'GATOR BAIT (1974)

No, that isn't Ben Affleck in drag.

I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to finally see the 1974 exploitation classic ‘GATOR BAIT, and I have to say I’m more than a little surprised by what it had to offer. The film’s rep rests squarely on the shoulders of its star, ill-fated Titian-tressed beauty Claudia Jennings, a former Playmate of the Year whose body of work lead her to being dubbed the “queen of the B’s,” and after sitting through one of her grindhouse epics it’s doubtful that she’d fade from the viewer’s memory any time soon.

Claudia Jennings: Can you say "Yowza?"

‘GATOR BAIT is a post-DELIVERANCE backwoods revenge pic that takes place deep in an unnamed bayou, a forbidding environment best avoided by those who don’t know its ways, and utterly at home in this seemingly limitless swamp is Desiree Thibodeau (Jennings), a barefoot Cajun trapper — in the skimpiest of outfits, including a pair of Daisy Dukes that pretty much doesn’t have an ass, and a potato sack blouse that allows occasional glimpses of her mouth-watering ninnies —who poaches the local wildlife to provide for herself and her younger brother and sister. Desiree’s activities are illegal but overlooked by the local sheriff who doesn’t care because her family has hunted the swamp for generations, so he figures she’s got the right by virtue of ancestral territory. Unfortunately his moron of a son, apparently the town’s only other cop, has other ideas, and along with a slow-witted hillbilly pal he lays in wait to catch Desiree in the act and offer her a choice of going to jail or fucking him and his buddy. The would-be sexual extortion goes terribly wrong, however, as Desiree eludes her pursuers after lobbing a bag full of venomous snakes onto their swamp boat; as the stupid cop shoots at the snakes, he blows holes into the boat’s hull, and shoots his homeboy in the head. Panicking, he returns to town and claims Desiree killed his friend, so the sheriff rounds up the dead guy’s outrageously inbred redneck relatives and sets off into the deep swamp to apprehend Desiree. Operating under the false impression that the poacher is a murderess, the rednecks can’t wait to get their hands on her, both to hand out their own brand of justice and get a piece of her “coon-ass.” (The Cajuns in the film are derogatorily referred to as “Coonies.")

That’s the setup, and from there viewers are taken deep into a swamp virtually untouched by man and made witness to a game of cat and mouse so overmatched that it’s like what would happen if a bunch of great white hunters had the incalculable stupidity to fuck with Tarzan on his own turf. Desiree may not have the jungle lord’s near-superhuman capabilities, but she’s plenty smart and knows her way through the bayou like it was the back of her own assless shorty-shorts, so it’s just a matter of time until she’s done killing those assholes one by one.

During the course of all of this we learn a lot about Desiree’s antagonists and swiftly realize just how vile and sleazy they are. The patriarch of the redneck family has a love/hate relationship with his sons, all of whom are at least mildly retarded or just plain mentally ill, and even disciplines the perpetually-horniest of his brood with a bullwhip when he catches the lad attempting to fuck his own very willing sister in the mud near where she was hanging the laundry. (Dad wasn’t all that pissed off about the boy wanting a piece of sis, but was seriously irked at the possibility of the voluptuous girl getting knocked up and squeezing out another dimwit.) The other redneck son holds a personal grudge against Desiree for having had the gall to cut off his balls years earlier when he tried and failed to rape her, and now wanders about with his sawed-off double-barreled shotgun serving as an ever-rigid and potent surrogate penis. And even the sheriff has a big secret: twelve years previous he’d had an affair with Desiree’s mom and “accidentally” murdered her father, a bit of information used by the rednecks as blackmail fodder, guaranteeing that their own illegal shenanigans go unchecked.

With all of this mishegoss going on there’s plenty of bad taste to go around, and once the hunt for Desiree gets underway things go from very bad to that much worse when, after searching for her home for days, the inbred posse locates the place just after our heroine has left on a three day hunting trip. The bad guys stage a home invasion that begins with them abusing Desiree’s tongueless little brother, and her nubile jailbait sister ends up in the lusty hands of the sheriff’s son and the two inbred brothers. As the two un-castrated men hold down the poor girl during the preamble to a gang rape, one of them tells the nutless wonder with the shotgun that he’s going to show him “how a real man does it;” that remark sends the castrato over the frustrated edge, so he throws his brother off of Desiree’s sister, stuffs his shotgun between her legs, and unloads both barrels, retorting “Is that manly enough fer ya?” The girl expires almost immediately, and the misogyny factor goes through the roof. No bullshit, when that bit of business happened I actually exclaimed “Oh my God!!!” and I’m pretty hard to shock. It’s not graphically depicted, but the idea alone really gets to you.

