08 March 2010

Rolling Thunder


United States - 1977
Director - John Flynn
Video Treasures, 1990, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 39 minutes

Rolling Thunder was a film written by Paul Schraeder around the same time he wrote Taxi Driver. That should give you some idea of the emotional content of the film. It comes across as a more physically savage approach to the same subject of a man deeply wounded by his experiences in war. In this case, the man is actually two men, William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones both giving excellent performances. Having just arrived home to a small Texas town after many years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp the tagline says it all; Major Charles Rane (Devane) is coming home to war! Truly a grindhouse classic, this the movie that lies at the root of brutal Tarantinoesque vengeance films and gave him the name for his defunct distribution company.

I'll use this box art post as an opportunity to inform you readers that I've modified the menus at the side of this blog. I'm keeping the genre list, but I removed the mind-numbing list of all the names and tags since it didn't get used much, and was only getting longer. I replaced it with something special for the VHS freaks, a clickable list of distributors with all the videos I've posted from each one. It will take me a while to finish updating them all since I have to go back through two years of crap, but in the end it will be worth it. Specific distributor names will also appear in the label list at the bottom of each subsequent post. Let me know what you think of the changes, and if you think a list of countries of origin or anything else might also be useful.




These two RAD Japanese boxes come from Japanese VHS Hell. They have tons of great scans, GO THERE.

3 comments:

James said...

Great posts, two of my favorites back to back.

Now, I can't who's a bigger badass - Devane in Rolling Thunder or Norris in Forced Vengeance...

Anonymous said...

I want to see this movie so bad. It desperately needs a dvd release.

James said...

Now, I can't "figure out" who's a bigger badass... wow, left out two words. I need a proofreader