Cry Blood, Apache (1970)

Low-budget crap riddled with amateurish editing, godawful dubbing, and vapid performances, this violent Western was presumably made to kick-start the moribund acting career of Jody McCrea, a second-generation performer who spent the ’50s and ’60s playing supporting roles in forgettable movies (including various Frankie-and-Annette Beach Party flicks). The son of famed cowboy actor Joel McCrea, Jody McCrea stars in and co-produced Cry Blood, Apache. The picture begins when a group of outlaws massacre the residents of an Indian village while searching for the location of hidden gold. The criminals abduct a survivor, pretty squaw Jemme (Marie Gahva), but one of the hoodlums, Pitcalin (Jody McCrea), tries to protect her from abuse. Meanwhile, an unnamed Indian brave (Marcus Rudnick) returns to the village and discovers the carnage, so he sets out to find the killers and exact vengeance. (The scene of Rudnick screaming in pain after finding his family dead is so overwrought that it’s unintentionally funny.) Right from the start, the picture makes zero sense. If Pitcalin’s such a nice guy, why is he hanging around with killers? And since Indians of the Old West era didn’t value gold, why not simply cooperate with the heavily armed whites and avoid the slaughter? Anyway, such logical considerations are immaterial, because nothing about Cry Blood, Apache merits close inspection. Most of the movie comprises tedious scenes of the criminals trekking across the prairie, with one member of the group, Deacon (Jack Starrett), giving long-winded religious speeches. (Starrett, who also directed the picture, was a prolific helmer of offbeat exploitation films throughout the ’70s, with subsequent credits including 1973's Cleopatra Jones and 1975's Race With the Devil.) Aside from the drab story and the lifeless acting (Jody McCrea being the worst offender), the most pathetic aspect of Cry Blood, Apache is the soundtrack, because nearly every line of dialogue sounds like it was looped in a wind tunnel. FYI, Joel McCrea turns up at the beginning of the picture to play his son’s character as an older man, then exits the movie as quickly as possible. Smart move.

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Moonfire (1970)

Since there’s not much to discuss with relation to the content of this insipid trucker flick, let’s note something peculiar on the movie’s Internet Movie Database page. The first user review was written by the film’s director, Michael Parkhurst, who spends half his post arguing that his picture isn’t as bad as its reputation suggests (Parkhurst valiantly labels Moonfire “fair”). The filmmaker spends the other half of his review bitching that Leonard Maltin once mistakenly described the plot as having a blackmail element. Only here’s the kicker—Moonfiredoes indeed have a blackmail element, unless one plays a semantic game and says that a villain taking technology hostage and demanding payment for its release somehow qualifies as kidnapping instead of blackmail. Anyway, one reason we’ve gone so far down this road is to demonstrate how vehement online movie-related discussions can become, no matter how insignificant the picture in question. The other reason is to underscore that even a hair-splitting e-debate about Moonfire’s storyline is more interesting than the film itself. The problem with Moonfireis that virtually nothing happens—Parkhurst’s film comprises 107 of the dullest minutes ever committed to celluloid. The plot is confusing, but it contains enough lurid elements that Moonfireshould have amounted to something. First, a manned space mission ends when the capsule falls to the ground in Mexico. Next, an ex-Nazi recovers the capsule and the pilot, triggering the blackmail/kidnapping. Then truckers are recruited to deliver ransom to the ex-Nazi, though they’re told neither what they’re hauling nor where they’re going. (Instead, the truckers stop at regular intervals to receive instructions.) As a result, most of the movie comprises endless, repetitive scenes of the truckers heading to their destination, and Moonfire has enough shots of engine maintenance and truck-stop convenience stores to qualify as a training film. Yawn. The cast includes journeyman actor Richard Egan (who’s barely in the picture), square-jawed B-movie staple Charles Napier, and boxer Sonny Liston. None does anything memorable, though Napier and Liston briefly fight a gang of bikers and both spend lots of time shirtless and sweaty. So, until Michael Parkhurst pops up on this blog to argue with what’s just been written here, that’s about all there is to say.

