Race with the Devil

Winnebago Warriors Part 2

Race with the Devil (1975) is arguably the greatest genre film ever made involving an RV (recreational vehicle).  OK, so there may not be all that many RV themed films to begin with; the only other one that your humble reviewer is even familiar with is the recently reviewed Ghosts That Still Walk, but Race with the Devil must surely be the most well known.

Released smack dab in the middle of the devil obsessed 1970s,  this film really does have it all: a big ass RV, motorcycle racing, Peter Fonda, car chases, robed cultists, a scary tree, Loretta ("Hot Lips" Houlihan from TV's M*A*S*H) Swit in a tight sweater, animal sacrifice, dirt biking, Satanism, female nudity only partially obscured by flame, that thing when you go to make dinner in your RV and then a rattlesnake jumps out of the cupboard at you, vehicular destruction, poolside leering, human sacrifice, a ring of fire, and last but certainly not least: public library non-circulating reference book theft.

Best line: After Warren Oates takes a spill on his dirt bike into a big puddle of water: "I'm getting too old for this shit!".  This has surely got to be one of the earliest sincere instances of this hoary saying before its eventual descent into action film cliche.

In spite of all joking at the preposterous absurdity of the whole thing, this film is actually really pretty scary and can be downright creepy, especially in the early scenes involving the cult at the sacrificial tree (which looks like a close cousin to the Louisiana devil tree from the recent True Detective).  One memorably terrifying action sequence has the RV vacationeers trying to flee the scene of human sacrifice they've inadvertently witnessed while several murderous cultists cling to the back of their RV, their hooded faces illumined by the hellish red glare of tail lights as they smash in the rear window in an attempt to gain ingress and thwart the protagonists' escape.  It's a truly violent and viscerally effective scene of motor vehicle violation.

But as the tag line says:  "When you race with the Devil, you'd better be faster than hell!"

Trailer:



One thing is for sure, a PG rated movie from the '70s like Race with the Devil could be way more explicit in terms of nudity and violence than a modern PG movie; it's hard to believe this film shares the same exact rating as something innocuous like Disney's Frozen; that would certainly make for an interesting double feature if you'd like to traumatize the kiddies for life!

P.S.: If you have the chance I highly recommend checking this film out on the recent Blu-ray from Shout! Factory (a double feature with Dirty Mary Crazy Larry).  It really looks amazing, almost like it was filmed yesterday instead of forty years ago.

Here's Dead Kennedys' "Winnebago Warrior" performed by The Fractal Cauliflowers to play us out:

Ghosts That Still Walk

File Under: Winnebago Warriors/WTF?

For many years I regarded The Alien Encounters (1979) as some fuzzy childhood hallucination until I finally found a PAL VHS tape from Australia on eBay in 2013 and could finally confirm that this strange film actually did exist--but that's a subject for another post.  An earlier film written and directed by the same nigh forgotten low-budget auteur James T. Flocker was not as hard to find: some poor, demented soul has recently uploaded a copy of the 1977 film Ghosts That Still Walk on YouTube.

If you're unfamiliar with this flick, here's a fan made trailer to give you a taste of just what to expect:



The capsule review in John Stanley's Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (Fourth revised version) reads:

GHOSTS THAT STILL WALK (1977).  Young boy is possessed by an Indian medicine man spirit in this low-budget pseudodocumentary about ghosts and spirits.  It's terribly disjointed and hard to follow but does have one exciting sequence in which an elderly couple traveling in a rec vehicle is attacked by boulders rolling across the desert.  Otherwise, tedious going.  And boring.  Written-directed by James T. Flocker. (VCI: United)

Most people that recall seeing Ghosts That Still Walk on a late night or Saturday afternoon UHF airing in the late '70s or early '80s usually only remember that "one exciting sequence" of rolling boulders in the desert inexplicably attacking a couple of senior citizens in an RV.  This unnervingly bizarre action sequence is probably the second greatest chase scene involving a motor home in cinematic history, topped only by well, really the entirety of Race with the Devil (1975); it gradually builds to a point of High Strangeness to create an overwhelmingly oppressive mood of true otherworldly alien-ness impinging on the normal waking world, as giant square shaped boulders--seemingly alive and with malicious intent--bear down on the RV like a galloping herd of mammoth antediluvian beasts, a tableau certainly never witnessed by a sane mind before or since, unless in the fevered phantasies of some deranged eater of hashish.

Another portion of the film involves a teenage boy's astral projection and his mommy's mummy (don't ask) and a few scenes of transcendent weirdness could be compared to a primitivist version of cult film maker David Lynch in the use of light and sound, sharing Lynch's predilection for sharp crackling sound bursts of electrical current and bright stroboscopic flashes of light as signifiers for a rent in the fabric of everyday reality.  These fleeting peeks of otherworldliness are contrasted with stultifyingly mundane scenes of middle class suburban normality, presaging the settings typical of late '70s to mid '80s Steven Spielberg classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Poltergeist, Gremlins, Back to the Future, or The Goonies that take place in one version or another of Spielburbia, USA.

That's not to say that Ghosts That Still Walk is by ANY stretch of the imagination as inherently "good" or well made as any one of those films, but it is as fascinatingly bizarre and eminently watchable as anything created by the man-god Ed Wood and does deserve to be seen again on DVD or Blu-ray disc by any fan of good old fashioned low budget schlock.  Just file it under: What the Flocker?