Combine the tequila, Midori, blue curaçao, and lime juice in a shaker with plenty of ice. Shake it hard. We want this cold enough to simulate the temperature drop in the Amityville basement.
Strain it into a glass filled with fresh ice. Drink it and get out!
A splash of brine from a jar of actual dill pickles
Put the 99 Pickles, gin, lime juice, and that splash of pickle brine into your shaker. Add a generous amount of ice. Shake it like you’re torturing it.
Strain it into a tall, chilled glass. It should look absolutely menacing.
Welcome to the weird, wild and at times absolutely inexplicable 1970s variety show era. It’s a place where the cocaine budget was likely higher than the GDP of a small nation, and someone in a boardroom said, “You know what goes great with soft rock? Aliens.” Today we’re talking about the 1978 television special The Carpenters…Space Encounters.
If you’ve ever sat back and wondered, “What if Close Encounters of the Third Kind was directed by someone — Bob Henry, who took his skills at directing and producing variety shows and ended up making variety specials for most of his career, including Leif, Feliciano! Very Special, Flip Wilson… Of course, and several specials for the Carpenters — who had only ever heard of sci-fi through a haze of mood lighting and easy-listening radio?”
Well, you’ve found your holy grail.
Richard and Karen Carpenter, that loveable brother and sister duo — are just minding their own business in the studio, cutting tracks and hanging out with legendary comedian Charlie Callas, who plays their agent. Soon — Wam! Bam! Thank you, spaceman! —they’re being scouted by extraterrestrials. Not scary, we’re here to harvest your organs, aliens, but John Davidson and Suzanne Somers, dressed like they’re about to host a space-disco on Saturn.
Yes, of all the people in the world who would portray the most perfect creatures in the universe, they picked the star of TV’s That’s Incredible! and a year into Three’s Company, Somers, who somehow looks better than she ever has before. Seriously, whoever did the makeup on this — great work, Sandy Holland (The Carpenters’ regular hairstylist), Rudy Horvatich and Katherine Kotarakos — earned their money.
It turns out that John and his fellow space-travelers have a major problem: their planet cannot make music. Obviously, the only logical solution to a universal cultural crisis is to kidnap The Carpenters. John teleports into the studio, whip-cracks a hi-tech pocket video screen to show them clips of “Fun Fun Fun,” and proceeds to perform a rendition of “Just the Way You Are” that makes you realize just how far we’ve strayed from the light.
I once saw Davidson star in Oklahoma, and the play was so bad that the entire audience booed the show when Jud, the villain, died. That’s how bad it was.
At this stage, the film then descends into a fitful blend of madness and mid-70s production value. We get a stroll through an old garage for a performance of “Goofus;” Richard sitting at a piano in front of a full orchestra, hammering out a medley of the Close Encounters and Star Wars themes while surrounded by laser lights and chroma key effects. Who gave Richard a phaser pedal?
Then, we achieve the grand finale, where the cast takes the party to the ship’s own nightclub. Karen and Suzanne Somers team up for “Man Smart, Woman Smarter,” followed by a disco-medley that includes “The Hustle” and “Boogie Nights.” If you’ve ever wanted to see the epitome of soft-rock royalty getting down to disco, stop reading and start watching.
The whole thing wraps up with the inevitable performance of “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”—the song that was practically written for this exact brand of madness—and an instrumental playout of “We’ve Only Just Begun.”
It’s saccharine, it’s bizarre, it’s a time capsule of a network television machine that had a nearly captive audience. Somehow, this had four writers: Bill Larkin, Joseph Neustein (a member of the Match Game staff for 700 episodes), Tom Sawyer and Stephen Spears.
“Calling occupants of interplanetary, quite extraordinary craft / And please come in peace, we beseech you / (Only our love we will teach them) / Our Earth may never survive / (So do come, we beg you).”
May 17, 1978 was a weird time.
Also: I love The Carpenters unironically. I want that to be perfetcly clear.
