistic 80s, after all and the CIA as the film informs us preferring Central America for mad science experiments – scientist the ending titles only call The Albino (Brion James, making up for the complete lack of dialogue of the bad guys by mugging as heavily as he can, which is pretty darn heavy) has poisoned the town’s water supply. For science, one supposes, though the film never makes us privy to why exactly any foreign power would want to make this sort of experiment on the home turf of an enemy country, nor what exactly it is supposed to achieve. Don’t they have rats in Not-The-Soviet-Union-stan?

Anyway, thanks to whatever it is dear Brion James has cooked up, some of the townspeople turn into raving, lunatic killers with increasingly green faces and green, acidic blood as well as mild super strength. The whole acid blood thing is in the film for no good reason, really, for it’s not as if this would be important to anything that’ll happen later. To be fair, what is happening is that the local sheriff (George Kennedy), a wandering would-be Dirty Harry named Reilly (Bo Hopkins), entertainment industry lawyer (boo-hiss) Ken Griffiths (Wings Hauser), and the Sheriff’s daughter and deputy Julia (Kimberly Ross) team up to shoot people and make stuff explode, so acid blood isn’t going to change anything.

If you’re into the more historical and sociological interpretation and critique of cinema, Nico Mastorakis’s film could be quite the mother load of deeply disturbing information about the US subconscious in the late 80s as seen by a Greek expat exploitation director. I’m not going to go into that here beyond mentioning that there’s a really Reagan/Bush (I and II)-America style disconnect between the acts seen as unethical when “the Enemy” is committing them and those seen as unethical when “our Boys” do that could make a boy despair of humanity.

Fortunately, Nightmare is just too dumb for me to go for a serious analysis of its political content, what with this being a film where the characters think it’s a good idea to let a doctor go into a cell with a not-restrained superhumanly strong crazy person on his own, cars basically already explode when you just look at them (unless the script demands otherwise, of course), and Wings Hauser has a law degree.

In other words, Mastorakis serves such a huge platter of bullet-riddled cheese I just can’t bring myself to go all clever on him. He’s just doing what everyone else is doing too, and there’s certainly no danger anything in the film is contaminated by thoughts or actual personal opinions and feelings. As an example of 80s low budget cheese, the film is pretty good at filling its quota of bullets, explosions, and general idiocy, with some truly absurd performances once it’s time to go green in the face as an added bonus. Mastorakis’s preferred acting approach is easily described as “Sunday morning cartoon but bloody”, and the actors are truly giving their all here.

At least for the first hour or so, I found myself rather taken with the all-around stupidity filtered through Mastorakis’s general technical competence (competence at least for the sort of thing this is, I’m not suggesting he’s Stanley Kubrick, or John McTiernan, for that matter). For my tastes, Nightmare’s final third or so, once we have lost George Kennedy to his old enemy, fire, and left Canyonland (a name that still causes me to giggle) for actual canyons, drags quite a bit. Mastorakis never has the same grip on his obvious ambitions to suggest the Western genre as on the simple action trash he did before. Plus, there’s a basically never-ending or at the very least pretty damn pointless – as we know nobody in any of the helicopters - helicopter chase right in the end, so that things go out on a somewhat sour note.

But hey, sixty minutes of fun is something.

In short: Night Shadows (1984)

aka Mutant

After a road encounter with the least pleasant human inhabitants of a small rural community, city-slicker brothers Josh (Wings Hauser) and Mike (Lee Montgomery) find themselves a bit stranded there, at least for a night and a day or so. Alas, they’ve picked quite the wrong time for their inadvertent stay, for the toxic waste an Evil Corporation has been dumping in the area is causing a peculiar sickness in many people around. Mike disappears quite early, and soon Josh finds himself teaming up with the local doctor (Jennifer Warren), the alcoholic sheriff (eternal sheriff Bo Hopkins), and romance-ready school teacher Holly (Jody Medford) against a whole bunch of blue-faced zombies with acid-bleeding, blood-sucking hands.

On a good day, Night Shadows’ director John ‘Bud’ Cardos was a perfectly decent man of his profession, filming straightforward plots in a straightforward manner, the unflinching professional of cinema. He had one of those days when he shot the film at hand, and while the result won’t win any originality prizes, it is an entertaining little variation on the eternal Night of the Living Dead shape.

Not surprisingly, this doesn’t have much – if any at all – of the political resonance of Romero’s film, but it goes through most of the expected zombie movie plot beats with a neat sense of pacing, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and generally knows how to be a fun time. Additionally, it features a lot of silly yet pleasing blue-faced zombie make-up, and does from time to time manage a fright scene or two archetypal enough to make the long-suffering horror fan look up with interest. There’s a really surprisingly ruthless mass child zombie scene in here, as well as a neat little monster under the bed variation early on – as long as you don’t stop to think about the practicalities of both of them, of course. But when has the stuff nightmares are made of ever cared about practicality?

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