Angry Joe Bass

This was sitting and gathering dust on the one of the shelves at my local video store, so I decided to rent it one day. Set in northern Michigan (where I'm from), this is a pretty forgettable, dirt-cheap revenge yarn. Bass is a native American fisherman who is having his fishing grounds taken away by the big, bad IL' white man. What does Angry do? Well, he goes nuts in a limited-budget way and wreaks half-handed havoc across the wilderness, including "accidentally" causing a man to chainsaw his leg off, and the Sheriff to scream "BAAASSSSS!" about 20 times. Without giving away the ending, Bass and the corn-fed Sheriff have a brutal showdown on a fishing boat, involving a shotgun and more screaming. I wonder where this was filmed, IF it was filmed, in Northern Michigan. None of the locations look familiar, neither do the names in the cast. BAAASSSSS! Sorry, couldn't help myself.

My uncle actually helped filmed this movie and my dads buddy was a co-writer as i understand it. if you are interested, i am not sure of the exact location of the filming but i know that it was filmed off the Big Bay peninsula about a half hour from where i am from. The premier was at my hometown theater of Manistque. They brought over a bunch of actors from new york to do the film. all no names. you are correct when you say that this was a low budget film. As i recall, my uncle provided his services for free. I was surprised to see that this movie was even on-line and that someone had actually taken the time to write a review on it. How entertaining!

My dad was an extra in this movie (one of the disgruntled fisherman who had a whole line in this movie) and his scene was shot in Fairport Michigan (on the Garden Peninsula) on the docks where he was an actual commercial fisherman. Other scenes were shot in a different location (maybe New York). It's a generally awful film, but we'd like an original if anyone knows of one out there- we have a version that we taped off of the TV, but my dad's part was cut (because he swears in the film).

If they redo/update the movie, they may have to change the title to "Pacified Joe Bass" after the government bought all of the "white-man" licenses and gave them to the Native American fishermen. Maybe this movie started the whole process...