70's British Horror Part Twenty-Nine

THE MAN WHO HAUNTED HIMSELF
(1970)
Dir - Basil Dearden
Overall: MEH

The last film from director Basil Dearden before his untimely death via car crash less than a year after its release, (which is coincidental since the movie bookends with Roger Moore suffering automobile accidents), The Man Who Haunted Himself plays an elongated psychological game that wears thin long before the characters finally catch up with the audience.  Anthony Armstrong's 1940 short story "The Strange Case of Mr Pelham" had already been adapted for both the small screen and radio a handful of times before, this version serving as producer Bryan Forbes' first work for EMI Films.  Made on the cheap with a ready and willing Moore on board to challenge himself after his seven year run on The Saint, its doppelgänger nightmare premise takes until the last few minutes to fully reveal itself, which would not be a problem if the plot had more mysterious juice to work with.  Instead, we quickly gather that there are two Moores running around and that it also stems from some sort of unleashed id judging by the opening scene.  Dearden does all the he can to keep the mystery compelling, stylishly moving his camera around to emphasis various clues, and Moore turns in a committed performance, but it is ultimately a tedious watch.

 

ZARDOZ

(1974)

Dir - John Boorman
Overall: GOOD

Seizing the once in a career opportunity to go hog-wild after the critical and financial success of Deliverance, John Boorman's follow-up Zardoz remains one of the most self-indulgent and baffling movies, (with a significant budget and top-tier production values at least), that the 1970s ever unleashed.  Snagging a post-James Bond Sean Connery after Burt Reynolds dropped out due to illness, Boorman dresses him in an iconically ridiculous mankini as his character weaves through a distant future utopia full of psychic immortals, gun-totting savages, a floating stone head, and an all-knowing artificial intelligence that lives inside of a crystal.  This of course only scratches the surface of the hodgepodge of ideas here, which also includes the metaphysical, Orwellian dystopia, eugenics, class structure, Arthurian legend, and the inevitable corruption of a human society that is left to perpetually linger with child birth being long abandoned.  Shot entirely in Ireland, Boorman and cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth co-mingle the lush, pristine scenery with dated New Age fantasy and hedonism, which makes for boundlessly interesting visuals to keep the viewer's head from exploding in trying to decipher a stubbornly nebulous narrative.  Still, the whole experience is so wacky and pretentious, (let alone pulled off at such an impressive scale), that it stands as a pristine cult movie in an era where a filmmaker's free reign was tailor made for such silliness.

 

FACE OF DARKNESS
(1976)
Dir - Ian F.H. Lloyd
Overall: MEH

The only movie of any kind from writer/director/producer Ian F.H. Lloyd was the fifty-eight minute oddity Face of Darkness.  Fusing medieval folk horror with increased paranoia in Great Brittan in the midst of terrorist threats that would eventually lead to Thatcherism, Lloyd's story is lethargic in structure yet also topical and curious.  A conservative backbencher hatches a bizarre plan to dig up a condemned male witch who he has read about in his occult studies, all in order to have him commit a heinous act that will push through a capital punishment bill that he is facing universal opposition for.  The tone is relentlessly dry, (stilted performances, no musical score, a matter-of-fact delivery system for its more quirky components, etc.), but it is interesting up until a point.  Once David Allister's resurrected and unemotive black magic practitioner sets off a bomb in a schoolyard, things settle into a sluggish crawl where Lennard Pearce and John Bennett walk around gardens and discuss Allister's mental state and the supernatural hold that it has on Pearce who unearthed him.  The material is weird and the hazy presentation enhances such weirdness, but it fails to kick up the right kind of unsettling atmosphere that it is going for.

70's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Ten

THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON

(1973)

Dir - Milton Moses Ginsberg
Overall: WOOF

Yet another independently made horror comedy done by a filmmaker that is too inexperienced to meld his chosen genres, The Werewolf of Washington, (Werewolf at Midnight), is a poorly executed dud.  As the title would suggest, this is a lycanthropy movie with a political slant, though such a thing is played for laughs at least on paper.  In execution, writer/director Milton Moses Ginsberg stages one klutzy scene after the next, letting the camera linger as actors humiliate themselves with no laughs to be found.  One may be intrigued by the idea of Dean Stockwell playing the title wolf man, but they will be disappointed by endless moments of politicians and journalists making inconsequential banter with each other.  Some people may find it mildly amusing when Stockwell mugs it up in the transformation scenes or crawls around on the floor while sniffing people in full on beast mode, including one baffling moment where he does this with a midget scientist who treats such an encounter nonchalantly, (a scientist that serves no other purpose in the story, mind you).  Otherwise though, this is consistently head-scratching in its stumbling attempts at humor, to the point where one can barely consider it a spoof and can more easily just forget about it entirely.

