Category Archives: Movies with a rural setting

The Boogens (1981)

Posted on October 25, 2026 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Creatures unleashed from mine.

It’s decided that a Colorado mine, that has been closed for 100 years, should be reopened and Brian (John Crawford) and Dan (Med Flory) are the two men heading the company that has been paid to excavate it. Unbeknownst to them there are large, scaly creatures hidden inside the mine that have been dormant for a century, but with the recent activity, have been awakened and begin to terrorize the people renting out a house nearby.

The film starts out with some potential. I enjoyed the turn-of-the-century photos seen over the opening credits depicting miners and settlers from when Colorado was just becoming a state. The amusing dialogue features some quick-witted responses and interplay. Too many horror films, particularly from the 70’s and 80’s would have stilted conversations, so at least here it’s snappy. It’s also great that it was filmed on location where they get the sights and sounds of living in a cold climate just right particularly the noise that is made when someone walks over freshly packed snow. The nudity by Rebecca Balding, brought on by the suggesting of director James L. Conway, whom she later married, as a way to ‘spice things up’, isn’t bad either.

Unfortunately, on a horror scale it’s pretty limp. The biggest issue is how long it takes for the scares to get going. It’s not until the 52-minute mark where we get a glimpse of the creature and even then, it’s only a tentacle. It then takes another 15-minutes before we see its face and body. I’m okay for some horror films to take their time to build up the tension as long as the payoff is good, but here that’s just not the case. There are too many gimmicks like the people, and the viewer, thinking there’s something frightening lurking only for it to turn out to be the pet dog. It’s okay if this is done once, but here it goes to the well too often until it seems like the dog is the star and maybe he should’ve been.

Exactly what these creatures are, and how they got there, needs better explaining. Why do they only inhabit this one little mine and how can they last so long without food? I know bears can hibernate during the winter, but that’s only for a few months, but we’re expected to believe that these things can do it for over a century? If they are hungry for flesh as the movie’s tagline suggests, then why don’t they eat the people when they do catch them instead of just clawing them up a bit? Watching one scarf down an adult human or two could’ve been cool and might’ve made the long wait seem worth it.

It’s unimpressive that only one creature was made for the production and that’s all you end up seeing if only fleetingly. They resemble a gargoyle from a gothic mansion and in fact gargoyles would actually be scarier. We also never get a full perspective of its body as only its head and front side is shown.

What shocked me the most though was how they only attack this one home. I was fully anticipating that the whole town would be under siege. Part of what made Tremors, which has a similar storyline, so good is that it took a whole community to bring the creatures down. Having more variety of onscreen personalities as well as weaponry and traps would’ve given the plot the imagination that it needed and deserved. Would’ve worked better as a horror film/disaster flick with some scientific ‘expert’ on hand to explain the origins of the species and an elaborate way to defeat them.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: September 25, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

Rated R

Director: James L. Conway

Studio: Taft International Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Horror, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity

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Pigs! (1973)

Posted on October 23, 2026 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Humans fed to pigs.

Lynn (Toni Lawrence) arrives at a remote roadside diner that is run by Zambrini (Marc Lawrence). No one knows her past and she’s highly evasive about it when asked. She gets a job there and sleeps in a back room unaware that the pigs that Zambrini keeps out back are into human meat and anyone that crosses him gets fed to them. Will Lynn be their next meal, or does she harbor a few dark plans of her own?

The film was a family project of noted character actor Marc Lawrence who had been acting in films in supporting roles since the early 1030’s.  He wrote the script along with his wife, Fanya Foss, and it was meant to help their daughter Toni break into the acting business by showcasing her talents. When no studio was willing to produce it, he took out a second mortgage on his home in order to get it financed and then directed it himself.

I remember first watching this way back when I was in college and it was shown on cable TV as a late Saturday night entry of a bad movie night where panned films would get broadcast that would otherwise have little or no interest. At the time it came off as having no plot just a lot of meandering scenes that went nowhere. Watching it now uncut via streaming it works a bit better, but only slightly. There’s still a lot of moments that have no connection to the main story.  One in particular has Marc entering a home lived in by two old ladies (Catherine Ross, Iris Korn) and talking to them in a creepy manner while wearing clown make-up, but nothing ever comes of it. They go on living there and he goes on caring of his pigs, so why was this moment even put in. Was it supposed to be a dream sequence and if so, what was the point of it?

I did like the remote location, which was filmed in Ventura County, California near the Los Padres National Forest. There’s just something about being in the middle of nowhere that helps accentuate the fear. These people have only themselves and their wits to count on, but then it also begs the question; if they are truly cut off where do these customers that frequent the diner come from?

The main problem is more with the script that gives too much away. I don’t know if the tension is really helped by us seeing an unnamed victim being fed to the pigs during the opening scene. Constantly alluding to Lynn’s mysterious past hurts it too. It becomes obvious that she’s not stable and thus no surprise later on when her dark side fully comes out where if this had been better disguised it could’ve been mor of a jolt.

The special effects are subpar. The blood looks like paste and whenever someone gets stabbed there’s never any rip in their clothing. A person can’t bleed unless there’s an actual cut in the skin for it to ooze out. The loud noise that the pigs make, which sounds more like a train horn, is annoying and overplayed.

I also found Jesse Vint, who plays the sheriff, to be too inept. With dumb cops like him where all the clues have to be spoon fed into him before he can figure it out, just makes the story weaker because there’s no true adversary for the bad guys who can freely get away with their crimes without much worry of being caught.

Spoiler Alert!

