Fighting Mad (1976)

          Filmmaker Jonathan Demme completed his productive tenure in Roger Corman’s B-movie operation with this uneven but watchable action picture about a principled redneck standing up to greedy developers. There’s nothing even slightly original about the plot, but as writer and director, Demme fills the picture with just enough idiosyncratic flourishes to keep things interesting during the beginning and middle of the story. Then, during the climax, Demme unleashes an exciting nighttime showdown replete with not only gunplay but also, for novelty’s sake, death by bow and arrow. Peter Fonda (of course) stars as Tom Hunter, a young man who returns to his family’s home in Arkansas only to discover that every private landowner in the immediate vicinity is under pressure from operatives of real-estate mogul Pierce Crabtree (Philip Carey). Crabtree wants to raze low-income homes to make way for a shopping mall, and he won’t take no for an answer, so his goons use lethal force to frighten citizens into selling. Among those who fall victim to Crabtree’s thugs are Tom’s brother, Charlie (Scott Glenn), and his wife. This pushes Tom into ass-kicking mode. Meanwhile, Tom manages his relationships with his young son, Dylan (Gina Franco); his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Lorene (Lynn Lowry); and his salt-of-the-earth father, Jeff (John Doucette), whose property is in Crabtree’s crosshairs.

          The best parts of Fighting Mad feature Tom sticking it to the man, because the tension between Fonda’s laconic persona and his character’s righteous passion is consistently interesting. The star is fun to watch whether he’s commandeering a tractor, planting explosives at a Crabtree work site, or shooting arrows into henchmen. Whenever the action hits a lull, however, so does the movie. Demme’s storytelling is choppy—every time it seems Fighting Mad has kicked into gear, Fonda’s character stops for a beer or a tumble with his girlfriend. Demme also lingers on pointless bits like musical performances, continuing his endearing/irritating career-long habit of losing the forest for the trees. Production values in Fighting Mad are fairly strong for a Corman production, since Demme focuses on real locations with loads of texture, and the performances get the job done; Doucette and Glenn in particular lend humanity to their small roles. However, the music score, by folk musician and frequent Fonda collaborator Bruce Langhorne, is all over the place—the old-timey bits with lots of banjo suit the milieu, while the electronic suspense stings hit their target but seem pulled from another movie.

Fighting Mad: FUNKY

Caged Heat (1974)

          Retrospect can be dangerous when writing about cinema, because critics and scholars occasionally color readings of vintage films with considerations that weren’t relevant at the time the pictures were released, thus arriving at a skewed sense of significance. To see how the process works, consider Caged Heat, a grimy women-in-prison picture issued by Roger Corman’s B-movie outfit in 1974. The flick is just as sleazy as any other entry in the genre, but because Caged Heat’s writer-director, Jonathan Demme, subsequently became respectable, there’s a temptation to scrutinize the picture for signs of artistic merit. And, indeed, one could offer an extraordinarily generous reading in which Caged Heat becomes a quasi-feminist statement about oppressed women breaking the bonds of patriarchal society. What that reading sidesteps, of course, is the actual content of the movie—the endless shower scenes of attractive women soaping their erogenous zones, the unpleasant sequences of half-dressed and/or naked women getting tortured, and so on.

          Therefore, in order to accept the categorization of Caged Heat as an important early work by Demme—whose later films are generally quite sensitive to gender issues—one must pretend the picture was made entirely with good intentions. And while I have no doubt that Demme was as humanistic an individual in the mid-’70s as he is today, it’s inarguable that Caged Heat was, at the time its release, simply the latest in a cycle of revolting grindhouse offerings about chicks doing lurid things behind bars. Furthermore, Caged Heat has even less of a narrative than many other entries in the genre, because the movie gets mired in such pointless sequences as a talent show put on by the distaff inmates.

          Anyway, here’s the story, such as it is. After Jacqueline (Erica Gavin) gets bushed on drug charges, she falls prey—along with her cellblock sisters—to the perverse machinations of Superintendent McQueen (Barbara Steele), the prison’s butch, wheelchair-bound warden. Breakout attempts and loss of life ensue. Along the way, Jacqueline fades into the background while fellow inmate Belle (Roberta Collins) emerges as the picture’s dominant character. Even though it’s only 83 minutes long, Caged Heat is boring as hell thanks to Demme’s meandering script and the weird tension between his professional obligation to deliver the T&A goods and his apparent desire to imbue the picture with redeeming qualities. In the end, Caged Heat isn’t lighthearted enough to qualify as escapism, and it isn’t substantial enough to quality as anything else—except, perhaps, a distasteful footnote to the career of an acclaimed filmmaker.

