After the original film, Preacherman raked in a cool $5 million. Albert T. Viola brought back the character of Amos Huxley, a backwoods con man posing as a man of the cloth, to stir up more trouble. In this installment, our hero finds his match in five-time widow Alzena Suggs (Marian Brown). It’s classic grindhouse structure: take a guy who thinks he’s the smartest person in the room, throw him into a situation where he’s totally out of his depth and watch the sparks fly. 

So yeah, this starts right where the last one ends, asuxley (Viola), fresh off a motel getaway with the mysterious lady in red, runs from the police. Soon, he falls for the widderwoman of the title, a woman who has married and buried five. She’s rich, attractive and has a hot daughter, Willie Mae (Jeramie Rain), who steals watermelons for a living. Don’t tell Vince Majestyk.

Unlike the original, this one was based on two plays by Chet McIntyre: Poor Rudolph and Feather and the Bell. You have to wonder—were there really stage plays dedicated to the Preacherman back then, or did they just shoehorn him into these plots? 

While the original got a second wind thanks to Troma’s 1983 theatrical re-release, Widderwoman got stuck with a PG rating and seemed to vanish outside the Southern drive-in circuit. It is, without a doubt, the most North Carolinian movie you’ll find, a regional curio packed with hillbilly caricatures and humor that only a drive-in crowd could love. And by that, I mean me.

Viola plays Amos Huxley with a level of demented conviction so true that you’d swear this guy was a real snake-oil salesman, not a Brooklyn-born playwright. He even goes so far as to decline an onscreen credit, billing the role as “Amos Huxley…as himself.” Despite this being a vanity production, he’s actually pretty generous with screen time. Jeramie Rain is a standout as the no-nonsense Willie Mae—a role that fits right in alongside her turn as Sadie in Last House on the Left. Interestingly, she used the pseudonym “Sue Davis” here, which is a bit of a mystery since she used her real name in films she reportedly loathed.

And then there’s the mystery of Rebecca Payson (who plays Armanda). Some think that she’s actually Deborah Loomis, who was in Blood Bath and Hercules in New York. The scandal sheets tried to track Loomis down when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, hoping for dirt, but she was untraceable. If the New York Post couldn’t find her, what chance do I have? 

Viola would go on to write one more movie, The Night They Robbed Big Bertha’s. 

You can watch this on YouTube.

I rarely watch a movie that gets on the very verge of upsetting me. Poor Pretty Eddie is that rare film that pushed me pretty far and made me feel somewhat upset while watching, which ended up making me keep going and enjoy the end results. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s amazing that this movie even exists.

Most of the makers of this film were employed in the adult film industry, with Poor Pretty Eddie representing their chance to go straight. Backing came from Michael Thevis, the notorious Atlanta-based “King of Pornography,” who owned a record company named GRC, a chain of sex shops and a company that manufactured peep show booths. In fact, the rock band Flood recorded the soundtrack for the martial arts movie Blood of the Dragon in his Sound Pit Studio on Atlanta’s Simpson Street, which also saw country singer Moe Bandy, dance sensation Loleatta Holloway and country songwriter and the author of the three million record selling “Chevy Van” Sammy Johns — as well as R&B acts like Ripple, the Rhodes Kids, King Hannibal and Sam Dees — all record there. He also published a series of pornographic novels that were written by Ed Wood under the name Donna D. Dildo.

Producing a legit movie allowed Thevis to launder money that he had made through shadier dealings, which brought the FBI in. Shortly after the film was released, he was jailed on a variety of charges and then escaped prison in 1978, ending up on the FBI’s most-wanted list. He had already put a contract out on the life of the man who had given the police all the info they needed to put him away. While on the lam, he tracked down that man — Roger Dean Underhill — and killed him and another associate. He bragged about it in prison, and fellow prisoners ratted him out.

In 1980, Michael Thevis, the so-called “Scarface of Porn,” who once owned nearly half of the industry and made $100 million a year ($311 million today when adjusted for inflation), was sentenced to spend 28 years to life in the Oak Park Heights Correctional Facility, an underground penitentiary outside of Minneapolis and eventually the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta. His palatial home was eventually sold to Whitney Houston. In 2013, he died of heart and respiratory failure. This Daily Beast article on his life is required reading.

Poor Pretty Eddie was written by B. W. Sandefur, who is mostly known for his TV writing and producing. In fact, he was behind one of the oddest series of the early 1980’s, NBC’s Cliffhangers, which featured three different stories that all began in the middle. Stop Susan Williams, The Secret Empire and The Curse of Dracula were all eventually released theatrically in Europe — with extra material added.

Loosely based on Jean Genet’s play The Balcony and directed by David Worth (Kickboxer) and Richard Robinson (whose films include Is There Sex After Marriage and Adultery for Fun & Profit ), this film is shocking even today.