The ‘twist’ ending has an extra pig getting ‘created’ every time a victim is eaten, but how does this happen? Are these pigs’ demons from hell and does evil magic doing the ‘creating’? This needed to be better explained and leaving it wide-open is not much of a payoff.

End of Spoiler Alert!

I will give credit to Marc Lawrence as his acting is engaging. His character doesn’t have that much to do other than standing around looking old and paranoid. The fun though comes with his over-the-top reactions to anyone who gets near his precious pigs and his extreme nervousness which he makes no attempt to cover up. On the flip side his character also becomes sexually attracted to Lynn and there are shots of him gazing at her longingly, which when you factor in that he was her real-life father is kind of creepy and in fact the creepiness thing about the whole movie.

Alternate Title: Daddy’s Deadly Darling

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: May 23, 1973

Runtime: 1 Hour 20 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Marc Lawrence

Studio: Ursus Productions

Available: DVD (Out-of-Print), Amazon Video, Screambox, Fawesome, Philo, YouTube

 

 

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Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with a rural setting

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Rancho Deluxe (1975)

Posted on August 28, 2026 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 8 out of 10

4-Word Review: Modern day cattle rustlers.

Jack and Cecil (Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston) are two drifters who don’t work an actual job and instead rustle cattle and use the meat that they take from that to help pay for the basic things that they need. John (Clifton James) is the ranch owner who’s tired of seeing his cattle routinely mutilated and determined to find those who are responsible. Curt and Burt (Harry Dean Stanton, Richard Bright) are his ranch hands who John puts in charge to find the culprits, but they end up being of no effect despite them knowing that Jack and Cecil are behind it. After his prize bull gets kidnapped and he’s forced to pay a large ransom to get him back, he hires Henry (Slim Pickens) a legendary detective in cattle rustling to finally solve the case, but Henry proves, at least initially, to be just as inept and oblivious about the crimes as everyone else, which further frustrates John.

This was the first screenplay written by the prolific and irreverent writher Thomas McGuane, his second script 92 in the Shade, was also shot in 1974 during the fall of that year while this one was done in the spring and early summer. McGuance directed the other one himself while Frank Perry helmed this one and having an established Hollywood director behind the chair makes all the difference here particularly the cinematography by William A. Fraker that captures the majestic, mountains landscape of the big sky country, which was done on location in Livingston, Montanna becoming the first of many movies that would be shot there.

Like with McGuane’s other works it’s his offbeat, wry humor that keeps it entertaining and helps it stand out. There’re some truly original comical moments that had never been done before or since making this film even after being around 50 years still come off as fresh and inventive. Some of the best moments are when Bridges and Stanton play a game of Pong while having a discussion, which was apparently something they both did of lot of during breaks in shooting, so Perry decided to work it into the story. The shot of the bull inside a hotel is funny too though there’s no explanation for how they were able to get him in there without being detected, which could’ve heightened the comedy had it been shown. There’s also the scene where Bridges and Waterston have a sex orgy with their girlfriends and then the next morning get caught while still naked in bed by the girl’s elderly relatives, which I consider the best moment in the movie.

The dialogue has a wonderfully quirky quality working off non sequiturs and weird tangents like when out-of-the-blue Waterston asks Bridges if he believes in the tooth fairy, or when John’s wife, played by Elizabeth Ashley, asks him if he regrets selling their beauty parlor business while he busily frets about tracking down the rustlers. The best though is when Slim Pickens goes off on a rant involving a dream, he had as a slave in ancient Egypt while John tries giving him the latest updates on the case.

The characters and their goofy contradictions help compliment the absurdity. Bridges and Waterston are especially fun, some may even say this is a precursor to the character he played in The Big Lebowski, as a happy-go-lucky drifter with no direction in life, which they equate as being ‘free’. Even after they get put into the prison, they still have the same carefree mentality proving that state-of-mind is everything. James is also quite fun as the cantankerous rancher who’s always quite confident despite being wrong on everything. Stanton and Bright good too as dimwits who think they’re in on the game only to end up getting played badly. I also enjoyed Patti D’Arbanville who plays Bridges girlfriend Betty. She shows a very wild side with her sexual nature and drug use, but in reality, she’s most likely going to be spending the rest of her life in this small inconsequential town and working the same mundane job we see her doing at the beginning. Having her provocatively dance around while getting drunk and just before she partakes in the orgy is in a lot of ways her final act of rebellion before the clutches of the conventional life, whose claws I suspect she senses are already on her horizon, fully traps her in.

Unlike other movies the residents of this small town aren’t portrayed as being sheltered or cut-off but instead shown as being just as jaded as any urbanite if even more so. It also examines how the ways of the old world have been completely taken over by the attitudes and mores of the modern era where even the rural folk, at least the younger ones like the two sisters, compete to see whose ‘hipper’ and more with the times while wanting to avoid any association of the bygone era of their elders.

My only two complaints are the interior segments done inside John’s ranch home as the rooms came off as cramped and echoey. John was supposedly a rich man, so I wanted to see a house that exuded this with high cathedral ceilings and gaudy decor. Also, having Bridges and Waterston able to retrieve the $50,000 ransom money after kidnapping John’s bull, was too easy. I don’t feel John, or anybody else for that matter, would be willing to let go of their money quite so graciously especially to a couple of crooks. He should’ve either gotten the police involved to set a trap or done it himself by lying in wait at a careful distance with binoculars and waiting to see who comes to retrieve the briefcase full of money and then chasing them down when he spots them, which doesn’t occur, but logically should’ve.

