Walking Tall (1973) & Walking Tall Part II (1975) & Final Chapter: Walking Tall (1977)

          Even though the virtues of the first film in the Walking Tallseries are quite humble, the franchise provides an object lesson in diminishing returns—and a crass example of Hollywood shamelessly milking a property for every penny. For instance, critical lashings and meager box-office returns for the second and third films did not derail the creation of a short-lived TV series. Nor did the broadcast of a TV movie from different producers titled A Real American Hero, which depicted the same real-life historical figure as the Walking Tall flicks. Then, years after it seemed Walking Tall was over, a remake of the original film was released in 2004, and the remake begat a number of straight-to-video sequels. Why all the bother? Well, if you believe half the tall tales told about the late Buford Pusser, the subject of all of these stories, he was about as close to a real-life action hero as there ever was. A former wrestler who became the sheriff of Tennessee’s McNairy County, Pusser took on organized crime and won, purging McNairy of moonshiners, prostitutes, racketeers, and so on. Yet justice came at a terrible price. Pusser’s wife was murdered, and he himself died under mysterious circumstances while still serving as sheriff.

          The first movie, simply titled Walking Tall, was based on a nonfiction book about Pusser. At the beginning of the story, Pusser (Joe Don Baker) gives up wrestling for a quiet life in McNairy County, only to discover that the area is overrun with crooks. Idealistic and stubborn, Pusser gets into hassles with the area’s criminal element, so he’s beaten and left for dead. After his recovery, he’s unable to exact justice via the legal system, so Pusser runs for sheriff and becomes a one-man vengeance squad. The title relates to Pusser’s signature weapon, a four-foot wooden club that he uses to beat evildoers (as in, “Walk tall and carry a big stick”). One of the most interesting elements of the movie is Pusser’s gradual education about things like search-and-seizure laws and suspects’ rights; he evolves from recklessly kicking ass to slyly trapping bad guys through their own misdeeds. Meanwhile, he tries to build a stable home life with his wife, Pauline (Elizabeth Hartman), and their two kids—but, of course, the grim ubiquity of danger makes that impossible.

          As directed by competent hack Phil Karlson, Walking Tallmoves along at a good clip even though it’s 125 minutes. In fact, it’s arguably the ultimate epic of brawling-redneck movies. Plus, by the time the movie slides into its final act—during which Pusser metes out bloody justice while his face is masked in bandages following a near-fatal assault—Walking Tall becomes just a little bit deranged. (How deranged? The plaintive theme song is performed by, of all people, Johnny Mathis. Seriously, Johnny Mathis.) Baker is in his natural element here, exuding badass ’tude and cornpone charm, so it doesn’t really matter that the rest of the cast is largely forgettable; only crusty character actor Noah Berry, Jr., as Pusser’s papa, makes an impression.

          Sadly, the real-life Pusser died a year after the first film was released, casting a morbid pall over Walking Tall Part II, in which the statuesque Bo Svenson takes over the lead role. Lacking Baker’s charisma, Svenson struggles through emotional moments and relies on his intimidating physique to sell action scenes. Further, he seems too gentle to believably play a man who’d rather crack skulls than read suspects their rights. It isn’t giving much away to say that the original Walking Tall ends with Pusser killing the men who murdered his wife, and that Walking Tall: Part IIdramatizes his attempts to arrest the gangsters who ordered the hit. The sequel adds swampy flavor, with supporting characters bearing names like “Pinky Dobson” and “Stud Pardee,” and the caliber of the supporting players is a slight improvement on the first film. Reliable actors including Luke Askew and Richard Jaeckel add energy, though leading lady Angel Tompkins is largely decorative as a temptress hired to ensnare Pusser. And while periodic car chases and shootouts keep things lively, there’s too much aimless yakety-yak—not exactly Svenson’s strong suit as a performer. Worse, the way the movie addresses the real Pusser’s death is highly unsatisfying.

          The last of the ’70s Pusser flicks, the oddly titled Final Chapter: Walking Tall, is as interminable as it is unnecessary. Fabricating a thin story to depict what happened to Pusser between the climax of the previous film and his death—while, of course, presenting a wholly unsubstantiated conspiracy theory in order to name Pusser’s killers—Final Chapter: Walking Tall mostly features Pusser (Svenson again) fretting about his troubles. A long scene of Pusser weeping over his wife’s grave represents the nadir of Svenson’s acting in the series; he tries mightily but can’t conjure anything genuine. Weirdly, the makers of Final Chapter: Walking Tall often forget they’re cranking out an exploitation flick, instead trying to generate wholesome family drama. Pusser saves a kid from an abusive father, romances a girl-next-door secretary, and generally tries to set a positive example for his kids—yawn. Literally an hour of screen time elapses before serious action occurs.

          Anyway, one last item for trivia buffs—two performes who appear in all three ’70s Walking Tall movies are teen idol Leif Garrett, as Pusser’s son, and character actor Bruce Glover, as Pusser’s deputy. Best known for playing a gay hit man in the 007 romp Diamonds are Forever(1971), Glover also sired oddball actor/director Crispin Glover.

