Van Nuys Blvd. (1979)

William Sachs, the director of the awesome low budget sickie Incredible Melting Man brings us this stupid late 70's sex comedy.

Yeah they really don't get more pointless then this one. In case you haven't noticed they based a whole movie around the hot cruisin spot in California. Van Nuys Blvd. is the street and this is where we see all the naked girls, drag races, fights, bad disco and destruction of vehicles.

Here's the plot if you can call it that. A bored young man leaves his small town trailer home, nympho girlfriend, job and television behind for a life of sex and partying on Van Nuys Blvd. He makes new friends almost instantly and I personally couldn't help but hate everyone in this movie. They are all so fucking cheery, I just want to puke. Its as if the cast from Happy Days made it into a sex comedy. Yuck!

Van Nuys Blvd. is very random and chaotic. You never know whats going to happen next except that it will most likely involve some gratuitous nudity. My personal favorite scene shows two young cruisers smashing the shit out of each others cars. Its total pointless destruction in the same vein as something like Herschell Gordon Lewis's Just For The Hell Of It. Some of the naked female flesh isn't all that bad to look at while others should probably have been avoided. The best looking girl in the whole movie is a blond biker babe who comes complete with leather bra, pants, gloves and studded belt. This one also sports a lot of sweet 70's mustaches, stupid cops, stupid kids, stupid adults, a horrible theme song, a worse disco song, a sex food fight and a very awkward scene where an old man hops in bed with his naked daughter and plays with her boyfriends ass.

Not really my kind of movie but if stupid comedies with lots of tits and cars is your thing you might wanna check this one out. From Crown International.

Race With The Devil (1975)

Race With The Devil is a strange little {PG} horror flick from the 70's. It almost seems as if it were a made for television movie. If it weren't for the foul language at times it could totally pass as a made for t.v. flick. They even go as far as to blur out the female nudity in one scene which is very weird because I can't really see Race With The Devil really appealing to a female audience, so why not throw the men a bonus or a boner for that matter.

Peter Fonda (Easy Rider, Wild Angles) and Warren Oats (The Wild Bunch, Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia) pack their wives and hit the road in their big mobile home camper for the vacation of their lives. The plan is to go from Texas to Colorado but the trip becomes a trip from hell as they are terrorized by blood thirsty satanic killers.

Race With The Devil is a classic example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fonda and Oats are getting good and drunk and talking about whatever when they witness a Satanic sacrificial offering. The only problem is that the Satanists know that they were witness to the murder and now it is a case of sweep and clear. All witnesses must go.

This movie is alright as a time passer. Most of the runtime is eaten up by car chases and stuff like that. We get all the cool car explosions that one would expect from a film like this and more. In one amazing scene a car flips at high speeds somewhere around 19 times. Trucks crash through barriers and fall off bridges and we basically just have a bunch of crazy stunts and vehicle destruction. Fonda fanatics will be happy to know that there is some motorcycle shenanigans and Warren Oats takes a nasty spill off a bike in one scene. Race With The Devil also offers up quite a bit of shoot-em-up mayhem with shotguns being the weapon of choice but we also have stabbings, a puppy is strangled and hung up as a warning. We have fun with fire, hillbilly bar fights and just about everyone in the world seems to belong to a Satanic cult.

In my personal favorite scene we see Peter Fonda wrestle with killer rattle snakes. Watching Fonda smash the shit out of rattlers is always high in entertainment but the film really could use some help in other areas. As I mentioned Race With The Devil is rated {PG} which is always a bit of a let down but even more importantly is how far fetched it all is. These vacationers travel from city to city and everywhere they go they are taunted by more members of the Satanic family. Everyone from librarians to police officers are all part of the cult and I really just do not buy into all of this. Then there is also the fact that the victims never decide to just go home. They are so dead set on continuing the trip that they are willing to die? To say the very least the movie is far fetched but luckily for me I can put some of these things behind me and just indulge in the car madness and Satan worshiping exploits.

A good time waster and braincell waster as well. If you are looking for a more believable tale of the same sort then you should of course stick with The Hills Have Eyes which would come out two years later and use cannibals rather then Satanists.

Death Proof (2007)

In 2007 Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino put together a double feature known as Grindhouse. Rodriguez's feature was an 80's style zombie flick called Planet Terror and Tarantino's being a Slasher crossed with a 70's carsploitation flick, known as Death Proof.

Kurt Russel (The Thing, Escape From New York) plays Stunt-Man Mike, a deranged ex stunt-man who now gets his rocks off by stalking hot girls and killing them with his car. "Do I scare you? Is it my scar? No. Its your car."

