Fine di un giorno di festa

SMASH-UP ON INTERSTATE 5 was one of the most entertaining entries on the Tuesday and Wednesday Movies of the Week. This episodic drama, somehow economically told in 90 minutes, opens with a spectacular 39-car crash on a deserted stretch of highway. The film then flashes back 48 hours before the crash occurs and through multiple stories we get to meet all of the people involved in the crash and what they were going through at the time of the crash. The impressive all-star cast includes Vera Miles, Robert Conrad, Donna Mills, Buddy Ebsen, David Groh, Scott Jacoby, and there's an especially lovely turn by Harriet Nelson, widow of TV icon Ozzie Nelson. I like the way this movie showed us the crash first and then took us back. For some reason, it made us care even more about these people, knowing what was ahead for them.

I was 7 when this was on TV and was so hyped by the commercials for it. My favorite thing was the time clock in the corner of the screen: 40 minutes to smashup, 30 minutes to smashup, 20 minutes to smashup, etc. Obviously trying to keep people tuned in. And it worked!! At least for a 7 year old kid. My 10

year old brother and I were on the edge of our seats, even tho we were sitting on the floor, our eyes glued to the screen. I was so excited by it waiting for the big smashup and was in heaven when it finally happened! Being kids we just wanted to see cars smashed, not concerned about anyones welfare. Awesome!

Incredible that but for one review, and even that only two months ago, no-one has seen fit to comment all through the years on this above average telemovie. Inarguably dated now, as evidenced by the vehicles themselves, the flares, hair-do's and music, SMASH UP ON INTERSTATE 5 is a reasonably faithful reconstruction (disaster-movie style) of the events leading up to the true-life pile up not so many years earlier.

Better than average script give the cast of well known actors and actresses something to work with. Robert Conrad, still looking the part of Jim West plays the police patrol officer most closely involved in the fifty car collision. Tommy Lee Jones, also a cop, looks like a youthful long haired refugee from WOODSTOCK and Buddy Ebsen is well, Buddy Ebsen, as always!

The film does not attempt to sensationalise the events, merely presenting them as is, albeit with considerable literary license one suspects. The actual collision is quite well done for its day, showed in stop-frame at the beginning and in full gory detail at the conclusion. I have this film in our library and decided to compile this review having watched it this evening, the first time in ten years or so. An absolute time-capsule!

Titled COLLISION COURSE in Australia, and several European countries.

SMASH-UP ON INTERSTATE 5 begins with a brief introduction to the various drivers involved in the catastrophe of the title, before plunging us into the vehicular mayhem, complete with slow-motion impacts!

Next, we're shown the lives of the victims, two days before the incident. This is made up of a true, all-star cast of 1970's TV luminaries, elder stars, and future celebrities.

Robert Conrad is a highway patrolman. Vera Miles is the lonely Erica. Scott Jacoby is a small-time crook, who got mixed up with a fugitive from justice. Buddy Ebson and Harriet Nelson are a loving, retired couple. David Groh is a trucker. Sue Lyon is a biker chick.

Even the co-stars are great! There's an impossibly young, Tommy Lee Jones as a cop, and Donna Mills as a pediatric nurse!

Unlike many such films, the individual backstories are actually interesting. The characters are fleshed-out well, and carry on intelligent conversations. We come to "know" and care about these people. So, when disaster strikes, it's tragic, and not just another action sequence.

Highly recommended, especially for the 1970's TV-movie connoisseur...

The 1976 TV movie SMASH-UP ON INTERSTATE 5 was one of the many disaster movies that popped up on the small screen during the 1970s as a spin-off of the larger big-screen efforts like EARTHQUAKE and THE TOWERING INFERNO.

Instead of being set in a plane, a train, or in a highrise, this film's disaster takes place along one of the most heavily traveled highways in America--Interstate 5 in Southern California. In flashbacks, it depicts the film's main characters in the forty-eight hours leading up to those frightening moment when dozens of vehicles pile into one another in a freakish fashion. Featuring such TV stalwarts as Robert Conrad, David Groh, and Donna Mills, as well as a young Tommy Lee Jones (still four years away from his breakthrough role in COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER), SMASH-UP ON INTERSTATE 5, given the melodramatics of the situation, is fairly well-directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, who helmed the classic 1972 TV film THE NIGHT STALKER, and with a reasonably convincing pile-up scene.