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They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way (1978)

The second of two pictures that funnyman Tim Conway made for a short-lived outfit called the International Picture Show Company, this abysmal would-be farce tries to present Conway and Chuck McCann as a bumbling comedy duo. The actors get the bumbling part right, but if either of them actually does anything funny in the course of the picture’s painfully stupid 95 minutes, it escaped my view. Sadly, Conway also penned the flick—one of the only feature-length projects for which he took a solo writing credit—so one fears They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way represents his best guess at what makes people laugh. To say Conway was someone who benefitted when collaborators raised his game is an understatement. The story concerns a pair of idiot small-town cops (Conway and McCann) going undercover as convicts in order to uncover corruption among prison officials, but mostly the script is a vessel for delivering one sequence of physical comedy after another. Even from the first scene, the gags in They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Waybludgeon the senses with their ineffectiveness. In the opening bit, Conway and McCann sit in a patrol car, and Conway tries to start the car. The failure of the engine to ignite is meant to be funny—during five repeated attempts. And yet then, when a suspect drives by, Conway starts the car without any difficulty, as if the previous five gags hadn’t happened. Unimaginably, it gets worse. The bad guy (played by a valiant Dub Tayl0r) is named “Warden Warden,” the lead characters prove incapable of using such simple devices as potato peelers and tape dispensers without causing chaos, and the “high point” of the picture involves an extended Carol Burnett Show-style sketch of Conway’s character attempting to perform dentistry on the bad guy while repeatedly injecting himself with Novocain. Oh, and the climax involves Conway and McCann disguised as, respectively, a buck-toothed Japanese dignitary and his geisha companion—because, apparently, the film’s various portrayals of brainless rednecks weren’t sufficiently offensive.

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Octaman (1971)

While it might be overreaching to describe Octamanas the worst creature feature ever made, since the monster genre has spawned some truly ghastly cinematic atrocities, it’s fair to say that Octamancomprises 76 minutes of stultifying pabulum. The story, which borrows heavily from the classic monster flick The Creature from the Black Lagoon(1955), is the usual noise about a scientist accidentally disturbing the natural habitat of a missing-link beastie, thereby invoking primeval wrath. In this case, the beastie is an octopus who walks like a man—as depicted, I shit you not, by a dude walking around in a silly green suit with a giant green head and flailing tentacles. Amazingly, this terrible suit was co-created by future Oscar-winning effects great Rick Baker, so one presumes his best intentions were impeded by budget limitations and poor execution; even shrouding the monster in shadow and spritzing the costume with some sort of moisture would have delivered better results than showing the thing dry and in full sunlight, as happens periodically. It also doesn’t help that Baker and crew failed to articulate the monster’s eyes, which just sit there, disallowing any illusion of life. And the Octaman costume isn’t even the worst thing in the picture. For instance, Octaman has a baby, which is depicted through the use of a floppy little glob of painted rubber that gets tugged along the floors of locations by unseen strings. Writer/director Harry Essex relies heavily on stock footage, and it’s obvious that even though the story is supposed to be set in some exotic South American jungle, the whole thing was shot in and around such overly familiar L.A. locations as the Bronson Canyon caves. Making the whole enterprise seem even tackier is that fact that Essex has a screenwriting credit on the original Creature from the Black Lagoon—he’s incompetently plagiarizing himself. About the only entertaining aspect of Octamanis seeing how many pathetic attempts Essex makes to portray the titular critter as a killer. At various points, Octaman bitch-slaps enemies with his tentacles, strangles people with his tentacles, and even impales victims with the tips of his tentacles. The only fearful thing about this interminable crapfest is the prospect of actually watching the movie.

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The Billion Dollar Hobo (1977)

Thanks to his small-screen success with McHale’s Navy (1962-1966) and The Carol Burnett Show (1967-1978), funnyman Tim Conway earned a shot at big-screen starring roles in the mid-’70s. With his impressive ability to play even the stupidest scenarios straight, Conway was ideally suited to ensemble work or to functioning as part of a comedy duo—hence his G-rated buddy movies with Don Knotts—but, inevitably, Conway wanted to topline his own pictures. And that brings us to The Billion Dollar Hobo, one of the most depressingly unfunny comedies ever made. Part of a two-picture deal Conway made with an indie outfit called the International Picture Show Company (the other picture being the equally awful 1978 romp They Went That-A-Way & That-A-Way), this misfire borrows narrative elements from Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, and then delivers its storyline by way of shtick so moronic it would embarrass Benny Hill. Conway stars as Vernon Praiseworthy, a well-meaning nincompoop who discovers he is heir to a railroad tycoon’s fortune. There’s a catch, of course, so Vernon is tasked with traveling the country as a hobo to learn life lessons before he’ll be granted his inheritance. How dumb is The Billion Dollar Hobo? Well, let’s see. In the first scene, Vernon gets hired as a short-order cook and left alone to run a kitchen after less than a minute of training, at which point Vernon fails to accomplish even the simplest kitchen functions, eventually blowing up the diner. Need more? How about the fact that the tycoon (Will Geer) assigns as Vernon’s traveling companion a dog whom the tycoon correctly believes is smarter than Vernon, and will keep Vernon out of trouble? And then there’s the whole business of Vernon stumbling into a criminal plot to kidnap a shar pei dog named “Lee Ching Win.” Can we stop now? Or must we dwell on scenes of Conway walking into doors and/or standing with his mouth open and his shoulders slumped, giving the impression that he’s just been lobotomized? Save yourself a few brain cells by giving The Billion Dollar Hobo a wide berth.

