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.
Monica, like the film itself, is driven by desires beyond her comprehension to give it up, but too scared or perhaps too romantically delusioned to do so. Artie is Monica's boyfriend, the class goof, along with his pal Vinnie (I made this name up, I can't remember and I don't like Vinnies). Vinnie sleeps with anything that moves, Artie wishes he could sleep with anything. He's dating Monica though, and she's got her legs crossed like a bouncer's arms. All her friends encourage her to fuck, and Vinnie makes fun of Artie to the extent that he and Monica break up. Artie hooks up with the school slut, who's also the girlfriend of the school fat jerk. Monica hooks up with creepy rapist college dude, also toucher of little kids. Newly free, the two boys go on a quest to get laid, goofy antics ensue, and, there's a few brief, somewhat cold scenes of boobs and heavy petting, some "bro" homophobic humor and then sex talk at school.
