The Mad Bomber (1973)

          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

Necromancy (1972)

During the post-Rosemary’s Baby boom, countless filmmakers generated schlocky thrillers mixing sex with the supernatural, although only a few of them actually generated movies worth watching. More typical of the trend is this bland offering from director Bert I. Gordon, best known for silly monster movies including The Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977). Featuring a campy plot that’s almost entirely predicated on the heroine being an idiot, Necromancy tells the story of an evil Satan worshipper who wants to harness a young woman’s occult powers in order to bring his deceased son back from the grave. In principle, this concept should be strong enough to support an acceptable frightfest. In practice, however, Gordon makes poor storytelling decisions at every single turn, creating a movie that lacks momentum and overflows with moments that either don’t make sense or fail to engage interest. Even with scenes of all-nude rituals and human sacrifices, Necromancy is dull. Lovely Pamela Franklin, who fared better in later ’70s horror movies—including the creepy theatrical feature The Legend of Hell House and the kitschy telefilm Satan’s School for Girls (both 1973)—stars as Lori, a young woman who moves to the small town of Lilith with her husband, Frank (Michael Ontkean). Upon arrival, Lori discovers that Frank’s employer, Mr. Cato (Orson Welles), is a Satanist with a messianic sway over all of Lilith’s permanent residents. Then Lori learns that she and Frank are expected to join Mr. Cato’s coven, which engages in debauchery and witchcraft. But does Lori, who is already tormented by the loss of a baby, leave town? No, she hangs around until she’s roped into a murder/suicide scenario. Whether she escapes is of zero consequence, because the characters in Necromancy are as forgettable as the storyline. To its credit, Necromancy has quasi-atmospheric photography, a tasty electronic score that’s akin to the sort of mood music later featured in John Carpenter’s movies, and a couple of trippy dream/hallucination sequences. Yet these elements aren’t nearly reason enough to watch the movie, especially since the slumming Welles gives an absurd performance complete with a ridiculous fake nose and an unidentifiable accent. The only magic this movie contains is the ability to put viewers to sleep.

Necromancy: LAME

Empire of the Ants (1977)

It’s not as if the world needed another schlocky H.G. Wells adaptation from producer-director Bert I. Gordon, following his execrable 1976 giant-animal movie The Food of the Gods. Yet apparently that one did well enough for American-International Pictures to release a follow-up—and while Empire of the Ants is an awful movie virtually devoid of redeeming values, it’s moderately better than its predecessor. Both films are adapted from Wells in the loosest sense, borrowing merely the fantasy-fiction legend’s titles and central gimmicks. Therefore, as in The Food of the Gods, the plot of Empire of the Ants is mostly Gordon’s own—not a good thing. The setting is the Florida Everglades, where Marilyn (John Collins) is a real-estate con artist. Escorting a boatload of losers to whom she hopes to sell worthless swampland, Marilyn leads her group deep into the wilderness, unaware that illegally dumped radioactive waste has transformed local ants into monsters the size of grizzly bears. How can the ants function at this overgrown stature, given their rail-thin limbs? Why do the ants suddenly develop a taste for human flesh? And why are the ants the only animals transformed by the radioactive waste? If you expect answers to these questions, you’ve never seen a Bert I. Gordon movie. Instead of logic—or, for that matter, excitement—viewers get tacky scenes in which bland footage of real ants is awkwardly superimposed onto location shots in order to create the unpersuasive illusion of large creatures running amok. Gordon also humiliates his actors by forcing them to wrestle with large mock-ups of ant torsos during close-ups of bloody attacks. None of the performers delivers laudatory work, though eye-candy starlet Pamela Susan Shoop fills out her skintight costume well. Luckily for all concerned, Gordon stopped pillaging Wells’ oeuvre after this flop crawled in and out of theaters.

Empire of the Ants: LAME

The Food of the Gods (1976)

Writer/director Bert I. Gordon, an inexplicably durable special-effects guru whose big claim to fame is having made campy Cold War-era junk along the lines of The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), hit a strange sort of career high with The Food of the Gods, a wretched riff on an H.G. Wells novel bearing the more florid title The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth. Mostly dispatching with tricky stuff like the whole “how it came to Earth” part, Gordon focuses on the idea of mysterious grub that causes creatures to grow to monstrous proportions. You know the flick’s in trouble when the first overgrown critters Gordon puts onscreen are giant chickens. Making things even weirder, in some shots the feathered fiends are portrayed by actors wearing oversized chicken masks. And while you’d think the bit with the giant rats would at least be creepy, by that point Gordon has sunk to using shots of real-life rats interacting with scaled-down props like a tiny VW Beetle. So if viewers can’t even relish the grotesquery of giant rats eating people without getting distracted by shoddy FX, then what’s the point of sitting through this abomination? Some fleeting distraction from the ridiculousness is offered by the verdant British Columbia locations, but it’s as depressing to watch studio-era great Ida Lupino slum her way through this tripe as it is to that realize leading man Marjoe Gortner is starring in exactly the level of movie his talent merits. If you’re the sort of viewer who enjoys watching awful movies and discovering unintentional laughs, feel free to take a bite of The Food of the Gods, but if doing so triggers your gag reflex instead of tickling your funny bone, don’t say you weren’t warned.

The Food of the Gods: SQUARE