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The Foreigner (1978)

I freely admit that the appeal of Greenwich Village’s grungy underground scene has always escaped me, even when I was peripherally acquainted with the scene during my NYU film-school days. Therefore, it’s no surprise that quasi-iconic punk-rock filmmaker Amos Poe’s black-and-white thriller The Foreigner left me cold. Featuring a plot that’s either nonsensical or trite, depending on how literally one interprets the onscreen images, the picture is marked by abysmal sound recording (many lines were dubbed, terribly, during postproduction), crappy cinematography (think garish lighting and spastic handheld camerawork), and ridiculously lifeless acting. If you can imagine a 77-minute student film shot on amateur stock and padded with drably filmed sequences of punk bands playing in dingy clubs, you’ve got an idea of why The Foreigner represents an endurance test for anyone but devoted fans of downtown hipsterism. The plot has something to do with European spy Max Menace (Eric Mitchell) spending time in New York while awaiting a rendezvous with the mysterious individual who will give him the details for his next job. Max wanders the streets, visits with strangers, endures a weird one-night stand with a chick who ties him up, and gets beaten and chased by enigmatic assailants. There’s also a random bit involving an Asian woman in a skin-tight catsuit being hired to spy on Max for reasons that are never clear (or interesting). What’s most peculliar about The Foreigner is the film’s paradoxical nature—it’s a “No Wave” exercise designed to flout the mainstream, and yet the overarching storyline is as conventional as that of a James Bond movie. Was the film meant to deconstruct popcorn cinema through unskilled emulation? Whatever, man. Perhaps the only reason The Foreigner still enjoys minor notoriety is that Blondie singer Deborah Harry—one of the most famous participants in the Greenwich Village scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s—pops up for one very brief scene. Alas, her appearance, like everything else about The Foreigner, is forgettable and pointless.

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The Great Adventure (1975)

An abysmal Italian production that tries to blend elements of Jack London-style adventure with tropes from cowboy cinema, The Great Adventurewould be rightly relegated to complete obscurity were it not for the presence of two familiar Hollywood B-listers, Joan Collins and Jack Palance, who are among the most indiscriminate selectors of material in film history. That they only play supporting roles with limited screen time should make no difference to anyone, because even hardcore fans of the actors would be hard-pressed to find redeeming values here. The story begins when a little boy living in the wintry Alaskan wilderness bonds with a wild German Shepherd while out hunting one day with his father—to the strains of saccharine music, the boy extracts the dog from a bear trap, and then the dog saves the boy from a wolf attack. Next comes the first of many major story shifts. The boy’s father ventures away from the family cabin for supplies, leaving the boy alone with his teenaged sister. The father dies. Then two trappers who are lost in the wilderness seek shelter with the children. Eventually, all of the characters travel to a small town ruled by gambler/landowner William Bates (Palance). One of the trappers is killed, and the other embarks on a romance with Bates’ saloon operator, Sonia Kendall (Collins). And so it goes from there—The Great Adventure can’t decide if it’s an outdoors survival tale, a boy-and-his-dog melodrama, a violent action story revolving around the evil machinations of Palance’s character, or an Old West romance. Exacerbating the chaotic storyline are cruddy production values, spastic editing, treacly music, and—of course, given the film’s Italian origin—terrible audio dubbing. Oh, and Collins and Palance phone in terrible performances, adding the final insult to unwise viewers who sample this bilge.

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Amazing Grace (1974)

An interesting mini-trend during the ’70s involved the resurgence of stars from yesteryear, with young-at-heart rascals George Burns and Ruth Gordon among the beneficiaries of unique projects catered to aged actors. Yet some performers from earlier generations returned to less laudatory effect, as in the awful comedy Amazing Grace, which features iconic “chitlin circuit” comedienne Jackie “Moms” Mabley. Despite having found the energy for career-revitalizing appearances on the TV show Laugh-In during the late ’60s, by the time she made Amazing Grace, Mabley was showing her years in the worst ways. It’s painful to watch her struggle through line readings and physical actions, so even though she basically delivers her characterization with the desired level of cartoonish sassiness, the sum effect is like watching your dotty grandmother tell an old story nobody wants to hear anymore. It’s a shame no one had the decency to pull the plug on this project once the lead actress’ limitations became apparent. Set in Baltimore and offering a silly, Capra-esque plot, Amazing Grace concerns busybody senior Grace (Mabley), who discovers that her next-door neighbor, mayoral candidate Welton J. Waters (Moses Gunn), is in the pocket of a rich (white) criminal named Annenberg (James Karen). Aided by her annoying friend, recently retired porter Forthwith Wilson (Slappy White), Grace sweet-talks Welton into the bosom of the lord, freeing him from corruption and even curing Welton’s wife (Rosalind Cash) of alcoholism. Each scene in Amazing Graceis more trite and vapid than the preceding, and the movie drags torturously as it stretches to include pointless cameos by old-time African-American performers Butterfly McQueen and Stepin Fetchit. Even if Mabley had been in better condition, Amazing Grace would still have been terrible—but given the condition of the leading actress, the movie is downright pathetic.

