Wishbone Cutter (1977)

We open in the thick of the American Civil War. Specifically, when Confederate Captain Josiah 'Wishbone' Cutter (Baker) and his First Arkansas Regulars are ordered on a suicidal cavalry charge right into the teeth of a fortified Union artillery position. This goes about as well as you'd think as the rebels are obliterated.

And while what’s left of Cutter’s brigade retreats (-- very effectively with The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as a meta, balladeering-tail tucked between their legs), Virgil Kane (Pickens), Cutter's First Sergeant, is gravely wounded by what appears to be a Yankee deserter. He’s saved, at least temporarily, by Half-Moon O’Brien (Houck Jr.), Cutter’s half-Indian / half-Irish scout, who plants a tomahawk in the enemy’s back.

Alas, Kane’s wounds are mortal. But before he dies, the man reveals a potentially lucrative secret to his beloved Captain. Seems before joining the army, while trapping beaver along the Buffalo River back in Arkansas, the old soldier collected a bunch of clear, shiny, and possibly precious stones found along the riverbank. He then stashed them in a cave high-up on a certain mountain, and manages to croak-out a basic map on how to find it by “looking through the eye of Needle Rock” that will reveal the bluffs where the X-marks the spot. Again, Kane isn’t sure if they’re worth anything but he’d like Cutter to be the one to find out. And if so, benefit from them.

Generous, sure, but Kane’s last words are downright sinister when he warns his new heir to be careful while rooting around on this specific mountain. For somethin' “spooky” goes on up there. Something so strange -- and ominous, even the Indians won't set foot on it. Seems something was always up there, Kane says in his final throes. No. Not something. Some thing that was always watching him. Following him. Trying to get him. Some damnable thing that he never could see -- and it might still be up there. And with that, the man expires.

Now, neither Cutter nor Moon put a lot of credence to this death-bed confession, what with the war still going on. But circumstances change when the conflict finally ends and Cutter, with Moon in tow, is mustered out on the losing side and returns home to Arkansas. Here, not only does Cutter find out his house has been commandeered by the occupying Union forces as a headquarters, but his mother has also passed away; and on top of that, his wife, Rosalie (Dano), is currently shacking up with the Yankee commander, a Major Lee Blackburn (Davis).

Now, to be fair, Rosalie had been informed that her husband had been killed in action nearly a year ago and was doing her best to survive. But Cutter isn’t in a forgiving mood as old animosities quickly boil to the surface over this betrayal, which is compounded when Blackburn shows up and it’s quite obvious that Rosalie has made her choice to remain with him. Thus, it soon comes to blows between the two men. And while Cutter seems to have the upper-hand at first, his wife cements her choice by smashing a vase over his head, allowing Blackburn to recover and press the advantage, resulting in a fairly nasty beat-down, which Cutter loses, badly.

Luckily, Moon intervenes and manages to extract Cutter from the house and they flee into the wilderness, where he works to stitch his bludgeoned partner back together. And once the bleeding stops, with his home and wife gone, flat broke, and with no other real prospects, Cutter decides to follow up on Kane’s mystery stones, seek out the cave, and stake out a claim in case his old friend’s hunch was right about them having value. Unfortunately for Cutter and his companion, they are about to find out that Kane was right about a lot of things hidden up there, waiting for them to trespass on that mountain...

When my Amazon Prime account first coughed-up this “Since you watched this, we think you might like that” and I gave it a spin, considering when Wishbone Cutter (1977) was made, and who made it, after that cryptic opening set-up, I nearly exploded with glee, thinking I had stumbled upon a potential Joe Don Baker versus a Bigfoot movie that, by some miracle, I had never even heard of before.

Alas, turns out that notion was too good to be true. It's not a Sasquatch roaming around our mystery mountain, but something perhaps even more strange -- and twice as deadly. As to what was actually up there, ready to raise all kinds of havoc, our first clue comes from the film’s executive producer, Barbara Pryor, who described Wishbone Cutter as an adventure film but was “really more of a witchcraft western.”

