Have you ever had one of those days when you're in a bad mood or just not paying attention, and you end up hurting people's feelings? Like maybe your wife has a new shirt that she really likes, and instead of complimenting her at breakfast, you spend fifteen minutes talking about your morning bowel movement, or waxing philosophical about whether John McCain or Tim Conway would make a better security guard at a Home Depot.
Or suppose you're a gigolo and some rich middle aged woman that you've been porking catches you flirting with a belly dancer, and you're arguing with her in the car, and you kind of wrap your hands around her neck and sort of squeeze until she goes completely limp, and then you light up a cigarette and attempt to resume your conversation in a more civil manner, which is a lot easier since you've just killed her? It's happened to us all, and when it has, we've all been wearing the ugly polyester shirts that Goodwill usually sends to the landfill.
This is precisely the mood that William Grefé decided to capture in Impulse, and damn if he doesn't nail it.
Or you know how when you're a kid, and your Mom is drunk, and her smelly drunk boyfriend is raping her on the couch, and you stab at him with a military sword that he left laying around, and he starts bleeding and running after you and you end up plunging the sword through his stomach and the shag carpeting has to be steam vacuumed professionally? A lot of emotional problems in adult life can stem from an incident like that, and it could even cause you to smoke skinny cigars, wear some ugly goddamn shirts that I think I've already mentioned, and try to cheat middle aged widows out of their life savings. But the upside is that every woman you encounter for more than ten seconds will desperately want to have sex with you, even if it means enduring your mood swings, which run the gamut from smiling like an insurance salesman to impersonating Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. So at least it's not as bad as being invited out to see Lord of the Dance with people that you work with.
Bill Shatner's career probably wasn't cooking along very well in 1974 when he accepted this role, but he throws himself into the schizophrenic psycho schtick with gusto, and really turns this one into a memorable feast. And it's not like Grefé worked completely on the fringe, since he somehow corraled Rita Hayworth into debasing herself in The Naked Zoo a few years earlier. Still, the production quality is right up the same pipe as Al Adamson or Ted V. Mikels, which is a win in my book. Grefé also seemed to be drawn to persistently unsavory scenarios, with an affection for commencing a scene with the camera fixed on a woman's butt or a grotesque hotel painting. It might then fade slowly to a blur, then pan to a closeup of Shatner mentally undressing a danseuse, with a cigar clenched in his teeth and a hairdo like Z-Man Barzell in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. This really is why I own a DVD player.
The story is a bumper car ride of ridiculous scenarios. For example, Harold Sakata makes an appearance as a blackmailer who wants a cut of Shatner's fraud racket. Shatner convinces him to meet at a car wash, and then stand precisely below the position where Shatner has rigged a noose for killing him. After some fun and hilarity with Sakata dangling from the end of a rope while Shatner makes "coochie coochie" sounds, Harold pulls out a knife to cut himself loose, only to be chased through the car wash and run down by Shatner's early 70s Pontiac LeMans. No empathy is required, since Sakata plays the role with the personal charm of a guy who uses your bathroom and leaves puddles of urine dispersed over a four foot diameter area.
Or then there's the woman in the amusement park who bumps into Shatner with a cluster of helium balloons, which baits him into Bill O'Reilly mode, yelling at her about how she deserves to be ground into dog food. Then just as abruptly he switches back to an affable grin and resumes courting his new girlfriend and explaining how they make hot dogs. Sometimes during these mood swings, Shat will bite his pinky, a simple but goofy affectation that knocks the character up a peg or two on the bulldada scale. Thank you, Bill. May I have another?
Of course in the end, he'll only end up shoving his girlfriend's face into a fishtank, so she won't tell the police about the bloody corpse he's carelessly left laying on the rug, or worse, the tight orange pants and striped muscle shirt that he wore when they went out for a snow cone. And this is where Grefé deftly brings the film full circle, showing that violence begets violence and the perpetrator must inevitably become the victim. Very deep stuff for the existentialists among us who see moral lessons in reruns of Maude.
This one gets a solid four Waldos, primarily because Grefé was smart enough to keep Shatner in the action, and to let him be Shatner. Don't try to rein it in. Let it slide. Let it ride.
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