"Impulse"(1974)d/William Grefe'

It's a sexy Thursday evening, folks, you can smell the pungent reek of primal lust in the air tonight.A woman's ample, heaving busom rhythymically quaking in a sparkly tube top stretched to the limits by the dinosaurian dimensions of her twin D's to a mid-70's disco bassline laid down by some cat with a caucasian natural 'fro, dressed in some outta sight polyester jumpsuit that'd make George Jetson piss Rosie the Robot into short circuitsville, culminating in a spirited twenty-five minute ham-slamming romp in the backseat of the Cougar behind the club.Solid, baby.Can you dig it?
Any movie directed by Grefe is usually an entertaining one, and when you've got The Shat on board as a sweaty-as-balls, sleazy-as-fuck murderous con artist-cum-gigolo decked out in only the most painful polyester fashions of 1974, well...you're in for a pants-pissing hootenanny, aren't ya.Adding to this Shatnerthon of epic hammy proportions, Grefe enlisted exploitation vets William Kerwin, formerly a H.G. Lewis splatter era leading man, and Harold Sakata, best remembered as the bowler-chucking James Bond Villain,"Odd Job" and a game cast of extras, not excluding Marcy Lafferty, who was later overwhelmed by hairy mygalamorphs in Shat vehicle Kingdom of the Spiders(1977), and oddly enough overwhelmed by Billy himself from 1973 to 1996 in what stands as his longest marriage to date.Tonight's entry suffers from countless gaping flaws in both logic and filmmaking, but Shatner alone is worth the admission price, delivering an unintentionally hilarious, classically hammy study on violent mental illness the likes the cinematic world may never see again, if it's lucky enough.Forward!

William Kerwin went from "long, hard ones"(cases)in Blood Feast, to "long, sharp ones"(Kitana swords) in Impulse.
Via inept black and white flashback,we get a miserable World War II era-slice of the childhood misery that shaped Matt(William Shatner)into the post-credits scuzbucket he grew up to be.Matt's mother,a drunkard in a nightie,serves up booze-soaked gash to the Sarge(William Kerwin),a hooch-hopped soldier who wants the boy's first birds and bees lesson to include his mom as the demonstration fuckdoll.The young Shat-to-be runs him through on a kitana blade for his troubles.Fast forward to present day Matt, a belly dancer-ogling, cigarillo-smoking hot shot, who's just burned his last bridge with Helen,an aging sugar mama who's been footing all of his bills, who he promptly chokes the fuck out of in her own car on the edge of a cliff in broad daylight("Big...tough...broad,aren'tcha!" he says beforehand).With her cadaver floating inside the car he dumps into the nearby drink, Matt wisely chooses to relocate in a hurry.We then meet Ann(Jennifer Bishop), single mother to pubescent clepto Tina(Kim Nicholas), who's soon to accept a ride from Matt wearing a checked blazer left over from the Love:American Style wardrobe rack where the professional chiseler wings a Doberman padding through suburbia with his car and drives off, sucking on his pinky like a pork-based precursor to Doctor Evil("Dogs...lick their wounds...they...clean 'em real good." he explains to the young passenger).When her mother meets him at her clothes boutique,where you can also buy cigarettes apparently(I never got to enjoy smoking during that era.I'm nearly finished completing my Bobby DeNiro Taxi Driver quick-draw sleeve gun that shoots packs of smokes, though.), the lonely young woman is no match for his corny bravado and deafeningly loud wardrobe.

"I ever...show you the...scar...I got from Spock's nerve pinch, baby?"
It's soon painfully evident that Tina is the only one impervious to Matt's over-the-top snake oil salesman bit, with a particularly easy hotel desk clerk(Mrs. Shat herself) and Ann's Maude-esque friend Julia friend quickly falling prey to his charlatanic charms.After Matt pyshcotically spazzes out on a woman who bumps into him with two arms full of balloons at the carnival("Fat... people like you oughta be ground up... and made into dog food!",he barks) ,Tina tearfully bears witness to the interloper running the pantsmeat to her mother in a hotel room,then dispatch his former associate,Karate Pete(!)(Harold Sakata)after what has to be the single slowest car chase through a working car wash ever filmed.When hanging him(!!) doesn't work, Matt simply gives him the Pasolini treatment(!!!), driving over him repeatedly with Tina hiding in the backseat.Matt corners the young eyewitness on her way to school,exclaiming that nobody'd believe a crazy little girl who talks to her father's tombstone in the graveyard.Then he threateningly points at her, pre-dating DeNiro by a few years, before driving off.In an insane headscratcher of a climax,Matt manages to jack ten large off Ann for phony investments, telling her he's flying off to Jamaica for a few days, which roughly translated from psycho means,"I'll be heisting all of your best friend's money and killing her too,so don't bother me."Tina watches Matt stab Julia in the labonza for recognizing the dark circle makeup he'd applied to his eyes, officially signalling his batshit craziness the rest of the way, then she's dramatically chased through a funeral home.While he's trying to drown her mother in the fishtank, she ironically skewers him on a sword, bringing him full cycle.Her mother shushes her ear-piercing shriek(you shanked him,what's he supposed to look like,kid?) as they walk past his lifeless body in fetal position on the floor,cuing an echo-heavy analogy Matt had made about being a puppy left out in the road.Explains everything, doesn't it.

