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Imagine this, if you will. You’re a monster kid (yes, you are, so shut
up). You’re cruising around the dial (back
when televisions had dials and you had to sometimes adjust the signal manually
[that means with your hands]) when you come upon it. A permanently boggled schlub in a seersucker
suit who looks like he would have fit right in at the press room in His Girl Friday leveling a crossbow at
an elderly lady, warning her not to approach.
She, naturally, does, and the man looses a bolt. As the arrow finds its target, the senior
citizen transforms into a gruesome, hairy monster (a rakshasa, to be precise) just
before dying. And so was I introduced to
the wild, wonderful world of Kolchak: The
Night Stalker, arguably one of the most fun television series ever made and
one of my all-time favorites (though, in all honesty, I can’t say it’s the
highest quality in the world, but how much of what we hold closest to our
hearts ever is?). The show was dubbed Kolchak’s Monster Of The Week (I believe
by “TV Guide”), and it was that, but this is what fed the hunger inside me and
kids like me. However, for how formulaic
the show is, the television movie from which it sprang (The Night Stalker) is exceptional and often touted as one of the
best films ever produced for the small screen.
That film was directed by John
Llewellyn Moxey, the director of Nightmare
In Badham County (aka Nightmare). Make of that what you will.
Cathy (Deborah Raffin) and Diane (Lynne
Moody) are a couple of students from UCLA on a little road trip through the
American South (always a bad idea in exploitation fare). When their tire blows out, they get a
firsthand taste of the local constabulary’s asshole-ish-ness in the form of
Sheriff Danen (Chuck Connors). Later, after the Sheriff tries to make it up
to the ladies by lecherously hitting on them and is rebuffed in public, the two
women quickly understand exactly how close-knit this little community is. They also learn that the Badham County Farm
is only one step removed from Hell.
This is a WIP film, and it has
all of the elements needed for the genre.
It has the prisoners being abused and forced to wear flimsy, easily
removable clothes. It has aggressively
predatory lesbian guards. It depicts
slave-like conditions under which the characters toil. It has vicious internal conflicts among the
inmates. And this last point is the specific
reason why the leads are played by a white woman and a black woman. You see, the tensions at the farm are only
exacerbated by its being segregated.
Though both sets of prisoners are treated as slave labor, it is the
black prisoners who are given the more menial tasks. Even at the bottom of the ladder, they get a
raw deal. This segregation and the
treatment of the different races come as a shock only to the two outsiders. To the people indigenous to the area, it’s
simply how things are. By that same
token, the women in the black barracks mostly get along with one another. It’s the women in the white barracks that get
into cat fights and generally want to kill each other. This sense of solidarity among the blacks
isn’t because they’re sager than the whites any more than the discord among the
whites is because they’re less civilized than the blacks. It’s more distressing than that. The numb obedience of the black women comes
from an innate sense of racial inferiority which has been institutionally reinforced
over decades. This idea enhances the
film’s overall somber attitude.
This vile corruption is embodied
by three men (four, actually, but one of them has very little to do in the
narrative), representing the government (or more specifically one part of
it). Danen, the Judge (Ralph Bellamy), and Superintendent
Dancer (Robert Reed) are supposed to
be enforcers of the law. These are the
people whom we rely on to keep the bad guys away. These are the people who are our
protectors. That they so readily twist
and manipulate the system to suit their own base desires points to an endemic
illness. We have seen this sort of
corruption of power countless times in film.
It is portrayed in communities both North and South (though I would
venture a guess that there are more of them set in the South, just because of its
old ties to slavery). But the one
constant in films like this is that these are small, clannish localities. Big, metropolitan, corporate corruption is
another facet in other movies, but that is usually typified by its
dispassion. In small areas, where
everyone knows everyone else and everyone seems in on the scheme, it’s the
familiarity that makes the evil done more insidious. This isn’t a wide net spread over a large
mass. This is a tight glove wrapping
itself around your throat. It feels more
intimate, as if the perpetrators have something personal against their
victims. But even the bodies of the
subjugated are just meat to be used and discarded at a whim, still just a means
to an end. No matter how much these
villains may enjoy what they do, they still do it with a sociopathic
detachment, because these acts no longer offer pleasure. This is merely what they do.
All WIP films are sleazy. That’s one of their big appeals, and Nightmare In Badham County is no
exception. Women are demeaned and
molested throughout. A scene with guard
Alice and prisoner Nancy nails this home.
Alice strips down to just her panties, sits on a couch with her crotch
splayed, and states, “I didn’t keep you out of the fields today just so you
could eat my lunch.” It’s not just the
situation or the double entendre of the dialogue. It’s Alice’s open repose that amps the sleaze
up. Her nudity makes her menace (again)
feel more intimate. But beyond all this,
the film is resolutely grim in tone.
Intriguingly, this is illustrated with Dancer’s skanky interactions with
the women and how they customarily turn out, but it takes on a quasi-meta
meaning due to Reed’s casting in the
role. This is not because of the actor’s
well-documented sexual orientation but to his identification as one of
America’s most beloved, moralistic fathers in recorded history (Mike Brady of The Brady Bunch, for those who don’t know).
To see a man who was held up as a moral compass for many years discard
said morality and get down into the gutter makes it feel somehow more wrong and
just a little shocking. It’s at this
point in the film when the viewer begins to understand the gravity of the
situation and believe that truly this nightmare may not be one from which our
protagonists may ever awake.
MVT: The dour quality of the
film sets it apart in my experience with this genre. This is bleak, even angry, filmmaking, and
despite its exploitation roots, it has something to say. It just says it through gritted teeth.
Make Or Break: The scene
with Danen and the girls in the local lockup manages to be nasty and creepy
without being explicit. It also sets the
timbre for the remainder of the film and reminds the audience that this is only
the beginning.
Score: 6.5/10
