Timber Tramps (1975)

          Old-fashioned, predictable, and shallow, Timber Tramps features a rare leading performance by burly character actor Claude Akins, who plays a tough logger heading a crew of roving laborers during a season of hard work in Alaska. While the film’s strongest element is extensive location photography—countless shots depict trees felled by axes, explosives, saws, and tractors—Timber Tramps also features a plot, or at least the slenderest approximation of one. The gist is that Matt (Akins) assembles a team of muscular dudes after learning of a lumber concern in Alaska that needs help. Soon Matt discovers that the proprietor of the company is his old flame, and that a young man in her employ is her son, the date of his birth roughly coincidental to the last time she and Matt were together. Yep, everything about Timber Tramps is painfully obvious, right down to cartoonish vignettes of baddies played by Joseph Cotten and Cesar Romero discussing plans to sabotage the lumber concern.

          At the beginning of the story, Matt bums around with an older friend, Deacon (Leon Ames), who lives up to his name by periodically looking skyward and asking God for strength. One evening, while getting drunk in a bar, Matt picks a fight with the biggest guy in the room, massive African-American Redwood Rosenbloom (Rosey Grier). As often happens in manly-man movies, the pointless fight leads to instant friendship. These three form the core of the group that heads to Alaska, where Matt reunites with Corey Sykes (Eve Brent). While working for Corey, Matt clashes with his second-in-command, Big Swede (Tab Hunter), leading to another epic fistfight between friendly combatants—for some reason, this picture’s hero spends more time battling buddies than slugging villains. Matt also discovers, about an hour after the audience makes the connection, that he’s the father of Corey’s son.

          As dumb as Timber Tramps is, the movie is basically harmless, the low-rent equivalent of a routine John Wayne flick. One could quibble about Ames’ awkward voiceover or the goofy moment when Deacon has a vision of the angel Gabriel, but there’s not much to be gained by dissecting something this feeble. Better to simply enjoy the dopiest moments, as when Matt challenges Big Swede with this bizarre remark: “You just let your mouth overload your ass!”

Timber Tramps: FUNKY

The Glove (1979)

          Starring the inimitable John Saxon, who offers one of his most appealing performances, The Glove is a tonic for schlock-cinema addicts who are tired of mean-spirited exploitation flicks. The Glove is not gentle, per se, but it avoids the familiar traps of objectifying women and sanctifying pointless violence. Additionally, the picture overflows with lively character development and whimsical dialogue, sometimes to the detriment of the storyline, and the use of hard-boiled voiceover gives the piece a pleasing flow. So while The Glove is mostly a dud as an action picture, it’s pleasant to watch as a character piece involving an amiable bounty hunter and an even more amiable escaped convict. You may find yourself perplexed as to whom this picture was meant to satisfy, since the poster suggests a brutal urban thriller, but if you’ve spent too much time aiming your retinas at ugly stories about ugly people doing ugly things, the goofy humanism of The Glove offers a refreshing alternative.

          Saxon stars as Sam Kellogg, a Los Angeles-based bounty hunter with money problems. His ex-wife is after him for overdue alimony payments, so his treasured visitations with his young daughter are in danger of being revoked. The filmmakers present layer after layer of detail about Sam, so we learn that he gambles recklessly, gives bribes to former police-force colleagues for help tracking down hoodlums, and sometimes cuts breaks for hard-luck cases. Motivated by the promise of a $20,000 bounty, Sam spends most of the movie chasing Victor Hale (Rosey Grier), who seems terrifying the first time we encounter him. Having acquired a full suit of police riot gear, including a five-pound, lead-lined monstrosity known as a riot glove, Victor demolishes a car before pummeling one of the vehicle’s occupants nearly to death. However, subsequent scenes portray Victor as a gentle giant, entertaining local children by playing blues songs on guitar while hanging out in a tenement apartment. When Victor learns that Sam is after him, he calls the bounty hunter and says to back off, instead of, say, ambushing Sam with the glove.