The Turner Classic Movies article on the film hits it right on the head. They describe Eddie as such: “A sleazy exploitation thriller with artistic pretensions, the film manages to be offensive, crude and inept in equal measure while still succeeding as a compulsive viewing experience for connoisseurs of fringe cinema who think they’ve seen everything.”

We start at the University of Georgia, where Liz Wetherly (Leslie Uggams, who older readers will know from Roots and younger ones will know from the Deadpool movies) is performing the national anthem. There’s a cut to her car driving down a country road, and we hear her say, “Look, I have two weeks before my next concert. Now I’m going to get in my car and drive until I find a nice, quiet hole to crawl into.”

Be careful what you wish for.

After his car breaks down, Liz rents a cabin for the night — so she thinks — while the gigantic handyman Keno (Ted Cassidy, who was Lurch on The Addams Family, as well as the second actor to play Bigfoot on The Six-Million Dollar Man after Andre the Giant. He was also the narrator for The Incredible Hulk and provided the voices for Godzilla, Frankenstein Jr., The Thing, Moltar, Metallus, Black Manta and Brainiac for various Hanna-Barbera cartoons.)

Somehow, she ends up stuck for days thanks to the machinations of Eddie (Michael Christian, TV’s Peyton Place), a lothario who has already ensnared motel owner Bertha (Shelley Winters, who was in so many movies where she ran a house of ill repute, at least in my imagination, as well as the killer mother of an alien child in a role that doesn’t add up in another astonishingly bonkers Atlanta-based movie, The Visitor). Strangely enough, in the filmed version of the aforementioned Genet play, Winter played nearly the same role. Yet here, she plays it as a once gorgeous showgirl stuck remembering the past through the haze of alcohol, trying in vain to hold on to her man. Of note, Winters was paid in cash for her role and nearly died when her private plane almost crashed upon landing in Atlanta.

Not only does Eddie want Liz for carnal reasons, but he also thinks she can help him in his career as a country singer. He spends much of the film dressed in Elvis jumpsuits and warbling his way through ballads. And oh yeah — he eventually assaults our heroine and then subjects her to further torture, like forcing her to please a traveling salesman and eating Keno’s dog.

Liz finally gets the courage to turn in Eddie, which leads to Sheriff Orville (Slim Pickens!)  asking her, “Did he bite ya on the tittie?” and making her submit to a public trial in a crowded VFW/bar as locals gasp that a black woman is in their midst. Drunken proprietor Floyd (Dub Taylor, a cowboy star and former Clemson Tide football player, who is in all manner of redneck films like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,  …tick…tick…tick…, Evel Knievel, Gator, Creature from Black Lake, The Great Smokey Roadblock and Moonshine County Express) then conducts a trial in front of an assembled crowd of drunken locals, many of whom appear disturbingly disturbed, that ends with Liz stripped nude and crying.

The film’s montage sequences are some of the most disturbing I’ve sat through, including Eddie assaulting Liz to the sounds of a country love song intercut with two dogs humping, as well as a scene where she takes photos of him near a waterfall, imagining her camera is a shotgun and that he is covered in blood and gore.

It all climaxes with a wedding where Eddie and Liz are to be wed, which ends in a slow-motion Sam Peckinpah-style gun battle as Keno blasts his way in for revenge over his dog, and everyone gets caught in the crossfire. The film ends with Liz, her life ruined and not enhanced by this escape from her busy life, raising a shotgun to murder Bertha.

Also known as Black Vengeance, The Victim, Heartbreak Motel and Redneck County Rape, the film played drive-ins and grindhouses for nearly a decade. The Heartbreak Motel version features plenty of differences, as Eddie narrates the movie and action scenes have been cut out and replaced with lengthy soliloquies that don’t appear in any other version of the film. Instead of ending with the gun battle, Heartbreak Motel closes with Eddie leaving Georgia for Nashville and a recording contract. There are fewer scenes of Eddie attacking Liz, but, strangely enough, there is one where Eddie and Bertha make, umm, third input love to the haunting strains of a bluegrass ballad.

To say that critics — especially in Atlanta — disliked this film is an understatement.

This article was taken from http://atlantatimemachine.com/misc/eddie15.htm

The 1970s were packed with films that you are kind of, sort of horror movies, yet feature no supernatural elements. They just made you feel like you needed to take an entire day’s worth of showers to clean off the scum after watching them. This is one hell of an addition to those movies. It’s not for everyone, but for those who want to see how low exploitation can go, it’s ready to attack your sensibilities.

You can watch this on Tubi.

In August of 1975, a bizarre chapter in Polk County, Georgia history was written.

