SUDDEN DEATH

d. Eddie Romero (1977)

We’re back in the Pearl of the Orient Seas* again, this time finding out about the hitherto hidden world of ruthless sugar barons, greedy, amoral men who are prepared to displace native people and destroy the environment in order to make a dollar, a sweet, sweet dollar. These men are so cartoonishly evil that, when their nice managing director tries to make reparations to the native people for the wholescale destruction of their homes and habitat, they have his entire family, including two little boys and a baby, shot to death, leaving the badly injured executive for dead.

Out of danger, but still full of grief and shotgun pellets, the man tracks down the legendary Harrison ‘Duke’ Smith (little Robert Conrad, wiry and in very tight trousers), a man who has had an illustrious career as a state sanctioned murderer, terrorist and all round good guy / undercover bastard. Now living out an idyllic retirement in a shack on the beach, he initially refuses to help, giving his about to graduate teenage daughter and a beautiful young girlfriend as reasons to stay alive.

When the man is subsequently burned alive, and Duke’s daughter tuts at him in disapproval, he finally decides to get involved, although his motivation is far from clear. I mean, firstly, teenage girls tut all the time and, even so, the guy is now a charcoal briquette and the rest of his family are already dead, and Duke didn’t know any of them, so what’s the point apart from the fact that feature films aren't usually twenty seven minutes long?

Enlisting the help of his old friend Wyatt, a sharp black martial arts expert, he roots out the conspiracy and takes out the nasty Sugar Barons one by one, at first almost by accident and then with accelerating zeal and sadism. Towards the end, you realise that this noble mission has unleashed a psychopath, a man who is so used to killing that it has become his default setting.

The film’s pacing is glacial for the most part, but then culminates in a spectacular last ten minutes, where even the camera struggles to keep up with the action. The last third of the film is greatly enlivened by the addition of ex-surfing champ and all round lunk / hunk Don Stroud, here playing a dandyish but socially awkward Corsican hitman called in to take Duke out before he can murder everyone in Manila. I like Stroud, but he often makes strange acting choices, here speaking in a weird, cotton-mouthed way, as if he wants to try an accent but is embarrassed by it. The battle between two professional killers ends in a bruising and very bloody encounter in an icehouse, where quick cutting is used to convey violence and to disguise the fact that Stroud is at least a foot taller than Conrad.  

The final moments are not entirely unexpected but are genuinely gut-wrenching, and the use of carousel music to accompany the horror is a masterstroke, symbolising both the grotesque tableau and the breaking of a over-stretched mind. It’s tough stuff.

*The Philippines, mate.

DEATH PROMISE

d. Robert Warmflash (1977) 

When I was at junior school, about a thousand years ago, once a week our teacher Mr. Crockett would let us perform a play of our own devising on a rotational basis. In my group - boys only, of course, because girls were horrible  - we never really put much effort in, either blatantly ripping off something we’d seen on telly or coming up with some nonsense about robot teachers or someone setting fire to the school. When inspiration ran completely dry, we often just improvised, returning again and again to the twin preoccupations of pre-pubescent boys: fighting and friendship. These 'plays' involved kung fu, sword fights, stabbings, stranglings, shootings, wrestling, boxing and a huge amount of male bonding: hand shaking, back patting, affectionate arm punching. The high five hadn't caught on in the UK at the time, and the fist bump was still under development. It was an amateurish, childish vision of what it meant to be a grown up man: violence, camaraderie, heroism, cuddling, no women. And that, dear reader, is what Death Promise reminded me of.  

Two tough New York guys, one white, one black, one short, one tall, neither in any kind of employment, spend their days jogging in matching track suits and training – hard – at the martial arts club. To show that they are friends, they touch each other constantly. When ruthless developers try to evict them from their apartment building, using a variety of nefarious means (turning off the utilities, starting a fire, infesting the building with rats) the guys find any number of arses to kick, somewhatr exacerbating the problem and culminating in the murder of the short white guy’s father. Eaten up by grief, hungry for revenge, he flies off to an exotic dojo where he becomes so disciplined that he can catch a fly with a pair of chopsticks. Shit hot and invincible, he returns to the Big Apple to kill those dirty scumbag landlords one by one: by bow and arrow, by poison, by putting a bag of angry, hungry rats on someone’s head.

Each time he crosses a name off the list he and his tall, black friend nod sagely, clasp hands and look into each other’s eyes for just a beat too long. It's very funny, not because it’s homoerotic but because it absolutely isn't.   

