Every 70s Movie: jack elam

Showing posts with label jack elam. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

A Knife for the Ladies (1974)

Despite my usual aversion to movies about violence against women, I wanted to like A Knife for the Ladies because of its novelty, seeing as how it’s a serial-killer saga set in the Old West. Alas, the toxic combination of sluggish pacing and stupid plot twists makes the picture tedious and unsatisfying. Oh, well. Set in a small town somewhere in the Southwestern frontier, the picture follows two men as they investigate a series of mysterious killings. Jarrod (Jack Elam) is the local sheriff, a surly tough guy convinced he’s capable of keeping order all by his lonesome, and Burns (Jeff Cooper) is some sort of traveling specialist whom town officials hire because they think Jarrod isn’t up to the task. The movie’s rhythm is painfully predictable—in between gloomy scenes of a mystery figure slashing women, Jarrod and Burns engage in a pointless pissing match that distracts them from their investigative work. All of this unfolds on the same types of prefab locations used for a zillion cowboy shows, so even though the film’s production values and technical execution are fine, A Knife for the Ladies lacks authenticity in the same measure that it lacks suspense. The nature of the acting doesn’t help matters. Elam is restrained to a fault—the movie could use his customary over-the-top saltiness—and Cooper is genuinely terrible, a mannequin with a bad perm. Although costar Ruth Roman lends some energy to her scenes as the town’s grand dame, she unfortunately resides within the subplot that renders A Knife for the Ladies ridiculous during its final act, when the picture awkwardly transforms from a detective thriller to a campy horror show.

A Knife for the Ladies: LAME

Friday, August 18, 2017

Creature from Black Lake (1976)

Another swampy story about a backwoods monster with similarities to Sasquatch, Creature from Black Lake plods through a simplistic and somewhat uneventful storyline until climaxing with a passable action/suspense sequence. For devotees of Bigfoot cinema, one decent vignette of a hairy biped laying siege to a college student in a panel van might be worth the price of admission, especially since the sequence, which is set at night, has a measure of creepy atmosphere. For other viewers, watching the rest of the movie just to enjoy a few low-grade thrills won’t seem like a fair trade. In other words, proceed with caution. The picture begins well, with Joe Canton (Jack Elam) and his redneck buddy steering a canoe through a swamp until they glimpse a bizarre creature and flee, only to have the creature emerge suddenly from the water and pull Joe’s buddy below the surface. Then things slow down. In Chicago, students Pahoo (Dennis Fimple) and Rives (John David Carson) hear rumors about the monster menacing a community in Louisiana, so they embark on a research trip.

While trying to find the much-discussed Joe Canton, the boys clash with a sheriff who doesn’t want his citizens riled up by rumors. Later, they hook up with two local girls and go camping with the girls in the hopes of getting lucky—only to endure an attack by the very monster they’re researching. Lest this give the impression the storyline is picking up speed, however, the whole business with the panel van happens during a subsequent confrontation. Although Creature from Black Lake is mostly drab from a cinematic perspective, cinematographer Dean Cundey—later to break big with Halloween (1978)—lends moodiness to nighttime scenes. The picture also benefits from the presence of familiar character actors Elam and Dub Taylor. Elam gets the meatiest bits, including a monologue about encountering boars slain by the creature, but there’s only so much one can do with dialogue along these lines: ‘If I hadn’t been drinkin’, I’d have blown his butt off!” Taylor does his usual angry-old-coot routine. As for the leads, they’re competent but milquetoast. All in all, this isn’t the worst guy-in-a-suit creature feature you’ll ever encounter, but it’s far from the best.

Creature from Black Lake: FUNKY

Saturday, March 12, 2016

The Winds of Autumn (1976)

One of low-budget auteur Charles B. Pierce’s most frustrating movies, The Winds of Autumn demonstrates how Pierce was simultaneously his own secret weapon and his own worst enemy. A revenge-themed Western with an offbeat angle, inasmuch as the character seeking revenge is an 11-year-old boy from a Quaker community, the picture has Pierce’s usual slick widescreen look, and yet it also has Pierce’s usual enervated storyline. The movie begins when young Joel (played by the director’s son, Chuck Pierce Jr.) observes a band of thugs approaching his family’s homestead. Joel’s parents ignore the boy’s warnings, believing God will protect them. He doesn’t. After the inevitable massacre, Joel is offered refuge by neighbor Mr. Pepperdine (played by the film’s cowriter, Earl E. Smith). Hungry for vengeance, Joel steals guns from Mr. Pepperdine’s stash—turns out the fellow used to be a gunfighter—and starts tracking the thugs. Soon afterward, Mr. Pepperdine arms himself and pursues Joel, hoping to prevent further tragedy.

