Max "Bunny" Sparber

ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING aspects of Shatner's film career is just how many of his films appear, on first blush, to be exploitation, but are, in fact, something more. Both The Explosive Generation and The Intruder look to be crass sensationalism, but turn out to be sensitive, if somewhat hand-wringing, dramatizations of significant social themes. And while Shatner turned in performances in a few entertainingly z-grade horror films, they came about at a time when really grotesque violence was just starting to enter the mainstream; as a result, they seem almost naive by today's standards.

Impulse, on the other hand, really feels like exploitation. Made in 1974, it was directed by William Grefe, a man who had a long history of helming films shot in Florida and and bearing titles like Death Curse of Tartu and The Hooked Generation. Unlike Big Bad Mama, the other Shatner film that legitimately deserved to be called exploitation, Impulse doesn't trade in female nakedness. No, it is exploitation because it is cheap and badly made, and turns its attention to an exploitative topic -- specifically, Impulse is about a murderous psychopath. Nonetheless, the film is tremendously entertaining and inadvertently hilarious, and William Shatner gets much of the dubious credit for that.

Briefly, Shatner plays Matt Stone, a gigolo and con artist who, as a boy, witnessed his mother being manhandled by a World War II veteran and so killed the man with a samurai sword, which happened to be nearby. As an adult, he parades around Florida in an embarrassing series of polyester suits, a J.C. Penny version of a Seventies' swinger. He meets and seduces older women, living off their largess while passing himself off as a financial investor.

He's also dangerously unbalanced. When one woman catches him with a belly dancer, he promptly strangles her, locks her in her car, and dumps both in a river. Shatner occasionally signals that he is going into these psychotic fugues by pressing his pinky to his mouth, the same gesture he me made, as a child, after plunging a katana into his mother's attacker. It's a ridiculous gesture, contrived and silly looking. In fact, Shatner is unable to convey any genuine menace in this film at all. In one scene, he attacks a woman who blocks his way at a park. Or, rather, he attacks a bouquet of balloons she carries, popping them viciously and then barking at her "People like you should be ground up for dog meat!" Rather than seeming dangerous, Shatner seems pathetic and inept in this scene; his popping of the balloons comes off as an act of impotent bluster.

Weirdly, this works. Shatner's character, Matt Stone, is not meant to be seen as a malevolent figure of menace. He is inept, he's a fraud, and he would be simply laughable for for the fact that, when he's really pressed, he's likely to grab whatever is nearby and stab you with it. This is highlighted by is a rather elongated murder at the film's midpoint, in which Shatner decides to off an old acquaintance, another con man portrayed by Harold Sakata, playing a character named Karate Pete. Sakata is most famous for having portrayed the mute killer Oddjob in the film Goldfinger, and it is easy to see why he wasn't given any dialogue in the James Bond film, as Sakata is terrible at line readings. (In one instance, Shatner shoos him out of his hotel room, claiming there is a woman coming; Sakata grins feebly and stutters out the immortal line "You all the time horny.") Shatner decides to kill the man at a drive-through car wash late at night.

This is obviously something Shatner has taken time to arrange, as he has a noose at the ready, carefully tied to the roof of the car wash, knotted at one end so, once Shatner gets the noose around Sakata's neck, he can use the rope to climb down the side of the building. It goes disastrously wrong. Shatner doesn't shimmy down the side of the building using the rope, as he had planned -- he tumbles off it. And Sakata produces a knife from his pocket and cuts himself free from the rope. Eventually, Shatner simply hops in his car, chases Sakata through the car wash, and runs him over.

This is witnessed by a little girl, the daughter of one of Shatner's lovers, and the rest of the film is a battle of wills between Shatner and the child, a battle that has Shatner badly outmatched. She taunts him with her knowledge of his crime, and he is powerless against her, unable to do anything but waggle his finger menacingly at her. Eventually he snaps and chases her through a cemetery in one of the most protracted and least exciting chase scenes ever put on the screen. It's also a strange scene from a directorial standpoint. It is late at night, and yet, when they run into the funeral parlor, they pass a body laid out in a coffin. Shatner chases the girl around the funeral home for a while, and then past the coffin again, at which point it becomes obvious that a funeral is in progress. Shatner assaults a few of the guests, and then leaves, running over to the nearby house of another woman, killing her goldfish as she watches in horror, and then stabbing her to death.

Obviously, this raises more questions than it answers. My brief description might seems as though it makes the scene more confusing than it is, but, trust me, the scene is just as confusing when you watch it. You find yourself wondering why people are having a funeral so late at night. Why don't they do anything the first time Shatner races through their funeral chasing after a screaming little girl? Why does Shatner kill the goldfish?

The murder of Karate Pete turns out to be a metaphor for the entire film, which is full of carefully knotted nooses that are mishandled and don't work, in a manner of speaking. There's a certain accidental comedy to watching scenes like this get lost in their own complexity, but, in the end, the slasher films of the Eighties got it right. Why bother making elaborate plans for murder when the simplest, most brutal methods are the best. You've got a car, man; just drive over your victim and be done with it.

More films of William Shatner.