Caged Heat: LAME

Death Race 2000 (1975)

           When is a bad movie a good movie? Death Race 2000 falls short of any serious standards, because it’s campy, cartoonish, and silly, with one-dimensional characters cavorting their way through absurd adventures. Yet the film’s exuberance and lack of pretention manifest as a crude sort of charm, which works in tandem with breakneck pacing—the movie’s like a piece of candy you don’t realize you shouldn’t be eating until it’s all gone. Science fiction delivered by way of black comedy, Death Race 2000 presents a future in which the United States has become the United Provinces. The supreme ruler of the United Provinces, Mr. President (Sandy McCallum), has eliminated many personal freedoms and keeps the population narcotized by presenting an annual blood-sport extravaganza called the Transcontinental Road Race. A small group of drivers, each of whom has an oversized persona and a colorful costume to match, competes not only by racing each other from one coast to the next but also by running over pedestrians for points. During this particular iteration of the race, however, leftist rebels subvert Mr. President’s authority by sabotaging the event.

          The main racers are Frankenstein (David Carradine), the reigning champion whose body comprises replacement parts after years of racing injuries; “Machine-Gun” Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone), a gangster-styled competitor determined to replace Frankenstein as the crowd’s favorite; “Calamity” Jane Kelly (Mary Woronov), who works a Western-outlaw motif; Herman “The German” Boch (Fred Grandy), the league’s resident ersatz Nazi; and Ray “Nero the Hero” Lonagan (Martin Kove), a vainglorious putz with a Roman Empire shtick. Each racer is paired with a navigator, so most of the film comprises standoffs in which teams try to beat each other’s racing times and score points by nailing innocent victims. Also woven into the film are running gags related to announcers and fans. Plus, of course, the violence of the rebels.

          Based on a story by Ib Melchior, Death Race 2000was produced by Roger Corman and co-written by longtime Corman collaborator Charles B. Griffith, whose sardonic touch is audible in the film’s playful dialogue. Director Paul Bartel, the avant-garde humorist who later made the cult-fave comedy Eating Raoul (1982), does a great job throughout Death Race 2000 of balancing goofy humor with sly social commentary—every gag is a nudge at consumerism, egotism, sensationalism, or something else of that nature. The movie is never laugh-out-loud funny, but the tone is consistent and the story (mostly) makes sense. Plus, this being a Corman production, there’s plenty of gore and nudity to keep l0w-minded fans happy. Carradine makes an appealing antihero, his casual cool suited to the role of a seasoned killer, and Stallone is amusing as his hotheaded rival. Meanwhile, Woronov lends a touch of heart, Don Steele (who plays the main announcer) sends up showbiz phoniness, and leading lady Simone Griffeth (who plays Frankenstein’s navigator) blends likeability with sexiness. Best of all, Death Race 2000 runs is course in 80 brisk minutes—all killer, no filler.

Death Race 2000: GROOVY

Eat My Dust! (1976) & Grand Theft Auto (1977)

          Although these silly car-chase romps produced by Roger Corman should not be mistaken for quality cinema, they enjoy footnote status in movie history because they allowed Ron Howard to become a director. By the mid-’70s, Howard was a veteran TV star, having appeared in over 200 episodes of the ’60s favorite The Andy Griffith Show as a child actor, and having successfully transitioned to grown-up fame in Happy Days, which hit the airwaves in 1974. Additionally, he’d gotten a toehold in features, thanks to American Graffiti(1973). But what Howard really wanted to do, as the saying goes, is direct—so he agreed to star in Corman’s Eat My Dust! if the producer let Howard direct the follow-up. And though Grand Theft Auto is not a sequel (Howard plays different characters in each movie), both pictures traffic in vehicular mayhem.

