1977, United States. Starring John Saxon, Susan Howard, William Conrad, Morgan Woodward, Claudia Jennings, Jeff Corey, Dub Taylor, Maureen McCormick, Albert Salmi, Len Lesser, Bruce Kimball, Candice Rialson, E.J. André, Fred Foresman, Dick Esterly. Directed by Gus Trikonis.

Ask me how I like my movies, and I'll probably jump at the chance to throw out the line, "I like my movies like I like my women: fast, cheap, and violent." It's a good saying. I'm not sure if I made it up or if I heard it somewhere else before and just thought I made it up, but whatever the case, it sums up a lot of thing while totally ignoring the fact that I don't actually like my women violent or cheap. Fast I can deal with so long as they're not furious as well, but all this needlessly complicates matters and ruins the impact of the line.

The opening scene of Moonshine County Express depicts a hill full of hairy, corn-cob-pipe smoking moonshiners kicking back at the still and having a good ol' time. A quick flash to a dirt race track gives John Saxon time to speed around in a muscle car, then we're back to the moonshiners' jamboree, which was going well up to the point where it gets violently dispatched by a gang of shotgun-toting thugs who come hauling ass through the woods to deliver some double-barreled death. Off in the distance, from a ramshackle shack emerges a shotgun-toting country gal in short shorts who is soon joined by her sisters in running off the murderers. The woman, of course, is Claudia Jennings.

Already you have moonshine, murder, and mayhem. You have sexy gals in Daisy Dukes armed with shotguns and howling hound dogs. This, my friends, this is how every movie should start, even movies set in space or in India, and even movies in which two neurotic yuppies struggle to find love and loyalty in New York's upper class circles of society. Now you may think that movies about yuppies and their relationships aren't exactly twigs for the Teleport City fire, and you'd be right. However, we might warm up to the genre a little more if every one of the movies featured hillbillies shootin' shit up before cutting to a scene of Meg Ryan sipping tea in a cafe.

Besides all the dyin' going on, you have Claudia Jennings. Any movie that wastes no time getting her up on screen is okay in our book, although our book seems to be taking a very long time in getting finished. Claudia Jennings is to women in hicksploitation action films what Burt Reynolds was to the men: in other words, she's an institution. Despite the fact that she's a Midwesterner (born in Milwakee, raised outside of Chicago), she would come both in life and on screen to represent the triumph and tragedy of the American South.

Claudia's rise to drive-in fame started when she took a job as a receptionist at the Playboy magazine offices in Chicago. One of the photographers noticed her sitting behind the desk answering phones and lookin' purty, so he asked her if she'd be willing to do a test shoot. The end result could be a $5,000 check, which would be more than enough to get her out to Hollywood where she'd dreamed of working as an actor long before she joined Chicago's Hull House Theater Company in 1968. The shots apparently turned out pretty well, since she not only appeared in the magazine multiple times, but became Playmate of the Year in 1970.

Okay, so it's not like she cured cancer or brought peace to the Middle East, but it was enough to get her noticed and open the doors to Hollywood. Her first role was a small part in the dull melodrama The Love Machine, apparently so named because lead actor John Phillip Law exhibits all the emotion and acting range of a machine. Not an auspicious debut, but it wasn't long before the sleepy-looking beauty snagged a starring role in the gritty roller derby actioner Unholy Rollers After that, her drive-in action film career shifted into high gear, and she starred in one cheap, somewhat sleazy charmer after another, including Truck Stop Women, Death Sport, and The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. Unfortunately, the film for which she's best known is not an especially good film. Gator Bait is perhaps one of the most universally available and battered VHS tapes in America, and scarcely a chain or mom and pop video store opens that doesn't have a copy on hand.

Her personal life was a constant up and down thanks to a series of rocky relationships, but by 1979 she had things pretty much ironed out and was starring in a movie called Fast Company, an utterly anomalous drag racing movie snuggled in between The Brood and Scanners in up-and-coming director David Cronenberg's bizarre filmograpy. It seems out of place on Cronenberg's resume, which is populated with some of the weirdest and most grotesque psychological horror films ever made, but given's the director's fetishistic relationship with the automobile and the human body (nowhere more evident than in Crash), this particular movie makes more sense.

Unfortunately, what could have been the springboard for an interesting career was instead Claudia Jenning's last role. After the film was complete, she was on her way to move her stuff out of the apartment of her now ex-boyfriend when she fell asleep behind the wheel of her car, resulting in a fatal accident. She was only 29 years old when the accident took her life.

Given her life and films, it's a lot healthier to celebrate Claudia than it is to get morose about her death, and Moonshine County Express is nothing if it isn't a celebration. It's a celebration of whiskey, fast cars, sexy women, big fat crooked Southern businessmen, big shotguns, more fast cars, and John Saxon faking a Southern accent. It's drive-in theater fare through and through, and nothing makes me happier than drive-in theater fare. These are the sort of low-budget, hell-raising action films that don't get made anymore, not even for the direct-to-video market, where people are too busy making really plodding, cheap copies of really plodding, expensive action films. They may have been around so long now that they're like old friends, but we all know you can't count on raucous, fun-loving action from Don Wilson or Andy Sidaris. Don Wilson can only promise you slow kicks, and Andy Sidaris can only promise you gravity-defying orbs of flesh and silicone - mostly silicone.

Luckily, movies like Moonshine County Express still linger around to provide all the knee-slapping, hoot-and-holler action us old fogies demand from our cheap exploitation films. While Claudia Jennings may not be the star here, she's still active enough to show folks why she became the ass-kickingest white chick of the 1970s. Too bad no one ever made a movie starring her, Pam Grier, and Angela Mao. The big stars here, or as big as you'll get in a movie like this, are Susan Howard and John Saxon. Howard is best-known for her role on Dallas. Saxon is best-known for.well, you know John Saxon.

