1980 Week: Without Warning

Schlockmeister Greydon Clark strikes again with this dull alien-invasion picture, which was made so cheaply that only one alien is featured. The picture mostly comprises interminable scenes of teenagers running from danger, so Without Warning is more akin to the slasher movies of the late ’70s and early ’80s than to other space-monster movies of the same period. It’s worth nothing that cinematographer Dean Cundey also shot Halloween (1978), because Clark apes that picture’s style quite shamelessly with heavy shadows and long Steadicam shots. In the opening sequence, a hunter and his son get killed by flying discs that look like fried eggs with tentacles growing out of them, so viewers learn quickly not to expect much. Later, two young couples hop into a van and head for the woods, encountering the requisite creepy old people on the way there. Word to the wise: When the proprietor of a general store filled with taxidermy says don’t go in the woods, maybe don’t go in the woods. Anyway, the flying egg things kill two of the teenagers, forcing survivors Greg (Christopher T. Nelson) and Sandy (Tarah Nutter) to seek help from the aforementioned creepy old people. The gas-station guy (Jack Palance) offers assistance, but a crazed ex-soldier (Martin Landau) makes things worse by slipping into a Vietnam flashback. Landau and Palance enliven their scenes, but the most enjoyable bits of Without Warning are unintentionally funny, as when Greg and Sandy defeat a horrific outer-space monster that’s attacking their car—by knocking it off the car with their windshield wipers. Consider yourselves warned about Without Warning.

Without Warning: LAME

Cocaine Cowboys (1979)

With its strange mixture of crime, drugs, and music, Cocaine Cowboys has just enough weirdness to claim a small cult following. The picture was mostly shot in and around Andy Warhol’s beach house in Long Island, and Warhol plays himself in a few scenes. What’s more, the premise is a kick—under the leadership of a tough-guy manager, played by Jack Palance, the members of a rock band moonlight as drug smugglers. Had the filmmakers played up the connections between drugs and music, perhaps from a satirical perspective, this idea could have led somewhere. Alas, cowriter-director Ulli Lommel, who later became a prolific horror-movie hack, was not up to the task, so Cocaine Cowboys is clumsy, meandering, and shallow. At times, it’s only possible to tell characters apart based on what instrument they play or what pocket of the storyline they occupy. Briefly, the plot goes like this—after agreeing to complete one last job before ditching the drug trade forever, the band arranges for an air drop of $2 million worth of cocaine, then somehow loses the dope, triggering violent revenge from suppliers. Instead of creating tension, this set of circumstances has very little effect. The musicians hang out, record music, and shoot the breeze with Warhol, who prattles monotonously and snaps Polaroids. In the weirdest scene, one of the band’s associates woos a sexy maid into a tryst by claiming he knows the whereabouts of the cocaine, then compels the maid to service his fetish for being showered with baking powder. If you’re wondering about the title, the band (lead by real-life singer-songwriter Tom Sullivan) performs a downbeat number lamenting their status as “Cocaine Cowboys,” and some of the characters ride horses. Adventurous viewers might be able to tolerate long stretches of tedium in exchange for flashes of strangeness, but most folks will find Cocaine Cowboys irredeemably confusing and dull.

Cocaine Cowboys: LAME

Angels Brigade (1979)

So here’s a bad idea for a movie—make a sexy action thriller about curvy babes who team up to battle drug dealers, cast it with beauties who can’t act, reconfigure the piece as a comedy even though nobody involved with the project knows how to construct or deliver a joke, and produce the movie as a PG-rated release, thereby eliminating possibilities for lurid content. Such is the sad state of affairs in Angel’s Brigade, a stunningly awful escapist romp from schlock-cinema stalwart Greydon Clark, who produced, co-wrote, and directed this shameless riff on Charlie’s Angels. Presented very much like a cartoon, with comical supporting characters, goofy optical transitions, and stylized uniforms for the heroines, the movie feels wrong from its first frames. To the accompaniment of a messy score that includes everything from disco to orchestral music, teenager Bobby Wilson (Mike Gugliotta) rips off small-time dealer Sticks (Darby Hinton), provoking the ire of Sticks’ boss, Mike Farrell (Jack Palance). Bobby gets his ass kicked, and word of the beating reaches his older sister, Michelle Wilson (Susan Kiger), an up-and-coming pop singer. Hold on tight, because here’s where it gets weird. Bobby’s schoolteacher, April Thomas (Jacqueline Cole), approaches Michelle with a plan to attack and destroy a drug-processing plant, which should be no problem because—yes, this is really the reason she gives—Michelle has a song on the pop charts. The duo then recruits five more ladies, including a karate expert and a stunt driver, for their commando mission. Michelle’s income—again, from one pop song—pays for the whole enterprise. Overnight, the ladies become highly skilled soldiers in matching skintight jumpsuits. Clark tries for a light touch throughout most of the picture (watch for appearances by Gilligan’s Island costars Jim Backus and Alan Hale), then inexplicably ditches the jokes for “serious” scenes featuring villains played by Palance and Peter Lawford. The tone is all over the place, and the acting by the leading ladies is ghastly. Plus, it’s not as if Clark meant to deter the male gaze, because he frequently puts the curvaceous women into lingerie and low-cut gowns and swimsuits. There’s virtually nothing so disheartening as sleaze without the courage of its convictions, because what’s the point? Also known as Angels Revenge and Seven from Heaven, this dud is to be avoided by everyone except those who thrive on schadefreude.

