Challenge (1974)

          North Carolina maverick Earl Owensby delivered his first offering to the Southern drive-in circuit with Challenge, a shameless riff on the previous year’s Walking Tall. Whereas that film adapted the story of real-life lawman Buford Pusser, Challenge invents a paint-by-numbers protagonist brought to life, if one uses that word loosely, by Owensby’s debut performance. Looking a bit trimmer here than he did in subsequent pictures, Owensby aspires to Burt Reynolds levels of manliness, but he exceeds Reynolds only in body-hair density. Seriously, Owensby is so furry here that it’s as if he’s already prepping for the werewolf picture he made at the end of the ’70s. Getting back to the saga of Frank Challenge (yes, that’s really the main character’s name), this is autopilot revenge cinema, so anemically conceived that viewers never learn what the villain intends to accomplish or why Frank was initially determined to thwart the villain’s scheme. Bad guy hurt good guy. Good guy hurt bad guy. Go with it.
          Frank (Owensby) is a Senatorial candidate with a wife and child, and thanks to a TV broadcast that plays during the opening scene, viewers learn he’s “ruggedly handsome” in addition to being a virtuous construction magnate-turned-politician. Somehow, Frank has acquired papers that incriminate W.F. Guthrie (William Hicks), so our hero arranges a meeting with authorities. Along the way, Frank explains his plans to a fishing buddy who secretly owes money to Guthrie, so the buddy rats on Frank, leading Guthrie’s thugs to beat Frank and leave him for dead, then burn down the hero’s house with his wife and child inside. Cue the Walking Tall cycle of a long hospital recovery followed by systematic revenge. Once Challenge gets cooking—simmering is more like it, but you get the idea—Owensby largely ditches characterization and plot, as demonstrated by a comically overlong chase scene that features three (!) lengthy musical cues separated by quiet interludes. Yes, Challenge is the kind of unhurried movie in which action sequences have rest periods.
          Nonetheless, like Owensby’s other revenge pictures (he faltered whenever he tried anything else), Challenge is watchably stupid and violent. Nominally directed by Martin Beck, the picture boasts Owensby’s usual hallmarks—extensive location photography, nonprofessional actors, simplistic dialogue, and thrills delivered on the cheap. Viewers get one fire, two explosions, and exactly one martial-arts brawl (notwithstanding a training match), though Owensby leaves room for a nostalgic montage set to a goopy ballad. Calling this movie perfunctory is giving it too much credit, but there’s a certain charm to the project’s unpretentiousness. Plus, even though the picture gets mired in dull stretches, Challenge ends well. The final showdown is somewhat offbeat, helped greatly by the backdrop of a stark forest, and the closing theme (which describes the final scene in granular detail) is hilariously dumb. Still, Owensby must have read his audience right, because a quickie sequel, The Brass Ring, appeared later the same year.
 
Challenge: FUNKY 

Dark Sunday (1976)

          One can’t question the consistency of Earl Owensby’s earliest cinematic efforts. After scoring hits on the drive-in circuit by playing a righteous avenger in Challenge and its sequel The Brass Ring (both released in 1974), actor-producer Owensby went back to the well for Dark Sunday, in which he portrays a preacher who seeks vengeance after drug dealers assault his family. All three flicks are shameless rip-offs of Walking Tall (1973), so those seeking depth, nuance, or originality should look elsewhere. However, if the red meat of an aggrieved everyman wiping out scumbags stimulates your appetite, then consider Dark Sunday the equivalent of a fast-food meal—if you know it’s bad for you but you eat it anyway, then you have no one to blame but yourself for the indigestion you experience afterward. Crudely made in Owensby’s home base of North Carolina, Dark Sunday was nominally directed by Jimmy Huston, who helmed several projects for the actor-producer, and it was nominally written by Thom McIntyre, another E.O. Studios veteran, but every frame bears the crass fingerprints of the project’s main man, who built a fortune by peddling cinematic junk.

          Lest we forget, Owensby is among the most unlikely screen personas of the ’70s—despite regularly casting himself as a fierce man of action, Owensby was at the time of his box-office success doughy and middle-aged. To quote Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the king!

          In Dark Sunday, Owensby plays Reverend James Lowery, whose flock includes young people mired in drugs. When one of these youths dies of an overdose, Lowery vows to clean up the streets. This puts him in the crosshairs of drug lord Herbert Trexler (Martin Beck), who sends thugs to take out Lowery and his family. The reverend’s wife and one of his sons are killed, another son is paralyzed, and Lowery is rendered mute with a bum leg. Upon leaving the hospital, Lowery cruises a grungy downtown area until he finds drug dealers, then starts killing them until he discovers the identity of the man pulling the strings. And so on. Name a cliché you might imagine fitting this framework and you’ll find it in Dark Sunday. Lowery befriends a noble hooker and a blind street preacher. He beats up a black drug dealer named “Candyman.” Lowery exhibits superhuman stamina, enjoys absurd good luck, and somehow also manages to inconvenience a corrupt cop. All of this leads to a laugh-out-loud climax that won’t be spoiled here; suffice to say that Owensby and co. took a big swing and missed spectacularly. This unintentionally hilarious misstep is a perfect capper for 99 minutes of grindhouse sludge.

