Fighting Mad

Mountain justice is usually the way to keep what belongs to you. A father and son go home to be at a farm in the mountains of Oklahoma to help out family there. But along the way, he would encounter greedy land developers who to deprive the people there of their homes. They would kill his brother and his wife when a celebrate the homecoming. The development crew with their machines cruelly destroy homes, blast rocks, and send the kind hard-working people out from their native land. Kind of like the Native Americans removed from their land out west in the 1800's. Peter Fonda's character doesn't play around when they attacked his family. This movie is like "Deliverance" meets "Gator Bait" meets "Death Wish". This movie has got a lot of action. It's not a let down. 4 out of 5 stars.

A man returns from the big city to his traditional family ranch in northwest Arkansas (Peter Fonda), only to discover that a determined land developer (Philip Carey) is buying up land nearby for strip mining and, of course, wants his dad's ranch. When beloved citizens turn-up dead, the kid gloves are off.

"Fighting Mad" (1976) comes in the tradition of "Walking Tall" and would influence "First Blood" six years later. Car crash movies from the 70s are also comparable, like Fonda's own "Dirty Mary Crazy Larry." This is the least of 'em, however, because the dramatics are curiously boring and needed a rewrite to flush out the potential, but it's still worth catching if you like Peter and these types of flicks. The best parts are the vehicular mayhem and the closing confrontation at the castle-like manor of the tycoon.

It runs 1 hour, 30 minutes, and was shot in Washington County, Arkansas, and the corresponding town of Springdale, which are in the northwest corner of the state. The jail scenes were shot in the studio in Los Angeles.

GRADE: B-

Ah, my favorite type of 70s exploitation... Poor, hard-working farmer families in the deep South are driven to desperation and pushed to violence by ruthless jerks in yellow hardhats and the greedy corporate tycoons they work for. The brave locals barely withstand the destructions of their properties and sabotages of their crops, but when innocent relatives start to get eliminated, they fight back with a vengeance! The Hunter family, from Arkansas, and their neighbors are aggressively chased off their land by the obnoxious Mr. Crabtree's mining corporation, but then the eldest son Tom return home from the big city after a failed marriage. Tom has a stubborn personality, a constant bad temper, AND a bow and arrows!

This is, simply put, masterful exploitation from the House of Corman. Written and directed by one his most gifted acolytes (Jonathan Demme), and with an excellent cast (led by the almighty Peter Fonda), "Fighting Mad" features grim but realistic violence and more than a handful of genuinely powerful drama moments. The casting of Peter Fonda and Scott Glen as brothers is genius (though, sadly, Glen's role is small) and the beautiful Lynn Lowry is splendid as the girl unable to calm down her furious love-interest. Excellent music, great use of locations, and a lot of loathsome henchmen to make the enjoyment complete. One of the best of its kind and era, together with "The Farmer", "White Line Fever", and "Mr. Majestyk"!

This standard but reasonably diverting revenge/action drama is an early effort from writer/director Jonathan Demme, who would go on to Oscar greatness years later with "Silence Of The Lambs." The movie delivers all the ingredients one would expect from B-Movie producer Roger Corman PLUS a quietly effective performance from Peter Fonda as a family man who is pushed to the limits when a strip-mining tycoon tries to bully his way into taking over Fonda's father's stretch of farm land. It's nothing you probably haven't seen before, but it's solidly done and Fonda makes for a great low-key hero worth rooting for. *** stars

Having been curious the last 45 years about this revenge pic starring Peter Fonda, I finally got to watch this on the Putlocker site. Having split from his wife from the city (she's only mentioned, never seen), he takes his pre-teen son with him back to his farm that his father still owns. But a corporation wants to take that land and the surrounding acres of other neighbors to build some development and will go to any lengths to get them off the property. Needless to say, Fonda's character is no pushover, that's for sure! This was one of Jonathan Demme's early movies he made for King of the Bs, Roger Corman, before doing more important work that got him Oscar nominations. So there's plenty of action and some sex with some nudity but the drama is also pretty good so on that note, I say Fighting Mad is worth a look.