What a blast!

The Mad Bomber (1973)

For starters a big blue screen pops up stating that this is called THE POLICE CONNECTION.

We find out straight away that Chuck Connors is a little unstable in this film. He stops a man in the street when he drops some litter. He grabs him and tells him to pick it up because he’s a pig.

The very next scene shows Connors making a bomb. Unstable as they come. Chuck seems to be disgusted with everything in the world. It shows in his face. Great face.

 Chuck follows a couple of filthy talking young girls into a high school. A couple of seconds later he comes out and the school blows up killing dozens of students. Did I state that Chuck was a little unstable?

Chuck then breaks into a mental hospital, rapes a mute woman and blows the hospital up. Chuck Connors is bloody mad. 8 minutes of none stop madness.

Enter Vince Edwards

Vince is a cop and he’s on the case. He soon deduces that it wasn’t Chuck who raped the woman at the hospital. No, another man did that my friends and the rapist knows who the bomber is.

Vince investigates, starting at a naked dance club. I would start there to.

Chuck makes another bomb. He gets stopped by a couple of muggers who want the contents of his bag. Chuck simply gives them a good hiding instead. He then goes shopping. I like films were bombers go shopping, don’t you? He then thinks he’s overcharged for peaches, he’s brewing again here in a kind of precursor to Michael Douglas’ character in Falling Down.

Enter the great Neville Brand, he just happens to be our rapist for the evening. He takes a woman hostage in a car. He drives her to isolation and rapes her. Naughty Neville! The woman manages to escape after her ordeal but Neville soon finds her in the woods and strangles her to death.

Chuck records a message for the police while listening to a song about love. He often looks at a pictures of what seems to be his family.

“I am disappointed that you did not see fit to broadcast my last tape. It is imperative that the public listens to these messages so they will know why they are being punished”

Chuck is as mad as a hatter.

Chuck gets a cup of coffee, a cheese sandwich and shouts at a waitress for not looking at him. People just don’t have any common courtesy these days he says before going to a hotel and blowing up a meeting of the Society of woman’s liberation. As you do.

Police women are on the streets dressed as prostitutes trying to entice Neville out of the gutter. After a long montage sequence to some jazz and wah wah guitar Neville finally gets caught by the cops. That wah sound will always get you in the end man.

Vince and Neville finally get to grips with the crux of the story now Vince does a bit of pushing and Neville finally decides to help by getting together a photo fit of Chuck. Actually, the photo fit turns out to be an actual picture of Chuck Connors.....How bloody advanced is that for 1973? Neville is freed with no charge because of his help. Bombers are more important than rapists and murderers in San Diego apparently. 

Neville goes home and watches a porno movie he made of his wife. He begins to masturbate. Chuck turns up and bombs him at the moment of climax. Funny stuff this.

It turns out Chuck was bombing everyone who did him or his daughter wrong. The high school where she was arrested for marijuana, the mental hospital she was evaluated and died in, an argument he had with a woman about women’s rights in a hotel. And now? The job he had an accident in. They wouldn’t pay him compensation you know. The police stop him from doing this but Chuck gets away.

Our mad bomber is now driving a red van around San Diego full of explosives, enough to blow up a city block. He’s passing all the places he bombed over and over again. Vince is on his tail. Where’s he heading? What’s he doing? Why is that washboard effect going over and over on the soundtrack?

Then suddenly!!!

Two trucks block his route and his wife is waiting. Chuck sees his daughter in his wife and it freaks him out. Chuck decides to leave the van and follow his wife with a little carry out bomb he made. Vince shoots him and Chuck blows himself up. Very messy indeed. 

The Mad Bomber is a cracking little sleazy thriller that could only have been made in the 70s. Bert I Gordon directs at a nice pace and the acting is pretty exceptional by the three leads. Story is nothing special but it works really well here. It’s Connors film for sure and he gives probably his greatest performance (Tin-Can Alley adverts don’t count). The film just drips of sleaze. I had to get a head cleaner to get rid of the filth from my player.

Highly recommended.

In the US he was known mostly for his western series The Rifleman.
Here it was this (and Sakura Killers)