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"It's a world full of freaks and nuts! Too many people! "
 Image
Entertainment and Something Weird's "explosive double feature"
of Booby Trap and The Takers offers
retro-minded sleaze beasts another glimpse into the warped meat and
potatoes smut of Carl Monson, the writer and director of
Scream in the Streets and Please Don't Eat My Mother.
Monson, who died in the late '80s, worked in front of the camera as
well as behind it (he helped establish a theater group in Los Angeles
during the '60s), and both films feature his beefy, David-Hess-on-a-cheeseburger-binge
frame in a pair of choice roles.
In Booby Trap, Monson takes a rare lead as Jack
Brannan, an Army explosives expert who is discharged after suffering a
concussion while training a young recruit. Brannan decides to take
out his frustration with the youth of today by loading up an RV with 40
stolen mines and planting them on the desert site of an upcoming rock
concert (oh, please, God, make sure that Poco and Loggins and
Messina are on this bill!). The military dispatches Captain Cliff
Shepard (who, with his collar-length hair and puffy-sleeved shirt, is
made to seem "with it," despite looking like a boozy high school football
coach) to track down Brannan before he carries out his plan. Shepard's
investigation leads him to Brannan's ex-wife Taffy, a cocktail
waitress at a strip joint (L.A.'s venerable Body Shop) who's making
time with the house guitar player (who's playing at the desert concert)
while avoiding the oily clutches of her comb-over-sporting boss (who's
backing the desert concert). Making matters even more complicated is the
arrival of the stick-up-the-ass sister of a hippie chick that Jack balled
and then blew up en route to the concert site; she and Shepard fall for
each other and despite the urgency of finding Brannan, take time out to
screw outdoors. Oh, one there's also an annoying queen who attempts to rip
off the strip joint boss and catches a solid beatdown from his flunky (Buck
Kartalian from Please Don't Eat My Mother, billed here
as Buck Bucky).
Meanwhile, there's still a crazy ex-soldier in the desert planning to blow
up a rock concert. The movie eventually gets back to him and sews up all
these loose ends by bringing them all together at the concert site for a
shootout where the bad guys get the just rewards and Brannan wins a chance
to redeem himself-despite the fact that he's bugfuck insane and killed two
people, deep down inside, he's a decent guy with a chip on his shoulder. A
highly explosive chip, mind one, but a chip all the same.
As you can tell, there's a whole lotta subplottin' going on in Booby
Trap. I guess the reason for adding this B-plot (which is almost a
separate movie unto itself) was to up the film's nude scenes, since
Brannan is essentially alone for his entire half of the movie and only
gets one tame softcore bit with the hippie girl. The problem is pacing:
the Taffy/guitar dude/strip boss storyline and the Capt. Cool and Hippie
Sister storyline become so complicated and boring that the film forgets
about Brannan for long stretches of time and diminishes its most
suspenseful and interesting aspect. It's too bad, because Monson throws
himself into the part-he's got a great crazy-man laugh and is a lot of fun
to watch, even when Avery's script can't make up its mind as to
whether he's a maniac or a troubled but honorable guy.
For grindhouse creeps who could care less about such matters, the sex is
fairly chaste-Monson gets a roll with the hippie girl, Taffy and her
boyfriend have super-vanilla fireplace sex, Shepard and the sister get it
on outside and there's a hot, big-titted stripper who shakes her cans for
a brief scene. Judging from the pair of theatrical trailers that are
included on this disc, there were a handful of additional sex scenes that
are missing from this print; also, Glittering Images' Bizarre
Sinema! book on sexploitation features a quartet of stills
featuring a grapple session between the strip joint boss and the stripper
that is also not included here. Dunno if these scenes turn up in the
film's alternative version, which is titled Young and Wild,
but it woulda been nice to see those too.
Extra points for: Buck Kartalian falling off the Body
Shop roof and surviving with only minor back pain; the killer theme
music, which sounds like Suicide covering the "Theme From Shaft";
the priceless opening footage of Monson piloting his behemoth RV through
downtown Vegas circa '71; and the fact that we don't see Monson's ass
during his sex scene. Thank heaven for small favors. Points taken away for
every time Avery slows down the film to show off how much he loves
cutaways and parallel plotting (which, by film's end, is a lot of points).
"We're gonna have us a party with some educated, social-type
broads!"
The Takers are E.J. and Will, a pair of random
road mothers who, after starting their day by beating the snot out of
another biker, cruise west down Ventura Blvd. and pick up a couple of
hippie chicks for some acid and fucking. After dumping the pair
("Bastards! Bastards!"), our boys rob and kill a gas station attendant and
then hassle lingerie model Barbie and her fragile friend Laura.
The two girls give E.J. and Will the brush-off, which encourages the
fellas to follow them to Laura's house, break in and repeatedly rape both
girls at gunpoint. This goes on for a couple of days, with intermittent
breaks for food and Barbie browbeating Will for being the muttonheaded
shit-for-brains that he clearly is, until Laura's husband-you guessed it,
Carl Monson (toting his Booby Trap shotgun)-shows up
to give these two hairy galoots a taste of San Fernando Valley justice.
The end.
As direct and unpleasant as a kick in the nuts from a steel-toed boot,
The Takers is unrepentantly mean-spirited smut that leaves a
sticky brown residue on one's soul after viewing. The only thing that
makes the film endurable is the fact that every living soul on the screen
is a complete and utter lunkhead-at one point, E.J. leaves his piece on
Laura's coffee table, and she palms it for a second before dropping it
when he enters the room. It's hard to get worked up over characters that
are so staggeringly dumb, but regardless, The Takers offers
rape scenes, which are choreographed like standard softcore fumblings, as
jerk-off material. If that blows sunshine up your dress, have at it. I'll
take a pass, so no points awarded here.
Image and Something Weird's disc offers the usual buffet
table of extras to accompany the double feature main course; in addition
to the two Booby Trap trailers, there's a handful of
additional spots, including ones for Erika's Hot Summer with
Erika Gavin of Vixen ("She'll be coming soon-all over
your screen!") and The Loves of Cynthia ("A bitch in heat
performing bizarre sexual acts under the lusting eyes of a waiting stable
keeper!"). Two short features are also served up; the first, "This Is
The Aliens," is a clip about the New York-based biker gang from the
overheated counterculture documentary It's a Revolution, Mother
(1970), while the second, "Magnificent Monique," is a silent
8mm loop from what looks like '65 or so (but is accompanied by tinny '30s
library music) and features a stacked stripper before and after her day
gig. There's also a commentary track for Booby Trap
featuring producer Harry Novak and Cult Movies'
Michael Copner and moderated by Nathaniel Thompson from
Mondo Digital (www.mondo-digital.com);
exploitation scholars hoping to gleam some tidbit of forgotten info from
the veteran sexploitation honcho will be sorely frustrated by this track,
'cause Harry, God bless him, is enthusiastic but clearly past his prime in
the remember-when department and offers a lot of repeated and frankly
wrong information. Harry's track record demands respect, but I think
Image and SWV might wanna consider giving this hard-working
sleaze merchant a vacation from future commentaries. Such is life.
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