Whiskey Mountain

Kill Hillbilly

Whiskey Mountain
USA 1977
Directed by William Grefé  
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Whiskey Mountain is the last of the movies featured in Arrow’s fine He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection Blu Ray box set. Now, I’ve had some fun with many of the movies in this set, most or probably all of which I would never have seen if it hadn’t been for this new collection. You can see from the poor state of some of these ‘restored’ movies that they must have been not very far away from ‘full on’ vinegar syndrome setting in on the film so, I’m grateful to some of the Blu Ray companies out there for rescuing these things before they disintegrate altogether (now if someone could do this for all the Flash Gordon serials etc, it would be a big help... the DVD versions aren’t good enough).

That being said, I think Whiskey Mountain, which I suspect is a kind of Deliverance rip off (I’m guessing since I’ve never seen the Boorman movie) is, I have to say, the least interesting film in this collection and the one I didn’t get much out of. Part of the reason may be the subject matter... families terrorised by hillbillies is right at the top of the list of movie types I really wouldn’t bother watching, right up there with home invasion movies (which I also, mostly hate).

The opening credits is of the two male leads taking part in a scramble bike race and Grefé leaves music off the soundtrack, preferring instead to catch the sounds of the engines during this sequence which sets up the two best buddies before following them into the main plot. This one tells of two protagonist couples, Bill & Jamie (played by Christopher George and Linda Borgeson) and Dan & Diana (played by Preston Pierce and Roberta Collins). They go off in their car, with bikes in tow, into the mountains of North Carolina to find the local myth of Whiskey Mountain because Jamie’s grandfather has drawn a map for her of where he and his friends hid gazillions of Civil War rifles and many cases of whiskey during the war. The antique fire arms are now worth around a thousand dollars apiece to the two if they can find the stash.

However, it turns out that the mountain is also being used by a bunch of drug dealers and hillbillies, who try to scare the family off when they are camping in the mountains by setting light to their cars and putting them at risk at various points. Our intrepid heroes eventually figure out they are being terrorised by human antagonists rather than nature biting back but not before they are all taken prisoner. The boss of the group, played by John Davis Chandler, who was so good in Grefé’s The Hooked Generation (reviewed here) and who also had a small part in Mako - Jaws Of Death (reviewed here), is going to kill them later but is cursed by bungling hillbilly gang members who play around and do stupid things when he’s not around. They rape the girls in a lengthy sequence where Grefé distances the audience from the action by having polaroids self develop on screen of what is happening to them as the soundtrack plays out the screams of the girls. It’s actually a fairly tame sequence by moderns standards but something about Grefé’s way of showing it but leaving it mostly to the imagination of the audience makes it a little unsettling, to be honest. But, as I said, I don’t really enjoy these kinds of movies that much.

Eventually the two guys escape and get away on their motorcycles, riding to the nearest town to call the sherif in to help them rescue the gals. Alas, the sheriff either doesn’t believe a word or is in league with the drug gang (it’s not quite made clear) and so the guys are forced to stock up (illegally, due to sheriff intervention) on guns and head back to the mountain where Dan is killed but Bill rescues the gals and kills everyone else. The film ends with a less than ambiguous freeze frame where the sheriff returns in a helicopter and you realise that Bill might not have many more seconds to live himself but it’s a recall to the time, in my mind at least, where Grefé finished off The Naked Zoo (reviewed here) with a freeze frame which suddenly throws the whole outcome of the film in question in the space of about a second or two before the credits roll.

And I wish I had more to say about this one but this one just didn’t light my fire like certain others in the box did. Grefé directed just one more feature film after this but not for another 18 years. I don’t know how successful Whiskey Mountain was but I’m guessing not all that. Looking at the timing of the movie, it was released into cinemas two months after George Lucas’ original Star Wars movie and, yeah, I think what Lucas unleashed onto audience expectations after this kinda changed cinema, for bad or good is something I’m still undecided on but, I really think films like Whiskey Mountain wouldn’t have stood much chance in the clamour from a  movie going audience infused with the spirit of space opera.

And that’s me done with Whiskey Mountain... the least of the films in this set and not one I’d probably recommend to most people unless they were studying this subgenre of movies. That being said, though, this whole Arrow Blu Ray package is definitely worth picking up because there are films here which, while not absolutely gobsmacking in their impact, are both very interesting and probably not very well known to the average cinema goer... at least not over here in the UK. So would definitely point cinephiles who think they’ve seen everything in the direction of this boxed edition because, yeah, some interesting takes on various kinds of movie making, for sure.

Grizzly

Truth Or Bear

Grizzly
USA 1976
Directed by William Girdler
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

“...another contemporary American
phenomenon that’s truly moronic.”

That’s how Woody Allen described the authorised novelizations of movies in his phenomenal film Manhattan and, I have to say, I’d pretty much agree with that. I grew up reading the 'above average' novelisations of old Doctor Who stories and, of course, when the ghost written novelisation of Star Wars came out, with its 8 pages of full colour photos in the centre, I was bitten by the bug the same as everyone else. It didn’t take me more than about six years to realise just how stupid that idea was, though. I mean, I guess they’re still technically literature but... I don’t know, I certainly give them a wide berth these days.

That being said, I used to thrive on tomes acquired ‘on the cheap’ from second hand bookshelves back in the 1970s (and 1980s for that matter) and one of those novelisations I acquired was the adaptation of Grizzly by Will Collins. I’d never seen the film as the rating would have been too high for me at that age (I would have been about 8 years old) but I do remember thinking to myself, even then, that this movie had obviously been made as a bandwagon attempt to cash in on the previous year’s Jaws (which is also a movie I’d not been old enough to see at the time... although I did have a rubber shark in my toy box).