The odd thing about it is that such horrors were once commonplace in exploitation films, and yet, despite the many ultra-violent movies I’ve sat through over the decades, I still find myself jarred by such material. I can handle all manner of cinematic carnage, but the idea of some innocent girl — or any girl at all, for that matter — taking a shotgun blast to the cooter is a bit beyond the pale, so keep that bit in mind before sitting down to watch ‘GATOR BAIT with your girlfriend.

Which brings me to the oft-cited sentiment that ‘GATOR BAIT is one of many exploitation flicks held to be a feminist statement. Lemme tell ya, buddy, the makers of this film simply set out make a movie about a scantily clad hottie who kicks ass on the people who fucked with her and her family, but I strongly doubt that capital F feminism was intentionally involved in the creative process. Think about it: you have fine-ass Claudia Jennings, a woman for whom the wearing of clothing should have been a capital offense, traipsing about the fen in gear that shows off her priapism-inducing assets for all they’re worth, despite the fact that such gear is in no way conducive to the rigors of marshland hunting and trapping.

Desiree is not so much a feminist role model as she is a fantasy wild woman/jungle girl updated and transplanted to a sweltering southern bayou, and as a lifelong fan of such characters I have no problem with that. But don’t hand me that feminist over-analysis horseshit; Desiree’s a forest spirit fantasy made flesh — hell, she even looks like an anthropomorphic fox — and to say otherwise is a tad disingenuous.

Other than the surprisingly taut story, the true surprise about ‘GATOR BAIT is that considering its R rating and the presence of Jennings, the star doesn’t get naked at any point in the movie. Sure, we get tantalizing glimpses of her good stuff, but the requisite nudity for this type of flick falls to her nymphet sister who innocently strips out of her already-revealing shift and bathes in the river. That somewhat disappointed me because I’d seen provocative shots of Claudia Jennings in her Daisy Dukes and unbuttoned sleeveless shirt for over three decades, and expected the film to deliver what the ad campaign couldn’t.

But I wasn’t terribly pissed because she looked great throughout the movie, and sometimes titillation is better than in-your-face nekkidness, and the movie kind of reminded me of pinup art or Al Capp’s Wolf Gal.

Bottom line, ‘GATOR BAIT is definitely worth checking out, and is a lot better film than you’d expect from the “hicksploitation” genre, capably holding it’s own alongside the real heavy hitters of its ilk, namely DELIVERANCE and SOUTHERN COMFORT. It’s solid, down-home, grimy sleaze, and as such it works just fine. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

MACON COUNTY LINE (1974)

After having heard about how great MACON COUNTY LINE is and how it’s one of the undisputed classics of the 1970’s drive-in/”hicksploitation” genre, I finally saw it for myself and was quite surprised by a few things. First off, for years I was convinced that I’d seen it but I now realize I hadn’t, and in fact I think I confused it with one of its many subsequent imitators or fused it in my memories with some other bit of cornpone exploitation; the film I remember seeing opened just like MACON COUNTY LINE, specifically with the title being seen over a freeze-frame of a fleeing, bare-assed guy as Lavern Baker’s timeless rendition of “Jim Dandy” is heard on the soundtrack,

but for some reason I recall the version of “Jim Dandy” in the film I thought I saw as being the ultra-redneck cover done by Black Oak Arkansas. After that I just recall pretty much a feature length nighttime car chase down some backwater road featuring two scared-shitless fifties “J.D.” types pursued at high speed by a crazed sheriff who took potshots at them with a pump-action shotgun while his deputy handled the driving chores. I have no memory of why the cop was after the two teenagers, but there was definitely a sense that the cop was an insane control freak who had it in his head that those Yankee sunsabitches had done something out of line within his jurisdiction, and he simply wasn’t having it. That’s kinda/sorta the plot for MACON COUNTY LINE, but I enjoyed my garbled recollections more than the actual movie and am at a loss to explain why it’s considered a classic.

