"Rolling Thunder": Twisted Violence



"Rolling Thunder": Twisted Violence

Washington Post, The (DC) - October 29, 1977

Author: Gary Arnold

John Flynn's crisp, laconic direction and evocative use of Southern Texas locations - the San Antonio area, with particularly effective, sinister excursions to border towns like Del Rio - transorm "Rolling Thunder," now at area theaters, into a more distinctive exploitation movie than it deserves to be. The screenplay, which originated with Paul Schrader, the writer of "Taxi Driver," is miserably vicious, a hybrid of "The Wild Bunch" and "Death Wish" in which a returning P.O.W., an Air Force major who spent eight years imprisoned in North Vietnam, sets out to massacre a gang of hoodlums who break into his home, shove his right hand down a churning garbage disposal and shoot his wife and son.

The premise is twisted in a way that could serve as a textbooks example of pornographic violence. All the major's ordeals - physical and emotional, as a prisoner and a returning serviceman and family man - become pretexts for kinked-up, brutal sensations and a final orgiastic shooting spree.

There's no point in responding to the hero's situation with ordinary sympathy or human interest, because these amount to sucker's responses in this context. Flynn directs the homecoming encounters between William Devane as the major, Hordon Gerler as his son and Lisa Richards as his wife, who has become romantically involved with another man, with such admirable stillness and concentration that one could be fooled into believing that the film intends to deal with his readjustment problems conscientiously. In retrospect, one may recall this as the neatest single illusion in the picture and wish John Flynn a more appropriate subject for stylistic concentration the next time around.

it doesn't take long to discover that the humanistic murmurs are setting up nihilistic knock-out punches. Bringing on the murderers spares a screenwriter the drudgery of trying to resolve the estrangement between the major and his wife. At the same time it's presumed to give a melodramatic warrior a "mission" worthy of his training and value system. Yet there's no conviction behind this mission of vengeance, no sense of values that might deserve to be protected or offenses that might deserve to be punished.

On the contrary, the hero and a fellow P.O.W. who joins him, played by Tommy Lee Jones, are justified on the basis of professionalism rather than motive. We're supposed to accept the platitude that they're emotionally dead and have been since their capture during the war. The major has become a stranger to his family, and while he's offered a girl friend who might be some consolation - Linda Haynes, who resembles a careworn Tuesday Weld, makes an appealing impression as a cocktail waitress whose down-to-earth aspirations and apprehensions correspond to the audience's - he must reject her, or else miss the climactic shootout.

The major's comrade leaves a household conceived as the meanest of lower middle-class sancturaries, a haven for prattling women and unheroic men. In its simultaneous contempt for the homefronts the heroes ostensibly march out to avenge or protect and for the scummy adversaries they'll face, the movie exposes an emotional and moral blackout far more genuine than the perfunctory daze ascribed to Devane and Jones, both very capable actors. This picture was conceived by someone - presumably Schrader - who glorifies violence, yet only responds to it as a transcendant, abstract pictorial spectacle, an esthetic thrill, like the nomcombatants who derive more satisfaction from combat than professional soldiers.

There are some exceedingly ugly notions in "Rolling Thunder," and they're never mitigated by the kind of character exploration and embiguity that strengthened "Taxi Drive." For example, the major is depicted recalling nightmarish scenes of torture and then reenacting some of those scenes, with a hint of of masochistic gratification. His severed hand is replaced by a prosthetic device that becomes even better than a hand for the purposes of this story, because he can file the to a point and use it as a deadly weapon.

The big showndown self-sconsciously justaposes sex and violence. The setting is a Mexican bordello, so naked actresses scurry about trying to stay out of the line of fire while the actors pretend to have it out. Speaking of having it out, Jones is depicted being undressed by a whore seconds before the shooting starts, and he comes out of her room with an automatic rifle in one hand while zipping up his fly with the other. "Rolling Thunder" is undoubtedly Spawn of Peckinpah, but some of its kinkier wrinkles might shock the originator himself.