My Rating: 8 out of 10

Released: March 14, 1975

Runtime: 1 Hour 34 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Frank Perry

Studio: United Artists

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, PlutoTV, Roku Channel, Tubi, YouTube

 

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Posted in 70's Movies, Buddy Movies, Cult, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Quirky

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Posted on July 21, 2026 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 10 out of 10

4-Word Review: Meetup at Devil’s Tower.

Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) works of a utility company in central Indiana and gets assigned in the middle of the night to investigate power outages that are occurring in the area. While he stops his vehicle to read a map a huge spaceship flies over him causing him to get a bad skin burn on the side of his face. After the encounter he becomes obsessed at recreating a distinct mountain landscape inside his home using any material necessary including digging up the dirt and plants from his outdoor garden and bringing them inside, which causes his wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) to leave him along with their three kids. Jillian (Melinda Dillon) is having a similar issue. She’s a single mother residing in a country home with her young son Barry (Cary Guffey) who gets swept up into the spaceship when it goes over her house. Since losing her son she too becomes obsessed with creating the same type of mountain landscape. Eventually Roy and her meet by chance and when they realize they both have the same vision in common and connect it to Devil’s Tower they set out to Wyoming to get there unbeknownst that the government has already become aware that the aliens intend to land there and have come up with a ploy to keep the public away by pretending that the area has become contaminated with a dangerous gas leak.

The film is a remake of sorts of Steven Spielberg’s first movie that he did called Firelight, which he directed in 1964 when he was only 17. While the storyline was similar that one was shot on a budget of $500 while this one was given almost $20 million and that made all the difference, but what really stands out is how, unlike most sci-fi films up to that time, it’s more about the people and their reactions to the ‘invasion’ or ‘visit’ than the space creatures. Some of the best moments deal simply with the local people congregating on a hilltop next to the highway in the middle of the night playing cards while waiting for the saucer to come. Another great segment is when the government officials become excited when they figure out what the coordinates that the aliens have sent to them mean and then roll out this giant globe to figure where on the planet the location is.

My favorite scenes deal with Roy’s home life, which is so realistic that it’s almost like it could’ve been somebodies home movies. I loved how the children, though still quite young, have essentially ‘taken over’ the house with toys and chaos all over. The parents have become so used to the kids shenanigans that when the one boy takes his younger sister’s doll and begins smashing it to pieces the mom and dad don’t bother to pay much attention to it even as it happens right in front of them, which is what I believe happens with most parents they essentially start to tune out the kids and the noise to the extent they no longer notice what their own kids are doing that others from the outside immediately would.

The casting is on target most of the way. Initially Dreyfuss was deemed too young for the dad role as he was only 29 at the time, but the segment where he becomes disillusioned at the children not wanting to see Pinocchio, which he had enjoyed growing up, brings out the universal generational disconnect that can befall most parents and thus almost immediately cements him as being middle-aged in the viewer’s mind.

I did feel that Garr’s and Dillion’s roles should’ve been reversed. Dillion’s character I never really got into. She’s got too much of a serious look about her and comes off as cold. Some may argue she was traumatized at losing her son, but I just didn’t really feel her pain. Garr is much better at playing vulnerable types and therefore should’ve been the single parent and Roy’s ultimate love interest while Dillion’s acting style would’ve been better suited for the distant and impatient wife.

Roy and Jillian’s quest to get to Devil’s Tower and fight through all the elements that try to stop them is compelling especially when done with John William’s pounding score, but there did seem to be a few logic loopholes. For instance, there’s no explanation where he got the car, as his wife drove off with the kids in their station wagon, and as his car keeps crashing through all the barriers there should’ve been a lot more front-end damage. Having the aliens message the exact coordinates of where Devil’s Tower is begs a lot of questions too. How would aliens know what English numbers mean and if they’re smart enough to learn that then why not learn the language too and speak to the humans with English words and not even bother with the musical note ditty?

Spoiler Alert!

The climactic finish, while still impressive especially with the giant spaceship landing, is a bit of a letdown. The biggest problem are the aliens themselves, which were obvious stop-action Claymation and comes off as tacky and unconvincing. There’s also the issue of this group of people, seems to be around 15, who agree to go off with the aliens in their ship and back to their home planet, but why would anyone want to do that?

How would they know they weren’t going into a hostile environment where humans wouldn’t be accepted, or treating unfairly? Wouldn’t they miss their friends and family here since there would be no guarantee they’d ever come back? Showing other people who had ‘disappeared’ years earlier and were now returned to the earth having not aged might’ve been enough to put the other people’s mind at ease, but still for me it would be taken too much of a risk and I don’t think there would be that many people like it gets shown here who would volunteer to do without question or pause.

The same goes for Roy who is seen entering the ship, but he has family here and if he’s any type of loving father he would never want to leave them. Some may argue that his wife left with the kids, so he was essentially ‘abandoned’, but he could fight for joint custody making the ‘abandonment’ angle null. To make more sense Roy should’ve been portrayed like the protagonist in Liquid Sky, as a loner with no connections or friends and thus leaving this planet wouldn’t have been any great loss.

My Rating: 10 out of 10

Released: November 16, 1977

Runtime: 2 Hours 17 Minutes (Director’s Cut)

Rated PG

Director: Steven Spielberg

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Classic, Movies Based on Conspiracy Theories, Movies for the Whole Family, Movies with a rural setting, Sci-Fi

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On Golden Pond (1981)

Posted on July 10, 2026 | 3 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 10 out of 10

Ethel and Norman (Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonday) are an older couple who spend each summer at their lakeside cabin. Norman, while being perpetually grouchy, is starting to show serious signs of aging. They receive word that their grown daughter, Chelsea (Jane Fonda), will becoming for a visit along with her new boyfriend Bill (Dabney Coleman) and his son Billy (Doug McKeon). She plans on traveling in Europe with Bill while leaving Billy with her parents. At first Norman does not take kindly to the news, but eventually he and Billy bond while taking the boat out to go fishing. When Chelsea returns, she finds the two have become quite close, but then her own past problems with Norman begin to seep through.

