Grindhouse Releasing is doing the Lord’s work by taking the presumably forgotten treasure of a 1970s niche horror gem and restoring it to 4k level from rescued lost footage. Impulse is exploitation that should be in your collection next to Herschell Gordon Lewis and Ted V. Mikels. A combination of film restoration and collection of well-rounded handful of extras including interviews, a live Shatner talk from 2022 and more make this experience complete.
It’s a glorious day to see this film back in print to show off that at the height of William Shatner’s presence as captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise, it did not typecast him. Like what “A Face in the Crowd” did to Andy Griffith, Impulse proved that William Shatner could step outside of science fiction and be a loveable character to portray someone with power and fragility as a psychotic killer that you want to sympathize with as much as you want to hate.
William Grefé, known for underground pleasures like “I Eat Your Skin,” “Wild Rebels,” and “Stanley,” exemplifies the Florida exploitation generation attracting famous actors like Rita Hayworth and Shatner, Hollywood royalty enticed by a director’s freedom of expression.
Tony Crechelas, who penned the script for Impulse, spent the 1960s writing perv novellas. Out of the steamy reads that mingled with lesbian lit and resurrected a passion that emanated out of the Psycho Hitchcockian mind fuck, Impulse was born. The irony and triumph is that this film needed not to pull hat tricks out of the drug and sex culture to make this gritty underground film effective.
As American as a drive-in cheeseburger, the film is an embodiment of the 1970s culture from the gigolo fashion of Matt Stone (Shatner) to the analog soundscape that created an aural identity and left a mark on the Florida exploitation scene.
The film begins by demonstrating the sheer savagery of the red-blooded male — a son witnessing the potential rape of his mother until it’s stopped cold with a sword through the heart. Flashforward to Stone as an adult, schmoozing his way through rich women and resorting to murder if his plan goes awry. Is it deep childhood trauma fueling an impulse of derangement or is it psychsexual urges?
Stone can be as charming as he can be terrifying. A con artist, Stone was spit out from the cradle of society (“They just let me out and left me like leaving a dog on the side of the road,” he says) only to exploit social norms and swindle money out of wealthy women, namely Julia Marstow, played by Ruth Roman (Strangers on a Train) and wooing the beautiful Ann Moy, played by Jennifer Bishop (“Horror of the Blood Monsters”) into his life to become Stone’s next victim after countless murders prior.
In the film, we also get a visit from Harold Sakata (Goldfinger’s Oddjob) who gets out of prison only to intimidate Stone through desperation. They end up in a brutal fight that exemplifies the art of rage through supernatural strength.
Kim Nicholas (Tina) is the daughter of Ann Moy and becomes a witness to Stones’s murder spree only to end the film in a reverse psychological role that generates a Catch 22 in plot structure. The relationship and conflict between child and adult is why Grefé wanted to title the film, “Want A Ride, Little Girl?” But that got nixed to make way for a more generalized tug of emotions.
Through Shatner’s charisma as an actor, Impulse still holds up and reigns supreme as a thriller, making his anti hero a supreme case of repressed Freudianism who is equally shocked by his uncontrollable deranged urges as the moviegoer probably was in 1975.
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