Howard stars as Dot Hammer, the eldest of three sisters who's daddy was one of the best moonshiners in the area before the corrupt boss Starkey (William Conrad!) murdered the whole crew in order to take over the shine business completely. When the sympathetic but powerless (aren't they all?) sheriff Larkin tells her there's no evidence to convict Boss Starkey of the crimes, the Hammer sisters vow to take matters into their own hands. The middle sister is Betty, played by our gal Claudia Jennings, and the youngest of the bunch is Sissy, played by none other than Maureen McCormick - best known as Marcia Brady from some television show a lot of folks seem to remember. Curiously enough, Claudia Jennings once appeared on an episode of The Brady Bunch as a hippie.

Caught in the middle is smooth-talking stock car racer and part-time moonshine runner JB Johnson (Saxon). He's got a thing for Dot, but he also has a past running shine for Starkey, whom he isn't prepared to accept immediately as a murderer - especially since Starkey is a prime source of income for the young hot shot. On top of all that, when JB isn't busy outrunning the Feds by making clever use of horsepower, banjo music, and a huge stump in the middle of the road that only he ever seems to notice, he's got competition from Starkey's main thug, Sweetwater (Morgan Woodward).

Things really start to heat up when the gals find the only inheritance their father could afford to leave them: a huge stash of the best damn whiskey the state has ever tasted. Armed with shotguns and a cellar full of prime hooch, the girls aim to get their revenge against Starkey and his men by driving him out of business. Being a fat, cigar-chomping Southern boss, however, Starkey isn't just going to roll over for the girls. A series of wild car chases and shotgun shoot-outs ensue as all hell breaks loose in the backwoods.

A simple plot is all this drive-in classic needs to propel it like a nitro-powered stock car through a wild, violent, and at the same time light-hearted hicksploitation romp. Yep, only back in the 1970s could a film be grittily violent and light-hearted. The action is plentiful and fairly exciting. Lots of stuff gets blown up or shot up. The car chases actually look like car chases, which may not seem like much until you've seen a ton of moonshiner movies that feature car chases that seem to be going about ten miles an hour.

There's a strict formula that these movies stick to, and Moonshine County Express isn't one to deviate from the formula. You have the evil boss and his vicious thug. You have the rascally hero with a cool car. You have a crazy old cackling drunk. You have lots of moonshine and banjo music. You have folks on the front porch with shotguns. You have the mechanic. You have dynamite, an ineffectual sheriff, and lots of Southern accents. It all goes into the still and comes as a predictable but entertaining and even amusing concoction.

The cast all turn in fine performances, which is to be expected since you have some of the best b-movie character actors and workhorses of the era. John Saxon is, of course, a b-movie legend. His appearance in a film means it probably isn't going to be a great movie, but it'll sure be enjoyable. Saxon always was a good actor in bad films, not to mention the occasion where he's a good actor in a good film. His Southern accent here isn't what you might call believable, but I've certainly heard worse. At least he has enough sense not to lay it on thick. Susan Howard is great as the determined, sassy Dot. In this day of wishy-washy PC heroes, it's nice to get back to a day when a woman wasn't afraid to just haul off and empty a barrel full of buckshot in some thug's ass. But she's here to do more than kick ass. She also pulls off a nice degree of intelligence, showing that she's just as likely to outfox Sweetwater and Starkey as she is to outgun them.

As Dot's sisters, both Claudia Jennings and Maureen McCormick turn in decent performances. Jennings is great as the whiskey drinking, gun-toting Betty, and the character gives Claudia a chance to cut loose and have a good time while shooting at guys with big thick mutton-chop sideburns. McCormick really has nothing to do other than tag along with her sisters and alternate between looking apprehensive, sweet, and angry.

The bad guys are suitably evil with nary a redeeming quality to make you feel like they deserve anything other than an assful of lead or canine teeth. William Conrad chews scenery left and right as he sweats and screams his way through the role of Starkey. He's not quite so over-the-top that he ruins the role, but he certainly pushes the caricature as far as he can. He yells, orders murders, sweats, chomps on cigars, and of course is a sex fiend. As his steely right-hand-man, Morgan Woodward's Sweetwater is a grimacing, hissing old bad-ass who seems to taking a page out of the Jack Palance book, which isn't a bad book to be stealing from unless your role is that of "sensitive computer programmer" or "nun." And then of course there's Dub Taylor as the town drunk, Uncle Bill. Dub Taylor may have played the cackling town drunk in more movies than anyone else in history. even when he's not playing the twon drunk, he seems like he's playing the town drunk. From Used Cars to Soggy Bottom, USA, Cannonball Run II to his lengthy stint as "the cackling dude with crazy hair" on Hee Haw, Dub defines the role of town goofball.

There are a lot of moonshine action films in the world, and although Moonshine County Express isn't one of the best known, it is one of the best examples. Of course, when your competition comes in the form of Honey Britches, you don't have to really push yourself to come out on top. Moonshine County Express falls a bit short of Burt Reynolds' backwoods classic White Lightning, but Moonshine County Express doesn't even have half the budget even though it manages to pack in just as many thrills (no one jumps a boat into the air though). What we have in Moonshine County Express is a solid, dependable, and competently made drive-in action film that delivers everything you expect a movie with such a title to deliver. Fast, cheap, and violent. We wouldn't want it any other way.

Labels: Rednecks, Year: 1977