Some Other Movies From 1978 (2)

For further background on the year in film please refer to the Some Other Movies From 1978 entry.

Some things that happened in 1978:

• The Copyright Act of 1978 took effect.  Might not sound like a big deal, but it was.
• The Sex Pistols held their last concert.
• Ted Bundy killed several women at a sorority house (for details see: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile)
• Director Roman Polanski skipped bail and fled to France.
• Electrical workers in Mexico City discovered the remains of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan.
• The first global positioning satellite was sent into orbit.
• The San Francisco city council signed a gay rights bill.
• The World Cup was held in Argentina.
• The leaders of Egypt and Israel won a Nobel Peace Prize for working out their differences.
• Vietnam and Cambodia weren't getting along well.  For that matter, neither were Ethiopia and anyone else.

Linked entries can be viewed in their entirety on YouTube.

Excellent

1. Watership Down

Part rabbit-oriented adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book stories, part unspeakable horror that terrorized a generation.  I can remember watching it when I was little, and it sure gave me some nightmares.  The animation is excellent for the time, and the script was well written.

2. Magic

Anthony Hopkins (!) stars as a ventriloquist who's more than he seems.  Hopkins really knocked it out of the park with his performance.  If you're ever wondering what a great actor can do with a great part, give this film a look.  Richard Attenborough, an incredibly underrated director and actor himself, was behind the camera.

Fun Fact: Both Norman Jewison and Steven Spielberg were considered for the director's chair, while both Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro were considered for "Corky."

70s Gloriousness

1. Hooper

Damn Sally Field was sexy back then.  Hooper, Stay Hungry, Smokey and the Bandit... the list goes on and on.  Sure, she won the Best Actress Oscar the following year for Norma Rae - an honor she truly deserved - but let us not forget how SEXY Sally Field was in the late 70s.

In Hooper Field costars with Burt Reynolds (R.I.P.).  Reynolds plays a stuntman nearing the end of his career, and Fields plays his girlfriend.  It's all silly fun, and those who scoff at the implausibility of the barfight at the Palomino are missing something.  Hal Needham, who knew a thing or two about stuntwork and also directed Reynolds (and Field) in Smokey and the Bandit, directed this one too.

And it really has everything: huge, flared bellbottoms with stars, rocket-powered Trans-Ams, people drinking and driving without seatbelts, doctors smoking in hospitals, "zaniness," and jokes that aren't all that funny but which Burt Reynolds somehow manages to make funny anyway.  In 1978 this movie almost made as much money as Star Wars, and that's saying something.

Fun Fact: After their "bender" Reynolds and co. watch outtakes from Deliverance at his house.

Some Good Ones

1. Death on the Nile

Whatever happened to Lois Chiles?  1979's Moonraker, and then nothing!  Wikipedia says she took a three-year hiatus from acting, and after that Hollywood kind of forgot about her.

Death on the Nile adapts Agatha Christie's famous novel.  Aside from Chiles, Mia Farrow, David Niven, Angela Lansbury and many others make up the cast.  If you liked the recent Knives Out you'll probably also like this one.  The director, John Guillermin, also directed The Towering Inferno.

Fun Fact: Another film adaptation of Christie's novel is due this year.  This version of Death on the Nile is directed by Kenneth Branagh, who is also starring as Hercule Poirot.

2. The Boys from Brazil

On the one hand it's a great premise: Nazis hiding out in South America, and Nazi hunters desperately trying to find them.  On the other hand it's bungled in the execution.  The beginning of this movie is solid, but it somehow fails to generate any kind of tension.  Laurence Olivier's character is a bit too bumbling to be credible, and many of the characters aren't fleshed out to anyone's satisfaction.  And why are the Nazis all speaking English?  In Brazil?  Just to make it easier for people to record their conversations?

Anyway, once it shifts into science fiction mode it gets better.  I liked it, but there are definitely better movies from that year.

Fun Fact: Gregory Peck starred in this two years after The Omen.  In both movies he plays a "father" who sires... EVIL!

Random Thought: A sequel to this movie, told from "Bobby's" point of view could be interesting.  I know they did something similar with Omen II and III, but those movies were distinctly lacking in Nazis.

3. Capricorn One

80% of this movie is excellent, but toward the end there's a coincidence that's really hard to buy into, and it really flubs the landing.  But yeah - up to the last 15 minutes or so it's great.