You just don't see a good high-speed car chase moving slowly through a car wash anymore.
We covered Grefe's earlier cult classic,Stanley(1972),last month,so check that out if you haven't already, ferchrissakes.Though nothing that would crack your conventional Top 25 of the seventies(perhaps a Top 50 70's cult classics list,methinks),there's simply too much mint stuff occurring within tonight's frame to not snag yourself a copy of it immediately if not sooner, especially if you're a Shatnerphile of some degree, on top of your well-documented terminal genre addiction.I think we're gonna have to have a Top Lists week here at the Wop sometime in February, since I've always highly dug reading you guys' faves n' rappin' about 'em afterwards.Right now, we've just got too many damned movies to get through.On the scale,Impulse scores a solid double wop,and belongs in every self-respecting woprophile's movie collection, bar none.Seek the effer out, boys n' girls.

"Pinky swear you'll...never dime me out, Tina."

"Stanley"(1972)d/William Grefe

We'll sidewind again tonight with another cautionary cold-blooded creature feature steeped in vengeance and characters whose outrageousness is only surpassed by their butterfly collars.This movie reminds me of a certain nutbag character I worked with years ago who nightly pushed for me to ignore the safety of my then-family and purchase rattlesnakes,cobras,and vipers for whatever reason,citing his own house full o'venemous snakes while asking me to overlook the highly-publicized fang-driven death one of his hooded harbingers of horror had caused sometime earlier.I never was much of a snake guy,to be honest with you.I've owned a couple over the years,but we never got on too famously,and asking the likes of me to wrangle ornery pit vipers with hemotoxic venom is like dunking an injured Michael Moore in steak sauce and making him backstroke the Amazon River.Probably not the brightest idea ever thought.
If you remade Willard(1971) and replaced the social ne'er-do-well caucasian with a shellshocked,paleface-hating native American who recently scrambled his grey matter like a hummingbird egg in Vietnam,then switched the rats for rattlers,you'd have cult director William Grefe's Stanley wrapped in your coils,a standard issue eco-thriller that got an assload of late night television mileage thereafter,and one of my favorites of the era.Grefe generously ladles on the exploitative ingredients like an apex sous chef with his roux-heavy Bechamel,substituting lunacy for believability(Chris Robinson is Seminole like C.Thomas Howell is black) at every taste,until the groovy broth belongs on the breakfast menu at Bedlam.

"Keep your skin sheds outta my firewater,Stanley!"
Enter Tim(Chris Robinson),a Seminole 'nam vet whose recurring migraines and disdain for Whitey have him living in a shack full o' snakes on an island in the Everglades swamps.He ekes out a meager existence milking venom from his expectant rattlesnake couple,Stanley and Hazel(She wears a floral headband),for research purposes at a local hospital(screenwriter Gary Crutcher has a cameo as a doctor),and supplies snakes for a washed-up-on-the-beach,over-the-hill stripper to incorporate in her dated burlesque act.When he does ride into town in his rickety pick up,he lets Stosh slither around freely on the bucketseat.His slipping grasp on reality becomes even more tentative due to an unscrupulous and cartoonish clothing don named Thomkins(Alex Rocco),who preens over his unimpressive physique in the mirror,constantly pumping one pound dumbbells from inside a robe stolen off the set of Maude,when he's not making creepily inappropriate comments to his own overdeveloped teenage daughter(who passes the time by fucking all of his hired help) by the pool.Thomkins,who had Tim's father whacked while his son was off fighting a war, sends off his comic book henchmen to poach snakes for a new line of snakeskin belts he has planned,but when the thugs try to lean on the indian for his cooperation,Tim and Stanley have other plans...Tim's stripper pal invites the karmic police when drunk on stage,she bites the head off of one of her hissing stage props,and the indian piles snakes upon her and her manager/husband while they lie asleep on the couch,effectively removing them from the equation forever.

