BLOODY, SPICY MOVIES: Bare Knuckles (1977)

     When I started this blog, I occasionally did some movie reviews and I'm going to try to add a new one every now and then to shake things up. Never fear, I'll figure out how to tie it all back to books. 

    Bare Knuckles is a L.A. shot 70s grindhouse/drive-in picture. So, a good kind of picture. Robert Viharo stars, he's probably best known for being in Valley of the Dolls. It co-stars former child-star Sherry Jackson, Gloria Hendry (from Live and Let Die) pops up too. Helping Viharo along the way is John (Black Shampoo) Daniels as, uh, a character named Black.  Even my man George "Buck" Flowers is in it, so you really know it was shot in L.A. It's got a pure-paperback-plot. Viharo is Kane, a bounty hunter on the trail of a kung-fu serial killer who's targeting women using his own martial arts skills. Yeah. Radical, right?

    Writer/director Don Edmond had a brief directorial career in the 70s, directing this, but most notably Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, its sequel and a handful of other movies. So, he's got some trash credentials. And he made a pretty fast-moving picture with all the things a drive-in audience would want in 1977. There's nudity, there's sexism, racism, a slight hint of giallo and plenty of sleaze. But most importantly there's plenty of action, both in the fist-fightin' and a you-know-this-was-too-dangerous car chase where Kane drives a bitchin' 1968 Plymouth Road Runner and hunts a guy on a motorcycle. This chase goes on forever and morphs into foot chase and then into the climatic brutal fight scene between Kane and the evil Kung-Fu Killer, who unfortunately for the movie, looks like a buffer Rick Moranis. 

    Low-budget 70s filmmaking hits different. They were shooting in dingy places, on the street without permits and the whole thing just has a dangerous vibe. Half the fun of these kinds of movies is checking out the surroundings, seeing long-lost artifacts on the street of a time long gone. There's a scene that takes place outside an old Pizza Hut and you can't buy that type of nostalgia. There are times where really feels like one-step above porn-level filmmaking, but that's charming to me at this point. Also, the picture looks pretty good which isn't surprising because this an early D.P. credit for Dean Cundey who shot Halloween (1978) and a lot of other John Carpenter films. Carpenter's early partner Debra Hill even served as script supervisor. It's funny how things like this happen. 

    But this is primarily a book blog, right? Yep. I'm getting there. First off Bare Knuckles is one of the closet films to really capture the seedy vibe of a 70s Leisure/Manor/Canyon paperback. It could have been a story from the pen of someone writing as Bruno Rossi, Len Levinson on vacation to Hollywood or a tale someone paid William Crawford to drunkenly write for the movies. And with Kane albeit brief partnership with, uh, Black there's minor shades of Ralph Dennis's Hardman books. I'm surprised there was never a really long going Men's Adventure series about a bounty hunter. It seems like a no-brainer. Tough crime stories, nasty villains on the loose, tough guy hero, seems simple. Alas it never was. But we have Bare Knuckles to show us what we missed. 

    But wait, wait there's more! Lead actor Robert Viharo is the father of private-eye writer Will Viharo who's first book, Love Stories Are Too Violent for Me is minor classic. Viharo's an interesting cat, living a Tiki-fused life with side gigs as a film programmer and hosting Thrillsville a burlesque/film show. He continues to write novels, but now openly experiments with the private eye novel form with added science fiction, horror and other gonzo touches. He's a great writer. Will talking about Bare Knuckles at some point got me to be on the look-out and eventually watch it.

    So, if any of that sounds good to you, check it out. It's free on Tubi, the best place to find every movie you forgot about and tons you've never heard about. 

QUICK SHOTS: Avenger #4: Manhattan Massacre by Chet Cunnigham

When I pick up certain books, I can feel smarter. A man, of taste. I'll go "ah, yes Moby Dick, what a fine piece of literature." Then there's a sliding scale the runs right down into the awesome muck that is Men's Adventure, Pulp, Trash lit, whatever you want to call it. I prefer being in the muck, as my tasters seemingly burnt out long ago.

80s Men's Adventure fiction has a different feel than the earlier stuff. Call it the Gold Eagle-fication of the genre. In the 70s sleaze was an important part of the equation, sex, depravity and nudity. The 80s still had some sex, but the emphasis was definitely shifted to pure action and copious details about various firearms. It didn't help that by this point a lot of the writers of the various series had in face written Mack Bolan for Gold Eagle by this time and if you're going to copy something, copy the most successful thing. 