Peter Hyams directed this movie about a NASA-centric conspiracy.  As this movie is less famous in 2020, I don't want to give away any more than that.  Hal Holbrook, James Brolin and Elliot Gould star.  I'm guessing the studio got nervous about its length, and there were some shenanigans in the editing room.  It's really too bad, because if it had been allowed to run its course it would have been much, much better.

4. The Legacy

It's a decent horror movie, even if the person who scored it should've been fired.  There are moments where the soundtrack completely destroys the mood - and horror movies are all about mood.

The beautiful Katharine Ross and Sam Elliot (!) star as two Americans mixed up with a group of sinister British aristocrats.  Richard Marquand, the director, would go on to direct both Return of the Jedi (!) and Jagged Edge in the 80s.

Fun Fact 1: The Who's Roger Daltrey appears in this.

Fun Fact 2: Despite winning several awards, Katharine Ross was never as famous as she could have been.  She turned down several high profile roles for various reasons.  Many of these roles went to Jacqueline Bisset, who appeared in The Greek Tycoon (below).  Ross married costar Sam Elliot years after filming The Legacy.  They remain married to this day.

Fun Fact 3: Charles Gray, who appears as one of the manor's "guests," also appeared in the Bond films You Only Live Twice and Diamonds are Forever.  In Diamonds are Forever he played the role of Blofeld.

5. Killer of Sheep

Less a story than a series of scenes set in the same black neighborhood.  Parts of this black and white student film are very memorable, but a couple of the actors are so self-conscious in front of the camera that it took me right out of the movie.

Weirdness

1. Jubilee

Adam Ant is in this!  Beyond that, it's about... uh... not exactly sure.  You see, there's the queen of England, right... and her fortune teller/court astrologer/whatever he is is telling her about the future... and then it's the future, kind of like A Clockwork Orange but a lot lower-budget... and then... and then...  I dunno.  Watch it if you want to feel "arty?"  I'm not into punk, and some of the acting in this movie is unspeakably bad, but it's nothing if not unusual.

Not Bad, but Just Not My Thing

1. The Last Waltz

Martin Scorsese directed this documentary on The Band's last show.  And I'm so NOT into The Band.  Watching this film in 2020, I was moved by their professionalism (that drummer had such a nice, light touch), but the music itself did nothing for me.  The movie FM, as terrible as it is, came out the same year and offers a glimpse at the niche The Band occupied.

Some Bad Ones

1. The (First) Great Train Robbery

Heist movie featuring Sean Connery, one of his less convincing hairpieces, and Donald Sutherland.  Michael Crichton directed this movie from a screenplay he wrote.  Some of the double entendres are amusing, but this film fails to build any kind of momentum.  The heist at the end just kind of happens, and it's hard to care about it one way or the other.

2. The Greek Tycoon

Aristotle Onassis gets a thinly veiled Jackie Collins/Danielle Steele treatment.  Anthony Quinn stars as the titular tycoon, with Jacqueline Bisset as Jackie Kennedy.  Quinn does his best to elevate the material, but the script just isn't very good.

Fun Fact 1: L. Lee Thompson, who directed this movie, also directed The Guns of Navarone and the original Cape Fear.  He ended his career directing some of Charles Bronson's more forgettable movies.

Fun Fact 2: Despite being cast as a Greek in this and other movies, Anthony Quinn was born in Mexico to an Irish father and a Mexican mother.

3. The Wild Geese

An extremely worn-down-looking Richard Burton leads a team of ex-military pals into darkest Africa.  It could have been a good movie, but it really goofs the military tactics (or lack thereof) used by the mercenaries.  As it is the solemn ending they were going for never feels earned.

So Bad It's Good

1. The Initiation of Sarah

FORESHADOWING.  A whole lotta foreshadowing.  And before you can say "Shelley Winters" or "Morgan Fairchild," Sarah is using her "gifts" for EVIL.  Yup.  Straight up evil.  It'll remind you a bit of Carrie, though in this case the "powers of the mind" have been exported to a college setting in which sororities battle for... something.  I'm not sure what.

Fun Fact: This movie was remade for TV in 2006.  Morgan Fairchild was also in the remake.

2. Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell

Hey, it's Richard Crenna!  Just a few years later he'd appear in First Blood as Colonel Trautman.  In that movie it was strictly military uniform, while in this movie he's clad in the finest men's wear the 70s had to offer.  Just check out that pantsuit.  Damn, Richard Crenna, you looking GOOD!!

