I was 11 years old when I saw The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck on opening night. It was a sleepover party for a friend's birthday and we were looking to go see a movie at the $1 second-run theater. Our choices of what had made the leap from first to second-run that week were limited: the Dennis Quaid remake of D.O.A. and Blake Edwards' Sunset, a movie about Tom Mix and Wyatt Earp solving a crime (Tom Mix wept). I've since seen both titles and they're fine, but there's not much there to appeal to a group of 11-year old boys. Then we noticed a listing for The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck, a title I immediately recognized as having bypassed a first-run release altogether and was opening at the second-run dollar theater. There was no YouTube to watch a trailer, no internet on which to read reviews or even a plot synopsis. There was only a tiny newspaper ad promising some kind of adventure. I didn't care what the movie was about; all that mattered to me was that this was a movie making its debut at the dollar theater. I had to know what that looked like.
And so it came to be that I was one of only a handful of people on the planet that got to see a 35mm print of The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck on opening night, and definitely one of the only children able to make such a claim. Let it be said that this is not an appropriate movie for kids. It's paid cable sleaze, full of gratuitous violence and even more gratuitous nudity. How my friend's mom didn't insist we cover our eyes when Playboy Playmate Kathy Shower gets an oil rub down from several native women remains a mystery. That she did not march us up the aisle and out of the theater when the same character is graphically raped I will never understand. I don't blame her for not knowing what would be in the movie -- no one did -- and I'm sure she was supremely uncomfortable during these scenes, but it's crazy to think we were allowed to sit through it at age 10 or 11. Tennessee Buck is the kind of movie we might sneak late at night when our parents were asleep, not watch three or four seats down from them.
Pitched as a starring vehicle for David Keith, the actor only signed on to do the movie when he was afforded the opportunity to direct it. Trans World Entertainment, uncertain that he could be the one calling the shots on a feature film, first had him direct a low-budget horror movie to prove he had the stuff. That movie was 1987's The Curse, starring Wil Wheaton and adapted from the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Colour Out of Space," years later adapted into a Nicolas Cage movie of the same name. (Fun fact: Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci is credited as a producer on The Curse and is said to have ghost directed some scenes.) Satisfied with the results, Trans World gave Keith the helm of his sophomore feature and shipped cast and crew off to Sri Lanka to make Tennessee Buck.
Scripted as a straightforward Indiana Jones rip-off -- primarily a more racist Temple of Doom, the movie's biggest influence -- by original screenwriters Barry and Stuart Jacobs, the project changed course once Keith was brought on to direct. It was Keith who reportedly added most of the movie's humor, dubious as it may be, adding a self-aware style of comedy that starts with the title, on obvious goof on Indy, and reaches all the way to Keith's performance as the title character, a roguish action hero with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. In her feature acting debut, Kathy Shower gives pretty good Willie Scott, remaining a trooper while the film subjects her to varying degrees of sleaze and depravity. Even the Further Adventures gag in the title -- shades there of Leonard Part 6 -- was something that registered with me at age 1l, indicating to me that this film wasn't meant to be taken too seriously. The levity in the movie helps, especially because it doesn't excel much in any area. Though it's never explicitly going for laughs (except maybe the hapless husband played by Brant Van Hoffman, a stand-up comedian whose performance could best be described as "big" or "muggy"), Keith keeps a light enough tone for most of it -- until he doesn't, in those moments when the film pivots to dark and ugly -- that it's easy to shrug off the shortcomings. It's all a lark.
What sells Tennessee Buck more than anything, though, is the location photography in Sri Lanka. Shooting in the jungle is tough; shooting in the jungle with little crew and next to no money must have been nearly impossible. so it's to the credit of David Keith and company that they not only made something that uses the locale to their advantage and manages to cut together, but that the movie got finished at all. While the cinematography by Avraham Karpick isn't anything special (it's particularly hard to appreciate in VHS quality, which most rips of the movie are; even what appears to be an HD version streaming on Amazon Prime is in 1.33:1, fucking up the compositions somewhat -- have I mentioned this movie needs a physical Blu-ray release?), there is tremendous beauty and real production value throughout. Cheap B-movies like Tennessee Buck earn their sweaty authenticity by taking chances that bigger productions wouldn't.
I'm not making the case that The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck is an underrated gem, or even that it's especially good. But it is the kind of movie that could have only existed in the 1980s, when cable television and VHS shelves helped determine what movies got made and Steven Spielberg's biggest hits were being mined for exploitation fare. It belongs next to Cannon's King Solomon's Mines in the Indiana Jones Rip-Offs Blu-ray box set. David Keith didn't direct again, which would have made this his Night of the Hunter is not for The Curse (a movie that's not as good as Tennessee Buck). There were no sequels despite the franchise potential of the title character, but I guess that's what happens when your movie gets dumped directly to second-run screens. I saw a lot of movies when I was 11, but few of them stick in my memory quite like this one.
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