'Telefon': Dialing for Spies



'Telefon': Dialing for Spies

Washington Post, The (DC) - December 17, 1977

Author: Gary Arnold

"You must admit it's ironic, the KBG sending you to protect the American Establishment," says Yankee accomplice Lee Remick to Soviet secret agent Charles Bronson late in "Telefon," a new espionage melodrama at several area theaters.

This line says a lot, since it reflects the movie's uncertainty about whether the audience has been witty enough to appreciate the filmmakers' little detente-in-spired joke of casting Bronson as a Soviet spy trying to prevent a renegade colleague, Donald Pleasence, from provoking World War III with acts of sabotage in the United States.

The real problem is that the filmmakers lay out this story blueprint so doggedly that the audienfe is invariably 25 pages of expository chitchat ahead of them. Following "Telefon" is about as thrilling as being kept on hold for the better part of the day.

The title refers to a telephone-activated sabotage network supposedly by the KBG back in the early '60s. If worse came to worst, about 50 agents long since submerged in ordinary American identities and walks of life could be triggered into carrying out strategic acts of sabotage in the manner popularized by "The Manchurian Candidate" - hearing a code phrase that compels them to obey hypnotically implanted commands.

There's a tension-eliminating goofiness about the premise from the outset. KBG biggies Patrick Magee and Alan Badel turn to Bronson, the superspy with the photographic memory, because they don't want to 'fess up to Brezhnev; assuming the Telefon project had become obsolete, they didn't tell him about it. As a matter of fact, it probably is obsolete, they didn't tell him about it. As a matter of fact, it probably is obsolete. Pleasence can't retarget the human missiles he activates. In the first of these suicide missions we're invited to see a Denver gas stateion owner blow up what used to be a Chemical-Biological Warfare storage depot.

Upon his arrival Bronson is contacted by Remick, an American liaison who rivals Pleasence as a candidate for instant liquidation in my book. Supposedly assigned to assist Bronson, she immediately begins to henpeck him prattle and demands for equality. But the filmmakers have a surprise up their sleeves, eventually played with no flourish, that they think explains her presumptuous conduct.

In my naive way, conditioned by so many years of stories in which characters with apparent affinities were brough together and clues were systematically followed up, I kept expecting Bronson to be matched with the likable woman on the premises, a brainy CIA researcher played by Tyne Daly (who also brought an ingratiating note of humanity to the last Clint Eastwood vehicle. "The Enforcer"). I still see no compelling reason why the paths of the American office worker with the fabulous memory and the Russian field operative with the fabulous memory shouldn't cross.

The script credited to Peter Hyams and Stirling Silliphant tends to inspire unintentional mirth at least from the moment one hears the ominous code phrase - a passage from Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." Still, they have a way to go before matching the editorial writers at Izvestia, who handed the film company a publicity bonus when "Telefon" was shooting in Helsinki, which doubled for Moscow.

The Izvestia salvo couldn't have been wilder: "It is obvious that the film has a provicative character. Its purpose is to stroke up a psychosis against the Soviet Union in western countries. . . The wires from this 'Telefon' lead back notorious western intelligence agencies which use every dirty method in their anti-Soviet activities."

Director Don Siegel joked that he expected to be summoned to the Kremlin and awarded a decoration after the movie came out.

He can dream, but no one will be pinning decorations on him for the quality of "Telefon." If anything, Siegel's style of direction seems to be slowing to an irreversible plod.

'The Choirboys': An Out-of-Tune Precinct




'The Choirboys': An Out-of-Tune Precinct

Washington Post, The (DC) - December 24, 1977

Author: Gary Arnold

Among the Los Angeles patrolmen characterized - or, to be precise, caricatured - in "The Choirboys," now at area theaters, the term "choir practice" is a euphemism for an all-night drunken toot in MacArthur Park. At some stage the original author, Joseph Wambaugh, and the director, Robert Aldrich, must have envisioned a profane popular comedy patterned after "M*A*S*H," with the choir practicesserving the same purpose for overworked, pressured and sometimes brutalized urban cops that the binges and practical jokes served for the battle surgeons in Robert Altman's film.

