Steel Arena (1973)

The debut films of prolific directors have a certain innate appeal, because it’s always interesting to see where a noteworthy filmmaker’s journey began. In the case of Mark L. Lester, whose subsequent affronts to cinematic quality include Roller Boogie (1979) and Firestarter (1984), watching his first feature-length project, Steel Arena, is illuminating albeit unsurprising. Very quickly, one notes baseline technical competence and even occasional evidence of visual style. Yet just as quickly, one marvels at laughable ineptitude with regard to acting, characterization, logic, and storytelling. Lester, who began his film career making documentaries, apparently befriended a group of low-rent daredevils who toured the south, then persuaded the daredevils to play fictionalized versions of themselves. Never mind that none of them could act, or that the “story” Lester imposed upon them is a flimsy frame connecting lengthy vignettes of demolition-derby carnage. One can almost feel the film straining every time Lester tries to add dramatic weight with a tragic moment, especially because most of the film is utterly bereft of interpersonal conflict. Nonetheless, Steel Arena offers plenty of guilty-pleasure signifiers common to vintage southern drive-in schlock—there’s a corpulent redneck sheriff, a car chase involving moonshine, a busty waitress with a thirst for adventure, and a hilariously overlong sequence in which people bitch about mosquito bites. Through it all, leading man Dusty Russell, sort of playing himself, manages to avoid forming a single facial expression. The cars he crashes give more convincing performances.

Steel Arena: LAME

Slick Silver (1975)

It’s difficult to actively dislike an amiable regional production like Slick Silver, since one gets a sense of enterprising filmmakers doing their best to emulate tropes they’ve seen in “real” movies while also sharing something of their local idioms with the world. Nonetheless, a dull viewing experience is a dull viewing experience, and Slick Silver never builds much in the way of empathy or momentum. A gentleman named R. Terrell Reagan, who also wrote and executive-produced this project but never made another film, stars as Slick Silver, a fast-talking schemer roaming through Texas and thereabouts. Early in the movie, he befriends a guitar-slinging hitchhiker named Leroy (Hal Fletcher), whom Slick nicknames “Strummer Goldenstring.” Flim-flam ensues. The guys pose as public-health officials and convince a farmer to hand over several chickens by convincing her the birds are victims of a hemorrhoid outbreak. They encounter a traveling preacher, then steal his clothes and leave him tied to a tree while they try to fleece the congregation that was awaiting the preacher’s arrival. They persuade a black guy to pose as their chauffeur so they can run a number on women in a rich neighborhood. And so on. Although most of the actors in the film render generic work, Reagan does a passable con-artist routine, and some of the scams are mildly imaginative. Unfortunately, there’s zero depth of character and the story goes nowhere, so after the first 15 minutes or so, you’ve seen everything Slick Silver has to offer—that is, unless the pie-fight sequence toward the end counts as novelty.

Slick Silver: LAME

Wheeler (1975)

Wannabe thriller Wheeler, also known by titles including Psycho from Texas, has fans among those who relish bad cinema, and it’s not hard to see why. The plot is derivative schlock about a twisted redneck drifter who abuses women because he was traumatized during childhood by watching his prostitute mother service clients. Fair enough, except for the way the filmmakers illustrate this concept—flashbacks featuring awkward cuts between shots of Mom getting screwed and shots of an angelic little boy crying. Shameless. Adding to the film’s craptastic allure is the bizarre performance by leading man John King III, who elongates and emphasizes random words, somewhat in the style Christopher Walken later employed to more deliberate effect. Watching Wheeler, one gets the sense of an actor struggling to read cue cards that are held too far away for him to see clearly. And then there’s that damn chase scene. In the storyline, Wheeler (King) and his buddy Slick (Thomas Knight Lamey) kidnap a retired oilman, but the oilman escapes—so for a good 40 minutes of the movie, the filmmakers repeatedly cut to Slick chasing the oilman. Beyond how dull and repetitious these vignettes are, the chase scene defies logic since Slick is young and healthy while the oilman is middle-aged and doughy. The capper on this dispiriting cinematic experience is an interminable scene during which Wheeler forces a pretty waitress to strip naked and gyrate while he empties a pitcher of beer onto her. Gross.