          Eat My Dust! was written and directed by frequent Corman collaborator Charles Griffith, who always brought gonzo humor to his work. The picture stars Howard as small-town kid Hoover Nievold, the car-crazy son of a world-weary country sheriff (Warren J. Kemmerling). Hoover’s desperate to make time with a sexy blonde named Darlene (Christopher Norris), and she’s a speed freak infatuated with a racecar owned by Bubba Jones (Dave Madden). Hoover steals the car and takes Darlene for a joyride so he can get laid. That’s pretty much the entire story. Bystanders lose property as Hoover blasts through the countryside,  the sheriff makes chase, police cars crack up in spectacular ways, and Griffith throws a few weird sight gags into the mix, but nearly the only thing differentiating Eat My Dust! from other Corman car flicks is the lively bluegrass score by ace mandolin player David Grisman. Still, Howard is appealingly peppy, Kemmerling is entertainingly cranky, Norris is wholesomely pretty, and the movie is basically harmless.

          As for the sequel, one must strain to find indications of Howard’s future directorial talent in Grand Theft Auto—the picture was made in the same quick-and-dirty fashion as Eat My Dust!—but great things often come from humble beginnings. Howard co-wrote Grand Theft Auto with his dad, character actor Rance Howard, and the sequel is more plot-driven but slightly less enjoyable than its predecessor, largely because it lacks the freewheeling abandon of Eat My Dust! In Grand Theft Auto, Howard plays Sam Freeman, a young California man of modest means who is eager to marry his wealthy sweetheart, Paula (Nancy Powers). Her folks object to the union, however, so Paula steals her parents’ Rolls-Royce, collects Sam, and makes for Vegas with authorities and her parents in hot pursuit. The story starts to mimic It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) when word gets out that a reward has been placed on the kids’ safe return—random people join the chase and make the situation even more chaotic than before. Eventually, Paula and Sam become folk heroes by defying the oppressive dictates of the Establishment. (This is one of those pictures in which commentary from radio DJs is used to illustrate public sentiment, making Grand Theft Auto a watered-down version of the 1971 cult classic Vanishing Point.) Naturally, the movie concludes with an overwrought demolition derby. Alas, whereas Eat My Dust! has a certain crude charm from beginning to end, Grand Theft Autoruns out of gas well before it crosses the finish line.

Eat My Dust!: FUNKY

Grand Theft Auto: FUNKY

Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It. (1970)

          Also known as Gas-s-s-s, this absurdist riff on the generation gap is a willdly imaginative movie that somehow fails to sustain interest even at its brief running time of 79 minutes. Written by George Armitage, who later channeled his weird narrative impulses into eccentric action pictures (notably the bizarre 1976 flick Vigilante Force), this picture was produced and directed by Roger Corman, as always an adventurous exploiter/explorer of youth culture. The story is a sci-fi lark that takes place after a chemical that was accidentally released into the atmosphere by the military/industrial complex has killed everyone in the world over the age of 25. The surviving kids rebuild a funhouse-mirror version of modern society, and the movie follows a gaggle of hip youths in their search for a place to settle.

          Along the way, Our Intrepid Heroes encounter gangs that have organized in strange ways, like the fascistic warmongers who behave and dress like a football team, or the automobile scavengers who “shoot” victims by aiming guns and shouting the names of cowboy-movie actors. (Best line in this scene: “Maybe I could’ve just winged him with a Dale Robertson or a Clint Eastwood.”) Among the movie’s myriad problems is the fact that it meanders through silly episodes and never defines its leading characters as individuals. There’s nothing human for viewers to grasp. Plus, many of the bits tip over the edge from irreverence into pointless surrealism. For instance, hippie characters engage in sex play by reciting “erotic” words to each other, and the apex of this practice is the invention of the word “arrowfeather.” One must admire Armitage’s imaginativeness, but there’s something to be said for using the rewriting process to focus flights of fancy into a coherent storyline with logic, momentum, and purpose. Gas! feels like something yanked straight from the head of a writer, without benefit of translation so others can play along.

          Still, the movie has a handful of genuinely tart lines. At one point, a motorcycle-riding Edgar Allen Poe (Bruce Karcher) shows up to warn the young heroes, “Now that you are sole heir to our world, you will have every opportunity to achieve wickedness.” In a more substantial context, this might have had more impact, but in Gas! laudatory elements get subsumed into the overall blur of trippy signifiers. (Corman reuses some of his favorite ’60s image-making gimmicks, including the projection of psychedelic film images onto undulating actors during a love scene.) Beyond its abundant strangeness, Gas! is noteworthy for the appearance of three future B-level stars—Talia Shire (billed as “Tally Coppola”), Ben Vereen, and Cindy Williams all play their first significant film roles here.

Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.: FREAKY

The Lady in Red (1979)

          One of the strongest entries in producer Roger Corman’s seemingly endless cycle of Depression-era crime films, The Lady in Red builds an intriguing story around the woman who accompanied famed ’30s gangster John Dillinger to the movies the night he was executed by federal agents. Written by John Sayles, who began his career crafting whip-smart scripts that elevated potentially exploitive Corman projects into the realm of quasi-respectability, The Lady in Red is, of all things, a politically driven character study with a feminist bent.

          The story begins on a small farm, where Polly Franklin (Pamela Sue Martin) dreams idly about becoming a dancer in Hollywood movies. This doesn’t sit well with her harsh, pious father. Driving into town one day, Polly is grabbed by a gang of criminals and used as a human shield during a violent getaway. Suddenly charged with excitement, she lets go of her inhibitions and enjoys a tryst with a handsome older man. Returning home that night a changed woman, Polly rebels against her father’s abuse and flees for a new life. So begins an odyssey in which Polly is lied to and used by men, jealously attacked by vicious women, and befriended by the few kind females she encounters in the big, cruel world. Polly ends up in jail after an act of workplace defiance, and her only choice for securing early release is to accept work as a prostitute. This puts her into the orbit of assorted big-time criminals.

          Yet by the time Polly meets John Dillinger (Robert Conrad), she’s actually come out on the other side of her lawless years and built an honest life of hard work and meager paychecks. The kicker, of course, is that she never realizes her new lover is America’s Most Wanted; he presents a fake identity and she’s learned not to ask too many questions about people. Alas, her romantic redemption is endangered by fate, because Polly’s friend and former madam, Anna (Louise Fletcher), discovers Dillinger’s identity and rats him out.

          The Lady in Red is an epic compared to other Corman ’70s productions, simply because it covers so much time and traverses so many locations. Yet Sayles’ tough screenplay keeps the story close to the central theme of Polly’s sociopolitical awakening—although her weapons of choice are her body and, eventually, a machine gun, Polly is as rich as any of the characters in Sayles’ more overtly political films. This thematic content is heady stuff for a quickie period drama filled with sex scenes and shootouts, but the way Sayles inserts meaningful content proves the genius of Corman’s approach at its apex—so long as filmmakers delivered the B-movie goods on budget and on schedule, Corman was happy to let them transform drive-in flicks into “real” movies.

          Lewis Teague, a former film editor who marked his second feature-length directorial assignment with this project, calls on his old cutting-room skills to give the movie more zip than one might expect—his detail shots of clothing and objects and surfaces lend credibility and texture. However, one should not extrapolate from all of this praise that The Lady in Red is great cinema; it’s merely a fine example of ambitious people capitalizing on the potentialities of a humble project. Even the actors seem imbued with a sense of purpose given the strong storytelling, because Martin puts her lean, pouty sexiness to good use—she’s a long way from the G-rated fluff of her Nancy Drew TV series—and the normally stilted Conrad, of The Wild, Wild West fame, is charmingly loose. Costar Fletcher, sporting a thick Eastern European accent, gives an effectively dimensional portrayal as a no-bullshit survivor.

The Lady in Red: GROOVY

The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (1976)

This brainless Roger Corman production delivers the exploitation-flick goods, because leading ladies Claudia Jennings and Jocelyn Jones spend a great deal of their screen time naked; furthermore, the promise of the film’s title is fulfilled, because the movie has Texan locations, dynamite explosions, and chase scenes. (As to whether any of these things are “great,” as the title suggests, that’s another matter.) Unfortunately, the movie is dull as hell, which is quite an accomplishment given the amount of action and skin that appears onscreen. Everything that happens in The Great Texas Dynamite Chaseis predictable and trite, with cardboard characters pursuing silly motivations as one lifeless scene blurs into another. Even the usual rebellious irreverence that permeates Corman’s innumerable redecks-on-the-run movies isn’t enough to give this one much energy. It’s all been done before, and better. Jennings, the sensual strawberry blonde who gained fame as a Playboy model, plays Candy, an escaped convict who returns to her small town with a bag full of dynamite she stole from a prison demolition crew. Lighting the TNT as a threat, she struts into a bank and robs the place, aided by recently fired teller Ellie-Jo (Jones). Then, after Candy gives her family the stolen loot so they can pay the mortgage on the family farm, Candy teams up with Ellie-Jo for a string of robberies, plus occasional sexcapades with men they meet along the way. It’s all very lighthearted, with the crime spree treated like a giddy adventure, but the film somehow manages to drag—though it’s only 90 minutes, it feels much longer. Aren’t exploitation flicks supposed to be entertaining?

