Category Archives: Obscure Movies

Nightmares (1983)

Posted on October 24, 2013 | 1 comment

nightmares

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: These stories aren’t scary.

This film is made up of an anthology of horror tales that were originally made for the ‘Darkroom’ TV-show that ran from 1981 to ’82 on ABC and was hosted by James Coburn.  The network deemed these stories to be ‘too intense’ for television so Universal decided to make it into a feature film. Unlike the series there is no actor or host that ties the stories together, which is unfortunate as Coburn’s presence could have given it a little personality. The biggest reason I was interested to watch this was to see what was considered ‘too intense’ for television back in the early 80’s and after viewing it the answer is ‘not much’.

The first story is entitled “Terror in Topanga” and features a mental patient on the loose in a suburban town and a housewife named Lisa (Cristina Raines) who has run out of cigarettes and feels compelled to go out late at night to get some. The segment is predictable and pedestrian with a twist ending that is a big letdown. Christophe Crowe who wrote the story is married to Raines in real-life and the two teamed up a few years later for an episode entitled “Prisoners”, which aired on the 80’s version of ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ and is much, much better than this one and well worth seeking out.

“Bishop of Battle” makes up the second story and features Emilio Estevez as a teen obsessed with beating a video arcade game. This segment features the best visuals. I found the graphics that were used for the game were actually kind of impressive and fun to watch. Estevez is enjoyable as the tightly wound character and this segment also features Moon Zappa in a small part as well as Billy Jacoby (Jayne) who is the younger brother of famous child actor Scott Jacoby and looks just like him.

Lance Henriksen stars in the third story “The Benediction” as a priest who is grappling with his faith and thus decides to leave the ministry. As he starts out in his car on his journey to get away he finds himself being menaced by a black pick-up truck whose driver he cannot see and the two start to play a game of cat-and-mouse with their vehicles on a lonely stretch of desert highway. The scene where the pick-up bursts through the ground is the only interesting moment in what is otherwise a weak, uninspired rip-off of Duel.

The fourth and final story “Night of the Rat” is by far the worst. It pertains to a suburban family whose house becomes invaded by a giant demon-like rat. The special effects used to create the giant sized rodent are awful and would be almost comical if it weren’t so thoroughly botched and ridiculous. Veronica Cartwright who plays the perpetually nervous, high-strung mother gets a bit one-dimensional and irritating, but it is nice to see Bridgette Anderson as the daughter who later went on to star in Savannah Smiles before dying of a drug overdose at age 23.

The stories are flatly photographed with dull looking sets that have no cinematic quality to them and no business being on the big screen. This thing was given an R rating even though there is no swearing, or nudity and just the minimal of violence. I realize that the PG-13 rating was still a year away at the time, but this still should have been given a PG.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: September 2, 1983

Runtime: 1Hour 39Minutes

Rated R

Director: Joseph Sargent

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Horror, Made-for-TV, Obscure Movies

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Dear Dead Delilah (1972)

Posted on October 18, 2013 | Leave a comment

dear dead delilah

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Greedy family gets hacked.

Delilah (Agnes Moorehead) is the matriarch of a large southern family who brings together the other members to tell them that her deceased husband’s gambling earnings of $600,000 is hidden somewhere on the premises. Desperate and greedy everyone goes on the hunt for it, but find they are being slaughtered one-by-one by an ax-wielding maniac.

As low budget horror movies go this one is about as poorly produced as you can get. This was John Farris’s first and so far last foray behind the camera. He is most famous for authoring ‘The Fury’, which was later made into a hit movie, but as a director he shows no visual ability. The scenes are poorly staged and the sets are illuminated by a bright unfiltered light that makes the center of every room in every scene look like it is under a spotlight. The scenes drone on with over-the-top characterizations of greedy family members and one-dimensional monotonous talk about money. The southern setting seems hooky almost like an amateurish attempt at Tennessee Williams. The scares and tension are non-existent and the film is an embarrassment to anyone having anything to do with it, which includes Bill Justis and his terrible music score.