The most hilarious part of this movie is the showdown at the end.  I don't want to give it away, but when the devil dog shows its true colors it's hysterical.

3. Message from Space

Japanese Star Wars ripoff with a racially mixed cast.  It's not as memorably bad as Starcrash (below), but it sure isn't Star Wars.  I had some trouble following the plot, but apparently an oppressed people disperse some kind of "seed" throughout the universe, and those who come upon their seeds become one of the seven heroes that will save the universe from the bad guy.

Fun Fact: Sonny "Street Fighter" Chiba is in this.

4. Spider-man Strikes Back

It's somehow even shoddier than the first TV movie.  Nicholas Hammond reprises his role as Peter Parker.  In this one a "Mr. White" is after an atomic bomb, and - as one would expect - a whole lotta coincidences lead up to that not happening.  My biggest complaint about this movie is that there's no karate fight between Spider-man and Mr. White.

Fun Fact 1: When the security guards are chasing Spider-man into/out of the lab, one of them says something to the effect of "That's Dr. Banner's lab!"  The implication being that Peter Parker is a student in the college where Bruce Banner is a professor.

Fun Fact 2: Joanna Cameron, who also appears in this movie, was the star of The Secrets of Isis TV show.

Fun Fact (?) 3: I'm fairly certain the Western-themed backlot toward the end of the movie is the same backlot seen in Hooper (above).

So Bad You Gotta See It

1. Starcrash

"Imperial battleship!  Halt the flow of time!"

SUPER low budget attempt to cash in on the Star Wars craze.  Marjoe Gortner, that titan of 70s B movies, stars as an... android?  Or something?  Caroline Munro, seen to better effect in The Spy Who Loved Me, costars as his copilot.  And hey, it's David Hasselhoff!  This is pre-Knight Rider folks - something for the history books.

Yet the true stars of this less-than-stellar Star Wars knockoff are the unspecial effects.  Apparently unsatisfied with the white stars seen in George Lucas' far superior film, the person in charge of special effects on this movie made them rainbow colors.  The models?  They were tiny in reality, and they look even tinier on film.

Fun Fact 1: Italian director Luigi Cozzi contributed to several of Dario Argento's films.  

Fun Fact 2: Caroline Munro also appeared in 1967's non-Eon production of Casino Royale - so she was a Bond girl twice over.  Much later on, in the 80s, the appeared in Adam Ant's video for "Goody Two Shoes."

Couldn't Go There

1. Faces of Death

I gave it a try.  I got to the part where they started cutting corpses open.  Then started thinking about the barbecue I had earlier for dinner.  That was it for me.

People who grew up with the internet will probably have a hard time understanding how this series developed the following it did.  Just cast your mind back to 1978: no internet, only four or five channels, and the home video revolution was just around the corner.  In other words, it was a lot harder to see dead people and explicit sex back then.  In 2020 you can just type whatever horrors you're looking for into Google and you'll get at least a few authentic images.  In 1978 people had to use their imaginations a lot more.

Porn

1. Hot Teenage Assets

As you probably guessed, this movie details the aftermath of World War I following the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.  The "teenage" in the title is a reference to the time period in which the global conflict took place, while the "hot assets" is a reference to disputed territories whose status was clarified by the Treaty of Versailles.

Either that or "Cathy" learns the pleasure of anal sex.  If true, let's just say that Cathy's end leads to a happier conclusion than the First World War, which contributed a great deal to the second.

2. Debbie Does Dallas

I get why this movie was such a hit.  The production values were much higher than those of most adult films of the time, it doesn't take itself too seriously, and star Bambi Woods was smokin' hot.  There are a couple urban legends about Woods' "disappearance" from the porn industry, but in all likelihood she just decided that it wasn't for her after Debbie Does Dallas III.

Related Entries:

Some Other Movies From 1977 (2)
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Some Other Movies From 1976 (2)
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Some Other Movies From 1978

The last one!  For now at least.  With this entry I've watched and reviewed at least 15 movies from every year I've been alive.  It hasn't always been easy, it hasn't always been entertaining, but I suppose I've learned a lot.

In case you're curious, I began this quest in September 2017, with the Some Other Movies From 1980 entry.  From there I worked forward through the even years to 2018, and from 2018 I worked backward through the odd years to 1975.  From 1975 I worked forward through 1976 and 1978.  44 years altogether, making for at least 660 movies and at least 990 hours.  No wonder it took me so long!