Angels Brigade: LAME

The One Man Jury (1978)

          Judged by normal standards, the violent cops-and-criminals flick The One Man Jury is thoroughly pedestrian, yet another saga about policemen who perceive the Miranda ruling as an inhibition on their ability to use any means necessary while apprehending bad guys. Judged by the standards of the schlock that leading man Jack Palance spent most of the ’70s making, often in Europe, The One Man Jury fares much better. Instead of being incoherent junk with bad dubbing and heavy exploitation elements, The One Man Jury is an American production with a clear storyline and passable supporting performances. And while Palance sleepwalks through much of his performance, as was his wont in low-budget productions, he at least gets to participate in a fully rendered action climax complete with colorful locations, double-crosses, shootouts, and twists. If nothing else, The One Man Jury seems very much like a real movie for the last 30 minutes of its running time.

          Set in LA, the picture concerns Detective Jim Wade (Palance), a tough guy who still beats suspects and violates their Constitutional rights, even though post-Miranda laws mean that many of his arrests are voided by the courts. When a psycho starts murdering women, Wade becomes obsessed with catching the guy, so he makes a deal with gangster Mike Abatino (Joe Spinell), In exchange for giving Wade the name of the killer, who is associated with Abatino’s gang, Wade agrees to leave Abatino’s criminal operations alone. Half the movie explores the circumstances leading to the deal, and half the movie explores the consequences. Structurally, this is solid stuff, even though writer-director Charles Martin wanders into narrative cul-de-sacs. For instance, the whole business of Wade’s romantic involvement with a much-younger records officer, Wendy (Pamela Shoop), feels bogus from start to finish. Still, Spinell and actors including Andy Romano make fun hoodlums, and B-movie starlet Angel Tompkins gives the movie a shot of attitude with her brief role as a glamorous gambler. The main takeaway is that there’s a terrific concept buried inside The One Man Jury. In fact, the movie is something of a precursor to the much slicker Michael Douglas picture The Star Chamber (1983), in which a cabal of judges hires killers to take out crooks who get off on technicalities.

The One Man Jury: FUNKY

Oklahoma Crude (1973)

          John Huston and Elia Kazan, among many others, have been credited with the quote that “90% of directing is casting.” To understand what this remark means, check out Oklahoma Crude, a handsomely produced but frustrating period drama about a belligerent woman operating a wildcat oil well in the early 20th century. The picture has four main characters, but only one is cast perfectly. The protagonist, Lena Doyle, is a tough-as-nails loner who works with her hands and dislikes people so much that she expresses a wish to be a third gender, complete with a matched set of sex organs, so she can tend to her own carnal needs. Improbably, she’s played by Faye Dunaway, a cosmopolitan beauty who seems more suited to a Paris fashion runway than a rugged work site. Further, because Lena rarely speaks during the first half of the picture, the role requires a performer with expressive physicality. Dunaway’s greatest gifts are her face and voice, so she’s wrong for the part on every level, even though it’s easy to understand why she relished a chance to try something different.