Serving as the Season 2 finale, “The Casavin Curse” is a whirlwind of campy melodrama, incestuous undertones and a twist that manages to be both completely predictable and utterly absurd. It all starts with the kind of scene that makes you wonder how the cleaning staff handles the turnover rate at the Casavin Estate. Gina Casavin (Catherine Parks, Vera from Friday the 13th Part III) wakes up in a trance, surrounded by champagne, pills and the butchered remains of her lover, Tyler. The local police, led by the ever-stymied Lt. Wright, are baffled by the crime scene, even though there’s a literal dagger involved.
Enter Dr. Jeffrey Webster (Scott Lincoln), a criminal psychiatrist who seems less interested in medical ethics and more interested in becoming a secondary lead. He spends the hour trying to convince Gina that her family’s legendary curse, which supposedly dates back to a jilted gypsy named Mirabel, is just a psychological crutch used by her cousin, Nicholas (Joe Cortese), to control her.
The dynamic between Nicholas and Gina is, frankly, skin-crawling. Nicholas is the quintessential “I have half the town in my pocket” villain, complete with thinly veiled threats and a disturbing obsession with keeping the Casavin bloodline pure by moving back to Corsica.
The episode leans heavily into the “he’s the killer” red herring, with the maid, Miranda (Julie Ariola), playing the classic role of the disgruntled employee who knows too much. When the police finally bust in to arrest Nicholas, it feels like the natural, albeit boring, conclusion.
But wait! In the final act, the show stops pretending to be a grounded mystery and leans into the supernatural nonsense. Gina undergoes a physical transformation — presumably achieved through some very affordable prosthetic makeup — and goes on a rampage. The final reveal, where the maid confirms she’s the descendant of the original victim, is the exact brand of “wait, what?” storytelling that keeps this show from being a total slog.
If you’re looking for a serious exploration of mental illness or a tight, suspenseful murder mystery, steer clear. But if you want to watch a show that goes from zero to demon-possessed heiress and still has time for commercials, watch it.
This is the film that introduced the world to Marko Zaror, a man who moves with the kind of gravity-defying grace that makes you wonder if he’s actually human. It was written and directed by Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, who also made Bring Me the Head of Machine Gun Woman and Fist of the Condor.
The title Kiltro—a Chilean slang term for a mixed-breed mutt—is the perfect metaphor. It’s a mongrel of a movie, scavenging bits and pieces from the best of cinema history to create something entirely its own.
Our hero is Zamir (Zaror), a street-tough romantic who handles his crush on Kim (Caterina Jadresic) with the subtlety of a sledgehammer: if you look at her, you’re getting a boot to the face. When the villainous Max Kalba shows up looking to settle a blood feud involving the sect of martial artists, Zamir has to evolve from a street brawler into a true warrior. He ends up training with a drunken master (the classic trope, played perfectly by Alejandro Castillo) and eventually taps into the legendary Zeta style.
Expect kidnapping, tragic backstories involving parents and a climactic showdown where bladed shoes make a terrifying appearance. It’s pure, uncut adrenaline while being a mixtape of its influences, referencing scenes to Leos Carax’sBad Blood (complete with the Bowie song “Modern Love“), an Ennio Morricone-inspired score and direct hat-tips to Kung Fu, The Man with the Golden Gun (with a character named Nik Nak!) and Ichi the Killer.
As for Zaror, he’s the real deal. In an era where editing hides the lack of talent, Zaror lets the camera linger on his acrobatics. He is the Chilean Scott Adkins, the South American JKVD, and he sells every single punch.
Kiltro is the sound of a filmmaker discovering their voice while shouting at the top of their lungs about every movie they’ve ever loved. It’s not refined cinema, and I wouldn’t want it to be any other way. Espinoza and Zaror had been planning this movie since high school. It was time well spent.
If you read the critics, they said things like ‘absurd,’ ‘messy,’ and ‘overly serious.’ But once I saw Nicholas Cage dodging a train and screaming at — spoilers! — aliens, well…this was for me.
It’s not good. But it’s for me.
