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Booby Trap
[Something Weird Video]
1970; color
Directed by Dwayne Avery
Starring: Carl Monson, Angela Carnon, Christopher Culhane & Norman Fields
The Takers
[Something Weird Video]
1971; color
Directed by Carl Monson
Starring: Susan Apple, Fred Bush, Coe Bart, Kim Kiya & Louise Douglas
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Booby Trap starts off with a brilliant premise - a discharged Marine munitions expert with a serious hatred for the long-haired set illegally acquires 50 land mines with the intention of literally blowing up a rock festival in the desert - but ends up a deranged drama involving ex-wives, new beaus, money-grubbing promoters, gay thieves, and special agents. (Actually there's only one of each of those in the cast but you get my point.) Right from the first scene, when our crazed vet in question, Jack Brennan (played by Please Don't Eat My Mother director Carl Monson), busts out with one of the most truly psychotic laughs in screen history, you know it's gonna be a crazy ride. Next we see Brennan driving a stolen motor home through Vegas and the California desert in order to visit his ex-wife in LA. (An uninvited, unexpected and seemingly unwelcome visit incidentally.) Along the way he meets, screws and blows up a hippie girl. (Sadly, the only hippie who gets blown up over the course of the film.) The couple's recent divorce is just one of the things Jack can't seem to get over, yet Tammy (his ex-) has definitely moved along. And with a guitar player no less! Granted he's the guitar player in the awful house band at the strip joint where Tammy's a cocktail waitress but, still, they're in love and have plans to move away together. As it turns out the uber-sleazy owner of the club is also the promoter of the soon-to-be-held rock festival; yep, the same one ol' Jack has plans on blowing up. Small world, huh? And, of course, the guitar player is in one of the bands scheduled to perform. What's funny is that Jack knows none of this until he rolls into town. He just hates hippies and was gonna blow the festival up for un-divorce related kicks. Now, since any kind of missing explosives are bound to eventually be noticed as missing (at least one would hope they would), eventually an agent is assigned to track down Jack and the mines before anything - ahem - crazy happens. This guy winds up meet the sister of the blown-up hippie and the two of them start to follow Jack's trail. (And, of course, they fuck too.) The way all these paths eventually overlap and collide almost makes Jack look sympathetic, or at least like some sort of anti-hero, until he starts shooting. The ending is unexpected, but isn't a real stretch for the characters if you think about it. Once again proving the adage 'There ain't no 'Nam vet like a psycho, hippie-hating 'Nam vet,' Booby Trap is just the kind of half-baked psycho-drama (emphasis on psycho!) I know I'll be revisiting at some point in the future.
The Takers, on the other hand, is a weird cross-pollination of biker flick and softcore porn that's probably best left for genre completists only (And I'm not even sure if they'd wanna hang through all of it.) Directed by Carl Monson, who's also in it for about two minutes, the plot can be summed up thusly: two guys take a couple "society broads" hostage in one girl's home for a few days, generally screwing and abusing them until the husband comes home and blows them away. Then we get one of the most unnecessary, perplexing and non-sensical "breaking the fourth wall" endings I've ever seen in a film. Seriously, if Carl Monson was still alive I'd be very tempted to track him down just to ask 'What the hell were you thinking?!
—the Kommandant
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