How to create a great cult movie from a ridiculous idea, The Car, 1977

Sometimes miracles happen in cinema. Incredibly stupid ideas give birth to formidably entertaining films. How this happens is a mystery, but it's probably due to a combo of a great cast, a good director and a smart script that keeps the pacing devilishly (!) fast and doesn't have the luxury of questioning the credibility of the horrible underlying idea of the whole story.

How Universal Pictures greenlit a project like The Car is an enigma, but one imagines what the pitch meeting must have been like. “Let's do Jaws (1975) but in the desert.” “But how are you going to put a shark in the desert, where there's not a drop of water?”. “Then let's turn the shark into an indestructible car”. “Ahhh... it's driven by a psychopath!”. “No. It's driven by the Devil.”

“Oh.”

WTF?

The Car is actually a pastiche of three genres that were all the rage in the mid-1970s:

Car Operas: although there were always car chases in films made up to the late 1960s - the most prominent of that era being the nonsensical climax of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) - it wasn't until the memorable duel in Bullitt, 1968 (between Steve McQueen's Ford Mustang vs the beautiful, evil black Dodge Charger, driven by the hitmen who want to kill him), that this kind of scene not only took on an entity of its own and became a demonstration of technical virtuosity of the filmmaker of the moment, but even became the definitive argument to sell a film commercially. From being a routine it became an art form, and everyone began to copy the recipe applied by Peter Yates in the 1968 film. And with the rise of pony cars and muscle cars - street cars with race-bred engines - suddenly what was a plot device suddenly became the whole story of the film. From films about interstate bootleggers out to make fools of rural cops with their muscle cars - Smokey and the Bandit (1977) -, to action-loving outlaws who don't know what it's like to take their foot off the gas - Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) -, films about illegal racing - The Cannonball Run (1981) -, car thieves obsessed with unique models - that independent cinema super hit Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), financed entirely by H. B. Halicki, a used car salesman who started buying and accumulating hundreds of cars to wreck them in a very long and spectacular race that lasted 70% of the film (what they say, a vanity vehicle!; sorry, the pun was inevitable) -, and races in muscle cars that even had a metaphysical sense, like the excellent Vanishing Point (1971), a cult movie that Quentin Tarantino paid tribute to with honors in Death Proof (2007).

Movies about the Devil and satanic cults: which appeared in 1968 with Rosemary's Baby, then reached its zenith with the release of The Exorcist (1973) and culminated in a big way with Richard Donner's The Omen (1976), giving birth to countless clones (American and Italian) who wanted a slice of what was in vogue at the time (in fact the satanist Anton LaVey acted as an uncredited advisor to The Car).

And finally, the films of the Revenge of Nature genre, where a bunch of animals went crazy and started attacking people. Although the genre's antecedents were in The Naked Jungle (1954) and Hitchcock's classic The Birds (1963), it wasn't until Willard (1971) that it became popular, giving birth to the genre's masterpiece Jaws (1977), and creating tons of clones, ranging from Grizzly (1976) to Long Weekend (1978). Now tropical ants, birds, sharks, sharks, grizzly bears and all kinds of animals that exist on the planet have dedicated themselves to mercilessly attacking humanity, in a kind of revenge for the damage that man was doing to the environment. These were times when ecological themes were at the height of popularity, and soon gave rise to these films, as well as a host of dystopias about overpopulation and resource scarcity such as Soylent Green (1973), Z.P.G. (1972) and Logan's Run (1976).

And suddenly some genius threw those three things into a blender and gave birth to The Car.

The most incredible detail is that The Car works. And in a formidable way. It's a spectacular popcorn movie that wastes no time on nonsense. In a small town in the Arizona desert - where nothing too serious ever happens - the bodies start piling up. All the victims have died in the same way, hit by a car. A young hitchhiker (brief cameo by John Rubinstein), two teenagers on bicycles... it's an escalation that suddenly spirals out of control. The sheriff (James Brolin) gets a clue: a dark, ultra-fast, super-customized car with darkened windows and no license plate. He soon issues an alert and the hunt is on.

But the killings continue. And what's worse, any living thing that crosses a road or a route is in the killer driver's sights. To top it all off, the local festival is coming up and the school boy band - led by the sheriff's girlfriend (the lovely Kathleen Lloyd) - decides to do their practice at the town's rodeo circuit. Yes, yes, it's the same thing that happens like when Sheriff Brody tells everyone not to go to the beach and, suddenly, you've got hundreds of swimmers in the water and splashing around.

At least The Car has the good sense not to have a stupid, evil mayor making idiotic decisions a la Murray Hamilton, which is a cliché of all Jaws clones.