DEATH RACE 2000

(1975)

Dir - Paul Bartel

Overall: GOOD

In typical Roger Corman fashion, the producer opted to make his own low-budget variant of United Artists' Rollerball, and the resulting Death Race 2000, (which was released the same year), has endured as the more seminal cult film of the two.  Loosely adapting Ib Melchior's 1956 short story "The Racer", Corman and character actor/director Paul Bartel clashed on the extent of how comedic the tone should be, with Robert Thorn's initial script allegedly getting re-written by Corman regular Charles B. Griffith to be more deliberately campy.  Such tactics are necessary for a film whose ridiculous premise involves murderous race car drivers scoring points on the age, innocence, and gender of the pedestrians that they brutally run over in an annual cross-country trek to appease a totalitarian government and the hungry masses.  Hot off of Kung Fu, David Carradine makes for a stoic anti-hero and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone proves that he could have had a career playing villainous thugs.  The rest of the cast is peppered with familiar faces, plus the racing scenes and souped-up hot rods have a dated pizzazz to them that matches the tongue-in-cheek social commentary and melodrama.

LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY

(1976)

Dir - Sam O'Steen

Overall: MEH

Done as an ABC Friday Night Movie, Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby is a mess of a sequel to an influential and beloved horror work.  Part incompetent and part unintentionally hilarious, (yet oddly sincere), it delivers on the promise of the title by showing the aftermath of Roman Polanski's seminal Rosemary's Baby, which is a moronic idea that can and does wield disappointing results.  This also serves as a D-rent version of Richard Donner's The Omen, which was released a few months prior and similarly follows the exploits of the Antichrist and all of the evil doers behind the scenes who are inching him towards his dark destiny.  Broken up into three chapters, the first one shows Not-Damien fleeing with his mother who is ultimately captured by a buss with no driver, (which is at least a creepy concept on paper), the second features grown-up Not-Damien being a local rock singer who we never hear sing, (yet we do see him in mime make-up while awkwardly dancing), and the third has Not-Damien waking up in an institution and escaping with a doctor/love interest that unsurprisingly is in on the whole Satanic cult thing.  The plot is a desperate hodgepodge of stupid and hackneyed ideas, but the presentation is endlessly clumsy, culminating in a "Huh?" finale that is just as lackluster and misguided as everything else going on here.

70's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Nine

THE VICTIM

(1972)

Dir - Herschel Daugherty

Overall: MEH

Television director Herschel Daugherty does a more expanded version of McKnight Malmar's short story "The Storm", (which he had previously adapted ten years earlier for the NBS series Thriller), here titled The Victim and featuring Elizabeth Montgomery in the lead.  An ABC Movie of the Week, it has a simple premise of a woman's sister getting murdered on-screen, yet said sister does not even find out for certain that a murder took place until just before the credits roll.  Likewise, the killer's identity is also not revealed to the audience until then, and there is still some room left to speculate.  This is a frustrating yet unique angle to close on since the entire film plays the slow-boil game where Montgomery grows more and more paranoid and suspicious of the only two characters who could possibly be behind the foul dead, wandering around a spacious house in the middle of a thunder storm with the lights out and the phone line dead.  Even if it uneventful and obvious in most respects, Daugherty handles the gradual dread as expertly as such a small screen presentation would allow, with low-key and eerie music plus gotcha moments peppering long portions where we are given no new information to munch on.