          The next important character is Noble Mason, a scrappy rogue whom Lena reluctantly hires as a laborer/mercenary once representatives from an oil company try to seize her well by force. Since the Lena/Noble relationship has a Taming of the Shrew quality, the obvious casting would be a handsome rascal along the lines of Steve McQueen or Paul Newman. Instead, Noble is played by George C. Scott, unquestionably one of the finest actors in screen history but not, by any stretch, a romantic lead. Rounding out the troika of casting errors is the presence of dainty English actor John Mills as Cleon Doyle, Lena’s estranged father. Seeing as how he plays the role with an American accent, why didn’t producer-director Stanley Kramer simply cast an American? Well, at least Kramer got the villain right, because Jack Palance is terrific as Hellman, the sadistic enforcer whom the oil company sends to menace Lena.

          The intriguing plot of Marc Norman’s script revolves around Lena’s ownership of a nascent well, which gains Lena unwanted attention once clues indicate the well might produce oil. Hellman makes a cash offer that Lena refuses, so Hellman simply steals the well, in the process ordering his people to beat Lena and her employees nearly to death. Then, with the assistance of ex-soldier Noble, Lena reclaims the well, sparking a lengthy standoff that culminates in a bittersweet combination of tragedy and victory.

          Oklahoma Crude gets off to a rocky start, because the first 20 minutes—in which the Lena/Noble relationship is established—simply don’t work, largely because of the aforementioned miscasting. Things pick up once Palance arrives, and the last hour of the picture is fairly exciting. Legendary cinematographer Robert Surtees contributes his usual vigorous work, and composer Henry Mancini’s music keeps things bouncy. (Occasionally too much so.) As with most of Kramer’s pictures, the tone rings false at regular intervals, since the filmmaker can’t decide whether he’s making a dramedy or a serious picture. The novelty of the story and the strength of the primal good-vs.-evil conflict ultimately sustain interest, but it’s a bumpy ride—especially when the syrupy, Anne Murray-performed theme song, “Send a Little Love My Way,” gets played on the soundtrack for the zillionth time.

Oklahoma Crude: FUNKY

Mister Scarface (1976)

          Filmed in Italian and then dubbed into English for its American release, the mob flick Mister Scarface—also known as Rulers of the City—offers a passable mixture of action, humor, intrigue, and violence. Like many substandard crime pictures, the movie has too much plot and not enough character development, so after a while it gets hard to follow who’s doing what to whom, and why, except in the broadest strokes. Plus, nominal leading man Jack Palance plays a secondary role as the titular villain, while German hunk Harry Baer (issuing a voice provided by some random American actor) is the true star. Nonetheless, the fast-paced Mister Scarface has some mildly exciting fight scenes, a smattering of physical comedy, and even eye candy in the form of attractive starlets occupying the periphery of the storyline. The movie is also executed with more care than the usual grindhouse-level fare, excepting a narrative that goes off the rails halfway through, so it’s possible to find a measure of mindless enjoyment—that is, for viewers willing to overlook the major obstacle created by voices that don’t match the lip movements of onscreen actors.

          Baer stars as Tony, a Mafia loan collector with an easygoing attitude. During the movie’s lighthearted first half, Tony goes about his daily business, charming attractive women and unleashing wisecrack-laden martial-arts violence on victims. Tony’s boss, Luigi (Edmund Purdom), gives Tony the thankless task of collecting a debt from high-level mobster Manzara, also known as “Mister Scarface” (Palance). To avoid revealing his identity to Scarface, whom Tony knows to be vengeful, Tony arranges a complex rip-off scheme and successfully reclaims Luigi’s money. Scarface does the math, however, and has Luigi killed before vowing to annihilate Tony. In the movie’s darker second half, Tony and two low-level Mob buddies—Napoli (Vittorio Caprioli) and Ric (Al Cliver)—simultaneously avoid Scarface’s goons and draw Scarface into a deadly showdown. While action fans won’t encounter anything in Mister Scarface they haven’t seen a zillion times before, there’s still fun to be had watching Palance scowl with a cigarette holder in his lips, or watching Baer romp through impressive fighting scenes. Chances are the Italian-language original version is even livelier, but searching for that probably isn’t worth the trouble.

