Amoeba Music

After the mania of Evel Knievel-style daredevils and stuntmen entered the pop culture imagination and the American lexicon, stuntmen became the subject matter of a string of films in the late '70s. This includes the Burt Reynolds opus Hooper (which was the directing follow up to Smokey & The Bandit by big time stunt coordinator Hal Needham) and finally the genre’s masterpiece, The Stunt Man in 1980, which earned three Oscar nominations, including one for the director Richard Rush. However most of the films from the stunt craze usually fell somewhere between forgettable, like Animal, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Raquel Welch (how have I never seen this?) and the bizarre, like Stunt Rock, starring the prog band Sorcery! Stunts in ’77 fell somewhere between the two. But now almost forty years later, Stunts -- while ignored in its day -- is a fascinating look at the filmmaking process, the stuntman brotherhood and an entertaining scorecard for genre box checking.

Many years later Quentin Tarantino would famously resurrect Robert Forster’s sagging career with Jackie Brown, but in this era, he would often pop up in some glorious B movies like Alligator and Vigilante. Stunts is another high point during his low years, and though the material may be lacking, you can see his easy charisma on display here. If you grew up in the '70s and '80s the rest of the cast is a virtual all-star team of B actors who had some hits, but are maybe more recognizable from episodes of Police Story or Fantasy Island. The cast includes Ray Sharkey (later fantastic in The Idolmaker), Fiona Lewis (The Fearless Vampire Killers), Joanna Cassidy (Blade Runner), Bruce Glover (best known for playing one of the pair of oddball killers in Diamonds Are Forever), Darrell Fetty (Big Wednesday), Candice Rialson (the talking vagina epic, Chatterbox!) and finally the great character actor Richard Lynch. (Lynch has a massive midnight movie resume; he’s always watchable in oddball films like The Ninth Configuration, but is best known for, I guess, playing the bad guy in Invasion USA).