It doesn’t help matters that the 1986 Embassy VHS issue of this film, which is as of this date the only source where this film can be seen, is terrible. The negative has a lot of scratches and the color is dark and faded making it look almost like someone’s forgotten home movie.

Moorehead, whose last film this was, is the one gem. She wears a brown wig and the only cast member who speaks in a Southern accent that sounds genuine. Her constant frowning facial expression is entertaining and helps enliven this otherwise poor excuse of a film with every scene that she is in.  She shares several scenes with Will Geer who plays her estate attorney. The two co-starred earlier that same year in an episode of ‘Bewitched’ where Geer played George Washington brought back to life by Esmerelda.

The film does boast some graphic murders that seem well ahead of its time in the grisly department. One of the best ones is when a female sitting in a wheelchair gets decapitated and the viewer sees her head lying on the ground next to her still quivering, blood spurting body. The opening sequence has a daughter speaking with her mother while the old lady has an ax sticking out of her head and her severed arm lying on the floor, which the daughter nonchalantly steps over like it is no big deal. The part near the end where a man gets shot through the back of his head and the bullet come out through his right eye socket is impressive as well.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: June 16, 1972

Runtime: 1Hour 37Minutes

Rated R

Director: John Farris

Studio: Southern Star Entertainment

Available: VHS

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Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Low Budget, Movies that take place in the South, Obscure Movies, Slasher/Gore

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Eye of the Cat (1969)

Posted on October 6, 2013 | 1 comment

eye of the cat 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: He’s afraid of cats

Wylie (Michael Sarrazin) returns to the home of his rich Aunt Danny (Eleanor Parker) who he hasn’t seen in ages at the urging of his girlfriend Kassia (Gayle Hunnicutt). Kassia has become aware that the aunt is suffering from severe emphysema and must sleep in an oxygen tent at night. She wants Wylie to get back into his aunt’s will and then when he does they will sneak into her bedroom and turn off her oxygen. The problem is that Danny also owns a lot of cats and Wylie suffers from ailurophobia, which is the irrational fear of them and this further complicates the matter.

David Lowell Rich directed mainly TV-movies in his career, but scores for the most part in this rare theatrical attempt. I enjoyed the split screen montage done over the opening credits as well as the bird’s eye view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The viewer gets a zesty feel of the San Francisco locale and the scene where Aunt Danny’s wheelchair teeters off of a very steep incline is well shot and edited. My only beef is with the inside of Aunt Danny’s mansion, which is basically just sets constructed on a sound stage that is a very clichéd, unimaginative view of a ‘rich person’s house’ that gives the production a kind of cheap and tacky look.

Saarazin again nails it. Usually he plays sensitive leading men, but here does a change of pace as the very amoral and apathetic cad and it works.

Parker is quite good in a latter career role. She was only 46 at the time making her one of the more attractive and sexy wheelchair bound Aunts you will ever see. The fact that she is going to leave her entire fortune to her cats seems whacky, but then after seeing Wylie for the first time in years she decides to immediately change her will and make him the beneficiary seems even crazier. The character could easily be written off as being ridiculously campy, but somehow Parker, who has always has a knack for playing vulnerable people, makes her seem entertaining and even intriguing instead. I enjoyed her strange misplace morality and the fact that she is attracted to the much younger Wylie and even makes a pass at him, which creates for some interesting sexual undertones.

Hunnicutt doesn’t have a lot of lines, but her facial expressions are right on-target for that of a cold and conniving woman. The scene where she has a physical fight with one of Wylie’s former girlfriends (Jennifer Leak) while inside the woman’s bathroom at a bar is fun especially as it is captured from a bird’s-eye vantage point having Wylie try to get into the middle of it to break it up only to get beaten up by the two makes it even more entertaining.

Of course the real stars are the cats. There are literally hundreds of them and the best scene is where they fight over a dish of raw meat. I loved hearing their very guttural growls and watching them hiss and claw at each other. The close-ups of their eyes and mouths are well captured and they appear well trained as they scratch at Hunnicutt and chase her all around during the final sequence.