In 1978 I turned three.  You'd think my mom would've kept me out of the local movie theater, but I have a clear memory of seeing Superman in a drive-in that year.  The first movie I ever saw?  Quite possibly.

The top 5 movies of 1978 were Grease, Superman, Animal House, Every Which Way But Loose and Heaven Can Wait.  I never liked Grease (sorry, just not into musicals), but I still like the rest of these movies very much.

Other good movies of that year were Hooper, The Deer Hunter, Halloween, Coming Home, Dawn of the Dead, Thank God It's Friday (I know it's ridiculous but I love it), Up in Smoke, Days of Heaven (my favorite Terrence Malick movie), Force 10 from Navarone, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Worst movie?  I really couldn't find one from this year.  As I searched through Wikipedia I realized that I haven't seen that many movies from 1978, and that all of those I'd seen (except for Grease) I liked very much.

Does this mean 1978 was a great year for movies?  Or just that I've only seen the highlights?  I suppose we'll discover the answer together below.

Excellent

1. Blue Collar

Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto star in this look at life in an auto assembly plant.  This was Paul Schrader's first outing as director, and I'd have to say it's both an unqualified success and Richard Pryor's best movie.  

Fun Fact: Pryor, Keitel and Kotto despised each other.  Their disagreements almost derailed the entire production.

2. The Fury

ESP, telekinesis, pyrokinesis... the late 70s was a good time to film a "powers of the mind" movie.  In The Fury - just like in The Medusa Touch (below) - a young man harbors an extraordinary ability.  This young man happens to be Kirk Douglas' son, who was abducted by a shady government agency.  Brian De Palma (yep, he directed this one, too) builds up a wonderful sense of dread in this movie, and Amy Irving is great in the lead role.

Fun Fact #1: Darryl Hannah is in this if you look real hard.

Fun Fact #2: I love both movies, but this one anticipated David Cronenberg's Scanners by several years.

3. Coma

I still think this was one of the best things Michael Crichton was ever involved in.  Genevieve Bujold and Michael Douglas were also excellent as the leads.  It's on the slow side, but it's grounded in enough details to make it seem plausible.  In Coma a doctor uncovers a conspiracy involving a medical institute, and it gets more and more paranoid from there.

Fun Fact #1: Bujold's friend is played by Lois Chiles, who would appear as Holly Goodhead in Moonraker the following year.

Fun Fact #2: This was Ed Harris' first movie.  He has a few lines in the pathology room.

4. Straight Time

In the 70s people put a lot of money into pay phones.  You see a lot of that in Blue Collar.  You also see a lot of it in Straight Time.

In Straight Time Dustin Hoffman stars as an ex-con trying to make it on the outside after doing six years for burglary.  It's a great movie and also very overlooked.

Sadly Forgotten

1. F.I.S.T.

Sylvester Stallone stars as a labor organizer in the 1930s.  For me this movie was the first instance of Stallone exhibiting the star power that would make him famous.  Sure, Rocky appeared two years before, but in this movie you can see him trying on a completely different persona, and speaking dialogue that Rocky Balboa would have struggled with.  In F.I.S.T. director Norman Jewison was also really on to something, and it's a shame some of the critics at the time couldn't see past Stallone's most recent success.

I'd recommend breaking it into two sittings though.  It's pretty long.

Some Good Ones

1. Remember My Name

Geraldine Chaplin had such a circuitous (torturous?) career in Hollywood.  Her famous father, years of obscurity, and then a role playing her own grandmother in 1992's Chaplin.

In Remember My Name Chaplin plays a woman stalking her ex-husband.  Casting Anthony Perkins as the object of her obsession was also a nice touch.  This movie feels like it could have been filmed yesterday.

Fun Fact: Alfre Woodard and Jeff Goldblum were in this, back when nobody knew who they were.

2. An Unmarried Woman

Was this the height of Jill Clayburgh's career?  Sure feels like it, but I'm not sure.  I liked her a lot in Semi-Tough, even if she was wasted on Silver Streak.

In this movie she plays a formerly married woman newly on the market.  Her relationship with her daughter is a little weird, but the performances are good and Clayburgh does a good job of holding the movie together.  In my opinion it's not nearly as good as Remember My Name (above), but it tells an interesting story nonetheless.

