Fri 3 Apr 2015
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975).
Posted by Steve under Action Adventure movies , Reviews[8] Comments
RACE WITH THE DEVIL. 20th Century Fox, 1975. Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, Lara Parker, R. G. Armstrong, Clay Tanner. Director: Jack Starrett.
Imagine it’s the mid-1970s. You’re not a hippie or a rebel, though you like your motorcycles and a drink or two. You’re planning the most kick ass vacation possible. You’ve got your wife, your best friend, his wife, her cute little dog all comfortably ensconced in a souped–up RV and you’re ready to hit the wide open American road. Freedom is in the air.
What could possibly go wrong?
In Race With The Devil, the answer is everything. But not in a comedic National Lampoon’s Vacation manner. There’s no John Hughes comedic sensibility in this suspenseful, disturbing, but compulsively watchable, thriller about two couples on the run from a horde of bloodthirsty Satanists.
A nightmarish journey into fear and paranoia, Race With The Devil stars Warren Oates and Peter Fonda as two buddies who, along with their wives, run afoul of a mysterious cult. Both men, actors whose work I greatly admire, are naturals here. Their distinct personalities shine through, giving life to their upper middle class characters. They are men caught between their bourgeois, consumerist lifestyle and their visceral desire to protect their women and to fight back.
Directed by Jack Starrett, the movie has two strong leads, some bang up car chases, and a cynical eye toward both authority figures and the counterculture. The plot strains credulity, but it’s easily forgivable. After all, this isn’t high art. It’s an exploitation film about normally dressed Satanists chasing two middle class American couples through West Texas, shattering their planned ski vacation in Aspen. It’s a hell of a ride, spiraling ever downward into a neo-noir landscape where you have no idea whom you can trust.
April 4th, 2015 at 3:55 am
I saw this absolutely years ago, as part of a horror movie double bill. It is basically an action movie cashing in on the mid-70s fascination with horror movies about the Devil. It reminds me a bit of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, in that the baddies are scarily undifferentiated and seem to keep coming however many of them that you kill.
Even back then it seemed to me that not only were there an awful lot of cult members, they also were very determined, and worked out a LOT! By about half-way through the film I could imagine the Cult Leader gathering the remaining members and saying–
“Okay, they got Steve, Kyle, Jeb, Art, Paul, Wayne, Bill, Morgan, Dave, Andy, Mike, Simon, Trev, John, Rob, Pete, Chris, Ollie and Matt, but we can still get those blasphemers. Tim, can you jump onto the roof of the RV and climb inside?”
“Do you mind if I take a rain check on that? I gotta bit of a cold,and I promised to take the wife to the cinema…?”
April 4th, 2015 at 4:18 am
It’s an action film, a car chase film, and a Satan-exploitation film all in one. But it (surprisingly) holds up pretty well. It reminded me a bit of THE STEPFORD WIVES which also came out in 1975. This may have been the drive in, Grindhouse equivalent. William Goldman, I am pretty sure, had no hand in RACE WITH THE DEVIL
April 4th, 2015 at 6:56 am
I liked RACE WITH THE DEVIL a lot more than STEPFORD WIVES.
April 4th, 2015 at 8:32 am
RACE WITH THE DEVIL is almost like a version of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, with Satanists instead of pod people. The TV series THE INVADERS is similar, too, as is, at a farther reach, a paranoid thriller like Alan J. Pakula’s THE PARALLAX VIEW. The question of whom you can trust is basic to all of these, and the answer always turns out to be: No one.
April 4th, 2015 at 9:58 pm
I first saw this movie in a theater – the Beverly, 95th Street and Ashland Avenue in Chicago.
At the time, I noticed the four stars:
– Peter Fonda, not that far removed from Easy Rider.
– Warren Oates, then mainly playing heavies in films and TV.
– Loretta Swit, between seasons on M*A*S*H, when her character was still the sex-crazed “Hot Lips”.
– Lara Parker, still much loved as Angelique from Dark Shadows.
– … and in this movie, they were the normal people.
Not only that …
… the director, Jack Starrett, was a sometime actor whose most prominent movie role, which he played under his real name, Claude Ennis Starrett Jr., was “Gabby Johnson”, the town rat in Blazing Saddles.
“Rawwit!”
Lastly:
The Beverly Theatre, mentioned above …
… well, the building is still there, intact –
– but it’s now a Baptist church.
(Insert your own joke here …)
April 5th, 2015 at 12:18 am
To paraphrase a review of a film with David Warner by Leonard Maltin, you know you are in trouble when the most normal people in the film are Warren Oates and Peter Fonda.
This is another of my personal quirks, I just don’t like cheap exploitation horror films from this era. I didn’t find it suspenseful but predictable. Of course I saw it many years later.
I’m afraid bits like Bradstreet mentions don’t amuse me, I don’t like incompetent bad writing or grindhouse. Just me.
Actually there is a good movie here, if they had bothered to make it.
But you have to admit when Peter Fonda and Warren Oates are the normal people in a film you should be a little wary going in. What, they couldn’t afford Andrew Prine?
April 5th, 2015 at 4:48 am
Well, to be fair I’ve seen David Warner play some very ‘ordinary’ non-villainous roles since he returned from America and many years of type-casting. Some actors can only play one role, others aren’t always given the chance.
The casting of RACE WITH THE DEVIL is interesting in that it’s a snapshot of the careers of both leading men; Fonda on the way down, Oates rising to leading man status but not in mainstream Hollywood movies. Neither of them were what you would call the guy next door, but the point of having them was to put a few names on the movie poster that the public might recognise. It’s so many years since I saw it that I can’t really say how they managed in their roles, although I suspect that Oate was more entertaining. Fonda always seemed to me to be lacking in the sort of charisma that makes a star.
Really bad movies can be perversely entertaining, but when this one struck me as a thoroughly average example of its genre.There are movies that I saw as a kid that still have something that sticks with me years later, whether its a performance or a moment. It says a lot that I’d completely forgotten about RWTD until this post. It suggests that it’s the sort of movie that, to quote Stephen King, ‘you come out of the theatre with nothing more than the taste of popcorn in your mouth’.
April 5th, 2015 at 3:16 pm
The movie is very watchable, but there are no profound lessons to be learned. It’s not exactly mindless entertainment, but it’s not anything worth an academic treatise, either. In many ways, the film is now a time capsule back to the mid-1970s when there definitely was a “fear of the occult” period in TV and movies