Wheeler: LAME

This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! (1971)

Best known for his low-budget gorefests, exploitation-flick guy Herschell Gordon Lewis also made other types of bad movies, ranging from comedies to porno flicks. Like his earlier picture Moonshine Mountain (1964), This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! is a redneck saga about illegal liquor, and Gordon (who wrote, produced, and directed) takes the title somewhat literally. Although the consumption of white lightning doesn’t cause any fatalities, killers prey upon bootleggers, resulting in several gruesome onscreen deaths. As for the plot, it concerns a film-flam man who poses as a preacher and runs a moonshine operation out of a backwoods church. Presented in a dull but quasi-linear fashion, the story tracks the con man’s efforts to intimidate local liquor-store proprietors out of business, to bribe regional law-enforcement officials, and to put on a convincing show as a religious leader. Executed competently, this premise might have coalesced into a decent drive-in diversion. Executed with Gordon’s usual clumsiness and vulgarity, This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! is consistently bizarre, though not in a good way. The ersatz preacher officiates a wedding at which the male guests gang-bang the bride. A woman is stoned. Two people are crucified. Someone’s head gets blown off in a gory close-up. Sigh. Gordon fans may enjoy seeing one of the director’s frequent collaborators, Jeffrey Allen, in the showy part of the preacher (though Allen’s over-acting gets tired quickly), and cinephiles should note this movie contains both the final screen appearance of Golden Age screen star Tim Holt, who plays a G-man, and the first screen appearance of future L.A. Law costar Larry Drake.

This Stuff’ll Kill Ya!: LAME

God’s Bloody Acre (1975)

There’s a decent idea for an exploitation flick buried in here, because the premise is that hillbillies who have lived illegally in the wilderness for an extended period of time fight back once government developers try to clear the land for creation of a park. Alas, the filmmakers avoid the obvious path of making the hillbillies sympathetic, instead portraying them as dimwitted maniacs. Worse, the filmmakers provide the hillbillies with a steady supply of victims by contriving subplots about folks wandering into the woods during the killing spree. To a one, the characters in God’s Bloody Acre are stereotypical and underdeveloped, so it’s impossible to care what happens to anyone onscreen, though of course basic human empathy kicks in once the final survivors of the ordeal seem close to becoming victims. In any event, God’s Bloody Acre represents many of the worst tropes in horror cinema, reveling in violence against women (there’s an endless scene of a young lady getting her throat cut) while reinforcing demeaning clichés about rural populations. Oh, and just for good measure, the picture throws in a little racism, because, naturally, the three black guys driving a Rolls-Royce are violent thieves who rob every white person they encounter. In the spirit of trying to say something kind, director Harry Kerwin manages a few clever scene transitions, and the vignette of a fellow getting chopped in two by a bulldozer blade is nasty. But in all the usual ways for this sort of junk, God’s Bloody Acre is boring, cheap, dumb, and unsavory.

God’s Bloody Acre: LAME

Thunder Country (1974)

A sign that something’s rotten in Thunder Country appears during the opening credits. Mickey Rooney has top billing, even though his character only appears onscreen for about 10 minutes. The picture’s second-billed star, former Addams Family giant Ted Cassidy, plays the villain, so he’s onscreen throughout the picture, but he often trades screen time with a group of women. Because, as some of the film’s alternate titles suggest, this is a women-in-prison picture—except when it’s not. Also known as Cell Block Girls, Convict Women, Swamp Fever, and Women’s Prison Escape, this rotten flick cuts back and fourth between a quartet of female inmates and the exploits of a drug dealer, played by Cassidy. Threads converge after the women escape and seek refuge in a shack owned by a sweaty redneck in a Florida swamp, because the redneck has connections to the drug dealer’s operation. Eventually, the drug dealer and the fugitive ladies battle while authorities search the swamp, attempting to capture various crooks and escapees. As for Rooney, he plays a grimy shopkeeper forced by the women to escort them to the aforementioned swamp. Thunder Country is pointless sludge, lacking even the courage of its sleazy convictions; since the picture bears a PG rating, the lurid elements one normally expects from a women-in-prison picture are absent. There’s some fun to be had in watching the Artist Formerly Known as Lurch play a slick modern-day criminal, all stylish shades and tailored suits, but that novelty wears off quickly. Even the kick of watching gators prey upon people gets old. If anything about this movie sounds appealing to you, seek similar pleasures elsewhere and you’ll be glad for the decision.