The film is based on the play of the same name that originally opened on February 28, 1979, and starred Tom Aldredge as Norman and Frances Sternhagen as Ethel, who were both only in their late 40’s at the time, but managed to somehow convincingly come off as elderly, and was written by 28-year-old Ernest Thompson who had struggled throughout the 70’s as an actor, co-starring in some short lived TV-shows, before finally finding his forte as a writer. The play, like the movie, was a big hit both with the critics and the audiences and it’s easy to see why. Instead of focusing on some bigger-than-life occurrence it captures the magical nuances of real life and how a simple visit to a cabin leads to unexpected results to what initially seems like two very different people with nothing in common.

The acting is a standout most especially Hepburn, who at the age of 73 did all of her own stunts including diving into the lake, is terrific and helps to hold the whole thing together. Fonda is great too, both won the Oscar for their work, though personally I would’ve liked his arc to have been more evident, he softens slightly at certain intervals, but I would’ve preferred it being broader and more permanent. It might’ve helped too had his mental decline not been telegraphed so quickly, make it seem like he was doing fine, which would’ve then made the scene where he can’t remember how to find his way home after picking strawberries more disturbing versus here where we’re pretty much expecting it before it even happens.

McKeon is adequate though Anthony Micheal Hall, who auditioned for the role, but lost out, might’ve been better. My main complaint is that I felt he was a bit too old. Leaving a 13-year-old who’s at that age where they begin to be rebellious and challenge authority alone with two frail, elderly people, might not have been the best idea, and having the kid be under 10, maybe like 8, where they’re more manageable, would’ve worked better.

The idea that the kid would’ve been ‘bored’ traveling in Europe made no sense to me. Exploring an entire new continent would’ve been quite memorable and something most kids would consider an exciting adventure especially if it was going to be done with their parents instead of spending it at a lonely cabin with old fogeys that he didn’t know, which is why I felt there needed to be a better explanation. For instance, he could’ve failed a class and thus forced to stay behind in order to attend summer school.

Having Jane bring up the idea of the kid staying with her elderly parents during the visit seemed audacious and really should’ve been discussed and planned out long before, like weeks or even months and having all parties agree to it. You couldn’t blame the kid for initially sulking about it and feeling like he had been ‘dumped’, which is exactly what it came off like especially since they weren’t even his grandparents and just people he had only met.

Coleman is splendid in support, and I really dug his manly beard, which actually makes him look younger. Jane’s role though seemed unneeded. Her conflict with her father was too broad and came-off more like padding than anything concrete. It’s not exactly clear what the specific problem is other than he was cold and distant to her growing up, but he’s that way to everybody, so why does she take it so personally? Having it revolve around some past incident of some kind would’ve been meatier.

While small in nature, the segment where Norman is reading the newspaper is a little confusing as he seems to be talking about the baseball scores, but when you look at the top of the page that he is reading it’s clearly the weather section and not the sports. I also felt it was dumb that Ethel asks for the aid of the mailman, played by William Lanteau, and his boat to help in her search when Norman and the kid don’t return home. Whatever state they lived in they had a working phone and were inside a county, so there would’ve been a police department and those should’ve been called as their boats would most likely been better able to go inside the treacherous rock area and they could’ve also had helicopters, which would’ve made the search easier and quicker.

Overall though the film succeeds on its vision and kudos should really go to director Mark Rydell, who as of this writing is still alive at the age of 97, which is considerable older than what Norman’s age was in the movie, which was 80. Rydell started his career as an actor and probably best known for his creepy performance in The Long Goodbye, but he’s helmed some really good films too with this one being his best. What I enjoyed the most was the imagery like when the kid takes the boat around the lake on his own and the brief shots of leaves growing out of the buds on trees and plants showing, like with the characters, the evolution of life.

My Rating: 10 out of 10

Released: December 4, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 49 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Mark Rydell

Studio: Universal Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, PlutoTV, Plex, Peacock, Roku, Tubi

 

 

 

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Posted in 80's Movies, Academy Award Winners for Best Actor, Academy Award Winners for Best Actress, Drama, Movies Based on Stageplays, Movies for the Whole Family, Movies with a rural setting

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Endangered Species (1982)

Posted on June 23, 2026 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Investigating mysterious cattle mutilations.

Ruben (Robert Urich) is a recovering alcoholic who quits his job as a cop and decides to move to rural Colorado with his teenaged daughter MacKenzie (Marin Kanter).  Along the way their vehicle breaks down in the small-town of Buffalo.  They decide to make their temporary home there and Ruben meets up with Harriet (JoBeth Williams) the newly elected sheriff. He learns that she’s investigating, with the help of local newspaper reporter Joe (Paul Dooley), some mysterious cattle mutilations that has been plaguing the area. Ruben, who grows fond of her, helps her in the pursuit for answers and comes to determine that it may have something to do with a nearby abandoned military complex as well as a neighboring cattle baron Ben (Hoyt Axton) who seems awfully worried about anyone snooping around.

The film’s direction, done by the still budding Alan Rudolph, is probably the best thing to recommend about what’s otherwise a pedestrian story. I liked the soundtrack, which despite the setting being quite rural, has a cool sci-fi vibe, and the grainy cinematography gives it a documentary feel. Rudolph’s use of capturing dialogue, which was clearly inspired by his mentor Robert Altman, is cool too as the camera will focus on one person, but we’ll hear the conversation of two other characters who are not in the shot. Unfortunately, the plot is unimaginative, and the mystery portion becomes too obvious.