"The Choirboys" belongs to the tradition of service comedies, but I doubt if anyone will hail it for doing a service for either cops or movie auidences. If the filmmakers had ironic or satirical intentions, the finished film totally obscures them. There's no contrast between cops at work and play. The whole movie suggests a dirtyminded "McHale's Navy," with scenes pivoting on gross set jokes alternating with scenes pivoting on grosser sick jokes.

Some of the jokes are so raucously or goofily low-minded that you may laugh out of a kind of shocked weakness. At a certain level there is something funny about the idea of a drunken slob creeping under a glass-topped coffee table to get a peek up a women's skirt or the idea of a jumper being provoked to her doom by a cop who tries to use reverse psychology and dares her to "go ahead and jump."

However, once commiting your entertainment in this direction, it may be impossible to change. Towards the end "Choirboys" attempts to get serious about the sordidness that it has been wallowing in for gratuitious, episodic laughs, and this switch seems both deceitful and laughable. It's much too late to take a different tack, and at the fadeout the mood returns to cackling facetiousness. The promotion for this movie should probably be built mately, neither the filmmakers nor the characters feel any credible pain. They're just rowdy fraternity boys in blue.

Wambaugh, who did the original adaptation of his own best-selling novel, has been busy disowning the film. He succeeded in having his name removed from the screenwriting credits and placed an ad in movie trade papers complaining that Aldrich had done him wrong. It's difficult to see how. The comic vulgarity originated in the novel, and surely no one could imagine the director of "The Dirty Dozen," "The Longest Yard," "Hustle" "The Killing of Sister George" and "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" suddenly developing a delicate touch.

It's more likely that Wambaugh came to the realization that visualizing this colection of tales told out of school could be more embarrassing and misleading than simply publishing them. "The Choirboys" is a vaudeville of precinct scandals and follies that may not mean the same thing to cops that they mean to civilians. Although he supplied the pretext and context, Wambaugh may not care to associate himself with the misconceptions about police work and psychology that could result from the film version.

"The Choirboys" takes a fairly obnoxious place among a burgeoning genre of Hollywood films determined to revel in raunchiness. "Slap Shot" set, the pace earlier this year. Now we have "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," "Saturday Night Fever," "The Gauntlet" "The Choirboy" and even "The World's Greatest Lover" straining to keep up, The spectre of television must be partly responsible: To a certain extent these movies recommed themselves because they'll need to be expurgated for telecasting.

Charles Durning has the most prominent role in a large, able but largely wasted cast as the hard-bitten patrolman "Spermwhale" Whalen, suggesting a cross between Spencer Tracy and Los Costello. Not too surprisingly, Burt Young creates the most human and appealing impression as a motley-looking but gentle natured vice cop. Tim McIntire also gets something distinctive into the boobytrapped assignment of the resident redneck bigot. Robert Webber cops the booby prize for his teethgrinding closeups as, naturally a mealy-mouthed brasshat.

'DEMON SEED': A Computerized Horror



'DEMON SEED': A Computerized Horror

Washington Post, The (DC) - April 8, 1977
Author: Gary Arnold

"Demon Seed," now at area theaters, pioneers and esoteric sex crime, computer rape, and blends it with the hit atrocity from "Rosemary's Baby" - infernal conception. Julie Christie has been lured into the thankless starring role of the victim, the estranged wife of computer designer Fritz Weaver, whose awesome new electronic brain. Proteus IV, the repository of literally all knowledge, gets an uncontrollable hankering to reproduce itself in human form and fixes on Christie as semi-Freudian mate bait.

Norminaly, the film is a science-fiction thriller about sexual terror, but it's governed by an attitude that minimizes the terrifying or suspenseful possibilities. Ultimately, director Donald Cammell seems to be proselytizing for crossbreeding between humans and machines, which is viewed as potentially Great Leap Forward in evolution.

They may not realize it, but Cammell and the other men who engineered this story - novelist Dean R. Koontz and screenwriters Robert Jaffe (the offspring of the producer, Herb Jaffe) and Roger O. Hirson - have failed to identify with their ostensible protagonist. Casting the sullen, hard-faced Christie as a Leda of the Computer Age seems an unconscious giveaway, because Christie became a star playing a spiteful, amoral girl who degraded herself and has never really transcended that image.



