The Death Squad (1974)

          Minor telefilm The Death Squad shouldn’t merit any attention—the story is so compressed that it feels as if pieces are missing, and the basic premise appeared in the previous year’s hit Dirty Harry movie Magnum Force. Yet good performances, especially Robert Forster’s emotionally committed turn in the leading role, make The Death Squad watchable. If nothing else, the picture provides a poignant reminder that something was lost when Forster’s career failed to gain momentum in his early years as a screen performer. While it’s true he was prone to robotic performances when saddled with sketchy material, moments in The Death Squad remind viewers what he could do when he tried. He’s more poignant here than the situation demands or deserves.
          Forster plays Eric Benoit, a cop tasked with identifying rogue officers responsible for vigilante killings of crooks who got off on technicalities. Although this setup prompts a handful of chases and shootouts, the main focus of The Death Squad is Benoit wrestling with divided loyalties. How deep a rot will he discover in his department? What happens when he learns that a cop who screwed him over in the past is part of the vigilante group? Will digging into the origins of the vigilante group reveal secrets that hit Benoit even more personally? To their credit, the makers of The Death Squad raise all of these questions—and to their shame, the makers of The Death Squad provide satisfactory answers to only a few of those questions. This is the sort of malnourished narrative in which the nominal female lead, played by Michelle Phillips, could have been excised from the storyline and her absence wouldn’t have been felt.
          Nonetheless, the stuff that works in The Death Squad is entertainingly melodramatic and pulpy. Claude Akins, who plays the heavy, provides a potent mixture of menace and swagger. Character actors including George Murdock, Dennis Patrick, Bert Remsen, and Kenneth Tobey lend color to small roles, while the great Melvyn Douglas classes up the joint by playing Benoit’s mentor in a few brief scenes. On the technical side, the picture benefits from unfussy camerawork and a rubbery jazz/funk score in the Lalo Schifrin mode (more shades of the Dirty Harry movies). Best of all, actors and filmmakers play the lurid material completely straight, so every so often a scene—usually involving Forster—provides a glimmer of the great Roger Corman drive-in thriller The Death Squad should have been. Ah, well. We’ll always have Akins.

The Death Squad: FUNKY

1980 Week: Alligator

          A highly enjoyable creature feature that revels in its own derivative nature and that occasionally feels like a real movie instead of a drive-in schlockfest, Alligator was one of the three above-average monster flicks that John Sayles penned during his breakout period, when he alternated between gun-for-hire gigs and early directorial efforts. Like Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1981), this movie conveys a strong sense of self-awareness, often simultaneously perpetuating horror-cinema clichés and winking at them. If nothing else, Alligator is almost certainly the best movie that anyone could have made on the basis of a ridiculous urban myth. The myth in question involves the notion that baby alligators adopted as pets survive in sewers after being flushed away by owners who discard the animals, growing to gigantic size beneath city streets.

          Sayles’ fanciful script adds a sci-fi flourish to this premise, tracking the lifespan of a particular baby alligator who survives by consuming animal carcasses that are illegally dumped from a laboratory conducting experiments on how to genetically increase the size of animals. Thus, once the titular creature begins his inevitable rampage, he’s a 37-foot mutant with a nasty disposition and a super-tough hide. Borrowing more than a few tropes from Jaws (1975), Sayles contrives an opponent who at first glance seems ill-equipped for defeating a gigantic monster—disgraced and unlucky policeman David Madison (Robert Forster). Once the alligator begins eating people in Chicago, David investigates and actually sees the alligator, reporting the amazing discovery to his superiors and receiving only disbelief and ridicule in return. Undaunted, David seeks help from a scientific expert, just as Sheriff Brody does in Jaws, so he teams up with reptile researcher Marisa Kendall (Robin Riker). Adding a bit of pathos to the mix, it turns out Robin owned the monstrous alligator when she was a little girl, and she was helpless to stop her parents from flushing the critter down the shitter. And later, just like in Jaws, concerned officials hire a grizzled hunter, Colonel Brock (Henry Silva), to wipe out the monster.