Urich is miscast in the lead, the part was intended for Robert Mitchum who would’ve been far superior. Urich’s a nice guy and all, but not convincing as a brash, hard-edge cop making his entire performance come off as affected. His character arch, which focuses on an alcoholic trying to redeem himself, both with his career and relationship with his daughter, is too formulaic to be either gripping, or compelling though it’s interesting to hear him casually utter the slur ‘faggot’ at one point as it would be impossible for someone in a movie today to say that and still be deemed the hero.

I also didn’t feel an outsider was needed here as Urich seems to come up with all the clues that you’d think somebody living in the town would’ve deduced far earlier. A good example is when he follows some trucks to the military complex and starts to connect this to the cattle killings, but any other resident could’ve done this too and most likely would’ve. Most small-town people are characteristically suspicious of government agencies, so knowing that there was an abandoned federal outpost nearby would’ve made that area number one on their suspect list and would not have required the assistance of some big city cop to get them there.

Jobeth looks awkward and uncomfortable in her police uniform. I dug the idea of having a female sheriff, which hasn’t been done too much, so it offers a unique angle, but it approaches it in an illogical way. For instance, it has her attempting to break up a male bar fight by her trying to somehow tackle one of the men, who immediately fling her away as if she were a rag doll and it looks as pathetic as it sounds. Clearly, she should’ve gone into that with some backup by male deputies, or a taser, but for her to go in it alone and think somehow, she can ‘handle it’ makes both her and the film look like it has no common sense.

I will though give some credit to the scene where Urich is in her shower and he makes a pass at her and she in returns gives him a gut punch, which was unexpected as I was afraid it was going to turn into some sort of sappy, stereotypical love scene, which does occur later, but I at least enjoyed the momentary attempt to go against the grain.

Spoiler Alert!

I did enjoy Axton’s bad guy part. He performance isn’t anything spectacular and his poisoning moments, where he brushes his teeth with a contaminated toothbrush that causes his gums to bleed looks more like he’s just swishing around red Kool aid in his mouth. I also thought it was ridiculous that Urich would force Axton to drive the pick-up at gunpoint when he was clearly in a weakened and distressed state that could’ve killed them both. However, his death scene, where he kneels on the highway and has his abdomen burst out of his body, is awesome and the film’s best moment though it could’ve been extended.

The ending unfortunately offers no resolution. It has the night helicopters of the bad guys flying away while JoBeth and Urich remain on the ground watching helplessly. To sit through nearly 2-hours of this thing, which is at times a bit slow, there needed to be more of a finale. Preferably nabbing the baddies and breaking open the case and the fact that this doesn’t happen makes the whole thing feel like one big waste of time.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: September 10, 1982

Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Alan Rudolph

Studio: MGM

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

 

 

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies Based on Conspiracy Theories, Movies with a rural setting, Mystery, Thrillers/Suspense

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I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

Posted on October 31, 2025 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Assaulted woman gets revenge.

Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) is a writer who has decided to get away from the bustle of New York City by renting an isolated cabin by a river that’s just outside of Kent, Connecticut. It’s here that she hopes to finish her novel but finds it hard to do when she inadvertently attracts the attention of Johnny (Eron Tabor) a gas station attendant and two unemployed men named Stanley (Anthony Nichols) and Andy (Gunter Kleeman) who routinely upset her quiet environment with their motorboat. When delivery boy Mathew (Richard Pace), who is mentally disabled and social awkward, comes back to the men describing how when he delivered groceries to her, he ‘saw her breasts’, it gives them the idea to attack her and then ‘offer her up’ to Matthew, so he can finally have sex with a woman. The men chase Jennifer down while she’s relaxing in her rowboat and take her to the backwoods where each of them takes turns raping her over an extended period. Once they finally leave, they give Mathew a knife and tell him to kill her while they wait outside. Mathew though is too afraid to stab her, so he lies and tell them he did when he really didn’t. Eventually, after several weeks, Jennifer recovers from her injuries, both physical and emotional, and decides to seek out the unsuspecting men by killing them off in gruesome ways one-by-one.

This film was and still is highly controversial, some might say it’s the most controversial film ever made and universally condemned by both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on their show where they described it as ‘the worst movie ever made’. Ebert even went as far as to write in his review that it made him physically sick to watch it. His review though had a Streisand effect as it garnered it more attention and got people to come to the theater to ‘see what all the fuss was about’ eventually making it quite profitable and a cult classic that’s turned the franchise into marketable one that has given it several sequels and even a 2010 remake.

The inspiration for the story came in October of 1974 when writer/director Meir Zarchi was traveling with his friend and daughter in New York City neighborhood of Jamaican Hills where they came upon a naked, beaten-up woman who told them she had just been raped. When he escorted her to the police, he was appalled at the indifferent treatment she was given and he came home and almost immediately began writing the script.

Almost 2 years later, in August of 1976, he had acquired enough funding so shooting could begin. The argument though was whether this really was a ‘trenchant’ drama meant to expose the brutal nature of rape, versus sanitizing it as other movies at the time tended to do or was simply a cheap way to exploit a difficult subject for money. In a lot of ways, it seems to be the later as gang rapes like the one portrayed here don’t happen too often and it’s usually just one attacker. The fact that the men seem to go away and then suddenly reappear again unexpectedly out of nowhere makes it feel like it’s being played up for tension’s sake and attempting to get the most out of the horror then simply trying to intelligently examine the cruel event.