3. The Medusa Touch

It wastes too much time dancing around its subject matter, but The Medusa Touch is still an interesting study of a man who may or may not have the power to kill people with his mind.  Richard Burton steals every scene he's in, and even if it's laborious it has the same kind of creepiness - the same worry over causality - that made The Omen and The Exorcist such hits.

4. The Driver

Ryan O'Neal stars as the titular driver, with Bruce Dern as a cop out to nab him.  It's a solid action movie that does exactly what it sets out to do.  On a Movie Manliness Scale of 1 to 10, 10 being Clint Eastwood's second-to-last speech in Unforgiven, this movie's a 9.5.

5. Jaws 2

The great Roy Scheider was still on board for this one, even if Spielberg, Shaw and Dreyfuss had already abandoned ship.  Of course it's not as good as the first movie, of course it gets silly at times, but it's an enjoyable two hours.

Fun Fact: The guy who directed this film also did Supergirl.

6. Drunken Master

Jackie Chan sets the stage for the glorious Hong Kong action spectacles of the early 80s.  There's a lot of history here, and of course Chan wasn't the first on the scene, but you can glimpse something new in Drunken Master.  The fight choreography is a lot tighter, there's more humor, and a lot of the fat was cut off the script.

Deja Vu

1. The Boys in Company C

Fucking Hollywood has tricked me yet again.  Lee Ermey is in this, playing the same role he played in Full Metal Jacket.  Seriously.  Nine years earlier.  So when you hear them talk about how Ermey was some kind of "surprise find" with regard to the casting for Kubrick's Vietnam film, don't listen - they'd already been down this road with him long before.

Kubrick, Stone, De Palma and Coppola aren't behind the wheel for this one, so of course it lacks that kind of polish, but The Boys in Company C covers a lot of territory familiar from later 80s Vietnam War classics - and it was there first.  It even anticipates American Gangster by a few decades.

This movie, by the way, would make a good double feature with Coming Home, which was released the same year.

Sad but True: Nominating Andrew Stevens for a Golden Globe - as good as he is in this movie - was bullshit.  Stan Shaw, who plays Tyrone Washington, was the one who deserved that kind of recognition.

2. Long Weekend

An unhappily married couple embark on a camping trip and find themselves under assault.  It reminded me a lot of Lars von Trier's Antichrist minus the extreme gore.  It also reminded me of Wake In Fright, another Australian "horror" film from the same time period.  Long Weekend isn't nearly as good as Antichrist or Wake In Fright, but it's undeniably atmospheric.

Fun Fact 1: There was a remake starring James Caviezel in 2003.  It holds a coveted 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Fun Fact 2: There's a documentary about movies such as Long Weekend.  Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! was released in 2008.  I'd love to see it.

Weirdly Historic

1. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin 少林三十六房

You might recognize the star of this movie, Gordon Liu, from Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies.  The actor who plays the villain was also the "human balloon" in John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China.  A lot of the bigger Hong Kong stars made transitions to Hollywood later on.

And forgive me if I ramble a bit here, but I live in Taiwan and have studied its history for years.  The "tartars" spoken of in the beginning are Ching Dynasty officials, sent to Canton Province to consolidate that dynasty's hold on the southern parts of China.  The heroes of this movie are Ming loyalists hoping to restore the "native" (ethnically Chinese) Ming Dynasty to power, which was displaced by the Ching.  Many ethnic Chinese regarded the Ching as northern barbarians.

The good guys in this movie, the Ming loyalists, are attempting to establish communications with the court of Jeng Cheng-gong, a pirate-turned-feudal lord who had forced the Dutch out of Taiwan.  Jeng Cheng-gong's stated goal was the restoration of the Ming Dynasty in China, and this goal made him a likely ally for the heroes in the movie.  In The 36th Chamber of Shaolin the good guys win in the short term, but in the long term the Ching would rule for hundreds of years.  The Ching would endure to become China's last dynasty, which would collapse in the early 1900s after years of civil war and the depredations of foreign powers.

And then, kung fu.  Gordon Liu has to get revenge, right?  Those rascals killed his dad after all.  He escapes to a Shaolin temple where he learns kung fu, and you can probably guess what happens after that.