As a terrorized heroine, she doesn't evoke the immediate sympathy of actresses like Ingrid Bergman in "Gaslight," Dorothy McGuire in "The Spiral Staircase," Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark" or Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby." One tends to associate Christie with girls who'll try anything once, so she seems ill-equipped to arouse pity and terror by pretending to spawn a metallic-looking Uberkind at the urging of a presumptuous machine that sounds like Robert Vaughn.

The filmmakers' crackpot transcendentalism, possibly inspired by that blasted embryo-in-the-cosmic-bubble image at the end of "2001," prevents them from taking the heroine's violation seriously in either human or melodramatic terms. In a scene that might have been irresistibly funny in a different context, Christie is shown with a rare smile on her face after being impregnated by Proteus IV, which puts her in the mood with computer animation designed by Ron Hays of M.I.T.'s Center for Advanced Visual Studies.



Like the rapacious computer, whose brain waves are illustrated with excerpts from the work of the great abstract animator Jordan Belson (Cammell has stylish taste in abstract imagery and deplorable taste in abstract thought), the filmmakers demonstrate perfunctory concern for the heroine's fears and protestations but ultimately dismiss them as short-sighted. The poor, skittish creature can't seem to grasp the honor of being used as an evolutionary guinea pig, the mother of a potential master race yet.

"Demon Seed" might have been a genuinely witty and terrifying thriller if someone had taken advantage of the story's glaring sadomasochistic implications. Nevertheless, Cammell plays it dumb at a thematic level, ignoring the sci-fi sexual bondage satire staring him in the face.

Proteus ought to be acting out the unconscious or half-conscious desires of his creator, a spurned and frustrated mad-scientist husband. Cammell establishes the fact that the Weaver-Christie marriage is on the rocks. But having established this conflict, the filmmakers neglect to exploit it. What might have become an ingenious parable about the battle of the sexes ends up a dopey celebration of an obstetric abomination.

There couldn't have been much feminine input during "Demon Seed." Cammell doesn't seem to be aware of how this computer-conrolled act of subjugation could be linked with more commonplace apprehensions. For example, a little conversation with new or expectant mothers might have alerted him to the fact that women often feel more threatened than reassured by the counsel they receive form supposedly authoritive males, particularly in the medical profession.

BILLY JACK: Running His Act Into The Ground



BILLY JACK: Running His Act Into The Ground

Washington Post, The (DC) - May 12, 1977
Author: Gary Arnold

While "Billy Jack Goes to Washington" never sounded like the most thrilling coming attraction of 1977, I expected a few more laughs and self-righteous outrages than the plodding, stuffy finished product, now at a trio of K-B theatres, has to offer.

Not that Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor have totally missed the old funnybone in the course of inserting those progressively insufferable characters, Billy Jack and Jean Roberts, into the screenplay of Frank Capra's 1939 rabble-rouser, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," nominally updated and rewritten to accomodate their own rabble-rousing formula.

One feels a tug in the right direction when Elmer Bernstein selects "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to underscore one of daughter's speeches as the newly appointed Senator Billy - a description of his pet project, a national camp for abused children.



When Billy asks, "How would you youthful, overwhelmingly nubile staff members chorus their approval "yeah!" shouts one and "All right!" cries another - one almost anticipates a production number in the tradition of the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney musicals. Alas, none materializes. Director Laughlin, alias T. C. frank, keeps the cast sitting around inflicting interminable speeches upon one another.

Only Delores Taylor could bring the appropriate note of doleful complacence to a construction like the following: "It's still the same old story, isn't it, Senator? As soon as someone tries to buck up against a big organization, the little guy just doesn't stand a chance, does he?" There will be no rest in high places when it's learned that "Billy Jack's Little Raiders are digging up some things on the whole nuclear program that are making people nervous, including people at the White House guys like to write a bill?" and his . . ." or that "The groundswell for Billy Jack is dangerous. Just let him link up with Nader or Gardner and he'd be unstoppable."