Somewhat stilted in terms of drama, the film only really comes to life during the fight sequences,  although luckily these take up about 75% of the films running time. The last half hour is literally just one big battle, eventually descending into hysterical madness as angry men scream wildly and uncontrollably at each other, tearing off their tight shirts to kick and punch the shit out of each other really slowly. It ends with a dummy representing the main villain being thrown off a roof, and it’s not a good dummy either - which is great. Highly recommended!  

THE BELIEVER'S HEAVEN

d. Ron Ormond (1977)

I'm a tolerant person. I don't mind what other people do as long as it enhances their lives and doesn't fuck others over. I've never had a religion, and never missed the absence, but I am fascinated with the mechanics of belief and, particularly, the mechanism by which it is delivered. 

The Believers Heaven is pure propaganda, overseen by the director, Ron Ormond, a fringe film maker and writer who turned to God after surviving a plane crash, and Estus W. Pirkle, a fire and brimstone preacher with steel hair, stone eyes, an unwavering voice, an immobile face, and rigid ideals. Pirkle has two modes: angry and furious. He reserves his greatest ire for us, the viewer, staring at us down the camera, confronting and challenging us, baiting us about how we’re never going to get into his heaven with the sort of shitty attitudes he knows we possess.  

Pirkle talks without interruption and without discernible respiration. He is clearly learned in the sense of having read The Bible enough times to recite large chunks of it, but this does not wisdom make. In fact, it’s genuinely hard to get any sense of what he's actually saying, apart from a list of the various precious stones and other minerals that Heaven’s walls are apparently made of. 

Pirkle’s monologue is intercut with interviews with other ‘experts’, all cut from the same sack cloth, and all with the strange habit of darting out their tongue to lick their bottom lips like some sort of pontificating toad, presumably a trick of the preacher trade. These talking heads are further supplemented by DIY historical pageant recreations featuring tea towel head scarfs and a multitude of stick on beards. The acting is abysmal but then the material they have to work with is terrible – The Bible may hold all the answers, but it’s scant on detail and very poor on dialogue.

To bring it up to date, the film uses news footage of a recent earthquake in 'Central America' spliced with fake re-enactments of the disaster that are both in poor taste and very badly done. To give an example, there is a seemingly interminable shot of a burial trench filled with blacked / browned up corpses, one of which winces when another body is dropped onto her legs.

The overall message of this mad melange is that the afterlife is only available to the saved and, as Jesus could be back at any minute and the Rapture takes no prisoners, you’d better be saved or get saved right now. It's not enough to live a blameless life spent helping others, by the way, and it’s not enough to just believe, no matter how fervently, and to quietly worship in your own way – you must be saved, presumably by Estus W. Pirkle, and you have to tell everyone or it doesn’t count. 

The consequences of not doing so are laid out in merciless detail: you will join the liars, cheaters, criminals, Jews and Buddhists (!) in Hell, a place which resembles a burning landfill site populated by people with sad, dirty faces wandering around moaning about how utterly miserable and wrong they are and how they should have listened while they were still alive. Oh, and this goes on forever.

The film is fun for a while in a stiff, arch, totally ridiculous way, but the oxen cart wheels finally come off when it introduces a 32 inch tall woman who is lifted onto a table and sings with almost unbearable sincerity about how she will be whole in the afterlife and won’t need a wheelchair anymore, and three badly burned teenagers, looking utterly broken, who sing half-heartedly while clutching a hymn book in their melted, fingerless hands. Unsurprisingly, this breaks the campy spell immediately and permanently and only serves to underline what a terrible confidence trick it all is.

DESPERATE LIVING

d. John Waters (1977)

I'll be honest and admit that, up until now, I hadn't seen a John Waters film that predated 1988's Hairspray, mainly because I could never quite remember which one it was where Divine eats dog shit and that was a moment of cinematic history I was happy to miss. Dangerous Living doesn't go that far, although it does feature multiple murders, sexual assault, vomit, mass cannibalism and someone hacking off their own recently transplanted penis with a pair of blunt scissors. It seems obvious to say that the film is in bad taste, but actually it goes beyond taste, it’s just in a feverish zone of high camp and offence where anything goes, and you either like it or you hate it and want it destroyed with fire. For me, it’s grotesque and hilarious, full of memorable and baroque dialogue and, most of all, outrageous people behaving badly and having fun.

