This week's VHS is Ross Hagen's 1979
crime noir The Glove.
A bounty hunter (John Saxon) swimming
in debt attempts to hook a big payday, a homicidal ex-con (Roosevelt Grier) who uses a riot glove to pummel his victims.
So yeah not a horror film. I obviously ignored the glaring “adventure” sticker on the box when I bought it. I
figured it was from the seventies, so it'd likely be at
least half-decent no matter what. Good enough to fork over the five bucks
at whatever convention or swap meet it would've been anyway. As it turns out
I was right - half decent.
The Glove starts out with a cracking tune
which unfortunately no film that followed could have lived up to. Check this out--
But I swear I'm hearing “you can't
escape from the kiss and rape of The Glove!” Am I crazy? Like WTF! As I
said, this was a seventies crime noir so its pace tended to be quite
deliberate and meandering, but not necessarily dull. It's not often
you get to see Saxon play the lead so it was cool to see him narrate
his way through the proceedings. He always had such a natural cadence with
dialogue and it's on full display here.
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John Saxon in The Glove. |
In between keeping up with Saxon's shenanigans, Grier - when not teaching kids to play guitar - walked around town beating white dudes to a pulp with the title appendage. Well, eventually he did. It seemed like he missed a lot at first, just so the filmmakers could show just how powerful this riot glove actually was.
The Glove was watchable, but did pad its run time with a lot of incidental material. I wouldn't say that you should just revel in Everything Is Terrible's three-minute version, but it's out there if you want to skip to the good bits.
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