Buster and Billie (1974)

          For most of its running time, the 1940s-set Buster and Billie feels like a melodramatic teen romance in which a popular high-school boy learns to see beneath the surface of the school slut, forming an unlikely bond that helps both characters mature. But then the picture turns tragic—as in out-of-nowhere, way-over-the-top tragic—and Buster and Billie becomes a weird sort of Southern Gothic horror show. The movie is a bumpy ride in the extreme, though not without its virtues. When the picture begins, Buster (Vincent) is the school smart-ass in a small Texas town circa the mid-’40s, pulling pranks like driving his truck in front of the schoolbus and blinding the driver in a cloud of dust. Cocky and handsome, Buster is the ringleader for a gaggle of cool kids and misfits that includes an albino (played by Robert Englund!) who dyes his hair black. Although Buster dates a pretty classmate (Pamela Sue Martin) and laments that she won’t put out, his buddies satiate their sexual cravings by traveling to the boonies for gang-bangs with Billie (Goodfellow), the self-loathing daughter of poor rednecks. Eventually, Buster decides to see what the fuss concerning Billie is all about. His curiosity leads to courtship.

          And then tragedy arrives, without much logical justification or narrative foreshadowing, throwing the story wildly off-course—the finale has power, but it feels like something from a different movie. Amid the strange plot twists and unexpected darkness, there are moments of insight and sensitivity, though both lead performances teeter on the fine line between gentle understatement and utter lifelessness. Star Jan-Michael Vincent and leading lady Joan Goodfellow offer tremendous physical commitment to their roles, with Vincent playing a full-frontal scene and Goodfellow enduring humiliating vignettes in which her character is sexually abused. Their emotional commitment is a bit more difficult to appraise. Part of the blame must surely fall on journeyman director Daniel Petrie, who can’t sustain a consistent tone in this movie; it’s therefore unsurprising neither Goodfellow nor Vincent can form coherent characterizations. Still, for all its flaws, Buster and Billie is strangely watchable, the tension between its unfulfilled promise and its weird narrative zigzagging creating a queasy sort of cinematic vitality.

Buster and Billie: FUNKY

Sunburst (1975)

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

Sunburst: SQUARE