          Yes, it’s all very by-the-numbers, and some of the FX shots used to convey the scale of the monster are questionable. But as directed by the capable editor-turned-filmmaker Lewis Teague, who previously collaborated with Sayles on the potent crime picture The Lady in Red (1979), Alligator hums along nicely, bouncing from enjoyably creepy sewer scenes in which the monster is barely seen to outrageous above-ground sequences featuring the giant gator chomping on people. Forster grounds the piece with an appealingly grumpy characterization, and Sayles ensures that gentle sight gags and verbal humor complement the bloodshed. An almost completely unrelated sequel, Alligator II: The Mutation, was released in 1991 to universal scorn.

Alligator: FUNKY

Journey Through Rosebud (1972)

          A well-intentioned meditation on the plight of the modern Native American that can’t quite lock into a storyline worthy of its themes, Journey Through Rosebud scores a few decent emotional hits but fails to make a lasting impression. The title describes a young man’s visit to the South Dakota town of Rosebud, and the lack of a hidden meaning in the title reflects an overall dearth of literary ambition. If the apex of narrative reach is a grand statement, then Journey Through Rosebud is a small assertion at best.
          Fresh-faced Kristoffer Tabori plays Danny, a longhaired draft dodger hitching his way through the American West. One day, he happens upon an Indian reservation, where he befriends bespectacled drunk Frank (Robert Forster). Although Frank is the nominal chief of his tribe simply by dint of heredity, Frank is so consumed with despair and self-loathing that he’s unwilling to comport himself with dignity, much less assume the mantle of leadership. Danny watches various white people abuse, cheat, and humiliate the Native Americans living in Rosebud, so Danny and Frank engage in philosophical discussions about one’s responsibility to combat injustice. Sometimes Frank assumes moral high ground because he performed military service, accepting a burden that young Danny shuns, and sometimes Frank undercuts himself with pathetic episodes of brawling and public drunkenness. Meanwhile, pretty Native American woman Shirley (Victoria Racimo) gets caught in the middle—when the story begins, she’s Frank’s lover, and when the story ends, she’s taken up with Danny. This being a bleeding-heart ’70s drama, everything builds toward a tragic climax that’s meant to be laden with emotion and meaning.
          While director Tom Gries stages scenes with his usual competence, Albert Ruben’s plodding script precludes the creation of genuine cinematic energy. Neither the circumstances nor the stakes of the story are made especially clear, and the character relationships feel writer-convenient. What keeps blood pumping through the movie’s veins are the performances, although even those are underwhelming. Tabori incarnates an acceptable if unimaginative vision of the arrogant youth who talks a good line about questioning authority even though he takes very little action, while Forster captures the dejected quality of his character without fully revealing the warrior that the script implies is buried inside Frank’s soul. So even though Journey Through Rosebud is more restrained than, say, Billy Jack (1971), it is yet another flawed attempt by Hollywood to dramatize the challenging realities of life on the rez circa the volatile American Indian Movement era.

Journey Through Rosebud: FUNKY

Cover Me Babe (1970)

          Released around the same time that real-life graduates from film schools began finding purchase in Hollywood, Cover Me Babe adroitly captures several interesting things—the influence of European aesthetics on young American directors, the insufferable quality of arrogant counterculture dudes, and the tensions running through academia because of clashes between new ideas and old-fashioned attitudes. The movie is ultimately somewhat less than the sum of its parts, because watching leading man Robert Forster play a heartless asshole for 90 minutes isn’t that much fun, and because the story lacks momentum. Nonetheless, Cover Me Babe evokes a specific time thanks to a tasty mixture of angst, art, and erotica. Forster plays Tony Hall, a prize-winning student at a Southern California film school. Best known for an experimental film peppered with nudity and surrealism, Tony is nearing graduation and is considered the frontrunner for another big award, which presumably will open the gates of Hollywood.