Walking Tall: GROOVY

Walking Tall Part II: FUNKY

Final Chapter: Walking Tall: LAME

Salvage-1 (1979)

          Featuring one of the loopier premises in the history of primetime drama, this feature-length pilot movie launched a short-lived series, which has since become a minor cult favorite among sci-fi fans. Beloved TV icon Andy Griffith stars in the movie as a junkyard owner who builds his own private spaceship for a trip to the moon, where he plans to salvage abandoned NASA equipment and sell it to the highest bidder. Once the concept went to series, Griffth reprised his role, with his character piloting the spaceship for missions to remote locations around the globe; in the first regular episode, the goal was to retrieve monkeys for a zoo and to explore the possibility of bringing back an iceberg for a California community suffering from drought. Not hard to see why the series got canceled. Still, two things make the Salvage-1 pilot movie charming—Griffith’s affable persona and the lightness of the storytelling. Written by Mike Lloyd Ross, whose character development and dialogue are as clunky as his narrative concepts are wild, Salvage-1introduces Harry Broderick (Griffith) as an expert in repurposing junk—he buys a World War I biplane for a song, then guts the vehicle and sells parts to various buyers, making a $14,000 profit in the course of a morning’s work.

          Harry’s gotten hip to the multimillion-dollar value of tech that NASA left on the moon, and he’s identified an aeronautics expert with a theory that might facilitate inexpensive space travel. Harry hires the expert, ex-astronaut Skip Carmichael (Joel Higgins), who in turn enlists the aid of fuel specialist Melanie Slozar (Trish Stewart). Together with Harry’s regular employees—including a pair of former NASA ground-control techs—Harry cobbles together a spaceship called the Vulture. Meanwhile, uptight FBI agent Jack Klinger (Richard Jaeckel) sniffs around Harry’s junkyard because he senses something strange is happening. Salvage-1is predicated on an inordinate number of convenient plot twists, and Ross’ script is so upbeat that there’s never any real tension, but Salvage-1 is fun to watch simply because it’s such a lark. Even the laughably bad special effects featured during the Vulture’s moon shot aren’t enough to diffuse the good vibes. This is pure gee-whiz escapism, and the saving grace of the piece is that it never pretends to have meaning or substance. So, yes, the acting is hokey and the story is borderline stupid, but who cares? Fun is fun.

Salvage-1: GROOVY

Day of the Animals (1977)

          While it has a certain schlocky appeal, Day of the Animals is a significant comedown from director William Girdler’s previous critters-run-amok flick, Grizzly (1976). Whereas the earlier movie is a shameless Jawsrip-off, Day of the Animals is a mishmash of Hitchockian avian terror, eco-themed sci-fi, and generic “something is out there” spookiness. (The movie’s blunt alternate title? Something Is Out There.) The premise is that ultraviolet radiation released via ozone-layer depletion has transformed animals living at high altitudes into killers, which means a group of hikers on a remote mountaintop path become fodder for nature gone wild. The denizens of a town at the base of the mountain also fall prey to rampaging creatures. Day of the Animals features attacks by bears, birds, dogs, mountain lions, rats, snakes, and wolves, but these events are nonsensical—at some points, the picture suggests that animals have formed an army, and at other times, critters simply attack independent of each other. In other words, any old plot contrivance that helps endanger and/or kill a given character at a given time is acceptable to the filmmakers, who couldn’t care less about consistency.

          As with Grizzly, Girdler’s comin’-at-ya jolts and sturdy widescreen compositions ensure that Day of the Animals basically delivers the goods. Nonetheless, the movie runs out of gas far before its 97 minutes are through, although there are a few campy highlights. For instance, the bit in which rats leap from a turkey carcass like tiny acrobats is particularly goofy. The movie’s “best” moment, however, is the climax of Leslie Neilsen’s performance as one of the hikers—crazed with fear and hunger, Neilsen strips to the waist, screams about how he’s the god of his own life, impales a fellow hiker with a walking stick, tries to rape another hiker, and wrestles a bear. Good times. Christopher George plays the rugged leader of the hikers, and his gritted-teeth performance is entertainingly cheesy, while Richard Jaeckel plays it straight as a professor. Also present are B-movie fave Michael Ansara (playing the movie’s resident Native American) and actress/animal handler Susan Backlinie, best known as the skinny dipper in the opening sequence of Jaws.

Day of the Animals: FUNKY

The Dark (1979)

A dreadful mishmash of horror and science fiction, The Darkmanages to make the quest to capture an extraterrestrial serial killer uninteresting. When the movie begins, a mysterious figure murders several people, including the daughter of author/ex-con Roy Warner (William Devane). Preoccupied with grief—but not so preoccupied that he doesn’t make time to flirt with TV reporter Zoe Owens (Cathy Lee Crosby), who is in turn tries to exploit Roy for a hot story—Roy dogs grumpy police detective Dave Mooney (Richard Jaeckel), the cop assigned to find the killer. Eventually, the various characters gravitate toward a blowsy psychic named De Renzy (Jacqueline Hyde), who has somehow intuited that the killer is an alien, and that the alien is inexplicably tethered to an out-of-work actor and . . . Oh, who cares? The Dark is one of those incompetent movies that can’t figure out how to deliver plot elements effectively, so it compensates by stacking characters and twists atop each other, as if the volume of concepts will compensate for the fact that none of the concepts is interesting. Worse, the story structure of boring filler scenes punctuated by a trite murder sequence every 10 minutes or so is beyond perfunctory. About the only time the movie gets vibrant is during the gonzo climax, when a 10-foot-tall, shambling man-monster squares off with an army of cops, frying the policemen with laser beams shot from the monster’s eyes. However, since the movie’s special effects are mediocre—and since the acting is so lifeless it feels like the performers were handed their lines just before they walked on camera—the film’s only redeeming value is atmospheric widescreen cinematography that lives up to the title. Using a mixture of deep shadows and epic lens flares straight out of the John Carpenter playbook, John Arthur Morrill’s tasty images almost make The Dark worth watching. Almost.

The Dark: LAME