The film takes place in 1954 and introduces viewers to the Dixon brothers, Chris and Wayne (played by real-life sibs Alan and Jesse Vint), two rakehell lads who epitomize the old “free, white, and twenty-one” spirit of the pre-Civil Rights era, and drops us right into the tail end of their two-week spree of fun and pussy-hunting before they head off for military service. They’re about as likable as a pair of don’t-give-a-shit characters can be, but they both display a casual disregard for the law as evidenced by their gleeful tactics of dining and dashing, stealing money from a whore (after Chris fucks her while making her bark like a dog, easily the funniest scene in the movie), and evading two cops while simultaneously totaling their squad cars, as well as the revelation of being lifelong troublemakers and that their signing up for the military was the only option for Chris as an alternative to being sent up the river for a petty crime (we never know he’s found guilty of, but it’s alluded to that it may be statutory rape), thus Wayne joined up with him so his little brother won’t have to go it alone. During the course of their adventures they pick up blonde Texan hitchhiker Jenny (Cheryl Scott) and eventually cross the Macon County line from Louisiana into Georgia, thus setting up the tragedy to come.

Once in Georgia, the gang’s car suffers automotive distress and they pull over to a gas station in the middle of nowhere to get a new distributor cap. While waiting for the live action version of THE SIMPSONS’ Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel to effect repairs, they meet walking NRA advertisement and control freak Sheriff Reed Morgan, played by Max Baer, Jr., best known for his immortal portrayal of eternally sunny and rather dim Jethro Beaudine on THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES television series (1962-1971). The sheriff, always polite but betraying a hint of ominous menace, questions the unfamiliar trio, demanding to see identification and informing them that unless they have thirty bucks between them they’ll be considered vagrants. Having made his point — a display of territorial pissing if ever there was one — the sheriff drives off to pick up his ten-year-old son (Leif Garrett) from military school, unaware that two petty criminals have broken into his house, stolen assorted property, and raped and murdered his adoring wife (Joan Blackman). The crooks get pulled over by some other local cops, and once the stolen loot is noticed in the back seat the situation escalates into a double cop-killing, but the criminals are eventually captured. Meanwhile, our heroes have once more hit the road, but their car once more breaks down, forcing the trio to camp out…just across the way from Sheriff Morgan’s house, right when he arrives home to discover his wife’s bloody corpse. The sheriff and his son both lose it, the kid collapsing into a weepy, catatonic state, while his father spies the trio’s car and incorrectly assumes they’re the culprits. Arming himself to the teeth, the sheriff goes after the trio with guns a-blazin’, and the whole mess culminates with a pile of bodies and a terrific twist that comes seemingly from out of nowhere.

When taken at face value, MACON COUNTY LINE reads like a tense, suspenseful cautionary tale about being in absolutely the wrong place at absolutely the wrong time, but the actual film comes up lacking for a number of reasons:

• The movie clocks in at 88 minutes and the actual conflict between the sheriff and the innocent travelers doesn’t actually occur until roughly the last twenty minutes, by which time I had checked my watch more than once. And when the shit finally does go down, there’s no chase since the trio’s car has broken down; the trio holes up in an empty houseboat, so they’re stuck there waiting for the sheriff to pick them off.

• There were several times when I found myself wondering if the movie even had an editor; during the film’s 88 minutes, much of the running time is spent on endless sequences meant to drive home a feeling of local color but those segments just drag on interminably, and the attempts at humor lay there like a dead raccoon. Except for the bit with the barking whore.

• The heroes’ mischievous nature is meant to be endearing, but their assholish and potentially dangerous behavior toward others was off-putting. The only reason I sympathized with them at all during the sheriff’s crazed meltdown was because I knew they were innocent of the crime, and while they deserved some sort of comeuppance for their earlier transgressions, they certainly didn’t warrant cold-blooded execution at the hands of Jethro Beaudine.

• The wholly gratuitous sex scene between Chris and Jenny brings the movie to a complete halt and does nothing whatsoever to advance the plot, offering a small helping of the nudity that was more or less mandatory for exploitation fare of the period. You simply will not care when the sequence begins, and may even fast-forward through it like I did.

• While we come to know and like the Dixon brothers as a kind of lower-rent Duke Boys (only minus the bows-and-arrows and the General Lee), Jenny is a cipher of a character who’s there only so there can be a female among the heroes, and a female that you just know will eventually get naked for reasons previously discussed. I found her utterly superfluous to the story and genuinely feel the film would have benefited immensely from her total non-inclusion; the only suspense that Jenny’s presence could have generated would have been the possibility of her getting raped by the crazed sheriff, but while he was crazed over the death of his wife, he wasn’t that crazy. That particular female element in hicksploitation would later be famously immortalized in the far superior JACKSON COUNTY JAIL (1976).