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The Crater Lake Monster (1977)

Amateurish, boring, and clichéd, this low-budget creature feature is built around special effects that wouldn’t have passed muster in 1957, much less 1977. Yes, The Crater Lake Monster employs the rickety old technique of stop-motion critters poorly superimposed onto normal live-action footage. Yet while true stop-motion masters such as Ray Harryhausen employed the process to fill cinema frames with armies of supernatural beasties, the makers of The Crater Lake Monster merely present a single dinosaur. Amazingly, the poorly executed stop-motion shots of the prehistoric killer are the best parts of the movie, because the filmmakers also use silly mock-ups of the dinosaur’s full-sized head for close-up shots in which interchangeable characters are eaten. Grade-school kids putting on a pageant could have generated more impressive visuals. The story, which loses interest after about a minute and a half, begins when archeologists exploring caves in rural Oregon uncover ancient drawings suggesting a dinosaur lived there up to the time of man, contrary to scientific theories about how long ago dinosaurs went extinct. Then a meteor falls in a lake and cracks open a long-buried dinosaur egg, after which the newly born creature immediately matures into a full-sized carnivore that lives underwater—except when it ventures onto land to eat people. None of this makes any sense, and every aspect of The Crater Lake Monster is as inept as the storyline. The acting by a slew of no-names is terrible, the dialogue is wooden, and the thrills are warmed-over silliness borrowed from an infinite number of better movies.

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Policewomen (1974)

While some viewers may enjoy watching leading lady Sondra Currie kick ass and strut around in revealing outfits, those without an affinity for the actress will find little to enjoy in Policewomen, a grade-Z thriller about cops who go undercover in a smuggling ring. The action is dull and fake, the one-liners are painfully stupid, and the acting is terrible, with Currie’s lifeless performance setting the pace for her equally inept costars. Plus, because people who seek out movies like Policewomen usually settle for trashy elements in lieu of worthwhile ones, it deserves mentioning that at least one widely available print of Policewomenis bereft of nudity and even swearing (the audio drops out whenever someone curses). Yet it’s hard to imagine that the inclusion of rough stuff could make much difference. Anyway, the story begins with Lacy (Currie) trying to prevent a jailbreak at a women’s prison. Despite her karate jobs and right crosses, several badass mamas escape and join the criminal gang of Maude (Elizabeth Stuart), an aging crone portrayed in the “dragon lady” style of the era. (You know a movie’s in trouble when you wish Shelley Winters would show up to add some vigor.) Having impressed supervisors with her valor during the jailbreak, Lacy meets with top cops including Tony (Frank Mitchell), who put her through a series of tests to confirm she’s got the right stuff. (Sample dialogue from Mitchell:  “Now, you’re a very pretty girl, and you obviously have a way with escaping female prisoners, but . . .”) The highlight of the movie, speaking only in veryrelative terms, is Lacy’s sparring session with a karate instructor played by the always-enjoyable B-movie madman William Smith. Lacy flips Smith’s character on his ass several times, and Smith plays the scene for high comedy. So, even though the scene is stupid and unfunny, at least the scene wants to be something, which is more than can be said for the rest of the movie.

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Shriek of the Mutilated (1974)

Ostensibly a Bigfoot flick but really just a psycho-killer/Satanic-cult gorefest made in the trashy Herschell Gordon Lewis style, Shriek of the Mutilated is completely devoid of redeeming qualities. The acting is atrocious, the storyline is moronic, and the thrills are nonexistent. The picture even fails as an excessive splatter movie, because the special makeup effects are amateurish. Following a few random vignettes that get the movie off to a disjointed, uninteresting start, the story proper begins when college professor Dr. Ernst Prell (Alan Brock) organizes a group of students for an expedition into the woods where a Yeti has allegedly been sighted. (Why a Yeti and not just Bigfoot, since the picture is set in America rather than Asia?) Prell loads a group of bland young adults into a van and schleps them to the remote home of his colleague, Dr. Karl Werner (Tawm Ellis). Karl’s a strange cat who’s balding on top but wears a graying ponytail, and he favors creepy ensembles of turtlenecks and way-too-tight pants. He’s also prone to florid lines like, “Your Yeti waits for you still, Ernst.” Before long, the college students start getting killed during attacks by a “monster” who’s really just a dude wearing a gorilla suit that seems like it’s made out of white shag carpeting, some pasty makeup, and a pair of dime-store Dracula fangs. It turns out the doctors are actually cultists who lure students to the woods, dress up like Yetis to scare them, and then kill the students for pagan rituals. This plot “justifies” close-ups of decapitated heads and dismembered limbs, none of which have any shock value—more like schlock value. Literally the only amusing moment in the whole movie is the scene during which one of the college students sits at the piano and croons a ditty he’s written about the situation: “On the prowl, hear him howl, here comes the Yeti now!”