There’s also no scene showing Jennifer going to the police and being treated poorly, which was supposedly what enraged Zarchi so much during the real event. Without that element it’s harder to justify the plot and there really needed to be a segment showing that.

On the flip side I was impressed with the film’s overall grittiness. It’s like Zarchi had watched Last House on the Left but decided to take out the ill-advised ‘comic relief’ scenes and weird music and just left in the unrelenting tension and to that level it succeeds. Having no soundtrack at all, outside of some organ music that gets played when Jennifer visits a church, helps give it more of a realistic effect almost like we’re watching a documentary where the camera is simply turned-on and whatever terrible things happen is allowed to simply play-out unabated. This along with Keaton’s dynamic performance, where she essentially plays two women, one a victim and the other the perpetrator, is what helps the movie stand out and gives it it’s legs.

Spoiler Alert!

The complaints I had comes more with the third act where Jennifer carries out her revenge. The segment where she entices Matthew to have sex with her again in the woods by the river, so she can put a noose around his neck and hang him, didn’t feel genuine. I would think anyone who had been raped that they wouldn’t want anyone to touch them, or get intimate after such a traumatic event, so allowing herself to get naked and letting a man, one of her former attackers no less, get on top of her, just didn’t seem plausible from a psychological perspective. On the physical end it didn’t seem possible that a young thin woman would be able to pull the rope tight enough to hang someone who clearly weighed more than she.

The second killing where she takes Johnny back to her place and they get naked in her tub had the same problematic issues. She had a gun in her hand when she got out of her car, so why not just shoot him then and get it over with? Why take the chance of bringing him back to her house where he could overpower her? Also, how dumb does this guy have to be that he would completely let down his guard and not think that this woman, who’s assault he happily took part in, could be completely trusted and not try to lure him into a trap?

Her final attack on the two other men is flawed as well as it has her swimming out to the boat that one of them is on, but she comes onboard carrying no weapon. She only gets her hands on the ax when the other guy accidentally drops it into her boat as she tries to side swipe him, but that’s still a very stupid and dangerous way to go about things. If she’s fully intending to kill the guy she should come prepared with something already in hand when she confronts him.

Alternate Title: Day of the Woman

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: November 22, 1978

Runtime: 1 Hour 42 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Meir Zarchi

Studio: Cinemagic Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, PlutoTV, Roku, Tubi, YouTube

 

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Horror, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Rape/Revenge

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The Other (1972)

Posted on October 8, 2025 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Twin brother causes havoc.

Niles and Holland (Chris and Martin Udvarnoky) are twin brothers living with their mother (Diana Muldaur) and aunt and uncle (Norma Connolly, Lou Frizzell) on an isolated farm. Niles becomes good friends with Ada (Uta Hagen) a neighbor lady who taps into Niles’ special abilities. She teaches him a technique in which he can separate his mind from his body and then have it harbor in another body be it a person, or animal, or even a bird. Ada though fears Niles is using this ability for evil purposes when those around him begin turning up dead. When his mother is found at the bottom of the stairs unconscious and stuck to a wheelchair the rest of her life afterwards Ada tries to convince Niles to give up the game, but Niles insists it’s really his brother Holland that’s committing the acts of violence and not him, but Ada refuses to believe him as she’s in on a secret that Niles is refusing to accept.

Tom Tryon, who had been an actor throughout the 50’s and 60’s, became frustrated at the quality of roles he’d been offered and wanted to try novel writing. After watching Rosemary’s Baby and seeing the reaction it got he decided to write his own horror story basing it on some of the experiences he had gone through while growing up in a small New England town. It took nine different rewrites before he was able to get it published where it became a best seller and allowed him to quit acting and become an author fulltime. When it was bought into a movie Tryon retained the rights to the story, which allowed him to write the screenplay though he later admitted to not liking the finished product and blaming it on the casting and editing, which had cut out a significant portion of the story, over 25-minutes of it, based on feedback from test audiences.

On the surface the film really doesn’t seem much like a horror movie, or at least what modern audiences have come to expect from horror. There’s no gore, several of the killings aren’t even shown and just implied, there’s also no shocks, or scares and the majority of the plot takes place outside in the sunshine versus the darkness of night. Initially viewers didn’t take to it too well and it lost money at the box office with many feeling that Robert Mulligan, best known for having done To Kill a Mockingbird, was not the right choice for this type of material with the biggest complaint being that the movie was ‘too beautiful’ and made more like a drama, which had been my feeling when I first saw it years ago on TV. However, after viewing it again in its complete form without any commercials I was able to get into it more and if one is patient, it can have many benefits.

It still could’ve been played up more, and I didn’t like the setting at all. It was shot in Murphys and Angel Camp, California even though the setting in the book had been a small town in the east. Originally Mulligan had wanted to shoot it in Connecticut, but since the story took place in the summer and they weren’t able to begin production until the fall he felt the leaves changing color would have a negative effect and thus choose to do it in the west, but topography is all wrong as all you get is very dry, brown, parched earth that doesn’t allow for much atmosphere. The eastern autumn foliage would’ve been to its benefit and made it even creepier as it would’ve reminded one of Halloween.

Despite this there are some good moments like the twin’s trip to the circus where they sneak behind the curtains and view the participants of the freakshow including witnessing a fetus floating in a glass jar of liquid, which is a great foreshadowing. Niles ability to view things outside himself like witnessing the point of view of a crow as it flies around the property is well done too though the best moment comes at the end when a baby is found missing during the night that creates a panic and is quite riveting both emotionally and visually.