THE SEVERED ARM

(1973)

Dir - Thomas S. Alderman

Overall: MEH

 

The second of only two movies directed by Thomas S. Alderman, The Severed Arm has a gnarly inciting incident where some spelunking buddies get trapped in a cave and resort to cannibalism while the delegated piece of human lunch meat screams and begs for them to hold out a little longer.  Cue getting rescued shortly after, fast forward five years, and the guy's hand is mysteriously delivered, (by Angus Scrimm in an unrecognizable first screen appearance), to the home of one of the survivors.  This sets in motion a slasher scenario where karma-infused vengeance is served, leading to a demented finale that would fit right at home in an issue of EC Comics.  Though these bookending moments are appropriately macabre, everything else going on leaves much to be desired.  Alderman is working with a razor-thin budget and the film has a typically flat aesthetic, even if cinematographer Robert Maxwell tries his best to cast some shadows on the wall and get some interesting camera angles in there.  The same problem that dooms almost every cheap genre movie from the period is present though, in that the pacing is snore-inducing.  Also, Marvin Kaplan embarrasses himself as a radio DJ with nothing but abysmal groaners at his disposal to spew over the airwaves, but at least he is one of the guys who dies a horrible death.

 

A*P*E

(1976)

Dir - Paul Leder

Overall: WOOF

This movie sure is stupid Charlie Brown.  An American/South Korean co-production that could be the most embarrassing kaiju monster film ever made, (saying something), A*P*E, (King Kong's Great Counterattack, King Kong eui daeyeokseup, Attack of the Giant Horny Gorilla, Hideous Mutant, Super King Kong, King Kong Returns), was apparently shot in two weeks on a budget of $23,000, with only $1,200 delegated to the special effects.  To answer your question, yes, it absolutely looks like shit.  This beat Dino De Laurentiis' big-scale King Kong remake to the theaters by two months, but anyone who was afraid that this would take away from the latter film's box office gross clearly did not see the actual movie.  Some profanity, a film director telling an actor to "rape her gently", and the title monstrosity literally giving the camera the middle finger makes this technically not a family movie, but it bizarrely still maintains a cutesy and comedic tone.  Well, either that or the film is so asinine in its presentation that it comes off as having a comedic tone.  Lots of footage of giggling kids, the ridiculous umpa-dumpa soundtrack, and not-King Kong dancing during his death scene provide the movie with a further combination of lighthearted schmaltz and strangeness.  If the whole thing was full of such conflicting silliness then it would suffice as a trainwreck to laugh at, but it is instead just insultingly lazy and cheap crap that is done on a crap scale.

70's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Eight

SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED
(1974)
Dir - Michael Findlay
Overall: WOOF
 
Z-grade smut peddler Michael Findlay directing a Bigfoot movie?  Shriek of the Mutilated, (Scream of the Snowbeast, Mutilated), was the last "real" film that Findlay would make before his untimely death via helicopter crash three years later, his estranged wife and long-time collaborator Roberta Findlay serving as cinematographer here.  On that note, the camerawork leaves everything to be desired as all of the monster murders are done in rapid-cut, claustrophobic close-ups that are impossible to decipher.  We get few glimpses of the Yeti anyway because of course, and also because of course, it looks ridiculous and about as frightening as a mall Easter Bunny.  In fact a mall Easter Bunny is far more frightening.  The story takes an idiotic twist in its closing moments once it is revealed that there is no Abominable Snowman conducting murders at all but instead just some rich assholes who lure college kids out into the wilderness to eat them as part of some kind of vague pagan ritual.  Equally boring and obnoxious, the instantly forgettable characters prattle on and on with each other and one of the actors decides that she has to scream all of her dialog once her character is upset.  Some viewers may laugh at the absurdity of the plot twist if they can stay with the movie that long, but this still ends up being as wretchedly bad and unwatchable as anything else that Findlay ever unleashed on the masses.
 

DOGS

(1976)

Dir - Burt Brinckerhoff

Overall: MEH

 

A silly killer canine movie that takes itself seriously, Dogs suffers from predictable ailments, namely that the characters are uninteresting, the plot spends a predominant amount of time with them prattling on with each other, and even in groups, dogs are not the most frightening of beasts.  The first act is dedicated to David McCallum's crotchety university scientist slowly figuring out what the audience already knows before they even press "play", then its the usual Jaws nonsense of the people in an authority position poo-pooing the threat because well, how else are we gonna get to the ninety-minute mark?  Then more talking, more arguing, people panicking and acting like idiots, and eventually some rampaging pooch scenes that are shot in a dark and claustrophobic manner that makes them more annoyingly indecipherable than intense.  This was the second and last theatrically released movie from director Burt Brinckerhoff who worked steadily in television for over two decades, but the guy can only do so much with O'Brian Tomalin's ho-hum script.  It is never a good sign when the threatening howls of the four-legged critters heard off screen are considerably more frightening than when they attack on screen, but at least an attempt was made there to provide some ominous atmosphere.  Plus the dogs maul a woman to death in a shower so again, silly stuff.

SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS
(1977)
Dir - Greydon Clark
Overall: MEH

While its title is accurate enough, Satan's Cheerleaders represents a missed opportunity of dopey occult high-jinks.  This was the first horror movie that screenwriter Greydon Clark was also behind the lens on, but he has a clumsy way of delivering his material to say the least.  This is a comedy on paper and all parties involved seem to understand the assignment, but it is more awkward than funny to watch a bunch of teenage girls speaking in sexual innuendo as their clueless cheer teacher just smiles like a ditz at everyone, even when a fat janitor proclaims that he is going to rape them after crashing his truck and bringing them to a satanic alter in broad daylight.  Every set piece plays out in such a butterfingerd manner where the things that are happening are sleazy and weird, yet the people on screen are acting like they are in an entirely different set of circumstances.  The fact that John Carradine, Yvonne De Carlo, and John Ireland needed the money enough to appear is even more confusing and even as the third act switches gears by trying to be more diabolical, the presentation remains just as aloof.  As a dated trainwreck, the film has some unintentional charm, but its head-scratching ineptitude cannot be denied.

70's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Seven

MARK OF THE WITCH

(1970)

Dir - Tom Moore

Overall: MEH

 

A ridiculous resurrected witch movie set in the groovy turn of the 1970s when hip, (and all Caucasian), college kids think that books on the occult are just the bee's knees, Mark of the Witch was the first of only three features directed by Tom Moore.  The cast is made up of people that no one has ever heard of, all of which deliver different levels of amateur-hour performances.  As the 17th century witch who vows vengeance on her persecutor's descendants, (that ole gag again), Marie Santell chews the scenery to Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element levels, and her vessel for revenge in Anitra Walsh has a jolly-wiz adorableness that makes her proclamations to Satan that much more absurd.  The script by Mary Davis and Martha Peters seems like a parody yet is played straight, running on flimsy and arbitrary supernatural logic where Santell-via-Walsh can only achieve her objective by making people drink something that incapacitates them, and can only be defeated by shining a cross at her.  It has an unintentionally goofy and painfully dated charm to it though, so long as no one coming in is expecting anything competent, compelling, or spooky.

 

THE PACK 

(1977)
Dir - Robert Clouse
Overall: WOOF

Both stupid and colossally boring, Robert Clouse's adaptation of David Fisher's novel The Pact, (how there was ever enough content here to make this a novel is anybody's guess), rides its daringly one-note premise along at a crawl for ninety-eight torturous minutes.  A bunch of people get stuck on an island where a handful or aggressive dogs sometime attack them, the end.  Everyone on said island is equipped with firearms that they often times forget to use and when they do, they frequently scare the canines away.  Why do that though when you can just scream, overreact, panic, and put yourselves in harm's way?  Sometimes everyone holds up indoors and boards up the windows, sometimes they venture outside knowing that the killer pooches are somewhere lurking, and watching such inconsistent character behavior is like witnessing paint dry in slow motion.  Worse yet, animal lovers will have a field day hating the entire concept.  If this was a series of wrongly-treated dogs going after their abusive owners then that would be one thing, but it is instead just random dogs going after random people when the plot lingers for too long with no action.  The movie pretends that the four-legged beasts are the equivalent to Return of the Living Dead-style zombies, but when they can both be easily thwarted and several die horrifically on screen, fuck this movie.

 

MARDI GRAS MASSACRE

(1978)

Dir - Jack Weis

Overall: WOOF

If Herschell Gordon Lewis made a movie with disco music in it, Mardi Gras Massacre would be close to the results.  Shot and set in New Orleans, it concerns a guy who is allergic to emoting that is on the search for the most evil prostitute in the city, purchasing time with several of them who he ends up laying on a sacrificial altar so that he can slice their stomachs open while they are still alive and screaming.  Understandably, this became one of the U.K's dreaded "video nasties" as the primitive gore sequences are certainly icky enough, plus the subject matter is all sleaze.  Sadly, director Jack Weis pads the film with several pointless detours, including boring strip tease and dancing sequences, plus every one of William Metzo's killing scenes unfolds in an interchangeably lifeless manner.  Worse yet, the movie seems oblivious to its own absurdity, playing up none of the horrid acting, moronic plotting, or exploitative ugliness for their inherent camp value.  Instead, this is a meandering watch full of funky disco beats, people who cannot act, characters saying "bastard" and "whore" a lot, blood, guts, boobs, and a whole lot of boredom.

