The Candy Snatchers (1973)

Directed by: Guerdon Trueblood
Starring: Tiffany Bolling, Ben Piazza, Susan Sennett

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Eddie: There she is. Little Candy. Do I get to ball her?
Jessie: There won't be time.

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I love movies like Candy Snatchers, because it reminds me just how vulnerable we are all, despite living in a 'civilized' society. We just kinda trust everyone around us to follow the rules, and when someone doesn't we're really caught with our pants down. The German movie Funny Games is kinda like that too. In this movie, one minute Candy's a regular teenage girl walking home from school. Ten minutes later she's been grabbed by a trio of Groucho-Marx Nose-'n'-Glasses wearing kidnappers, dragged out into the desert, and buried alive in a makeshift coffin with only a tiny airhole to keep her alive.

As the trio drive off to blackmail Candy's jewelry-store manager father, we find out that an autistic kid named Sean was hiding in a nearby thornbush and saw the whole thing. Unfortunately for Candy, Sean can't talk, and even if he could, it's pretty clear that his asshole parents wouldn't believe anything he said. Sean's parents are real pricks... there's a sequence where they take him to a fancy dinner to meet the Dad's boss... the boss gets a big laugh when he finds out that the kid can't talk, and the Dad doesn't get the promotion he wants. As they drive home the Dad keep telling him how he screwed everything up, as the mom screams at him "I never want to see you again!"

But as bad as Sean's parents are, they've got nothing on Candy's dad. When he gets the blackmail call from the trio's leader, Jessie, he heads home to tell his wife that Candy's spending the night with a friend. Yup, the bastard figures this is his chance to get out of his marriage, ditch his daughter, and spend the night with his mistress. His parting line to his wife is classic "Dear, I'm going to be a little late tonight. You know those damn Dutch and their cartels."

Now the kidnappers have a problem - a nabbed girl that nobody wants. They dig Candy up and take her back to their hideout for the night, where the big lug of the group, Eddie, starts to fall in love with her. He tells Candy about his dreams of opening a bowling alley with "a nice bar, just enough light, and two or three hookers... I'll be set for life!" Meanwhile, Jessie (the hot leader) and Alan (the psycho one) head off to the local morgue to buy an ear. (I kept expecting Walter Sobchak to pop up - You want an ear? I can get you a ear, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me.)

I guess you don't need me to say it, but damn... this movie is dark as hell. It has a reputation of a film that's hard to watch, and it is, but not because there's a lot of violence or rape scenes (although there are a couple of those). There's just so damn much fighting and backstabbing in this movie... you'd swear you were watching an Andy Milligan movie. Even the kidnappers don't get along with each other. One of my favorite lines comes when Eddie gets tired of being bossed around by Jessie. He throws her against the wall and cooly tells her "You're two walnuts and 150 pounds short of telling me what to do." The rest of the movie is a will-they or won't-they waiting game, with some extra revalations concerning Candy's father and a surprise or two from our old friend Sean.

The thing that's so great about movies from this era is that filmmakers weren't afraid to make a movie without a protagonist. On paper Candy is would presumably be a sympathetic character, but Trueblood seems to go out of his way to make sure that she has zero personality. She's really nothing more than a prop... they could have stolen a painting or an expensive vase and the film would have played the same. And the Sean character has obvious potential for being the unwitting hero - and if this movie had been made in any other decade he absolutely would have been - but here... damn. Keep in mind when you watch this movie that Sean was played by Christopher Trueblood, the director's son. This one goes up there with Daddy's Deadly Darling in the Bad Parents Caught on Film shelf.

This movie was shown this week as part of the Alamo Drafthouse's Weird Wednesday series. If you missed it, your chances of seeing it in a theater anytime soon are pretty slim. Luckily, Subversive Cinema released a great print on DVD last year. Lots of extras on this one, including featurettes, trailers, etc, but the best part is a commentary track with Candy (Susan Sennett) and Jessie (Tiffany Bowling). It makes a great addition to any exploitation library.

- Micah