Johnny Vik (1973)

A Vietnam veteran called John falls foul of a small town sheriff, escapes from jail and becomes the subject of a relentless, woodlands manhunt. I know what you’re thinking “he must be talking about First Blood, right?” Well, no, this isn’t John Rambo, this is Johnny Vik, made in 1973 but for reasons unknown often cited as a 1977 film. Never heard of it? Well I can’t say I’m too surprised, in the twenty years since I first discovered this film I’ve only ever known of three other people who have seen it, and one of them was in it.

Personally, I first encountered the film in the late 1990s at my local branch of Blockbuster Video, of all places. Hidden away in an obscure corner of Blockbuster was a film called ‘The Hunted’ on the Intervision label, a video label dating back to the pre-cert era. Something which in itself got my attention, since it certainly wasn’t common to see a video from the pre-cert era still being on the rental shelves by the late 1990s. The irony is that those type of older video releases, which quickly ended up in Blockbuster’s ‘for sale’ bin, were the only videos on their shelves that are of any value today. If I remember rightly I not only picked up this film, but Truck Turner, a re-titled version of a Lee Frost film called Chain Gang Women, the English dubbed RCA release of A Better Tomorrow and Black Mama, White Mama from Blockbuster too. Yet back then all those were being cheaply sold off to make room for twenty odd copies of Titanic, Gladiator, Waterworld and the Mel Gibson Maverick. Mass produced tapes that are now worthless and considered the absolute dead wood of the VHS era.

Intervision, gawd bless em, had given a thorough exploitation makeover to this film, which by then had been re-titled ‘The Hunted’ from its original title Johnny Vik, had the tag-line ‘IF ONLY THEY HADN’T PUT JOHNNY IN JAIL’ slapped onto it, and was generally made to look like a First Blood rip-off. In fairness though this isn’t a film you could honestly market for commercial release, Johnny Vik is the type of film that wins lots of critical praise and awards, but proves a nightmare when it comes to being sold to the public.



In that sense Johnny Vik is part of an oddball family of near unclassifiable hippie era movies that enjoyed a brief period of visibility in the early days of video by being falsely marketed as horror or exploitation movies. Other members of this family would include Alan Rudolph’s Premonition (1972) given a horror film makeover under the titles ‘Head’ and ‘The Impure’, Brianne Murphy’s Yyalah (1972), released on video as ‘Blood Sabbath’, and the Canadian rarity Golden Apples of the Sun (1973), known on video as ‘Caged Terror’. The discrepancy between these films’ original titles and their VHS era ones, tells you everything you need to know about how different they are to the way they were sold to horror hungry VHS audiences.

My own quick way of selling this film to people over the years has been to imagine an episode of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, had it been directed by David Lynch. Which...I don’t know...maybe raises people’s expectations of this movie a little too high, but on some level is justified. It is certainly a far more accurate description of the film than “if only they hadn’t put Johnny in jail”. Despite the film containing uncanny similarities to the film and the book First Blood, Johnny Vik does also anticipate some of Lynch’s key themes. Images of pollution, industrialization and deformed children evoke memories of Eraserhead, while the setting of the film, a logging town whose blue collar normality masks many, many hidden layers of strangeness is straight out of Twin Peaks.

The titular character of the film, Johnny Vik (Warren Hammack) is a shell shocked Vietnam veteran attempting to readjust to civilian life in his home town. Johnny, a Native American, is also torn between the white man’s culture and his own heritage, at a time when one is eradicating the other. The guilt trip of having worked at the logging factory that is tearing up and dismantling the nearby woodlands, is something else that weights heavily on Johnny’s conscience. For all his Nam background and PTSD issues, Johnny is far from being a tough guy. In the early stages of the film he is less Rambo or Billy Jack and more a fun-loving man-child in the manner of Jim Varney’s Ernest P. Worrell, who passes the time by watching the locals pull pranks on the sheriff while Benny Hill type music plays in the background.



