Retribution

An effective, if occasionally poorly acted violent revenge drama from North Carolina independent producer and actor Earl Owensby. At (unusually for a drive-in movie) nearly 100 minutes in length, future Final Exam director Jimmy Huston, shows confidence and an eye for gritty realism in this, his first feature; Owensby used him again for Death Driver (1977) and Seabo aka Buckstone County Prison (1978). Another Owensby regular, Worth Keeter, provided the bloody gunshot effects.

Owensby is the Reverend James Lowery, a middle-aged big city priest who also runs a shelter for skid row junkie teens. When Tim, one of the drug addicts, gives the police a tip-off about local pusher “Candyman”, he is ruthlessly and bloodily gunned down, along with Lowery and his family.

Miraculously, Lowery and one of his two sons survive the massacre, however, the son is left comatose and paralysed, whilst Lowery is rendered dumb, aimlessly hobbling around the city streets with a walking stick. He casts off his clerical collar and takes to hard drinking, hoping to deaden his depression.

Using ‘The Hole in the Wall’ — a dingy below street bar — as his base, he is taken in by Julie (Monique Proulx), a kind-hearted blonde hooker, who calls him “Soldier”. When one evening, “Candyman” walks into the bar, Lowery follows him out to a bus station restroom, brutally beating him with his cane before drowning him in one of the toilets.

From this point on, the booze-addled Reverend sets out on a lone mission to clean up the streets of all the dope pushers, but his bloody vigilantism attracts the attention of drug baron Herb Trexler (Martin Beck) and his pay-rolled corrupt police Lieutenant Untz (Phil Rubenstein), who see Lowery as a threat to their operation and must be eliminated…