Beginning with King Dinosaur in 1955 through Earth vs the Spider in 1958, filmmaker Bert I. Gordon earned his moniker of Mr. BIG. Big monsters terrorizing small towns was his stock in trade. As were slow plots and literal garage-level special effects. Alas, everyone’s salad days come to an end, and once the public’s appetite for big monsters was satiated by the end of the ’50s, Gordon’s output slowed. He never left the world of b-movies, bouncing around all sorts of different genres. Eventually he returned to big monsters with The Food of the Gods in 1976, and I like to think that was because today’s film was the last straw. He had had enough and wanted to get back to what he did best.
From 1973, The Mad Bomber is glorious exploitation sleaze. It’s the kind of movie that would be the second or third movie shown on a night at the drive-in, when the parents have taken the kiddies home and the lot is full of horny teenagers.
The plot would be simple, but Gordon, who also wrote the screenplay, decided to overcomplicate things, possibly to justify all the nudity. The start concerns Chuck Connors as William Dorn, a dour beanpole of a man who embarks on a bombing campaign throughout Los Angeles. His bombs are simple and look inspired by Looney Tunes — just a few sticks of 
dynamite, a battery, and a ticking alarm clock. Dorn’s first target is a high school, and the disgust on his face grows and grows the closer he approaches and overhears the lurid conversations of the teens. There is some sanctimonious outrage in his motivations. Boom! And a pile of bloody youths is left in his wake.
At the second bombing is where Gordon starts to reach. Dorn plants his second bomb at a psychiatric hospital. It blows up, but not before one of the patients is raped. The cop investigating the scene, Lieutenant Geronimo Minneli (Vince Edwards), is confused. Why would a bomber stick around to rape a patient when he knows there will soon be an explosion? The only answer is, the two crimes must be unrelated. There is a rapist out there who has seen the bomber. Find the rapist, find the bomber. This convoluted story was too tall a mountain for Gordon to climb, but it makes for a hell of a b-movie.
The rapist is George Fromley, played by Neville Brand. Much of the cat and mouse in the movie is between Minneli and Fromley, with Dorn left to brood and bomb at his leisure. The rape investigation leads Minneli into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, as envisioned by Gordon. He had a type, that’s for sure. Slim, busty, scantily-clad, young, and willing to get naked in front of a camera. Minneli sets up a sting operation that seems to endanger every young woman in Los Angeles, with cops arresting creep after creep, but rarely before they manage to rip off a blouse or two.
Eventually the sting sweeps up Fromley. Minneli bullies him into identifying Dorn, and the movie enters its final act.
The shitty movie bona fides in this flick are strong. Besides the big stuff, like how the plot progresses and the general cheapness, the little stuff adds delicate layers of soupçon to the production. There is Minneli’s cop car, for one. It’s a 1971 baby shit brown Ford. So far, nothing unusual. But it’s not fitted, at all, for police work. There is no radio and no spinning dashboard light. There is no speaker for a siren and yet, whenever Minneli races off to an emergency, there is a wail on the soundtrack. So precious.
The best moment of shitty is when Fromley pegs Dorn as the bomber. The cops used the old Identi-KIT system. In real life, that would provide a composite face that merely resembles a suspect. That wasn’t good enough for Gordon. It may have not looked enough like Chuck Connors. So he just used actual pics of Chuck. It’s as if, in the most unlikely coincidence in human history, Dorn had posed for the makers of Identi-KIT. This must have happened before Dorn decided to become a terrorist, right? Right?!
Connors also gave his all. Dorn is wound tight. There is a reason for what he does, involving his daughter, but really, this guy was always going to snap, as Connors plays him. Every petty annoyance city dwellers deal with on a daily basis raises his hackles. He demands decorum and decency from everyone around him, and it never occurs to him that he’s one of the assholes that makes cities difficult to live in. It’s not a realistic performance, but it’s nicely over-the-top in a way the film needed.
Whatever shortcuts there were, in production and storytelling, Gordon took them. The entire film has all the sophistication of an episode of Dragnet, with a whole bunch of gratuitous nudity thrown in to increase box office. Perhaps this is not the way fans of Gordon would have wished the latter half of his career to go, but that doesn’t mean The Mad Bomber isn’t a fun watch. At times, it’s an absolute howler. The Mad Bomber enters the Watchability Index at #195, displacing Truck Stop Women. Check it out.