          Yet Tony resents everything connected with authority and convention, so over the course of the film, he burns every bridge that he had previously built. Tony destroys his relationship with a professor he sarcastically calls “Uncle Will” (Robert Fields), because the professor has the temerity to demand that Tony submit a script for his thesis project. Tony humiliates his sensitive girlfriend, Melissa (Sondra Locke), by commencing an affair with busty coed Sybil (Susanne Benton), and then Tony does a number on Sybil by asking her to have sex, on-camera, with their mutual friend Ronnie (Floyd Mutrux), who is ashamed of being gay and wants to make a go at heterosexual relations. While all this is happening, Tony wanders through Los Angeles with his trusty 16mm camera, stealing footage of strangers: a mother wailing in grief after her young son drowns at the beach, a depressed man jumping off a building, and so on. Tony also stages several shocking scenes, at one point hiring a female prostitute to masturbate on-camera. Eventually, Tony assembles the footage into an abrasive but pointtless montage that, he claims, illustrates the despair of life. (For punctuation, Tony inserts stock footage of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot by Jack Ruby.)

          Headstrong boundary-pushers of Tony’s ilk are staples of film school, and many of them become interesting directors, so there’s a measure of authenticity in George Wells’ script. Additionally, director Noel Black (who peaked early with the fantastic 1968 teen noir Pretty Poison), approaches the material with artistry and craftsmanship, applying lyrical touches to sex scenes, and two songs by soft-rock band Bread give the picture unmistakable early-’70s atmosphere. In the end, however, Cover Me Babe is strangely uninvolving, which is partially attributable to Foster’s chilly performance and partially attributable to the off-putting nature of the lead character’s journey. Believable as the notion of a self-destructive diva may be, it’s a challenge to stay engaged while Tony inflicts pointless psychological wounds and recklessly squanders opportunities.

Cover Me Babe: FUNKY

Stunts (1977)

          Gonzo director Richard Rush has opined that during the long gestation periods of his film projects, disreputable producers frequently copied his ideas and created lesser versions that diminished his box-office potential. Watching Stunts, which bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Rush’s demented drama The Stunt Man (1980), it’s tempting to give Rush’s complaint credence. Like The Stunt Man, Stunts depicts an out-of-control film shoot on which a maniacal director’s quest for spectacle endangers the lives of stunt performers. Yet the similarities mostly end there, since The Stunt Man is as deep as Stunts is shallow. Stretching credibility way past the breaking point, Stunts implies that authorities would allow production to continue after not one but three on-set deaths, and that authorities would be content letting macho stuntmen investigate the mortalities. Just because Stunts is silly, however, doesn’t mean the movie lacks entertainment value. The various stunt scenes, including falls from tremendous heights and tricky automotive gags, are staged and filmed well, with hack director Mark L. Lester employing a range of stylish camera angles and maximizing tension through the use of brisk editing. Furthermore, the production values are slightly more than adequate, and it’s always fun to see behind-the-scenes footage showcasing what movie sets looked like back in the day.
          Atop all that, Stunts shamelessly panders to audience expectations with such clichéd characters as the lone-wolf stud, the nosy reporter, the obnoxious director, and the tweaked special-effects guy. Incarnating these one-dimensional roles is a fun ensemble cast comprising offbeat men and sexy women. Robert Forster, at his most endearingly indifferent, stars as a heroic stunt man investigating the death of his brother. Portraying his fellow daredevils are Joanna Cassidy (Blade Runner), Bruce Glover (Diamonds Are Forever), and Richard Lynch (The Sword and the Sorcerer), among others. Meanwhile, petite blonde Candice Rialson and sultry brunette Fiona Lewis play the women romancing Forster’s character, while veteran character actor Malachi Throne appears as the overbearing director. Alas, none of these actors is given a single original moment to play—beyond the trite elements already mentioned, Stunts features a starlet sleeping her way to the top and a scene of macho dudes honoring a pact by pulling a paralyzed pal off life support. Nonetheless, the movie’s colorful milieu, impressive stunts, and zippy pace make for 90 minutes of pleasant viewing.