Scenes of Joel trekking through the wilderness are picturesque but repetitive and sluggish, so the picture’s limited entertainment value stems from the presence of actors seasoned in playing rural varmints. Jack Elam plays the main heavy, and the always-colorful Dub Taylor plays a snake-oil salesman who is moderately important to the plot. Every scene follows predictable rhythms, from the friction between the villains to the incredible resolve of the virtuous characters. On the plus side, the movie has a couple of so-so shootouts, and there’s a whorehouse scene featuring several attractive starlets—however, because The Winds of Autumn is a family picture, neither of those scenes has much bite. Nor, in fact, does the movie overall. Getting back to the secret weapon/worst enemy notion, Pierce, a set dresser by trade, always makes his pictures look more expensive than they are, but he’s perpetually incapable of embellishing narrative concepts with similar flair.

The Winds of Autumn: LAME

Monday, January 27, 2014

Hawmps! (1976)

After scoring a surprise box-office hit with the independently made canine adventure Benji (1974), director Joe Camp was in a position to try something different—so for his second feature, he used a little-known historical episode from the pre-Civil War era as the basis for a gentle comedic romp. Hawmps! depicts the misadventures of a U.S. Army squad tasked with testing camels as possible replacements for horses in desert outposts. Given the nature of Camp’s previous film, it’s surprising that very little of the picture is devoted to the specifics of animal behavior—in fact, only two of the camels are given memorable names and “personalities.” Instead of focusing on critters, Camp builds jokes around the broadly sketched—and unapologetically clichéd—characters populating the Army squad, including a drunken Irishman, an inexperienced lieutenant, and a stalwart drill sergeant. The only surprising character is an Arabian camel trainer named H. Jolly, played by Gino Conforti, because the character is a British-schooled dandy with a monocle.

Hawmps! is shallow and silly, but it basically works in an undemanding sort of way. Whether Camp is staging elaborate slapstick sequences of barroom brawls or vignettes of dehydrated soldiers trudging through the desert, the director keeps things amiable and lively. Plus, the picture is billed right in the opening credits as “a family film by Joe Camp,” so the mandate clearly was to make lighthearted entertainment suitable for very young viewers. And if Hawmps! is ultimately little more than a Disney knock-off made without the glossy cinematography and lavish production values one normally associates with Disney’s live-action fare, the movie has the benefit of an offbeat historical basis, and Camp resists the sentimental excesses that make similar Disney movies (such as the Apple Dumpling Gang pictures) unnecessarily saccharine.

James Hampton, a pleasant comic actor who costarred in the ’60s series F Troop, which was something of a stylistic precedent for this movie, plays Lt. Clemmons, a Washington, D.C., gofer who gets assigned the thankless task of supervising the camel experiment. Upon arriving at an outpost in the West, Clemmons takes command of a squad led by Sgt. Tibbs (Christopher Connelly), even though Tibbs’ men all misunderstood their orders and thought they were getting Arabian horses instead of Arabian camels. High jinks ensue as the camel-riding soldiers clash with the cantankerous sergeant (Slim Pickens) of a rival squad, and with an outlaw (Jack Elam) who commands a town filled with criminals. The movie features lots of chaotic physical comedy—people falling off camels or tripping into mud, and so on—and the dialogue is occasionally cartoonish. Still, most of the actors in Hawmps! are stone-cold pros, including those previously mentioned plus Denver Pyle, and the sight of bluecoated U.S. soldiers chasing after crooks or Indians while riding on camels is reliably amusing.

Hawmps!: FUNKY

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Grayeagle (1977)