Of course the band rehearsal goes wrong. The car sniffs out victims and goes after them with relentless ferocity. If Spielberg used the shark's dorsal fin to warn of the proximity of danger, here the resource used by director Elliot Silverstein is the horn of the killer car, which can be heard in the distance and has an unforgettable tune. The Car attacks children and teachers, and they run for shelter... to the local cemetery. Of course, it's consecrated ground and the Car can't set foot... er, wheel on it. So it starts roaring its huge V8 engine, honks its horn to intolerable levels, starts tearing down walls like a deranged beast that can't get to its prey... and, when it learns that the police are on their way, it decides to get the hell out of there to hunt down the police cars. How?. Apparently he can pick up the radio signal of the patrol cars.

Of course one does not question obvious things. If it can't get into the cemetery... then the Car is diabolical. If so - and to paraphrase Captain Kirk in Star Trek V, The Final Frontier (1989) -… why does the Devil need a car?.

How does he change its tires or fuel it?

Does any of what I'm saying make sense?

Nope.

But the film doesn't care, the story keeps moving forward and, better yet, is believable within its microcosm of absurd rules and inexplicable assumptions that the audience assumes even if it lacks explicit answers. This isn't a boring city car that's all about stepping on people. It is an evil monster on four wheels, a ferocious-looking car fruit of the Machiavellian mind of coachbuilder George Barris, the author of the beautiful Batmobile used by Adam West in the 1966 Batman series. Its headlights look like two huge, ferocious eyes. The Car is big, not at all conventional, and looks like an indestructible tank painted black. The engine is gigantic and roars thunderously. And the Car itself behaves like a beast. It pounces on its victims and, if it manages to knock them down, runs over them again and again. When the Car can't catch up with someone, it starts to throw a tantrum, spinning over itself again and again, and breaking things in its path. Or it can move forward silently and with the headlights off, but in the middle of the night and if you feel a slight noise, when you turn around you will run into that mass of metal thrown against your body at more than 100 mph. In one of the best scenes of the film, the sheriff's girlfriend is at home and is talking on the phone with the protagonist. Behind her back there is an open window, showing a dark and impenetrable night, typical of living in the desert. While Kathleen Lloyd and James Brolin are talking, in the distance we see two white dots breaking the darkness. Soon they begin to get bigger... bigger and bigger... and by the time Lloyd feels the roar of the car, it is too late. The tank cuts through his house as if it were made of butter, while he celebrates the hunt by honking his horn in a crazed manner.

It's a movie riddled with memorable moments. And at no point do you think “hey, this is really idiotic”. From the cat-and-mouse game the car plays with Brolin - who's already on a revenge spree - to the massive chase by the police cars - which he destroys in the most creative ways possible, including decapitating the cars by doing an incredible flip in the air - not to mention the siege at Brolin's house. Imagine going to look for something in your garage, finding it and, when you turn around, discovering that the giant animal-looking thing is sitting quietly in the corner of the room. What a shock.

That's why The Car is one of my favorite movies. I've known about it since I was a kid, as my uncle - a guy who loved watching horror and sci-fi movies - had told me about it. Then it was on TV and I was in love. And when the Internet era came along, I scoured heaven and earth until I found it. Today it's in my video library and, when I'm bored, I play it one more time. How many times did I watch it? 10, 20 times? Did I ever find it stupid, incoherent or ridiculous? Not at all. Sure, it's a refrigerator movie - Hitchcock would say -, those stories that you find fault with 5 hours after watching it and when you go to get a snack from the fridge in the early morning. How did the car get into Brolin's garage? How does it know who to attack and how to attack? What does it gain by killing people?

Does anyone care?

PS: critics trashed it at the time, especially for taking itself too seriously. Today it has a 30% approval rating on RottenTomatoes (and the public gave it 53%).

PS 2: as a sign that The Car left a memorable mark in people's memories, there were pseudo sequels, homages and mentions in films and series of all kinds and colors. Christine (1983) it is inspired by a similar concept, only reworked through the lens of Stephen King (and, later, John Carpenter in the movie version). In the Futurama episode The Honking, Blender transforms into a vehicle identical to the Car. Super Hybrid (2010) is a pseudo sequel / homage about a killer car that hunts its victims in a huge parking building... and the final version of the vehicle looks incredibly similar to the deadly machine built by George Barris (a heavily modified Lincoln Continental Mark III). And there's a terrible direct sequel - The Car: Road to Revenge (2019) - with a custom Chrysler 600 that resembles Barris' metal monster and includes a cameo by Ronny Cox, who was the alcoholic sheriff's deputy in the original film.

But none of them reach the cult film status that this 1977 classic has.

Other articles this month, January 2025:

• The infamous power of spectacle: Triumph of the Will (1935) - in english, challenge Red Flag Films
• How to create a great cult movie from a ridiculous idea: The Car (1977) - in english, challenge My Guilty Pleasure on Screen
• From Roger Moore with Love (2024): Icon on and off the screen - in english, challenge Fresh Film Focus
• Casablanca (1942) and the dilemma of whether the classics need to be reevaluated - in spanish, Overrated classics challenge