The Udvarnoky twins was an unusual choice as they hadn’t been in any movies before, nor did anything films afterwards and only became aware of the roles through their grade school teacher who sent in their headshots upon learning that a film was being shot in the area and searching for twins to star in it. Originally the part was meant for Mark Lester, who could’ve done it easily since neither twin is ever in the same shot, but the brothers do admirably especially Chris, who sadly died at the young age of 49 from kidney disease, who’s able to carry the film throughout and in just about every scene though their constant whispering may eventually become irritating to some. Uta Hagen, who was known for being an acclaimed acting teacher as well as for her stage work, but had never been in a movie before, is splendid and the one element that keeps it both compelling and unnerving. Good work too by Victor French in a small, but pivotal bit and a young John Ritter.

Spoiler Alert!

The story was actually given three different endings. In the book we find that Niles is sitting inside a mental hospital as an adult and describing what happened through flashbacks. In the version broadcast on TV Niles is able to escape the fire set by Ada, but then through voiceover is heard talking to his dead brother where he states that they’ll be ‘taken away’ (most likely an institution) and will be able to ‘play the game’ there. In the film though we see Niles looking out his bedroom window before being called down to dinner revealing that he had escaped detection by the others who did not suspect him of committing the killings and thus was still free to kill again, which is the scariest.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: May 26, 1972

Runtime: 1 Hour 41 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Robert Mulligan

Studio: Twentieth Century Fox

Available: VHS, DVD-R

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Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with a rural setting, Mystery, Obscure Movies

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Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1979)

Posted on September 3, 2025 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Spinster teacher is raped.

Evelyn Wyckoff (Anne Heywood) is a middle-aged single woman who teaches high school in a small town in Kansas. She has never married and is showing signs of severe depression, which alarms her best friend Beth (Carolyn Jones) as well as the older couple (R.G. Armstrong, Joycelyn Brando) whom she’s living with. Both her doctor (Robert Vaughan) and her psychiatrist (Donald Pleasance) believe it’s because she is not in a relationship or having any sex and that she needs to get out more and meet people. She attempts at starting something with fellow teacher Chester (J. Patrick McNamara) but finds him to be too shy and embattled with his own problems to be able to recognize her interests. She also considers friendly bus driver Ed (Earl Holliman) only to call it off when she learns he’s married. Left alone after school one evening she comes into contact with Rafe (John Lafayette), a black man who works as the janitor, who sees her loneliness as a weakness that he can exploit. He comes onto her strongly and abrasively eventually forcing her to submit to his sexual demands, but she doesn’t go to the authorities and instead starts to enjoy the degradation and continues to come back for more until the rest of the students and teachers find out about it putting her job and reputation in peril.

The story is based on the 1970 novel of the same name written by William Inge. The film rights were sold in 1971 but sat on the shelf for many years until producer Raymond Stross found it and felt it would be a good vehicle for his actress wife Heywood who had already made a name for herself in tackling controversial, edgy material and even sought it out, so this was considered a perfect next project. While she had received critical accolades for her earlier work, The Fox, where she played a lesbian in a  relationship with Sandy Dennis, which was envelope pushing for its era, this one did not go over as well and was genuinely lambasted causing her career to take a downfall from which it couldn’t recover and she ended up retiring from acting just a decade later.

On a surface level it’s okay. The recreation of the 1950’s Kansas, while shot in Stockton, California, is still effective and the personalities of the people isn’t as cliched. There are those that show prejudices and oppressive mind sets, but there’s a healthy balance that don’t, which helps make it feel more realistic. The supporting cast is full of familiar faces though most of them are wasted in small roles that don’t add much and Carolyn Jones, in her last feature film appearance, stands out best albeit with an awful hairstyle.

The biggest detriment, besides the flat direction and booming music score, is Heywood who doesn’t offer enough nuance to her part. I’ll commend her for taking on a very difficult role that required at age 48 to be fully nude and allowing herself to be put into some very vulnerable and demeaning positions, but her facial expressions and responses are one-note. Her constant crying for no reason, which alarms those around her, and unexplained impulsive behavior, like smashing a mirror during a party, is too dramatic. Instead of using this to reveal that she’s unhappy it makes her seem more like a complete mental case that has far worse issues than just being lonely and I felt more sympathy for her friends trying to put up with her erraticism than I did with the main character who for the most part is rather whiny and annoying.

There’s never any explanation for why she’s unable to get into a relationship. She’s attractive, so you’d expect there would be eligible suitors who’d ask her out. All we see is a bus driver who’s already married, but what about other single men who would have to be out there? Why don’t we ever see one of them make a move and if so, how would she respond to them, which would be far more revealing than anything she says to her shrink, which amounts to talky pseudo-science.

The rape scene isn’t either shocking or effective and seems to come out of nowhere. It occurs in the middle of the second act, but before then we see the Rafe character only once while cleaning the chalk boards for a few seconds, so we have no idea what makes him tick, or why he chooses to prey on this woman and none of the others. Had she made the first move in an attempt to connect with someone and relieve her of her isolation, and this then inadvertently incited some inner aggression with him it might’ve made more sense and worked with the flow of the story, but the way it gets handled here makes it seem like two different movies: one dealing with the pain of being alone and the other about a man who enjoys exploiting women.

Ultimately nothing comes together. We don’t learn much about the protagonist. Yes, she’s sexually repressed, but the root cause is never made clear. The fact that she accepts her degradation at the hands of Rafe makes her even more confusing. When her friend Beth says that she feels like she didn’t really know her at all I the viewer felt like saying the same thing. The result is shallow using shock elements that are no longer effective causing the film to be both forgettable and boring.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: April 13, 1979

Runtime: 1 Hour 46 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Marvin J. Chomsky

Studio: Bel Air/Gradison Productions

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Tubi

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Drama, Exploitation, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity

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Straw Dogs (1971)

Posted on May 28, 2025 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 8 out of 10

4-Word Review: Man defends his home.

