The Van

It may seem like a dumb sex comedy from the 70's but it's more like a window to the decade of decadence.This movie has it all!Sex,pot smoking,a car wash,super-cool vans,cool clothes,a pimp,hookers,van racing,the continuous playing of Chevy Van and other Sammy Johns songs and more!If you want to know what people were really doing in the 70's,get this movie.It will make you want to go FUN TRUCKIN'.

Let me start by saying that I saw this movie during its (short) original release. The drive-in had a couple dozen custom vans along the rear wall. I can only assume the shenanigans on the screen were being duplicated in the row of rolling bedrooms. Hey, it was the '70s.

This time I watched on Prime, some 56 years later. How the times have changed. While I still find the film amusing, some of it is a little hard to watch. What may have been considered acceptable by 1977 morals would never fly today. Apparently no didn't mean no, it meant "that's ok, keep trying, she'll come around eventually." That said, it's still an interesting piece of '70s culture. Custom vans, CB radios, 8-tracks and pot. Lots of pot. It was the end of the free love generation.

It's certainly not for everyone, but for those looking for an entertaining trip back to their own teen years it's worth a watch.

...this is, above all else, the typical Crown International Pictures drive-in (read "passion pit") programmer. The 1975 Sammy Johns hit record "Chevy Van" is heard repeatedly on the soundtrack (this movie has even been reissued with the title CHEVY VAN), despite the film's title vehicle being a Dodge. Danny DeVito makes only six minutes of on-screen appearance, but countless VHS reissues falsely credit him as the star of the flick. The movie is a comparatively sexist morality tale -- will Bobby find sexual satisfaction through the one-night-stand his customised van facilitates, or must he wait until Tina, the girl of his dreams, gives him the time of day? Still, it is representative of the prevailing carnal dream of male American high schoolers of the time, and on that basis alone THE VAN has, almost in spite of itself, become an artifact of the period that must be referenced in any honest retrospective of the period's popular American cinema...

The teen sexploitation comedy had its heyday in the early 1980's with movies like "Porky's" and a brief revival years later with "American Pie" (and perhaps we're experiencing another right one now with the new movie "Superbad"). But these movies can really be traced back into the 1970's,(and perhaps even earlier in a much tamer form). The 70's movies were a little different, however, in that it was never clear whether they were trying to "exploit" the actual teenage audience of the era or just exploit the bodies of the "teenage" characters (almost always played by older actors) for the benefit of perverts of all ages. (Just look, for instance, at all the 1970's movies about cheerleaders, babysitters, and sexy female hitch-hikers).

This movie is somewhat unique then because, though it certainly fulfills its quota for female nudity, it really does seem to be aimed at actual 70's teenagers. It has a believable (relatively) and likable (very relatively) protagonist with a (somewhat)realistic problem: he wants to improve his love life by buying a customized van. It doesn't work too well at first, but eventually he has some success although not in the way he planned. This movie is not particularly funny, nor is it exactly neo-realism, but it does capture the spirit of the times enough to achieve a kind of nostalgia (which certainly can't be said about stuff like "The Cheerleaders"). I was actually just a kid at this time, but I remember being disappointed when I reached adolescence in the "just say no" Reagan era that my female peers weren't quite as, uh, fun as my teenage babysitters seemed to be back in this era. (At least, I personally never owned a van with a waterbed, a mirrored ceiling, and, for some reason, a toaster).

I'm sure this isn't a totally realistic movie about being a teenager in the 1970's, but it's as close as THESE kind of movies are probably going to get.

Positively THE definitive film about toaster-equipped van lovin'. A must for anyone who loves insanely bad movies - I saw this movie by accident 8 years ago, and now own 3 copies of it, and have watched it at least a dozen times. Do yourself a favour, and hop on board with Bobby and his pals(?)... and remember, "There ain't a woman around who don't like the sound of a zipper goin' down!"