It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Probably not. Most likely (and I mean this in all seriousness) this movie just went over the heads of most reviewers. They were expecting a DUKES OF HAZARD romp and instead were presented with a scathingly accurate portrayal of the good ol' boy lifestyle in all it's Neanderthal glory. Also they saw a movie made on the cheap in the 70s, two very big strikes against it in the eyes of contemporary viewers. Sure, the garish colors and harsh lighting scream "cheesy" to audiences weaned on the kind of multi-zillion dollar Hollywood crap that lost touch with reality decades ago. The verisimilitude of this movie is stunning (again, no irony intended). The characters are dead on representations of their type, a very real type I assure you, and the cheap location shooting only adds to the realism. Even the girls in the wet tee-shirt contest don't look like models or actresses, they look like the kind of women you'd really find in a red-neck bar shaking their hooters for the amusement of a bunch of drunks (no offense to these ladies, wherever they are). And the most surprising thing about THE BOYS/Texas LIGHTNING are the occasional subtleties, the little nuances of character. The whole scene where they hunters are stopped in their pick-up truck (complete with gun rack, of course) by a black policemen is nothing but a small but revealing character aside. It's great. I never thought I could say this about a movie called Texas LIGHTNING but it's really an art film. It should be appreciated by more discriminating movie fans. Unfortunately I suspect most people only watched this movie hoping to see Marcia Brady naked. (Possible spoiler: they must have been sorely disappointed).

A common strategy for a life in film is to trust certain artists, and few confound the spirit like Orson Welles. His best work was done late in life and much of that either we never will see or see corrupted. So we have to go spelunking through all sorts of abandoned shafts, and the most frustrating of these is following Gary Graver around. He's a nitwit, but he was Orson's nitwit, and he did make one rather interesting porn film.Now this is a goofy one: written by someone else, featuring no one at all who seemed to know much about what they were doing, and a story about the same. It appears that the result was so bad that the sponsor send Graver back to reshoot as he wished. So we come to this to see Orson imposed on Graver imposed on a disaster of a film about men imposing themselves on another.Its something of a terrific game to sort out which was original and which replaced. In other words, which Graver was told to do and which he chose to do, remembering that everything he knew about film was from Welles. Its not worth it at all unless you are prepared for a great hunt and you know what the master was thinking toward the end.Shooting for fun, shooting by Texas nitwits.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

There's nothing funnier (or perhaps sadder) than watching a grade D movie containing a once-famous actor who is only in it because they have come way, way down on their luck. Such is the opportunity afforded while watching Maureen McCormick (a.k.a. `Marcia' from `the Brady Bunch') doing her thing in `Texas Lightning.'At one point in the film, Mcormick's character (a tarty, chain-smoking barmaid named `Fay') delivers the line `they don't pay me to be stupid,' which literally led me to yell back at the tube `oh, they most CERTAINLY do' (anyone who goes from a starring role in a network TV hit to this sort of grade D trash is definitely guilty of selling out).Poorly written, directed, filmed and edited, laughing at McCormick's pathetic attempt at serious acting (including a rape scene which is so poorly done that it comes across as tasteless comedy) is just about the only entertaining thing to do while watching this boring, slow-moving `coming of age' story. None of the other principal characters in the film (who are all fat, ugly or just plain messed up) warrant any mention. But wait - there's even more in this excursion into the realm of truly high camp: the bad performances and tiring storyline are enhanced by some of the worst production values and editing you'll EVER see. Seriously. This thing truly looks like it was shot for less than $100. The `sets' consist solely of residential dumps in drab neighborhoods, a tired roadhouse, a tacky motel and desert backwaters, and the editing feels like it was done by a drunken chimp with a machete.And just when you think it can't get any worse, the film ends with McCormick performing a musical number, in a truly laughable preview of what would eventually become her last `career,' that of grade Z country singer.

Maureen McCormick from "The Brady Bunch" is actually a pretty good actress (I recall seeing her on TV's "The Streets Of San Francisco" in '74 or '75 convincingly playing a prostitute), and I see why she took on this low-budget project, but, alas, it is a film constructed by filmmakers who have little idea how to construct a film. Maureen plays a honkytonk waitress who befriends a backwards young man in town on a hunting trip with his "macho" dad and the dad's sniggering pals; peppy McCormick takes the kid back to her room to make out (I think) but the other guys burst in and try to rape her (from what I could see through the production murk, 'rape' would be difficult for these lousy Lotharios). I think Maureen took this acting job because it's a sympathetic part and she gets to sing and play her guitar. She probably had no idea how it was going to turn out. How did it turn out? It's so bad that when I searched the credits for a director--it wasn't to see who he was but if the movie even had one.