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U.S.A.
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1967
Directed
by John Brahm
Starring
Dana Andrews
Jeanne Crain
Mimsy Farmer
Color |
100 Min.|
Not
Rated
Format:
DVD (R1 - NTSC)
Warner Home Video
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As
if a bad back weren't enough, Cranky Conservative Dad contends
with sadistic teen delinquents threatening his brood during
a desert road trip...
Kitsch, as defined by Czech writer
Milan Kundera, is "the translation of the stupidity of received
ideas into the language of beauty and feeling."
The beauty of
Hot Rods To Hell
is just how much fun it is despite being a genuinely bad movie.
The feeling it provokes is mirth.
All-American
family man Tom Phillips (Dana Andrews) is nearly killed in a
Christmas Eve car accident which badly injures his spine. Recovery
is slow, both physical and mental, as the wreck triggers a form
of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome that renders him unable to
drive —
he has little or no confidence
behind the wheel. His days as a traveling salesman in New England
are over with regardless. With a stake given to him by his well-off
brother, Tom buys a motel, sight unseen, in the California desert.
He and the family can start a new life there as Tom earns a
good income in a hot, dry climate as recommended by his doctor.
Supportive wife Peg (the lovely Jeanne Crain) is naturally in
favor of the move, since she helped talk him into it; the kids,
10-year old Jamie (Tim Stafford) and high school senior Tina
(Laurie Mock) are split —
son thinks it'll be swell playing in the desert, while sexually
maturing daughter laments the loss of boyfriends.
So the Phillips clan
packs up and heads west. By car. With no air conditioning. To
the desert. Mom drives almost the whole way, though, with perfect
makeup and nary a hair out of place. Fortunately we don't have
to sit through any of this, as the story shifts immediately
to the last 80 miles of road they have to travel. Time for some
hot rod hell, baby! Tom has just recovered enough courage to
take the wheel for the final hour of the trip when the family
runs afoul of vicious local teens in souped-up, tricked-out
cars. As a cop later describes them, these delinquents "have
no place to go and they want to get there at 150 miles an hour."
They're thrill-crazy for kicks, and one way to get 'em is harassing
innocent motorists on the long, desolate stretches of road between
towns. When not drag racing or terrorizing travelers they congregate
at the Arena, the only juke joint for miles around. (While this
roadhouse may be smack dab in the middle of nowhere it's got
a totally happening house band!) Sure enough, the Arena is a
part of the motel complex Tom purchased. During an argument
with Tom at a gas station one of the punks learns about the
change in management and informs his pals. There's simply no
way they can let an uptight old fart take over the one place
they can go on a Saturday night to get liquored up, dance the
"Chicken Walk" and knock boots for reasonable, hourly
rates... He'll have
to be discouraged somehow. Complicating matters, the leader
of the hot rod gang, Duke (Paul Bertoya), has the hots for virginal
Tina. He's not the type to take no for an answer, either, especially
when his prey's "no" has a definite tang of "maybe"
to it. Duke callously discards speed-crazy girlfriend Gloria
(Riot On Sunset Strip's Mimsy Farmer)
and puts pedal to the metal in his quest to ravage the Phillips
girl.
But even wussy, middle-aged
guys with bum backs have their limits. Duke and company keep
pushing and pushing, upping the ante with each transgression.
Eventually Tom's rage will be unleashed in all its ankle-beater/golf
shirt-wearing fury...
Hot
Rods To Hell is a
veritable feast of unintentionally campy cheese, a 'family friendly'
exploitation pic that offers overwrought dramatics in place
of the sleaze, nudity and/or violence it dare not show. In 1967
America was experiencing the Summer of Love, Bonnie
And Clyde was in theaters, social divides over Vietnam
were widening —
yet this movie could have very
easily been made a good ten years earlier as one of those black
& white "JD" flicks (only the music wouldn't be
as good). It has the same sort of vibe those "drugs 'n'
hippies" episodes of the old Dragnet TV series had,
which is to say totally hip in its abject squareness. I first
saw this on the AMC cable channel some fifteen years ago and
to this day it never fails to crack me up. Maybe it's because
I grew up as a kid in the '60s and have memories of that time,
and can recall how the movies/TV shows of the day shaped and
interpreted the zeitgeist. The message amid the melodrama: America
is goin' to hell in a hot rod!
By
no means unprofessionally or incompetently made, the flick qualifies
as bona fide schlock due to its inherent phoniness — every medium
to close-up shot of the actors in a 'moving' vehicle uses painfully
obvious rear projection effects — and a surfeit of laughable
soap opera-quality dialog, often delivered in over-the-top style.
(Crain, as the mom, easily trumps the rest of the cast in this
regard.) Former A-List leading man Andrews (Curse
Of The Demon, The
Frozen Dead) knows full well that the best years of his
career are long over; he's a bit old for the part and humorously
caked in too much makeup in some scenes, but the weariness he
brings to his performance fleshes out the Tom character nicely.
This still doesn't explain why he delivers a couple of key lines
in a bizarre-sounding accent that comes completely out of left
field. ("What kind of an-ee-mahls are those?")
I'm still scratching my head over the impossibly lush and verdant
picnic area that magically materializes in the middle of Death
Valley, or how Gloria can ride sitting on the trunk of Duke's
Corvette convertible, clutching the roll bar, without being
literally coated with dust. She'd be digging black boogers out
of her nose for days.
This film reportedly
started out as a made-for-TV project but was distributed to
theaters with the realization that they had some excellent drive-in
fodder on their hands. A longer, slightly different cut of the
movie was later broadcast on television and eventually the theatrical
cut was shown as well, on cable. I've seen both; it is the TV
version that is presented on Warner's new DVD. As mentioned,
it's some eight minutes longer. In terms of content, only one
scene of mildly tawdry innuendo is replaced with a completely
tame one... When a motel room door is flung open by Andrews
in the theatrical cut we see Farmer lying on the bed inside,
fully clothed; she derisively slams the door shut with her foot.
In the television/DVD version she's standing up and closes the
door with her hand. (Jeez! The stuff they thought was risqué
back then...)
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I've
waited a long time for this cheesy favorite to make its way to
DVD. In late June 2007 it was released as part of Warner's Cult
Camp Collection, Vol. 3: Terrorized Travelers triple-disc
box set — which also includes Zero Hour!
(1957) and Skyjacked (1972) — but
is available in stand-alone form as well.
The anamorphic 1.78:1 transfer looks gorgeous,
featuring colors that are eye-poppingly vivid (the red Corvette,
Farmer's psychedelic frock); conspicuous camera crew shadows visible
in the fullframe TV version are effectively masked in this matted
presentation. Detail is so sharp you can count the sweat beads
on Daddy Dana's brow when not ogling shapely daughter's panty
lines. A clean, robust Dolby Mono audio track offers crisp dialog
and serves the roaring engines and groovy music quite well.
I
wish I could report some worthy extras here, even if just a commentary,
but sadly this isn't the case. The fun trailer (faded and fullscreen)
is all you get. Andrews and Crain are dead now but a number of
the other participants are still with us; it would've been nice
had Warner put together some sort of featurette. (I'd particularly
like to know more about the cars and the music.)
7/05/07 |
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