The film has a few twists although I saw them coming long before they happened. The film isn’t bad for its type, but it fails to distinguish itself and becomes nothing more than a passable time-filler.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: June 18, 1969

Runtime: 1Hour 37Minutes (TV-Print runs 1Hour 30Minutes and has different scenes edited in.)

Rated M

Director: David Lowell Rich

Studio: Universal

Available: www.modcinema.com (Both the theatrical and TV-Print.)

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Posted in 60's Movies, Obscure Movies, Thrillers/Suspense

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The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie (1972)

Posted on October 4, 2013 | Leave a comment

the strange vengeance of rosalie

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: She can’t be trusted.

This is an okay obscurity about an Indian girl named Rosalie (Bonnie Bedelia) whose grandfather has just died and in an attempt to stave off loneliness tricks Virgil (Ken Howard) a traveling businessman into coming back to her isolated ramshackle place. Once there she breaks his leg in order to trap him and hopes that in the time it takes to heal he will learn to love her.

Critic Leonard Maltin calls this film “farfetched” and going “way off base” yet nothing could be further from the truth. If you accept the initial premise then the rest of the film is carried out in a plausible and believable fashion.

Director Jack Starrett certainly has a vision here. The remote desert like local is captured well and gives it a distinct feel. The premise is static, but the story keeps moving and new elements are added in nicely. The second hour does begin to meander, but it is finished off by a surprise ending that comes out of nowhere and is completely unexpected. You have to watch it all the way through to really appreciate it yet it does help the film come together and even helps explain its title.

The similarities between this and Misery are quite evident and in some ways this film wins out. It is not as slick or polished, but it is also not as formulated either. This is not your standard thriller as you have no idea where it is going. It runs the gamut between drama, adventure, and even human interest. There is also the added sexuality element and a genuine relationship between the two, which Misery did not have.

The best thing is the Rosalie character. She is young and beautiful. Her intentions and motivations are constantly surprising. In some ways she is like the Barbara Eden character in ‘I Dream of Jeannie’. She is naive and trusting, but also headstrong, self- sufficient and cunning and Bedelia is perfect in the role.

Being made in the early 70’s and at the height of political awareness there is some thought to there being meaning to the fact that she is Indian and Howard the typical white businessman. She is constantly trying to win approval of this white man who otherwise seems oblivious to her conditions or needs. He is also too self-absorbed and too locked into his mindset of minorities being ‘inferior’ to realize how consistently she outsmarts him. Like with a lot of minorities there is a great deal of frustration with the attitudes of the establishment. Howard is just too stuck in to his preconceived notions to ever see her as an equal no matter how hard she tries.

Overall this is a decent film especially when compared to other low budget, independent films of that same era. The twist ending helps, but you have to stick with it.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: June 16, 1972

Runtime: 1Hour 47Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Jack Starrett

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: Amazon Instant Video (Edited Version)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Kidnapping Movies, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with a rural setting, Obscure Movies, Thrillers/Suspense

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Doin’ Time on Planet Earth (1988)

Posted on September 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

doin time on planet earth 1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Weird people don’t belong

Ryan (Nicholas Strouse) is a teenager who has always been ridiculed as being ‘weird’, but finds that he may actually be an offspring to aliens from another planet. This may be the case with all the other weird people too. He and his fellow ‘weirdos’ must now band together and return to the planet that their forefathers came. Charles and Edna (Adam West and Candice Azzara) are the two that are heading the mission.

This is definitely an original idea that is on the most part handled well. The humor is certainly quirky and on the whole not bad. The problem is the fact that it is treated too lightly like it is nothing more than a harmless joke. A deeper, darker underlying theme might have given it more stature and not made it seem so silly and forgettable. It also places too much emphasis on the kids high school life, which makes it seem at times like just another redundant ‘jock vs. geeks’ thing. There is also has too much of that 80’s look, which gets annoying.