Among the more intriguing participants in the assembly line that fed the ’70s drive-in circuit was Charles B. Pierce, a Hollywood set decorator who moonlighted as an auteur of schlocky low-budget features. His work generally comprised rural horror and Westerns, and while Pierce evinced a measure of cinematic skill—for instance, his compositions are almost always pleasing to the eye—his storytelling ranged from the basically competent to the hilariously inept. Grayeagle, one of several Pierce-helmed Westerns with a Native American theme, falls on the “hilariously inept” end of the spectrum. A shameless copy of John Ford’s classic The Searchers (1956), only with a more sympathetic point of view on the Indian psyche, Grayeagle is dull, melodramatic, silly, and turgid. For instance, Pierce awkwardly attempts to generate operatic levels of emotion, so whenever he lingers in slow motion on a “significant” event, the picture slips into self-parody. It doesn’t help, of course, that two of the film’s most crucial performances are outrageously awful. The story concerns trapper John Colter (Ben Johnson), who lives in the wilderness with his adult daughter, Beth (Lana Wood). One day, Cheyenne brave Grayeagle (Alex Cord) kidnaps Beth, so John and his trusty Indian sidekick, Standing Bear (Iron Eyes Cody), begin an epic rescue mission. Grayeagle is presented as a noble warrior, so, predictably, Beth develops affection for her captor. Eventually, all the plot strands converge in a maudlin twist ending that transforms Grayeagle from an action saga to a would-be tearjerker. Johnson and fellow screen vet Jack Elam, who plays a supporting role, deliver their usual professional work. Cody, best remembered for his role in an iconic anti-pollution commercial, contributes little. As for Cord and Wood, however, yikes. Cord, an Italian, is both miscast and terrible, preening in every shot while issuing dialogue with a comic-book version of plains stoicism. It’s hard not to laugh every time he appears onscreen. Wood, the younger sister of screen legend Natalie Wood, is worse. Screaming idiotically whenever she’s not forming goofy facial expressions, the actress is undeniably sexy but otherwise unwatchable. On the technical front, cinematographer/editor James W. Roberson generates attractive shots of the film’s Montana locations (though his cutting is sloppy at best), and Pierce lends texture with his usual eye for physical detail.

Grayeagle: LAME

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Rio Lobo (1970)

The last movie directed by the revered and versatile Howard Hawks, Rio Lobo would seem—if based solely on the genre, star, and title—to be a quasi-successor to Hawks’ wonderful 1959 adventure film Rio Bravo. Yet even though Rio Lobo is a Western with John Wayne in the lead role, Rio Lobo is no Rio Bravo. Whereas the 1959 film bursts with excitement, humor, and vivid characterization, the 1970 film is a turgid slog through random plot elements piled indifferently onto a heap. Everything in Rio Lobo feels half-hearted, from the flat cinematography to the mindless music to the stiff acting. The picture starts out as a Civil War-era heist story, with Confederate soldiers stealing gold from a Union train, but then the narrative shifts into a postwar justice saga, with now-retired Union officer Cord McNally (Wayne) chasing after the traitors who sold information about the train to the Confederacy.

And since that premise, apparently, was deemed insufficient by the filmmakers in terms of plotting, the picture gets mired in various subplots about wronged women seeking vengeance against bad men. Furthermore, to justify the title, there’s another subplot, about the liberation of a small town from oppression by crooked varmints. There’s enough story in Rio Lobo for several different movies, and as a result, everything gets short shrift. The characters feel either clichéd or underdeveloped (sometimes both), the action scenes are confusing (since there are too many players on the filed), and the whole thing is directionless (in every sense of the word, with all due respect to Mr. Hawks).

As usual, appraising Wayne’s “performance” is a pointless endeavor, since the veteran star simply drawls and struts through a rote demonstration of his familiar persona. Luckily, reliable character actors lend flavor to minor parts, with Jack Elam and David Huddleston providing humor and gravitas, respectively—but their work isn’t enough to compensate for the overall mediocrity. Unfortunately, much of Rio Lobo’s cast comprises young actors whose work here explains why they never achieved stardom. Fresh-faced studs Christopher Mitchum and Jorge Rivero aim for likability but instead come across as vapid, while beautiful starlets Susana Dosamantes, Sherry Lansing, and Jennifer O’Neill embarrass themselves with amateurish line deliveries.

In fact, it’s quite shocking to look at the sprawl of bad performances in this movie and realize that such a venerable filmmaker was calling the shots. Clearly, the muse was not with Hawks while he assembled this picture. The pervasive blandness of Rio Lobo also drags down the normally excellent composer Jerry Goldsmith, whose score only catches fire during the big shootout at the end.

