This week our Roundtable Reviewers discuss the 1970 grindhouse/exploitation film BOOBY TRAP, a sleazy journey into the mind of an ex-marine intent on destroying humanity by planting land mines at an outdoor rock concert. The film is available from Something Weird Video.

Reviewers present this week include Bill, Ashlon, myself and Stewart, who missed last week’s discussion. Stewart, in case you don’t know him, stays busy producing video for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and balances such wholesomeness by freelance editing all manner of sleaze locally. Last year he collaborated with Ashlon on THE FOUR CHILDREN OF TANDER WELCH, for which he was DP and Editor.

Now, lets get on with it.

Andy: Whether it was the intent of the filmmakers or not, I felt like BOOBY TRAP could almost work as an anti-war film. Jack is ex-military and psychotic, as if the plate in his head is rubbing up against the wrong portion of his cerebral cortex, causing his antisocial behavior. Now, I don’t know if he even has a plate in his head — the plot wasn’t quite that generous — but if we go by the archetype, he should. Hehe.

He reminds me of the protagonist in another subversive film, DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE, about a Vietnam vet-turned-photographer who goes around LA strangling women.

Ashlon: I couldn’t agree more, Andy. While I’m not ready to mark Dwayne Avery’s directorial debut as any crown achievement, I have to say the picture is saying and doing more than what’s haphazardly presented onscreen. Aside from the sleazy undertones and explosive action, no pun intended, promised by the deceptively well-crafted trailer, this movie may actually be dumb enough to be smart in places.

The anti-war sentiment is fairly clear. When the film was released in 1970, the country was embroiled in the scandal of war, a corrupt presidential administration was expanding its power and for the first time in American history, armed services veterans were finding themselves, by and large, greeted as living representations of the ills of the nation. Enter Jack Brennen (played by Carl Monson), ex-Marine and recently divorced, struggling to find an identity in this new country. The beauty of this b-feature is the humor, not the horror, of Jack’s maniacal war-damaged brain concocting a ludicrous plan to destroy a hippie rock concert for no other reason than to supposedly solve the country’s problems. Of course, on its face, this plot device is tired and as anti-war pictures go, probably too overt to not be considered preachy. However, while laughing through the bumbled dialogue, uncomfortable nudity, and raucous excuses for action, the narrative stumbles upon bright flashes of depth.

Andy: What was really strange is that Jack eventually redeems himself in the end in the ultimate act of selflessness. After the zany antics of the nightclub owners, the Marine investigator having dirty woodland animal sex with his prime witness and general homophobic stereotypes scattered throughout, Jack seemed almost normal. The good guy even. But then again, I find myself disgusted with the majority of humanity myself, so it’s hard for me to make a value judgment on the guy.

Bill: I agree, that Jack, despite his penchant for blowing people up, is the most sympathetic person in the film! A lot of that has to do with the fact that Carl Monson was about the only person in the cast who could act. Monson, by the way, was also a director of sleaze. His directing credits include the sex-biker hybrid THE TAKERS (the trailer for which burned all our retinas last night) and a skin variation on LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS known as PLEASE DON’T EAT MY MOTHER (which, by the way, starred Buck Kartalian - the guy who plays Scarpo the overacting thug in BOOBY TRAP).

Angela Carnon, who plays Jack’s ex-wife-turned-strip-club-waitress Taffy, was fairly prolific in the skin flick racket. I’ve seen her in THE DIRTY MIND OF YOUNG SALLY, A SCREAM IN THE STREETS (directed by Carl Monson) and GUESS WHAT HAPPENED TO COUNT DRACULA.

