Watch out, here he comes… and there he
goes! Ha ha, it’s Eddie Macon’s Run,
and it is I, Burl, here to talk about it! This is a chase picture, mainly, and for
me was one of those movies that I was aware of thanks to the ubiquity of the VHS box, but never
had any interest in seeing… until now!
In fact I can’t claim any real interest in
seeing it, but, having spotted the tape lurking in my basement, I watched it
anyway! The picture was an early effort from Jeff Kanew, who later gifted us
with Gotcha!, and Kanew wrote and
edited it as well! Ha ha, kanew believe it! I guess the mastermind behind Revenge of the Nerds was once a sort of
auteur!
He began a relationship with Kirk Douglas (well
known from The Fury and Out of the Past) on this picture too,
which he would continue later with Tough
Guys and I think some kind of Kirk tribute documentary! Ha ha, it must have
been pretty great to be a filmmaker who became friends with Kirk! And Kanew uses
him pretty well in Eddie Macon’s Run!
John Schneider, well known from The Curse and of course for essaying the
role of that shine-runnin’ Bo Duke, plays the title character, a fellow who’s
been thrown in the pokey for doing virtually nothing beyond having put a
punching on John Goodman, from C.H.U.D.
and Matinee, who plays a nasty man entirely
deserving of it! He’s chased by cops and pulled over and railroaded right into
slam, and away from the family he loves so well! Immediately he escapes and is
re-caught by a professional chaseman played by Douglas, but not before he
smites Douglas a sound clobbering upon the pate! Now Eddie Macon is facing a nickel’s
worth in the pen, and boy howdy he doesn’t like it!
Now, all of this background business is
delivered throughout the picture in the form of flashbacks, which is too bad! Eddie
Macon’s major escape occurs right at the top of the picture, which initially
cheers the viewer - ha ha, she thinks, here is a picture that begins right
away! Then the flashbacks start popping up and the heart sinks, for we know
this flashbackery will continue until the proto-story is told! But front-loading all this background
would have been bad too, of course; much better would have been to find the
most economical way possible to deliver the necessary information and get on
with the chase itself, which after all is the topic of the picture, and even of
the picture’s very title! We don’t need to be persuaded of Eddie Macon’s
relative innocence, or have it laboriously spelled out for us, because
Schneider’s performance is sufficiently solid and goodhearted to meet that
need!
Aside from Kirk and John, the picture
features performances from a pair of slasher movie ladies: Leah Ayres from The Burning and Lisa Dunsheath from The Prowler! The former is Eddie Macon’s
beloved wife, who sets out a backpack full of escape supplies for him! The
latter plays a member of a demented ranching family, which also includes menacing
tallmen Tom Noonan from Wolfen and F/X and Jay O. Sanders from Hanky Panky and JFK, who-all capture Eddie and attempt to lynch him right in the middle
of their living room! Ha ha, this is quite a sequence all right, and serves as a nightmarish centerpiece to the picture; quite at odds with the rest of it,
frankly! Ha ha, but I was glad it was in there!
Finally Lee Purcell, whom we know from Necromancy and Mr. Majestyk, shows up to play Jilly Buck, who becomes Eddie’s
last-act guardian angel and helps see him to a happy ending! Kirk does his bit
too, of course, but only after a car flip scrambles his molecules! Ha ha, the
chase at the end is okay, and the rancher scene is pretty unsettling, but
otherwise the picture is not as thrilling or exciting as it would like to be!
The performances are fine and we all want Eddie’s run to be successful - and it is literally a run, as Eddie's preferred method of escape principally consists of jogging - but in
the end there isn’t a whole lot of hossmeat to the picture! It comes in, does the
job, and takes its leave with a courtly bow and a curt “good day!” I give Eddie Macon’s Run two games of Gorf!
No comments:
Post a Comment