'THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN'........DEATH BY TROMBONE.....

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)    You might think we're kidding about the sub-title of this post.....

                   Nope.......

                   This movie's mad killer, rampaging through Texarkana Arkansas, ties a girl to a tree and stabs her to death by standing close enough to her while he blasts out a few notes on a trombone with a knife attached to the end of it......

                    Wow......talk about hitting C Sharp.....the poor girl, understandably, has little comment on the guy's musical technique, except to gasp and die.  Ah well.....everyone's a critic..

                    We only wish we could tell you that the rest of this wretched little movie, a piece of cornpone 1970's  flotsam, maintains that level of gruesome inventiveness.......

                     Not a chance. This film's director, Charles B. Pierce, was one of those backwoods auteurs who'd mastered just enough rudimentary filmmaking skills to slap together junk for whatever drive-in theaters were still in operation......

                    And we do mean rudimentary.

                     But if you care enough (and that's the BQ mission in a nutshell) ....you can dig out a few shiny nuggets in this  pile of horseshit......

                     Standing out in a huge crowd of worthless non-actors, there's good old reliable Ben Johnson as a grizzled Texas Ranger hot on the trail of this 1946 serial killer.......(playing, more or less, the same exact role he performed a few years earlier in Steven Spielberg's first theatrical film, "The Sugarland Express")

                    Ben spends the entire film looking like he wishes he were somewhere else. We feel his pain......so did we.

                   Given Charles B. Pierce's total incompetence, the movie's tone careens wildly, much like the film's collection of vintage 1940's cars swerve along muddy back roads......if nothing else, the film's crazy downshifts make you snap to attention....

                  In its ample, gory murder sequences, it pre-dates the horde of teen slasher movies that would flood the market in the late 70's and early 80's......

                   Most jarring off all, the movie interrupts its own self-important, semi-documentary aura to suddenly indulge in 'Smokey And The Bandit' low comedy........but trust on  this, Charlie Pierce makes Hal Needham look like Orson Welles......

                  We've no idea how this movie gradually built up its reputation as a worthy cult offering.........53 years later, it's still the same undercooked sludge.....

                    We will however, do a slow clap for that Terror Of The Trombone, that Master Of Musical Madness, the resident loony who makes Texarkana dread sundown.....

                   And the rest of us dread movies like this. 1/2 a star . (We would have upped this rating to at least 1 star if the killer had remembered to cut a mouth hole in the sack he wears over his head......forcing him to hyperventilate while he blows those lethal notes from his instrument.....)