Stewart: Siighhh… Ok, BOOBY TRAP. Let me just tip my hat to the craft of editing here. The trailer for BOOBY TRAP is great and did exactly what it was designed to do - get us to watch the film. It has car chases, explosions, strippers, love scenes and a guy with a shotgun laughing maniacally to the heavens. What more could you ask for? Graphic nudity you say? Done. It’s got that too. There’s also the constant flashing of the film’s title, “BOOBY TRAP”, in between each action montage, a brainwashing technique I always find amusing in trailers of the era. I was impressed by how the addition of narrative voice over lent a certain authority to the sell of the film as an action flick. This omnipotent
presence telling us who’s who and what’s goin’ down. Of course we’ve heard these voices before but since I was the one who watched the movie first and then the trailer, it was far more apparent what effect the VO could have upon a first impression.

What I find interesting is how a trailer from the 70’s can easily fool four film buffs into watching what I thought turned out to be a rather slow and I hate to say it, rough picture. So let me ask this - what link is there between the shameful choiceness of a “drive-in-grindhouse-b-rated” movie trailer and the film itself? Is it just luck of the draw or is there a science to it? Is it the phenomenal special effects and pyrotechnics? Is the pacing of each scene after ridiculous, improbable scene? A good one-liner? Is it the cooch?

In the end I really don’t have anything to say about it. I thought it sucked and I’ve already forgotten most of what happened.

Ashlon: Stewart, I had no idea your disdain for the picture. Given what we’ve seen in the past, I think Booby Trap actually holds up well. I don’t think it’s great but I think it certainly entertained. Just for the reasons you addressed, I might add.

Andy: Sadly, almost all of the film’s compelling scenes were in the trailer (and even some of the good one-liners too), so there was little reason to watch the film in the end (That’s a problem with modern movies now I might add). I didn’t think it sucked though. As with many of the flicks from this era, it presents us with something ultimately more interesting than the story. It gives us an insight into a bizarre, seedy world of filmmaking that doesn’t really exist anymore. It encapsulates the odd and often quirky attitudes, fashions and behaviors of the era. In an odd way, I find these pictures inspiring and sometimes even refreshing. But overall, yes, it was rough and dull.

Stewart: You’re right Andrew, movies like this are indeed a time capsule. Sometimes I’m so bored by them though that aspect is hard to appreciate or I’m not drinking enough.

Ashlon: One can never drink enough for some of the stuff we see. Maybe what you loathed about the flick, is what I liked about it. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure and there was plenty of trash in this one to go around.

Bill: Surely by now you guys have figured out that exploitation movies are akin to carnival sideshows: more time and energy is put into the promotion of the product than the actual product. The producers were nearly all in it for the money, and their driving force was figuring out how to lure us in to buying a ticket. If occasionally a good, exciting movie was made, it was usually because of some freak accident - a talented director on his way up the ladder, or a case where a few ingredients just magically came together.

As a Harry Novak/Box-office International picture, I knew going in that the film would be a tough slog. Novak cranked out some enthusiastic sex films (pushing the limits of soft-core moreso than his major competitor, David Friedman), but his attempts at more legitimate genres almost always fell flat due to the poor writing (endless dialog scenes that go nowhere just to pad the running time), monotone deliveries, harsh “sun-gun” lighting and uninspired direction.

Ashlon: If there is a complaint to be had with Booby Trap, it’s because the movie really doesn’t know what it wants to be. Once introduced to Jack, we immediately take him for the antagonist. Of course the film doesn’t reveal a bona-fide protagonist, and this includes the sorry performance of a puffy shirt wearing, toupee-sporting hipster we’re supposed believe is a an actual Marine investigator. With this lack of a hero, I found my rooting for Jack. Eventually, he becomes the one most heroic as he sacrifices himself for the group, most notably Taffy (played by Angela Carnon). As the final shot craned skyward, absorbing the desert landscape, I couldn’t help but notice that I just saw a film about a man who had experienced the horrors of war, wanted nothing but to regain the love of his life and ultimately find his way in a world that didn’t want him anymore. I admit I was trapped, pun intended, by the trailer but I certainly enjoyed the ride.

Bill: I thought BOOBY TRAP had great potential — what a wonderful opening, with Monson (one letter way from “Manson”) blowing up his helper and raucously laughing while discharging shells into the air — but it never really “breaks out” in the way we want it to. Thank God for the action in the finale, but was anyone else disappointed that we never got to see the “hippie’ rock concert? I mean, isn’t this what it was all leading up to? I guess Novak couldn’t afford the extras required to fill “Gorn Valley.”

