Review of The Car (1977) by Brian H — 22 Mar 2012

A relic that beckons us back to a movie era when radio dispatchers actually said things like "Sheriff, you'd better get out to the Kadiddlehoffer farm; there's somethin' strange goin' on there." And of course the sheriff did and there was and that all seemed perfectly logical at the time.

Made nearly a full decade before the hapless adaptation of "Christine" made its way to the screen, this film is hokey, hopelessly dated, and superior in every way to its auto-from-Hell descendant. This is the film that Stephen King should have made but, well, didn't.

If you can get past the sense of 70's time-warp (for those of you that were even around in the 70's), with its teenage boys in denim hot pants and unfortunate haircuts, its schoolteachers who actually hung around long enough after last bell to coordinate marching band practice; and its lack of modern-day sensitivity training towards American Indians, you'll find that "The Car" was actually made with grand style, with its wide panoramic vistas of a lonely desert ripe for a visit from pure evil, and its menacing depiction of what a car possessed by Satan would actually look like. Christine was every teenage boy's wet dream car, about as scary as a Scion, and a total babe-magnet to boot. Nobody wants to get even close to THIS car; you take one look at its black opaque windshield, its handleless doors and its front metal grate, resembling a giant steely mouth just ready to open up and start munching away on a deputy or some dumb-ass hitchhiker, and you KNOW you'd pass this one up in the used car lot, no matter what the mark-down. When THIS car gets pissed,the reaction is palpable; it nearly grinds a hole in the earth with its maniacal gyrations. It waits in darkened alleys and on unlit country roads for its next victim to wander by, and when its eyes-of-the-devil headlights go on, you know someone's totally hosed.

Loved this when it opened in '77 and seeing it 31 years later hasn't changed my opinion one bit. It only took 20 minutes of "Christine" to bore me to death.

Honk honk.