The reason I mention this novelisation now is because, like a lot of those things either written from an early script before the film was completed (look at the Marvel comic strip adaptation of Star Wars the year it came out if you want to see all the stuff that was cut out of that movie, as an example), it never really matched the film completely and sometimes you’d find something interesting going on. Of course, only if you’d seen the movie and... well I hadn’t. The reason this one sticks in my mind fondly, however, is because it’s the first time I’d been made aware, via a blonde ‘model’ character in the book, that a woman’s pubic hair would naturally match the hair colour on the rest of her body. Of course, that makes perfect sense but... it’s not something I’d ever thought of before so... something of a quirky and somewhat sexy memory from my childhood, I guess.

Now that I finally come to watch the movie on a relatively new Blu Ray release from 88 Films, I have to say I am somewhat disappointed that this scene is nowhere to be found in the movie. Instead, we have a scene where a lady park ranger (the film is set in a state park with lots of forest and campers) takes a shower in a natural waterfall and gets gored up by the title creature. In her underwear. Because, if you take the time to strip off and go and walk under a waterfall, you’re certainly going to leave your bra and knickers on to get wet aren’t you? Well apparently so. This movie follows a 1970s aesthetic where female nudity should be kept off screen but it’s okay to see people’s limbs flying off in various directions... not to mention a horse's head in one memorable moment during the running time.

This film is... not good. Looking at it now for the first time, in a truly excellent widescreen transfer, I have to wonder why it was the top grossing independent film of the year... a status it kept for two years. I guess the answer was it was based on Jaws, to a certain extent and is hitting similar ‘moments’ that the far superior Spielberg movie delivered in a much more stylish package.

The film is full of people you recognise but don’t know, too. Sure there are character actors and there are even less famous character actors and what we have here, I think, are specimens of the latter. People like Christopher George, Andrew Prine and Richard Jaeckel are on hand to track down and attempt to kill the nefarious, giant sized grizzly bear of the title. Joan McCall is the love interest but she’s not in it much and, after the sexist Christopher George tells her character she can’t come on the hunt with him and his rangers, she dutifully sits the rest of the movie out from about the half way mark. Which is really strange, I thought.

The film starts off with Andrew Prine driving his helicopter around and explaining to some officials about the park/nature reserve for the benefit of the audience. We then follow the helicopter in a montage through the opening credits and the audience is immediately hit with Robert O. Ragland’s nauseatingly syrupy main theme as we see... just way to many shots and angles of a helicopter flying, after a static shot with extra camera jitter which no transfer is going to be able to correct. The music isn’t bad all the way through the movie, with some Jaws inspired rhythms, dissonance and synthesiser work... but it does get quite terrible whenever melody comes up. We then have Christopher George briefing his men in what could be the most short and redundant briefing ever committed to a movie. I mean, why gather up all your men if you’re just going to say the equivalent of “Be careful out there.”?

And then it becomes a 'by the numbers' Jaws remake but with no sea and with some terrible writing and acting on hand a lot of the time. The various gory demises, mostly of good looking women, are clumsily done and all in the edit because, as you might expect, the bear they had on hand was going to be going nowhere near the rest of the cast and crew other than its handler. So all the shots of the actual bear in no way match up to the sequences they are edited into... for example, you might see a clumsy ‘man in suit’ close up of a fake bear arm or snout coming into shot, followed by a gruesome picture of gory aftermath and... a cut back to the immaculately coiffured bear who has absolutely no traces of blood on him at all. Crazy stuff. So the waterfall scene I talked about earlier, is literally a shot of the arm reaching from within the waterfall followed by a shot of the water turning red to emphasise how horrible it must all be if you ever find yourself being attacked by a furry arm. Indeed, the second victim of the movie even has her screams looped on a repeat on the soundtrack for a good while in a move to emphasise the sheer non-shock of what you might have just seen while also... well, who knows? Maybe it’s trying to sound like an echo... one of those echoes that never fade and just sound like a bad sound sample repeated over and over.

There’s a lot of silly things on offer in this movie, to be honest and, if I was being just a little more charitable, I might say it belongs in the ‘so bad it’s good’ camp and... I’m not sure it isn’t.

After all, this is the film where I learned that the main occupation of people who go camping is to run along in single file, frolicking at high speed while wearing their heavy back packs. I mean... what the heck is going on here? This can’t be accurate. Is this what campers do? I think not.

There is a nice moment when, upon hearing the bear expert’s report that it must be a giant grizzly that’s doing the killing (in place of Richard Dreyfuss’ shark expert in Jaws), the head of the park (who refuses to close the park, just like the mayor in Jaws) says that the expert is talking about science fiction. About the only witty piece of dialogue writing in the whole movie occurs when Richard Jaeckel replies... “Science, yeah! Fiction, no.” He is, presumably, paraphrasing Bela Lugosi in the 1934 Universal version of The Black Cat where he famously replies to the accusation of “supernatural baloney” with... “Supernatural perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.” This was a really nice touch, it has to be said.

Other than that, though, this phenomenally successful independent movie, somehow comes off as a low budget TV movie at best, in my view. Complete with gory violence, bad editing, mismatching bear shots and a lot of point of view work from what I can only describe as a perpetually growly bear cam substitute. I wouldn’t, in all honesty, recommend Grizzly to anybody but I am kinda glad I saw it and I can see how it would be a good film to slip into a drunken, all night movie session with friends... so a feeling of community spirit can be achieved by everyone having something silly to mock. So, yeah, it might be true to say it’s a grisly movie in terms of what it does to drain the stamina from its audience, as much as it is a grizzly one.