Viva Knievel!

Evel Knievel delivers toys to orphans one day and makes a death defying jump the next. Will Atkins (Gene Kelly) is his drunk manager. Kate Morgan (Lauren Hutton) is a photojournalist. Ben Andrews (Red Buttons) is a greedy crooked promoter. Stanley Millard (Leslie Nielsen) has an evil plan luring Evel to Mexico.

Evel, the character, does not come off that appealing. He's a bit misogynist towards Kate. He's a bit callous towards Will. If he's really worried about his drinking, he would keep all booze away from him. He needs to make small calibrations to his character which he already does with the orphans. He stops the momentum when he makes the anti-drug speech. He's trying to project machismo which doesn't look good like a middle age salesman with a fast sports car. He would be better off being humbled since his real life stunts already speak for his manhood. He may not be capable of projecting much else as an actor. His acting needs to round out the rest of him and I doubt he has it. He is self-righteous when he doesn't deserves it. As for the evil scheme, it's mostly non-sense and meaningless. It's bad writing and it needs to be explained well ahead of time. The flash photography premise is silly. Overall, Evel is a limited actor even if he is not the worst. His character has unappealing flaws. The story has unappealing flaws. It is bad but it could be worst.

Oooh... Leslie Nielsen is trying to sabotage Evel's bike. Will Lauren Hutton discover the plot in time?

And can Evel convince his mechanic to give up the bottle, and be a good father to the son he has heretofore ignored?

Will Evel and Lauren give up their adversarial flirting and get together?

DOES ANYBODY CARE?!?!

I am a fan of bad, cheesy movies. And even this one had me snoozing. Although I do give it thumbs up on the marvelous transition from the final jump to the closing credits.

Daredevil Evel Kneivel (just say his name out loud - ridiculous) stars as himself. The movie seems to portray Kneivel as some sort of wheelie-popping Christ figure.

You can't see it enough to fathom how truly bizarre it is. Kneivel says he's never taken a drug in his life, which is good so there was plenty enough to go around for the writer, the director and love interest Lauren Hutton.

And Kneivel's not even the weirdest guy in the movie! That honor goes to poor old Gene Kelly who plays Evel's sad excuse for a mechanic. His performance is quite possibly the worst captured on film; Kelly was playing this either as senile or retarded, though I suppose it doesn't matter which.

It's rough when the most convincing actor in the film is from Frank Gifford.

Viva Knievel has to be one of the worst movies ever made. But like like Plan 9 From Outer Space, it is so bad that it makes for a hilarious night. If you like bad movies, this is a must see. In the film Knievel is presented as some sort of cross between Elvis and Jesus. One scene at the front of the film even has Evel seeming to heal crippled children by presenting them with Evel Knievel model kits. He's shown as being a beacon of hope in a dark world, yet he's also shown nearly threatening the life of Red Button's character because Red hasn't paid him his money yet. By the way, how on Earth did people like Red Buttons, Gene Kelly, Lauren Hutton, and Leslie Nielson end up in this turkey?!? If you can't appreciate an incredibly bad movie, stay as far away as you can!

In VIVA KNIEVEL, the daredevil foils a drug shipment, charms a Mother Superior, reunites a long-estranged father and son, inspires crippled children to walk, woos a feminist news photographer and makes a 150-foot jump over a cage full of lions. Not all at once, however.

Robert Craig Knievel was one of his era's most singular pop culture figures, an endless self-promoter whose failures (e.g. his aborted 1974 Snake River Canyon jump) drew more media hype than almost anyone else's successes. A well-marketed, low-budget Knievel biopic starring George Hamilton did great at the box office in the early 1970s, so it was assumed the real Evel would also pack them into the theaters. But Knievel, unlike a Babe Ruth or Muhammad Ali, has no genuine on-camera magnetism and many of his line readings are horrid; trying to get Red Buttons to pay up on a debt, Evel says flatly, "You stole from me (long, long pause)... PROMOTER."

A quintessential 1970s cast (in fact, three POSEIDON ADVENTURE survivors appear here) includes a poorly-wigged Gene Kelly as Evel's alcoholic mechanic, a pre-AIRPLANE! Leslie Nielsen as the drug kingpin, Marjoe Gortner (take my word for it, kids, he was big in the 1970s) as Evel's protégé-turned-druggie and Lauren Hutton as the women's lib photographer who F-stops her way into Evel's heart.