Mister Scarface: FUNKY

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1974)

          Producer-director Dan Curtis, the king of small-screen ’70s horror, struck again with this restrained adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel. (Jack Palace stars as the world’s most famous bloodsucker.) The question, of course, is whether “restrained” was the right approach for a story about sex and vampirism. Therefore, while Curtis is to be commended on some level for exercising good taste, this picture is ultimately as bloodless—metaphorically speaking—as any of the victims Dracula leaves in his wake. Penned by the great Richard Matheson, who was apparently instructed to exclude his wonderful sense of humor from the screenplay, Bram Stoker’s Dracula sticks closely to certain elements of the source material. The picture begins in central Europe, where English lawyer Jonathan Harker (Murray Brown) arrives to present various UK properties to a rich client, Count Dracula (Palance). The count and his three bestial brides prey upon Jonathan. Then Dracula takes a ship to England, where he menaces Jonathan’s fiancée, Mina (Penelope Horner), and her best friend, Lucy (Fiona Lewis), until the intervention of wily Dr. Van Helsing (Nigel Davenport).
          According to the fine folks at Wikipedia, this adaptation was the first to include two clever nuances: Dracula being the same person as real-life warrior Vlad Teppes (better known as “Vlad the Impaler”), and Dracula stalking a woman whom he believed to be the reincarnation of a lost love. (These nuances were later repurposed for Francis Ford Coppola’s frisky big-screen 1992 smash, also titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)  Notwithstanding its admirable literary properties, Curtis’ movie is turgid because of flat direction and even flatter performances. Palance is okay, clearly relishing a chance to play something other than a generic goon, and he strikes some facial expressions imbued with real pathos. Yet Brown, Davenport, Lewis, and Simon Ward (playing Lucy’s betrothed) seem stiff as they churn through leisurely dialogue scenes in between the film’s too-few fright sequences. Clearly, Curtis wanted to transpose the Gothic-romance formula of his enduring Dark Shadows franchise onto Stoker’s narrative, but it’s easier to appreciate what he tried to do than what he actually accomplished.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula: FUNKY
 

The McMasters (1970)

Despite earning cinematic immortality with his moving performance as a victim of prejudice in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Brock Peters didn’t get many opportunities to play leading movie roles. The middling race-relations Western The McMasters is an exception, because even though avuncular thespian Burl Ives has top billing, this is Peters’ movie from start to finish. Set in a small Deep South town just after the Civil War, the picture dramatizes the explosive consequences of a free black man trying to live quietly as a property owner in a heavily racist white community. Benjie (Peters) returns from service in the Union army and reconnects with Neal McMasters (Ives), the white rancher who raised Benjie and regards him as a son. Recognizing that he’s getting older and has no other heirs, Neal gives Benjie his last name and half-ownership of his ranch. This development doesn’t sit well with nasty rednecks including Kolby (Jack Palance), a former Confederate officer, and Russel (L.Q. Jones), a local troublemaker. The racists ensure that Benjie and Neal can’t hire white workers for their ranch. However, Benjie befriends a band of Indians led by White Feather (David Carradine), and the Indians agree to help with chores. White Feather also “gives” his sister, Robin (Nancy Kwan), to Benjie as a concubine. Predictably, Benjie and Robin fall in love, and just as predictably, Robin is raped during a siege on the ranch. All of this leads up to a bloody showdown, though the climax of The McMasters is neither as decisive nor or simplistic as one might expect. And while it would be inaccurate to describe The McMasters as a surprising film, the story has just enough emotional texture to make a casual viewing worthwhile. The acting is generally solid, although Ives delivers rote work and Peters comes on a bit theatrically at times, while Western-cinema veterans including Jones, Palance, and R.G. Armstrong provide standard-issue varmint flavor. The miscast Kwan is appealing, and as for Carradine, his performance as an Indian is a stretch, since his line deliveries sound suspiciously modern, but his unique persona adds vitality. (The actor’s father, John Carradine, shows up for a small role as an idealistic preacher.) One of the only features directed by prolific TV helmer Alf Kjellin, The McMasters is never less than competent in terms of technical execution, and it’s never less than serious about its subject matter.

The McMasters: FUNKY

The Great Adventure (1975)