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The Capture of Bigfoot (1979)

Fungus scraped off the bottom of the Sasquatch-cinema barrel, The Capture of Bigfoot is a no-budget dud in which the redneck denizens of a small, snow-shrouded town blame a string of murders on something called “The Legendary Creature of Arak,” a white-haired Bigfoot/Yeti/whatever rumored by Native Americans to haunt the mountains surrounding the town. During this interminable movie, scheming entrepreneurs attempt to capture the monster for purposes of financial exploitation, while police officers try to determine whether the killings are the work of man or beast. Badly acted, incompetently filmed, lazily edited, and padded with meandering bits like pointless party scenes and unfunny “comedy” vignettes, this is one of those grade-Z creature features that only contains about 10 minutes of actual monster action, so trudging through the flick’s entire 92-minute sprawl is a monotonous chore none but the masochistic should attempt. Toward the end of the picture, once “The Legendary Creature of Arak” is finally captured, he/it is revealed to be a neatly groomed giant with a smooth white coat, a pointy head, and a scowling orange face; closely resembling the ridiculous “Mugatu” alien from the original Star Trek series, this critter ain’t the most formidable of beasties. Plus, the monster turns out to be quasi-benevolent, which makes all the previous scenes depicting the creature as a savage killer seem nonsensical in retrospect. And so it goes for the rest of this abomination, which offers nothing in the way of amusement, entertainment, novelty, or thrills.

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The Gore Gore Girls (1972)

Splatter-movie titan Herschell Gordon Lewis’ final flick before a 30-year directing hiatus, The Gore Gore Girls is pure cinematic sludge, leavened only by a lowbrow sense of humor—although the jokes don’t actually justify watching the movie. In the opening scene, a mysterious maniac attacks a stripper in her home, kills her, and then mutilates her corpse. As Lewis’ camera lingers to savor every detail, the murderer decapitates the woman, carves off her face, and pummels the bones and muscles of her skull into a pulp decorated by one intact eye. Since Lewis’ camerawork is as clumsily amateurish as his team’s makeup effects, this scene isn’t so much horrifying as unpleasant; there’s no illusion of reality, of course, but it’s hard to stomach the idea that Lewis thought such atrocities should be filmed. Once the story proper gets underway, attractive reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) hires aristocratic private investigator Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress) to search out the identity of the killer. Gentry plunges into the world of low-rent strip clubs (all the victims are exotic dancers), so Lewis gets to complement scenes of bloodletting with grungy vignettes of strippers plying their trade. Inexplicably, comedy legend Henny Youngman shows up as a strip-club proprietor, so Youngman delivers crude jokes like this one: “We just got the news that Tom Jones crossed his legs quickly—he’s in critical condition!” (Jokes about Jones’ reputedly impressive manhood were already growing mold by the time The Gore Gore Girls was filmed.) It’s hard to know whom The Gore Gore Girls was meant to please, since the comedy scenes undercut suspense and the murder scenes are so absurdly extreme the movie was originally rated X. However, one hopes Lewis was aiming for irreverence with touches like the title card that appears after the final scene: “We announce with pride—this movie is over!” Would that it had never begun.

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Piranha (1972)

Starring drive-in stalwart William Smith, Piranha is a grungy thriller produced in South America that bears no relation to the cult-fave 1978 Joe Dante flick of the same name. (In fact, not a single killer fish appears onscreen in this movie, excepting the one featured in a stock shot running beneath the main title.) The gist of the piece is that an adventurous American nature photographer, Terry (Anha Capri), heads to Venezuela for work, accompanied by her brother, womanizing party boy Art (Tom Simcox). They hire Jim (Peter Brown) as a guide, but soon fall into the web of Caribe (Smith), a swaggering gringo who promises to help the crew find interesting photographic subjects, like a remote diamond mine. In its broadest strokes, the plot of Piranha is okay—Terry’s got baggage from childhood trauma, Jim’s romantically interested in Terry, Caribe is an operator with a secret agenda, and so on. Plus, since it turns out Caribe is actually a psycho trying to draw Terry away from civilization so he can rape her and kill her companions, it’s not as if the picture wants for dramatic content. The problem, or at least one of them, is the directionless script and the padded running time. Piranha contains perhaps 30 minutes of purposeful(ish) dramatic scenes, and the rest of the picture comprises endless montages of jungle animals, primitive locals, and other National Geographic-type material. There’s even an interminable motorcycle race. Compounded by the amateur nature of the acting—excepting Smith, who is as menacing as possible given the movie’s stupid dialogue—the narrative dead weight makes Piranha a long journey not worth taking.