Chet Cunningham had been knocking around for a while by the late 80s when he came up with The Avenger (no, not the pulp hero, though I wonder if he remembered the title from his youth) he had co-written The Penetrator books (they took turns, I like Chet's better) with Mark Roberts in the 70s, a fair amount of westerns, Scholastic young-adult fiction, and was in the first wave of new Mack Bolan writers. He also dipped his toe into the world of Carousel Books, the (supposedly) quasi-mob-owned publisher. Carousel was an off shoot of a "dirty book" publisher who was trying to go "mainstream," so they had Chet and people like Mike Newtown write them westerns, action yarns, horror stuff etc. etc. I covered Chet's "mystery-team" book Silent Murder a long time ago and had a good time with it. 

I like Chet's work; he's not a flashy author by any stretch, but he's always got his mind on the readers wants and needs. He keeps things moving, has enough flair to be a little memorable and has a good handle on writing action, mystery and suspense. He was an old-pro young and continued to put out work almost right up to his death in 2017. That's a long, good run. 

The Avenger started in the mid-80s. It has Jason Savas on the cover, who is basically the 80s Steve Holland, and has a fairly familiar set-up. Matthew Hawke, the titular avenger is a 'Nam vet and DEA agent who's too good and his wife gets killed by the baddies. He resigns and goes revengin' and that's the whole set-up. I knew this going in and since I didn't have the first book in the series, I just jumped headfirst into the fourth. The whole concept is reassuringly basic. It's nearly every direct-to-video action movie set-up and it clearly owes a fair amount to ol' Mack Bolan. Like Bolan, Mark Hardin and many more paperback heroes, Hawke goes town to town and fucks shit up for bad guys with guns, explosives and other tough guy antics. 

Chet wrote these books for Warner Books who was always trying to launch a lengthy Men's Adventure series it seems. They were probably most successful with their paperback Dirty Harry adventures, but their editorial staff never seemed to figure out the genre. They produced some fun series. Like the Ninja Master books, The Hook series, or S-Com but a lot of their titles didn't last more than four or five books. The Avenger is no different. 

#4 Manhattan Massacre finds Hawke in, uh, Manhattan and going after the deadly New Control, a fancy mob that has taken control of the drug trade. Hawke sorta just barges in, finds an old 'Nam buddy who's bored, buys some machine guns and tackles New Control. The rest plays out very much like you'd figure a book like this to play out. There's action and intrigue, some unfortunate racism of the time, firearm information, and Matt Hawke's sort of bland brand of psychotics. Hawke's not much of a character. I go back to the direct-to-video action movie vibe; he reads like a martial artist or model got a starring vehicle after the success of Segal or Van Damme but lacking in major personality. But as I have said Chet handles the action scenes well and they are frequent, the stuff in-between isn't too bad either. It's all just incredibly workman like. Which sounds like a dig, but I find that kind of writing comfortable.

The Warner Books must have had a shorter print run than the competitors because they're a little scarcer, not impossible to track down, but you'll pay a few books more for most of them if you're so inclined. I got lucky in a dusty old small-town bookstore a few years ago and got three of them off the 25-cent table, it was an easy mistake for a bookstore to make, they are nearly indistinguishable from the sea of Mack Bolan's. But I think they are worth a read or two if you need something the same-but-different-in-between an Able Team and a Pheonix Force.

And in my sleuthing and fact-checking for this review, I stumbled on a Barnes and Noble listing for Avenger #5: Radiation Wipeout, an eBook from 2012. The listing on Amazon for this is lost to time, but the B&N listing is still live and purchasable. I had to download the free Nook app and remember my ancient login-info for B&N to download a free sample (I'll probably buy it) to confirm, the first page says "Matt Hawke" and "AK-74," so it's truly an Avenger novel. My guess was that it was done before Warner's pulled the plug and Chet released it later as a "Chet Book" as it is called. From hanging out in various Facebook groups I know this is an isolated incident. James Reasoner released Diamondback, a first in a series that never saw the light of day, year later and it's a great Men's Adventure book. Lee Goldberg finished off the .357 Vigilante series later and so on. Makes you wonder what other hidden vintage works are lurking in writer's forgotten file cabinets. 

And again, my first book Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon now!