Bottom-feeding director
Bert I. Gordon is best known for his various movies about giant monsters—such
as the execrable H.G. Wells adaptation The
Food of the Gods (1976)—but he occasionally brought his dubious
storytelling skills to bear on more conventional subjects. As the cowriter and
director of The Mad Bomber, Gordon
explores the dangers of deranged people walking the streets of America’s
cities. Suffice to say that Gordon’s engagement with the psychological aspects
of the story does not occur on an elevated plane. Quite to the contrary, Gordon
presents a trite cause-and-effect explanation for why his bomber is mad, and
Gordon’s dramatization of police efforts to capture said bomber imply that
Gordon learned everything he knows about investigative procedure from watching
bad movies. In fact, everything about The
Mad Bomber is so overwhelmingly stupid that the movie passes through the
Rubicon of awfulness and enters that special realm of enjoyably terrible
cinema. Although The Mad Bomber is
quite dull for most of its running time, every scene features a laughably
nonsensical action or line or plot development.
The demented individual
referred to in the title is William Dorn, played by leather-faced TV veteran
Chuck Connors in an amusingly inept performance. Driven mad by the death of his
young daughter, he creates homemade bombs and detonates them at places where he
believes his daughter was mistreated. Tasked with capturing the bomber is
seasoned cop Lieutenant Geronimo Mitchell (Vince Edwards), a grumpy iconoclast
who beats suspects, picks locks, and tampers with evidence. Caught between
these two characters is rapist George Fromley (Neville Brand), who saw Dorn at
a crime scene and is therefore Mitchell’s best hope for identifying the bomber.
As sax-driven funk music better suited to a porno movie grinds on the
soundtrack, Mitchell tries to pressure Fromley into testifying even as Dorn stalks
the rapist.
It’s all very bland, predictable, and unbelievable, with Edwards
delivering a performance as indifferent as Connors’ is overwrought. On the plus
side, Brand is creepy and twitchy as the rapist who also gets kicks by shooting
stag reels of his mousy wife. And if nothing else, the rapist character’s final
onscreen moment is laugh-out-loud funny because Gordon exhibits marvelously bad
taste in the way he juxtaposes sex and violence.
The Mad Bomber: FUNKY
1 comment:
Connors looks and acts so insane in this that it's amazing he had any sort of career that followed.
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