But that’s fine with me. I enjoy digging for the few treasures in the great trash heap that is exploitation cinema. As film critic Pauline Kael once said, “Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.”

One moment of directorial brilliance worth mentioning: the fake overhead shot of Jack and the hippie hitchhiker making love! They’re supposed to be horizontal on a blanket; but in order to achieve an overhead shot of them, the filmmakers actually hung the blanket on a clothesline and instructed the actors to fake rolling around while they stood up against it. Priceless!

Andy: Yeah Bill, I wanted to see the rock concert too. I was hoping for some crappy one-spot lighting and some low angle handheld footage of gyrating topless hippies. I wanted to see a few of them stagger into the land mines and set off a chain reaction of Claymore carnage.

Ashlon: When you talk about failed narrative devices and missed opportunities, Booby Trap is textbook. Bill, you couldn’t be more right about the disappointment felt when the hippie rock show never happens. The entire picture to that point had built this event up as the second coming of Woodstock and there we were, in the canyon with not one vendor or band member or promoter to be seen for a huge concert supposedly happening the next day. Instead, we’ve got a homicidal ex-Marine shooting at a local mob boss, his henchman, and a gay concierge while the ex-Marine’s cocktail waitress ex-wife tends the bullet wound of her strip club musician boyfriend in a stolen Winnebago surrounded by radio-controlled land mines all the time being surveyed from afar by a .38 caliber-toting Marine investigator who looks like he just got out of Monkees music video. Now that I think about it, maybe the concert would have been a disappointment compared to the action offered at the end of the movie. It was a great moment in the picture where I thought for sure a Mexican standoff would ensue ending with the gay concierge sneaking off into the sunset with his attache of stolen loot. Alas, as soon as the plot twist was unveiled, it was quickly resolved. Another opportunity gone. Stupid wins again.

Bill: BOOBY TRAP was a pretty minor film overall, but there were a few great “bad movie” moments.

I liked the hilarious fist fight on the roof of the strip club. It’s not often that you see a guy tossed from a one-story building so that he doesn’t die in a splat, but just lies there wiggling in pain. The love scene was so inept it was hilarious. In one scene, the sister to the dead hippie is raging mad at our totally ineffective, Marine detective (if his toupee isn’t distracting enough, there’s the 17th century puffy shirt and equestrian pants) … Then, the next time we see her, the two of them are intimate lovers doing the nasty in the middle of wilderness. They’re supposedly on a picnic, but where’s the basket? Oh, okay, it’s that kind of picnic. Well, even if it is, it seems they could’ve chosen to spread their blanket on some pretty green grass rather than ugly grey dirt. Anyway, I enjoyed taking in the details of this woman’s body, even if she couldn’t act her way through a Chapin Community Theater play.

I loved it when Jack and the Marine dude are facing off in the finale, and Taffy sticks her head out the RV door to yell, “Can I help?!” The car chase was wonderful. Just a couple of cars going nowhere, spinning donuts in the dirt. And I loved how Jack’s car just kind of slowly tips over and lands upside down. I wonder if that was even planned?

I counted at least two instances of badly blown lines, a solid sign this was a one-take production.

Stewart: By the way, I’m enlisting with the Marines today. They don’t take applications - only committments. And I’m committed to laying every broad I picnic with while on duty. God bless America! Ya dig?

Ashlon: I’m sure this won’t be the last picture I’m duped into seeing because of the trailer but in the case of Booby Trap, I loved being along for the ride. I have to say, despite its flaws, I’m going to say Booby Trap is a solid choice pick for me with a score of three stars!

Bill: I give BOOBY TRAP 2.5 stars… It’s trapped in that frustrating realm between rough and choice.

Andy: Same here. 2.5 stars.

Stewart: Here’s to the trash heap! I give it 1.5 stars.