Eaten Alive (1976)

          The best horror filmmakers realize there’s a lot more to disturbing audiences than gore—fictional worlds populated by weird characters often make viewers more uncomfortable than onscreen bloodshed. Consider a pair of early Tobe Hooper movies. His breakout hit, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), imagines a remote pocket of the Lone Star State where insane cannibals prey upon innocent visitors. His follow-up, Eaten Alive, presents a rural hotel where the proprietor is a psychopath who kidnaps people, slaughters them with scythes and other instruments, and feeds their bodies to the gigantic alligator he keeps in a pond behind the hotel. Whereas many horror pictures frighten viewers by inserting a chaos agent into the normal world, these Hooper films drag normal people into chaos.
          That said, there’s a massive difference between these two pictures. Shot on location and featuring a no-name cast, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an immersive nightmare. Shot on soundstages and featuring several Hollywood actors, Eaten Alive is fake on every level, and therefore much less effective. Other problems include a slow-moving script, threadbare characters, and the vulgar intrusion of gratuitous nudity. Nonetheless, there’s a certain compelling derangement to Eaten Alive. After all, the first scene features a pre-Freddy Kreuger Robert Englund as a redneck who introduces himself to a prostitute by saying, “Name’s Buck—I’m rarin’ to fuck.” Later, the movie includes a woman stripped to her lingerie and bound and gagged for days; a young girl trapped in the crawlspace beneath the hotel, with the psychopath coming at her from one direction and the alligator coming at her from the other; and various persons impaled, stabbed, and swallowed in grisly death scenes.
          Nihilism hovers over this flick like a dark cloud.

          Yet it’s the bizarre throwaway scenes that make Eaten Alive unsettling, more so than the ho-hum creature-feature moments. In one bit, a weirdo played by William Finley, known for his work with Brian De Palma, engages in a masochistic conversation with his wife. (“Why don’t you just take that cigarette and grind it out in my eye?”) In another scene, the hotel proprietor tries on various pairs of glasses while reading porno mags and ignoring the pet monkey that’s dying in a nearby cage. The strangeness extends to the actual filmmaking. Hooper often bathes his sets in garish red light, so characters seem as if they’re in hell, and the editing lingers on lurid images—the dying monkey, a nubile young woman stripping—so the whole movie has the air of deranged voyeurism.

          Neville Brand’s leading performance is obvious and silly, but his character is so grotesque that Brand’s work gains a sort of unpleasant power, and onetime Addams Family star Carolyn Jones adds a peculiar quality with her small role as an alternately courtly and cross madam who wears men’s clothes. The performances are hardly the point, though. As a straight-through narrative, Eaten Alive—which was inspired by the crimes of a real-life killer—is a dud, too campy and episodic to maintain real suspense. As a journey into an otherworldly headspace, it’s fairly effective.

Eaten Alive: FREAKY

Five Days from Home (1978)

          Among the least suspenseful chase films ever made, Five Days from Home stars George Peppard (who also directed) as a congenial convict who breaks out of jail so he can visit his hospitalized son. How congenial? The convict apologizes to people he abducts, keeps a running tab for debts he incurs, and leaves notes at stores he robs promising to reimburse the owners for damages and stolen items. Once the story adds in the notion that the protagonist was once a cop, it’s hard to accept that he was ever convicted for a crime, and the way he constantly evades capture makes the lawmen who are chasing him seem incompetent. Among the filmmakers’ strange storytelling choices is the decision to limit the protagonist’s shared screen time with his son to only one very brief scene. Since viewers are clearly expected to root for the antihero’s compassionate mission, wouldn’t it have made sense to present, say, flashbacks deepening and enriching the father-son relationship? Oh, well. Five Days from Home is pleasant enough to watch thanks to the inherent momentum of the storyline and the presence of a few mildly credible supporting characters. There’s even a cute dog in a few scenes, though the film’s odd poster greatly overstates the pup’s primacy within the narrative.

          The startling opening images promise a very different movie than Five Days Home actually delivers, because during the credits, T.M. Pryor (Peppard) is shown running naked except for boots through rugged bayou country in Louisiana. After clothing himself, Pryor sneaks a ride on a passing cargo truck, escaping the vicinity of his former prison and making his way toward the nearest city. He acquires guns and kidnaps a dumpy young woman named Wanda (Sherry Boucher), who drives him across several state lines. They bond somewhat, though T.M. remains focused on reaching his boy, who was hurt in a car accident. Way too much screen time elapses before the story introduces T.M.’s main pursuer, Inspector Markley (Neville Brand), and his presence never generates much tension. The film’s most colorful passage begins with T.M. and Wanda commandeering a car driven by a sleazy businessman, who is on his way to a tryst with his secretary/mistress. Appalled by the businessman’s immorality, T.M. contrives to humiliate the man without inflicting bodily harm. The ending of the picture is never in doubt, and the portrayal of the antihero as a tight-lipped man of principle rings false. Nonetheless, Five Days from Home moves along at a fair clip, and the friction between the nastiness of Peppard’s screen persona and the wholesomeness of his character creates an interestingly weird vibe.

