The Girls from Thunder Strip (1970)

It’s astonishing how often inept ’70s filmmakers botched simple ideas for drive-in flicks—after all, conjuring a passable exploitation flick shouldn’t involve more than matching a lurid concept with a trite plot, then filming lots of gratuitous sex and violence. Try explaining that to David L. Hewitt, the culprit behind The Girls from Thunder Strip. The picture ostensibly pits a trio of sexy moonshiners against a gang of greasy bikers, so the juxtaposition of rural and urban sensibilities should have resulted in something eventful and trashy. Emphasis on should have. Among myriad other problems, Hewitt fails to identify a proper leading character, so the picture jumps from one underdeveloped character to the next seemingly at random. Worse, Hewitt and his collaborators integrate a third set of characters, redneck dudes who sorta-kinda align with the moonshiners, so the basic conflict between two distinct factions gets muddied. The list of flaws goes on. Although Gary Graver’s cinematography is frequently imaginative, the acting is generally as bad as the storytelling, and The Girls from Thunder Strip lacks conviction as sexploitation. In what should be the movie’s tawdriest scene, a buxom moonshiner bathes herself in a pond while wearing lingerie. Is she cleaning herself or doing laundry? Another sure sign the film lacks direction? The most entertaining scenes are comic-relief bits in which famed DJ/actor Casey Kasem, who plays a dopey federal agent, bickers with B-movie actor/director Jack Starrett, who plays a grumpy sheriff.

The Girls from Thunder Strip: LAME

Disco Fever (1978)

How much do titles matter? Let’s use this low-budget music movie as a case study. Although the picture has disco elements, including the principal location of a nightclub and a subplot about the rise of a wannabe disco singing star, the flick is not actually about disco. Rather, it’s about a nightclub owner who exploits a former teen idol, using his notoriety to gain publicity. While there isn’t a single original idea in the picture, the acting is adequate and the general arc of the piece is more or less satisfying in an empty-calories sort of way. (Anyone who’s ever encountered a story about an artist being asked to sell out will be able to predict the entire storyline.) Disco Fever even has something akin to credibility, since the main character is played by Fabian Forte, a real-life former teen idol. So here’s the problem with the title. Anyone buying a ticket for something called Disco Fever would, naturally, expect something in the vein of the previous year’s Saturday Night Fever. Thus, consumers willing to support any old movie with disco themes were hoodwinked, and the filmmakers who generated a borderline passable showbiz melodrama were precluded from reaching moviegoers who might be interested in the actual content of the picture. No big loss either way, but still. In any event, a couple of peculiar things about Disco Fever are worth mentioning. Famed radio personality and sometimes actor Casey Kasem plays the teen idol’s manager—making this the second of two movies in which Kasem served as Forte’s foil, the first being Soul Hustler (1973). Additionally, George Barris, the self-proclaimed “King of the Customizers” whose main claim to fame was creating the Batmobile for the 1960s Batman TV show, not only appears as himself in this movie, but he also wrote the story and served as one of the project’s executive producers. Holy Random Credits, Batman!

Disco Fever: LAME