8/20/07: The
Mad Bomber (1973)We've spent over a
year worrying about how to approach
The Mad Bomber, and then we see our friends* at
Relapsed Catholic gleefully having
a good laugh over someone's
review of a far inferior film about a right-wing maniac looking to kill a bunch of people. "Someone made a movie about blowing up hippies at a rock concert,"
says Kathy Shaidle, "and I missed it?"
See how Shaidle makes it sound like good clean fun? So let's discuss the brilliance that is
The Mad Bomber, and we'll come up with some way to feel better about ourselves by the end of this entry.
The Mad Bomber starts as a hypochondriac with a previous assault arrest walks outside his house and becomes furious at all the oblivious creeps in his neighborhood. Finally, a film about people like us--even if the hypochondriac is played by Chuck Connors, who looks far more dashing in steel-framed eyewear and manly sideburns.
Connors is William Dorn, who goes up to strangers and says things like, "It's people like you who make our world filthy, my friend." Then we see that Dorn is quite literally ticking away, as he returns to his apartment and works on a bomb. It consists of an alarm clock wrapped around sticks of dynamite, and then bundled in plain brown paper before being put into an even plainer brown paper bag. That's what a bomb is supposed to look like, people.
Dorn goes out for another stroll, and ends up behind two high-school girls discussing their possibly-pregnant pal. "I
told her to go on the pill," says one. Dorn seems unhappy. He's having some flashbacks, and we'll later learn that he's thinking about his sweet teenage daughter who OD'd on heroin. Anyway, Dorn strolls into school right behind the gals and sets off his bomb. The aftermath suggests that he's taken out the cast of at least two sequels to
The Pom Pom Girls.
Then we cut to Neville Brand---as leering sicko George Fromley--raping a female inmate of Northridge State Hospital. She had wandered into the basement because she saw Dorn running out of there. So did Fromley, but he must've been so rape-crazy that he didn't notice that Dorn was planting a bomb. The victim survives the explosion; sadly, so does the rapist.
The LAPD sends out Detective Geronimo Minneli--played by Vince Edwards--to slowly figure out that the rapist and the bomber are two different characters. "There were two men who broke into the mental hospital," intones Minneli into his tape recorder. "The bomber and the rapist. The rapist came first." Then he talks into the tape recorder for a while about how hopeless the case is unless the victim can identify the bomber.
Unfortunately, the poor lady is a mute who can only use sign language to explain that she's too ashamed to cooperate with the police. "I wish I was dead," she signs. Minneli assures the woman that he'll catch the rapist and have him begging for death. That's the detective's idea of a bedside manner.
So now Minneli's stuck trying to chase down a rapist. He goes to the LAPD computer room, where the machinery looks like the stuff that the Wizard of Oz kept behind the curtain. Minneli compiles a list of rape victims all likely attacked by the same guy at the mental hospital. One of the ladies is a stripper who goes topless while filling Minneli in on some details. She adds, "Kill the bastard for me, will you?" Minneli responds that he'd love to.
By now, we're okay with Dorn being the villain if Minneli is the good guy. It's neat how Dorn beats up the longhairs who try to steal one of his precious bombs, but you can't go around blowing up high-school students. There might have been a few Young Americans for Freedom in the place. Besides, we kind of prefer Minneli's lack of manners--like when he tells his superiors, "Let me blanket the city with policewomen just
asking to be raped!"
Besides, Dorn is sending off whiney tapes to the local newspaper explaining that "it is imperative that the public listens to these messages, so that they will know why they are being punished." Dorn is a bit too much of a Dinesh D'Souza conservative for our taste.
That said, we'll think of some way that we can enjoy the scene where Dorn goes out to bomb a hotel and stumbles on a gathering of The Society for Women's Liberation. There's a female supremacist heading up the meeting, and, boy, does she yammer on:
The day of the male chauvinist is gone. Women are no longer second-class citizens to be looked upon as love objects of men--utilized as receptacles for the germ of their masculine insecurity. Women have been used and abused long enough. We are free at last. Free of male domination, free to work under equal conditions, free to make love as equal partners...
She keeps going until Dorn joins in the revolution by serving the ladies a heaping helping of dynamite under a silver serving platter.
That stunt upgrades Dorn from "mad" to "psychotic" in the jargon of the police computer. Otherwise, the machine is pretty useless. Minneli's finally got his army of undercover policewomen just asking to be raped. During one montage of rounding up rapists, Minneli beats the hell out of an attacker before announcing, "He's not the guy"--not that Minneli has any idea what the rapist looks like.
But then they finally catch Fromley, who refuses to cooperate. Minneli can't even pressure him with a rape arrest, since the mental patient Fromley attacked has committed suicide. Minneli finally releases Fromley, but then hauls the rapist back in so that the detective can put a gun to Fromley's head to prompt some cooperation. This leads to a fun Identikit scene where Fromley assembles a perfect picture of Chuck Connors.
Fromley is then free to go, but he's surrounded by a bunch of news reporters who know he's given the police a detailed description of the bomber. It's never made clear, but we like to think that Minneli alerted the press. This means Dorn will learn that Fromley ratted him out, and will seek revenge. Minneli told that stripper that he'd get the rapist killed. Where we come from, a promise to a stripper is a sacred thing. (The mental patient is dead, so it doesn't matter if Minneli made a promise to her.)
In any case, Dorn blows up Fromley while the rapist is pleasuring himself to naked home movies of his incredibly sexy/geeky wife. Fromley's description has still allowed the cops to track down Dorn--he looks exactly like Chuck Connors--and they raid his apartment. Dorn isn't home, but there's plenty of evidence. The only thing that the cops don't find in the apartment is a copy of
Mad Bomber Monthly.
This allows the police to foil Dorn's plan to blow up his former place of employment. Dorn becomes so angry that he sends out a tape announcing that he'll now "punish all of society" by driving around in a truck with "enough dynamite in the back to level a city block." He'll push the detonator "very shortly" and the only thing the police can do is "wait until it happens."
Minneli's superiors agree, so it's obvious that we're dealing with a Democratic administration. Our hero ignores orders and heads out to put a bullet in Dorn's head. The bomber is driving around downtown Los Angeles, so this isn't a particularly exciting pursuit. At one point, Minneli is foiled when a red light turns green.
The trigger-happy cop manages to save the day, and that's the end of the movie--except let's all pretend that there's a post-credits scene where Dorn wakes up the day after his daughter's funeral and realizes he just had a horrible dream, and looks into the camera and says, "Boy, have I learned not to force my intolerant fascist ways onto society--and how cool was that Geronimo Minneli guy?"
Make it your own: The good news is that you can get
The Mad Bomber cheap on
VHS and
DVD. The bad news is that all the copies are heavily-edited prints for television. You'll have to pay a lot more for
the rare VHS tape that includes plenty of the incredible Ilona Wilson as Neville Brand's topless wife. It's a shame that she didn't become a bigger star.
And speaking of big stars, it'd be nice to get a Special Edition DVD of
The Mad Bomber, if only for a documentary exploring how Chuck Connors managed the incredible hat trick of fitting it between his turns in the equally amazing
Soylent Green and
99 and 44/100% Dead.
*We don't really have friends.