Thunder Country: LAME

Love and the Midnight Auto Supply (1977)

          Entertaining in a brainless sort of way, Love and the Midnight Auto Supply is partially the story of a redneck Robin Hood who contrives a scheme for funneling profits from his various criminal enterprises to a group of oppressed farm workers. Yet it’s also a sex comedy about the main character’s relationship with a madam, a love triangle involving a rich kid torn between a good girl and a hooker, and a political story tracking the adventures of a activist. These parts hang together about as well as the disparate elements of the soundtrack, which toggles between discofied riffs on “The William Tell Overture” and swamp-boogie grooves, some of which were generated by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Tom Fogerty. The picture bombards viewers with just enough car chases, intrigue, rebellious rhetoric, and sex to keep things interesting, but it’s fair to say writer-director James Polakof hadn’t the faintest idea what sort of movie he was making. Is Love and Midnight Auto Supply a drive-in flick for the southern audience, a with-it counterculture story for the college crowd, or straight shot of exploitation nonsense? The answer to all of these questions is yes, because, with apologies to Donny and Marie, Love and the Midnight Auto Supply is a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.

          Michael Parks, enjoyably rural and bitchy with his cowboy hat, leather jacket, and snide remarks, stars as Duke, proprietor of Midnight Auto. He and his boys sneak into parking lots, strip cars belonging to rich folks, and re-sell the stolen parts. Midnight Auto adjoins a brothel operated by Duke’s girlfriend, Annie (Linda Cristal). Through convoluted circumstances, Duke gets involved with Peter (George McCallister), son of a local bigwig, and Peter’s revolutionary pal, Justin (Scott Jacoby). Together, these unlikely allies develop the aforementioned Robin Hood scheme. Explaining the details is pointless, since Polakof doesn’t worry much about consistent behavior or narrative logic, opting instead to rush from one colorful scene to the next. The picture is best when Parks occupies center stage, dispensing a darker hue of the good-ole-boy charm one normally associates with Burt Reynolds. Whether he’s barking at his sidekick (“C’mere, Stupid!”) or romancing Annie in a bathtub, Parks epitomizes southern-fried swagger. Those around him mostly flounder in search of roles to play, though everybody gets to do something cartoonish or nefarious or sexy. Long on vibe and short on everything else, Love and the Midnight Auto is a mildly enjoyable mess.

Love and the Midnight Auto Supply: FUNKY

Moonshine County Express (1977)

          Since the ’70s were rotten with drive-in flicks about rednecks hauling white lightning through the woods with cops hot on their tails, there wasn’t much left to say about the subject by the time Moonshine County Express was made. That said, the textures of this low-rent genre were so firmly established that delivering a straight recitation shouldn’t have been too difficult—especially since Moonshine County Express was issued by trash-cinema titan Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. All of which goes to explain why Moonshine County Express is vexing. The movie has the usual barrage of zippy nonsense, so it’s never boring, per se, but the storyline is so sloppy that it’s hard to tell which of the two main characters is the protagonist. After all, John Saxon gets top billing for playing a racecar driver who moonlights running ’shine, but the narrative actually hinges on the character played by Susan Howard.

          After thugs kill an aging moonshiner, his three daughters learn that he left them a secret stash of valuable Prohibition-era whiskey, so the oldest daughter, Dot Hammer (Howard), begins selling the hooch to her dad’s old customers. This gets the attention of Jack Starkey (William Conrad), the kingpin of the area’s illegal-liquor business, since he’s the one who killed the father in the first place as a means of eliminating competition. Giving the story its small measure of complexity is J.B. Johnson (Saxon), who drives for Starkey until switching sides to help the imperiled Hammer sisters. There’s also a sheriff involved, but suffice to say nothing truly surprising happens.

          Still (no pun intended), it’s possible to groove on the film’s pulpy elements. Playing the Hammer sisters, Howard, Claudia Jennings, and former Brady Bunch star Maureen McCormick add eye candy, though all of them manage to keep their clothes since this PG-rated film is tame compared to other moonshine flicks. Saxon gives an unusually casual performance, and Conrad has a blast playing a cartoony villain. (Not every movie features the enormous Cannon star in a sex-fantasy scene featuring fishing tackle.) Furthermore, Dub Taylor plays a supporting role without his frontal dentures; the rootsy soundtrack features banjos and spoons and the like; and in one party scene, a bar band renders these peculiar lyrics: “Grandma’s got syphilis, Grandpa’s deranged, and all the children had their sexes changed.”

Moonshine County Express: FUNKY

Mean Dog Blues (1978)

         Mean Dog Blues gets off to a decent start. After the AIP logo (always a promising sign), Fred Karlin’s smooth lounge-rock score accompanies credits that include these heartening words: “Scatman Crothers as Mudcat.” Shortly afterward, shaggy-haired protagonist Paul (Gregg Henry) abandons his useless car on the side of a desert road near a stand of Joshua trees by saying, “Goodbye, Old Paint,” then wanders off to his next adventure carrying only his guitar and a suitcase. By this point, viewers have learned that the cast includes George Kennedy, Kay Lenz, Tina Louise, and William Windom. As the saying goes, you had me at hello. Although it’s not exactly downhill from there, Mean Dog Blues never builds the desired head of steam. Nonetheless, it’s enjoyable in a disposable sort of a way. (Sadly, it's also homophobic, par for the course in B-movies of this vintage.)

