The Tormentors (1971)
Imagine a Benny Hill lookalike leading a combination Nazi party revival and motorcycle gang and you have half the premise of 1971's The Tormentors. A dim-witted tale of a neo-Nazi plot to win hippie converts to their cause by killing the flower childrens' Jesus-wannabe spiritual leader (called "The Messiah") and pinning his death on the cops, The Tormentors stumbles in trying to overcome its unlikely script. William Dooley (Aloha, Bobby and Rose) stars as insurance salesman Dan Ballard, whose fiancee is raped and murdered by "The Fourth Reich," khaki-clad devotees of Der Fuhrer who rob banks and escape on bulky hogs no M.C. would be caught dead riding. When they're not lounging around their threadbare bunker, the blockhead bandits bully stereotypical hippies at a love-in and attempt to crash the stage where "Rudy and the Love Slaves" are cranking out the oh-so-groovy soundtrack.
In a unique plot twist never before used in any motion picture, Ballard pretends to be a Nazi sympathizer so he can infiltrate the gang and kill its leader, B. Rockwell Kemp (exploitation mainstay Bruce Kimball), so named in apparent reference to real-life neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell and...painter Rockwell Kent? Kimball's slick, businessman boss is the redoubtable James Craig, fresh from starring in the Ed Wood-scripted Venus Flytrap (1970). On the right side of the law and trying desperately to keep the vengeful Ballard on a short leash is police Lieutenant Connors (film and television veteran Anthony Eisley, peddling his steely persona from The Naked Kiss), who hopes that capturing Kemp alive will lead to bigger fish.
The Tormentors is the brainchild of filmmaker David L. Hewitt (credited here as "Boris Eagle"), whose King Kong knock-off The Mighty Gorga (1969), also featuring Eisley and Kimball, is one of the most brain-searingly atrocious films to ever torment a drive-in audience. Hewitt, a skilled visual effects producer, never let his inability to secure financing deter him from making his own genre films, however ludicrous the result.
With The Tormentors, Hewitt appears to have been aiming at the lucrative drive-in market for films featuring motorcycle-riding outlaws, the genre introduced by Roger Corman with The Wild Angels (1966), but with Nazis thrown in for good measure. The effort was unsuccessful, for the film gathered dust until its VHS release by cheap-o genre specialists Trans-World Entertainment fifteen years later. One stumbling block to success may have been the scrambled script from biker movie specialist David Gordon White, which bounces merrily across genre boundaries, even providing the brownshirts their own love-in scored with a dippy hippie ballad no self-respecting Nazi goon would add to his playlist.
The Tormentors is the brainchild of filmmaker David L. Hewitt (credited here as "Boris Eagle"), whose King Kong knock-off The Mighty Gorga (1969), also featuring Eisley and Kimball, is one of the most brain-searingly atrocious films to ever torment a drive-in audience. Hewitt, a skilled visual effects producer, never let his inability to secure financing deter him from making his own genre films, however ludicrous the result.
With The Tormentors, Hewitt appears to have been aiming at the lucrative drive-in market for films featuring motorcycle-riding outlaws, the genre introduced by Roger Corman with The Wild Angels (1966), but with Nazis thrown in for good measure. The effort was unsuccessful, for the film gathered dust until its VHS release by cheap-o genre specialists Trans-World Entertainment fifteen years later. One stumbling block to success may have been the scrambled script from biker movie specialist David Gordon White, which bounces merrily across genre boundaries, even providing the brownshirts their own love-in scored with a dippy hippie ballad no self-respecting Nazi goon would add to his playlist.
Such contrivances, particularly the illogic of The Fourth Reich's scheme to convert hippies to fascism (perhaps based on reports that the Manson murders were intended to initiate a race war), are supplemented with standard action genre conventions. The Nazis all have great-looking girlfriends (one of whom is beach party stalwart Chris Noel), none of whom seem the least interested in anything other than lounging poolside at Kemp's stately mansion, arguing with one another over their reject boyfriends, and making out with unlikely leading man Dooley.
And although The Tormentors is crammed full of swastikas and Hitler portraits, fascist dogma is downplayed in favor of typical bad guy swagger. Racist and anti-semitic epithets are never uttered, but the thugs symbolically execute a cop named Silverman and a "jockey" lawn ornament can be glimpsed outside Kemp's front door. Nazi atrocities are barely referenced: aside from the relatively bloodless beatings, chokings, and shootings, Kemp's dominatrix moll scorches a turncoat Nazi femme's breast with a lit cigarette.
It should be no surprise that The Tormentors is at its most entertaining when unintentionally hilarious. Ham-fisted religious symbolism that would choke Ingmar Bergman and post-synched dialogue that could have been lifted from a Tex Avery cartoon compete in hilarity with a getaway scene where the culprits stop to observe traffic signals. Other highlights include Kimball occasionally forgetting his unconvincing German accent, and Nazi bigwig Craig hiding his identity during a phone call by assuming a hillbilly dialect.
The cheap laughs and early-seventies sleaze earn The Tormentors a recommendation for hopeless trash junkies. Public domain specialists Platinum Disc Corporation of La Crosse, Wisconsin market a budget-priced DVD release that offers a respectable print in its original 4:3 ratio, and includes a convincingly crafted trailer for a theatrical release that apparently never happened. Hapless Best Buy shoppers enticed by the lurid cover art will be annoyed by the film's utter lack of suspense and implausible plot, but those aware that what's inside the case is the handiwork of David L. Hewitt will not be disappointed.
And although The Tormentors is crammed full of swastikas and Hitler portraits, fascist dogma is downplayed in favor of typical bad guy swagger. Racist and anti-semitic epithets are never uttered, but the thugs symbolically execute a cop named Silverman and a "jockey" lawn ornament can be glimpsed outside Kemp's front door. Nazi atrocities are barely referenced: aside from the relatively bloodless beatings, chokings, and shootings, Kemp's dominatrix moll scorches a turncoat Nazi femme's breast with a lit cigarette.
It should be no surprise that The Tormentors is at its most entertaining when unintentionally hilarious. Ham-fisted religious symbolism that would choke Ingmar Bergman and post-synched dialogue that could have been lifted from a Tex Avery cartoon compete in hilarity with a getaway scene where the culprits stop to observe traffic signals. Other highlights include Kimball occasionally forgetting his unconvincing German accent, and Nazi bigwig Craig hiding his identity during a phone call by assuming a hillbilly dialect.
The cheap laughs and early-seventies sleaze earn The Tormentors a recommendation for hopeless trash junkies. Public domain specialists Platinum Disc Corporation of La Crosse, Wisconsin market a budget-priced DVD release that offers a respectable print in its original 4:3 ratio, and includes a convincingly crafted trailer for a theatrical release that apparently never happened. Hapless Best Buy shoppers enticed by the lurid cover art will be annoyed by the film's utter lack of suspense and implausible plot, but those aware that what's inside the case is the handiwork of David L. Hewitt will not be disappointed.
[This review originally appeared, in different form, in ecco, the world of bizarre video Volume One, Number One.]