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Starcrash (1978)

How bad is Starcrash? To paraphrase the Bard, let us count the ways. First, there’s the discombobulated, idiotic storyline—an interstellar smuggler gets sent to the monster-filled home world of an evil wizard in order to rescue the son of an outer-space emperor, aided only by a band of outlaws and robots. Yep, it’s all the main signifiers from the previous year’s blockbuster Star Wars, thrown into a blender and transmogrified into nonsense. (Proving the makers of Starcrash have no shame, the flick even features low-rent light sabers.) Then there’s the garish production design, which blends Buck Rogers-style camp (the heroine spends most of the movie in an outer-space bikini) with sub-Star Warsmechanization, resulting in an aesthetic jumble. Next come the godawful special effects, ranging from chintzy stop-motion monsters to weak spaceship shots. And finally, there’s the abysmal acting, which is exacerbated by sloppy dubbing: B-movie stalwarts including Marjoe Gortner, David Hasselhoff, Caroline Munro, and Joe Spinell hiss and preen through ridiculous performances. Throw all of these elements together, and you’ve got junk so dreadful that even producer Roger Corman, whose company released the picture in the U.S., should have been embarrassed. Made in Italy, and variously titled in different international territories as Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione and The Adventures of Stella Star, the picture is nominally a showcase for leading lady Munro, a raven-haired beauty who first caught notice in Hammer horror flicks and a kitschy Sinbad picture. She fills out her barely-there costume nicely, but her bug-eyed acting diminishes her appeal considerably. Even more painful than enduring Munro’s work, however, is watching Christopher Plummer’s stupid cameo as the emperor—could he possibly have been paid enough for this humiliation? And for that matter, how the hell did the producers get A-list music composer John Barry, already a three-time Academy Award winner at this point, to do the score? Mysteries, to be sure, but not worth investigating.

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Sunburst (1975)

Even by the low standards of evil-redneck flicks, Sunburst is atrocious. Dull, terribly acted, and tonally schizophrenic, the picture is more than halfway over before anything of significance happens, and even the introduction of an actual plot is insufficient to generate interest. The picture begins on a college campus, where wholesome coed Jenny (Kathy Baumann) hooks up with sensitive stud Robert (Peter Hooten). The couple travels to the mountains to visit a pal, Michael, who quit school for a simpler life in the wilderness. And that, more or less, is the first 40 minutes of the movie, which comprises one uneventful scene after another, interspersed with montages set to fruity ballads. (And let’s not forget the pointless sequence featuring ’30s crooner Rudy Vallee as a shopkeeper whom the young lovers encounter.) Eventually, while Jenny and Robert take a romantic skinny-dip in a mountaintop lake, they’re spotted by a pair of mouth-breathers (played by James Keach and David Pritchard) who speak to Jenny and Robert and strongly imply threats of sexual violence. Demonstrating spectacular stupidity, the heroes head to Michael’s seemingly abandoned cabin, rather than fleeing to someplace safe, and spend the night screwing. Sure enough, the rednecks show up with knives to beat the crap out of Robert and rape Jenny. The next morning, Michael (played by a very young Robert Englund) finally appears. The future Freddy Krueger must summon a straight face for insipid speeches like this one, appraising Jenny’s post-assault mood: “She’s doing the right thing. She’s putting it together for herself without words. She’s just into herself.” Yeesh. Onetime Miss Ohio Baumann is sexy but vapid, Hooten’s spacey look makes him seem detached, and Keach and Pritchard deliver cartoonish performances. (Sample Keach dialogue: “I suggest that you go right over there in those bushes and wizzle your lizard!”) Whether in its original form or its ’80s video incarnation (bearing the alternate title Slashed Dreams), this flick is to be avoided at all costs.

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Billy Jack (1971) & The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) & Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977)

          Actor-turned-auteur Tom Laughlin first portrayed Billy Jack, a karate-chopping recluse who fights for righteous causes, in the 1967 biker movie The Born Losers. Laughlin occupied several behind-the-scenes roles on the picture but used pseudonyms for directing, producing, and writing—one gets the impression he wanted to downplay the idea of his movie as an ego trip. Furthermore, The Born Losers hinted at Laughlin’s agenda of creating a platform for sharing progressive political ideas. Combined with the inherently weird nature of the Billy Jack character, a spiritually enlightened pacifist who solves problems by killing people, The Born Losers revealed that Laughlin was one complicated cat. However, The Born Losers was just the overture.