The car chase scenes are pretty amazing in this movie. Cars flip, motorcycles crash, girls hang from the hood of the car and we have plenty of homage to American car flicks, especially Vanishing Point. Anyone interested in Tarantino's influences for the fast paced car action in Death Proof might want to check out a documentary called Not Quite Hollywood : The Wild Untold Story Of Ozploitation. In this documentary Tarantino discusses Australian car flicks and the influence they had on him.

Death Proof even has a bit of dialogue that mentions Australia when Someone mistakes Zoe Bell's New Zealand accent for an Australian one. Death Proof is full of the normal witty dialogue one would expect from Quentin Tarantino and in one scene the director recreates the memorable diner sequence from Reservoir Dogs with an all female cast.

Death Proof is loaded with homage to classic influential films and actors. In one of my favorite frames Sydney Tamiia Poiter (Daughter of Sidney Poitier) copies Briggite Bardot who is posing in a poster above her. Foot fetishists should find Death Proof to be a bit stimulating to say the least. Every other frame in the movie seems to have a close up of foxy females toes and in the films trashiest moment Kurt Russel licks Rosario Dawson's feet while she sleeps.

Death Proof eventually shifts gears into some what of a revenge flick but before the revenge takes place some of the high notes consist of Rose McGowan (Doom Generation) having her achy-breaky skull smashed in, in a brutal car crash. Another girl has her head sawed in half by a flying tire, legs are severed and sent flying, we have some gun violence, a pipe to the face, a head is stomped into the pavement and a whole lot of damage to really nice cars. We also have an amazing soundtrack which is pretty normal for a Tarantino movie.

I personally like to watch Planet Terror and Death Proof together, the way the gods intended them to be seen but if I had to choose between the two I think I prefer Death Proof over Planet Terror. Death Proof plays more like a true 70's exploitation film despite the use of cellphones and modern female chit-chat. I was lucky enough to catch both films in the theater upon the Grindhouse release. They came complete with all those great fake trailers. The films worked well together in that memory for me. For everyone else who wasn't able to catch the theatrical release, I can't really see how much they would appreciate either one of these movies.

Death Proof was made by a fan-boy, for fan-boys and it is a shame that when the two movies were released for dvd the films were split up with all the added fun missing. For me it almost feels like I am watching a cut down version of the movie and we all know how much it sucks to watch a cut film. I still await the proper dvd release of Grindhouse.

Thunderbolt (1995)

This Jackie Chan flick blends Kung Fu shenanigans with road racing action. Chan plays a auto mechanic who is forced into street racing with criminals after his little sister is abducted by the bad guys. The plot is weak and of course silly and since this isn't really my genre of preference I had a hard time staying focused. There were some expected cool and very dangerous stunts on display and some of the fight scenes were pretty bad-ass. One in particular shows Jackie Chan going ape-shit against his enemies with a sledge hammer but I would have to say the best scene involves chan being trapped in a metal storage room which is lifted by bulldozers. He is thrown about and any normal human being would have been a broken, mangled and or dead. Chan of course pulls through for the big race and kicks everyones ass. We also get a group of hot Asian cheerleaders in white cotton panties. Nice!

Hitch-Hike (1977)

If you took Rabid Dogs and crossed it with Last House On The Left we would end up with something like Hitch-Hike. Of course in Mario Bava's Rabid Dogs, George Eastmen is our main source of violence but this time around we get David (Last House On The Left) Hess as our violent protagonist.

Italian cult icon Franco (Keoma) Nero is on the road with his wife Eve when they stop to pick up a Hitch-Hiker played by Hess. Picking this bastard up was the biggest mistake of the married couples life. They are held hostage at gun point by the criminal/killer hitch-hiker.

Hitch-Hike is a pretty miserable movie. Franco Nero and his wife are far from happy even before they pick up the hitch-hiker. The film opens with a shot through the scope on Franco Nero's riffle. He zero's in on his wife and holds the cross hairs directly between her eyes. Nero decides to shoot a deer instead of Eve. They spend most of their time arguing and fighting and Nero likes to rape his wife at least once or twice a day.

Things get worse when the king of rape joins the couple across country. Of course David Hess does what he does best and adds some more rape-happy hi jinx to the mix.

Nero is forced to watch his wife being ravaged by another man but he doesn't seem to care much about Eve's feelings instead it seems that his manhood and "Latin pride is hurt" and to make things even more twisted it almost seems as if Eve might like the abuse a bit but it is never clearly stated. "My wife is what you call a bit of a whore".

David Hess and Franco Nero are great together. We get a pretty cool fight scene between the two actors and Hess claims in an interview that Nero really broke his nose in that fight.

Its awesome to watch Franco Nero doing a fight scene in a cast because his hand was broken on his previous film Keoma, a Spaghetti Western classic where Nero apparently busted his hand from punching his horse!?!? Ya gotta love a man who openly admits to punching his horse so hard that he breaks his hand.