Stunts: FUNKY

Pieces of Dreams (1970)

          Ordinary in every way, this drama explores the moral conflicts experienced by a priest who questions his faith. Specifically, young and handsome Father Gregory Lind (Robert Forster), who is assigned to a small neighborhood parish in Albuquerque, struggles with issues like the Vatican’s opposition to birth control, since a 15-year-old girl in his parish becomes pregnant and needs an abortion for medical reasons. Concurrently, Father Gregory meets Pamela Gibson (Lauren Hutton), a beautiful social worker, so temptations of the flesh compound his angst. Although the birth-control subplot is pointed and worthwhile, the romance storyline, which takes greater prominence, is predictable and trite.

          Nonetheless, Pieces of Dreams gets points for trying to tell its story in a grown-up sort of way. Father Gregory’s crisis is depicted methodically, with each step along his journey logically suggesting the next, and the revelation that his priesthood defines his relationship with his mother goes a long way toward individualizing the character. Furthermore, the subplot about Father Lind’s tense relationship with his immediate superior, Father Paul Schaeffer (Ivor Francis), provides a vivid glimpse into the everyday lives of priests. Schaeffer is a domineering, judgmental racist who expects the people around him to ignore his periodic lapses into alcoholic stupor—one can understand Father Gregory’s frustrated reactions.

          Unfortunately, for all its good intentions, Pieces of Dreams suffers from lifeless acting and writing. The screenplay’s tone is so matter-of-fact that very little dramatic heat is generated, and love story is woefully underdeveloped. Hutton, the former model appearing in only her second movie, mistakes intensity for acting, so she comes across as sullen instead of substantial. And Forster, who later became a wonderful character actor, is virtually catatonic: His performance is so restrained that everyone else around him, even the nonactors playing bit parts, is more interesting. His performance, and the movie as a whole, perk up slightly during a final exchange with a powerful bishop (Will Geer), but getting that far requires a great deal of patience on the viewer’s part. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Pieces of Dreams: FUNKY

The Don Is Dead (1973)

Even as Italian-American auteurs Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese reimagined the gangster genre in the early ’70s, other filmmakers cranked out perfectly serviceable mob thrillers of a more conventional nature. The Don Is Dead is a good example, since it’s a brisk potboiler that lacks much in the way of artistic ambition but still gets the down-and-dirty job done with a florid mixture of intrigue, sex, and violence. Anthony Quinn, overripe as always but effectively cast, stars as Don Angelo, leader of a powerful gang. When his mistress (Angel Tompkins) is murdered, Don Angelo orders his soldiers to go on a killing spree, sparking a war among various factions angling for power. Eventually, as the title suggests, Don Angelo gets caught in the crossfire, and the most effective stretch of the picture depicts the crime lord scheming from a secret hiding place while his enemies think he’s been taken out of commission. Based on a novel by Marvin H. Albert and directed by versatile workhorse Richard Fleischer, The Don Is Dead offers acres and acres of tasty ’70s texture. The clothes are all big lapels and synthetic fabrics, the locations are gritty, and the action is nasty. Fredrick Forrest stands out among the cast as an enforcer-for-hire who works alongside his brother; his energetic performance captures the melodramatic spirit of the piece. Robert Forster, working a nice blend of seething and suave, is good as well, playing an ambitious junior mobster trying to climb the organized-crime ladder no matter who gets hurt along the way. There’s even some crossover with The Godfather, which hit theaters about a year and a half before The Don Is Dead, because character actors including Al Lettieri and Abe Vigoda appear in both films. The Don Is Dead doesn’t break any new ground, but it works.