Dark Sunday: FUNKY

Wolfman (1979)

I like to believe that Earl Owensby had an absolute blast during the ’70s, building a production facility in North Carolina so he could generate a string of low-budget movies in which he starred, despite having negligible acting skills. Most of his flicks were redneck-themed action pictures, but every so often he threw a curveball with something like Wolfman. As the unimaginative title suggests, this on-the-cheap creature feature delivers a bland lycanthropy tale owing a great deal to The Wolf Man (1941). Owensby’s Wolfman is a terrible movie, thanks to anemic acting and sluggish pacing, but it’s almost endearingly bad because one gets a sense it was fun to make. After all, what movie fan wouldn’t get a kick out of building Gothic sets, drenching them with artificial moonlight, and shooting scenes with hands popping out from graves, monsters crashing through windows, and supernatural zealots wielding silver daggers? Plus, by casting himself in the title role, Owensby got to emulate Lon Chaney Jr. by sitting still while makeup applications and overlapping dissolves create the unconvincing (but charmingly old-fashioned) illusion that he’s becoming a hirsute horror. Not that it matters, but the plot, which is set in the early 1900s, goes like this: after his father dies, Colin (Owensby) returns to the family estate, where conniving relatives make him the latest victim of his family’s werewolf curse. There’s other stuff—forged legal papers and romance with the girl next door, et cetera—but that’s all background noise. The “pleasure” of experiencing Wolfman involves watching a fleshy dude with a drawl and his down-home pals shuffling their way through what amounts to a Halloween-themed costume party.

Wolfman: LAME

Death Driver (1977)

Earl Owensby, an enterprising actor-producer who made a string of successful pictures for the drive-in circuit during the ’70s and ’80s, rarely aimed for high art. Yet even by his low standards, Death Driver is a shabby piece of work. Bogusly billed as “The True Story of Rex Randolph,” it’s actually a fictional story set in the world of thrill shows, with Owensby playing a dude who became famous by attempting to drive a car through a flaming house while crowds watched. The general shape of the piece is that of a redemption saga, with Randolph (Owensby) searching for new forms of income and validation in the years following his brush with death. Viewers are asked to believe it’s a tragedy that Randolph can’t find anything more satisfying to do than attempting the same incredibly dangerous stunt again, even though he’s well past his prime and therefore unlikely to survive. Had Owensby and his collaborators demonstrated any measurable skill at characterization and drama, this storyline could have been poignant. Unfortunately, Randolph comes across as a backwoods scumbag. He steals cars and demolishes them in stunt shows. He cons a woman into sex by pretending he’s acquainted with a Hollywood talent agent. Et cetera. Instead of telling the sad story of a man who is only good at one thing, Owensby and his team tell the pointless story of an adrenaline junkie who feels entitled to whatever gratification he desires, no matter who gets hurt along the way. Death Driver is so vapid and wrongheaded that the only enjoyable aspect of the movie is sarcastic commentary spewed by the yahoo speaking over the PA system during race scenes. When a nameless guy who never appears onscreen delivers a film’s most dynamic element, that’s a sure sign something major is lacking.

Death Driver: LAME

Buckstone County Prison (1978)

          Something of a backwoods equivalent to Roger Corman, North Carolina-based filmmaker Earl Owensby was on a roll by the time he made Buckstone County Prison (also known as Seabo), the grim story of a bounty hunter who suffers abuse after being wrongly incarcerated. An unpretentious storyteller with an affinity for drive-in fare, Owensby eliminated movie-star fees by casting himself in the leading roles of his early films, and he used outdoor locations and semiprofessional supporting players to stretch his budgets even further. His efforts gave birth to the self-sustaining E.O. Studios and eventually made Owensby a multimillionaire. Not a bad record of achievement, seeing as how most people have never heard of the man.
          Buckstone County Prison illustrates the pluses and minuses of Owensby’s modus operandi. After half-breed bounty hunter Seabo (Owensby) angers corrupt local authorities, he’s thrown in jail on trumped-up murder charges. Vicious Native American guard Jimbo (Ed Parker) beats the shit out of Seabo, among other inmates, apparently for the sole purpose of demonstrating Seabo’s toughness to the audience. Eventually, Seabo gains his freedom and participates in a manhunt for several convicts who escaped with the help of another bounty hunter, Reb (played by country singer David Allan Coe, who cut some tunes for the soundtrack). Additional story elements include a corrupt warden, a hooker with a heart of gold, and other hackneyed tropes. The characterizations and storyline are so simplistic that viewers could nap through several minutes and pick up the narrative without difficulty.
          Actors are cast to type, so most of them render perfunctory iterations of clichés—the stuttering African-American man-child, the sneering warden in a seersucker suit, the madam made of brass, etc. Some of the players deliver adequate work and some don’t, but it’s all part of the same down-and-dirty vibe. As for Owensby’s turn in the title role, he’s a paunchy everyman who growls most of his lines through clenched teeth. At best, Owensby is a weak facsimile of a movie tough guy—he neither adds much to the experience nor takes much away. So it goes for the movie as a whole. With its copious violence and hissable villains, Buckstone County Prison is a mindless rendition of things that viewers have seen a million times before, and yet the picture unspools with a measure of heaviosity. For unapologetically derivative junk, Owensby’s opus is weirdly sincere.

Buckstone County Prison: FUNKY