Hitch-Hike comes complete with a Franco Nero nervous breakdown that is to funny to describe, Two dead cops complete with a brutal blood spraying squib, of course all the rapey stuff, some homosexual undertones, a vicious hippie motorcycle gang, crash and burn car scenes, shoot-em-up scenes, full frontal female nudity, a sing along Manson family type song and a really downbeat 70's ending.

Rabid Dogs (1974)

Italian horror master Mario Bava (Twitch Of The Death Nerve, Baron Blood, Blood And Black Lace) takes on a crime flick and adds elements of Last House On The Left and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.

Four criminals one of which being George (Anthropoghagus) Eastman take on a robbery at a local pharmacy. Things go violently wrong and one of the criminals is shot down. The three survivors kill a few Innocent civilians during their escape and take three hostages.

Rabid Dogs takes place almost entirely inside a car and its a game of cat and mouse between the hostages, the cops and the bad guys. The fact that Bava is able to make a highly interesting movie from the restrictions of a car puts the man (in my opinion) in the ranks of Hitchcock and reminds me a lot of Rope.

The hostages consist of one man, one woman and one sick child. The fact that a young kid is thrown into the violent mix makes Rabid Dogs that much more tense.

As the minutes run by the criminal become more vicious. We have a scene reminiscent of the "Piss your pants" scene from Last House On The Left and we have our fair share of brutality. One of the criminals uses a switchblade as a weapon of choice. He stabs a man to death, slashes another woman's throat and sticks the blade through another females neck. George Eastman gets a bit drunk from some excessive J&B guzzling and gets a bit rapey with his female hostage. This comes to a end when Eastman is shot in the head and left in a zombified state. "He's more dead then alive. Let him croak in peace". Eastman hangs on a lot longer then expected and just makes Rabid Dogs all the more intense. We get a nice amount of gun violence and a twist ending that I didn't see coming.

Rabid Dogs also known as Kidnapped was left unfinished when Mario Bava died and the slack was picked up by his son Lamberto Bava but for once in history the shorter version is better. The "full uncut" version is nothing more then a few added scenes from Lamberto but they only end up hurting the film in its finished product. To keep a nice runtime some of the scenes were cut down from the original Bava shoot. It just so happens they were excellent scenes of violence and style. Skip the Kidnapped version and stick with Rabid Dogs. You wont be disappointed. Fans of this movie should be sure to check out Hitch-Hike

Best Friends (1975)

Another bad one from Crown International. This one is about two best friends Jesse & Pat. They both plan a road trip with their soon to be brides and they are like one big sappy family. Actually the first half of this movie is so incredibly sappy that its a bit painful to sit through. We usually end up watching Jesse and Pat rolling around on the floor together with no shirts on and giggling like school girls. Its a bit homoerotic at times. Anyway, its not long before Pat's true colors start to show. He is jealous, manipulative and pretty crazy all around. Pat decides he is not going to marry his girl and he makes up his mind that Jesse is not going to marry his... Pat will not let anything step between him and his best friends good times even if it means someone has to die.
Best Friends takes a positive turn once we see how nutty Pat really is and the movie had potential to be alright but it holds back and overall disappoints. Best Friends has its share of flesh but the bare breasted girls on display aren't much to be desired. We also get an attempted rape, some fist fights and really shitty go-go dancing. Best Friends was so close to becoming a revenge flick. You can feel the nastiness that wants to come through but instead it chooses to stay tame and lame.

Burnout (1979)

No this movie is not about pot-heads. Its about drag racers and it is one of the most boring movies I have ever sat through. For 90 minutes we are forced to watch guys in shinny suits and helmets race their nitro burning funny cars and there is nothing entertaining about it. Each race lasts from anywhere between lets say 5 and 8 seconds and the rest of the time we are watching the racers burn rubber or Burnout as the title says.
There is one of the smallest subplot's going on in here and its about a spoiled brat who's rich daddy wants him to take over the family business. The spoiled brat wants to be a drag racer and that's what he becomes.
Please don't make the same mistake as me. Avoid this movie at all costs.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Off the wall craziness with hot go-go babes in tight skimpy outfits, fast cars and violence from the great Russ Meyer. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is probably the most entertaining of all Meyer films and its definitely the one hes remembered for.
Three beautiful big breasted Go-Go dancers take their cars through the desert where they meet a all American couple, in other words "Squares!" If there is anything these girls can't stand its squares. The girls challenge the couple to a race and the gratification of winning isn't enough for the leader of the threesome girl gang played by Tura Satana. She swipes a stop watch from the couple and tells them to split. When the couple refuse Tura gives "Lover-Boy" the beating of his life and breaks his spine with some hilarious Kung Fu. The three babes tie up the now single bikini clad girl, force feed her some sedatives and continue to travel across desert as they make up their minds what to do with their little witness. The audience is treated to a nonstop sexual teas-o-ramma as the camera drops in on very revealing angels of bra busting boobs and hot-pants shots. The deadly trio of femme fatales form a plan to steal the riches from a hillbilly family in the desert who is supposedly "loaded". The girls get a  little more then they bargain for when they learn that this family has some sort of sick perverse form of vengeance that they are taking out on pretty young girls. Old grandpa is in a wheel chair due to a bad accident involving a pretty young girl and a train. The old man has a big "stud" of a son who spends all of his time working out and fondling pretty babes the only problem is that he plays a little to rough. The family and the girls have a big bloody fight and the ending is as incredible as the beginning.
This one has something for everyone. Sexy babes, race cars, really bad Kung Fu, Go-Go dancing, pervert rednecks and really silly dialogue. Anybody who likes trashy exploitation movies would get a total kick out of this movie and its a little hard to even place a genre to this movie. Its almost a cross between a roughie and a on the road flick. It can't really be considered a sexploitation flick because there is no nudity on display. Despite the lack of flesh, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is the ultimate in tease exploitation flicks.