          After dumping his car, Paul hitches a ride with Victor (Windom) and his wife, Donna (Louise). Things get tricky a few hours later, when Donna hits on Paul while Victor gets drunk at a roadside diner. Imprudently, Paul remains in their car afterward, so he’s a witness when Victor hits a 10-year-old kid. Politically connected and wealthy, Victor claims Paul was behind the wheel at the time of the accident, so Paul gets slapped with a one-to-five stretch at a prison work farm. Predictably, the commandant, Captain Omar Kinsman (Kennedy), is a sadistic redneck who cares more about the welfare of his favorite bloodthirsty Doberman, Rattler, than he does about the health of the convicts under his supervision. Paul decides the best way to survive his prison term is to take a dangerous job as a “dog nigger” (seriously, that’s the phrase used through the movie), so his work involves running through wilderness while guard dogs chase him for training exercises. Meanwhile, Paul’s wife, Linda (Lenz), agitates for his release.

          So much of the picture comprises scenes of Paul getting chased by the dogs that everything else gets pushed to the sidelines. Lenz, for instance, is barely in the movie except for a sequence during which a creepy guard bedevils her during a prison visit. The great Crothers has even less screen time. Of the film’s many underused supporting players, Louise probably comes off best because one doesn’t usually expect an adequate performance from the Artist Forever Known as Ginger. Kennedy is Kennedy, growling and stomping his way through scenes, while Henry, later a strong character actor, makes an ineffectual lead. 

Mean Dog Blues: FUNKY

Angel Unchained (1970)

          Despite going slack for a while during the middle, Angel Unchained is a fair compendium of late ’60s/early ’70s signifiers thanks a plot that combines a biker gang, hippies living on a desert commune, and nasty rednecks who don’t like either of the preceding social groups. There’s not much in the way of thematic material, beyond the protagonist’s angst when he finds himself torn between the biker and hippie lifestyles, so it’s not as if director Lee Madden and his collaborators tried to reinvent the cycle-flick formula. That said, Angel Unchained has clearly defined characters, a paucity of seedy exploitation elements, and unhurried pacing, so it’s perhaps best described as a biker picture that people who don’t normally like the genre might find palatable. By the same measure, those who groove on wild scenes of scooter freaks unleashing mayhem would do well to get their kicks elsewhere, since Angel Unchained is tame by the genre’s normal standards. There’s a fair amount of brawling and drinking and riding, but the leading character is a thoughtful dude who takes a principled stand, rather than an outlaw who stirs up trouble by antagonizing authorities.

          The picture starts stylishly with a rumble at an amusement park, and then Angel (Don Stroud) says he’s ready to quit the biker-gang scene. He relinquishes leadership of his gang to Pilot (Larry Bishop), then hits the road until he encounters hippie chick Merilee (Tyne Daly). After Angel helps her out during a hassle with rednecks who dislike having a commune near their town, Merilee invites Angel to groove on their back-to-nature trip a while. Later, when the rednecks make serious trouble, Angel recruits his old biker pals for help, leading to an interesting strange-bedfellows passage during which the bikers and the hippies attempt coexistence. Nothing surprising happens in Angel Unchained, but the picture is shot fairly well, and the performances generally hit the right notes, although it’s peculiar to see Luke Askew—who usually played scumbags and thugs in the ’70s—portraying the leader of the hippie commune. That said, the scumbag quotient is more than amply filled by character actor Bill McKinney, who plays a violent biker named Shotgun with his usual gleeful menace.

Angel Unchained: FUNKY

Smokey and the Hotwire Gang (1979)