A large cargo plane loaded with marijuana crash-landed, and no one could figure out how to remove it. More than four decades later, the incident remains one of the strangest and most memorable events in the county’s history.

What followed that summer night involved a hijacked cargo aircraft, an international drug-smuggling operation and a chain of events that thrust quiet Polk County into the center of a story that seemed more suited to a Hollywood crime thriller than rural Georgia. Yet for the residents who witnessed it, the Pot Plane incident was very real.

The New York Times reported on it, saying “In normal times, Seals W. Swafford, the sheriff of Rolk County up in the North Georgia hills just across the Alabama state line, spends most of his time worrying about how to oversee 313 square miles of territory with just two deputies to serve papers and keep cars moving on the two highways into and out of town.

“Our main problem in Polk County is traffic,” says the 46‐year‐old sheriff, a taciturn but amiable man. “A grave problem. Then we get this airplane. . .”

“This airplane” is a red, white and blue, 93‐foot, four-engine DC‐4 cargo plane that rests incongruously at the end of a rutted, stump‐lined field on the top of a nearby mountain in the middle of nowhere.

The plane landed on the night of Aug. 3 with a cargo of marijuana, and now no one knows quite how to get it out. Meanwhile, it has become something of a tourist attraction.”

Former Army pilot Robert G. Eby was arrested, along with four co-defendants, as the pilot for the Douglas C-54 Skymaster in a field that had been cut into a dense wooded area. This strip’s lights? A string of 100-watt lightbulbs. The operation was part of a much larger drug-smuggling network that had transported thousands of pounds of marijuana and hashish from Colombia into the United States using surplus military aircraft. Although police seized part of the shipment and linked the plane to a massive trafficking operation, prosecutors were unable to prove Eby was the pilot.

The case ultimately fell to pieces due to insufficient admissible evidence. Not even any sticks and stones? Well, whatever, as the abandoned plane remained stranded on the mountain and became a local curiosity after authorities struggled to figure out how to remove it.

According to Secret Handshake Cinema, that’s where James West Jr. comes in. He was an ex-Marine who became a maverick politician, passing a law that allowed women to conceal carry guns in their purses and flying into work every day via helicopter.

He bought the plane, the mountain and access to all of the men who pulled off this crime — all to make this movie.

If you’ve ever sat around wondering what would happen if two guys who looked like they’d been auditioning for a Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie position since 1973 were handed a script about the Dixie Mafia and a plane affectionately dubbed Big Bird, then stop what you’re doing. You’ve found your movie.

The film introduces us to Oosh (Don Watson) and Doosh (Bobby Watson). These guys aren’t actors; they are forces of nature. With full beards, wild hair and thick Southern drawls that make Boomhauer from King of the Hill sound like he’s practicing for a Shakespearean monologue, the Watson brothers are the beating heart of this flick. They don’t have careers in this movie; they just exist. They smoke, they drink, they drive too fast, and they work for the local drug kingpins.

Oosh and Doosh, who help pilot Big Bird, a DC-4 cargo plane, onto a makeshift mountaintop airstrip in rural Georgia. After unloading a shipment of marijuana into an RV, they are immediately pursued by local law enforcement in a chaotic series of crashes involving police cars, a bulldozer and their own battered vehicle. The pair is eventually arrested and jailed after the shipment is lost and their escape attempt fails.

Rather than eliminate them for botching the operation, a group of local crime bosses decides to break Oosh and Doosh out of jail and send them on another smuggling run. The duo is dramatically rescued from a prison rooftop by helicopter and soon finds themselves involved in more over-the-top adventures, including a massive tractor-trailer chase that destroys police cruisers and culminates in a semi-truck smashing through a house. After accumulating a large debt to their criminal employers, Oosh and Doosh rob an armored car in an attempt to make things right, leading to a shootout, more casualties and yet another high-speed pursuit.

That climactic scene where our heroes break out of jail via a helicopter, dangling for their dear lives hundreds of feet above a small Georgia town? That’s not a green screen. That’s not a stunt double. That is Don and Bobby Watson holding on for dear life.

The film’s climax recreates the real-life landing of the famous pot plane on Treat Mountain. As a local radio announcer reports that the aircraft will be auctioned off, Big Jim himself pilots Big Bird back into the spotlight, taking off from the mountaintop runway and soaring into the sky. The movie ends by celebrating the legendary airplane and the local folklore surrounding its exploits, using a string of car crashes, stunts and chases to transform a true Georgia drug-smuggling incident into a good-ol’-boy action-adventure.