Human deformities and pollution are running themes here, the film points an accusatory finger at the logging factory, depicted as a monstrous creature that chews up the natural surroundings and spits out smoke and pollution, as having left its damaging mark on the population. In one scene Johnny visits a bar, only to become unnerved by the amount of people with wooden legs, warts, scars and nervous twitches. At the bequest of his pill popping Mama, Johnny makes a further attempt to blend back into the populace by getting a job as a window cleaner at the local hospital. Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong, and in a scene that is equally uncomfortable, disturbing and comic, Johnny freaks out after seeing severely deformed babies in the hospital, runs into the town in a panic, destroys his bicycle and eventually pisses in the street.



For this Johnny is arrested and sent to jail for 30 days. Unable to cope, Johnny snaps, escapes from the jail and heads up into the forest, where he becomes the subject of a manhunt. Now, keep in mind that all this guy has done is pissed himself in public, yet the police treat him as if he were a mass murderer or public enemy number one. An absurdity that is picked up on and pointed out in the film itself “did they think he was going to flood the town” asks one character. I was astonished to realise a few years ago that this film is actually based on a true story, there really was a Johnny Vik character who was arrested for peeing in public, escaped from the local jail and was hunted down and shot to death by a posse of eighteen men, in what sounds more like a lynching than anyone’s idea of justice. It was a case that obviously incensed director Charles Nauman, enough to pick up a camera and make this film, as well as revisit the story many years later in a book called ‘Pola : The Mysterious Communications of a Gone Woman’, which is also about the same case. Nauman is an infrequent filmmaker, as far as I can tell Johnny Vik was his only narrative film, but he has also made documentaries, wrote books, been involved in activism....a real renaissance man.

Unconventional as the movie is, Johnny Vik does tap into the zeitgeist of the times, there are lots of counterculture concerns in this film about environmental issues, the treatment of the native American, the effects of the Vietnam war, the disillusionment with modern society and the desire to drop out and live among nature. The great outdoors is seemingly the only place where Johnny can get his head together, and a peaceful world away from the noise and pollution of the town, which the film sees as leaving people mentally and physically crippled. Anyone expecting the type of vengeful payback for the town having drawn first blood, that Intervision video promised, is going to be left feeling short changed here. Johnny is entirely a man of peace who just wants to be left alone in the woods, where he is content to eat berries and build wooden effigies of his ancestors. The man though, just won’t leave Johnny alone.

Had I not discovered this film was based on a true story, I have to admit I would have had suspicions that Johnny Vik was an unauthorised adaptation of David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood, similarities between the two however just seem to be one of life’s strange coincidences. Even so, it is fascinating to compare this curio to the 1982 film of First Blood, since they actually tell pretty much the same story, but in very different ways. Far from going in the direction of an action movie, Johnny Vik’s second act is a Sunn Classic type love letter to the American wilderness before taking a more progressively trippy and surreal turn in its third act, as Johnny totally retreats from society and into his own fantasies. Johnny imagines himself being attended to by an army of identical oriental ladies, has visions of being hunted down by faceless men in steel masks and of a couple formed out of clay making love. As the spectre of death grows nearer, Johnny’s visions and fantasies become even more terrifying and religious themed. Johnny encounters an angel who throws animal offal into the snow and meets a pale faced Christ like figure who ...returning to the film’s fascination with deformities...has a finger that has two other fingers growing out of either side of it, giving the impression that he has a cross for a middle finger.



By rights Johnny Vik should have made it onto the midnight movie circuit, where its whole bag o’ weirdness would have been right at home with the Eraserheads, The Harder they Comes and the El Topos...and a weed smoking audience who shared the film’s counterculture anger and passion. It wasn’t to be though, and today Johnny Vik is obscure as they come. Clearly, this isn’t a film for everyone, it is a sad, bleak movie that has the potential to leave you in a very negative and depressed state of mind, be aware of that going into it. Even if one of those boutique blu-ray labels were to spring Johnny Vik from the forgotten movie bone yard I have a nagging feeling that this film wouldn’t entirely be welcomed with open arms. It is an odd, different and difficult movie that has never found an audience, and yet there are images in this film, the deformed babies at the hospital, the angel throwing guts around, the man with a cross for a finger, that have haunted me for the last twenty years. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand Johnny Vik, but I know I’ll never forget Johnny Vik, and that surely is the sign of powerful filmmaking. The fact that in twenty years I’ve only ever encountered three other people who have seen this film is a travesty. Johnny Vik is the great, lost, shoulda been a midnight movie that never was one.