But while I found MACON COUNTY LINE to be a vastly overrated disappointment, I was intrigued by Max Baer, Jr’s portrayal of Sheriff Morgan. In sequences not dealing with his harassment of the innocent trio, Morgan is seen as a devoted family man who has a friendly rapport with the citizens of his town, and longs for nothing more than to spend quality time with his son. Far from the psycho cop he’s often described as, Morgan is all too understandably human, control freak flaws and all, and I found it impossible to hate the guy, even when it’s revealed that he’d rather his son not associate with the black kids who play basketball across the street from the military school; Morgan’s racism comes across not as the stereotypical burning hatred usually found in a southern-fried exploitation flick, but rather as the result of being a product of his time, culture, and the accepted status quo. His explanation of his views on the subject to his son is more segregationist than flagrant “lynch them goddamned niggers” bigotry, and considering the tropes common to this genre that comes as a surprise since exploitation filmmakers certainly never had any problem with creating outright, moustache-twirling villains of the vilest order; the quintessential example of a balls-out psychotic racist asshole villain would undoubtedly be William Sanderson’s incredible Jesse Lee Kane in FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE (1977), and when compared to him Sheriff Morgan is certainly no villain. A hardassed control freak driven to violence by irrational grief, yes, but a villain per se? I don’t think so.

There’s been a lot of misleading stuff written about MACON COUNTY LINE over the years that paints the film as considerably more than it is, and as a curious student of the grindhouse/drive-in genre you may be intrigued by its rep, but bear in mind that much of its legend may be heavily colored by fond nostalgia, and that’s why the ready availability of such oft-cited “classics” on DVD can be the genre’s own worst enemy. Seeing is definitely not always believing, so TRUST YER BUNCHE and approach this one with no expectations if you feel you absolutely must see one of the perceived landmarks of hicksploitation pantheon.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

POOR PRETTY EDDIE (1975)

"Now, uh, did ol' Eddie, uh, I mean the rapist...did he bite ya on the titties?"
-Sheriff Slim Pickens, good-naturedly conducting a post-rape questioning of the assaulted woman.

Two weeks before her next concert, popular black jazz singer Elizabeth "Liz" Wetherly (Leslie Uggams) gets in her car and drives until she finds the most rustic, backwoods, middle-of-nowhere place where she can clear her head and relax. When her car breaks down before finding an ideal spot in which to chill out (cue ominous banjo music), she ends up at "Bertha's Oasis," a decaying motel that would give Tennessee Williams hives, run by its namesake, a boozy, washed-up, fat and aging former entertainer (played to great effect by Shelley Winters), and her questionable staff that consists of somewhat-slow handyman Keno (Ted Cassidy, best known as Lurch from the classic ADDAMS FAMILY television series), who really loves his dog, and delusional, talentless Elvis impersonator Eddie (Michael Christian). Though openly bitchy and hostile to him, the starstruck and awkward Eddie takes a sweaty shine to Liz and hopes to wow her with his "talent" and thereby get an entry into showbiz. The attention Eddie shows to Liz does not sit well with the already racist Bertha (who has been in a long-term sex thing with him and will do anything to keep him because she knows he's the last dick she'll ever get) but her efforts to steer Eddie away from putting his cream in Liz's coffee amount to naught as Eddie sabotages Liz's car and, mistakenly under the impression that Liz fancies him, rapes Liz while a tender country song is heard on the soundtrack. The heinous act is tastefully interspersed with footage of good ol' boys watching a pair of hunting dogs fucking and, thankfully, the rape is shot in a surrealistically slo-mo fashion with no nudity. From that moment onward, Liz finds herself trapped in what amounts to a creepy David Lynchian version of Hooterville as translated into the hicksploitation genre (yes, there is such a thing, but that's a discussion for a whole other post).

At first, Liz seems nothing more than rather annoyed at having been violated, a state of attitude and composure that persists until it becomes clear that there is likely no way out of the forgotten redneck limbo. As the narrative progresses, the audience is "treated" to more of Liz's abuse and humiliation at the hands of Eddie, who thwarts her escape attempts, keeping her as his captive and more or less sex slave, the local sheriff (Slim Pickens) and the local justice of the peace (an exceptionally grubby-looking Dub Taylor), and it seems like our heroine may be losing her mind thanks to the perpetual horrors she endures as her chances of ever finding her way back to civilization appear slimmer with each passing moment. Things finally reach an insane and apocalyptic conclusion that reads like what would have happened had Sam Peckinpah — complete with signature slow-mo and guns-a-blazin' action — directed an installment of HEE HAW.