The Don Is Dead: FUNKY

The Black Hole (1979)

          By the late ’70s, a decade after Walt Disney’s death, the movie company bearing his name had lost the marketplace dominance it enjoyed during Walt’s heyday. Although the animation division remained adrift until 1989, Disney’s live-action unit began a brief but daring creative renaissance in 1979. That’s when the studio jumped onto the Star Wars bandwagon with The Black Hole, a dark sci-fi adventure story boasting opulent special effects and a memorably brooding music score by the great John Barry. The story involves a wonderfully absurd contrivance: In the year 2130, a deep-space exploration ship encounters a black hole and discovers that a long-lost spaceship, the Cygnus, is somehow locked in a permanent orbit over the mouth of the black hole. Our intrepid heroes enter the Cygnus and discover that megalomaniacal scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) controls the ship with an army of robots. When Reinhardt tries to shanghai the heroes into participating in a mad scheme, they rebel and trigger a chain of events that sends all of the movie’s main characters plunging into the black hole.

          The story is goofy and turgid, and the clumsiest fingerprint of the Disney brand is the presence of cutesy robots including the wide-eyed V.I.N.CENT (voiced by Roddy McDowall). Furthermore, the acting and dialogue are laughably wooden, with unfortunate leading players Joseph Bottoms, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Forster, Yvette Mimieux, and Anthony Perkins effortlessly upstaged by Schell, who works a florid Bond-villain groove. (Flattening the overwrought performance styles of both Borgnine and Perkins is a dubious sort of accomplishment.) As a piece of dramatic art, The Black Hole is, well, a black hole. As a compendium of vivid sensations, however, the picture is memorable. Barry’s music is grandiose and malevolent, expressing the vastness of space in such a powerful way that many scenes are genuinely unnerving. Some of the old-school optical effects are breathtaking, with exquisitely detailed spaceship models faring better than inconsistent greenscreen work.
          The Black Hole also boasts one of the weirdest climaxes in mainstream sci-fi cinema—a grim, phantasmagorical sequence illustrating the trippy horrors hidden inside the titular phenomenon. To say there’s disharmony between cutesy robots and a 2001-style head trip is an understatement, but if you’re an imaginative viewer willing to pick and choose which parts of this movie to enjoy, you’ll discover many superficial pleasures, as well as a few surreal ones.

The Black Hole: FUNKY

Avalanche (1978)

Once producer Irwin Allen became Hollywood’s master of disaster by cranking out spectacles like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), a slew of copycat titles seemed inevitable. Yet only a handful of disaster movies in the true Allen mode were made without his involvement, probably because the buy-in for ensemble casts of faded Hollywood stars and for extensive special effects daunted low-rent outfits. The inability to acquire proper production resources never daunted producer Roger Corman, however, so in 1978 the world was subjected to his nearly unwatchable production Avalanche, a pathetic attempt to mimic Allen’s style of meshing melodrama with mayhem. Suffice to say that the picture’s tacky mixture of bargain-basement FX and ski-resort stock footage doesn’t exactly create a persuasive illusion, and suffice to say that none of the actors involved distinguishes themselves. The big names slumming in this tedious flick are Mia Farrow and Rock Hudson, with B-movie stalwart Robert Forster and Hollywood veteran Jeanette Nolan along for the ride. Hudson plays, predictably enough, the irresponsible owner of a ski resort who rebuffs warnings that his facility is built on dangerous ground. Yes, it’s that sort of disaster movie, which doesn’t even pretend to be anything except a rote recitation of tropes from the Allen playbook. Offering nothing of interest in terms of action, character, drama, spectacle, or suspense, the movie isn’t even entertaining enough to satisfy ’70s disaster-movie completists, an undemanding population of which I am, for good or ill, a longtime representative. When a disaster movie makes Earthquake seem like a nuanced classic by comparison, you know it’s more of a disaster than a movie.

Avalanche: SQUARE