Now, the story of how Pryor became involved in the making of this movie is a whopper of a tale all on its own, which is fraught with peril and filled with political intrigue. It started back in 1957 when Barbara Jean Lunsford, a 19-year old freshman at the University of Arkansas, married David Pryor, a graduating senior, who would serve as the founder and publisher of the Ouachita Citizen from 1957 to 1960 before starting law school. Mr. Pryor then entered politics, getting elected to the Arkansas state legislature, serving for six years. He then ran for Congress in 1966, won, and eventually served three terms as a representative.

Barbara Jean, meanwhile, pushed herself to be the ideal politician’s wife, taking care of their three children on top of all her other responsibilities. “Politics is so public,” Barbara Jean told Judy Mann in an interview for the March 16, 1979, edition of The Washington Post. “It's a constant assault on your inner life ... I felt compelled to be perfect. Always smiling, always pleasant, always willing to do whatever had to be done."

David and Barbara Pryor

But she ended up pushing herself too hard, wound up hospitalized for an emergency hysterectomy, and suffered through a near death experience when a pulmonary embolism caused her heart to stop while recovering from the surgery. Barbara Jean would pull through but there was little time to recover as her husband geared up to run for a Senate seat in 1971. And against medical advice, she left the hospital early and campaigned for her spouse, who wound up losing -- “the first time he had lost anything since the third grade.”

Thus, the Pryors limped back to Arkansas in 1973, where they purchased a big house, which Barbara Jean quickly transformed into what she would call “the perfect home.” Only they weren’t allowed to stay there very long as her husband would wind up being elected governor of Arkansas in 1975. But after moving into the governor’s mansion, the governor’s wife kinda snapped and suffered a bit of a mental breakdown.

“She was exhausted,” according to Dunn’s article. “The surgery, nearly dying, the moves, and the constant campaigns had consumed her, but [Barbara Jean] didn't realize how fully.” She had tried to supervise the staff at the mansion, and she tried to fulfill all her new state and political functions -- until she reached a breaking point one Sunday afternoon, where she came home, sat down with her husband, and told him she'd had it. "I couldn't take it another day,” said Barbara Jean. “Not another minute." She needed to leave. Now.

"When I was first lady of Arkansas, it seems the more I did, and the better I got at my job, the less I saw David,'' Barbara Jean told Mann. “Even though the jobs were similar, the duties were so diverse we literally never saw each other. Politics," she said diplomatically, "was not my chosen vocation. I didn't want it to consume my life, and it seemed to consume all my energy."

Her husband understood completely and agreed to the trial separation, despite the likely political fallout of this estrangement; and after agreeing to leave the boys -- aged 16, 13 and 10, with him, Barbara Jean left that very night and struck out on her own. At first, she holed up in their lake house near Hot Springs for nearly two months and just rested. Her mental batteries recharged, she then re-enrolled at the University of Arkansas, where she took courses in English literature, a course on film, and a course in journalism and typing. “Very practical,” said Barbara Jean. “I decided I would prepare myself to go to work." Only no one would hire her because of all the rampant rumors over the prickly situation with her husband, as the official statement from both parties was, "No comment."

But! It was while visiting her children at the governor’s mansion when Barbara Jean ran into Charles B. Pierce, a regional filmmaker, who had produced and directed The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), which went on to be a huge sleeper hit, making the backwater auteur a ton of money, allowing Pierce to keep making movies locally. Apparently, Pierce had worked at the Ouachita Citizen back in the day, a job he desperately needed at the time. And as a way to pay the Pryors back for this kindness, he gave Barbara Jean a job at his production company, Charles B. Pierce Productions.

According to Barbara Jean, she started by taking care of the secretarial duties, answering phones, typing up letters, as well as serving as the office cleaning woman. At the time, Pierce was gearing up to shoot The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) in Texarkana and Barbara Jean soon got involved; first as an assistant wardrobe mistress before getting promoted to script supervisor for the duration of the production, where she watched Pierce and learned the nuts and bolts of filmmaking.