On the contrary, Laughlin and Taylor have virtually stopped themselves by running their act into the ground. Laughlin should have realized how superfluous it was for him to remake "Mr. Smith" literally. For all intents and purposes he had remade it after completing "Billy jack," which resurrected most of the impassioned virtues and sentimental, slightly hysterical defects of the Capra movie in an early '70s context.



Unlike its solemn sequels, "Billy Jack" even benefitted from leavening touches of humor in the Capra tradition.The film's success evidently prompted Laughlin and Taylor to elevate the characters of stalwart Billy and haggard, do-gooding Jean into pop culture sacred cows. After the sanctimonious excesses of "The Trial of Billy Jack" in 1975, there was nowhere for the series to go. It would have been more logical to establish a Church of Billy Jack than shoot another Billy jack movie.

Laughlin relies so heavily on the original plot and dialogue of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" that one may feel a little embarrassed on his behalf. It's obvious that he's used the Capra film as a crutch rather than an inspiration. If "Billy Jack Goes to Washington" isn't a word-for-word "adaptation" of the screenplay Sidney Buchman wrote for Capra, it's close enough to pose the question, Why not revive "Mr. Smith" itself?

Laughlin bloats the running time by tacking on certain Billy Jack speeches and shtiks, including one brief display of hapkido, inflicted on a gang of threatening blacks whose possibly disquieting racial makeup is blithely rationalized by pretending that the CIA or FBI must have wanted it that way.

I had been wondering how Billy Jack, who served time between "Billy Jack" and "The Trial of Billy Jack," could reach the Senate in the first place. Laughlin has an explanation for that: Billy is granted a full pardon by governor Dick Gautier, who appoints him to fill out the term of Kent Smith, a senator who seems to succumb to questioning by argumententative reporters. There's no explanation for Jean Roberts' amazing recovery from what appeared to be permanently crippling injuries in "Trial." Oh, well, you can't expect everything in a talky, static, derivative picture that seems to run on forever. Frank Capra Jr., the producer of "Billy Jack Goes to Washington," may be considered out of the running for this year's Honor Thy Father Award.

'THE CAR': A Real Lemon



'THE CAR': A Real Lemon

Washington Post, The (DC) - May 16, 1977
Author: Gary Arnold

Clinkers as resounding as "The Car," now sputtering about several area threaters, might be avoided if the film executives reponsible for approving their production were immediately subject to certain penalties. For example, they might be compelled to reimburse deluded exhibitors out of their own pockets for any advances extracted on the implict understanding of supplying a presentable attraction. Or they might be required to defend their handiwork before crowds of derisive customers.

It's impossible to believe that "The Car," a bumptious horror melodrama about a driverless demon vehicle that terrorizes a Utah town, ever impressed anyone as an original or venturesome project. It's a blatant, pitiful attempt to recycle elements from superior scare vehicles - Steven Spielberg's television movie "Duel," which made a good deal of money for Universal in theatrical release abroad, and Spielberg's "Jaws," which has earned the company rentals of $200 million in less than two years.



Under the circumstances, Unversal should be the last distributor which finds it necessary to bankroll a rip-off like "The Car," which should probably be called "Fenders." There's no telling how many sounder, wittier scripts, including stories in the same genre, might have been overlooked or rejected in order to waste time and rejected in order to waste time and resources on this feeble in-house imitation.

Poor James Brolin! After all those dutiful, stultifying years as protege to Marcus Welby, what is his big-time movie reward? "Gable and Lombard" followed by "The Car." In the latter Broling and Ronny Cox, cast as the lawmen who must protect their loved ones and community from a motorized demon, wear permanently pained expressions.Cox is meant to be feeling guilty because he's taken to the bottle again, but it's easier to believe that he's just realized how awful his material is. Brolin punctuates his scowing inner torment with breathing exercises that expand his chest incessantly if not quite heroically.