Rio Lobo: FUNKY

Monday, September 9, 2013

The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County (1970)

The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County represents a failed attempt to make a movie star out of amiable actor Dan Blocker, the man-mountain who played “Hoss” Cartwright on the classic TV series Bonanza from 1959 to 1972. (The series lasted another year, but Blocker died shortly after this film’s release.) A would-be farcical Western about the residents of a small town snookering their beloved blacksmith into marrying a dancehall girl so he won’t uproot his business, The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County features a raft of B-list actors, so folks like Jim Backus, Jack Cassidy, Jack Elam, Nanette Fabray, and Mickey Rooney populate the cast. Every single actor, Blocker included, is guilty of shameful mugging; the type of broad-as-a-barn acting on display throughout this laugh-deficient “comedy” went out of style with the advent of synchronized sound. Furthermore, the story is so contrived that there’s not a single surprise in the entire picture. Blocker’s character is a naïve galoot who learns to accept the seedier realities of life, Fabray’s character is a cynic who secretly longs to be loved, Elam’s character is an incompetent bounty hunter who’s supposed to add danger to the story but never does, and so on. Some performers make the best of this bargain-basement material, so, for instance, Backus uses double-takes and exasperated line deliveries to make his characterization of a flim-flamming mayor as enjoyable as possible. Meanwhile, others—especially Rooney—deliver work that’s best described as cringe-inducing. (This is the kind of sub-sitcom flick in which Elam, whose character has poor vision, spends several minutes grooming himself while looking at a framed portrait that he mistakes for a mirror.) The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County is harmless inasmuch as the jokes are never offensive, but it’s hard to imagine anyone sitting through the whole lifeless flick without subsequently regretting the loss of 99 minutes.

The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County: LAME

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Hot Lead & Cold Feet (1978)

Generic family entertainment from Walt Disney Productions at the nadir of the company’s live-action cycle, Hot Lead & Cold Feet is a farcical Western featuring the unremarkable British comedian/singer Jim Dale in three roles. And while Disney’s concerted effort to transform Dale into a U.S. star was admirable (he was featured in three of the company’s movies from 1977 to 1979), Dale lacks the easy charisma of a genuine box-office attraction, so a triple serving of Dale in Hot Lead & Cold Feet represents too much of a not-so-good thing. In fact, even with his multiple roles, Dale is less interesting than veteran actors Jack Elam, Don Knotts, and Darren McGavin, who play silly supporting characters. The story begins with crusty old varmint Jasper Bloodshy (Dale) announcing that he’s leaving his entire estate—which includes the crime-riddled frontier town that bears his name—to his twin sons. After a fashion, that is. One of the sons is Billy (Dale), a rootin’-tootin’ outlaw who menaces the good (and not-so-good) townsfolk of Bloodshy. The other son is Eli (Dale), a preacher-in-training raised by his mother in England. Billy’s the “hot lead” of the title, and Eli’s the “cold feet.”

As a means of bringing his sons together, Jasper stipulates that his boys must race each other through the wilderness surrounding the town of Bloodshy, with the winner claiming the family wealth. Billy tries to rig the contest, abetted by the town’s corrupt mayor (McGavin), while Eli simply wants to provide for the pair of orphaned children who are in his care. (Because it wouldn’t be a Disney flick without orphans.) Knotts plays the town’s bumbling sheriff, the so-called “Denver Kid,” and Elam plays his arch-enemy, a crook named “Rattlesnake.” The running gag of these two men trying to stage a gun duel despite constant interruptions is about as close to real humor as this movie gets. Most of the running time comprises goofy Disney slapstick and overly exuberant racing scenes, with a spoonful of saccharine thanks to Eli’s relationships with the kids and with a pretty schoolteacher (Karen Valentine). There’s not a hint of originality or wit anywhere in Hot Lead & Cold Feet, but it’s a harmless enough distraction, with okay production values and energetic acting. Even Dale, who isn’t up to the task of carrying a picture, deserves credit for his hard work—he tries every trick imaginable to entertain viewers, so it’s a shame he can’t conjure screen presence by force of will.

Hot Lead & Cold Feet: FUNKY

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971)

Recognizing that there was still an audience for the brand of smart-alecky Old West humor he perfected on the 1957–1962 TV series Maverick, leading man James Garner dove back into cowboy comedy with Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969), a harmless romp about an opportunistic quick-draw artist who becomes the lawman in a frontier town, despite his frequent claims that he’s just passing through. The movie didn’t leave much room for a sequel, since the final scene explained how the characters’ lives turned out, so Garner (whose company produced Sheriff and its sequel) took a novel route—he commissioned an entirely new story, with a fresh set of characters, but then used a similar title and much of the original film’s supporting cast, thereby promising audiences they’d get more of the same. This type of quasi-continuation was not unprecedented, particularly in family movies, because Disney used this technique to elongate several of its live-action franchises, and, indeed, Support Your Local Gunfighter is a G-rated trifle in the Disney vein (although it was a United Artists release).