Five Days from Home: FUNKY

Hi-Riders (1978)

          Basically a biker flick featuring drag-racing cars instead of motorcycles, this moderately entertaining exploitation flick benefits from copious amounts of action as well as moody cinematography by Dean Cundey, who later became a favorite of directors John Carpenter, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Zemeckis. In fact, the best reason to watch this forgettable picture is to savor the grainy shadows with which Cundey imbues the storyline. As for that storyline, it’s wise to set your expectations low and still leave room for disappointment. The gist is that Mark (Darby Hinton) and his girl Lynn (Diane Peterson) prowl the countryside in their tricked-out car looking for suckers to race. One night, they drag against thuggish Billy (Roger Hampton), a member of a gang called the Hi-Riders. He loses but refuses to pay his debts, so they chase after him and land at Hi-Riders HQ. After the gang’s leader, T.J. (Wm. J. Beaudine), sides with the newcomers, Mark and Lynn decide to hang out with the gang for a while. Later, when a young guy from a local town is killed during a drag race with a Hi-Rider, the man’s father, Mr. Lewis (Stephen McNally), sics rednecks on the Hi-Riders. Mark and Lynn get caught in the crossfire.

          Noting how much of this stuff is predicated on silly coincidences is futile, because the characters are so one-dimensional it’s hard to care what happens. Still, Hi-Riders zips along fairly well. Burly Hampton is enjoyably nasty during early scenes, perky Peterson has fun spewing automotive trivia while playing an engine freak, and director Greydon Clark peppers the cast with a trio of familiar Hollywood players. Mel Ferrer and Ralph Meeker give indifferent performances as small-town cops, and craggy Neville Brand plays a bartender. Additionally, spunky rock tunes by a band called “Coyote and the Pack” fill the soundtrack. Does any of this high-octane noise mean anything, or will you even recall a frame of Hi-Riders after the credits roll? No, but the same could be said about most of the biker movies after which Hi-Riders is patterned. This is unapologetic lowest-common-denominator sludge, with exciting stunts and rebellious attitude and snarling bad guys, all set to the rhythm of roaring engines. 

Hi-Riders: FUNKY

Killdozer (1974)

          Enjoyably stupid escapism with more than a tip of the hat to the iconic, Steven Spielberg-directed Duel (1971), this made-for-TV sci-fi thrilller is about exactly what its title suggests: a bulldozer that kills. The narrative justification for this premise is almost laughably lazy, because a meteor falls to earth, and when the blade of the bulldozer strikes the rock, a field of blue energy transfers from the meteor to the machine. Presto-chango, the heavy equipment is possessed! And that’s nearly all the story the film provides, notwithstanding some lip-service material about how the protagonist, a construction-crew foreman, puts efficiency over safety and therefore is slow to react once several mysterious deaths occur. (Well, mysterious to the characters, anyway—we, the viewers, see the Killdozer causing the deaths.) Fitting the lunkheaded nature of this movie, the leading man is 1950s TV star Clint Walker, an amiable man-mountain whom none would ever mistake for an avatar of dramatic nuance. Other members of the sausage-party cast include reliable tough guy Neville Brand and versatile TV thesp Robert Urich.

          As for the plot, it’s so thin as to barely merit description. Lloyd Kelly (Walker) supervises a small crew tasked with clearing land for an airstrip on a remote island in the Pacific. Naturally, this means the men are isolated between visits from supply boats, so once things get screwy, they’re on their own. After the aforementioned close encounter between the bulldozer and the meteor, the titular mechanical monster starts Killdozing, although the first few incidents take place while the victims are alone, hence the time it takes for survivors to correctly assign blame. After that happens, the Killdozer goes into full attack mode, destroying the work camp and with it the survivors’ supplies. Watching the film, it’s impossible not to wonder why the men don’t simply retreat to high ground and stay there until help arrives, but in the realm of dopey genre pictures, it’s better to go with the flow. Otherwise, the viewer would be denied the pleasure of watching survivors try to outwit the Killdozer. Chew on that one for a minute—and if you like the taste, then seek out Killdozer for 74 minutes of brain-cell-murdering silliness. If not, give this baby a wide berth.

Killdozer: FUNKY

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

Scalawag (1973)

Choppy, episodic, and saccharine, the family-friendly adventure Scalawag represented an ignominious directorial debut for actor Kirk Douglas. The movie features such maudlin devices as crying children, cutesy musical numbers, sentimental monologues, a talking parrot (voiced by Mel Blanc!), and a weak subplot about a bad man finding redemption by serving as surrogate father to a child. Yet even these offenses would be tolerable if Scalawag was a rip-roaring action picture. It is not. Filmed on an insufficient budget in a singularly unattractive mountain region of Serbia, the movie looks cheap and ugly, a problem exacerbated by Douglas’ dodgy camerawork. Some scenes don’t cut properly, others have such profound screen-direction problems that it’s difficult to parse spatial relationships, and some scenes just look drab. The tone of the piece is just as chaotic. Set around the middle of the 19th century, Scalawag takes place in the deserts of California. Peg (Douglas), a one-legged pirate, leads a rough gang including twins Brimstone and Mudhook (both played by Neville Brand), Fly Speck (Danny DeVito), and Velvet (Don Stroud). Through convoluted circumstances, the pirates join forces with Latin stud Don Aragon (George Eastman), as well as the beautiful Lucy-Ann (Lesley-Anne Down) and her preteen brother, Jamie (Mark Lester). Together, the characters search for gold. Each character is either anonymous or trite, the plotting is amateurish, and the double-crosses and lies that are supposed to generate dramatic conflict instead produce confusion. Douglas is a terrible ham throughout, Stroud is wasted in a nothing role, DeVito plays a cartoonish imbecile, Down is ornamental, and Lester comes across like a lab-generated child-star robot. Plus, why bother to make a pirate picture if nearly all the action takes place on dry land? Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of dumb.