Death Race 2000 (1975)

This is probably my favorite car movie of all time. Its nonstop campy fun from beginning to end with a wacky plot that never takes its self to seriously and still manages to deliver. Some films were destined to become timeless cult classics and that's pretty much what we have with this one. I have not seen the remake nor do I want to. Why would anybody want to sit through a politically correct Hollywood version of this? Ill stick to the original Paul Bartel Roger Corman classless classic.
Death Race 2000 is the biggest sport of the future. Its a car race across country but this race has a point system. The drivers get points by hitting pedestrians as they roar through city streets and country side. Each car has two people, the driver and a navigator. The route that the pair chooses is entirely up to them and obviously more populated areas are better for the drivers. Each car has its own bizarre, tacky style. One has big swords protruding from the hood that the driver uses to ram through pedestrians in the street. While another might be covered in swastika's. After all this buzz-bomb is driven by "Herman The German".

The movie also costars Sylvester Stallone as Machine Gun Joe and for once a Stollone film doesn't completely suck. He plays a over the top violent prick in a old-time mobster get-up with a Brooklyn accent. Machine Gun Joe is hated by most and it seems hes always doing something obnoxious like spitting on his fans or beating his female navigator. He pretty much yells all of his lines and in one of his best scenes he has an argument at a diner table as he spits food all over the place and has mashed potatoes or some mess all over his face. Another reason Machine Gun Joe has a shortage of fans is because he is the rival enemy of the films hero, Frankenstein. Frankenstein is played by David Carradine and the fans love him. "America loves you Frankenstein" is one of the greatest lines in the movie and its very true. They call him Frankenstein because of the amount of car crashes he has been in and all the surgery and reconstruction that he has gone through. "He lost his left arm 76 and his right in 79" They say he lost both eyes, most of his skull and face and hes supposed to be covered with scars but we don't get to see because Frankenstein wears a leather gimp suit. Its awesome to see David Carradine walking around in a leather S&M get-up and just being a all around bad-ass.

Eventually Frankenstein looses his mask and underneath he is just normal, young looking David Carradine. He's supposed to be kind of handsome in this movie and its not long before he is screwing his hot blond navigator and saying things like this "What did you expect, just another pretty face?".

Theres a descent amount of violence in this movie with peoples heads being run over and torsos being crushed. We also get a decapitation and a guy who gets his crotch split in a crash. We also have a subplot going on about some anarchist rebels who want to stop the national Death Race sport and assassinate the president. The subplot helps add for a bit more violence and a few car explosions. Not to mention a airplane crash and burn. There is also a few bare breasted women on display and Mary Woronov is in here as well but unfortunately she doesn't show to much flesh in this one. (gotta watch Sugar Cookies for that) Death Race 2000 has a few more twists and turns within the plot and I'm not going to go into them in here. All I have to say is "Frankenstein for president"!

Hell On Wheels (1967)

Not even slightly interesting piece of garbage about a racecar driver played by Marty Robbins and his jealous brother. For 97 minutes we get to watch Marty Robins drive in circles on a race track or play awful country music in a night club. Marty's younger brother played by John Ashly (Brides Of Blood) is a whinny little brat who is determined to beat his brother in a race. Then theres this stupid subplot about criminals and their moonshine stills. The brothers get caught up in their racket for a bit but it only eats up about 10 minutes of the crappy screentime.
It was pretty hard to make it through this thing. I found myself trying to find one redeeming value aside from John Ashly and the only thing I could come up with was that I liked the grandpa character because the majority of his screen time he was sleeping. I guess I just felt I could relate to the old man. If you don't want to sleep, stay far far away from Hell On Wheels. On the other hand if you need a good sedative it might be of some use. Ya know what, scratch that. The loud motors will keep you up. Just stay away from Hell On Wheels all together!