          Although the filmmakers never reconcile the dark and light aspects of Victor’s portrayal, it’s enjoyable to watch a picture of this type that strives to make characters dimensional. The Glove also benefits from a cast stocked with familiar professionals: Joanna Cassidy, Joan Blondell, Michael Pataki, Aldo Ray, Keenan Wynn. In the end, is The Glove a jumble of contradictory intentions? Sure. But it’s hard not to appreciate elements including the pithy voiceover (“I felt like somebody had kicked me in the stomach and left their shoe there”) and the stunningly overwrought theme song, which must be heard to be believed.

The Glove: FUNKY

The Treasure of Jamaica Reef (1975)

Among of the worst movies of the ’70s, this amateur-hour adventure—which tries and fails to deliver comedy, excitement, and underwater grandeur—would almost certainly have disappeared from the face of the earth had its leading lady not achieved fleeting sex-symbol status a few years after the picture was made. The woman in question is Charlie’s Angels beauty Cheryl Ladd (billed here as Cheryl Stoppelmoor), and it says most of what you need to know about this cinematic atrocity that she plays a perky treasure hunter named Zappy. Check, please! But, no, sadly, there’s a movie to watch, or at least endure. Zappy gathers her pals, played by Z-listers including studio-era hunk Stephen Boyd and future game-show host Chuck Woolery (sporting a pimp beard of which Superfly would be proud), for a trip to Jamaica, as it seems Zappy has acquired salvage rights for a sunken wreck in which treasure is supposedly hidden. The plot is virtually nonexistent, with a few throwaway scenes of crooks trying to steal a treasure map from our heroes, so the interminable movie comprises endless diving scenes, often with absolutely nothing of interest happening. Making the whole thing even more painful to watch is clunky narration that’s clearly used to add a measure of coherence to the disjointed footage, plus music that would have been cut from a children’s cartoon for being too cutesy. The only novel element, besides the not-unpleasant sight of Ladd cavorting in a bikini, is the bizarre casting of former football pro Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier as the heroes’ boat captain. He spends most of his time giving Ladd diving lessons (because, of course, the character who initiated the treasure hunt isn’t qualified to dive), and the sight of enormous Grier splashing around with tiny Ladd—well, it’s not exactly interesting, but it’s almost something, which is more than can be said of the rest of the picture. (FYI, this movie was later reissued as Evil in the Deep, and given a silly shark-centric poster, in a crass attempt to hop aboard the Jaws train.)

The Treasure of Jamaica Reef: SQUARE

The Thing With Two Heads (1972)

Some movie ideas are so phenomenally stupid that one has to admire the nerve of the filmmakers involved for seeing the idea through to fruition. And if a respectable actor can be persuaded to participate, then the conditions are right for the creation of entertaining awfulness. In this instance, the respectable actor is Ray Milland, playing a surgeon experimenting with the transplantation of heads because he’s dying of cancer but wants to preserve himself from the neck up after he croaks. At the beginning of the picture, we see that Milland has created a gorilla with two heads (one original, one a transplant), and the unapologetic way the filmmakers showcase a stunt performer wearing an unconvincing gorilla suit sets the craptastic tone. Before long, Milland slips into a coma and his flunkies attach his noggin to the shoulder of a death-row inmate played by former NFL star Roosevelt “Rosie” Grier. Little problem: The convict is black and the doctor is a flaming racist. The ebony-and-ivory racial banter is flaccid, Grier is awful (though likeable), it takes forever for the action to kick into gear, and the motorcycle-chase scene is endless, but the absurdity factor is such that watching Grier play scenes with Milland strapped to his back has inherent train-wreck appeal. Plus, every so often the movie enters full-on bizarro mode, like when Milland conspires to kill Grier while Grier naps in the middle of a chase scene, or when actors bark lines like this one: “Cut down the dosage of Barbitol to the black head!”

The Thing With Two Heads: FUNKY