Technically it could have used a bigger budget. The quirky humor gets you through it, but the sets are poor and the special effects tacky. The editing is choppy and the color schemes ugly.

The lead himself is the blandest ‘weird’ person you will ever see. He really doesn’t seem that strange at all. The weirdest trait he has is that he has booby trapped his bedroom so anyone that doesn’t knock gets caught in a net. This seems more like a trait of someone who is immature than weird. He is also way to clean cut. A weird person should have a little more of an eccentric style or look. It also doesn’t help matters that the actor who plays him is quite poor and never went on to play anything else.

The presence of West and Azzara help a lot. Azzara’s outrageous beehive hairdos and fingernails alone make it fun. West seems to act like this is nothing more than some campy walk through, but it is still nice to see him doing something more than just a token appearance. Martha Scott is the real surprise as she really seems to get into being a bitchy, snobby mother-in-law.

If your expectations are moderate and you are just in the mood for something that’s just a little bit different than this might fit the bill. There are a few good chuckles and a higher than usual quotient of movie references.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: September 14, 1988

Runtime: 1Hour 25Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Charles Matthau

Studio: Cannon Film Distributors

Available: VHS

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Posted in 80's Movies, Campy Comedy, Low Budget, Obscure Movies, Offbeat, Sci-Fi

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The Deadly Trap (1971)

Posted on September 17, 2013 | 6 comments

the deadly trap

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: They have their kids.

Philippe (Frank Langella) works at a high-tech job in a large corporation. For years he has been giving trade secrets to a mysterious organization that pays him handsomely for his efforts. Now that he is married and has children he has decided he no longer wants contact with this underground entity, but they refuse to leave him alone. When he is no longer willing to corporate they kidnap his two children, which sends his emotionally and mentally fragile wife Jill (Faye Dunaway) over-the-edge.

Dunaway’s amazing performance is the one thing that really helps propel a film that is otherwise too laid-back. I have always been an admirer of hers, but her performance here is great because it is so different from any of the other characters that she has played. Normally she is cast in parts of strong or manipulative women, but here she plays someone who is very fragile and does it with amazing effectiveness. I felt like she was a completely different person and showed a side to her that I didn’t think she possessed. Her face and expressions accentuate the fragility and she looks quite beautiful.

Langella is good on the opposite end. He plays a cynical and aloof man who snaps at his wife in an annoyed manner at regular intervals. The contrasting personalities and dialogue between them is interesting. In many ways he seems to playing an extension to the character that he did in Diary of a Mad Housewife and given the fact that Eleanor Perry wrote the screenplays for both films makes me believe that there had to be more than just a passing connection there.

The story has some interesting underlying elements that manage to retain a modicum of intrigue, but Rene Clement’s direction is too leisurely. The first hour gets bogged down with too much conversation and certain tangents that go nowhere. It is only in the last half hour that things finally get going and has some interesting twists, but by then it is too late. It would have been better had we seen some sort of face to the organization instead of having them portrayed in such a vague way. The movie is also in need of a lot more action although the part where Jill and her kids get into a car accident and get thrown from the vehicle is impressive since actual bodies where used, which is something I had never seen done before.

Spoiler Alert!

The film features several loopholes that will end up confounding anyone. One is that when the children are kidnapped they are locked in an upstairs room that has a loaded gun stashed away in the closet. The children get their hands on it and use it against their captors, but you would think that a sophisticated and large criminal group that this organization supposedly is wouldn’t be so utterly careless as to leave it there. Also, when it is found that the couple’s downstairs neighbor Cynthia (Barbara Parkins) has a connection to this organization and kidnapping the police shoot her dead at point-blank range instead of just arresting her and interrogating her in order to find the whereabouts of the kids. The biggest problem though is the ending itself where the kids are saved and everybody becomes one big happy family, which doesn’t jive at all with the rest of the film that had a constant murky undertones and a couple that was always squabbling. By having this otherwise dark thriller suddenly become ‘The Brady Bunch’ at the end is jarring in tone. It also doesn’t answer the fact that the organization was never caught and therefore will continue to harass him again, so why should they be all happy when the bad guys could strike at any moment?