Garner plays Latigo Smith, a gambler on the run from a romantic entanglement with an overbearing madam. Hiding out in a mining town, Latigo runs various schemes—e.g., posing as the business representative for a gunfighter (Jack Elam) who isn’t really a gunfighter—but mostly he gets into harmless high jinks with colorful locals. The picture is chipper and fast-paced, with wall-to-wall cartoony music, and veteran character players including Henry Jones, Harry Morgan, and Dub Taylor ensure that everything feels safe and predictable. James Edward Grant’s script has a few witty lines, but the jokes are mostly of the painfully obvious variety. Case in point: The local vet (Taylor) indicates that his current patients are donkeys and says, “You got a pain in the ass, you come see Doc Schultz!” Leading lady Suzanne Pleshette grumbles her way through a drab performance as a tomboy, and Elam’s comedy chops mollify the fact that he’s playing yet another amiable cow-town grotesque. As for the star, Garner’s charm is peerless as always. Unfortunately, there’s not much difference between this picture and an average Maverick episode.

Support Your Local Gunfighter: FUNKY

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The Last Rebel (1971)

Cocky New York Jets quarterback “Broadway” Joe Namath was virtually assured a screen career thanks to his photogenic looks and widespread popularity. Like many other athletes-turned-actors, however, Namath wasn’t able to complement his charm with dramatic skill. He got by on bravado when he played a trash-talking biker in the colorful action flick C.C. and Company (1970), but wasn’t able to pull off the same trick in the misguided Western The Last Rebel. Lazily utilizing his offscreen persona to play a runaway Confederate soldier, he seems not only anachronistic but also way too upbeat given his character’s grim circumstances. (One gets the sense that being the real Joe Namath around this time was a nonstop party, which might explain his disinterest in acting like anyone other than Joe Namath.) It doesn’t help that the film’s story is thin and trite, or that the characterizations don’t make much sense.

Confederate soldiers Matt (Jack Elam) and Hollis (Namath) escape from Union pursuers and free a black man, Duncan (Woody Strode), from a lynching. The three then form a criminal gang. Huh? Aren’t they all trying to avoid attention because they’re fugitives? The exploits of these roving dudes mostly comprise getting card sharp Hollis to a gaming table, whereupon Hollis wins a small fortune and refuses to divide the winnings to Matt’s satisfaction. This triggers a blood feud between the two men. Again, huh? As to why any of these things happen, your guess is as good as mine.

The Last Rebel proceeds in a linear fashion, so it’s not a complete logistical quagmire, but so many events go unexplained that the movie starts to take on a surreal quality, with unmotivated actions piling atop one another. At its weirdest, the picture includes a seduction scene that rips off the famous dinner sequence in Tom Jones (1963), but in lieu of that film’s flirtatious editing, The Last Rebel simply intercuts shots of a smirking Namath with close-ups of two women molesting their food lasciviously. Compounding the peculiarity of the whole enterprise is the fact that it was shot in Italy (with no attempt to make the locations look American), and the fact that the horn-driven rock score was cut by members of the venerable band Deep Purple. Period authenticity was not a priority.

The Last Rebel: LAME

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) & The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979)

Standard Disney live-action fare about cute youngsters getting into mischief, The Apple Dumpling Gang features skillful support from grown-up players Bill Bixby, Tim Conway, Don Knotts, Harry Morgan, and Slim Pickens. The Old West story concerns three young orphans whose varmint uncle dumps them into the care of an irresponsible gambler (Bill Bixby), who in turn tries to dump the kids onto someone else until the moppets discover gold in a mine belonging to their family. When assorted disreputable types try to rip off the gold, seeing the children endangered causes Bixby to grow a conscience. Television icons Conway and Knotts are the main attraction, working as a comedy duo for the first time, and they’re comfortably amusing even though their slapstick antics as a pair of inept outlaws are contrived and silly (typical bit: trying to steal a ladder from a firehouse and slamming the ladder into everything in sight). Earnest, old-fashioned, and beyond predictable, The Apple Dumpling Gang moves along at a pleasant clip, despite cloying music and rickety process shots, so the movie is innocuous entertainment for very young viewers; grown-ups should be able to swallow everything except perhaps the requisite warm fuzzies at the end and the cutesy theme song.
Bixby and the kids were jettisoned for the sequel, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, in which Conway and Knotts try to go straight but end up running afoul of the army, a crazed sheriff, and a criminal gang, causing destructive mayhem along the way. The sequel’s storyline is a patchwork of Western clichés—the climax is a train robbery—so neither Conway’s deadpan delivery nor Knotts’ bug-eyed crankiness is enough to liven up the proceedings. And the less said about the scene they play in drag, the better. Harry Morgan returns in a different role than he played in the first movie, while Tim Matheson, Jack Elam, and Kenneth Mars add color to the cast. The overstuffed plot and the depiction of the “heroes” as complete morons makes the sequel far less palatable than its predecessor, but as a small mercy for those who take the plunge, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again runs its forgettable course in a mere 88 minutes.

