Rider On the RainFrance - 1969
Dir. – Rene Clement
Monterey, 1992(?), VHS
I am entering into the binding agreement to watch this film to the end with the assumption that this movie is going to be terribly boring. It is French afterall, and at two hours is set to be truly agonizing.
A sinister looking bald guy gets off a bus into the rain. Across the street, a chainsmoking mother and her daughter fix slot-cars in a bowling alley. Later that night, the daughter is tied up and raped by baldy. When she comes to a while later, she unties herself, and blasts him down the cellar stairs with a big shotgun then finishes him off with an oar to the skull. Loading the corpse in her car, she drops it off a nearby ocean cliff. When she gets home her greasy trading Italian husband has arrived there and is waiting to belittle her.
The next day at a wedding, Charles Bronson shows up, corners the daughter and starts asking questions with greater and greater intensity and menace.
For the rest of the movie Bronson will bully the daughter about the murder, moving into her house, getting her drunk, explaining to her the criminal psychology of her victim, and finally throwing walnuts at her walls. The husband and mother appear intermittently and treat the daughter like crap in dry poorly shot boring dialogue scenes.
Another murder case accidentally gets tangled up with the original one, some rich people start harassing the daughter, and the swilly penny opera piano music reaches a cacophonic crescendo. In the end, even Bronson gets fed up with the crap and walks off without his prey.
The cover image at the top is a smaller intact version of the cover I have (above), which at some point was badly mutilated to fit into a clamshell box. The design is the same, so I'm pretty sure it was released by the same distributor.
A French poster, and a supposed DVD cover which features a much older Bronson, who looks about as bad as the film was.
The Mongrel title sequence is awesome too, pretty foreboding. Ken, a random dapper dude moves into a big rambling mansion with a bunch of unknowns, and a vicious barking dog in the front yard. Jerry, a nervous shy bookworm gives him a tour and a warning about the roommates before running off. Woody (Mitch Pileggi, or “Skinner”of The X-Files) is the asinine hotshot balding redneck Jerry warned Ken about. When one of the other roommates, somebody named “Toad”, taunts the snarling dog with a steak, the dog breaks its chains and mauls him. Everyone reacts with strenuous Seriousness, and with stage play sincerity, and Woody shoots the dog.
Soon, Jerry starts to lose his shit, getting sweatier and sweatier, hearing things in the hall at night, and ranting wildly. Each time the belchy growling mongrel sound stacks up the mostly offscreen body count, Jerry matches shot for shot with a sooty shrieking paranoid schizo panic scene.
But the dog is already dead, so that sound is coming from somewhere, I knew that irritating little shit was up to something, you don’t get that grating and harpy-like for no good reason.
The perfect kind of early 80’s gore-horror movie that has a lot of promise, a lot of ambition and a really low budget. Often this type of thing seems to overreach itself, but sheer sincerity and the tactile onscreen filth and decrepitude make Mongrel well worth drinking through.
Amazons vs. Supermen 
With their racially matched mates in tow, black man and Chinese man team up to beat up some more thugs, ostensibly to prove their worth to Dharma who is busy trampoloining into a fracas with the gullible Amazons, taunting them all the while with an incessant trampoline slide whistle sound effect. With Dharma hogging 90 percent of the screentime, and having sufficiently angered the hollering Amazons with a little panty-raid, the three heroes return to the valley to prepare for the inevitably bizarre confrontation.
Back in the house, the wife lubes Becky up with some more booze and seduces her into prolonged lesbian friction in front of a warm welcoming hearth. The husband arrives home to find the ladies in a post coital cat-nap and decides to smoke a hookah and again call his buddies who begin to show up like paisley feathered vultures to a groovy fresh roadkill.
Creeping into the party on his slime trail is Buck, and while all the other suburban hippies start grinding all over the nasty furniture he tries to dose Becky with rufies.
Just in time to save us from seeing these people dance again is Stanley who’s back to redeem his character (despite the fact he too merely wants to screw Becky) and bring another flesh fueled movie about the supposed depravity of the “free love” lifestyle which it so freely displays to a gloriously noncommital finish. Now that’s sexploitation.
Preparing for the big game, the cheer squad eats up the extras budget with auditions for a bunch of lackadaisical girls while the footballers perpetrate a bunch of typical stunts that are supposed to be serious to them, and amusing to the audience. Classroom scenes are the same, a whoopee cushion on the teachers chair, a food fight. It all has a strange quality though that matches the burned out scratched up print. All the predictable silliness is bound together with a sort of gritty flatfooted sincerity, I almost expect Eric Stoltz as Rocky Dennis to come walking in puking puppydogs. You can really feel these people acting, attacking their jobs with a vigor equaled only by the canned romance rock soundtrack.
Despite his cocky crude (still the best in the film) approach to the task, Johnnie manages to win Sally’s heart, and uses his irritating toothy Alfred E. Newman mug to rub it in Duane’s face like a gangly whining munchkin on a sugar buzz. His buddy Jesse shows a couple girls the back of his new van, and slugs the asshole gym coach in the face, and then finally the big game, the climax of the film, and based on the importance the characters place on the moment, likely the most important day of their lives.
A bunch of adults playing at being children, and trying very, very hard at it. At once funny, dramatic, dirty and irritating, none of them driven fully home. By itself, not worth much more than any other teen sex comedy I’ve seen, but in this format it’s perfect.