The Shaolin (or Shiao Lin or Xiao Lin) temples were in essence subversive religious organizations, and the Ching Dynasty had a lot of trouble with those.  The most famous example is the Boxer Rebellion, but the Taiping Rebellion could be another example.  Even now the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has issues with this type of organization, as seen in their persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.

But I digress.  Or do I?  Whether I do or whether I don't, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is one of the best - if not the best - kung fu movies I've ever seen, and this fact, weirdly, has little to do with the fight choreography.  It's just a well-crafted action movie that tells an interesting story.

Definitely not Good, but VERY Late 70s

1. FM

Just check out that room full of LPs during the credits!  This, and special "in concert" appearances by Linda Ronstadt AND Jimmy Buffett!  Oh, and I almost forgot the scene in Tower Records - back when they really sold records!

The cast?  Let's just say that some of them were in much better movies, others went on to much better movies, and others didn't really go anywhere at all.  The plot?  As you'd expect it's about an FM radio station.  Something something not wanting to play army jingles something something.

Cleavon Little, by the way, deserved the Oscar for Pretending to Like Songs That No Self-Respecting Black Man Would Ever Like.

Some Bad Ones

1. California Suite

I fucking hate plays.  And this movie feels way too much like a play.  Neil Simon wrote it, Herbert Ross directed it, and even though I like a lot of the cast members it just wasn't working.

People only have certain kinds of conversations in plays.  In real life they say "Fuck you" and disappear for several years.  They're probably right in doing so.

My One Coherent Thought for the Day: Michael Caine was terrible at picking movies.  Great actor, but when he was in a good movie it was almost by accident.  He and Maggie Smith are excellent in this movie, but the rest of this film ruins it.  For every The Man Who Would Be King there's a Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and for every The Dark Knight there's a Journey 2: The Mysterious Island.  I admire his work ethic, but he could have been more selective.

2. Convoy

"Did you ever ride in a truck?  Do you want to?"

Sam Peckinpah sort of directed this.  Kris Kistofferson stars as a trucker, with Ali MacGraw (and a terrible perm) as a woman he meets on the road.  This movie could be seen as the highlight of the late 70s trucker/trucking craze, and yes, CB radios abound.  It was the most commercially successful movie Peckinpah ever directed, and also one of the last.  The first half is solid, but during the second it really wears out its welcome.

Fun Fact: The big afro dude from Car Wash is in this.

Not-So-Fun Fact: As has been discussed elsewhere, Peckinpah was having serious substance abuse issues around this time.  During the filming of Convoy it got so bad that his Cross of Iron star James Coburn was called in to act as second unit director.  Coburn went on to direct most of this movie.

3. Pretty Baby

Susan Sarandon would go on to star in Louis Malle's Atlantic City, a movie I loved, but this one wasn't doing anything for me.  I suppose those involved thought the setting would go some distance toward making this movie interesting, but this story about life in a New Orleans brothel feels very staged.  Brooke Shields' nude scenes in this film (she was 12) have caused some critics to label this "child pornography," and even with that aside I'd have to say that this movie just isn't very good.*

4. I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Robert Zemeckis directed this teen comedy about the Beatles coming to America.  Critics liked it, but it bored the hell out of me.  Reminded me a lot of American Graffiti - another movie I'm not fond of - and I liked this one even less.

5. Five Deadly Venoms 五毒

Normally I'd be fully onboard with this kind of kung fu ridiculousness, but it's SO talky.  The fight at the end and the torture scenes are cool, but between the bits of action there's SO much dialogue.

Fun Fact: This movie enjoys a huge cult following, encompassing everything from Kill Bill to the Wu-Tang Clan.

6. Wilderness Family 2 (a.k.a. The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family)

If the boy hit the can how did it "come within two feet" of the old timer's head?  Where did they get the apples for that apple pie?  Have they considered the dangers of domesticating that many wild animals?  The prevalence of rabies?  This movie prompts many such questions, and answers few.

For a more nuanced movie on a similar topic I recommend 2016's Captain Fantastic.  Hell, even The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams is better.

Related Entries:

Some Other Movies From 1976
Some Other Movies From 1975
Some Other Movies From 1977
Some Other Movies From 1979

*Maybe I'm going to come off as a prude when I say this, but this was the first movie that actually made me feel dirty for watching it.  This said, that "dirty" feeling probably falls outside the bounds of a critical analysis of this movie, so I'm just including this footnote as a warning.  One of the last scenes in this movie really turned my stomach, and I never want to see anything like that again.