When you think of the post-Vietnam psyche in 1970s cinema, you usually picture the polished desperation of Taxi Driver or the raw, vengeful fury of Rolling Thunder. But if you dig into the humid, low-budget underbelly of South Florida, you find this movie, which is a weirder, rougher beast. 

This isn’t a high-gloss production; it’s a gritty, sprawling piece of pulp fiction that feels like it was ripped straight out of a discarded men’s adventure magazine. The film opens with a brutal, visceral sequence in the jungles of Vietnam—filmed in the Florida Everglades, naturally—where our protagonist, Ross Archer (Chris Robinson, The Intruder, Stanley), loses his eye to mortar fire after a grim encounter with the Viet Cong.

Ross returns home a year later, sporting an eye patch and carrying a metric fuckton of unresolved trauma. He finds his wife, Angela (Elisa Ingram), missing and his houseboat occupied by a go-go dancer named Ellie (Patricia Rainier). What follows is a circuitous, convolution-heavy investigation into the Florida criminal underworld as Ross tries to uncover what happened to his wife. It’s a quest to wash away the sins of the war and a downward spiral into a life he was already ill-suited for before he ever set foot in a jungle.

This is the last role of Sidney Blackmer, a legend of the silver screen and Roman Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby. He delivers a gravitas that the film perhaps doesn’t always deserve, but certainly benefits from. It also features Joe E. Ross from Car 54, Where Are You?, playing alcoholic comedian Maxie Marks, who delivers a nightclub routine that will leave you absolutely bewildered.

Hey! There’s Bill Kerwin as a cop. And Zorita, born Katherin Boyd in Youngstown, Ohio, who became a burlesque artist who danced with boa constructors Elmer and Oscar. She’s also in Judy’s Little No-No, Naughty New York and I Married a Savage. And Milton “Butterball” Smith, one of Miami’s best-known radio DJs, who is also in The Wild Rebels, The Hooked Generation, Stanley and Mako: The Jaws of Death. And “Teacher to the Stars” Jay W. Jensen, who was once Carroll Baker’s dance partner and ended up teaching Andy Garcia, Mickey Rourke and Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell while finding time to be in She-Man, Werewolves On Wheels and Bob Fosse’s Lenny, a movie that is chock full of burlesque stars like Zorita, Rita Turner and Kim St. Leon. 

Director Joseph Adler (responsible for other curiosities like Scream Baby Scream and Convention Girls) keeps things moving with a scrappy aesthetic. While the pacing is occasionally hampered by budget constraints, the film captures the dying embers of early 70s Miami Beach. Somehow, this had a script by Mardik Martin (Raging Bull, Mean Streets) and a score by Stu Phillips (whose song “The Name of the Game is Kill!” shows up in Jess Franco’s Venus In Furs and who did music for Simon King of the Witches and the theme songs for Knight Rider, Quincy M.D. and Battlestar Galactica) and Richard Markowitz, who composed the stock music in Kingdom of the Spiders and therefore, also the music in the U.S. Grim Reaper cut of Antropophagus.

Revenge Is My Destiny is a film of contradictions. It’s titled like a non-stop action flick. Yet it plays more like a moody, character-driven pulp noir with spy and Nazi-hunter elements. It looks like a TV movie — no complaints — and yet there’s an undeniable, grimy charm at work here.