Texas Lightning

Should be no surprise that I was not familiar with this 1981 movie titled "Texas Lightning", as I was a mere six years old when it was released. And can't exactly claim that the movie was a classic in any way, which meant I never actually knew about it before now in 2025, as I happened to stumble upon it by random chance. Since it was a movie that I hadn't already seen, nor actually ever heard about, of course I opted to give writer and director Gary Graver's 1981 movie a fair chance.

But talk about a swing and a miss of a narrative. The storyline failed to entertain me, and I wasn't brought to any laughs. In fact, I found the characters insanely annoying and some of them downright obnoxious. And that certainly didn't help to make the movie any easier on the eyes.

The movie does have a couple of familiar faces on the cast list, with the likes of Peter Jason and Cameron Mitchell. The acting performances in the movie were nothing outstanding, but at least it wasn't downright bad performances.

Hardly a noteworthy movie. Nor a movie that I will ever return to watch a second time.

My rating of writer and director Gary Graver's 1981 movie "Texas Lightning" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.

Maureen McCormick from "The Brady Bunch" is actually a pretty good actress (I recall seeing her on an episode of TV's "Vegas" in the late '70s doing solid work). It's easy to see why she took on this low-budget project, but, alas, it is a film constructed by filmmakers who have little idea how to construct a film. McCormick plays a honkytonk waitress who befriends a backwards young man in town on a hunting trip with his "macho" dad and the dad's sniggering pals. Songbird Maureen, peppy and possibly flirting, takes the kid back to her room to make out (I think) but the other guys burst in and try to rape her (from what I could see through the production murk, 'rape' would be difficult for these lousy Lotharios). The star likely accepted this acting job because hers is a sympathetic part and she gets to sing and play her guitar. She probably had no idea how it was going to turn out. How did it turn out? It's so bad that when I searched the credits for a director--it wasn't to see who he was but if the movie even had one. NO STARS from ****

A common strategy for a life in film is to trust certain artists, and few confound the spirit like Orson Welles. His best work was done late in life and much of that either we never will see or see corrupted. So we have to go spelunking through all sorts of abandoned shafts, and the most frustrating of these is following Gary Graver around.

He's a nitwit, but he was Orson's nitwit, and he did make one rather interesting porn film.

Now this is a goofy one: written by someone else, featuring no one at all who seemed to know much about what they were doing, and a story about the same. It appears that the result was so bad that the sponsor send Graver back to reshoot as he wished. So we come to this to see Orson imposed on Graver imposed on a disaster of a film about men imposing themselves on another.

Its something of a terrific game to sort out which was original and which replaced. In other words, which Graver was told to do and which he chose to do, remembering that everything he knew about film was from Welles. Its not worth it at all unless you are prepared for a great hunt and you know what the master was thinking toward the end.

Shooting for fun, shooting by Texas nitwits.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Marcia's hot in this one. She does her own version of the "bull ride" in a trailer that would've made the Bradys' proud. Barry Williams wishes he could have had a scene like this with her in the 70's. Hell, we all wish we could have had a scene like this back in the 70's. With all the recent Brady revival, they should re-release this cheesy classic.

A misguided father (Cameron Mitchell) wants to make his shy, sensitive son "into a man" (and it's about damn time since the young character, played by Mitchell's real-life son, looks to be about twenty five). He decides to take him on a hunting trip with his buddies, two of the sorriest excuses for "men" around. (Even in Texas this pair would be regarded as fat, dumb, redneck losers). The hunting trip/rite-of-passage involves getting drunk and driving into the 120 degree Texas summer heat to shoot at beer bottles and bunny rabbits (if this makes one a "man", then my friends in Wyoming and I would have achieved manhood at about ten). Later they go to a honky-tonk bar where the most pathetic wet t-shirt contest you ever saw is taking place, and a Hal Needham/Burt Reynolds-style bloodless brawl breaks out every five minutes. There the boy meets a pretty young barmaid and aspiring prostitute (Maureen "Marcia Brady" McCormick)and takes her back to the hotel room. They suffer some traumatic coitus interruptus, however, when the two redneck friends bust in a force themselves on "Marcia", I mean Maureen. The movie then turns into a REALLY tame and bloodless (in every sense of the word) rape-revenge flick.

This movie started out as a more serious "Macon County Line" type of a film, a labor-of-love by talented cinematographer and not-so-talented director Gary Graver based on his own script called "The boys" (which certainly must have, given the title, recognized the irony of a group of immature middle-aged butt-wipes who everyone still refers to as "boys" trying to initiate ANYONE into manhood). The distributors renamed it "Texas Lightning" possibly to fit with the wretched country-music theme song (or vice versa)and re-edited it into a sub-"Smokey and the Bandit", sub-"Dukes of Hazzard" redneck-athon with a lot of alleged comic relief and an implausibly happy ending. The uneven (to say the least) tone will give you cinematic whiplash. Cameron Mitchell, who was the only really good actor in this, refused to participate in the re-shooting and just disappears entirely near the end. It's rumored that in the original Graver cut, still floating out there somewhere in terminal litigation, the two rednecks meet a much more unpleasant, if deserving, fate. (In MY cut they would receive shotgun enemas in the first five minutes and be left rotting in a shallow grave in the desert along with the "good ole boys" responsible for the crappy theme song). You'll have to take Graver's word for it that his cut is any kind of masterpiece, but the one under consideration here is certainly worthless dreck regardless.

Most people today will no doubt see this for Maureen McCormick's brief "nude scene", but frankly you'd have better luck spotting subliminal ads for hot dogs and soft drinks from back when this played the drive ins. The only remotely sexy aspect of this movie involves a scene with the implausibly attractive young girlfriend of one of the rednecks dressed in a see-through teddy. McCormick is OK as an actress here, but she's pretty miscast as a tough honky-tonk Southern girl. She also "sings" at point, which will invoke, for those of us Americans of a certain age, traumatic and previously deeply repressed memories of the notoriously ill-advised "Brady Bunch Variety Hour" TV show (shudder!). Not recommended--at least until when (or if) the Graver cut is ever released.