Knowing is a mixtape from a maniac of every major disaster possible, leading up to an extinction-level solar flare. Plane crash? Got it. A prophetic time capsule in an elementary school that sages dates, death tolls and the exact coordinates of major disasters like the Oklahoma City bombing, September 11 and Hurricane Katrina? Sure, why not? It’s very America first in that way. And along the way, Cage and his family — his wife died in the first event — are there for so many end-of-the-world moments.
Rose Byrne is Diana, the daughter of Lucinda (Lara Robinson, who also plays daughter Abby), who made those prophecies. At some point, Cage thinks — yes, I will only refer to him as his name and not his character’s name — thinks he can stop the end of the world.
I can only imagine that Proyas had a Road to Damascus moment, because this feels like a religious film, bringing in Matthäus Merian’s engraving of Ezekiel’s vision of a UFO, along with whispering alien angels who like to steal SUVs.
Speaking of those critics — I’m not one, I’m just a dude who watches too many movies — hated the pivot from sci-fi thriller to cosmic, angel-infused religious allegory. I love how hard it swings for the fences. It goes from “MIT Professor solves a riddle” to “Interstellar Arks and White Trees of Life” in about 20 minutes. It’s bold, it’s bananas, and it doesn’t give a fuck what you think. It’s like Proyas saw Signs and said, “I can raise you a twist, M. Night.”
Most people will tell you it’s a failure because the science is absolute bunk.
Look, if you’re coming to a movie where Nicolas Cage spends two hours deciphering numbers on a closet door to figure out when the world is going to end, and you’re expecting a lecture from Neil deGrasse Tyson, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Proyas said at a press conference for the film, “The science was important.” I wanted to make the movie credible. So, of course, we researched as much as we could and tried to give it as much authenticity as we could.”
Well, let’s just say the real-world scientists didn’t exactly hand out a gold star.
The critics were waiting with their calculators and textbooks, and they had a field day. Ian O’Neill over at Discovery News pointed out the obvious: those solar flares aren’t exactly going to turn our cities into charcoal. That’s just not how physics works, folks. Then you’ve got Erin McCarthy of Popular Mechanics, who called the movie out for mixing up actual science with straight-up numerology. She rightly noted that the film confuses mathematical modeling—the stuff that actually runs our world—with mystical, occult-style number crunching.
The IMDb goofs page for this is, as you’d expect, packed.
Maybe they also reacted to the tone shifts, which are violent mood swings. It’s grim, it’s moody, and it features one of the most hilariously nihilistic endings in modern cinema as — spoiler — everyone dies right after Cage makes up with his angry old father.
Then the kids ride those space arks to a place where the Tree of Life lives.
The end.
Who the hell came up with this idea?
The road to the screen is often messier than the movies themselves. Back in 2001, novelist Ryne Douglas Pearson walked into a room with producers Todd Black and Jason Blumenthal. His pitch was a total hook: imagine a 1950s time capsule being opened, only to reveal a list of every major disaster that’s happened since, and it ends with the cryptic “EE,” standing for “Everyone Else.”
Naturally, the majors got their hands on it first. It was set up at Columbia Pictures, and for a minute there, it was a hot potato. You had guys like Rod Lurie and Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly attached to direct. Can you imagine a Richard Kelly version of this? Southland Tales follow-up? Please, Mandala Effect, activate.
Writers Stiles White and Juliet Snowden were to take a crack at the script before Proyas came on. He was hooked because the script wasn’t just a disaster flick; it was a character study about how knowing your own end date would absolutely wreck your life.
But guess what? As wild and critically hated as this was, it made $80 million on a $50 million budget. Guess who liked it? Roger Ebert. He gave it four out of four stars and proclaimed, “Knowing is among the best science-fiction films I’ve seen—frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.”
In short: Cage gets apophenia, starts seeing patterns in everything, it rips off a lot of Childhood’s End, yells stuff like “I’m not saying that 81 people are going to die tomorrow, okay? I’m just trying to understand why this is saying they will!” and it ends with him answering his dad like this:
Rev. Koestler: This isn’t the end, son.
John Koestler: I know.
