Saturday, December 14, 2019

The Mad Bomber - 1972

"Dorn didn't have to keep a diary, the newspaper did it for him."  This was a great line from this Bert I. Gordon directed film, a director which I don't believe we've seen on this blog before. 

I put on The Mad Bomber because the Amazon art was amazing and because I wanted something 70s again.  There's been a lineup of 80s movies recently, and I was wanting something with that slower, more character driven build I now equate to the 1970s.

IMDb claims this movie is from 1973 and called The Police Connection.  Also known as Detective Geronimo.  The plot is described as "Los Angeles detectives Minelli and Blake must track down a serial rapist who may know the identity of a mentally disturbed bomber."  And yes, that does happen, in the first like 20-30 minutes, but really for most of the film we follow the bomber himself, William Dorn as played by odd looking Chuck Connors.

William Dorn is a driven man.  Tall and a big gangly lookin, William starts bombing places early into the movie, much like the movie I just saw, The Train Killer.  Also like Train Killer, motivation and reasoning goes unexplained, and instead we watch both killer and the police detective who's chasing after him.  A hospital is bombed while a rapist is in there doing his thing, and soon enough the police nab the rapist and get a description of the man,  After a hilarious scene where they're artist rendering his face, police are after Dorn!

The Mad Bomber felt inspired by Dirty Harry quite a bit, but with a more human and centered killer.  It has that same gritty bad boy cop and unreasonable but somehow contained killer.  I liked the movie, I think it was compelling and the killer was well played.  I give it a 3.5 star rating.

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