To see the poster art and read the tag lines for
Texas Lightning is to prepare for a good ol' boy romp
in the best Hal Needham tradition of fast pick-up
trucks, easy women, brawling, beer drinking, hound
dogs, three-named cowboys, dumb-ass lawmen and
firearms. The cover of the DVD shows a young guy
in blue jeans sitting on a giant cowboy hat, raising a
Budweiser and surrounded by girls in cowboy boots,
halters and short shorts. The promo reads, "they're
stormin' on the taverns, thunderin' over the roads,
and just plain havin' a good ol' time."
Now try to reconcile that with this plot summary:
A burly, manly bully of a country dad (Cameron
Mitchell) wants his son (Cameron's real-life son,
Channing Mitchell) to stop bein' such momma's boy and
start actin' like a real man, redneck style. Pursuing
this goal, he forces the kid to go rabbit hunting with
him and his two pudgy, ign'rant friends. It will be
the boy's rite of passage into manhood, a chance for
the older generation to teach him to shoot and drink
and chase poontang. Cuz' when Texas Lightning strikes,
a boy becomes a man. (Hey, that's what it says in the
song, amigo.)
The boy tries to be a good sport as the three
assholes rag mercilessly on his ass, so the first day
of hunting goes fairly well, but that night turns into
a disaster. At the local honky-tonk, the young man
scores with a pretty barmaid (Maureen McCormick of the
Brady Bunch), probably because she's never seen anyone
act all shy and polite in a shitkicker bar. The kid
gets Marcia Brady back to his room and is making love
to her when dad and his dentally-challenged cronies
show up and decide to throw the kids a proper
shivoree. Their idea of a good time is to knock the
kid unconscious and rape the living daylights out of
Marcia.
The next day, the older guys act as if nothing
improper had happened, but the kid goes ballistic
during the hunting expedition. Instead of shooting at
rabbits and lizards, he starts blasting away at the
older men. Finally he takes their truck, strands them
in the desert, drives back to the honky-tonk, listens
to Marcia Brady sing a sad-ass country lament (slash)
love song, and apologizes to her. They kiss and make
up. While the closing music plays, the film shows a
couple of minutes of ... er ... "highlights" from
scenes we have watched throughout the film, for no
other reason other than (presumably) to fill out a
contractually obligated running time.
Yup, just a good ol' Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed, Dukes
of Hazzard kind of premise - "just plain havin' a good
ol' time," like a dad participating in the rape of his
son's first love, and the son in turn attempting
patricide, then stranding his dad in the desert.
Some years ago, the VHS video box for this film
called it a "warm, funny story of a boy growing up."
WTF is going on here? These pieces don't fit
together.
Well, they kinda do if you know the film's history.
It seems that the film was not originally designed to
be a "good ol' boy" movie. Writer/director Gary Graver
originally created a serious drama called "The Boys,"
which would have been a sensationalistic shocker in
the manner of I Spit on Your Grave. Producer Edward L.
Montoro said that was not what he was paying for, and
forced the director to re-cut what he had and to shoot
additional comedic footage to turn the film into a
proper Needhamesque drive-in flick. The final cut
includes a zany wet t-shirt contest which occupies
substantial running time, for example, and most of the
action is accompanied by hard-drivin', feel-good
bluegrass guitar and banjo music in the general
toe-tappin' style of the Foggy Mountain Boys.
According to IMDb, "The new version was released to
the theaters as Texas Lightning, while the original
cut of The Boys remains officially unreleased to this
day. An illegitimate video was released in Finland in
the early 90's. There might also be other European
bootleg editions."
The net result of the re-cut was what you have
probably already deduced, a film with an
inappropriately casual attitude toward very serious
and tragic matters which would be better suited for a
drama, as originally planned. One thinks that the
ultimate fate of dad and his rapist cronies,
unresolved in the theatrical cut, must have been far
more gruesome in the director's original cut.
Ultimately, one concludes that the film's
bottom-dwelling IMDb rating is well deserved because
of its cavalier attitude toward rape as well as its
almost complete lack of merit, even on the guilty
pleasure level, save for some rare breast exposure
from Marcia Brady. Even that savory flesh is ruined by
a DVD transfer which is approximately VHS quality:
dark and grainy and washed-out, with poorly synched
mono sound. (Marcia Brady's song is post-dubbed, and
very poorly at that, although it really is her voice.)
Not only are the movie and the DVD bad, but if the
marketers really wanted to use that poster to sell us
on a good ol' boy romp, it should not have shown the
kid drinkin' a can of Budweiser. Orderin' a can of Bud
in a Texas honky-tonk is pretty much a sure sign that
you're a tourist from Oxfordshire, Podner. You might
as well come in wearin' one a them little derby hats
and swingin' your brolly like John Steed. Why don't
you just order a fuckin' Guinness while you're at it?
Everyone knows that any self-respectin' Texas cowpoke
would be drinkin' a Lone Star out of a longneck
bottle.
