So, my Netflix queue was getting a bit sparse and so I put up the 70's spoofing, intentionally schlockfest of Planet Terror and Death Proof "Grindhouse" double feature from a couple yeas ago by Richard Rodriguez and Tarrantino. First one was an interesting monster/zombie flick with some humor and intentional retro throwbacks; comparable maybe to the Resident Evil movies today.
The second one was a car chase splatterfest thriller. One of the funniest parts of it was the "preview" of a fake movie called "Machette" of which you could probably find on YouTube and is well worth seeing. This clip reached such popularity that they actually went ahead and shot this movie, pretty much unchanged from the premise of the clip. Gotta put it on my list some day. Danny Trejo is cool. Oh, here is one link:
What was interesting is that in Death Proof the actors spent an entire 10 minute scene talking about their love of the 1970 Dodge Challenger 440, and "Kowalski" (the main character of the movie Vanishing Point, which featured that car), and how great that movie was and stuff. Specifically, and by name. They might as well have turned to the camera and said "Hey, rent that frickin' movie, eh?"
Vanishing Point is a classic indie-cult motor movie that nails the 1970 vibe; and has the infamous "naked woman on a motorcycle" bit, cool music and Cleavon Little as a DJ. There is no scifi in it (except that it was to later influence the Mad Max movies). The pacing is old-school, with none of the modern shaky-cam style that is so prevalent today, so younger people might get bored in the scenes that are not constant action or eye candy.
Another motor movie influenced by Vanishing Point is the 1975 Roger Corman flick "Death Race 2000" with Dave Carradine and Sly Stallone, which is definite a candidate for a "Saturday Morning Crapfest" review (and was also a Mad Max influence). This movie gave to pop culture the Points system for killing old people, kids, etc. with your car. Very weird and yet quite hysterecally funny in places. The different car designs are pretty cool, and the used them in promotions around the country to push the movie.
Ok, so this was a bit of ramble about several vaguely related movies, none of which goes into details, but I thought there are some interesting points that can be discussed in the comments, so tell me your thoughts below.
Ok, the old link to the Machete trailer is broken, but here is a substitute one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIV26nu24gw
Also, if you want a more objective and detailed review of Vanishing Point, and by an author with more respect than me, here is a link to John Varley's review of that movie: Oops, it don't like linking directly, so I'm just gonna copy and paste, although it gets a little long but it's worth it.
"Vanishing Point (1971) After seeing The Driver for the first time, I just had to check this one out again. I saw it for the first and last time when it was only a few years old, in the Embassy Theater on Market Street in San Francisco, where you could see three second-run feature films for not very much money and get a Depression-era spinning-wheel game called Ten-O-Win into the bargain!
I remember I was very impressed, but that’s always worrisome, isn’t it? Will it hold up, all these years later? Unlike most films I saw that many years ago, I remembered virtually everything about this movie … for the simple reason that there was not a lot to remember. I mean, most of it is a car moving very fast. There are short stops for odd adventures along the way, but mostly it’s about speed, both in the physical and chemical sense.
Good news: I liked it even more this time. Here it is, in all its simplistic glory:
Barry Newman is Kowalski,, a man who makes his living driving cars to places where their owners want them but are too lazy to drive themselves. (There were always stories in the ‘60s hippie communities of companies where you could drive a fancy car cross-country and actually get paid for it. I was dubious, but I guess they existed. Maybe still do.) He pulls into Denver, sleepless, and immediately wants another car to … anywhere. The car agency guy has a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T with a 426 hemi engine (and doesn’t just reading that make your right foot twitch on an imaginary accelerator?), certainly one of the top four or five muscle cars of the muscle car era. He gets in, drives off with that monster engine growling, buys some speed from some bikers, and makes a bet that he can get the car to Frisco in 15 hours.
Now, in most movies this would be the important thing: the 15 hours. Like the infinitely inferior Cannonball Run or Smokey and the Bandit. Not here. When a motorcycle cop tries to stop him, he runs the cop into a ditch without apparent thought. And the chase is on. We get short flashbacks of him racing a dirt bike, wiping out in a stock car race, being a cop, smooching on the beach with his girlfriend. We gradually learn that he was thrown off the police force (we assume for stopping another cop from raping a girl), earned the Medal of Honor in Vietnam … and that his girlfriend was killed in a surfing accident. Just a few little tantalizing details, enough to know that this is probably a man who doesn’t really give a shit for anything anymore except driving. Real fast. He has no destination, and no life. Soon the cops from three states are after him. He shakes them off easily, simply because he’s a better driver and prepared to take any risk. There is no sense of urgency to beat the 15 hours (which is hardly mentioned again), or to do anything at all other than move! During the drive he is encouraged and abetted by a blind black radio DJ (Cleavon Little) who turns him into something of a folk hero of the wide, trackless desert. Along the way he meets the underrated and almost unknown (these days) Severn Darden, and the legendary Dean Jagger.
And that’s it. You just know it will end in tears, but I’m not going to tell you exactly how. There have been many deep philosophical assessments of this film over the years, existentialist, nihilist, you name it. It is cited as emblematic of the attitude of the time, and we do see several rather idealized hippies. I don’t really care to analyze it, I prefer just to sit back and appreciate the purity of it all. There are no horseshit messages, no goals (they remade it in 1997 with Kowalski driving to be with his wife, who was in labor, and I’m glad I didn’t see that one, as I’m afraid I’d have had to seek out the screenwriter and put a major hurtin’ on him). Some of the people he meets along the way, and the DJ, have “deep” things to say, mostly bumper sticker philosophy, and Kowalski seems totally uninterested in all of them. We learn just enough about him to give us the (probably erroneous) feeling that we understand him a little. The rest is up to us. It takes lot of guts to make a movie that way.
There are so many things to like here. The awesome, totally non-SFX stunt driving. The amazing composition of the shots, the beauty of the vast desert that makes a human so small and vulnerable. There are many shots from so far away that the Challenger is just a tiny white speck. You have to look for it.
An addenda:
No review of Vanishing Point could be complete without a few words about the lovely Gilda Tester. (Who?) Well, she may be the only actress ever to appear in the credits of a movie as “Nude motorcycle rider.” This was a bit of a mind-stretching scene in 1971, the sight of this bronzed young lady riding through the desert completely naked. Hell, it’s mind-stretching today. She is entirely nude in all her scenes, and you don’t see that very often, either. No explanation is deemed to be necessary, and she seems totally without modesty. (Those crazy hippies!) She asks him if he wants to “have some fun.” (Free love!) He declines. (He just wants to drive!) She takes this without offense. I had to mention her because, aside from the fact that that image has been riding enjoyably around in my head (and, I suspect, the heads of a lot of other guys) for 37 years, there is an irony about her life. Her career as an actress was short, only three films, and I deduce from their descriptions that her chief asset was her lack of concern about exposing her body. I’d bet money there were nude scenes in the other two films. But the sweet irony is that she did have a career in Hollywood, right up to the present day … in the costume department! And the only costume I’ve ever seen her in was a pair of sandals!"