Yeah, last night's movie was "Killdozer"(1974). You knew it had to happen, with us being on a Clint Walker binge. We even presaged it, by mentioning it as one of his classics. When did we first watch it, anyway? Was it in the YouTube era? I'm guessing it was, probably early on, like way back in early 2020. Can you believe it will soon be four years since Covid started? Time doesn't just fly, it takes the freakin' Concorde. Well anyhow, with Walker movies on the bill, sooner or later we were gonna get around to Killdozer, and we did, and it was every bit as good as we remembered.
Six men are working a construction site on a remote Pacific island. It's just a little sand bar, really. I say "construction", but it actually looks like they're grading roads or building a landing strip. There's one allusion to that, but their exact work is never specified. As the movie opens, we're in outer space, observing the progress of a meteorite as it ejects from it's home planet and makes its way down to Earth, where it crash lands on the self-same island while emitting synthesizer noises. That's the last we hear from it for the next five minutes, as the crew engage in hijinx. "Dutch" (James Wainwright) and "Mac" (Robert Urich) are goofing around instead of working. They find an old WW2 Quonset hut with a picture of Veronica Lake inside. She provides a welcome distraction until bossman "Kelly" (Clint Walker) discovers the men slacking and orders them back to work.
This establishes some back story on half the crew: Dutch and Mac are the new guys with the least seniority. Dutch is a light hearted, fun loving fellow; Mac is just a kid, but has a big responsibility: he drives the company's D9 bulldozer, a beast of a machine - 50 tons, 13 feet high. Kelly, the boss, is a hard ass, but has reason to be, according to Dutch: "He's a dry drunk. This is his last chance with the company. He's gotta finish this job on time or he's done." That's why there's no goofing off around Kelly.
While Mac is out bulldozing, he runs into an object, sunk into the cliff side, that stops the D9 in it's tracks. He gets Kelly to help him free it, and Kelly is able to dig the thing out. "It's metallic, could be a meteorite." While he's removing it, the rock starts making synth noises again, and it fuses its life force into the blade of the D9. Killdozer is born! While this is happening, Mac sees the transfer of energy. The lifeforce senses this, wants no witnesses, and irradiates Mac, who - on his deathbed, badly burned - testifies to Kelly what he saw. Kelly at first won't accept it, even though Mac's fried to a crackly crisp with radiation burns. "It could've been caused by the meteorite, but so could his madness at the end."
Okay, fine. Who would jump straight to: "It's gotta be the demon-possessed bulldozer!"? But then, that night, the crew's senior engineer "Dennis Holvig" (Carl Betz), who is also Kelly's second in command, is out having a smoke, and the Dozer tries to chop off his foot. This time, both men admit there's a ghost in the machine, but they believe it's a mechanical bugaboo. "C'mon, Dennis, we've all had tractors malfunction on their own, without a legit explanation. I'll have Chub check it stem-to-stern in the morning." But before mechanic "Chub" (Neville Brand) can go the D9 over, sixth member "Beltran" (James A. Watson Jr.) has taken it for a joyride, attempting to show that there's nothing wrong with the brute. He soon finds out he's wrong, however, when the thing starts shifting gears, and disabling its own brakes, before driving Beltran to the sand dunes and squashing him beneath its treads. Now, two of the six crewmen are dead, but Kelly still won't believe the Dozer's responsible, until he observes it operating with no one in the driver's seat. He can only watch as it runs roughshod over their campsite, destroying their radio, beds, stove, everything. "All we've got left is some canned goods and two jerrys of water."
There's no question the D9 is extremely pissed off, but it would be nice to know its motivation. Of course, it's really not the Dozer's fault, any more than it was Regan's fault when Father Karras went out the windum. The D9 is possessed, you see, by a Predator-like entity, in the form of the blue light that rode the meteor to Earth. Whatever it is, it's not a happy camper. It doesn't play nice, and now the remaining four crew members take two jeeps and a truck, with the supplies they have left, and drive up a hillside to hide, after seeding the beachhead with DY-no-Mite! in an attempt to kill the Killdozer, but all that does is make it angrier.
And now, we find out that it can read minds, because it knows where the men are hiding. It finds them in a canyon, up a trail, and kills Chub by squashing him in his jeep. That leaves just Kelly, Dennis and Dutch to continue the fight, and Dutch has been pounding whiskey in search of a "logical explanation". He drives off a cliff and the D9 squashes him. which leaves only Kelly and Dennis, who try using the company's steam shovel against the D9 in a Battle of the Tractors that summons to mind movies like "Predator vs. Alien" or "Freddy vs. Jason" or Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.. One of my all-time favorite children's books was "Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel", so you know who I was rooting for, but the two men soon realize they're outmatched by the massive Killdozer. Earlier, Mac had said, "You can't kill a machine", and now Kelly thinks of his words and agrees, saying, "Mac was right! Because we aren't dealing with a machine, but a Thing!" This movie is reminiscent of "The Thing", in the way the men are whittled down, one at a time, and the fact that the entity comes from another planet and infects a host body. Finally accepting that the killer is a Thing and not a machine, Kelly considers what it's made of - blue light - and decides to use electricity to kill it, and I implore you to watch the movie for yourself to see how it all turns out. Yes, there are admittedly some slow moments when the D9 is just driving around, deciding who to kill next. But it has headlights for eyes, and it makes those beeping synth sounds..........(I mean, holy smokes man, are you kidding me?)