The Apple Dumpling Gang: FUNKY

The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again: LAME

Friday, November 26, 2010

Hannie Caulder (1971)

After spending a few years making insipid pictures that promised (and delivered) little more than ogling shots of her bikini-clad body, Raquel Welch decided to prove she could act by tackling more serious roles beginning with Hannie Caulder, a nasty little Western made by Tigon British Film Productions on location in Spain. Shortly a trio of slovenly brothers (played by Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, and Strother Martin) botch a bank robbery and escape into a desert, they stumble across a small ranch owned by the title character and her husband. The brothers kill the husband, gang-rape Hannie, and leave her for dead. In one of the movie’s many overly convenient plot contrivances, conscientious bounty hunter Thomas Price (Robert Culp) happens upon the ranch soon afterward, then agrees to teach Hannie about guns so she can track down and murder her assailants. Predictably, they fall in love while she trains, and just as predictably, circumstances ensure that Hannie must confront the brothers without Thomas by her side. Excepting an interlude during which Hannie and Thomas hang out with a philosophical gunsmith (played by Christopher Lee), that’s more or less the extent of the story.

Thanks to the considerable skills of director/co-writer Burt Kennedy, the picture moves along at a good clip, frequently exploding with bursts of brutality, and the film looks terrific. Yet the story is trite and even periodically nonsensical; virtually no explanation is provided for a shootout at the gunsmith’s home or for the presence of a mysterious gunfighter played, silently, by Stephen Boyd. This narrative opacity makes the movie seem more and more vapid as it speeds toward an insipid climax. Unsurprisingly, the picture’s biggest shortcoming is also its biggest attraction, and that’s Welch. Her performance comprises posing rather than acting, so she’s never more than a beautiful physical presence. That said, Borgnine, Elam, and Martin are enjoyably repulsive as they bicker and whine their way across the frontier, and Culp is terrific as the bounty hunter. Calm, prickly, and wise, his characterization commands the screen, so Hannie Caulder rises when he’s present and wanes when he’s not.

Hannie Caulder: FUNKY

Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Norseman (1978)

So shamelessly absurd that it’s almost amiable, this medieval adventure stars Lee Majors as the chief of a Viking war party that sets ashore in 11th-century America to rescue their lost buddies from the clutches of dastardly Native Americans, with the help of a weather-controlling wizard and an Indian woman who inexplicably turns on her people. Suffice to say that Majors, a strapping Michigander with the acting range of a Pet Rock, doesn’t exactly disappear into his role as “Thorval the Bold”; from his flat Midwestern line readings to his perfectly groomed ’70s-stud mustache, he’s preposterous. It doesn’t help that his Viking costume includes a black superhero mask for no discernible reason, and that he spends much of the movie running in slow motion, which makes the film seem like a dream sequence from one of his Six Million Dollar Man episodes. Jack Elam, another performer who’s about as American as they come, plays the wizard, scowling from under the black cloak that hides his unconvincing hunchback prosthetic. The picture starts out well enough with a fusillade of action and semi-coherent plotting, then devolves into a series of needlessly protracted fights and chase scenes; even the spectacle of watching Majors spout silly dialogue wears thin. (Sample line: “Our shores are laden with the remains of intruders whose ambitions were far greater than their fighting skills.”) Running the show is writer-producer-director Charles B. Pierce, a prolific hack who spared every expense making robustly bad movies like The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976). Pierce shot The Norseman in Florida—which everybody knows is exactly where Native Americans and Vikings would most likely tussle—and he didn’t break the bank acquiring the picture’s one impressive prop, because a closing credit thanks the city of Newburn, NC, “for furnishing the Viking boat.”

The Norseman: LAME