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.

The Hooked Generation

Fury With The
Syringe On Top

The Hooked Generation
USA 1968
Directed by William Grefé  
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilerage ensues.

The Hooked Generation is the third of the movies presented in Arrow’s Blu Ray box set He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection. Now you might be forgiven for assuming, from the title (which really doesn’t seem to mean much in relation to the content of the movie), that this was some kind of psychedelic documentary about the drug tinged counter culture of the time. However, although there is a scene in the later parts of the film with a ‘lair’ of stoned hippies in it, the movie is more a kinda crime drama, of sorts, with a heavy drugs leaning.

Okay, so the main characters are three guys (originally four but one gets killed fairly quickly) who obviously enjoy drugs but also trade in them for cash. The whole opening titles, in fact, are shown against a backdrop of the arm on a table of one of the characters, as he goes through that whole heroin style ritual of the teaspoon, powder, heating it in a candle flame, tying the arm off with rubber tubing etc (excuse me, I don’t know anything about drugs but, presumably the rubber tubing you always see them use in films is to reduce marks and bruising on the skin?) and popping the vein up for receiving a needle. All accompanied by a not bad, trippy jazz score courtesy of Chris Martell & The Odyssey... I’d buy it if it was available but there’s obviously been no commercial release.

After the credits we meet the heroin addict in question, Acid (played quite hypnotically by John Davis Chandler), Dum Dum (played by World Light Heavyweight Boxing Champion Willie Pastrano) who is hollowing off the tops of bullets, which is presumably where he gets his name and the leader of this little rag tag group, Daisey (played by Jeremy Slate). They’re in a boat near Cuba and roughly the first two thirds of the film take place, more or less, on this boat (in keeping with Grefé’s budget conscious modus operandi). The three have been saving up to buy some drugs from some Cubans but, when the Cubans arrive on the boat, the price has changed. So Daisey harpoons the leader and they grab the big stash of drugs, kill the other two and blow the Cubans’ boat up. If you hadn’t figured it out by now, even though these guys are the three characters who the film focuses on, none of them are very likeable.

But they’re all doing a lot better than most of the actors I’ve seen in Grefé productions of the 1960s and they’re all very interesting to watch. So, yeah, you can’t sympathise with any of them and you really just want them to die horribly as soon as possible but, they do make for fascinating characters, it has to be said.

Anyway, the rest of the story goes like this... the coast guard arrive the next day and, long story short, the drug dealer protagonists end up killing them, grabbing a young couple as hostages and making a run for it. The first dealer they try to sell their stash to wants nothing to do with them because their actions have made them ‘hot’ and he tips off the FBI, who are already on their trail. They hole up in the swamps of Florida (of course, it’s a Grefé film!), initially with some Seminole Indians and Acid is sent to the local hippy commune to grab some food, where he meets his ultimate fate. Then the FBI go into the swamps and, after some pedestrian but never boring shenanigans, Dum Dum and Daisey are also killed. Because... I dunno... they’re the hooked generation? Or something.

Either way, it’s an interesting film and that, like I said, this comes from the portrayal of the characters. Slate plays Daisey as a solid leader who tries his best to keep his head above water while his two friends manage to trip him up and get everyone in worse trouble every step of the way. Dum Dum is, also pretty good considering that acting was not Pastrano’s main profession. It’s Acid who’s the one to really watch, though. He spends the entirety of the film completely hopped up on heroin and is even shooting up during a pitched gun battle in the earlier scenes. He manages to have an almost permanent, half smile on his face (apart from when he gets really angry) and he’s a nasty character (stabbing and even raping a woman he just accidentally drowned) but it’s such a fascinating performance. He gets one of the more poetic deaths in the film when, in his permanently confused state, he tries to stop the raid on the hippy commune and takes on multiple gun shots before taking a dive through a glass window... then Grefé goes to town in his dying moments as he has some kind of ‘death trip’ with the camera and editor going nuts to give a surreal, jittery flashback of some of the events for a minute before he dies and we are treated to the visual metaphor of a candle being snuffed out. These might have been low budget cheapies that Grefé was churning out at this time but he was really trying to put something worth watching up on the screen, you can be sure of that.

As I said, the music is quite good, which helps... although, the director does manage to get another of his bikini gal dancing scenes in when the three protagonist/antagonist figures get one of the hostages dancing and, yeah, you can bet it features Grefé getting enthusiastic about showing her bottom shaking again... I’m really beginning to sense a theme in this director’s work.

And that’s that. The Hooked Generation is not going to light everyone’s fire but it’s not without interest and has an atmosphere all its own. The ‘three evil hoodlums’ terrorising innocent people genre of film is not the kind of thing I really like to watch (even the famous Italian ones) but Grefé and his performers really hold the interest here and, it’s one I would recommend if you’re a cinephile who’s seen it all and who wants to see something just slightly different from the norm at that time. Terrible title though, to be sure.