Rooster: Spurs of Death! (1977)

          Perhaps no factoid gives a better sense of how strange American cinema got in the ’70s than this—the decade produced at least three movies about cockfighting, the illegal sport in which chickens kill each other while gamblers cheer the pointless bloodshed. First came Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974), a periodically mesmerizing character piece starring the great Warren Oates. Then came Fowl Play a/k/a Supercock (1975), a low-rent comedy with Ross Hagen. And closing out the cycle was Rooster, later given the sensationally extended title Rooster: Spurs of Death! Deliberately or otherwise, this third film combines elements of its predecessors, making for a strange viewing experience. Rooster wobbles between earnest drama and lighthearted comedy, so it’s a sort of deranged rural epic even though it’s only 91 minutes long. The only reasonable reaction one can muster after the movie runs its course is confusion.

          When respected sportsman Kink (Jeff Corey) announces a match with a big purse, perennially unlucky trainer Stoke (Gene Bicknell) conjures a scheme—he’ll enter his impressionable son, Wyatt (Vincent Van Patten), as a contestant, hoping that people will bet big against the young man, unaware that he’s secretly trained for years to achieve cockfighting glory. In one subplot, Stoke’s long-suffering wife (Ruda Lee) rekindles her courtship with a wealthy gambler (Ty Hardin) who wants to marry her. In another subplot, a slutty Southern belle (Amy Johnston) teases men including a volatile little person named Chicken (Tommy Madden). And in yet another subplot, Wyatt reconnects with a high-school buddy (Kristine DeBell) who’s now working in a brothel.

          You begin to see where the whole “epic” notion enters the conversation, because it’s worth reiterating that Rooster runs just 91 minutes—with this many characters and storylines, everything is handled superficially, and transitions between different narrative threads are sketchy. As a case in point, the scenes between the wife and the gambler are fairly intelligent, but vignettes of Stoke tooling down country roads with Wyatt and their mute African-American pal Billy (Charles Fort) seem extracted from a Burt Reynolds picture. The road scenes even have their own theme song, featuring the lyrics, “Here we come from far away, bringing with us the death on wings!”

          Yet it’s impossible to dismiss Rooster as pure drive-in trash. Firstly, there’s the aforementioned kaleidoscopic quality, all jarring rhythms and wrong notes. Secondly, some scenes have a demented sort of artistry. In particular, the vignettes with Corey—a fine character actor—radiate weird heartland poetry, as when Corey’s character holds a barnful of cockfighters rapt with quasi-Biblical speechifying. Similarly, scenes in which characters praise the nobility of cockfighting are inherently perverse. And just as Hellman did in Cockfighter, director Brice Mack employs slow-motion during cockfights, complementing balletic shots of battling birds with discordant music to create an eerie effect.

          Some intrepid soul should try programming a double feature of this picture and the equally inappropriate Mr. No Legs (1978) just to see if any viewers can endure the whole program.

Rooster: Spurs of Death!: FREAKY