When filming wrapped, the tight-knit crew was eager to tackle another project. But Pierce was tied-up in post-production on Sundown and Grayeagle (1977) was several months off. Earl E. Smith, who wrote nearly all of Pierce’s films -- The Legend of Boggy Creek, The Bootleggers (1974), and Winterhawk (1975), had a script for a supernatural western ready to go, they had even scouted locations in the Ozarks along the Buffalo River, but this was all moot because they had no money. Here, Barbara Jean piped up, saying she could probably raise the needed funds.

 Barbara Pryor

The others were a tad dubious, but Barbara Jean wound up raising over $1-million dollars from fifteen different investors outside of her husband's sphere of influence for Wishbone Cutter. "I sold it on my own merit," which earned her a spot as executive producer. She then formed Fairwind Productions with Smith and co-producers, Steve Lyons and Doug Jackson. Smith would also make his directorial debut on the film, who borrowed most of Pierce’s stock crew, including cinematographer James Roberson, editor Tom Boutross, and Jaime Mendoza-Nava for the score. 

Filming commenced immediately in the fall of 1976 as cast and crew headed into the Ozark mountains along the Buffalo River for nearly nine weeks, running into a bit of luck with the changing seasons as the landscape became more barren with the falling leaves the further they pressed into the wilderness, making things a little unreal and more ominous as the hunt for the stones commences.

And just like with Pierce's pictures, their film just oozes with its rural atmosphere and a sense of rustic bucolic-ness, which helps ground the film, considerably, once you realize we're basically looking at a mash-up of John Ford's The Searchers (1956), John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and William Girdler's The Manitou (1978). And so help me, it works. Honest. I mean, not real well. And yet...

Now, the quest for these stones is a bit of a macguffin, even though they turn out to be diamonds. And while that also sounds dubious, well, turns out Arkansas is fairly famous for being one of the rare places outside of South Africa where diamonds have been found and mined -- our film even opens with a scrolling prologue, explaining the geological distinction of our locale. There was even a diamond rush when the first stones were found in 1906. Thus, our film, if anything, is only guilty of jumping the gun a bit.

Of course, neither Cutter nor Moon would know a precious stone from a petrified cat turd. And to those ends, they recruit a local school teacher / mineral expert by the name of Amos Richmond (Neely). And once he’s onboard, our trio of prospectors start fording up the Buffalo but don't get very far before coming upon the burning remnants of a wagon surrounded by the bodies of its former occupants.

And while all signs point to an Indian massacre, Cutter finds the over-abundance of spent arrows confusing, noting how most of the local tribes are better armed than they are by now with repeating rifles. Even stranger, Moon doesn't recognize the markings on these feathered shafts. However, more arrows soon start flying -- one hitting Richmond in the arm, causing them to flee deeper upstream; but not before stumbling upon a lone survivor, a woman, whom they snatch up before making good their escape.

Obviously traumatized, Drusilla Wilcox (Locke) is a little sketchy on the details of what happened to her party or who attacked them. And while Cutter and Richmond argue about what to do with her -- bring her along, take her back, or just abandon her, an agitated Moon is convinced they're still being followed but can find no sign or trace of any pursuer and begins to fear malicious spirits of some sort might be after them.

And things get even stranger from there as our group is constantly herded deeper into the forest and up into the mountains by these unseen archers. As for why? Well, we're definitely heading into spoiler territory, so, fair warning for those who read on from here on out.

Honestly, I'm not really sure when I first realized Drusilla wasn't what she appeared to be. The film camouflages her pretty well. Yes, she keeps disappearing right before any attack; but we kinda gloss over this because we are so conditioned to see her as a victim; a survivor of the massacre but not totally unscathed. 

I mean, it's never spelled out specifically but it's implied that she'd been raped by her attackers, which is bad enough; but, remember, in the eyes of her rescuers, she is damaged goods, defiled by savages, and no longer fit for civilized society, which is why Cutter treats her so badly and considers just abandoning her to whomever finds her next, feeling it's the most humane option. 

However, as I said, this woman is not what she appears to be. Not a victim at all, but perhaps the strangest bait in film history.

You see, after being sidetracked by a trio of bushwhackers, who are summarily dispatched after killing off a reel of film, Cutter’s expedition finds Kane's landmark that points out where his hidey-hole cave is secreted. Here, Moon recognizes the mountain as Chok-Oh-So-Be, the Mountain of Demons, and then relates the tale of Chikara, the great spirit eagle, who did battle with a jealous medicine man looking to steal his magic.