David (Dustin Hoffman), a nerdy mathematician, has been given a research grant and uses it to relocate to the rural countryside of England with his wife Amy (Susan George). They move into a farmhouse that was once owned by Amy’s father and they hire four men (Del Henney, Ken Hutchinson, Jim Norton, Donald Webster) to fix up the roof. The men though don’t work much and spend most of the time making fun of David and ogling Amy. After several bad encounters, including the grizzly death of their pet cat, David fires them and hopes that’ll be the last it, but things only get worse. When a teen girl named Janice (Sally Thomsett) disappears her violently drunken father Tom (Peter Vaughan) thinks it was caused by Henry (David Warner) a mentally handicapped man that Janice had shown an affinity for. Tom, along with the four other men, become a lynch mob determined to find Henry and bring him some ‘street justice’. David and Amy, while returning from a church service, hit Henry with their car as he’s running from the other men. David agrees to take the injured Henry into his home until a doctor can arrive, but the five men insist on getting inside to beat and kill Henry for his perceived crime. Since David had avoided having any confrontation with the men previously even when they had openly mocked him, they presume he’ll be a pushover this time as well, but David has finally decided to take a stand and will defend his home from the intruders in any way he can. 

While it was controversial at the time many now consider this the pinnacle of director Sam Peckinpah’s career and his directorial touches are supreme. The capturing of the brown empty vast landscape of nothingness, shot during the winter of 1971, brings out a surreal sense making it seem like the characters are living in a purgatory outer world where everything is dead and helps explain the deadness of the men’s souls that have been forced to endure their entire lives there. The climactic sequence where David’s home comes under siege is deftly handled. Normally in thrillers pounding music gets played during these segments to ramp up the tension, but here there’s only the sound of a distance foghorn, which makes it much more creepy, distinct, and helps accentuate the isolation. 

Some have been critical of the film’s violence especially at the time when there was activism going on that tried to stymie violent material on both TV and movies with the idea that violence was a ‘learned’ behavior and if people didn’t see it so much in entertainment, then they wouldn’t do it in real life. Peckinpah though saw it differently as he felt violence was an instinctual reaction that couldn’t just be ‘unlearned’ and that in certain situations it was necessary and not every conflict could be resolved peacefully, a message the film brings out quite well. 

While Susan George gives an excellent performance, as do the four villainous men, particularly Vaughan as their ringleader making them some of the creepiest bad guys in film history, I did find her character confusing. I didn’t understand why she’d marry a guy that she found by her own admission cowardly even bringing up that he was ‘running away’ from problems he was having at his university and his ‘hiding behind his studies’ in order to avoid it. She also shows no respect for his work and several times even vandalizes his chalk board that has his mathematical equations, so what attracted her to him in the first place? Would’ve made more sense had she initially idolized him for his academic status and then became painfully aware of his meekness as the film progressed, which would’ve made for a more interesting arch.

Spoiler Alert!

The film is based on the 1969 novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon Williams, but with many changes some of which worked while others didn’t. In the novel the couple had an 8-year-old girl, but in the film there is no child. To a degree it doesn’t make that much of a difference though when the bad guys attack the house it might’ve heightened the urgency more knowing that David was not only defending his ‘home’, but also the safety of his terrified daughter. The biggest change that the film does is that it creates a connection between Henry and Janice where Janice sneaks away with him during a church party where she invites him to be intimate with her, but in the process, he accidentally kills her, which seemed too similar to Of Mice and Men. It’s confusing too why this teen girl, who outside of her buck teeth seems reasonably attractive, would feel the need to throw herself at a mentally handicapped man, or get flirty with David, who is married. Why can’t she find guys her own age to fool around with? Knowing the hormones of most teen boys that shouldn’t be too hard, so without further explanation to her psyche, which doesn’t happen, her ‘inviting’ of Henry is quite unnatural and forced. 

In the book Henry is instead a child killer who’s being transported back to prison when the vehicle he’s in gets stuck in the snow, which allows him to escape. At the same time Janice, who’s mentally disabled, which isn’t made clear in the movie, runs away from a Christmas party where she ends up dying from the exposure to the cold, but otherwise it has nothing to do with the escape of Henry and is only presumed to have a connection by the five men, which makes more sense and the screenplay should’ve have kept it this way.

On the other hand, in the book none of the attacking men die and are only badly injured, but I think death gives it a more final resolution, so the movie scores there. I also liked how David is forced to resort to items he can find around the house, much like in the film Last House on the Left, which came out a year later, to fight off the bad guys versus the cliched machoism of having a big gun to blow them away and it also helps to show how intellectual wits can ultimately be used to overpower the otherwise physically stronger attackers. 

The rape scene in which the wife gets assaulted by not only one, but two men was another problematic moment as the book had no such segment. For one thing it makes it seem like she’s actually enjoying the attack, at least with the first one, and she recovers from it much too quickly and doesn’t even bother to tell David about it and able to go on relatively normally afterwards, which didn’t seem realistic and thus I think it should’ve been excised since it comes off as exploitive and doesn’t have that much to do with the main plot. 

My Rating: 8 out of 10

Released: December 22, 1971

Runtime: 1 Hour 57 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD, Blu-ray (Criterion Collection)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Classic, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Thrillers/Suspense

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