Navigation

The Ravager (1970)

Dir: Charles Nizet

Joe Salko (Pierre Agostino) emigrated to America, became a citizen, and was then shipped off to Vietnam for his trouble! Tough luck pal!

Separated from the rest of his squad Joe wanders around a bit until he spies two Vietcong rape and torture a woman hostage (the torture consisting of whipping her with a belt across her bared breasts).
As he watches, the men (who are dressed in just the right clothes for blending into a jungle, consisting of matching white t-shirts and knee length khaki shorts, which resolutely stay on during the rape), finally kill the woman by shoving a pipe bomb into a place pipe bombs were not designed to be stuck, and she promptly blows up!

Joe is later rescued and shipped back home to Las Vegas where he is shoved in a hospital to sort out the damage done to his fragile mind by such a terrible sight. Therapy over he is then released.
Although supposedly cured Joe is in fact (according to the unknown, unexplained narrator) “A very sick man, with a very sick mind”. OOPS!

To prove this the now bald Joe causally walks into a store and orders everything he needs to make numerous bombs, from a shop keeper who jokes about someone blowing the town up…Only in America!
Now armed with his explosives Joe heads on out to kill any courting couples he can find, “Joe was obsessed with just one idea…to kill people. Particularly lovers”, to replay the atrocity he saw committed in ‘Nam. Or something like that! You know how wacky these psycho’s are….

 

Coming so soon into the 70’s this far out lump of grimy schlock was actually one of the first films to use the ‘damaged’ Vietnam vet as a protagonist, it beat the Hollywood boom by years and was out of the starting gate even before those fellow Grindhouse/Exploitation titles like “Forced Entry”, which would trail 2 years in the wake of “The Ravager”.
Despite this place in Vietnam cinema history though “The Ravager” is something of a lost film, surfacing only on a beaten to hell print released on DVD-R by those good folks at ‘Something Weird Video’.
Sadly though the film is hurt by this war wounded print.
The entire film suffers from some very obvious jumps where missing frames mean we not only lose some dialogue but also some of the sex (possibly snipped by a naughty projectionist in some Grindhouse booth!) and at one point it jumps forward so much we only just catch an exploding car before the scene fades. Even the end is cut short!
But this is all we have to work with so let’s get on with it;

From the opening we are warned that this is going to be a movie that wallows in it’s crude technical aspects and low, low budget, instead of trying to work around such things, as nothing is done to hide the fact that Vietnam is actually a patch of Nevada scrubland.
More goodness comes in the shape of Joe’s hotel room which is a shockingly obvious set, with black painted walls, a false window with the curtains always drawn and a bizarre mix of furniture obviously scrounged at random from here and there (‘Set Decoration’ by Herman Thyson...what a genius!)

Hysterical technical moment to top all these hysterical technical moments though is when a woman drives away from a supermarket, with a hidden bomb in her car, and very handily drives off into the desert wilderness (and I mean wilderness, there is nothing for the eye to see for miles) so the car can blow up without any expensive planning, let alone damage to anything, that could threaten to push the film’s budget over that magic $50 threshold!

Belgium born Director Charles Nizet (supposedly murdered in Brazil in 2003) also seems to have no idea that editing can be used to simply get to the point and avoid the obvious.
Want to see in detail how Joe stakes out a woman victim? Well you can, as every single knot for every single limb is shown being tied as we fight the desire to go out and make a nice cup of tea until he’s finished.

Throughout the film every move of Joe’s is painstakingly shown every time he makes one, thus we lose all the energy that we should surely have given the fact we have a plot about a killer who likes to watch people get naked before blowing them to bits. Tension, thrills and chills should almost come naturally given this set-up but good old Nizet ensures these things are as rare as hairs on Joe’s crazy head.
As such your mind starts to wander even during the stalking sequences as all tend to be the same in location and set-up; this means we have to constantly follow baldy Joe as he slowly creeps along the sandy ground, slowly swims across lakes and lethargically plants his little bombs before we get to the more interesting moments when he sweats a lot, bares his teeth a great deal and watches the sexual shenanigans of his targets before blowing his load (as it were). All scored to easy listening jazz naturally.