And according to the lore, Chikara won this battle (-- sort of, in a Ben Kenobi, A New Hope sense), and, feeling betrayed, cast out every native from his realm. And this legend is so deeply rooted it explains why no native in their right mind will set foot up there or face some nasty retribution of a supernatural order, meaning those can't be Indians shooting at them, right? Right.

Thus, Moon is convinced their attackers must be some form of manifestation of this great eagle spirit, while the others, well, not so much. Thus and so, ignoring Moon's ever escalating paranoia and stern warnings, they press on. But the closer they get to their goal, the troupe runs into even more bad luck and misadventure.

Upon reaching the target cave, the search begins for Kane's stash, which proves maddeningly elusive. Meanwhile, Drusilla starts to subtly but deliberately set the men against one another. Then, things really take a sinister turn when Moon and Drusilla take the horses for water and, in the film's most notorious scene, Moon and all the horses are lost in a freak accident when they fall off a cliff due to a thunder-clap induced landslide. (More on this “accident” in a sec.)

Somehow, Drusilla manages a handhold and gets rescued by the other two men before she falls to her death. And despite the loss of their friend, this rescue by rope gives Cutter an idea as to where Kane's stones might be. And after lowering Richmond into a deep crevice inside the cave, he finally finds the coveted stash, whose contents are quickly confirmed to be bona fide diamonds.

All well and good, but now they're faced with the daunting task of making the long trek back to civilization on foot to exploit this new wealth. Agreeing to set out in the morning, the camp quiets down for the night. Richmond takes first watch and is joined by the girl outside the cave, who lures him deeper into the forest for a little spit-swapping, where they get separated until he sees something, recoils in horror, and promptly takes an arrow to the throat.

Fleeing back to the cave, Drusilla alerts Cutter as to what happened and he quickly holes-up for the expected siege -- which never comes. When the sun rises, Drusilla finally confirms she is, in fact, not human at all but a surrogate Siren for Chikara, luring any trespassers (-- including, we can assume, those dead settlers back at the burning wagon,) into letting their guard down before dispatching them, which she does again with Cutter, who takes the bait but then realizes too late what she really is before becoming a permanent fixture of the cave.

The deed done, our film ends with our vengeful spirit manifestation returning the diamonds from whence they came before spying a large eagle circling above. She then retrieves her bow and returns it to her master. She then spies two more trespassers heading up the mountain and quickly tears up her dress and lays herself out prone again, baiting the trap once more as we fade to black.

Wow, and wow again. Hookay, Wishbone Cutter is one strange bugaboo of a movie that tends to get under your skin and itches like crazy once you’re exposed to it. Sure, I was disappointed when it turned out the mystery of the mountain wasn't a hairy bipedal cryptid of some sort, but what it turned out to be proved just as fascinating, especially how Smith's script keeps you guessing -- not necessarily as to who was after them but how it was done from the inside out. And again, considering when it was made, that Debbie-Downer of an ending should come as a surprise to absolutely no one.

Dirty, crass, unrelentingly bleak, brutal, and bewitching, this film might not be quite historically accurate but bears a strange sheen that makes things seem a little too real at times. Case in point, the scene where Moon and the horses get caught in the landslide and go over the cliff.

At first glance, those falling horses look awfully real during that landslide; and one would hope this was a tragic accident caught on film at best; and at worst they decided to leave it in any way as any other scenario is freakin' unconscionable. Yeah, after scanning through it a couple of times, I can safely say those definitely weren't any kind of stuffed equine effigies taking the plunge. (Just watch the legs.) Thus, I had a strong and queasy suspicion that those were real horses -- and turns out my hunch was sadly spot on, as the production got into a bit of a kerfuffle with The American Humane Society when word leaked-out that four horses were purposefully killed for the production. 

