Customer Reviews

When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

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I saw this film in 1981 onboard ship while in the Navy, and it's not a film you can easily forget. But since it's been 30 years, I'll try to recap as much as I can.

Since Marjoe Gortner had finally given up the evangelist business, he went into acting with limited success usually playing corrupt or psychotic individuals. Here, he really lets loose as a zoned-out Viet-Nam vet working as a drug smuggler. After crossing the Mexican border while taunting the border guards of having a "considerable amount of cocaine", and enduring a rather painful body cavity search along with his girlfriend (Candy Clark), he decides to hole up in a off-the-beaten path diner in New Mexico when their truck breaks down.

Gortner holds the owner and patrons hostage at gunpoint and the rest of the film basically has him insulting and tormenting the people while his girlfriend looks on helplessly. The hostages are a mixed crowd, we have Hal Linden (yes, that's Barney Miller!) and Lee Grant as an upper class couple, Peter Firth as a somewhat dimwitted cook, Pat Hingle as a local.

The film has some scenes that are rather tough to watch like Gortner trying to force the cook to have sex with the waitress on a table in front of everybody, humiliating Lee Grant by lifting her blouse exposing her breasts then beating up Linden when he tries to intervene among other things involving physical and mental torture. What the point is with all this, I can't really remember.

It's pretty much done on a B scale with a very low budget, it came and went with little notice. It was based on an obscure play written by Mark Medoff. Certainly no classic in any sense, but interesting to say the least. No video available in any format, but you can view a poor quality of it on Google Video. Worth a look at least.