          After other, non-Billy Jack projects fell through, Laughlin returned to his signature role for the 1971 release Billy Jack. In the series’ defining installment, Billy Jack is the guardian of a hippy-dippy school in rural California, so when local thugs prey upon the school—going so far as to and murder a Native American student and rape saintly teacher Jean (played by Delores Taylor, the real-life Mrs. Laughlin and his constant cinematic collaborator)—Billy Jack springs into action. He carves his way through a goon squad of redneck locals determined to undermine Jean’s flower-power educational aspirations, using the martial art hapkido and the lethal skills he learned while serving as a Green Beret in Vietnam.

          Laughlin stacks the narrative deck, presenting the bad guys as one-note ogres and the good guys as paragons of virtue, with Billy Jack occupying a weird middle ground between the opposite poles. The movie is a disaster politically, arguing that violence is the path to peace, and it’s strange from a storytelling perspective, with meandering sequences that depict touchy-feely rap sessions and other with-it school practices. Yet the cumulative effect of the movie is quite something, one man’s plea for greater compassion in modern society.

          Laughlin also cuts an impressive figure, dressed in head-to-toe denim and sporting one of the coolest hats in ’70s cinema, a flat-brimmed black cowboy job with a multicolored band. Billy Jack became one of the most successful independent movies of the era—although originally delivered to theaters by Warner Bros., the movie was re-released by Laughlin once he regained distribution rights, and the second time around, Billy Jack did bang-up business. Further sequels therefore became inevitable, though Laughlin quickly lost sight of what made Billy Jack popular.

          For instance, the next installment, The Trial of Billy Jack, is a three-hour death march into the surreal wilderness of Laughlin’s imagination. Weakly framed around vignettes of a hospitalized Jean (Taylor) recovering from a mysterious incident at the school, the picture weaves together three primary storylines—Billy Jack’s legal struggles stemming from the events in the last movie; the ongoing culture clash between the locals and Jean’s school, which escalates to even greater levels of violence; and, finally, Billy Jack’s Native American-styled vision quest in the desert.

          Although the movie includes a few exciting fight scenes, Laughlin also makes room for embarrassingly sensitive musical numbers featuring students at Jean’s school, to say nothing of interminably earnest and repetitive speeches. The Trial of Billy Jack is Billy Jack on steroids, but not necessarily in a good way—it’s among the most excessive and indulgent movies of the ’70s, a period not known for cinematic restraint. By the time the threequel climaxes in a ridiculous bloodbath meant to evoke the historical atrocities of My Lai and Sand Creek, it’s clear The Trial of Billy Jack has left the normal realm of human consciousness. Depending on what you bring to the movie, you’ll either find this singular experience a heavy trip or a major bummer.

          Unfortunately, no such ambiguity is needed when appraising the final opus in the series, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, which is wretched. As the title implies, the movie is a direct remake of the Jimmy Stewart classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). And, yeah, that means we get to see Billy Jack in a suit, filibustering Congress, which is exactly as awkward and uninteresting as it sounds. Beyond being insipid, Billy Jack Goes to Washington is the only movie in the series badly marred by technical shortcomings—whereas the other pictures have a certain kind of swaggering style, Billy Jack Goes to Washington suffers from dodgy sound work, with many scenes featuring distractingly overdubbed dialogue. Unless you’re determined to see every frame of this series, the final film is to be avoided at all costs.

          Given the diminishing returns of the series, it’s unsurprising Laughlin never completed his proposed fifth entry, The Return of Billy Jack, production on which began and ended quickly in 1985. But, to his credit, he’s still regularly issuing messages on his website, circa 2012, claiming that a brand-new Billy Jack picture is in the works. You’ve been warned.

Billy Jack: GROOVY

The Trial of Billy Jack: FREAKY

Billy Jack Goes to Washington: SQUARE

The Legend of Bigfoot (1976)

          A certain shambling man-beast with oversized lower extremities was so prevalent in ’70s pop culture that he permeated not only fiction and nonfiction films, but also sensationalistic schlockumentaries that combined fabrications with facts. For instance, The Legend of Bigfootpurports to contain real footage of a Sasquatch, but the footage is so obviously juiced that only the most gullible viewers could be swayed. Presuming, of course, that anyviewers can stay awake long enough to see the money shots. Overall, The Legend of Bigfoot is a tedious compendium of G-rated animal sequences, tied together with florid narration by the man who shot the images, Ivan Marx. Marx explains that he was working as an animal-control specialist when he started hearing rumors about Sasquatch sightings. He then spent months trying to find the elusive monster. So, about 25 minutes into this interminable record of his search, Marx includes a blurry shot of a silhouetted shape moving behind a tree line.