If he had said knowing instead of know, I might have suddenly run into the streets of my small city and screamed, “KNOWING!” as if Pee-Wee had said the secret word.
Proyas hasn’t made a movie — outside of shorts — since Gods of Egypt, but he has said he’s making his own version of R.U.R., which would be interesting after I, Robot. I’m lining up for the first day because he has the insane energy I want.
I also understand why normal people would absolutely hate this.
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 Postcouldn’t find her, what chance do I have?
Directed by one-and-done director Jimmy Murphy, who co-wrote it with The Killers screenwriter Ray Chavez Vegas, The iInk Garter Gang is, as the poster tells us, all about Billy Boy and his five girl gang and they’re wired for action! They rob for kicks, fortune and thrills!
Some of the ads also say, “These hot pants chicks mean trouble!” and “SEE the 140 M.P.H. getaway… wildest chase ever filmed!”
It’s got ten watches on Letterboxd and I had to pay $12 for a copy from DVD Lady, so allow me to take you through it.
You’ve got Mick Mehas (The Girls from Thunder Strip, Hell’s Chosen Few, The Cycle Savages), Saxon Chase, Bruce Kimball (Drive-In Massacre, Fangs), Deborah Darnell (one of Count Yorga‘s vampire women), Tanye Morgan (Targets) and Ann Martell heading up the cast, but the real “wait, is that…?” moment comes when you see Paul Gleason on the screen. Yeah, the same guy who played Vernon, the nightmare principal in The Breakfast Club, is in here. So is Keith Carradine as a surfer.
We do at least start with a girl in a mini-dress with a pink garter. Don’t get used to her. She isn’t around long. But there is a guy with a gang of five women, just as the sales copy promised us. And we do get a biker gang, which includes Roach, Bongos (who doesn’t play them), their leader Splinter (who isn’t a mutant rat) and Kimball, who brags of never taking a bath.
This is less biker movie and more people hanging out in wood-paneled dives and going to the beach. And the pink garter does show up, around twenty minutes in, while a song that sounds like a ripoff of “The Candy Man Can” plays over and over.
This gang wears black track suits, kind of like they’re a thrash band in the 1980s more than bikers. This also has one of the best narrative shifts I’ve ever seen, where a dying cop says, “I have a daughter. I mean, I had a daughter,” as we cut to a bunch of hippies smoking thai sticks while bikers gather around a concert for the band Rain Forest that probably is going to be more Altamont than Woodstock. The cop’s daughter is getting double teamed by Splinter and his gang, as they laugh about it by way of ADR. “They were the ones that picked her up and turned her on,” says the stoic lawman. “I couldn’t prove it, but I know it was them.”
Once we see the cops start chasing that silver Corvette of our heroes and police start crashing and dying, it’s only a matter of time before this all ends like so many early 70s films. Biker films, especially. Easy Rider set the bar. As Adam in Werewolves On Wheels said, “We all know how we’re gonna die, baby… we’re gonna crash and burn!”
But no! At the end, after some gunfights and chases, Billy Boy just leaves and an angry matronly lady just walks off as his boat sails off to the sound of that “Candy Man” bootleg. One of the girls waves goodbye just in time to fake me out again.
Spoiler: Billy Boy’s boat — well, it’s an insert stock shot probably from another movie — blows up real good.
In Warped and Faded, Lars Nilsen said, “Without a doubt, the rarest biker movie we ever played. There were dozens of these things making a constant circuit through the U.S. Late in the cycle, the occasional token new film like The Pink Garter Gang was popped into a “Cycle Carnival” triple or quadriple feature alongside classics like Devil’s Angels and Hell’s Angels On Wheels. People never seemed to get tired of watching scuzzy scooter trash behaving inappropriately, and from all indications, this is a chip off the oold engine block. Expect blasting fuzz guitars, endless scenes of bikers riding through square towns, hair-pulling cat fights, a lot of beer drinking, smooching and — in all likelihood — a biker named Mouse, Speed or Acid.”
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, buthe 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 Roadblockand 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, TheVictim, 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.
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.
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 Fratand 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.”
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