Wretched nonsense involving criminals, hookers, and truckers, Smokey and the Hotwire Gang is passable only as the cinematic equivalent of background noise—it contains just enough action, lowbrow humor, and sex to hold the attention of undemanding viewers so long as they’re doing something else while the movie is running. The discombobulated plot seems to have two major elements. In one, amiable rednecks Filbert (Tony Lorea) and Joshua (James Keach) share criminal misadventures, mostly to do with stealing vehicles. In the other major element, a madam nicknamed “Hotwire” (Carla Ziegfeld) augments her skin-trade income by selling stolen cars. There’s also some sleazy business involving two prostitutes who prowl the countryside in a tricked-out, cowboy-themed Winnebego they call “The Westerner” while offering their services to truckers via CB radio and using the handles “Sexy Sadie” and “Sweet Cakes.” Eventually, all of these things coalesce during a shabby attempt at a madcap finale, because Smokey and the Hotwire Gang is supposed to be a comedy. No matter the genre, the picture is chaotic, disoriented, and sloppy. The movie also looks and sounds awful, thanks to grungy cinematography, jumpy editing, and a rotten soundtrack combining bad country tunes with even worse disco songs. Adding insult to injury, the flick is so tame it bears a PG rating, meaning that anyone looking for cheap thrills during the prostitution scenes will be disappointed. About the only fleetingly enjoyable things in Smokey and the Hotwire Gang are snippets of weird dialogue, as when a trucker identifies himself as “Texas Levy, the Kosher Cowboy,” or when a redneck exclaims, “I haven’t seen anything take off like that since that kid put acid on a cat’s ass.”

Smokey and the Hotwire Gang: LAME

Country Blue (1973)

The lovers-0n-the-run saga Country Blue has abundant local flavor, immersing viewers in the sweaty everyday reality of life among poor folks in rural Georgia, but that’s the only kind thing one can say about the picture. Amateurish and boring, Country Blue tracks the exploits of a young man who is unwilling to work for a living and angry that the world demands he must do so. Further aggrieved by having served time in prison after committing a crime, the young man rails against the constraints of small-town life even though a crusty old mechanic provides employment and the mechanic’s pretty daughter provides companionship. In sum, Country Blue is the character study of an asshole. Had a dangerously charming actor been cast in the starring role, the desired illusion of a romantic rebel might have been put across, but leading man Jack Conrad—who also cowrote, produced, directed, and edited this film, earning his only credits in many of these craft areas—is a hopelessly generic screen presence. With his lackadaisical manner and his quiet drawl, he seems like some random dude who wandered in front of the camera, not a professional actor. Viewers are likely to be just as disappointed by Conrad’s costar, Rita George; she adds nothing to her generic girlfriend role, essaying a character so passive that watching her drift indecisively through scenes quickly becomes irritating. The film’s top-billed actor is reliable big-screen coot Dub Taylor, playing the aforementioned mechanic. Watching Taylor chortle and scowl his way through scenes, wearing an undersized ballcap and sweat-stained T-shirts while casually spewing epithets about blacks and gays, one can only marvel at the effortlessness of Taylor’s acting, even if a little of his cantankerous shtick goes a long way.

Country Blue: LAME

Poor Pretty Eddie (1975)

          Viewed from a rational perspective, the hard-to-classify exploitation flick Poor Pretty Eddie is pure trash, combining showbiz ennui with murder, rape, and stereotypes. Viewed from a more adventurous perspective, watching Poor Pretty Eddie is like patronizing an all-you-can-eat buffet with nothing but junk food—everything might seem tasty at first, but indigestion is sure to follow. The loopy plot begins with African-American pop singer Liz Wetherly (Leslie Uggams) taking a break from the celebrity grind. Unwisely venturing alone into the Deep South, Liz experiences car failure near a roadside motel/restaurant, so she walks onto the property—even though it looks like a junkyard—to seek help. First Liz meets hulking handyman Keno (Ted Cassidy). Then she meets handsome but smarmy Eddie (Michael Christian), the kept man of the facility's owner, Bertha (Shelley Winters). Despite many red flags, Liz sees no choice but to stay until Eddie and Keno fix her car. This draws her into a sordid situation.

          Aging and overweight, Bertha runs her place like a fiefdom and builds her life around Eddie, even though she doubts his loyalty. Sure enough, Eddie lusts after Liz and rapes her the first night she's in the motel. Liz confronts Bertha with this information the next morning. That’s when things get really ugly: Bertha’s okay with Eddie using Liz as a plaything so long as that keeps him docile. When Liz seeks help from local authorities—grotesque rednecks played by Dub Taylor and Slim Pickens—her nightmare escalates.

          Even with this potboiler of a plot, Poor Pretty Eddie wanders into tangential weirdness at regular intervals, notably Eddie’s inept, Elvis-inflected performance of a country song. Furthermore, certain scenes include trippy intercutting and superimpositions, vignettes of gruesome violence are rendered in loving slow-motion, and the overarching aesthetic is surpassingly vulgar. In the most extreme sequence, shots of Eddie raping Liz are intercut with shots of rednecks forcing pigs to have sex, all to the accompaniment of a folksy love song. Oddly, the film’s performances are not as gonzo as the storytelling. Winters does her usual share of screaming, but she also imbues her pathetic characterization with a measure of pathos. Similarly, Christian’s portrayal of Eddie has a disquieting little-boy-lost element even though Eddie is unquestionably a monster. As for Uggams, she works a straightforward exploitation-flick groove while tracking a victim-turns-violent arc, lending Poor Pretty Eddie a touch of blaxploitation attitude.

