This ’70s exploitation action film inspired Quentin Tarantino to name his mid-’90s production company Rolling Thunder Pictures, which should give you a clear indication of the film’s level of quality (and insanity). On its surface, Rolling Thunder appears to be a conventional revenge film. William Devane plays a Vietnam War POW who returns home to Texas and seeks vengeance for a brutal crime committed against his family. But director John Flynn and screenwriter Paul Schrader use the “out for justice” genre (revived by Taratino for the Kill Bill films) to plum the depths of madness engulfing Devane’s PTSD-suffering vet.
[Mild spoilers to follow]
Rolling Thunder is disturbingly tense, right from the start. Most other films, for example, would show Devane’s return home to his family as triumphant. That poignancy would heighten the horror of what awaits the family and accentuate Devane’s unquestionable right for revenge afterwards. But here, Devane returns to a family that barely remembers him, forced to lurk in the margins of the new life they’ve created without him (he sleeps in their wood shed!). When horror befalls their home, Devane is curiously unfazed. While he does seek vengeance, the film implies that this is not the result of his character’s grief or rage, but rather a primitive desire to reenact the barbarity of Nam.
Rolling Thunder ends in a violent, nihilistic shootout very reminiscent of the previous year’s Taxi Driver (also scripted by Schrader), with which it shares many sensibilities. The film is heavily bolstered by an excellent, stoic performance from Devane, whom I’ve always found vaguely unsettling, and great supporting performances from a very young, jockish Tommy Lee Jones and an effective Linda Hayes. It features a memorable use of a garbage disposal, as well as this unforgettable bit of dialogue:
“That’s cause I can’t think of anything to say. It’s like my eyes are open and I’m looking at you, but I’m dead. They’ve pulled out whatever it was inside of me. It never hurt at all after that and it never will.”
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