Mink Stole plays Peggy Gravel, a shrill, neurotic housewife fresh out of the sanitorium who amplifies every tiny experience into grand opera. When the neighbourhood kids accidentally hit a baseball through her window she takes it as an assassination attempt, shouting 'don't tell me I don't know about Vietnam'. When she finds her son and daughter playing Doctors she screams 'my daughter has been raped - and now she's pregnant'. This hysteria has fatal consequences when her husband tries to calm her down and Peggy assumes he is trying to kill her. The Gravel's huge, black, kleptomaniac, dipsomaniac maid, Grizelda (Anita Lane, absolutely the star of the show) intervenes, sitting on the husband's face and killing him. Peggy and Grizelda go on the run, just getting out of the city limits before being pulled up by a cross dressing cop. In return for their underwear and a couple of sloppy kisses the Cop lets them go on the understanding that they should put themselves in exile in Mortville, a shanty town populated by misfits and criminals, all ruled over by the cruel and perverse Queen Carlotta. All this accounts for about ten minutes of screen time and, in legend, was where, during the premiere, the critic from Good Housekeeping walked out.

What follows is an amazing cavalcade of pantomimic action, all filmed on a set made out of bits of plywood, cardboard and rubbish placed in a field in Maryland. Every actor is in  top form and top gear, all the time, emoting, screeching, rolling around on the floor, taking their clothes off or putting them on backwards. It sounds tiring but, actually, it's like watching a mad school play delivered by naughty children. There are adult fairy tale elements too, with the wicked snaggle toothed Queen and her retinue / army of well hung leather boys, not to mention a lot of lesbianism, some rabies, inter-gender wrestling, rat eating and someone having a gun inserted into their anus. 

Best of all, there's line after line of incredible dialogue. I have a number of favourites but I'll limit myself to one example that is now stuck to the inside of my brain forever like a piece of filthy discarded bubblegum:

'He's not a garbage man, he just helps pick up trash at the nudist colony'

A work of crazed and evil genius. 

BREAKER! BREAKER!

d. Don Hulette (1977)

I like Chuck Norris. Not in an ironic, post-modern way, I mean I genuinely and sincerely like him. He was 37 (although he looks younger) when he made Breaker! Breaker!, a huge hit that was the start of almost two decades as a leading man in American films. He's a nice, all American hero: blond, quiet, capable, likable, he's respectful to the ladies and nice to the Village Idiot. He's slow to rouse, but dangerous to cross. It even takes him twenty minutes and a huge amount of provocation before he unleashes his first roundhouse kick.

Chuck plays a trucker whose little brother goes missing while driving a delivery of TV meals across the country. The kid has been tricked into driving through a corrupt one horse town, arrested on trumped up charges and given a choice: a $250 fine, or 250 days in jail. When he tries to escape by crashing through a window (he's Chuck's brother, alright), he is badly beaten, tied hand and foot and chucked into a barn. Big mistake.

The town is a Kritarchy, presided over by an erudite but alcoholic judge called Trimming, who is not only the Law and the Religion there, but also the store keeper, bar keep and everyone's Boss, like a Hillbilly Roy of Wroxham. He and his toothless serfs make a living crushing impounded vehicles and selling them for scrap, as well as making moonshine that they distribute by helicopter.

When Chuck eventually comes to town, driving a Ford van with an American Eagle airbrushed on its side, the whole dirty enterprise comes tumbling down. The Judge's men keep Chuck pretty busy, and there's a wonderful sequence where he walks along the unmade street being attacked by every guy in town, each of whom he beats up and throws to the ground. He's so assured in his mission he even has time to fall in love. Finally, fed up with the hassle, he finds his brother and a CB and calls in his truck driving pals, who trash the place and leave it in smouldering ruins. 

Chuck has a final face off with a fairly secondary figure who is elevated to chief villain at the last moment. They have a slo mo slug fest in a corral that is also home to an angry, tethered horse. When Chuck finally kicks the guy to whatever Valhalla hicks go to, the horse jumps over the fence, free at last. This is America, man, fuck with freedom, you'll get the flat sole of the wrathful boot of REAL justice.

Two additional features that particularly struck me about this homely but never hokey production: 

1. Chuck is no ordinary trucker, also being a Karate instructor who specialises in Third Eye Manifestation. He does this wearing a black open necked shirt with a gold sequined collar.

