Directed by John Flynn from a screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould, based on a story by Schrader, Rolling Thunder is the story of a man who should by all rights be dead. He might be, when you get down to it. U.S. Air Force Major Charles Rane (William Devane) has spent seven years as a POW in Vietnam. They throw a parade for him, but there’s no real joy for him back home in San Antonio. His wife, Janet (Lisa Blake Richards), has moved on, and who can blame her for needing a man? You can’t blame his son, Mark, for not seeing him as anything but a stranger. And you can’t fault the town itself for the strange way that they view him as some ghost or as an object, like Linda Forchet (Linda Haynes), the girl who wore his ID bracelet every day, sees him. There’s nothing in him to return affection or even emotion. All they can do is give him a piece of the American dream. A brand new Cadillac and 2,555 silver dollars, one for every day he was captured.

That’s when The Texan (James Best), Automatic Slim (Luke Askew), T-Bird (Charles Escamilla) and Melio (Pete Ortega) — the Acuña Boys — bust in, take those silver dollars and try to torture a man who has been tortured by the best. They mangle his hand in a garbage disposal, and when his son tries to save his dad by bringing out those silver dollars, they just shoot him. Kill his wife, too.

Only one person may know how he feels. Master Sergeant Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones). They were in Hanoi together all that time. He’s so disconnected from this world that he’s signed up for another ten years in Airborne. So when Rane uses Linda to get intel, when he finds those boys, he doesn’t even need to be asked to be in on the revenge. It’s just what has to be done.

After a disastrous test screening — Devane said, “The Mexicans set the theater on fire! They were really, really, really down on it,” Twentieth-Century Fox pretty much gave the film to American-International Pictures, who made a lot of money off it.

Part of the reason why that test screening went so badly was that the hand in the garbage disposal was much worse in the original cut of the film. It was filmed with a lamb shank for the hand, and when the scene played, writer Heywood Gould said, “One woman fainted, another person ran into the lobby and demanded his money back, and another guy was so freaked out that he entered his car in the parking lot, and crashed into another car.”

Rolling Thunder shows up in the work of Quentin Tarantino quite a bit. Beyond the company that he assembled to re-release movies — Rolling Thunder Pictures — the seven-year reference in the Christopher Walken speech in Pulp Fiction is a direct reference to how long Rane was a prisoner. There’s an Acuña Boys cup in Jackie Brown, an actual Acuña Boys gang in the second Kill Bill and an ad for a fake restaurant in Grindhouse. Is it any accident that his acting teacher was James Best?

As you can imagine, Paul Schrader didn’t like the movie. He doesn’t like it much. But I kind of love that about him, you know? In Schrader On Schrader, he says that he wrote the movie to criticize U.S. involvement in Vietnam as well as fascist and racist attitudes in America. Rane was originally written as a white trash racist, with many similarities to Schrader’s more famous character Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. In fact, Bickle was in the script in a cameo. Schrader claims that he wrote a film about fascism, and the studio made a fascist film. There is a newspaper clipping about Rane — spelled incorrectly — at the end of Taxi Driver, so these movies are in the same cinematic universe, a term I know Schrader would attack me for using in connection with his art.

Filmed and released within four months of the late-1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots, this American-International Pictures film was directed by Arthur Dreifuss and written by Orville H. Hampton. It even has its own song, “Riot on Sunset Strip”, written by Tony Valentino and John Fleck of the Standells.

It has some of the same cast from another AIP movie, Hot Rods to Hell. In that film, Mimsy Farmer was the bad girl and Laurie Mock was the virgin. Here, they switch roles, as Farmer is Andrea Dollier, a young girl seduced by LSD and evil hippies. Aldo Ray plays Sgt. Walt Lorimer, a cop who has been trying to get along with the kids on Sunset, but when he finds his daughter sexually assaulted, he goes wild on a bunch of flower children. If only she hadn’t taken that drink laced by Herbie (Schuyler Hayden), she wouldn’t have been attacked by five boys that same night.

Beyond the music of The Standells, The Enemies and The Chocolate Watchband, we also get a long sequence of Farmer tripping out. Perhaps in my cinematic universe, her character Andrea goes on to become Estelle from More, which was made just two years later and is much franker about drug use. Maybe if her parents had stayed together, maybe if her mother, Margie (Hortense Petra), hadn’t been a drunk, maybe if her dad hadn’t been so driven to clean up the streets, all of this would never have happened.

