I bought a pirated VHS of this title a few years back out of extreme frustration at this maverick '70s film's patent neglect.
It's one I saw back in the early days of HBO/Cinemax and it made that big an impression on me, as it probably will on you, if only for the extreme freakishness of the storyline.
Teddy (Marjoe Gortner) is a disenfranchised Vietnam vet turned drug dealer who gets stranded in a small nowheresville town with his girlfriend Cheryl, played by Candy Clark. While waiting for his car to be fixed, Teddy fixes his attention on the goings-on at the diner next door and finds it might be fun to...mentally terrorize and torture the patrons inside, just for laughs. And that's basically it.
Sound boring? It's anything but. Red Ryder is a throwback to a day when scripts really were about something. Something layered, something complex...beyond mere storyline and plot points in a ProgramAScript project. They were closer to indie theater projects than big studio star vehicles.
Of course, there's a lot of subtext behind Teddy's vindictiveness and rage, but none of it is obvious or boring, and neither are the performances from a wide array of master craftsmen, including Lee Grant, Peter Firth, and Pat Hingle.
I've never talked to anyone who's seen this film and not had their a** knocked sideways by it. It's just that raw, well made (kudos here to Milt Kaselas), well written (thank you Tony award winner Mark Medoff), and well performed.
Rent it, steal it, bootleg it.
Just see it.
It's one I saw back in the early days of HBO/Cinemax and it made that big an impression on me, as it probably will on you, if only for the extreme freakishness of the storyline.
Teddy (Marjoe Gortner) is a disenfranchised Vietnam vet turned drug dealer who gets stranded in a small nowheresville town with his girlfriend Cheryl, played by Candy Clark. While waiting for his car to be fixed, Teddy fixes his attention on the goings-on at the diner next door and finds it might be fun to...mentally terrorize and torture the patrons inside, just for laughs. And that's basically it.
Sound boring? It's anything but. Red Ryder is a throwback to a day when scripts really were about something. Something layered, something complex...beyond mere storyline and plot points in a ProgramAScript project. They were closer to indie theater projects than big studio star vehicles.
Of course, there's a lot of subtext behind Teddy's vindictiveness and rage, but none of it is obvious or boring, and neither are the performances from a wide array of master craftsmen, including Lee Grant, Peter Firth, and Pat Hingle.
I've never talked to anyone who's seen this film and not had their a** knocked sideways by it. It's just that raw, well made (kudos here to Milt Kaselas), well written (thank you Tony award winner Mark Medoff), and well performed.
Rent it, steal it, bootleg it.
Just see it.