Starring: Chuck Norris, George Murdock, Terry O'Connor,
Don Gentry, John Di Fusco, Ron Cedillos, Michael Augenstein, Dan Vandegrift
Director: Don Hulette
Action Director: Chuck Norris
By 1977, Blaxploitation had largely fallen out of favor, with ultra-cheap films like The Man from Harlem speaking for the genre. The burgeoning martial arts genre in Hollywood had ridden on the coattails of Blaxploitation, mainly thanks to the popularity of Enter the Dragon and Jim Kelly’s role in it. While it is appropriate that the mantle would fall on the shoulders of Chuck Norris—he had already fought Bruce Lee in Way of the Dragon and one-time Bruce Lee imitator Don Wong Tao in Slaughter in San Francisco—it is ironic that the genre, still in its infancy in the States, would hitch a ride with not only a different genre, but one that was arguably that lay as far removed from Blaxploitation as could be. I am talking about the “Hicksploitation” genre.
The origins of Hicksploitation can be traced back to the late 1940s with the popular Ma and Pa Kettle series. The films told the adventures of a hillbilly couple living in Washington State with their fifteen children. They get into hijinks involving trips to New York, fairs, digging wells and mining for uranium, and visiting the Ozarks. The films were hugely popular at the time. Bayou, or Poor White Trash (1957), was closer to an actual exploitation film, in which Peter Graves falls for a woman from a Cajun village. Gore pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis helmed 2000 Maniacs! (1964), in which cityfolk are menaced by the inhabitants of a literal ghost town in the South. The following year, breast specialist Russ Meyer turned out Mudhoney (1965), a sleazy soap opera set in Missouri during the Great Depression.
The genre reached the height of its respectability in 1972 with John Boorman’s Deliverance, in which a quartet of city boys are menaced by a band of hillbillies when the construction of a dam threatens the latter’s existence. Like Two Thousand Maniacs!, the film traded on fears that urbanized people might feel for their rural counterparts. Other movies that followed in a similar vein, albeit in more horrific ways, were The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1976). The late 1970s saw a number of action-oriented films set in the sticks, the swamps, the marshes and the backwoods, many of which starred Burt Reynolds, like Gator and White Lightning. Playboy Playmate Claudia Jennings headlined Gator Bait, about a family of inbreds being chased through a swamp by a sheriff and a rival family, full of incestuous boors. And the list goes on…
Breaker! Breaker! begins in a small California town located off the beaten path (somewhere off Highway 99 between Fresno and Bakersfield). The town has been granted a city charter and the local judge (George Murdock, who played God in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier) declares the name of the place to be “Texas City.” Some time later, a trucker by the name of J.D. Dawes (Chuck Norris) has arrived in Southern California after a few gigs up in Alaska. His younger brother, Billy (Michael Augenstein), is about to start his own career as a trucker and has a trailer of frozen dinners to haul up north. An “accident” on the highway leads him to take a detour toward Texas City, where he’s arrested on trumped up charges and his truck is impounded. Instead of paying the fine, Billy lashes out at the corrupt Sergeant Strode (Don Gentry) and his equally brutal deputy, Boles (Ron Cedillos).
A few days later, J.D. receives word that Billy never reached any of the weigh stations along the way. A conversation with a colleague suggests that Billy might’ve passed through Texas City, which is where Dawes heads next. His arrival in town is initially met with indifference and lies from the residents, although a visit to the local diner suggests that the town has made a cottage industry of fleecing outsiders. It doesn’t take long before Dawes makes a nuisance of himself and the Judge orders the inhabitants to arrest him so he can be conveniently disappeared. Of course, that doesn’t work. This is Chuck Norris we’re talking about. This is the same man who doesn’t have a chin beneath his beard, but another fist—for the record, he’s clean shaven in this film. Of course, while romancing the waitress from the local diner, he discovers that the town has a mysterious new supply of frozen dinners being distributed all over. Something fishy is going on in Texas City.
Breaker! Breaker! plays a little on the Hicksploitation trope in which rural folk are inherently suspicious, even disdainful, of urban dwellers. It also gives us a main villain in the form of a drunken, womanizing, Bible-quoting judge whose distorted vision of prosperity for his town revolves around illegal activities and indiscriminate screwing over of basically everyone who sets foot near the dirt road that leads into town. There are also moonshiners—did those ever exist in California after Prohibition?—and an intellectually-challenged young man who figures into the plot in several importante ways.
There is also some overlap with a second exploitation genre, mainly the super-genre of Fadsploitation, which was big in the 1970s. Fadsploitation films usually sought to cash in on whatever was popular at the moment: Evil Kineval, vans, and roller derby, among other things. In the case of Breaker! Breaker!, there are some references to the CB Radio craze that started with the popularity of the song “Convoy” by CW McCall. The song was adapted into a movie by Sam Peckinpah, while films like Smokey and the Bandit with Burt Reynolds also cashed in on this trend—like Breaker! Breaker!, those movies were something of a marriage of both Hicksploitation and Fadsploitation elements.
Chuck Norris was not much of an actor at this point. Nonetheless, he did have a blue-collar everyman air to him that helped to endear him to audiences at that time. He choreographs his own fight scenes, and it’s clear that he’s not quite as confident in that regard as he is with his own spin kicks. By 1977, Norris had two Hong Kong movies and a tournament fighting career to draw from, but uses almost none of that. Instead, we get sort of brawling fights that you might find in a typical Western barroom brawl, with a few sloppy kicks thrown in as needed. Outside the final scuffle, Norris doesn’t really convince us the viewer that his roundhouse kicks are able to “alter your DNA [in such a way that] decades from now your descendants will occasionally clutch their heads and yell ‘What The Hell was That?’”
There are two major fight scenes, plus a brief brawl at a truck stop and a shorter fight where Chuck knocks out the local police force. In the first, Chuck beats up almost the entire town after confronting the judge for lying about his brother. This fight felt the least like that of a martial arts film, save a kick or two. During the finale, when Dawes’s fellow truckers are literally tearing up the down, our hero throws down with Deputy Boles—both the judge and Sergeant Strode are handled in suprisingly offhand manners. While Boles attacks him with a hook at one point, I’m surprised he didn’t use his nightstick. In this scuffle we get to see more kicking from Norris, although he’s taking on an opponent who is clearly his inferior. Chuck finally dispatches him with a flying side kick, although the fact the scene doesn’t end with stock footage of a mushroom cloud calls the film’s realism into question.
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