CANNON MONTH 2: Five Minutes of Freedom (1973)

Also known as Pushing Up Daisies, this was directed by Ivan Nagy (a former bookmaker for the mob and boyfriend of Heidi Fleiss; he also directed episodes of CHIPs and HBO’s The Hitchhiker, as well as the movies Captain America II: Death Too Soon and Skinner) and co-written by Ross Hagen (who wrote and directed The Glove and Click: The Calendar Girl Killer, as well as acting in 89 movies including this movie).

Four criminals — Maddux (Hagen), Kelly (Kelly Thordsen), Wilber (Hoke Howell) and A.J. (Eric Lidberg) — have just successfully broken two of their members out of jail, killed a whole bunch of cops via machine gun and make a big score while dressed as nuns. Soon, they’re on the run again, killing even more cops on the way to the Mexican border, if they make it.

Yet this is no normal movie, as the editing is jarring, the montages are frequent and there are even sequences made out of still photos. It also has a two-minute-long sequence of heavy reverb audio and slow motion of a racist prison guard stabbing a black jailbird that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie and has credits running over it.

It’s really something else and I have no idea who this is for or how they hoped to sell it. Not every movie can be Easy Rider, which only seems slapdash. A lot of movies learned just how difficult it is to make a movie that seems like it wasn’t all that difficult to make.