It's damn scary, and of course you agree. The D9 makes Clint Walker look like a shrimp. The crew's road grader is bigger (it's one-a-them trucks with 20-foot-high tires) and I don't know why they didn't try using it against the Killdozer, but I mean - hey. this is great stuff. Killdozer! The title alone is worth your time. For me, its been good enough to watch twice (thrice if you count the original airing on TV in 1974) and I'll watch it again in a couple of years, maybe even a couple of months. Two Bigs, and it would get Two Huge if not for the slow moments, which are few. The D9 itself gets Two Gigantic. The movie could've done with more Neville Brand ("tell 'em to git 'n git"), but it has Robert Urich in a very early role. It's a classic and the picture ain't bad this time, for a TV-movie color print. ////
The previous night, we had our old pal Buster Crabbe in "The Oil Raider"(1934), kind of a Poverty Row version of "There Will Be Crud", made 80 years earlier. And in fact, it's probably a better movie. For one thing, it doesn't have Daniel Day Lewis hamming it up. Buster plays "Dave Warren", a wildcatter seeking an oil strike. First, he needs money to fund a "lease", so he goes to "J.T. Varley" (George Irving), a wealthy speculator. The first 15 minutes of the hour-long film are used to set up two things: 1) That Buster has an enemy, a driller named "Simmons" (Max Wagner) who starts fights on the job. After Buster beats him up and fires him, Simmons vows to get even. The second thing established is a potential romance, when Buster goes to Mr. Varley for a loan and spends 7 minutes chatting up Varley's niece "Alice" (Gloria Shea), which will give him an ally when he needs one.
With Varley's fifty thousand dollar loan in hand, Buster sets about finding another oil lease, and locates one that looks promising. Soon, his crew have raised natural gas to the surface, which means oil isn't far behind. But at the same time, Mr. Varley has just received bad news: one of his major investments has gone bankrupt, costing him 100,000 dollars (over a mil in today's dough). He needs money fast, to remain solvent. Hearing the news of Buster's impending gusher, he gets an idea. The fine print of their contract says that Buster can borrow no extra money without Varley's permission, so Varley undercuts his machine tool supplier, and when Buster needs more dough to keep the oil lease functioning, Varley refuses to lend it to him. And when Buster says, "That's okay sir, I'll get it somewhere else", Varley - having heard about Simmons from company scuttlebutt ("we had a troublemaker on the job"), Varley asks around at the driller's union and locates the embittered Simmons, offering him a cut if Simmons will sabotage the well, and thereby kill the lease. By their contract, this will enable Varley to take possession of the lease from Buster, start it up again, and make a killing when the well spouts a gusher.
"Kill that well, but nothing else, you hear me Simmons? There's to be no violence, I don't want to end up in prison."
But all Simmons knows is violence, and besides, he wants revenge against Buster, so instead of sabotaging the well, he fixes the brakes on Buster's truck. Buster has to jump as it's careening down Santa Susana Pass Road. "I think someone was planning to kill me," he says afterward, "and I have an idea who." He knows for sure it was Simmons: "But I think he got paid for doing it." Buster thinks it was Mr. Varley who paid him, seeing how he wouldn't make Buster a loan when he needed it.
But he can't convince Alice that her uncle is a crook, even though Simmons is now planning to blow up the well by igniting the natural gas at the drill tap. Get ready for another white-knuckle Box Canyon chase. Buster's pal Jim will save the day.
Look, you can either spend an hour with this static but entertaining flick, or you can waste half a day with Paul Thomas Anderson. He made one good movie: "Magnolia", and if I watched that again I'd probably say it wasn't very good after all. But "There Will Be Blood", with that knock-down drag-out between Daniel Day Lewis and the other guy at the end, which was supposed to be a metaphor for corporate ruthlessness? Fuggeddaboudit! Go with Buster Crabbe, instead. He gives you the oil biz in a nutshell. Two Bigs. They have a real oil derrick and the picture is soft but watchable. I'm not trying to be a jerk, or a get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon. It's just that I didn't realize how overblown most modern movies are, and how bad the acting is (by supposedly great actors), until I started watching older films. In this case, I'm not saying Buster's a great actor, but he is a great movie star, and a serviceable actor, and he gets the job done over DDL, who's supposed to be a genius actor but was only good in "Last of the Mohicans". Everything else he was in, he was terrible because he chewed the doggone scenery. "Gangs of New York", anyone? I rest my freakin' case. And I love Paul Thomas Anderson for caring about The Valley, but he can't make a good movie to save his life. Well, anyhow, I'll shut up. PTA did put Cupid's in his last picture, so God Bless him. ////
And that's all I know. How about that Rams overtime win? They're showing some grit, and Puka Nacua is incredible. In my mention of classic TV Movies the other day, I inexplicably left out "Pray for the Wildcats" and "Savages", both starring Andy Griffith and both among the greatest movies ever made, TV or otherwise. Please, oh Gods of Cinema, forgive my omission. My blogging music is Klaus Schulze "La Vie Electronique #9", my late night is Wagner "Das Rheingold". I hope you had a nice weekend and I send you Tons of Love as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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