Scalawag: LAME

This Is a Hijack (1973)

          Executed with as little originality and subtlety as its hilariously bland title might suggest, This Is a Hijack is best described as “undemanding.” Produced on a low budget and shot without any attempt at visual flair, the picture cycles through generic scenes as it moves steadily toward a predictable climax. Every so often, a glimmer of individuality shines through the workmanlike storytelling—for instance, one of the hijackers makes his prisoners shout animal noises like a farmland chorus—but director Barry Pollack and his collaborators mostly demonstrate an impressive skill for determining the minimum effort required for manufacturing filmic elements, from composition to performance to editing. This Is a Hijack isn’t even lurid enough to qualify as proper drive-in fare, so it’s basically the equivalent of a forgettable TV movie, except with a couple of feature-film actors and slightly more elaborate production values.

          Set in L.A., the movie begins when Mike (Adam Roarke), an inveterate gambler, is hustled out of bed by lackeys in the employ of a gangster to whom Mike owes a considerable sum of cash. Told he must pay his debts immediately, or else, Mike contrives a scheme to hijack the private jet owned by his boss, Simon (Jay Robinson), a rich entertainer who treats everyone around him like garbage. Assigned to watch over Mike is Dominic (Neville Brand), a psychotic thug who works for the gangster. Once the hijackers have taken control of the aircraft, Mike discovers that Dominic would be perfectly happy killing everyone aboard just for the thrill—he’s the one who makes people yell animal sounds—so Mike must tap his shallow reserve of bravery in order to prevent a catastrophe. Meanwhile, in a subplot so anemic it barely merits inclusion in the film, a small-town sheriff (Dub Taylor) coordinates with the FBI on a plan to seize control of the plane when it lands.

          Brand, Roarke, and Taylor provide most of the watchable moments. Brand does his patented happy-maniac bit, Roarke broods with the same charismatic intensity he brought to ’60s B-movies, and Taylor provides his signature crazy-old-coot shtick. (The climax of the movie involves Taylor running around an airport while wearing nothing but boots, a cowboy hat, and boxer shorts.) This Is a Hijack runs out of gas toward the end, with characters overcoming problems after exerting only a modicum of effort, and it’s not as if there’s any visual spectacle on display. For the most part, however, the picture delivers exactly what it promises—which isn’t much.

This Is a Hijack: FUNKY

Cahill: United States Marshal (1973)

An entertaining but forgettable entry in John Wayne’s latter-day filmography, Cahill: United States Marshal lacks the tragic poetry of The Cowboys (1972) and The Shootist (1976), the elegiac Westerns that comprise the Duke’s farewell to his beloved cowboy genre. Instead, Cahill: United States Marshal briskly presents a by-the-numbers story punctuated with solid action. There’s nothing here that fans haven’t seen a gazillion times before—Wayne struts through hordes of enemy gunmen like a superhero with a six-gun, barely flinching whenever he’s shot—but then again, novelty and surprise aren’t what people expected (or wanted) when they bought tickets to cowboy movies starring John Wayne. In this flick, the Duke plays J.D. Cahill, a tough-as-nails U.S. Marshal whose young sons fall in with a bad element while he’s away on business. Fraser (George Kennedy), a two-dimensional villain with a tendency to snarl while standing outside in lightning storms, pressures Cahill’s boys Danny (Gary Grimes) and Billy Joe (Clay O’Brien) to help with a bank robbery. When the robbery leads to the murder of a local sheriff, the lads realize they’ve gotten involved with the wrong varmints and try to wrangle themselves free of their predicament without getting killed or letting Dad know what’s happening. Much of the picture comprises Cahill stalking the robbers with the aide of his cranky Indian guide, Lightfoot (Neville Brand), so the drama of the piece, such as it is, stems from the question of how long the Cahill boys can manage to deceive their father. Quite predictably, it all comes to a head when Cahill figures out the truth in time to dole out equal measures of hot lead and life lessons. Efficiently directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and adequately written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink (who also penned the Duke’s 1971 Western Big Jake), Cahill: United States Marshal is pleasant entertainment and nothing more, a well-made but uninspired run through the usual tropes of last-minute rescues, ornery put-downs, tense shootouts, and tough talk about how a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Cahill: United States Marshal: FUNKY