Beyond acting in the movie, Big Jim also directed and produced it.  The script came from Jim Clarke. This was the only film from both, but they had support from cameraman Allen Facemire (who shot hicksploitation classics like Cockfighter and Moonrunners before being the DP for Under the Rainbow), editor Angelo Ross (whose work on Smoky and the Bandit had to come in handy here; he also edited Who Killed Teddy Bear?, The Cross and the Switchblade, Mr. No Legs, King Frat and the paintball slasher Masterblaster), producer Robert W. McClure (Hot Summer In Barefoot County, Trucker’s Woman), cameraman William D. Barber (who also shot camera on Empire of the Ants, Cat People, Face/Off, Rsh Hour and so many more movies) and cameraman Jerry Crowder (DP on UFO: Target Earth and J.C.),

Re-released by Paragon Video as In Hot Pursuit, this movie is a fixture on Mill Creek sets.

PS: This post on House of Schlock is where some of the images came from and is packed with info, including the fact that this movie was shown on television as part of the late-night Movie Greats series and a rumor that High Times publisher Tom Forcade was involved with this movie. This is soon disproved in the comments, as an anonymous poster writes, “He never owned the rights to distribute the movie or to put it on tape. The movie appeared on VHS shortly after James I. West, Jr., handed over a copy to Tom’s people during negotiations.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

Yeah, Lee Marvin might be the coolest person to ever live.

And Point Blank?

This film has more swagger in its first five minutes than most modern action movies have all put together.

Marvin was in London filming The Dirty Dozen, but already had his sights set on his next move: an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s hard-boiled pulp classic, The Hunter. He sits down with director John Boorman to go over the script, and they reach the same conclusion almost immediately: it’s absolute trash.

But that character, Walker? That cold, unkillable force of nature? That was pure gold.

So, Marvin does what only Lee Marvin could get away with. He calls a meeting with the big brass at the studio, the producers, his agent, and Boorman. He walks into that room like he owns the place—because, let’s be honest, he did—and lays down the law. He asks if he has script approval. They nod yes. He asks if he has approval over the principal cast. They nod yes again.

Then, he said, “I defer all those approvals to John.”

Just like that, Boorman—a guy fresh off the boat and doing his very first Hollywood feature—is handed the keys to the kingdom. He had final cut, complete creative control and the total backing of the biggest tough guy in the business. That’s how you get a movie as uncompromising and weird as Point Blank. 

After being betrayed and left for dead by his partner on the abandoned rock of Alcatraz, Walker (Marvin) returns to Los Angeles like a ghost haunting his own life. He’s not just looking for his $93,000; he’s looking for something, anything and heaven help anyone who stands in his way.

This isn’t your grandfather’s detective story. Boorman used avant-garde techniques, fractured timelines and bold color palettes to create an atmosphere of existential torpor.

The story starts on Alcatraz. Walker and his buddy Mal Reese (John Vernon; Marvin didn’t think Vernon was strong enough to contend with him. Marvin then punched him in the stomach during a fight scene, causing the actor to yell that he was an actor, not a fighter.) pull off a massive heist, but Reese is a snake. He puts a few slugs in Walker, makes off with the loot and steals Walker’s wife, Lynne (Sharon Acker), for good measure.

Walker should be dead. Maybe he is — we’ll get to that.

Walker tracks Reese to a heavily guarded apartment, using Reese’s own lover, Chris (Angie Dickinson), as his inside woman. The scene where Reese goes over the balcony while clinging to a bedsheet? It’s pure, beautiful chaos. Walker then hits the high-level guys — Carter (Lloyd Bochner), Brewster (Carroll O’Connor) and the mysterious Fairfax (Keenan Wynn) —one by one. Every time he gets close to the money, it slips through his fingers, replaced by more violence.

The genius of the plot isn’t in the heist; it’s in the surreality. Walker’s confrontation with Chris at Brewster’s house is bizarre. One minute, she’s slapping him, taunting him through a speaker system, hitting him with a pool cue and then—boom—they’re in bed. It doesn’t make sense in a standard movie, but in this movie’s world, it’s the only thing that does.

And that ending? Walker hides in the dark, watching the hierarchy of The Organization cannibalize itself while the money just sits there on the ground. He doesn’t even take it. He just stands there, a phantom who’s done his job and has nowhere left to go.

Is Walker a man, a ghost or a manifestation of post-WWII trauma? Boorman keeps his cards close to his chest, and honestly, that’s what makes the movie work.

On the commentary track for this, Boorman said that another adaptation, Payback, was so poorly made that Mel Gibson must have used the original script he and Marvin had thrown away. Boorman was joined by Steven Soderbergh for that commentary, who said that Point Blank was “a film that I’ve stolen from so many times.”

Back to being cool. There are just some actors — and therefore, the characters they play — so effortlessly and effusively cool that we can’t believe they’re alive. Like Clint in High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, that’s the only explanation our geeky and awkward minds can offer up as to why Marvin’s Walker can walk the same world as us.