An abysmal Italian production that tries to blend elements of Jack London-style adventure with tropes from cowboy cinema, The Great Adventure would be rightly relegated to complete obscurity were it not for the presence of two familiar Hollywood B-listers, Joan Collins and Jack Palance, who are among the most indiscriminate selectors of material in film history. That they only play supporting roles with limited screen time should make no difference to anyone, because even hardcore fans of the actors would be hard-pressed to find redeeming values here. The story begins when a little boy living in the wintry Alaskan wilderness bonds with a wild German Shepherd while out hunting one day with his father—to the strains of saccharine music, the boy extracts the dog from a bear trap, and then the dog saves the boy from a wolf attack. Next comes the first of many major story shifts. The boy’s father ventures away from the family cabin for supplies, leaving the boy alone with his teenaged sister. The father dies. Then two trappers who are lost in the wilderness seek shelter with the children. Eventually, all of the characters travel to a small town ruled by gambler/landowner William Bates (Palance). One of the trappers is killed, and the other embarks on a romance with Bates’ saloon operator, Sonia Kendall (Collins). And so it goes from there—The Great Adventure can’t decide if it’s an outdoors survival tale, a boy-and-his-dog melodrama, a violent action story revolving around the evil machinations of Palance’s character, or an Old West romance. Exacerbating the chaotic storyline are cruddy production values, spastic editing, treacly music, and—of course, given the film’s Italian origin—terrible audio dubbing. Oh, and Collins and Palance phone in terrible performances, adding the final insult to unwise viewers who sample this bilge.

The Great Adventure: SQUARE

The Horsemen (1971)

          Macho and savage, The Horsemen is a sports movie for only the hardiest of viewers. Set in modern-day Afghanistan (circa the early ’70s), the picture concerns the brutal sport of buzkashi—think polo, but with longer playing times and with a headless goat carcass in lieu of a ball. Exploring themes such as male identity and primitive codes of honor, The Horsemen is mildly fascinating as an ethnographic study, but it’s not an easy film for Westerners to embrace. Even though The Horsemen relies on certain clichés that are common to most sports movies (and most stories about fathers and sons), the picture is so thick with virility that it’s a sonnet to manly suffering. In The Horsemen, the best man isn’t the one who wins, per se; it’s the man who endures the most pain in the pursuit of winning.

          Based on a novel by Joseph Kessel and written by the formidable Dalton Trumbo—whose previous collaboration with Horseman director John Frankenheimer, 1968’s The Fixer, was just as tough and uncompromising—the movie revolves around a young man trying to win the respect of his unyielding father. Jack Palace, wearing a mist of old-age makeup over his leathery features, plays Tursen, a retired buzkashi player who makes a humble but respectable living tending horses for a wealthy landowner. After grooming his son, Uraz (Omar Sharif), to become a buzkashi champion, Tursen places a huge wager on Uraz’s performance in a match, only to watch Uraz lose. Never mind that Uraz suffers a broken leg; broken pride is all that matters here. Much of the film comprises Uraz’s excruciating quest to rehabilitate his body for a return to the game, and since this is a merciless Frankenheimer film, the cure is far worse than the disease.

          The Horsemen looks amazing, with cinematographers André Domage, James Wong Howe, and Claude Renoir conveying the stark majesty of the Afghan landscape—to say nothing of the ferocious action during buzkashi matches. Unfortunately, neither Palance nor Sharif is sufficiently expressive to deliver all of the subtle nuances inherent to the material. They convey a certain undeniable primal intensity, and each has affecting moments, but the film would have benefited from performers with broader emotional palettes. Faring even worse than the male leads is beautiful Leigh Taylor-Young, cast as a fallen woman who enters Uraz’s life. While she looks blazingly sexy with her long, dark hair and smoky eye makeup, Taylor-Young is merely ornamental to a story that’s all about men and their animalistic drives to impress each other.

The Horsemen: FUNKY

God’s Gun (1975)

A boring spaghetti Western arriving so late in the genre’s dubious life cycle as to lack any significance, God’s Gun pairs two of America’s favorite leather-faced B-movie stalwarts, Jack Palance and Lee Van Cleef, for a violent romp through the usual muck of religion-drenched vendettas. Produced by the notorious hacks at Golan-Globus, and co-written and directed by Sabata helmer Gianfranco Parolini (using his Americanized pseudonym “Frank Kramer”), God’s Gun doesn’t look like the usual spaghetti-Western schlock. Instead of rolling hills and parched deserts, the picture is mostly set in an ersatz Western town, complemented with overly lit soundstages that give the picture a Hollywood feel. These contrivances make God’s Gun more garish than grungy, which is not an improvement over the genre’s norm. Yet the worst aspects of spaghetti Westerns are present in full force, such as atrocious dubbing, which replaces the actors’ on-set performances with studio-recorded impersonations by substitute performers. (Why hire name actors and not use their voices?) The embalmed plot begins when a gang led by Sam Clayton (Palance) invades tiny Juno City. Since the sheriff (Richard Boone) is an ineffectual non-presence, the municipality’s real muscle is Father John (Van Cleef), a gunfighter-turned-preacher. Father John acts as a surrogate father for wide-eyed teenager Johnny (Leif Garrett), the son of a buxom saloon hostess (Sybil Danning). When Clayton’s goons kill Father John, Johnny flees into the wilderness and stumbles across his late mentor’s twin brother, Lewis (also played by Van Cleef). And so it goes from there: Lewis exacts revenge, the baddies are brought to justice, et cetera. Ineptly written, haphazardly filmed, and acted with suffocating disinterest, God’s Gun is a chore to sit through and not worth the effort. It says everything you need to know about the picture that the linchpin dramatic performance is given by the talentless Garrett, then at the beginning of his uninteresting run as a teen heartthrob.