The Great Texas Dynamite Chase: LAME

Hollywood Boulevard (1976)

          The idea of a Roger Corman production spoofing the cheapness and tawdriness of Roger Corman productions is tantalizing, but Hollywood Boulevardis better in the abstract than in reality. Disjointed, sleazy, and underdeveloped, it features many amusing moments but doesn’t hang together well. Reading about the film’s creation, one quickly learns why. Apparently, producer Jon Davison, a Corman protégé, pledged to make the cheapest movie in the history of Corman’s ’70s company, New World Pictures, so Corman gave Davison $60,000 and access to the New World library of footage from previous Corman productions. Enlisting the aid of screenwriter Danny Opatoshu (credited by a pseudonym) and first-time directors Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, Davis contrived a campy story about a would-be starlet (Candice Rialson) who arrives in Hollywood fresh from Indiana, then falls in with a shameless agent (Dick Miller) and a low-budget film crew led by a reckless director (Paul Bartel) whose stunt players tend to die on the job. The movie is part behind-the-scenes comedy, part murder mystery, and part slapstick nonsense, with lots of skin—Hollywood Boulevard has so many topless scenes that even the horniest viewer might get bored of looking at breasts.

          Arkush later went on to create inspired lunacy with Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979), and Dante’s subsequent career includes such irreverent favorites as Gremlins (1984), so it’s easy to see what sorts of comedic ideas were brewing in the young filmmakers’ brains when they made Hollywood Boulevard. However, the amateurish cast, the reliance on recycled footage, and the rushed shooting schedule precluded anything truly inspired from reaching the screen. That said, cinema buffs will obviously find more to like here than general audiences, from the wink-wink depictions of life on a low-budget set to the goofy film-nerd in-jokes (a criminal character is named “Rico” as a shout-out to the 1931 gangster classic Little Caesar, and so on). Plus, the whole enterprise is so knowingly and playfully trashy that it’s hard to dislike Hollywood Boulevard, even though it’s just as hard to feel genuine passion for the flick. Although, it must be said, the running joke about Miller’s character formerly representing everything from an elephant to a meatball sandwich is slightly fabulous.

Hollywood Boulevard: FUNKY

Deathsport (1978)

The saving grace of Roger Corman’s cheapo productions is usually a sense of humor, and the importance of jokes to low-budget crap is obvious when watching the Corman turkey Deathsport, which is monotonously grim. A sci-fi thriller set in the same sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland seen in a gazillion other movies—gladiator contests organized by an authoritarian regime, radioactive mutants, and so on—Deathsportis so close to self-parody that it would have been easy to tip the thing into full-on satire. Instead, Deathsportis played straight, even though it’s filled with cartoonish costumes, over-the-top violence, and ridiculous dialogue. (In the finale, the hero announces, “Now we will have our duel,” and the villain replies, “I agree.”) David Carradine, seemingly unaware that he’s appearing in a piece of shit, lays on the gravitas to portray Kaz, a quasi-mystical warrior who roams the wasteland protecting common folk from overlords. He gets captured by bad guys who force Kaz and other warriors, including Deneer (Claudia Jennings), to participate in “Deathsport,” an open-field battle between warriors on foot and soldiers on motorcycles. During the game, Kaz and Deneer mount a rebellion/escape because they need to rescue a little girl from mutants. All of this is set to a chintzy synthesizer score that sounds as if it’s being played by a keyboardist whose day job is pounding away at a roller-rink pipe organ. Co-written and co-directed by Nicholas Niciphor (Corman and Allan Arkush also helped direct the picture), Deathsportis dull, grungy, and unpleasant, featuring not one but two scenes of nude women getting tortured in an electroshock chamber. Still, B-movie fans may enjoy the absurdly somber performances of Carradine and main villain Richard Lynch (a genre-flick favorite memorable for his badly scarred face). Furthermore, leading lady Jennings, a former Playboy model, is easy on the eyes whether dressed or (as if often the case here) not.

