Race With The Devil

Race With The Devil (1975)

Runtime: 88 minutes

Directed by: Jack Starrett (replacing Lee Frost)

Starring: Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, Lara Parker, R.G. Armstrong

From: 20th Century Fox

Here is a movie I’ve heard about for awhile now (I don’t remember where first) and had available for viewing for awhile also, but finally I got around to watching it just recently.

It’s a movie SO a product of its times, from the fashion, to the fact that the main vehicle is a motorhome, and other things… this is about a pair of guys involved with dirtbikes; one of them races (Fonda) and the other runs a store (Oates). Well, Oates has a fancy new motorhome, looking all 70’s and stuff. The two men and their significant others (Swit and Parker; yes, Loretta was Hot Lips on M*A*S*H) decide to embark on a much-needed trip filled with R &R, headed to Aspen, Colorado. They leave San Antonio and stay in remote locations as hey, their RV has everything they need, right? Well, one night they get drunk and they happen to see a… satanic sacrifice! There’s another trend from that decade, fear of devil worshippers and cults. They get spotted and they barely escape. From there they try to move on but they get the feeling that there are more people in the cult than they first realized…

This is a flick which combines several different genres, from horror to b-movie action to exploitation to even a car chase scene, but this one involves an RV. If you think about it the plot isn’t all that realistic, but if you check your brain at the door, you should enjoy this. It’s a movie that has some humor, but a lot of creepiness in that you don’t know who to trust, and you don’t know what will happen next. It’s suspenseful and it’s punctuated by the action stuff, especially the car chase at the end, where you see stuff blow up and some people get their comeuppance. The ending… it’s totally 70’s, too, I’ll put it that way. There was a remake planed a few years ago but it didn’t happen and who knows if it’ll ever happen. I don’t know how it’ll be if they take it out of the 70’s and they don’t have quality actors like Fonda and Oates in the lead; they’ll probably change the ending too so that would be no good, I say. Maybe it’s best if they remake something else besides this, as I don’t think you could really improve it. So, if you see it on something like Fox Movie Channel (which shows it once in a while) it may be worth checking out if you sound intrigued by it.