God’s Gun: LAME

Chato’s Land (1972)

          British filmmaker Michael Winner made a slew of gruesome movies in the ’70s and ’80s, often starring Charles Bronson as tight-lipped avengers who let their bloody actions speak for them. At their best, the duo created provocative work like Death Wish (1974). At their worst, they made ugly trash like Chato’s Land, which can best be described as a two-hour murder symphony. It’s hard to tell which element of the picture is most confusing and distasteful: The casting of Lithuanian-descended Bronson as a half-breed Apache, or the weird plot that presents Bronson’s character, Chato, as a vigilante seeking revenge even though he’s the perpetrator of a crime instead of the victim.

          At the beginning of the story, Chato struts into a white town, lets a racist marshal talk him into an argument, and kills the lawman instead of walking away. After Chato heads for the Indian country outside town, he’s pursued by ex-Confederate solider Capt. Whitmore (Jack Palance) and a posse of bloodthirsty townies. Once the pursuers slip into “Chato’s land,” the half-breed uses clever guerilla tactics to demoralize the posse. Then, when the pursuers rape and murder Chato’s relatives, he declares war. The problem is one of motivation: The attack that justifies Chato’s vigilantism doesn’t happen until after he’s already started picking off his enemies. Since Chato’s Land is merely a quick-and-dirty action picture, it’s unlikely the filmmakers were trying to make a nuanced statement about violence begetting violence—therefore, the storytelling just seems sloppy. It doesn’t help that most of the posse members are depicted as cartoonish rednecks, notably vile Elias (Ralph Waite) and his sex-crazed little brother, Earl (Richard Jordan). There’s some lip service given to the subject of morality, with characters including grizzled frontiersman Joshua (James Whitmore) questioning the virtue of violence, but the talk rings hollow as Winner stages one elaborate kill scene after another.

          Beyond its dubious content, Chato’s Land also suffers from erratic acting: Whereas Jordan, Waite, and Whitmore chew up the scenery, Palance wanders around in a daze, whispering elegiac monologues that don’t make much sense, and Bronson just glares a lot. Furthermore, since Bronson spends most of the movie flitting about in a loincloth, his taut musculature ends up giving a more expressive performance than his famously squinty face.

Chato’s Land: LAME

The Four Deuces (1976)

An awful gangster-themed comedy/thriller featuring Jack Palance at his all-over-the-map worst, The Four Deuces has a few interesting flourishes that are worth noting, if not necessarily worth watching. The movie uses comic-book text panels during transitions between sequences, plus actual comic-book drawings that morph into live-action photography, so the idea is apparently to present a ’30s-era newspaper strip come to life—if, in fact, “life” is the right word for a movie so utterly lacking in vitality. The story is standard stuff about a mob boss whose main squeeze two-times him while he’s trying to win a bloody conflict with a rival hoodlum, and the generic quality of the picture is accentuated by costumes and props that all look they’re fresh off the rack; one gets the impression that dodgy producers rented everything instead of buying or manufacturing. As for the alleged comedy elements of the movie, not a single funny thing happens, unless enduring sped-up Kesystone Kops-style chases or watching the ghoulish Palance laugh hysterically while he kills people hits your sweet spot. Seeing Palance bounce between cringe-worthy over-acting and limp under-acting is nothing new; nor is watching leading lady Carol Lynley, of The Poseidon Adventure fame, demonstrate an utter lack of dynamism. Thus, the only disappointment is watching Adam Roarke spin his wheels in yet another pointless role: A handsome, intense player from ’60s exploitation flicks who never found his breakthrough role, he’s a cipher as the hotshot reporter who tags along with Palance’s gang and hops into the sack with Palance’s moll (Lynley). Especially since the movie’s only novel element, the comic-book stylization, was used more effectively in other pictures, like the exceedingly weird 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974), it’s safe to say The Four Deuces is not a winning hand.