          Emboldened to get an even closer look, Marx keeps investigating, eventually becoming annoyed at his own lack of results. Thus, we’re treated to the following petulant voiceover: “I took a job up in the wilderness near Vosburg, Washington. I had to photograph a cinnamon bear in its natural habitat. You want a bear? Here’s a bear. Piece of cake. I always got what I set after. Except bigfoot.” The shots of the cinnamon bear are crisp, and in fact all of the images except those of the actors pretending to be Sasquatch are fine; the problem is they belong in some Disney nature documentary, not this supposedly thrilling journey into the unknown.

          Director Harry Winer, tasked with shaping Marx’s underwhelming footage, clearly had no choice but to pad The Legend of Bigfoot with nonsense. (For instance, we spend several minutes watching cute fox cubs cavort around Marx’s ranch.) Eventually, Marx gets another eyeful of monsters during the movie’s lifeless climax, triggering this narration: “I began to shake all over. I could barely keep hold of my camera.” And what’s featured in the accompanying shot (which, it should be noted, is perfectly steady)? That would be two silhouetted actors in bigfoot costumes washing their bodies in a forest stream. Whatever, man.

The Legend of Bigfoot: SQUARE

The Astral Factor (1976)

So drab it sat on a shelf for nearly 10 years after being completed, The Astral Factoris a thriller about an imprisoned murderer who masters paranormal skills including astral projection and invisibility. Armed with these new abilities, he escapes jail and begins killing women who testified against him. Despite this colorful premise, The Astral Factoroffers nothing of interest except for the presence of attractive B-level actresses. The acting is lifeless, the direction is amateurish, and the story is as dull as it is insipid. Robert Foxworth tries to add a little swagger to his leading role as the cop tasked with tracking down the paranormal psycho, but since the climax of the picture involves him shooting an M-16 at the empty space where he imagines the unseen murderer to be, it’s not as if Foxworth ever really had the option of retaining his dignity. Playing the killer, Frank Ashmore is so bland he barely exists onscreen; Ashmore spends most of his time scowling in way that makes him seem constipated instead of homicidal. The various lovelies decorating the movie fare even worse. Marianna Hill appears for one scene as a shrewish actress, while Stefanie Powers appears at regular intervals as Foxworth’s bimbo girlfriend. (Powers’ character refers to herself in the third person, so she makes perky announcements like, “And now, Candy is gonna cook you a birthday dinner!”) Playing the largest female role, a robotic Elke Sommer struts around in bikinis and other revealing outfits during her “performance” as a sexed-up eyewitness. It’s all a tease, however, because The Astral Factor lacks genuine titillation in the same way it lacks genuine suspense. When The Astral Factor was finally released in the mid-’80s—going straight to video, of course—it was retitled The Invisible Strangler. By any name, it’s junk.

The Astral Factor: SQUARE

The Animals (1970)

Soul-sucking dreck expunged from the bowels of the American film industry, The Animalsis a crude Western about a woman seeking revenge against men who violated her. (A year after this movie was loosed upon an unsuspecting world, the moderately superior Raquel Welch vehicle Hannie Caulder took the same basic story into the mainstream.) Michele Carey stars as Alice McAndrew, a schoolteacher traveling by wagon across the sun-baked American wilderness. Unfortunately, one of her fellow passengers is heartless criminal Pudge Elliot (Keenan Wynn), who is being transferred between prisons. Pudge’s henchmen attack the wagon and kill everyone aboard except Alice. The criminals then strip her, tie her to stakes on the ground, and rape her. Inexplicably, a soulful Apache named Chatto (Henry Silva) watches all this happen from a nearby hiding place. Then, after the thugs leave Alice for dead, Chatto transports her to a cave and nurses her back to health, eventually teaching her to shoot and helping her track down the rapists so she can murder them. Obviously, none of this has any credibility. Carey looks glamorous throughout the movie, New York native Silva’s casting as an Indian is ridiculous, and the idea that Alice falls in love with her caretaker is absurd. How warmly can she feel toward a man who watched her assault instead of intervening? Excepting Wynn’s reliable villainy, the acting in The Animals is as bad as the storytelling, and the score—by Rupert Holmes, later the purveyor of ’70s soft-rock staple “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”—is an atrocity dominated by screeching acid-rock guitars. Making matters worse, The Animals is widely available in a choppy UK cut bearing the alternate title Five Savage Men, and the UK cut suffers from distracting fade-out transitions and prudish optical adjustments during the nastiest scenes. Still, anything that hides even part of this terrible movie from human view should be considered merciful.

The Animals: SQUARE