          All of this makes for a strange vibe, and not a pleasant one; Poor Pretty Eddie is fascinating in that old can't-look-away-from-a-traffic-accident sort of way. Weirder still? The film’s producers, capping what appears to have been a wild production experience, released Poor Pretty Eddie in several different versions under multiple titles, including an almost completely re-conceived and re-edited cut bearing the name Heartbreak Motel. After all, it’s better to recycle trash than to simply throw the stuff away, right?

Poor Pretty Eddie: FREAKY

Bad Georgia Road (1977)

While some viewers might enjoy huffing Bad Georgia Road as a straight shot of clichéd moonshine-cinema stupidity, the picture is unimpressive even by the low standards of its drive-in-friendly genre. Yes, Bad Georgia Road has betrayal, brawls, chases, drunkenness, sex, shotguns, skinny-dipping, and nearly every other signifier associated with ’70s redneck flicks. What it lacks, however, is spunk. Whereas the best moonshine flicks roar through the backwoods on overdrive, Bad Georgia Road ambles through the same territory in a frustratingly low gear. Carol Lynley plays bitchy New Yorker Molly Golden, who inherits an estate in rural Georgia. Told she can cash out the estate for $100,000 if she shows up in person to sign papers, Molly quits her job and drives to Georgia. Upon arrival, Molly realizes she’s been duped—a lawyer persuades her to sign over the $100K to creditors, so her real inheritance comprises a decaying house, a few acres of land, and a ramshackle moonshine operation. Left with no options, Molly takes over the operation and clashes with her driver, Leroy Hastings (Gary Lockwood), an alcoholic womanizer. Predictably, other local moonshiners declare war on Molly’s operation. As B-movie setups go, this isn’t bad. Unfortunately, Lynley is shrill and uninteresting in the leading role, while Lockwood is questionable as her loutish compatriot. His accent is dodgy, his mannerisms are cartoonish, and he seems bored in most scenes. Everything in Bad Georgia Road feels trite, and the Taming of the Shrew dynamic between the leading characters is so retrograde as to seem grotesque. After all, Bad Georgia Road is one of those icky “lighthearted” movies in which the hero seduces the heroine by raping her. Thanks, but no thanks.

Bad Georgia Road: LAME

Texas Detour (1978)

Texas Detour is not without its low pleasures. The contrived story of three Californians who become victims while trapped in a small town, the picture is predicated on stereotypes and stupidity, as per the norm for drive-in schlock. Yet the movie knows just which lizard-brain responses to provoke, so the evil guys do evil things, the heroic characters do heroic things, and the sexy starlet gets naked. There’s also an abundance of vehicular action, including a couple of dirt-bike scenes. Much of this is set to original songs by Flo & Eddie, formerly of the Turtles, whose tunes mimic popular Me Decade musical styles. (One number, “The Big Showdown,” is a fair simulacrum of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run vibe.) Alas, the picture’s shortcomings greatly outnumber its trashy thrills. The story begins with the McCarthy siblings—twentysomething Clay (Patrick Wayne) and teenagers Dale (Mitch Vogel) and Sugar (Lindsay Bloom)—venturing from L.A. to Nashville, where Clay has a job doing stunt work on a movie shoot. The McCarthys are run off the road by crooks who steal their van, so the siblings hitch a ride with creepy redneck Beau Hunter (Anthony James). After even creepier Sheriff Burt (R.G. Armstrong) takes their crime report, the McCarthys accept an offer of hospitality from Beau, who lives on the ranch owned by his dad, John (Cameron Mitchell). While on the ranch, Clay falls for Beau’s sister, Claudia (Priscilla Barnes), even as circumstances wend inevitably toward Beau raping Sugar. Reprisals ensue. As in their other films of the same period, Barnes is ornamental and Wayne is wooden, so it falls to Armstrong and James to inject Texas Detour with individuality. There’s only so much they can do, seeing as how the movie’s dialogue was apparently composed for the benefit of viewers perplexed by language past the first-grade level.