The Four Deuces: LAME

Monte Walsh (1970)

          A lovingly photographed ode to an aging cowboy trying to make sense of his life in the waning days of the Old West era, Monte Walsh is evocative and humane despite glacial pacing and murky storytelling. One of the few films directed by the venerable cinematographer William A. Fraker, the picture looks fantastic from start to finish, with dusty scenes of hard men battling nature plus glamorously lit romantic vignettes; furthermore, the production design makes every costume and prop feel like a real object that’s been used for tough work. The authenticity continues through to the dialogue, which is effective in an unpretentious sort of way (“I ain’t gonna spit on my whole life,” the title character says when faced with the prospect of becoming a performer in a Wild West sideshow). The big problem with Monte Walsh is that for all of its insight and texture, the picture doesn’t have a particularly strong story.

          Based on a novel by Jack Schaefer, the tale concerns graying cowboys Monte (Lee Marvin) and Chet (Jack Palance), who struggle to find work as employers including straight-shooting rancher Cal (Jim Davis) lose market share to omnivorous conglomerates. Meanwhile, the boys fall into a violent ongoing rivalry with Shorty (Mitch Ryan), a younger man with a bad temper and a buffoonish tendency to show off his riding skills. Monte also has an ongoing quasi-romance with a French prostitute, Martine (Jeanne Moreau), and even though they talk about settling down, she knows Monte will be out riding horses until he dies.

          There’s a somber quality to the whole picture, as if every character knows a gloomy future awaits, and the film uses irony for effective counterpoint (Mama Cass sings a wistful theme song, “The Good Times Are Coming,” which is appears as a sad refrain throughout the movie). Unfortunately, even though many moments are touching, there’s a fundamental lack of psychological clarity, so heavy scenes of characters facing their demons are perplexing. For instance, what is Monte trying to prove during the movie’s biggest action scene, when he breaks a bronco over the course of a wild ride that destroys half a town?

         Despite the handicap of a muddy script, Marvin and Palance give plaintive performances, and the supporting cast is strong. Though Moreau is badly underused in one of her few English-language pictures (Monte Walsh isn’t terribly concerned with the lives of women), Davis, Ryan, Billy “Green” Bush, Matt Clark, and Bo Hopkins all essay vivid frontier types. FYI, Hollywood took another crack at Schafer’s novel when Monte Walsh was remade for television in 2003, this time with Tom Selleck in the title role.

Monte Walsh: FUNKY

The Shape of Things to Come (1979)

Scads of shameless producers pounced on the success of Star Wars (1977) by cranking out low-budget crap stuffed with robots and spaceships, so there’s a lot of competition for the title of worst Star Wars rip-off. By most measures I can summon to mind, however, the misbegotten Canadian turkey The Shape of Things to Come may be the winner in this particular sweepstakes. Clumsily adapted from an H.G. Wells novel and boasting not only a profoundly awful screenplay but also a completely halfhearted approach to acting, directing, production design, and storytelling in general, this is the sort of dorky tedium that gives space opera a bad name. Set in the standard sci-fi milieu of the postapocalyptic future, the movie details a battle between government officials in New Washington, a human HQ on the surface of the moon, and cape-wearing megalomaniac Omus (Jack Palance), who uses his army of robots (Palace pronounces the word as “row-butts”) to hoard supplies of a life-giving medicine found only on his remote outpost of Delta 3. Several heroic types from New Washington launch an experimental new vessel to overthrow Delta 3, leading to battles between interchangeable human characters in goofy bodysuits and cheaply constructed robots who look like dudes waddling around in tricked-out garbage cans (actually, they probably are dudes waddling around in tricked-out garbage cans). The rudimentary musical score is produced so badly that it sounds like it’s being played off a warped LP, and the producers believe that shooting everything with cheap gimmicks like star filters will make images look otherworldly. The acting is consistently atrocious, from Palance’s usual phoned-in ghoulishness to Carol Lynley’s bland earnestness, and it’s hard to appreciate the handful of decent spaceship shots since they’re repeated ad nauseum and intercut with hopelessly static interiors. Lethargic, stilted, and uninvolving, The Shape of Things to Come is pure spacejunk.

The Shape of Things to Come: SQUARE