70's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Six

THE INVASION OF CAROL ENDERS

(1974)
Dir - Burt Brinckerhoff/Dan Curtis
Overall: MEH

A SOV, soap opera-styled supernatural thriller from producer Dan Curtis, (who also co-directed with Burt Brinckerhoff in an uncredited capacity), The Invasion of Carol Enders gets in and out in only an hour and seven minutes, plus it features TV mainstay Meredith Baxter in the lead.  Playing a woman who is possessed by another woman, it has a unique enough plot where Baxter wakes up in a hospital after being on the brink of death, miraculously inheriting the spirit of another woman who actually died at the same time.  Cue every character getting aggravated and confused, least of all Baxter who runs the gamut of emotions and turns in a properly heavy performance as she ends up being the only person who can solve her own death, be it while stuck in another body.  The twist should be easy to see coming several minutes before the characters figure it out and because of its neutered, chatty, and small-screen presentation, the movie is lacking in cinematic flair and macabre atmosphere.  All of the pressure therefor falls on the actors who do a decent enough job even if they cannot elevate this above just being a pedestrian melodrama.

SNOWBEAST
(1977)
Dir - Herb Wallerstein
Overall: WOOF

 

The only full-length from exclusive television director Herb Wallerstein, Snowbeast was authored by Joseph Stefano of Psycho and The Outer Limits fame.  An NBC Thursday Night Movie, it is one of many pieces of 1970s celluloid to use a Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti/Abominable Snowman as its monster.  It is also one of the many to feature as little Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti/Abominable Snowman shots as possible.  For this one, we have to wait forty-eight goddamn minutes to get our first "blink and you'll miss it" look at the creature, and such lightning-flash glimpses of it remain all that we are allowed.  It is a shame that Stefano's script spends such an ungodly time fleshing out its slew of characters, including two of them who used to date, one of them being a former Olympic athlete, and the usual Jaws nonsense of the people who run the ski resort ignoring all of the accusations of a murderous beast on the rampage in order to keep their place of business open for tourists.  If such "white people problems" melodrama was balanced better with killer snow monster scenes and any semblance of suspense, then we could have at least had a chance to give a shit about anything that happens to anyone on screen.

 

SATAN WAR
(1979)
Dir - Bartell LaRue
Overall: WOOF

Six years after wrapping up his voice acting career, Bartell LaRue made his only feature as writer, director, and producer; the quasi-mockumentary-by-way-of-haunted-house head-scratcher Satan War.  Bizarrely inept, it is bookended by Satanic mass and voodoo footage, with voice narration giving us the rundown of their shenanigans, as well as dishing out alleged factoids about how many hundreds of thousands of people practice human sacrifice and various other Lucifer-pleasing deeds.  We eventually settle into our story about a married couple who move into a house that they got at a bargain, (never a good sign), and it is at this point that LaRue adorably attempts his own version of The Amityville Horror except with a sixty-five cent budget.  No sound was recorded so all of the dialog is ADRed and frequently does not match the actor's mouths, two pieces of music that borrow "The Immigrant Song" hook are played almost uninterrupted throughout, and the scary bits include a cross that slowly, (slowly), turns upside down over and over again, plus various masses of goo that erupt in the kitchen.  We also get dialog like, "I'm not gonna be molested day and night just so you don't have to take out the garbage", followed by "Just tell him that rape, sex, molestation is my department", cue both people lovingly smiling at each other.  Odd, cheap, embarrassing, boring, obnoxious, hilarious, and extraordinary terrible stuff.

