Pray for the Wildcats (1974)

Rich macho asshole and deeply unpleasant sleazebag Sam Farragut (Andy Griffith) is one of the richest, most lucrative and most important clients of an ad agency. He knows it too, and because he is that sort of man, he uses his position to belittle, manipulate and denigrate the poor guys who are in charge of his account. So the plan for a campaign using Baja California in Mexico as the backdrop for his campaign turns into him blackmailing his “favourite” ad executives into going on a dirt bike trip through the desert with him, or else. So off Warren Summerfield (William Shatner), his old colleague and work buddy Paul (Robert Reed) and young turk fancying himself an artist Terry Maxon (Marjoe Gortner) have to go with him, as if they didn’t have their own problems. Namely, Warren is in some sort of quantum state of being secretly half-fired, with Paul pegged as his replacement, while Warren is sleeping with Paul’s wife Nancy (Angie Dickinson) who clearly wants the also married Warren as a replacement for Paul in her life. Warren is also suicidal, and believes the trip might just be the way for him to kill himself and make it look like an accident, leaving a fat insurance policy for his family as some sort of ultimate, idiotic “I’m sorry I failed at being THE MAN SOCIETY TELLS ME I’M SUPPOSED TO BE!”. Terry for his part as problems admitting to himself that the work he is doing stands against all of his supposed values, and that he’s turning into a Yes Man for the worst kind of person possible, even though pretending Farragut isn’t the worst humanity has to offer is pretty much akin to talking oneself into a state of actual delusion.

Things don’t get better for anyone in Baja, not just because Farragut just loves to push everybody’s buttons, but because he’ll also turn out to be a murderer just waiting for an opportunity and a pretext.

I don’t generally fall into this jargon (it’s not really mine, philosophically), so when even I want to call Robert Michael Lewis’s TV movie about a trio of ad men, all broken in their own, distinct ways, and their horrible rich guy client a film about the destructive force of various 70s versions of toxic masculinity, it probably really is that. The script by Jack Turley isn’t exactly subtle about this either, doubling down on everything that’s dysfunctional about these men and how dangerous and oppressive this kind of dysfunctionality is for those around them; unlike a film made today would be, it’s not without compassion for these men (except for Farragut), though, so it will not only show them as the destructive forces they are, but also grief how they got there. It doesn’t show a terrible amount of hope for them ever getting better, alas.

Even the way the film side-lines the female characters after the first act for the main narrative thrust but never wants to quite lose sight of them seems to be a pointed, conscious choice, suggesting much about the divide between men and women the culture they live in will build, even when there’s love and an actual human connection between them.

Because that’s not quite enough for a little TV movie, apparently, Pray also adds an equally unsubtle yet effective criticism of a style of capitalism that seems to be build to create exactly this kind of behaviour in men, turning artists into yes-men, and middle-aged men bitter and self-destructive because they can’t quite keep up with the monsters.

Not surprisingly with this cast and the film’s themes, there’s quite a bit of scenery chewing going around, though it’s really Griffith (with the understandable relish of a guy who mostly played the aw-shucks Southerner in his career) and Reed who take the greatest bites, while Shatner, quite unexpectedly, turns in a comparatively nuanced (for his acting style, obviously) performance that makes quite a bit out of all the little hurts, betrayals and self-betrayals this character’s life has become, somehow making Warren more sympathetic than you’d believe.

With all of this going on, it’s not much of a surprise that the film’s actual thriller plot takes a bit of a backseat and is really just there to give characters the final push into the direction fate and the script need them to go; but then, that’s not so much a criticism than it is an observation.

In short: Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

What starts with the mysterious death of the prize calf belonging to farmer Walter Colby (house favourite Woody Strode) quickly turns out to be the spiderpocalypse in a rural US small town. Apparently, humanity’s love for nuking insects with poison has killed off the main food sources of spiders. Tarantulas have moved habitats and have developed new and rather exciting habits, now swarming together instead avoiding each other, making tactical strikes, and killing humans.

Will local vet Rack Hansen (William Shatner) and quickly called-in arachnologist Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) solve the little spider problem, or will they waste valuable time on a romance so horrible, even 50s monster movie romances may suddenly feel swoon-worthy to a viewer?