Texas Detour: LAME

Whiskey Mountain (1977)

          If you’re willing to trudge through this drive-in flick’s tedious first half, Whiskey Mountain eventually becomes a florid and violent Deliverance rip-off, complete with an unexpected drug angle. All the familiar clichés are here, from deranged hillbilly weirdos to gang rape, and the storyline is predicated on both stereotypes and the stupidity of protagonists who venture into places they know are dangerous. Yet there’s a certain vigor to the picture’s second half, with prolific B-movie actor Christopher George delivering most of his lines through gritted teeth and, in the finale, storming an enemy stronghold with a shotgun in each hand. Suffice to say, this picture was not designed to challenge viewers’ intellectual faculties. The story begins when two couples—Bill (George) and Jamie (Linda Borgeson), Dan (Preston Pierce) and Diana (Roberta Collins)—head into a Southern mountain range looking for a priceless cache of Civil War-era rifles. The couples have dirt bikes for transportation. Even though the behavior of locals grows more and more threatening as the couples transition from civilization to rural enclaves, they press forward, driven by adventurousness and greed. Per the Deliverance formula, things take a dark turn once the couples reach the vicinity of their ultimate destination, Whiskey Mountain, home turf for a gang of redneck criminals led by the menacing Rudy (John Davis Chandler).

          As noted earlier, the first half of the picture is almost interminable, with lots of repetitive musical montages showcasing dirt bikes as they zoom through forests. The scenery is pretty and some of the tunes (including a few originals by the Charlie Daniels Band) have spunk, but cowriter/director William Grefe has zero control over the film’s tone. Instead of conveying ever-present danger, Grefe wastes time on bland travelogue footage and flimsy buddy-humor scenes. However, once mysterious bad guys cut the cables on a rope-drawn raft over rough water, nearly sending one of the couples to their doom, the movie transitions to a livelier predators-vs.-victims style. The acting in Whiskey Mountain is never more than serviceable, and the plot machinations toward the end are so far-fetched as to be almost laughable. Nonetheless, it’s novel to see an evil-hillbilly flick that isn’t about moonshine or pointless savagery, since the villains in Whiskey Mountain wreak havoc in order to protect a profitable enterprise.

Whiskey Mountain: FUNKY

Black Oak Conspiracy (1977)

          A redneck revenge saga that delivers the meat-and-taters goods while making a few admirable if clumsy attempts at characterization, Black Oak Conspiracy starts strong, lags in the middle, and wraps up with a colorful finale set at an outdoor mine. Viewers will not encounter anything here they haven’t seen before, and none of the actors does anything special. That said, Black Oak Conspiracy goes down smoothly because it evades certain clichés (don’t look for moonshiners in this story), and because leading man Jesse Vint, who also cowrote and coproduced the picture, knows that what people want from this sort of picture is a simple saga about a good ole boy who gets pushed too far and then pushes back. Specifically, Vint—who earned his redneck-cinema bona fides by starring in Macon County Line (1974)—stars as Jingo Johnson, a country boy trying to make a living in Hollywood as a stuntman. When he gets word that his mother has fallen ill, he heads back to his rural hometown and tries to reconnect with his high-school sweetheart, Lucy Metcalf (Karen Carlson). Unfortunately, she’s moved on to a relationship with Harrison Hancock (Robert F. Lyons), son of the richest man in town, power-monger Bryan Hancock (Douglas Fowley). Worse, Jingo discovers that his mother has fallen victim to a conspiracy aimed at stealing land. Is a corrupt sheriff involved? Of course a corrupt sheriff is involved.

          While Vint and Carlson are relatively ineffectual as leading players, some of the supporting actors make tasty contributions. Unlikely as it may seem, one of John Cassavetes’ favorite actors, Seymour Cassel, appears as Jingo’s old buddy, and Cassel adds a bit of humanity. Reliable character actor Albert Salmi imbues the sheriff character with appropriate levels of rage and violence, and sexy starlet Janus Blythe ups the film’s eye-candy quotient as a waitress who helps Jingo fight the bad guys. The movie even provides a few nasty flashes of gore when one of the characters goes on a killing spree, so it’s clear the filmmakers endeavored to tick as many B-movie boxes as possible. The folks behind Black Oak Conspiracy may not have set out to make art, but they sure aimed to please their target audience.