2. Secondly, the brilliant Jack Nance is featured in a supporting role. This film was made in 1977, the same year that Eraserhead was finally finished. Nance keep his cowboy hat on at all times, presumably to hide his Lynchian pompadour.  I miss that guy a lot.

A fun film, but then, hey, I like Chuck Norris. 

BARE KNUCKLES

d. Don Edmonds (1977)

Bare Knuckles is sometimes described as a Blaxploitation film, despite the fact that it was produced, written and directed by a white man, and, after about forty minutes, dispenses entirely with its few black cast members and concentrates exclusively on Robert Viharo, a bepermed and moustachioed action hero of obviously Italian descent. But the original poster cannily emphasises the black actors and it does feel like a Blaxploitation film: fast, fun, daft, full of fighting, shouting and running around. At the end, I felt like I'd been watching it for about ten minutes.

Viharo plays Zachery Kane, a principled and unconventional ex-cop turned bounty hunter. In a quick montage, it's also revealed that he is a semi-pro boxer (who trains in jeans and a polo neck jumper), a kung fu expert and that he plays the flute, albeit in a way that produces synthesised electronic tones. He lives on pizza and sleeps in an office plastered with 'Wanted' posters. When a perverted psycho killer starts picking off young women, Kane decides to catch him, partly for the reward and partly because Kane is a good guy with a strong moral compass and incredibly tight jeans.

The killer, revealed early on, is a horrible, incredible creation: a stunted rich kid (in his 30s) who was so disturbed by his Mother's promiscuity that he grew up full of hate and sickness and murder and incestuous lust. Rather like one of the younger Trumps, the only way he can feel whole is to don a leather suit and a ragged gimp mask and stab young women to death, hissing and wheezing in a most disturbing way. He's a really horrible guy, with no redeeming features whatsoever and, when he kisses his Mom and tries to slip his tongue in, you can't wait for Kane to bring him to justice, preferably using a flaming chainsaw.

The last quarter of the film is a chase: by car, by motorcycle, on foot. The finale of the action, like Grease, takes place in a partially flooded storm drain. Unlike Grease, however, death is on the cards for at least one of our combatants. I won't spoil it by telling you which one, other than to say I actually pumped my fist and said 'yes!' when it happened.     

DEVIL'S EXPRESS

d. Barry Rosen (1977)

Another ramshackle, hyperactive, hugely endearing Blaxploitation Kung Fu film, this time with a very welcome supernatural element and the intermittent but powerful presence of Warhawk Tanzania, who should have been a much bigger star because he's fucking awesome, like a black Jason King with mad martial arts skills and even madder hair.

Warhawk plays Luke Curtis, a cool dude on a spiritual quest and a kung fu obsession that takes him to Hong Kong for expert tuition. He takes along his best pal, Rodan, a nice guy who, nevertheless, refuses to take things seriously and, as such, is always getting into trouble, mainly with The Tongs, who want him dead. While in Hong Kong, Rodan discovers a cave in a skull strewn valley. In the cave is an amulet, which he decides to pinch and wear as a medallion. The removal of the amulet unleashes a demonic creature, who follows the two friends to New York and takes up residence in the subway, subsisting on wayward travellers, who get dragged off the platform and torn apart. 

This goes on for a while, and is counterpointed by Rodan and a previously unintroduced friend being chased by The Tongs, who they battle with over and over. Rodan even kills a few, like shelling peas, and with as much thought. Things lose focus here, and become slightly confused. Lots of red paint gets used.

After some time, the two seemingly disparate elements combine when Rodan is chased down into the subway station and is killed by the monster he set free, having his face jammed into an electrical generator. It’s a quite clever twist, and slightly saddening as, for all his idiocy and murder, he was a likeable doofus. This (finally!) brings Warhawk Tanzania into the frame. Out for revenge, he dons a pair of gold lame dungarees and goes down into the subway to kick some ancient demon ass. I’m not making this up. He meets the demon, who manifests itself in a number of ways (including as Warhawk’s barely seen girlfriend but not, strangely, as Rodan, which would have been much more interesting) before reverting to its standard form, a kind of big, ugly pile of aged mince. After a humongous battle, Warhawk uses his hard hands, heavy feet and the groovy oriental amulet to defeat the demon and make New York safe again. Which is a relief, as I really like it there.

Unbelievably, after this starring role Warhawk Tanzania has no further IMDB credits. What sort of world are we living in?