If any single image could sum up the sordid tone of POOR PRETTY EDDIE, this would be it.

Also known as REDNECK COUNTY (a much better title that communicates exactly what the film's about) and BLACK VENGEANCE, POOR PRETTY EDDIE is one seriously fucked-up and nasty piece of work and I intentionally left out describing the majority of the film's incredibly lurid content so you can witness it for yourself, but by anyone's estimation of such things, this flick is definitely one of the sleaziest pieces of cinematic vileness ever unleashed. Violent, insane in a very inbred way and toxically charged with casual race-hate, it's also surprisingly well-made for an unmitigated piece of utter trash. It has visual flourishes that are quite artsy and it conveys a sense of claustrophobic, white lightnin'-soaked hopelessness that places the viewer right there alongside the protagonist as she languishes in a nightmarish southern netherworld where no one else finds any of its horrors to be in any way out of line with the daily routine.

The performances are all far better than anything to be expected from a hicksploitation film, with my girl Shelley Winters leading the pack.

Shelley Winters as the boozed-up, desperately horny Bertha.

Once a glamorous young starlet, when middle age and its attendant poundage got the better of her, Winters wisely chucked the young hottie roles and embarked on a career reboot as a completely convincing horrible, fat old cunt who lived up to all the negative connotations of that particular extreme pejorative, most notably seen in her Oscar-winning turn as Rose-Ann D'Arcy in A PATCH OF BLUE (1965). I love Winters in sleazy, villainous parts, and as Bertha she's simultaneously pathetic and loathsome, in many ways providing the wretched center around which the story's events revolve.

Michael Christian as the titular piece of boondocks vermin.

Also of note is Michael Christian as Eddie, a man of almost seismically-detectable worthlessness whose Elvis fantasy and weird musical performance would be laughable were it not such an obvious precursor to Dean Stockwell's creepy crooner in BLUE VELVET (1986). At first merely uncomfortably awkward, Eddie is slowly revealed as a seriously deranged sociopath who is protected by the ways and culture of his backwoods home, with even the local authorities (such as they are) writing off his weird behavior and crimes as jes' some harmless good ol' boy funnin'. What lays just below his surface is a volatile psycho whose demeanor can switch from a childlike and sincere need for kindness and approval to staggering acts of violence and cruelty in the blink of an eye. Christian is very good here and I would like to check out some of his other work.

Surprisingly, her character's plight notwithstanding, Leslie Uggams is easily the weakest element in the film. She at first portrays Liz as something of a bitch, but after the first rape occurs she acts like nothing much more serious than a purse-snatching took place, only occasionally registering umbrage or a slight bit of post-traumatic freaking out, and later still she kind of drifts from one scene to another with little protest over her treatment by all and sundry, which, when all things are considered, is incredibly unlikely, trapped among twisted hillbillies or not. By the end of the film she's kind of zombified, only springing to vengeful life during the final two minutes. But whatever the deficiencies in Uggams' performance, which I'm certain is largely the fault of the script, we still root for Liz and want to see her get the hell out of that alternate-universe Mayberry post-haste.

Bested only by MANDINGO (1975) and GOODBYE UNCLE TOM (1971) and only a notch more severe than FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE (1977) in terms of films that will absolutely send black folks into a full-on state of homicidal apoplexy, POOR PRETTY EDDIE can be read as DELIVERANCE for black people, and as such I fucking loved it. However, the DVD print that I watched looked like it was transferred from an old VHS tape (which I'm willing to bet was actually the case) and features the kind of washed-out look I remember from the much-rented used copy of PINK FLAMINGOS I owned back in the mid-1980's. Occasionally dodgy sound is also on hand and I had to keep turning up the sound to catch dialogue I couldn't quite hear. Also, in some places the print is so murky that I could not discern exactly what the hell was going on. The film just ends abruptly; no "The End," no credits, no nothing, just an immediate return to the disc's menu, which consists solely of PLAY MOVIE and SCENE SELECTIONS options. Hopefully a distributor with more on the ball than 905 Entertainment will eventually release a crisp print (provided one still exists) with some much-needed extras, including commentary or even just the goddamned trailer, ferfucksakes!