Something Weird Video | Buy at Amazon | Review by Sinferno
This is the story of a poor mountain man who struggles to fit into our civilized notions of chivalry, love and acceptance. Just kidding, this is story of a Grizzly Adams-looking sexual deviant who accosts four young survivors of a plane crash, an accident he all but causes with a couple shots from his antique rifle. Let us go deeper into the bush and explore the art of survival and living off the land, sexploitation style. Catching as only catch can.
In the first few frames of the film our intrepid antihero shoots down a plane carrying the following sexploitation stock characters: Dan a rugged gentleman type; Dawn, a blonde bimbo; Sherry a brunette who almost makes Dawn look like a Mensa member by comparison; and Maureen, a fortysomething ravenous, predatory lesbian. After our intrepid foursome narrowly escape a plane crash suggested by flashing light and a tossing of some debris they wander across the scrubland, never realizing that their predicament is far less accidental than they could have ever known.
Dan, being a stern leader and a capable man with a square jaw immediately suggests he should collect some firewood as night approaches. Dawn and Sherry, being the helpful lasses that they are, offer to accompany him. Maureen speaks up, however and forbids Sherry from rejoining them, because she “doesn't want to be left alone”. This serves Dan and Dawn Just fine as they have sex the moment they find themselves alone. This plot development and the related USDA quotient of onscreen breasts being met, the two eventually rejoin the others and discuss their options. Again Dan, altruistic gent that he is, offers to stay awake all night to guard the others, and again Sherry offers to join her as well. But Maureen will have none of it. She immediately calls the girls over to her and gives them some mysterious pills which will help “relax” them.
After nightfall, Dan and Dawn stand vigilant watch by rolling around in the dirt having sex, oblivious to the world, meanwhile the Bushwhacker comes into their camp and gropes Sherry in her sleep, while she dreams about running around naked through the landscape with Dan, making love to him. Eventually the Bushwhacker – who has all the smooth romantic slow hand moves of a dog in heat – makes the mistake of waking Sherry and her screams cause Dan to drop what he is doing, (namely, Dawn) and they run back to see what happened. Even Maureen, who has been unsympathetic as can be up until this point to her fellow females tribulations, soothes Sherry by stripping her naked as she passes out from the pills and gives her a massage, all the while Dan and Dawn watch, asking Sherry sympathetically “how she feels now?”
Of course, the Bushwhacker comes back and that's when the weirdness really starts. The evil out-lander in the coonskin cap soon kidnaps Sherry and while this sounds like a really bad turn of events, it does allow lots of time for Dan and Dawn to have sex again until they happen on Sherry's dead body giving Maureen one more chance to say goodbye her way, by massaging her naked body one final time (to make sure she is properly relaxed, I'm guessing).
The Bushwacker is a terrible villain, but his ineptitude almost makes him a comedic figure despite the cold-blooded sexual assaults he hands out. Sometimes he bites his victims and beats them with small branches, yet compared to the sneaky necrophiliac ways of Maureen, I would rather take my chances with him in a survival situation even if I was female. While rape, sexual assault and murder are NEVER funny in real life, the Bushwhacker mauls his naked female victims in such a particularly sloppy, madcap, ineffectual non-objective fashion that you will be reminded of Cookie Monster attacking a box of Mallomars NOT a realistic depiction of actual sex crimes – at least until the hunting knife comes out and the scene ends...
Again, much as in the case of THE RAVAGER, this film is only watchable because it is so unrealistic and the characters all behave in counter-intuitive ways that no human beings would ever engage in were they stranded in a desert dune land chased by a skilled maniac with a gun who was hunting them and knew the terrain like the back of his hand. If Dan wasn't so eager to have sex with Dawn in every other scene and Maureen could have quelled her insatiable desire for the flesh of her fellow females, this could have been a whole different film with perhaps a pro-social message about solidarity, group dynamics and teamwork. As it stands, it just the EXACT type of film you would expect from Something Weird with the name THE BUSHWHACKER and for some of you that will be enough.
| Yucko/Neato Factor: So tritely vicious and misogynistic, it's almost an unintentional comedy. |
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| Production Values: Film stock is bleached in places. The plane crash was suggested, merely talked about (almost in passing) rather than shown. And once more, the only thing saving this one is the fact that realism of any sort would have made it too terrible to behold for any audience. Though this was from 1968, the women were attractive by the standards of any decade. |
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| Realism: The motives of the four stranded travelers in peril were short-sighted, vicious and self-serving at all times in the face of peril. The rest of it was complete nonsense. |
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| Value for Price: What the hell... at this price it's a lot more sensible (per disc purchase) than a season of Survivor on DVD. |
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| Plot: Imagine the plane crash from ALIVE! with a sexier form of cannibalism and you can pretty much envision for yourself how this plays out. |
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