Black Oak Conspiracy: FUNKY

Hot Summer in Barefoot County (1974)

Even if one accepts as a thesis that ’70s movies about moonshiners rarely charted new intellectual terrain, Hot Summer in Barefoot County is extraordinarily stupid—so much so that it seems as if the filmmakers forgot their own plot about 20 minutes into the picture. Despite being presented with the incompetent acting, sludgy imagery, and twitchy editing of the worst low-budget junk, the opening of the picture presents an adequate B-movie premise: Moonshiners have gotten the best of local authorities in rural Barefoot County, so a Southern-bred government agent is sent there to work undercover. Yet as soon as the agent arrives, he gets into a car accident and is recovered and nursed to health by a backwoods matriarch and her three sexy daughters. The agent recuperates quickly but then spends all of his time romancing one of the daughters, periodically calling back to the office to claim that he’s making progress even though he barely ever does any investigating. In fact, just about his only crime-fighting activity involves saving his favorite gal from an attempted rape after a bunch of hopped-up rednecks watch her and her sisters skinny-dipping. Yes, this is the sort of picture in which women are largely portrayed as oblivious sex objects, and in one scene the daughters annoy their mama by trying to paint the family’s moonshine still pink as a means of alleviating their boredom. Alas, nothing can alleviate viewers’ boredom while enduring Hot Summer in Barefoot County, which is basically coherent but so plotless that following the story is like trying to grab vapors. Besides the eye candy of shapely women in barely-there costumes, the only quasi-noteworthy element of Hot Summer in Barefoot County is the presence in the cast of actor Jeff MacKay, who later enjoyed a long small-screen career with recurring roles in Black Sheep Squadron; Magnum, P.I.; and JAG.

Hot Summer in Barefoot County: LAME

Nymph (1975)

Before he found his niche making TV shows and family-friendly features, director William Dear worked in exploitation cinema, though he displayed no flair for generating trash. Consider Dear’s wretched debut feature, Nymph, a meandering drama about a young man who ventures into the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in order to collect his father from a hunting trip because of a family emergency. An attractive young woman tags along for the voyage, though she’s hardly the sexpot described in the movie’s title; quite to the contrary, she’s inhibited by ’70s standards, refraining from intimacy until after she spends several days with her respectful would-be paramour. In fact, the only real sex in the movie, despite the come-on moniker, is a rape scene that happens inside the protagonist’s mind. Yet the lack of saucy content is hardly the biggest problem with this ineptly edited picture. Vast stretches of Nymph comprise shots of animals, bridges, cars, forests, trailers—really any old damn thing that captured Dear’s pictorial fancy—juxtaposed with rotten songs and/or voiceover tracks. Maybe 25 percent of the picture includes actual synchronized sound. And except for the bit when the protagonist and his girl run afoul of rednecks, virtually nothing happens. Dear cuts between dull scenes of the young couple chatting as they drive and even duller scenes of the protagonist’s father wandering through the woods, thinking aloud (by way of voiceover) about the elusive 16-point deer he wants to kill. Nymph is a numbingly uninteresting barrage of disassociated vignettes culminating in an ending so cryptic as to be pointless. The fact that Dear was able to build a career from such humble beginnings is remarkable.

Nymph: SQUARE

Hooch (1977)

Before vapid leading man Gil Gerard found his signature role in the campy TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981), he appeared in a handful of movies and TV shows, none of which did much to elevate his stardom or to establish Gerard as a talent worthy of serious attention. Nonetheless, his productivity earned Gerard sufficient stature to claim behind-the-scenes involvement in some of his projects, such as the flavorless and plodding moonshine saga Hooch, for which Gerard served as cowriter and coproducer in addition to playing the starring role. A dull recitation of redneck-cinema clichés that’s populated by one-dimensional stereotypes instead of characters, Hooch is as bereft of entertainment value as it is of original ideas. It’s also poorly made, with anemic character introductions, shoddy transitions, and an undernourished musical score. More than anything, Hooch suffers from a lack of urgency, with the pacing of the movie feeling as laid-back as Gerard’s screen persona. The most that one can say is that Hooch is tolerable, but even mustering that much praise requires effort. It's all just so empty and trite. Gerard plays Eddie Joe, a moonshiner mired in competition with beardy and corpulent Old Bill (William T. Hicks). Eddie Joe juggles relationships with two women, one of whom is Bill's daughter, so we’re meant to perceive him as an irresistible charmer who enjoys living dangerously. The fun-and-games period of Eddie Joe's life ends when New York City gangster Tony (Danny Aiello) arrives as a lead man for crooks seeking to enter the moonshine business. Intrigue of a dimwitted sort ensues. So, too, do unnecessary scenes like the bit of Gerard and costar Melody Rogers performing a country song onstage at a hoedown. Aiello, appearing fairly early in his long career, keeps things lively during his scenes by rendering an over-the-top caricature of a goodfella. Reason enough to watch the flick? Not hardly.

Hooch: LAME