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: June 9, 1971

Runtime: 1Hour 36Minutes

Rated R

Director: Rene Clement

Studio: National General Pictures

Available: VHS, Warner Streaming

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Foreign Films, French Films, Kidnapping Movies, Movies Based on Novels, Mystery, Obscure Movies, Thrillers/Suspense

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Bad Manners (1984)

Posted on September 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

bad manners 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Orphans on the loose.

Piper (Greg Olden) is the new kid inside a rough orphanage who befriends Mouse (Michael Hentz) who looks up to Piper as a sort of tough guy hero. When Mouse gets adopted by a snotty rich couple (Martin Mull, Karen Black) Piper convinces the orphans to break out of the orphanage and rescue him.

If there is one thing that can be said for this film, which is so obscure it is not even listed in Leonard Maltin’s Video Guide, is that it is lively. Director Robert Houston uses a lot of quick edits, interesting camera work and spinning tracking shots to keep things at a fast, irreverent pace. Piper’s sessions with his psychiatrist, which is played by Stephen Stucker is the funniest. Stucker is best known for playing the hyper air traffic controller in Airplane, but I felt he was more engaging and amusing here. The scene where Mouse swallows a small dinner bell and sends everyone into a panic is also a riot.

Unfortunately the film is unable to hold the balance between quirky humor and action and eventually devolves into a cartoonish, silly mess that becomes pretty much just an R-rated kiddie flick. I also didn’t care for the synthesized music score, which had a generic sound similar to ones used in 80’s porn flicks and only further cemented this as an uninspired B-movie.

The children characters are excessively crude and in some ways I prefer it a little more like this because I think it is realistic to how teens and pre-teens behave instead of as the wide-eyed sweet innocents that some other movies portray them as, but parents most likely will cringe and won’t want their own kids to watch it. A mean-spiritedness permeates throughout and although I am not sure if this was intentional or not but the two male leads and the one female are quite androgynous.

The one thing that keeps it fun is the adult performers who seem more than up to the campiness. Murphy Dunne is delightfully hammy as the orphanage warden and Anne De Salvo is quite cute despite playing an oppressive nun. Mull’s glib one-liners are a perfect balance to the zaniness. Black is also great and practically steals the film at the very end when she goes on a spastic shooting spree. This also marks the final film appearance of Richard Deacon best known for playing Mel Cooley on ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ who appears here in a brief bit as a ticket agent.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Alternate Title: Growing Pains

Released: November 4, 1984

Runtime: 1Hour 22Minutes

Rated R

Director: Robert Houston

Studio: New World Pictures

Available: VHS, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Crude Comedy, Farce, Low Budget, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies, Quirky

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Body Rock (1984)

Posted on September 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

body rock

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Lots of break-dancing.

Chilly (Lorenzo Lamas) is a an aspiring street artist who learns of an agent named Terrence (Ray Sharkey) who is looking for break-dancers for his next production. Although Chilly doesn’t know how to break- dance he gets a young African American kid named Magick (La Ron A. Smith) to teach him how. Soon Chilly and his friends are doing the moves and form a group called The Body Rocks. Unfortunately the producers like Chilly, but not his friends. He gets hired to dance at a high class club while leaving his friends behind, which causes friction with his old buddies especially when things don’t work out and Chilly finds himself in need of them.

If you like an 80’s movie that is oozing with cheesy 80’s kitsch from its first frame until its last then this movie is for you. Amazingly director Marcelo Epstein shoots it pretty well with a nice pace that never gets boring. There are a lot of scenes of break dancing here. In fact out of the entire 90 minute runtime at least 30 minutes of it deals with shots of somebody dancing. Director Epstein uses creative camerawork to keep it interesting and avoids it becoming anymore repetitive than it already is and in that regard he deserves credit. I liked how he showed some of it in slow motion as well as the underneath shots where the viewer sees the dancer’s body fly over the camera. The segment where the dancers wear glow-in-the-dark costumes resembling skeletons was actually kind of cool. It has been so long since I’ve seen anyone doing the moonwalk or the other dance moves that on a nostalgic level this is kind of fun.

