Director/Story/Producer – William Grefé Screenplay – Gary Crutcher, Photography – Cliff Poland, Music – Post Production Associates. Production Company – Crown International Pictures/The Stanley Corporation.
Chris Robinson (Tim Ochopee), Alex Rocco (Richard Thomkins), Steve Alaimo (Crail Denning), Susan Carroll (Susie Thomkins), Mark Harris (Bob Wilson), Marcie Knight (Gloria Calvin), Ray Baumel (Sidney Calvin)
Tim Ochopee is a Seminole Indian who has just returned from service in the Vietnam War. Tim is a recluse and lives in a shack in the Florida Everglades. He believes it is his calling to tend a horde of rattlesnakes that he has befriended and allowed to overrun his shack. His former employer Thomkins asks Tim to come back to work, but Tim holds resentment over the way that Thomkins’ men lynched his father. Tim then learns that Thomkins wants him back to use his snakes to manufacture snakeskin goods. Furthermore, he finds Gloria, the stripper that he provides a snake to perform with, has premiered a new act in which she bites off the snake’s head. As a result, Tim’s mind snaps and he uses his snakes to take revenge.
Stanley was one of the films made by the largely unrecognised William Grefé, a low-budget director based in Florida who made a number of works usually for drive-in audiences during this era. Grefé’s first film as director was the racing film The Checkered Flag (1963). He found the horror genre with his third film Sting of Death (1966) where a mad scientist creates a jellyfish creature and followed this with the voodoo film Death Curse of Tartu (1966); Impulse (1975), a film shot entirely in Esperanto featuring William Shatner as a serial killer; the killer shark film Mako, The Jaws of Death (1976); and the Backwoods Brutality film Whiskey Mountain (1977). From the Swamp: The Films of William Grefé (2019) was a documentary about his career.
The 1970s was the period of the Animals Attack film. The way had begun with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) in which birds inexplicably turn on and attack humanity. Next up was the surprise hit of Willard (1971) in which mousy underdog Bruce Davison trains an army of rats to do his bidding and the genre took off with the mammoth success of Jaws (1975). Ahead would be the likes of Frogs (1972), Chosen Survivors (1974) with vampire bats attacking survivors in a nuclear fallout shelter, Grizzly (1976), Squirm (1976), Day of the Animals (1977), Dogs (1977), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), The Pack (1977) and The Swarm (1978), among others.
Amid these there was a mini-genre of snake attack films with the likes of Fangs (1974), Fer-de-Lance (1974), Killer Snakes (1975) and Rattlers (1976), plus several other snake associated films such as Night of the Cobra (1972), SSSSSSSS! (1973) and Jennifer (1978). I have an essay on the topic here at Animals Attack Films.
Stanley has been conceived as a blatant copy of Willard. Stanley substitutes rattlesnakes for rats but there is the same story of the loner who prefers the company of animals to humans and then uses his animals to take revenge against those who have wronged him. Both films even have titles that consist of a human personal name that is given to one of the animals in the film.
One of the major differences between the two is that where Willard attacked those who had wronged him, Tim’s revenge scheme is against those who have wronged his snakes – Alex Rocco who wants to turn them into leather goods, stripper Marcie Knight who develops an act where she bites the head off a snake. The other major influence on Stanley would appear to be the then recent hit of Billy Jack (1971), which concerned an American Indian former ex-Vietnam Veteran who took up personal vengeance after returning to smalltown life.
Stanley was a Mockbuster back before anybody coined the term – no more, no less. The film appears to have been conducted on a tight shooting schedule. William Grefé’s set-ups do little to invest anything in the snake attack scenes or build any suspense or horrific effect out of them. One person who does well is Chris Robinson who plays Tim and goes through the film talking to snakes and acting angry as though he believed every line of it.
Trailer here