According to Smith and Pryor, this was all done above board and the animals were purchased from a rendering plant, meaning they were old, disabled, and destined to be killed anyway. So instead of heading to the glue factory, these decrepit horses were rode, driven, or pulled all the way up the mountain to get that shot. Again, both Smith and Pryor insist the horses were "humanely" put down before being shoved over the precipice. "We have all that verified," said Pryor in a later interview with the Associated Press. "We made sure everything was done according to Humane Society rules, and I know we were very careful to do it properly."

But despite all these claims that they cleared this rather heinous act with the very same animal safety officials who now condemned them, the film was officially denounced by The Humane Society, who wound up calling for a boycott of Wishbone Cutter. And while bad publicity is better than no publicity, as the old axiom goes, animal snuff is the kind of notoriety that can keep your film from making it or breaking it in half. But aside from that disturbingly bizarre piece of verisimilitude, and Roberson once again stunning with his alluring cinematography, and Mendoza-Nava once more needling into your ear with another haunting score, most of the credit for the film's surprising effectiveness must go to the cast, who over-compensate for Smith's dawdling script and languishing dialogue. 

Post his lambasting via Mystery Science Theater's take on Mitchell (1975), Joe Don Baker gets way too much grief as an actor these days. Few played a hard-ass better than he did as far as I'm concerned; and here, he's involved in one of the nastiest, no-holds barred brawls I've seen him in yet -- even rivaling the one that gets the ball rolling in Phil Karlson’s Framed (1975), where Baker also got the living shit beat out of him. And it should be noted that the man who pasted him so badly was played by Bud Davis, who served as the stunt-coordinator on all of Pierce’s films and played the masked Phantom Killer so effectively in The Town that Dreaded Sundown. Davis was also in charge of the stunts on Wishbone Cutter, and would also serve as an assistant director.

Sondra Locke, meanwhile, brings her usual doe-eyed innocence to her part; but you don't have to look too hard to see the damage and dementia behind those same eyes. And it took me about half the movie to finally recognize Ted Neeley. E'yup. This was his follow up film after playing our Lord and Savior in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). And Joy Houck Jr. was no stranger to this kind of exploitation movie, either; but he was usually on the other side of the camera, directing the likes of Night of Bloody Horror (1969), The Night of the Strangler (1972), and Creature from Black Lake (1976). Also along for the ride were a trio of veteran character actors and genre stalwarts, Slim Pickens, Dennis Femple and John Chandler.

Sadly, this would be Fair Winds only feature, as after a nearly two-year estrangement, Barbara Jean reconciled with her husband as the production wrapped up -- just in time to go back to Washington D.C as David Pryor finally won that coveted Senate seat. And while things would never be quite the same between them, the couple is still together at the time of this publication.

Her single feature would be released theatrically by Howco International Pictures -- at least regionally, where it cut a dry-fart at the box-office, and was then picked up and re-released under several different titles, ranging from The Shadow of Chikara, Demon Mountain, The Ballad of Virgil Cane, The Curse of Demon Mountain, and Thunder Mountain -- none of which who could decide on the proper spelling of Chikara, Shekarra or whatever,  which probably goes a long way in explaining why the film is currently wallowing in the purgatory of Public Domain and really lousy prints.

The version I watched, and the only one apparently available at this time, is a severely truncated and bowdlerized TV print, with visible gaps in the film, resulting in some atrocious edits and a lot of audio drop-outs to hide what little profanity there was.

This, is too bad. Because whatever title you see it under, I think you'll all agree that this film deserves some kind of restoration effort and a larger audience than its current small cult of fans. Because while Wishbone Cutter is far from great -- I'm not even really sure if it qualifies as being good, but, it definitely sticks with ya long after it’s over.

Originally published on February 14, 2014 at Micro-Brewed Reviews. 

Wishbone Cutter (1977) Fair Winds Production :: Howco International Pictures / EP: Barbara Pryor / P: Steve Lyons, Earl E. Smith / AP: Douglas Jackson / D: Earl E. Smith / W: Earl E. Smith / C: James W. Roberson / E: Tom Boutross / M: Jaime Mendoza-Nava / S: Joe Don Baker, Sondra Locke, Ted Neeley, Joy Houck Jr., Linda Dano, Slim Pickens