Lamas wasn’t quite as bad as I feared. I admit I’ve never followed his ‘career’ much and he always seemed to me to be one of those hollow hunks, but here he doesn’t take himself too seriously. His colorful ‘hip’ bare chest exposing outfits and headbands are goofy and the fact that he insists on wearing them even on job interviews gets over-the-top and makes the already one-dimensional character even more of a caricature. The biggest problem though is the fact that Lamas was too old for the role. He was already 26 at the time and the part was more suited for an 18-year-old. Personally I would have had Majick as the lead. The kid has way more charisma than Lamas and was a much better dancer.

Sharkey as the agent is completely wasted and trapped in a blandly written role. I did like Grace Zabriskie as Chilly’s white-trash mother. A woman who seems to lie in bed all the time and smoke cigarettes while somehow trying to camouflage her aging, worn face with a platinum blonde dyed hairdo. The talented Zabriskie plays the caricature perfectly and I wished she had more scenes.

The movie is tolerable on a tacky B-level, but the corny over-blown ending pretty much kills it. The script was written by Desmond Nakano who later found critical success with Last Exit to Brooklyn and White Man’s Burden, but you wouldn’t see a shred of that here in a story that is woefully pedestrian and predictable. In fact the whole thing would have been more interesting had they scrapped the paper-thin plot and made a documentary on break-dancing instead.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: September 28, 1984

Runtime: 1Hour 33Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Marcelo Epstein

Studio: New World Pictures

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Musical, Obscure Movies

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The Grass is Singing (1981)

Posted on September 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

the grass is singing 1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Farming isn’t her thing.

In memory of Karen Black who died on August 8th we will review on each Monday of this month an 80’s film that she starred in as well as a 70’s movie that she was in on Fridays. This film is based on the Doris Lessing novel and was filmed on-location in Zambia. The story centers on Mary a racist woman from South Africa who is bored with her job and lonely. She meets Richard (John Thaw) a simple man who becomes smitten with her. She is not as crazy about him but decides to accept his proposal of marriage simply as a way to escape her dreary existence and loneliness. He moves her to his farm where she finds the rigorous lifestyle difficult to adjust too. The isolation begins to wear on her already tightly wound temperament and eventually she begins to show erratic behaviors that become more disturbing and shocking.

The Zambia locations are captured in vivid style with a grainy film stock that makes it look like it were a documentary. The farm setting is indeed desolate and makes for great atmosphere. Director Michael Raeburn wisely refrains from using too much music and when he does he uses instrumentals from the native culture, which further elevates the film and gives it distinction.

The film stays pretty faithful to the novel and starts out in startling fashion with Mary being stabbed and bloodied on her backdoor step and then shifts back seven years where we see what lead up to it. The pace is slow, but involving and the characters are three-dimensional and believable. Mary’s breakdown happens in a deliberate and realistic fashion starting with little things that work into bigger ones. In the end you feel more sorry for her than frightened and thoroughly engulfed with her sad and pathetic circumstances.

This was Black’s last serious role before being quarantined in B-movie purgatory. This may also be one of her finest moments as she brings out the manipulative nature of the character quite well and I love the way she always seems to add quirky qualities to her parts. She also speaks with an authentic sounding South African accent.

Thaw is quite good in support and creates empathy from the viewer playing a very humble man looking for simple companionship with no idea what he was getting into.