I realize I love Mimsy Farmer on film because she’s always in trouble. Or causing it, freaking out about slashing her father, a man who always wanted a boy and got her instead or dealing with a conspiracy that wants to eat her or sunspots and autopsies. Her movie life is a nightmare, and she’s a dream, what can I say?

This movie is ridiculous, made by out-of-touch people for kids who are probably far away from Los Angeles and want a piece of the action. Therefore, I love every minute.

I get it. This movie isn’t a giallo. But what is it, really? It was sold under so many titles, from the more horror-centric Cauldron of Death (complete with a completely insane poster) to the more crime-oriented Gangland, the great Italian title Un Tipo Con una Faccia Strana ti Cerca per Ucciderti (A Guy With a Strange Face Is Looking for You to Kill You), The Dirty Mob, Mean Machine and even O Exolothreftis (The Terminator) in Greece.

It was written by Jose Gutierrez Maesso, who wrote Django and was an uncredited writer for the magical Pensione Paura. He’s joined by Santiago Moncada, who wrote A Bell from Hell, Hatchet for the Honeymoon and The Corruption of Chris Miller, along with Mario di Nardo (The Fifth Cord, Five Dolls for an August Moon). Directing all of this mayhem is Tulio Demichelli, who made the utterly insane Assignment Terror, as well as The Two Faces of Fear,  Espionage in Lisbon and the well-named There Is Someone Behind the Door.

Make no mistake — this is a movie awash with exploitation, gore, aberrant behavior and no real heroes. In short, it’s exactly the kind of movie you come to this site to read about.

Rico Aversi (Chris Mitchum) has just got out of jail, two years after Don Vito (Arthur Kennedy, the inspector from The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) killed his father. Everyone wants Rico — notice that his name is spelled completely unlike the title of the movie — to kill the boss off, but Rico just wants to enjoy life outside of prison.

Malisa Longo (Cat in the Brain) plays his girlfriend — and who used to love Rico’s woman — and she enjoys sleeping with the hired help, which gets one unlucky member of the workstaff castrated in shocking detail. Then his John Thomas gets shoved into his mouth, and he’s dipped in acid and turned into soap. This movie is not interested in being unoffensive. Plus, you get Paola Senatore (Eaten Alive!) as Rico’s sister, whose death finally sets him on the path to revenge.

Robert Mitchum is one of my favorite actors ever, so it kind of pains me to admit this, but his son kind of slumbers through this leading role. But then again, everyone else in this movie is going to seem boring next to Barbara Bouchet, who pretty much sets the screen on fire, dances on the flames and sets it ablaze all over again in this movie. Anyone could show some leg to get the attention of some criminals. Bouchet goes all in, dancing nude on the roof of a car, covered in fog, giving her all no matter how grimy this scumfest gets. Without her, this movie would be passable. With her, it’s transcendent.

So yeah. It’s not a giallo. But man, if you’re coming in looking for bad behavior, gorgeous women and great clothes, it’s all covered.

After The Cheerleaders and The Swinging Cheerleaders, where else was there to go?

This feels like porn without the penetration and by that, I mean it feels like amateur porn and somehow, David Hasselhoff is in it as a character named Boner. There’s a moment where the cafeteria spaghetti is dosed with LSD and the entire school freaks out, ending up in the gym showers as class is cancelled and the orgy begins. There’s also a moment where one of the cheerleaders gives one of the boys a rim job while he works in an ice cream stand, which feels way ahead of its time, seeing as how it was made in 1976.

Yes, there’s a story where the adults want to combine Aloha and Lincoln High to sell the school land and make money. Everyone dances whenever they feel it. Sex solves everything.

Speaking of sex, Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith is in this and was actually pregnant while it was being made. This is even worked into the plot, as much as the dinosaur theme park is. She’s holding her real son, Justin Sterling, at the end. His father, John, composed the music for this film.

Directed by Richard Lerner, who was involved in all of the cheerleaders series one way or another, this was written by Ted Greenwald, Nathaniel Dorsky and Ace Baandige, which, as I’ve said before, has to be their real name.

Beyond Rainbeaux, there’s also Penthouse July 1976 Pet Helen Lang, who was also in Tarz and Jane and Cheetah and Hot Nasties, which stars Susan Kiger, the first Playboy Playmate to do porn before she became a Playmate in January 1977; Jerri Woods (Toby from Switchblade Sisters); Patrice Rohmer (Harrad Summer) and Susie Elene.

You can watch this on Tubi.