Deathsport: LAME

Big Bad Mama (1974)

          In his autobiography Up Till Now—well, one of his many autobiographies, that is—the incomparable William Shatner derides this Roger Corman-produced action flick as Big Bad Movie, which isn’t fair. Sure, Big Bad Mama is yet another Corman rip-off of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), but it’s a hoot. Campy, funny, sexy, and violent, the picture has just about everything you might want from a silly drive-in flick. Set in the Depression era, the story follows tough Texan Wilma McClatchie (Angie Dickinson), who’s having trouble paying the bills with her small-scale bootlegging operation. When she meets a charismatic bank robber, Fred Diller (Tom Skerritt), she embarks on a new career as a machine-gun-toting thief, abetted not only by Fred but also by her two sexy daughters and, eventually, by dandy-ish con man William J. Baxter (Shatner).

          The plot meanders because too many characters are involved, and it’s odd that Wilma’s the lead character but not actually the leader of her gang, but this sort of picture is all about creating a badass vibe and presenting exciting events. Wilma gets to spout power-to-the-people propaganda while she’s robbing wealthy people—yes, this is one of those soft-edged crime pictures in which the heroine just wants to make enough money to care for her family—and the movie offers a steady stream of sex scenes and shootouts.

          Regarding those sex scenes, one of the reasons Big Bad Mama has enjoyed a long life on home video is that Dickinson appears in the altogether during a pair of scenes, including a yowza full-frontal reveal. Since Big Bad Mama was released the same year Dickinson’s TV series Police Womandebuted, the movie captures her beauty at just the moment she enjoyed her greatest notoriety. Corman has speculated that Dickinson did the risqué scenes because she had reached her early 40s and wanted to prove she was still sexy, a classic Corman justification for exploiting an actress if ever there was one.

          As to why Shatner considers the movie a stinker, one can only speculate that he didn’t like getting upstaged by Dickinson’s body or that he didn’t like playing a ridiculous coward of a character. In any event, Corman and his cheerful accomplices, including reliable B-movie helmer Steve Carver, deliver the goods in Big Bad Mama, but not gracefully—the story sputters through awkward rhythms even as the screen fills with vivid vignettes. FYI, Dickinson reprised her Wilma McLatchie role in the poorly received sequel Big Bad Mama II (1987), also produced by Corman but helmed by sleaze-cinema hack Jim Wynorski instead of original director Carver.

Big Bad Mama: FUNKY

Rock ’n’ Roll High School (1979)

          Goofy and irreverent, Rock ’n’ Roll High School playfully updates the youth-run-wild ethos of ’50s teen movies. Built around a girl’s obsession with punk-rock slobs the Ramones—who appear in the film as themselves, mostly during performance scenes—the picture conveys an exaggerated vision of that thrilling moment in life when nothing matters more than music, rebellion, and romance. Better still, the movie is funny as hell, though not in a laugh-out-loud sort of way; rather, the flick’s relentless assault of stupid jokes (with a few genuinely clever gags thrown in for good measure) creates a frenetic, party-like atmosphere that’s almost impossible to resist.

          The heroine of the tale is a teenager named Riff—or, as she calls herself, “Riff Randell, rock ’n’ roller.” As played by the endearing P.J. Soles, Riff is a wild child who’s never met a rule she didn’t want to break. Therefore, when Riff starts getting hassled by Miss Evelyn Togar (Mary Woronov), the psychotic new principal of Riff’s school, a showdown is inevitable. The feather-light plot involves Riff’s quest to get tickets for an upcoming Ramones concert so she can show the band some songs she’s written for them; meanwhile, Togar uses every resource at her disposal to keep Riff from realizing her dream.

          Director Allan Arkush—abetted by his fellow maniacs in Roger Corman’s junk-movie chop-shop—flits around like a honeybee between various subplots, each more outlandish than the last. For instance, Clint Howard plays Eaglebauer, a grown-up hustler running an elaborate business out of a men’s room—for the right fee, he’’ll supply students with advice, dates, drugs, whatever. There’s also a sweet love story involving two nerds. Arkush and co. cram the movie with sight gags that bridge the old-school schtick of Mel Brooks and the insanity of later films like Airplane! (1980). Examples include the tomahawk-wielding Indian lurking near a line of ticket buyers—he’s a scalper, get it?—and the whimsical dream sequence of the Ramones performing in and around Riff’s bedroom, featuring a shot of bass player Dee Dee Ramone rocking out in Riff’s shower while the water’s running.

