The Death Squad (1974)

          Minor telefilm The Death Squad shouldn’t merit any attention—the story is so compressed that it feels as if pieces are missing, and the basic premise appeared in the previous year’s hit Dirty Harry movie Magnum Force. Yet good performances, especially Robert Forster’s emotionally committed turn in the leading role, make The Death Squad watchable. If nothing else, the picture provides a poignant reminder that something was lost when Forster’s career failed to gain momentum in his early years as a screen performer. While it’s true he was prone to robotic performances when saddled with sketchy material, moments in The Death Squad remind viewers what he could do when he tried. He’s more poignant here than the situation demands or deserves.
          Forster plays Eric Benoit, a cop tasked with identifying rogue officers responsible for vigilante killings of crooks who got off on technicalities. Although this setup prompts a handful of chases and shootouts, the main focus of The Death Squad is Benoit wrestling with divided loyalties. How deep a rot will he discover in his department? What happens when he learns that a cop who screwed him over in the past is part of the vigilante group? Will digging into the origins of the vigilante group reveal secrets that hit Benoit even more personally? To their credit, the makers of The Death Squad raise all of these questions—and to their shame, the makers of The Death Squad provide satisfactory answers to only a few of those questions. This is the sort of malnourished narrative in which the nominal female lead, played by Michelle Phillips, could have been excised from the storyline and her absence wouldn’t have been felt.
          Nonetheless, the stuff that works in The Death Squad is entertainingly melodramatic and pulpy. Claude Akins, who plays the heavy, provides a potent mixture of menace and swagger. Character actors including George Murdock, Dennis Patrick, Bert Remsen, and Kenneth Tobey lend color to small roles, while the great Melvyn Douglas classes up the joint by playing Benoit’s mentor in a few brief scenes. On the technical side, the picture benefits from unfussy camerawork and a rubbery jazz/funk score in the Lalo Schifrin mode (more shades of the Dirty Harry movies). Best of all, actors and filmmakers play the lurid material completely straight, so every so often a scene—usually involving Forster—provides a glimmer of the great Roger Corman drive-in thriller The Death Squad should have been. Ah, well. We’ll always have Akins.

The Death Squad: FUNKY

Thunder and Lightning (1977)

Yet another drive-in flick about rambunctious moonshiners, Thunder and Lightning would linger far below the pop-culture radar if not for the popularity of its leading actors, David Carradine and Kate Jackson. Working once again under the penny-pinching aegis of producer Roger Corman, Carradine pours on the rebellious charm to liven up the story’s aimless cacophony of chase scenes, explosions, and fist fights. In fact, Carradine is forced to contribute extra effort—if smirking can be described as effort, that is—because Charlie’s Angels spitfire Jackson is more or less a nonentity given the colorless nature of her co-starring role. Carradine plays Harley Thomas, a good ol’ boy whose graying uncles cook up moonshine that he delivers in his souped-up ’57 Chevy. Harley dates Nancy Sue Hunnicut (Jackson), a wealthy young woman who doesn’t realize her father, Ralph Junior Hunnicut (Roger C. Carmel), hides a massive moonshine operation behind the front of his legit soda-pop empire. Through the machinations of an unnecessarily convoluted story, Ralph Junior gets into trouble with the Northeast mafia, Harley gets into trouble with Ralph Junior, and everybody ends up chasing after a massive shipment of poisoned moonshine. The fast-moving picture also makes room for an alligator-wrestling preacher, a pair of incompetent Noo Yawk assassins, and Ralph Junior’s knuckle-dragging henchmen, two of whom are played by ’70s B-movie stalwarts George Murdock and Charles Napier. Although Thunder and Lightning is ostensibly a comedy, frenetic onscreen action is presented in lieu of actual jokes. Given the movie’s choppy editing, one suspects that director Corey Allen’s on-set camerawork was chopped apart during post-production to rev up the pacing, so if Thunder and Lightning ever had nuance (unlikely), it disappeared long before the movie hit screens. Still, the picture offers a few brainlessly diverting scenes, as well as some choice examples of redneck patois—like the moment when a motorcycle cop sees a pair of cars zoom by and exclaims, “Sweet kidneys of Christ, those boys were movin’!”

