Verdict
Summary
Kill Crazy is exactly what I thought it would be, but just “less” entertaining that I was hoping. It’s conspicuously cheap and cheesy, has the requisite amount of hyper masculine action, although it takes awhile to get going, and it has totally gratuitous nude scenes and several ugly rape scenes for no good reason at all. It’s goofy, dumb, and off-putting, but it’s something and for that moment in time, it was a product that delivered (mostly) on its premise, although with a real pro behind the camera and with a lot of fine tuning, Heavener might’ve developed into a real action star, but there’s a good reason why he – and guys like him from that era – did not last the test of time, and nor did their movies. Kill Crazy is the perfect example of why.
Plot:
A militia group hunts mental patients to death in the desert, not realizing how deadly one of them can be when he becomes “kill crazy.”
Review:
A field trip for a van full of mental patients – several of whom are Vietnam veterans struggling with PTSD – is driven to a remote desert location by two orderlies who have convinced the patients that this camping trip is to help them clear their heads, but in fact, is a trip of doom. The orderlies have made an arrangement with “The White Arm of Justice,” a white supremacist terrorist militia group, thinking that the militia is just going to “play a game” by hunting the mental patients with paintball guns for their own personal jollies, but as soon as the orderlies deliver the patients, the militia kills the orderlies and strips the clothes off the patients and hands them a couple of guns and tells them that they’ve got one hour to run and hide in the wilderness before they’re all hunted down and killed. One of the patients is Puckett (David Heavener, who also wrote, directed, and did the music), a guy who’s in remarkable shape for a mental patient, but he’s devoted his post-war years to learning how to play the guitar and sing folk songs. The other men in the group are all over the map: two of them are black veterans who are already accepting of the fact that they’re going to die, another is a mute (played by Burt Ward from the Batman TV series), and one guy is so fat that the others have to leave him behind almost right away to be humiliated and captured by the militia. But it’s Puckett that turns out to be the real wild card when he’s thrown off a cliff by the terrorists, left for dead, and then wakes up to be reminded of his harrowing war experiences and wanders off into the wilderness, only to be rescued by two hapless female (and attractive) cousins out camping for the weekend. These two gals nurse Puckett back to health while the militia nearby tortures and kills the other mental patients, and when they eventually get around to discovering Puckett and the two young ladies, the poor girls are raped, with one of them being shot in the back with her trousers and panties curled around her ankles. The other girl is thrown into a tent, prepared for rape (again), but by then Puckett has adapted his “kill crazy” killing machine persona with a gun belt, grenades, a machete, and a machine gun, and he goes to work, killing off the white supremacists one by one. It’s literally a montage of killings from that point on in the final act: Puckett goes ballistic, blowing up everything in sight (usually at very close range in sometimes funny moments where he suddenly appears). He and the rescued girl ride off in the sunset at the end.
In the ’80s and ’90s, if a man had a mind to, he could literally become a direct-to-video star, leading low budget action movies built around their persona. Exploitation distribution companies such as AIP or PM Entertainment churned out dozens upon dozens of these types of genre films, and Heavener was one of the most prominently displayed stars of that era. I will admit that he’s a very big blind spot in my explorations of the genre, but many years ago I interviewed him for my book World Gone Wild: A Survivor’s Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Movies because I found his end of the world western movie Deadly Reactor worth talking about. That single interview I did with him remains one of the weirdest interviews I ever conducted (for reasons that I could explain, but won’t here), and yet I never watched any of his other movies until now for this review. Kill Crazy is exactly what I thought it would be, but just “less” entertaining that I was hoping. It’s conspicuously cheap and cheesy, has the requisite amount of hyper masculine action, although it takes awhile to get going, and it has totally gratuitous nude scenes and several ugly rape scenes for no good reason at all. It’s goofy, dumb, and off-putting, but it’s something and for that moment in time, it was a product that delivered (mostly) on its premise, although with a real pro behind the camera and with a lot of fine tuning, Heavener might’ve developed into a real action star, but there’s a good reason why he – and guys like him from that era – did not last the test of time, and nor did their movies. Kill Crazy is the perfect example of why.
Dark Force Entertainment has just released a new Blu-ray edition of Kill Crazy, and they’ve restored the film in a nice widescreen transfer, looking better than it did on home video in a full-frame format, and the bonus feature here is that they’ve included an on-camera interview with Heavener. The interview included here is okay, but nothing compared to the one I did with him close to 20 years ago.