There is some serious filmmaking going on here in a movie that makes some great points about life and human nature that is well worth checking out. The original theatrical release which is what I saw and able to obtain from a private collector runs a full 105 minutes. However, the American release which is available on DVD from Synergy Entertainment as well as Amazon Instant Video and goes under the title Killing Heat runs only 90 minutes and heavily edits out the explicit violence and nudity and has a narrative that is choppy and at times confusing.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Alternate Title: Killing Heat (U.S. version)

Released: September 18, 1981

Runtime: 1Hour 45Minutes (Original Version)

Not Rated

Director: Michael Raeburn

Studio: Chibote

Available: VHS, DVD, Amazon Instant Video (as Killing Heat)

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Foreign Films, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies, Psychological

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Paperback Hero (1973)

Posted on August 30, 2013 | Leave a comment

paperback hero

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Big fish small pond.

Rick (Keir Dullea) is a hockey player living in a small town on the western plains of Canada. To pass his time he imagines he is a gunslinger in the old west and makes himself the self-imposed marshal of the community.  Outside of Sheriff Burdock (George R. Robertson) the other townsfolk considered it an amusing and otherwise harmless quirk. Then Rick learns that his hockey team will be disbanded and he will be without a job. He is given an opportunity for employment in nearby Saskatoon, but he refuses it feeling that he will lose his ‘mystique’ in the bigger city. Slowly the strains and pressures of his situation start to get to him and eventually it culminates in an old fashioned gunfight right in the center of town between him and the sheriff.

If the film gets one thing right it is in the recreation of small town life. Filmed on-location in Delisle, Saskatchewan director Peter Pearson gives the viewer a wonderful and vivid feel of the town. Just about all the sections of the hamlet are captured including the inside of abandoned buildings, trailer homes and farms as well as a couple of nice bird’s eye shots. The remoteness and flat wheat laden terrain brings to life the region in an almost stunning clarity. Having grown up in a small town not too terribly far from the Canadian border I can say that this film hits-the-mark in its portrayal of people in the Nordic region. All the little dramas that can go on between people locked in a remote local as well as the scenes done inside a dark and dingy bar that many times can constitute as the place to go for a ‘night-on-the-town’ is amusingly well played-out.

However, despite having the right flavor the film lacks direction. It was hard for me to get into this because all the scenes were random and not connected together by all that much. The plot is thin and made up if anything by a series of vignettes.  The main character is brass, egotistical, deluded and arrogant. He treats women like they are his property. He beats up one and considers it minor because her bruises are only the ‘size of a quarter’. He talks about getting turned on by one woman while making love to another and then is surprised when she gets upset with him. Having a film built around such an unlikable character is not entertaining or interesting especially when we are given no history to why he became the way he is.

Dullea does well in the lead and shows a lot more emotion and panache than one might expect from him especially when compared to his most famous role as the rather robotic Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is always fun to see Elizabeth Ashley and here she plays one of Rick’s love interests, but her role is small and rather thankless though she does get shown in a long and explicit nude scene.

My favorite was Dayle Haddon as the alluring Joanna. Haddon has retired from the acting profession years ago, but was at one time a fashion model and she looks gorgeous here. The scene that takes place in an abandoned house where she tells Rick off and shreds his deluded ego while doing it in a quiet whispery tone is the movie’s best moment.

The segment showing a big hockey brawl where fans jump out of the stands to get involved and even the ref gets bloodied is fun. I also liked the part where Rick takes Joanna on car ride through the wheat fields. The camera is hooked up to the bumper of the car so the viewer gets an up close experience of watching the wheat thrash before them at high speeds. The standoff at the very end in the center of town is also interesting, but the film takes too long to gel and the main character is such a turn-off that it hurts the good points and ultimately makes this a misfire.

The movie also features the Gordon Lightfoot’s song ‘If You Could Read My Mind’, which is a great a song, but it has been played so much on lite-rock stations that instead of getting the viewer more engrossed in the movie it instead takes them out of it. The film works hard to create a gritty appeal and for the most part succeeds, which is why having a long segment with the song played over it doesn’t work and I would have left it out.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: September 21, 1973

Runtime: 1Hour 33Minutes

Rated R

Director: Peter Pearson

Studio: Alliance Film Distribution

Available: VHS, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Comedy/Drama, Foreign Films, Movies from Canada, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies

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