Thunder and Lightning: FUNKY

Thomasine & Bushrod (1974)

          Although nominally a blaxploitation flick because of its racial themes and predominately African-American cast, Thomasine & Bushrod is primarily one of the many Bonnie & Clyde rip-offs that appeared in the early ’70s—an old-timey love story about doomed souls on the wrong side of the law. The fact that it’s also a Western is what makes Thomasine & Bushrod somewhat unique, because the varied influences add up to an offbeat vibe, even though the movie isn’t particularly impressive.

          At the beginning of the story, sexy bounty hunter Thomasine (Vonetta McGee) uses her wiles to trap a white criminal. Delivering the crook to odious U.S. Marshal Bogardie (George Murdock), Thomasine announces her plan to capture the notorious black outlaw J.P. Bushrod (Max Julien)—and when she tracks him down, viewers realize that Thomasine and Bushrod are actually a couple reuniting after a long separation. Together, they embark on a crime spree so brazen that Bogardie makes capturing them his personal mission. Before the final confrontation, however, the robbers hook up with their impulsive Jamaican friend, Jomo (Glynn Turman), forming a surrogate family in a series of campsites and abandoned homes.

          Written by Julien, who starred in the gritty pimp saga The Mack (1973), Thomasine & Bushrod misses nearly every opportunity to add meaning and significance to its story. There are a few lip-service speeches about the difficulties of being black in the Old West, and Bushrod’s Robin Hood-style habit of giving his stolen loot to poor people approaches a weak kind of social commentary, but for the most part, the lead characters are simply crooks biding time until they pay for their misdeeds. Perhaps the idea was to say something about how African-Americans can only be free in an oppressive society by flouting that society’s rules; if so, this potentially interesting theme never rises to the surface. Nonetheless, Julien’s humane screenwriting delivers a few memorable moments, like the throwaway interaction between Bushrod and an aging black man who is touched when Bushrod actually asks his name, a courtesy the man hasn’t been shown in years.

          Julien and McGee make an interesting screen couple, since Julien is so mellow he barely seems like he’s acting and McGee is as fiery as she is photogenic. Turman, so great a year later in Cooley High (1975), is borderline campy with his flamboyant accent and costume, though still quite likeable, and Murdock delivers the requisite one-note villainous performance. Thomasine & Bushrod was directed by Gordon Parks Jr., best known for the drug-dealer flick Super Fly (1972), and he employs his usual haphazard style, punctuating Thomasine & Bushrod with the same type of groovy still-photo montages he employed for Super Fly. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

Thomasine & Bushrod: FUNKY

Breaker! Breaker! (1977)

Karate champion Chuck Norris took a baby step toward movie stardom by headlining this meagerly budgeted B-movie, which awkwardly meshes the martial arts, trucker, and vigilante genres. Given this slapdash approach and the movie’s crappy production values, it’s no surprise that Breaker! Breaker! has spent decades languishing in well-deserved obscurity. In fact, had Norris not subsequently achieved cinematic fame elsewhere, the picture probably would have fallen out of distribution entirely. Having said that, the movie has a promising hook—a redneck villain gets his backwater burg incorporated as a municipality called Texas City so he and his minions can use “official” traffic stops to rip off motorists and truckers. Norris plays a trucker whose little brother was last seen in Texas City, so he struts into town to find out the truth and, if necessary, issue swift-footed justice. There’s also a thread in the story about Norris calling in his brother truckers for help, resulting in a climactic scene of 18-wheelers literally mowing down the entire city. None of this hangs together well, so even though Breaker! Breaker! zips along (it’s barely 90 minutes), everything onscreen feels fake and meaningless. The fight scenes are absurd—Norris takes on what seems like the city’s entire male population at one point—and a crudely rendered subplot about a rural simpleton is especially pointless. Plus, while Norris fights impressively and exudes an easygoing likeability, he can’t act. The movie’s only interesting-ish performance is given by character actor George Murdock, as the city’s Shakespeare-spouting overlord, but his exertions are wasted because the movie as a whole is so forgettable.

Breaker! Breaker! LAME