"Shnakesh?" You can always count on a good one liner when it's belched by the town drunk.
Then,after Thomkins' boys run afoul of the Seminole while poaching snakes in the swamp,and Stanley bites one of them on the ass for his troubles,the businessman enlists the services of a freaked out,indian-hating hippie named Psycho(Yeaaaah,muthas!) to oversee the thugs' covert operation and ensure the indian's wrench is kept clear of Thomkin's lucrative illegal machinery.While the men are hunting snakes,another encounter with Tim and Stanley ends with both henchmen sinking in quicksand with the rattler watching from the bog surface.Meanwhile,Psycho,zooted on inhalants,wanders off into the swamp and stumbles upon Tim's shack,where he finds Hazel and her newborn rattlers resting in elaborate beds that the indian has built for them.Grooving on the violence,Psycho smashes the juvenile snakes with his gun butt(onscreen!)and blows the head off of their mother,to boot.Tim arrives in time for a sloppy punch up,and Stanley puts two fangs to Psycho's neck before the crazed bigot can force his owner's head under a humming outboard motor.Tim then fills Thomkins' pool with writhing snakes that he doesn't notice before diving in,sealing his own fate in screaming seventies slo-motion.Tim kidnaps Thomkins' daughter and takes her back to his shack for apparent rape and servitude-through-enslavement,which the girl seems to be alright with(!!),but when the indian's last marble bounces across the floor,and he starts rambling about hating humanity and the desire to be a snake instead,he orders Stosh to bite the hysterical honey,and when the snake refuses,Tim starts offing his own snakes in a completely bat-shit bananas boffo finale,setting his own shack on fire in the process,then being repeatedly bitten by his rattling pal as the girl escapes.Cue groovy,sombre,eco-friendly,hippie folk ballad and the end credits.

Does this one even need a smart-assed caption?C'mon,look at it...
Grefe,who has had a long,storied career helming such genre fare as Sting of Death,Mako:The Jaws of Death,Death Curse of Tartu,and Wild Rebels,is pretty proud of tonight's effort,and along with star Chris Robinson,who went on to act in several soap operas,has recently screened the movie publicly with q n' a and autograph sessions thrown in for attending genre nuts.Alex Rocco,who was in Florida to advertise his work in the yet-unreleased Godfather movie at the time,had an inborn fear of snakes,only agreeing to dive into the pool during filming if it was filled with rubber snakes.Grefe instead put live snakes in the water and filmed Rocco's hilarious mid-air reaction,which is a definite hoot for any lip-reading woprophiles that might be in attendance.An entertaining ride,to be sure,despite the on-screen killing of some snakes that might have a hypocritical org like PETA clucking,that you can pick up on special edition dvd,loaded with extras,thanks to BCI/Navarre.On the scale,two solid wops.

Groove on that righteously reptilian psychedelic snake toss,maaaan.

Yeah Muthas!"Stanley"(1972)'s Most Colorful Villain

We'll be putting William Grefe's 1972 horror film,"Stanley", under the microscope at a later date.Today's focus is on the memorable antagonist,Psycho Simpson,as portrayed by Paul Avery,who went on to play a tv cameraman in "Superman:The Movie"(1979),and television cameos in "Three's Company","Soap",and "Tales from the Darkside".When Thomkins(Alex Rocco) decides to take his vendetta against Tim(Chris Robinson)to the next level in Grefe's cult classic,he adds "Psycho" to his enlisted goon squad.

Psycho grooves on heavy drugs.
His background,as related to the viewer by another goon,is that "he hates snakes,and the only thing he hates more than snakes is Indians".Yeah muthas!Looking like the bastard child of Will Ferrell and Captain Sensible of punk band,The Damned,Psycho is one crazy cat with an outrageous wardrobe:a pink shirt,striped hip huggers,stars and stripes socks,red,orange and green shoes with white laces,tinted hippie shades,and a Billy Jack hat with Indian design around the brim(!).As he snorts the contents of an inhaler,Psycho has obviously blown his gourd,and could care less what the other two goons do or say.When they tell him to sit tight and guard the vehicle for a couple of hours while they poach snakes,he flips them the bird,and repeatedly says...you guessed it.

Dig that crazy outfit,muthas.

Psycho says "Yeah muthas!YEAH MUTHAS!"
When we return to Psycho later in the story,he squashes a tree crab against the bark of a tree where he is squatting.The groovy violence blows his mind,and he exclaims...

Psycho hates snakes,Indians, and tree crabs.Yeah muthas!
He stumbles off,hallucinating, into the everglades and happens onto Tim's place.Upon entering,he notices the various cages full of snakes,and the makeshift crib Tim has built for Stanley's brood of baby rattlesnakes.Still zooted on goofballs,Psycho uses the butt of his rifle to pulverize the baby rattlers on camera,then shoots and kills Hazel,Stanley's mate.Yeah muthas!

Psycho and Indian Tim in a battle to death,muthas.
When Tim returns to his place,he sees Psycho stumbling out the door, clutching his rifle and a limp,dead Hazel's body in his hands,causing Tim to snap.Psycho,focusing his drug-laden eyes on the charging man,realizes Tim is an Indian.It's on,muthas!He tries to shoot Tim,but his rifle is empty,so he decides to throw the gun at the rampaging redskin with both hands!The two men wrestle in the mud,and before Psycho can dice the native American into bits with an outboard motor,Stanley rescues his owner with a well placed bite to Psycho's neck,causing him to freak out and run into the swamps.

Psycho really hates snakes now.
For the record,there's no real reason for any of this,I just enjoy over-the-top villains in films,and let's face it,you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone more over-the-top in ANY film than Psycho Simpson.Good stuff.

YEAH MUTHAS!