Booby Trap (1970)

One of several ’70s movies about angry men from the World War II generation declaring war on hippies, this abysmal drive-in picture features the sensational premise of a psycho planning mass murder at a music festival. Suffice to say, cowriter-director Dwayne Avery hasn’t a clue how to realize the potential of this premise, and Booby Trap—befitting its title—spends more time on boring sex scenes than on suspenseful vignettes dramatizing the villain’s outrageous scheme to kill flower children. In fact, so much of the picture’s screen time gets chewed up on carnal encounters and strip scenes that Booby Trap ends up feeling a lot like a porno flick without the money shots, right down to the cheap production values and unforgivably bad acting. Anyway, unhinged Jack Brennan (Carl Monson) buys a cache of Claymore anti-personnel mines on the black market, then makes his way across the dusty American southwest to the location of a planned Woodstock-type event. Investigators tracking the stolen munitions follow clues, leading to the inevitable showdown between a lawman and the wannabe mass murderer. Beyond the rotten camerawork and sloppy sound recording, Booby Trap suffers from incompetent pacing. Early on, the movie is derailed by a pointless subplot when Jack picks up a hippie hitchhiker, sleeps with her, and kills her the next morning. Similarly, the movie stops dead close to the ending so the lawman chasing Jack can have his own sex scene. Is Booby Trap an action movie, softcore sleaze, or a thriller? Does anyone actually care enough to make that determination? Oh, well. If nothing else, it’s pleasant to ponder the potent potboiler a proper provocateur could have produced from this premise.

Booby Trap: LAME