The cast members might be wise tostart cultivating gags about their work in "The Car," since it's likely to remain the low point of their careers. At least one hopes so. The director, Elliot Silverstein, seems to have dedicated his career to making fools out of all the people who predicted great things from him after "Cat Bailou." He can't seem to handle anything skilfully in "The Car."

What could he have instructed the actors assembled for the denouement, in which Brolin supposedly lures the car to a fiery doom? Did he really ask for the hilarious set of bug-eyed, cringing reactions documetned on the screen? How can you set up a spectacular visual shock, like the shot of the car's headlights approaching out of the distance straight toward a living room window, the heroine and us, and then defuse it by switching to oblique angles right before the moment of impact? Every would-be scarifying highlight in the picture is undercut by disjointed editing maneuvers or inexplicable trick effects.



Of course, the premise is not exactly foolproof. If something as tangible and mechanical as a customized limousine (designed by George Barris, the noted customized limousine (designed by George Barris, the noted customizer who was one of Tom Wolfe's subjects in "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," on the chassis of a Lincoln Mark III) is going to be on a supernatural rampage, a certain cleverness or finesse would be desirable in both the writing and directing departments.

There's nothing under the surface either, no pattern or primitive fear mechanism guiding the car. What you see is what you get, and it deserves to be thrown back.

Promising, Precocious 'LITTLE GIRL'



Promising, Precocious 'LITTLE GIRL'

Washington Post, The (DC) - May 17, 1977
Author: Gary Arnold

"The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane," set in a New England sea-coast town but actually shot in Quebec two years ago as a Canadian-French re-production, stars Jodie Foster in a role that takes some advantage of her unique, impressive precocity - a self-reliant 13-year-old who attempts to sustain a solitary, independent existence by concealing the death of her poet father.

Ultimately, this account of a bright child's peculiarly dangerous social deception is confined within murder mystery bounds that are too glib, too imorally contrived, to be satisfying. The young heroine is burdened with more skeletons in her closet than she needs if her plight is to remain credible and sympathetic.

While it's too pat, "Little Girl" is several cuts above thrillers in the dopey, bedraggled class recently exemplified by "Burnt Offerings" and "The Sentinel." You may leave feeling disappointed at the way the story is resolved, but you aren't likely to feel like walking out contemptuously long before the denouement.Laird Koenig, who adapted his own novel, works more conventionally than one might wish, but at least he knows how to place one melodramatic foot after the other, a feat of coordination that eludes many people posing as screen-writers these days. Director Nicholas Gessner is deft enough to keep "Little Girl" engrossing from start to finish, and he springs a few witty, creepy surprises.



In her efforts to remain master of her fate and domicile, Jodie Foster is threatened by a pair of undesirables - Alexis Smith as a domineering, bigoted realtor and Martin Sheen as her son, a vicious creep with a yen for little girls - and assisted by a superficially unlikely suitor, Scott Jacoby as a crippled high school boy named Mario, who does magic tricks.

Given the overload of "sensitivity" that surrounds this juvenile Mario the Magician who must hobble around on a lame leg and then contract pneumonia too, it's a wonder Jacoby never seems the least mawkish. On the contrary, his Mario is a remarkably funny, resourceful boy, and the most appealing moments in the film trace the friendship that develops between Mario and the girl, named Rynn, after he catches onto her charade and decides to help her maintain it.

The film really ought to explore this relationship in depth. Foster and Jacoby play very attractively together, and the premise might have ended more agreeably if it had been manipulated as a juvenile romance with undertones of suspense rather than a Gothic murder story with undertones of romance. The outgoing Mario seems capable of drawing Rynn into an orbit that might be more rewarding and the secure than the devious, shaky isolation she's trying to protect. One could imagine these characters in a beguiling variation on the Sleeping Beauty legend, a Sleeping Beauty story about precocious adolescents.

The characters played by Alexis Smith and Martin Sheen ask for drastic comeuppances, especially the latter, who not only makes lewd overtures to the heroine but also tortures and kills her pet hamster. These fairy tale witches in modern dress barely deserve to live, but Koenig might have exercised more restraint in the acts of deploying and eliminating them. The heroine ends up tainted with a good deal of their sadism, a somewhat disagreeable turn of events. It's rather like starting to watch "Wait Until Dark" and then finished up with "The Bad Seed" or "Arsenic and Old Lace."