           All of this is delivered with stick-it-to-the-man insouciance, so even if Rock ’n’ Roll High School is dumb and shallow, there’s an edifying central theme related to the importance of treating kids with respect. Plus, how can anyone dislike a movie containing the line, “Do your parents know you’re Ramones?” Produced on a miniscule budget, Rock ’n’ Roll High School has deservedly gained cult-favorite status over the years, and the makers of the original film should not be held responsible for the existence of the 1991 sequel Rock ’n’ Roll High School Forever, which stars (shudder) Corey Feldman.

Rock ’n’ Roll High School: GROOVY

I Escaped from Devil’s Island (1973)

Produced by Roger Corman to piggyback on the release of Papillon(1973), a big-budget drama about the inhuman conditions on the French penal colony known as Devil’s Island, this colorful but dull exploitation flick features an eye-popping procession of abuse, murder, sex, sweat, and torture. Set in the early 20th century, the picture follows the attempts of a violent criminal named Le Bras (Jim Brown) to flee the seemingly inescapable Devil’s Island, which is run by sadistic prison guards who whip inmates whenever the convicts aren’t being worked to death. Le Bras recruits unlikely accomplices in political prisoner Davert (Christopher George), who initially shuns violence, and Jo-Jo (Richard Ely), a “fancy boy”—or, in the less delicate terminology of today’s prison pictures, a “bitch.” The movie trudges through several repetitive and ugly scenes of these and other inmates getting beaten by guards until the “heroes” build a raft and flee, only to suffer a series of melodramatic crises. Their raft falls apart, they’re attacked by sharks while adrift on the ocean, they stumble into a leper colony once returning to shore on a remote part of the island, they’re captured by bloodthirsty natives, and so on. Director William Witney, a veteran of ’30s serials and Golden Age television, was near the end of an epic career when he helmed this pedestrian flick, and while he seems perfectly efficient at organizing crowd scenes and simulating violence, the film’s storytelling is enervated in the extreme. Brown occasionally livens up the proceedings with a sly line delivery or a charming smile, but since he’s mostly tasked with looking impressive while parading around shirtless, it’s not as if there’s much room for him to shape a persona. As for George, a limited actor with a campy sort of appeal, he spends most of his time gritting his teeth and snarling. Plus, while some of the production values are impressive-ish, notably crowd scenes during the climax, the film’s reliance on unvarnished exterior locations and tacky stock footage is unhelpful. Worse, the movie’s plot is so turgid the flick feels like it’s three hours long even though it’s only 89 minutes.

I Escaped from Devil’s Island: LAME

Starcrash (1978)

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

Starcrash: SQUARE

Thunder and Lightning (1977)

Yet another drive-in flick about rambunctious moonshiners, Thunder and Lightning would linger far below the pop-culture radar if not for the popularity of its leading actors, David Carradine and Kate Jackson. Working once again under the penny-pinching aegis of producer Roger Corman, Carradine pours on the rebellious charm to liven up the story’s aimless cacophony of chase scenes, explosions, and fist fights. In fact, Carradine is forced to contribute extra effort—if smirking can be described as effort, that is—because Charlie’s Angels spitfire Jackson is more or less a nonentity given the colorless nature of her co-starring role. Carradine plays Harley Thomas, a good ol’ boy whose graying uncles cook up moonshine that he delivers in his souped-up ’57 Chevy. Harley dates Nancy Sue Hunnicut (Jackson), a wealthy young woman who doesn’t realize her father, Ralph Junior Hunnicut (Roger C. Carmel), hides a massive moonshine operation behind the front of his legit soda-pop empire. Through the machinations of an unnecessarily convoluted story, Ralph Junior gets into trouble with the Northeast mafia, Harley gets into trouble with Ralph Junior, and everybody ends up chasing after a massive shipment of poisoned moonshine. The fast-moving picture also makes room for an alligator-wrestling preacher, a pair of incompetent Noo Yawk assassins, and Ralph Junior’s knuckle-dragging henchmen, two of whom are played by ’70s B-movie stalwarts George Murdock and Charles Napier. Although Thunder and Lightningis ostensibly a comedy, frenetic onscreen action is presented in lieu of actual jokes. Given the movie’s choppy editing, one suspects that director Corey Allen’s on-set camerawork was chopped apart during post-production to rev up the pacing, so if Thunder and Lightningever had nuance (unlikely), it disappeared long before the movie hit screens. Still, the picture offers a few brainlessly diverting scenes, as well as some choice examples of redneck patois—like the moment when a motorcycle cop sees a pair of cars zoom by and exclaims, “Sweet kidneys of Christ, those boys were movin’!”

Thunder and Lightning: FUNKY