Well, they certainly will do the latter, but stuntman turned director John “Bud” Cardos’s Kingdom of the Spiders doesn’t seem to put much stock into their efforts of fighting off those pesky arachnids in more than skirmishes anyway. This is a 70s animal attack movie, after all, so chances of winning out against an angry nature are slim to non-existent. Which, even more so from today’s perspective, seems like the proper way to treat these things. This of course doesn’t make the bizarre “romance” between people who’d rather kill each other than fuck in real life more believable or less squirm-inducing to watch, but it does explain it as an attempt (emphasis on “attempt”) to make us sad to see humanity go. Even if the result may very well lead to the opposite.

Though, to be fair, the rest of the character work is good enough. Cardos clearly puts effort into making the audience care for the characters, at least enough not to want to see them get eaten by spiders.

The first act is a little slow for my tastes, but the small town apocalyptic business in the rest of the movie does make up for it rather well, with the effectively shot panic in the spider-infested streets of the town late in the movie and the final, absurd yet utterly awesome, shots of the film being particular favourites of mine.

Tonally, Kingdom is a very 70s movie, having a rather bleak outlook on humanity’s place in the world even while keeping inside of the lines drawn by silly monster movies (that’s a good thing) and clearly having a lot of fun with all the tropes this suggests. Apparently, not even William Shatner (here in a comparatively controlled mood) can save us all.

Before the Shat fails, Cardos sets quite a bit of unobtrusively fine filmmaking in front of the audience, the film pretty much having all the visual and stylistic hallmarks of the sort of lived-in US 70s film that looks less carefully made than it actually is. It’s the filmmaking version of classic working class values, and it’ll make you happy (or unhappy, if you prefer humanity to tarantulas) just fine without making a lot of fuss about how good it is at what it does. Doesn’t mean it isn’t good at it, obviously.

In short: The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973)

Clearly, not at all named with any hopes in mind people might confuse it with a certain Twilight Zone episode, oh no.

An extra flight – therefore populated with few enough characters from the disaster movie playbook we’ll get to know them all, yay! – from London to L.A. runs into a spot of trouble. Nope, it’s not just William Shatner’s acting as a defrocked priest (though it is indeed hilarious enough to be dangerous to the weak of mind – see also, Things Man Was Not Meant To Know) that’s the problem here. Part of the plane’s cargo consists of altar pieces taken from an old English abbey, and as every reader of Jamesian ghost stories knows, that sort of thing can only lead to danger. This particular altar also includes a former Druidic sacrificial slab, so soon, women are speaking in Latin, the cargo hold freezes, and the plane isn’t moving very far any more.

What follows is mostly a competition between the actors concerning who can chew the horrible 70s psycho-babble dialogue the best/worst, some moments of “people not played by Paul Winfield become utter shites when under pressure”, and a lot of wind noises with a bit of added chanting.

As far as US 70s TV horror movies go, David Lowell Rich’s epic isn’t anything special. There’s little of the cleverness and actual sense for the creepy films like Gargoyles knew on display here, with Rich fumbling every possible fright scene through his nearly improbable bland professionalism. The script buries the seeds for what could be a cool little British style ghost story - but on a plane! -, or for an interesting little film about the differences between superstition and faith and what happens when these collide with something supernatural you really shouldn’t pray to, under a few too many 70s disaster movie  clichés, the already mentioned psycho-babble (where today’s TV is inordinately fond of clever quips, the 70s just loved to pretend to psychological depth by people spouting self-help book nonsense), and a haunting so hokey it’s pretty darn impossible not to use that dreaded word “camp” (the horror!). It’s rather frustrating, really, particularly once the film gets around to theoretically incredibly resonant scenes like the passengers preparing a doll as a symbolic sacrifice, and just buries them under the all-around hokum.

That impression of camp is certainly not dispelled by half a dozen actors fighting to out-act one another as outrageously as possible, resulting in so many bugged eyes, melodramatic pauses and weird line deliveries William Shatner’s acting approach here impresses as downright subtle, something that is bound to convince even a hardened sceptic like me of the existence of the supernatural.