Cyclops was my inspiration to play the game of Continuity with this movie. That’s the game where you count all the mistakes, such as that his patch is over his right eye the first time we see him and his left eye the other times. Also, Norris and Anderson are in a VW bug that sinks while fording a river. It’s two feet from shore, but when they escape from it, they have to swim at least twenty-five yards. Later, they find Gossett suspended above a pool of boiling water by a rope tied around his hands. Norris leaps out to embrace Gossett, and they swing back and forth until the rope frays and allows them to land on a ledge, where Gossett’s hands are miraculously free.
Continuity is a game you play only during a movie that gives you little else to think about. Although Norris and Gossett are capable of better things, nothing in this movie gives that away. They never really seem to feel anything. For example, Gossett disappears, apparently eaten by an alligator, and the most Norris can work up is a case of vexation. Anderson seems to be in the movie mostly so that Norris has someone to drag out of danger.
There are, of course, the obligatory karate fights, in which Norris flies through the air and aims his magic heels at the villains, killing or disabling dozens of them. Karate scenes always inspire the same question: Why doesn’t somebody just shoot the guy dead while he’s whirling around?
Firewalker was directed by J. Lee Thompson, whose credits include The Guns of Navarone. He has recently labored in the Cannon stable, turning out weary action retreads such as the Richard Chamberlain version of King Solomon’s Mines. This time he has directed by rote, failing his actors by letting them appear blasé in the moments when they should be excited, and, even worse, excited when they should be blasé. This effectively short-circuits all the potential moments of humor. For example, Gossett is more excited at the sight of the treasure map than he is at the sight of the treasure.
On second thought, maybe Gossett simply got a good look at the treasure. The temple contains a room roughly as big as Citizen Kane’s warehouse, filled with gold objects. Once or twice, the camera strayed too close, and I was able to see that some of the priceless treasures of the ancients included spray-painted Tupperware.
Consumer note: Nobody walks on fire in this movie.
Food of the Gods
(Directed by Bert I. Gordon; starring Marjoe Gortner, Ida Lupino; 1976)
“Most guys who play pro ball, they get racked up every once in a while,” observes the hero’s buddy in Food of the Gods. “But not old Joe. Seven years in the major leagues and he never got carried off the field even once. And then this had to happen to him. It really makes you think.” It sure does. Old Joe has just gone and gotten himself stung to death by a giant killer wasp.
Joe’s friends load him into a Jeep, drive the body back to the mainland, and then return to the island where the attack took place. “There’s something strange going on out there,” one observes sagely. “I don’t know if I should go back,” says the other. “I gotta be in Chicago on Tuesday. . . .” Meanwhile, poor Mr. Skinner has stopped to change a tire and has been eaten alive by gigantic mutant rats. In a way, that was simple justice; it was Mr. Skinner’s doing that got the whole plague of giant rats started. He found some of this funny stuff oozing up out of the ground on the back forty, you see. Creamy-like, and about the color of skimmed milk. For some fool reason he mixed it with the chicken feed and fed it to the chickens. It made the baby chicks grow taller than a man. It also had an effect on the adult chickens: Their babies ate them.
This is obviously a case for Marjoe Gortner, playing a pro football teammate of poor old Joe. He loads up some shotguns and drives back to the island in his Jeep, and not a moment too soon, because Mrs. Skinner has just had her arm chewed up by gigantic mutant worms and a young couple has busted the back axle on their Winnebago camper just as the girl has started labor pains. Meanwhile, the wasps have built hives twenty feet high, the rats are reproducing like crazy, and the venal businessman, Bensington, has gone out to the island determined to get the patents on the stuff oozing out of ground: “In five years, no one will be hungry—and we’ll be rich!”
What happens next is a cross between Night of the Living Dead, The Birds, and a disaster movie, if you follow me. The little band of people are marooned in the Skinner cabin. Rats sniff around outside. Marjoe and the others fire at them with shotguns and throw Molotov cocktails into their midst. Pamela Franklin falls down into a rat hole and Marjoe falls in trying to help her. They get lost and almost eaten before they find a tunnel to safety. Killer wasps attack again and are driven back. Marjoe electrifies the fence that cuts the island in two, but the rats sabotage the electrical generator. The pregnant girl (did I forget to mention her?) says her labor pains are becoming more closely spaced.
“I’ll bet those rats can’t swim,” Marjoe speculates. “When you’re a rat and suddenly you weigh 150 pounds, you got to learn all over again how to swim.” He dashes to his Jeep, races over to the dam, blows it up with two well-placed charges, and drives so quickly that he gets back to the house before (a) the floodwaters, and (b) before we ask ourselves what a dam could be holding back on a small island with no apparent heights.
Anyway, the floodwaters surround the house, and Marjoe leads the survivors upstairs and out onto a small second-floor balcony that did not exist in any of the earlier shots of the house and will have disappeared in all of the later shots but is mighty handy just at the moment. The rats drown. The baby is delivered. It’s a boy. Everybody agrees that Mr. Skinner sure shouldn’t have fed that oozy stuff to the chickens.
Fools
(Directed by Tom Gries; starring Jason Robards, Katharine Ross; 1971)
How can I possibly describe how awful Fools is, and in how many different ways? The task approaches impossibility. The only way to fully understand how transcendently bad this movie is would be to see it for yourself—an extreme measure I hope, for your sake, you’ll avoid. Let me just sort of hint at the depth of my feeling by saying Fools is the worst movie in 1971, a statement that springs forth with serene confidence even though here it is only February. Happy Valentine’s Day, by the way.
The movie is about love. Now the one thing we all know about love is that it’s more important than money, position, respectability, age, anything. When people fall in love, they’re supposed to abandon all caution, embrace the moment, be true to Life, run through the park, sing songs, cluck at swans, blow dandelion pods, and in general flout convention. Fools is a movie like that.
Jason Robards once again plays the fiftyish Free Spirit with a feather in his hat and spring in his step. He falls in love with Katharine Ross, who has been repressed by her rich, constipated husband, the most successful young lawyer in San Francisco despite the fact that he is a paranoid closet queen with a nasty homicidal streak and a Napoleonic fixation, and likes to play with guns. He’s the kind of lawyer that ambulances chase.
Okay, so Jason and Katharine fall in love. They are then set upon by cops, the FBI, the San Francisco pornography epidemic, neon signs, smog, hate, bigotry, exhibitionists, fierce dogs, and freeways. That’s what the middle part of the film is about: how people can’t be in love because of our materialistic, capitalist, fascist society, which invades privacy and is not, ever, tender. Then at the movie’s end Katharine runs into a church during a baptism and is shot dead by her husband, who drives off in his Rolls-Royce.