Jodie Foster's clear-eyed spunkiness and emotional assurance bring more authority and resonance to the character of Rynn that the plot can quite support. At the moment Foster is ideally suited to portray extraordinary kids, and the general idea here is very promising - a precocious girl making trouble for herself as only a precocious girl might be tempted to.

Foster is the least deferential of juvenile actors. Her self-possession lends a special undercurrent of apprehension to the scenes in which she defies would-be intimidating adults like Smith and Sheen. You admire her and yet fear for her. She needs roles that can exploit the challenging, straight-forward aspect of her personality while suggesting the inherent vulnerability of her youth and sex. Rynn isn't an adequate role in the long run, but it suggests the direction filmmakers who valuea resource like Jodie Foster might be interested in pursuing.

'Motel' Vacancies



'Motel' Vacancies

Washington Post, The (DC) - October 25, 1980

Author: Gary Arnold

If a straightforward approach fails, rejection can sometimes be finessed by pretending that you were just kidding.

In show business, this subterfuge comes in handy when a show seems miscalculated or dumbfounding. The obvious explanation is that it's really a deadpan parody, intended to satirize the genre it appeared to be imitating so poorly.

"Motel Hell" has been preceded by rumors that it should be perceived not so much as a straight horror thriller but as a tongue-in-cheek spoof of horror thrillers. The evidence suggests that this interpretation grew out of the good old if-it-doesn't-play-as-a-drama-maybe-they'll-buy-it-as-a-comedy dodge.

The most perfunctory and least imaginative of the recent cycle of horror melodramas, "Motel Hell" may be credited with a fleeting wry touch, but it wears out its welcome by running a minimum of ghoulish stunts into the ground. The title refers to an out-of-the-way hostelry called the Motel Hello; the final letter on the neon sign begins. The owner, Farmer Vincent (Rory Calhoun, now gaunt and white-haired) is a cheerful psycho who uses his motel as a front for a subsidiary enterprise: the preparation of hickory-smoked meats whose savory fame has spread across the nation.

Farmer Vincent's wicked secret is that he not only slaughters the porkers one sees on the property but also lays traps for unwary motorists and visitors, who are planted in a secluded little garden before being butchered and processed into sticks of beef jerky. Farmer Vincent is assisted in his outrages by a stout, malign kid sister, played by Nancy Parsons. They have a kid brother -- a deputy sheriff played by Paul Linke -- who is ignorant of the foul commerce. However, Farmer Vincent sows the seeds of his destruction by taking a fancy to a potential victim, Nina Axelrod, whose ingenuous charms also attract his straight-arrow sibling.

If memory serves, the cannibalistic premise of "Motel Hell" was a staple of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." Maybe kids will be able to respond to it as a chilling, diabolical novelty, but it seems to me that writers Robert and Steven-Charles Jaffe (the sons of executive producer Herb Jaffe, evidently helping to Get the Boys Started) fail to dust off an accumulation of expository cobwebs or rearrange the creepy furnishings in any fresh or witty manner.

Farmer Vincent's rationale for his homicides is awfully flat -- he claims to be increasing the food supply while reducing the excess population -- and so is much of the picture. There are effectively grisly situations, like the garden of victims with their heads sticking out of the ground, struggling to cry out despite slashed vocal cords, or the dueling chain saws showdown between Farmer Vincent and his brother. However, the longer such spectacles remain in view -- and this movie has a bad habit of stringing everything out -- the more questions they raise and the less sensational they appear.

For example, if planting the live victims is meant to serve a purpose in the hickory-smoking process, it's never explained. The Jaffes haven't thought out the illustrative details contrived around the cannibalism gimmick.

Arbitrary and prosaic, "Motel Hell" conspicuously lacks the satiric logic that helped rationalize the weird, wacko killings in early Roger Corman diversions like "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Bucket of Blood." Not even the motel seems integral to "Motel Hell" when all is bled and done.