Stanley (1972)

Stanley
Starring: Chris Robinson, Alex Rocco, Steve Alaimo
Director: William Grefe
Writers: William Grefe, Gary Crutcher 
Genre: Horror
Year: 1972
My rating: 

STANLEY is one of the more repugnant films I've seen a long time. What the producers lacked in technical prowess, they more than match in their ability to create utterly loathsome and unappealing characters. I didn't like this film from the beginning, but the longer it went on, the more I was appalled that anyone would think this was a story worth telling or that it featured characters worth sharing. There is very little to recommend about this film.

The plot is very thin. Tim Ochopee is a Native American recently back from army service in Vietnam. The experience has left him a broken man, shunning all human contact (including the Indian tribe he formerly lived with) and existing purely to improve the lives of the local snake life, his only friends in the world. As the film progresses the snakes become his hit men, taking the lives of all the people he perceives have wronged him in the past.

One of the movie's moral lessons is that where the white man goes, he brings nothing but pain and misery. It is difficult to argue against this when one realizes that the white man created the film industry which in turn produced the film STANLEY. Of course -- to be fair -- the black man is not exactly given the most flattering portrayal either. Nor does the Indian come across very well all things considered. In fact, watching this film makes one feel a little worse about all of humanity. I myself felt a little less than civilized after sitting through this, and I hadn't even been born when the movie was first released.

Tim has many snakes living in cages in his shack. His favorite snake is named Stanley (presumably for the sole purpose of allowing the graphics department use a cartoon snake to represent the "S" in the film's title card). He takes his snakes on field trips to seedy nightclubs where the two of them watch a particular stripper who dances with a snake. I get the impression that Tim was checking out the lady's snake, while his snake was checking out the stripper.

An odd subplot involves the use of the snakes in the strip act mentioned above. The manager of the shady strip club is convinced that an animal-cruelty stunt will be a great boon for business. Apparently he is unaware that he is the manager of a shady strip club and that no one cares about snakes. At least, not the two-eyed snakes on the stage.

The costume department presumably intended to make everyone look absolutely up-to-date and modern, and consequently everyone looks incredibly 70s. Everyone seems to be wearing their shirts unbuttoned to their navels, have gaudy gold medallions around their necks and have been poured into their hideously colored bell-bottoms.

Now, reading the description, one may wonder why I was so averse to this film. It certainly sounds like cheesy fun. Low budget filmmaking, bad 1970s fashion, snakes visiting strip clubs. But trust me, there's little fun to be had. The problem is not merely that the plot is paper thin, uninspired and predictable. It's also that everyone in this film is particularly and overwhelmingly loathsome. 

And I don't mean the people are merely "bad guys". Movie bad guys can be perfectly watchable, entertaining and enjoyable. Think of the questionable morality of the characters played by Lee van Cleef, Malcolm McDowell or Vincent Price; you want to watch them, not because they're "good", but because they're interesting. Yet the characters here are utterly lacking in charisma, they're purposelessly sadistic and are fundamentally banal.

You can't even cheer their bad behavior, because it's virtually impossible to feel any sympathy for their point of view. Take the scene where the protagonist brutally kills two heavies. Up until this point in the film, the pair have been portrayed entirely as stock comic relief characters. Yes, they try to capture some snakes for nefarious purposes, but they're played as total incompetents. For example, one of their raids ends in disaster as one one guy gets bitten on the backside and cannot sit down on his ride to the hospital. And we go from this to a sequence where the two slowly and painfully drown in quicksand while Tim throws a poisonous snake on them. It as disconcerting as it would be to watch the Road Runner submitting Wile E. Coyote to waterboarding, or Bugs Bunny violently ripping out Elmer Fudd's fingernails. 

By about the halfway point, I started wishing the venomous snakes would immediately bite every character so I wouldn't have to look at them anymore. While I eventually got most of my wish, the film took way too long to kill off its unpleasant cast. I usually watch these films twice before writing a review, but this time I decided I wasn't going to do that to myself. I can't recommend this film to anyone but the snakes in the audience who wish to assert their moral and artistic superiority over bonehead human film producers. And I cannot at the moment say I disagree with the snakes.