Away from the utterly distasteful and nasty opening rape/murder (where the camera ogles the totally naked woman as she is stripped and flogged in true 70’s Exploitation style) the film is very tame for the most part when it comes to sex and nudity with only the occasional, though very welcome of course, glimpse of pubic bush on display.
But as with all these Grindhouse era works (especially those that mix sex and death) even the mildest sexual moment feels steeped in grime. So when we are treated to a late arriving moment of female masturbation (again though it’s afflicted with those damaging snipped frames) the slime almost drips out of the television. And as we know we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Naughty Nizet also ensures that Joe takes enough time in actually detonating his bombs though so the couples can deliver as much soft core sex and nudity as possible before Joe gives them the kind of bang they weren’t expecting.
These plentiful victim scenes (it seems the Nevada desert is packed with as many horny guys ‘n’ gals as it is A-Bomb craters) include a couple in a car who are reduced to draped limbs covered in blood (the only real moment of bloodletting), and a couple out fishing who get naked between bites where we are treated to fondling, kissing, tan lines and amazingly the guy’s hairy arse…obviously this actor was not as shy as the two guys playing the Vietcong nut jobs.
With the hairy boyfriend blown up Joe then rapes the woman and (we presume) does something nasty with his little exploding stick…presume is sadly all we can do though, as the print now suffers a huge jump cut that skips away from the still ongoing rape to Joe running back to his boat to escape!

The most amusing victim sequence (though it has a cruel ending) is one introduced by the following narration;
“On this occasion Joe comes across two Lesbians, seeking their own brand of thrills”!
How come this never happens to me?
Mind you, don’t get too hot at the thought of sandy Lesbians good reader, as the actress playing the buxom blonde half of this relationship seems she can’t stand the touch of the other actress and even during a simple kiss keeps the other’s lips as far as possible from hers as basic common sense allows (as the other actress gamely tries to make out it’s really a passionate snog) before hastily hitching up her bra.
Another classic line of narration comes to the rescue of this sequence though;
“Even though Joe is loaded with hang-ups, one thing that bugs him are girls that make love to each other”!

Pierre Agostino is the only actor given any real screen time, bar Jo Long as Joe’s interfering landlady, and as such he has to carry the film on his less than mighty shoulders.
Such a task is basically killed at birth though as his strong accent makes his bad line readings even worse, and all in all if it wasn’t for the fact he twitches so well, sweats like a pro and looks strangely like the lanky off-spring of Peter Lorre I’m sure he would never have worked again.
As it was 3rd rate schlock merchants Ted V. Mikels and Ray Dennis Steckler would find employment for him later on. Steckler even going so far as to give him the lead in his infamous “The Hollywood Strangler meets the Skid Row Slasher” where he plays the aforementioned Strangler.
Beware though…Agostino now dwells in Las Vegas in semi-retirement (please Pierre…make it full retirement for all our sakes) so anyone living or visiting there should heed these words;
If you get horny after watching all those Elvis impersonators…don’t head for the desert to make out!

So what we have here is cheap, shoddy, badly acted, badly made and yet it has that unique feel that such 70’s Exploitation films have. You know the feeling I mean…the one that makes you aware that such celluloid atrocities harbour a guilty, grimy, never to be repeated pleasure that silently makes you applaud the damn things for simply existing.
Quite frankly “The Ravager” has so much hoaky, politically incorrect, occasionally nasty, always sleazy and just plain bizarre content that although it fails to reach the heights (by a long way) that the greatest moments in Grindhouse cinema reach, there is still much to have fun with here and if a less damaged (indeed less ravaged) print ever appears of this rare slice of cinematic grunge then the movie can only benefit.
But even then “The Ravager” would still be for hardcore bad movie/Grindhouse buffs only, as such strange beings as ourselves would be the only ones to have any chance of mining the nuggets of gold embedded in its dark hulk of smelliness.