MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: VIGILANTE FORCE (1976)

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Thursday, December 4, 2025

VIGILANTE FORCE (1976)

Twenty-five years before the horrible Brothers Weinstein, public face Harvey/backroom Bob, a similar dynamic played between the pleasant Brothers Corman, B-pic King Roger, front-man and stealth distributor of classy foreign cineasts, while kid brother Gene mostly content to stick with unassuming action junk such as this, one of a short series produced by Gene, on his own, for M-G-M release in the '70s.. And they don’t come much junkier than this tale of a terrorized town where locals hire a clean-up specialist only to discover that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. (Heck, that’s almost SEVEN SAMURAI, no?) Vietnam vet Kris Kristofferson’s the one-man wrecking crew (and closet sociopath) who simply replaces the current gang of shoot-em-up brawlers with a new protection racket of business-backed thugs. It’ll take kid brother Jan-Michael Vincent to organize the town against KK and take back the town from the corrupt vigilante force who took back the town from the previous bad guys. Writer/director George Armitage manages to make a 30-day shoot look like they had 21, though art director Jack Fisk (with uncredited assistance from wife Sissy Spacek) somehow conjures convincing small-town flavor. But who can explain what a hot property like Kristofferson (just off two Sam Peckinpah pics and about to start Streisand’s STAR IS BORN remake) is doing here. (The filmmakers so surprised he showed up on set, they apparently forgot to buy him shirts!) Jan-Michael Vincent shows the natural screen presence that somehow never quite put him in the top tier, while in a smaller part, pal Andrew Stevens makes a real impression even if Armitage throws away his sacrifice at the climax. Guess he was too busy lifting James Cagney’s WHITE HEAT/’49 finish to bother.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: IMDb says this is a remake of Blaxploitation pic BUCKSTOWN/’75. (Not seen here.) And it does seem something of a precursor to popular guilty pleasure ROAD HOUSE/’86. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/08/road-house-1989.html

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Thursday, December 4, 2025

VIGILANTE FORCE (1976)

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