70's American Horror Part One-Hundred and Five - (William Grefé Edition)

STANLEY

(1972)

Overall: MEH

 

Admittingly inspired by Daniel Mann's surprise hit Willard from the previous year, Stanley was William Grefé's Florida attempt at a story about a social outcast who is more comfortable with a type of animal that universally creeps everyone else out.  Shot in the Everglades as well as Miami, Grefé and screenwriter Gary Crutcher give the title character a noble reason for living on the swampy outskirts.  He is a Native American, (played by a Caucasian with a tan of course), his father was murdered by Alex Rocco's sleazy businessman who also likes to grope his own teenage daughter, and most of the other people that we meet are unwholesome at best, so why not hold up out in the middle of nowhere while giving your pet reptiles human names and talking to them as if they understand English?  In the title role, Chris Robinson is too aloof, and lacks the charisma needed to keep his eventual revenge escapades engaging, but at least the character that he plays is insane enough on paper to hinge a movie on.  There is a theme song that is terrible, an over-the-hill stripper with a scuzzy husband that convinces her to murder some snakes on stage with her teeth, two hired goons who try to kill Robinson, another guy that tries to kill Robinson, and then Rocco's daughter inexplicably shacks up with our not friendly antihero until his shack burns down. 

IMPULSE

(1974)

Overall: MEH

 

Staying in Florida though switching settings from the Everglades to the swanky suburbs, D-rent director William Grefé's Impulse randomly snagged William Shatner of all people after Grefé allegedly bumped into him at an airport.  Whatever the specifics were, the actor's curious presence in something that should have never even got past his agent let alone scored him in the lead serves as an interesting footnote as he is aggressively against type here.  A brief black and white flashback gives us a bare-bones explanation for the psychopathic tendencies that he exhibits as an adult, and most of the movie is spent watching his unhinged conman struggle with trauma-induced emotions and violent outbursts.  Along the way, he meets an attractive widow and her bratty daughter while running over a dog, killing an older sugar mama, killing Harold Sakata from Goldfinger fame, and then killing his new love interest's gossipy best friend.  Shatner still has effortless charisma and sex appeal even if he is specifically vile and unsympathetic under these circumstances, plus he does a better job than the material deserves.  Grefé of course could not make a decent movie even if he was Orson Welles, but the results here are unintentionally amusing enough with Shatner giving it his all.

MAKO: THE JAWS OF DEATH
(1976)
Overall: WOOF

 

Even going so far as to put the word "Jaws" in the title, Mako: The Jaws of Death came early in the stream of movies to shamelessly cash-in on Stephen Spielberg's massive nature horror hit.  This one comes from none other than Cannon Films and Florida-based exploitation hack William Grefé, who does a quasi-remake of his 1970 film Stanley, just replacing the snakes with sharks.  Richard Jaeckel portrays a mopey, stupid, and mentally unhinged man that takes it upon himself to murder anyone who disrespects his water-dwelling friends.  He came to such a fate after running into a shark shaman, (yes that is a thing in this movie), some years earlier, who gave him a necklace that not only affords protection from the ocean beasts, but also allows him to telepathically communicate and control them if need be.  The only other thing left to such a story is that everyone else who Jaeckel meets is some kind of shady scumbag, trying to get their hands on the sharks for nothing but nefarious purposes.  This would make Jaeckel an animal-defending hero, but the fact that his character is such a miserable and unlikable schmuck gives the film a lousy protagonist to say the least, not to mention an antagonist who readily murders people.  Horrendously paced, there is no enjoyment to be found either intentionally or otherwise.

WHISKEY MOUNTAIN

(1977)

Overall: WOOF

If you hate actors loudly fake laughing in movies except done up hillbilly style, be warned.  Some uninspired backwoods redneck crap, Whiskey Mountain was the last full-length from trash filmmaker William Grefé, (unless one counts The Psychotic Priest which was filmed in 1971 yet not released until 2001, at which point Grefé was so embarrassed by it that he asked to go uncredited).  As one could guess, this is a Deliverance knock-off except with Roberta Collins and TV actor Christopher George providing all of the star power since Ned Beatty, Jon Voight, and Burt Reynolds were too busy being in real movies.  There is gang rape, cackling lunatic country bumpkins, banjo music playing over dirt bike transition scenes, and a shitbag group of drug dealers hiding out in caves near the mountain of the title.  Things go boring, then they keep going boring, then they go boring for a whole lot longer, before finally things go bad about fifty-odd minutes in, which is when the rape starts.  A waste of celluloid in every respect, it takes a special kind of terrible movie to be dull, ugly, and obnoxious in equally insufferable measures.  By the time that the greedy and idiotic "good" guys go back for gun-toting revenge, anyone watching has already checked out.