Road Movie

The drive-in's redneck trucker genre gets the art house treatment in this intense, grungy 70's obscurity. Two novice independent truck drivers pick up the wrong passenger. Surreal, somewhat supernatural and soaking in sexual politics that are definitely up for heated debate. There's a lot going on here, especially with it's subtle depiction of independent business vs. corporate giants and unions. This is independent film as it was and should be. Essential.

This is a great little movie and, judging by the lack of comment and sparse reviews here, unjustly neglected.

Apart from the three leads, the main protagonist here is America, the real USA where most people live and work and not the munchkin-land depicted in most Hollywood movies. And what a desolate wasteland it is! So that's where all the Trump supporters come from.

One good aspect of this film is that it does not outstay its welcome. Despite many long sequences of trucks barreling along, and extended views of the landscape from the cab windows, which do not advance the plot at all, the film is done at 88 mins.

One reviewer here criticizes the "unnecessarily" melodramatic ending, which abruptly slams on the handbrake. Perhaps he is right, but having recently watched a string of (mostly French) films with open or ambiguous endings, I am not in the mood to complain.

Although the two male leads are good, the star of the film is Regina Baff as Janice. She is the spiritual successor to Vera, played by Ann Savage, in "Detour" (1945), a similar and even briefer low budget effort now rightly lauded as quintessential Film Noir. She even looks like her, and I am sure Baff must have modeled her performance on that of Savage - cunning, psychotic malice but with streaks of vulnerability.

I bought the DVD hoping to add another gem to my collection of "road movies". In fact, despite more of the action occurring in a moving vehicle that most any film I can recollect, it does not really fall into that genre, in which the journey is a metaphor for spiritual development of the protagonist.

This is pure Film Noir, in which the hero is trapped in a downward spiral by a combination of bad luck and poor choices, the worst of which is usually, as here, getting involved with a Femme Fatale. No hope of spiritual development here, although there are hints that Hank is beginning to see (though too late) what his partner Gil is really like.

In "The Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), Burt Lancaster's character says of Tony Curtis's character "I'd hate to take a bite outta you. You're a cookie full of arsenic." You could not better describe Vera in "Detour", or Janice in this one.

The final shot is ominous, like something from the B-movie SciFi cheapies of the 'fifties. Having wreaked destruction on the truckers, Janice hitches a ride in a private vehicle. It is just like a virus leaving the host it has destroyed to continue its lethal infection within a new one. Which brings us back neatly to "Detour" where the protagonist's downfall is sealed once he picks up the venomous Vera.

Two independent truckies( Bostwick and Drivas) pick up an emotionally battered prostitute(Baff) en route to Chicago. Her presence forces them to change their plans drastically.

Gritty seventies flick has all the hallmarks of the era that make it so great when compared to today's franchised McMovies; excellent performances, gritty characterisation and overall gritty downbeat feel. I found this film to be constantly engaging and intriguing with it's meandering plot taking the viewer on a journey not dissimilar to the film's protaganists. ROAD MOVIE is in a micro genre all by itself and is a fascinating glimpse into the darkside of the truckies' world. The perfs by all three leads are excellent,with Regina Baff a standout as the unstable and unpredictable hooker with a heart of molten lead. The script is solid and the characterisations are full of ambiguity and subtlety. How refreshing to see a flick where the characters aren't cliched cutouts. Cinematography is gritty and portrays the ever changing American landscape as a post apocalyptic wasteland. At times I felt as if I were watching a low key science fiction movie. ROAD MOVIE is an excellent antidote to anyone burnt out by the soulless franchised marketing -driven fx reels that pass for cinema in the current climate.

What an amazing picture. America the bleak, the picture shows what too many Americans are forced to look at: shooting flames of 100 foot pilot lights at the Jersey oil refineries, filthy, trash strewn barriers and streets, swampy landfills, miles of destroyed land strip mined, dump yards, and all vision encompassing, tacky billboards luring us to destinations like the "Monkey Snake Farm"

Playing into the visual aspect are other touches such as the radio playing advertisements for items like the "writhing, bleeding Jesus statute for two dollars - . . . with genuine simulated blood." Here is a picture of an America too many see, yet too few admit exists.

The young (almost unrecognizable) Barry Bostwick gives an astonishing performance is amazing as Hank, a young idealistic country boy truck driver partnered with Robert Drivas wondrously hardworn, (yet unwittingly naïve) Gil. Regina Baff is nothing but bad news as the mistake in the form of a whore they pick up causing their string of bad luck yet making herself necessary as their only means of redemption. That Hank recognizes this early on and the "older, wiser" Gil does not gives an interesting, unspoken and uneven balance and reversal of their roles in this partnership. Ms. Baff teeters gloriously between laughably horrible and dead on, offering a frightening character study that is at once loathsome and pitiable

The soundtrack matches perfectly the visual images we are given throughout - songs and sounds of the time in which the story takes place and intertwine in a manner that seems to be an actual commentary - a necessary appendage of the story.

Such movies need the balance of tension and release to make their point, but Road Movie never offers that - giving instead a sense of tension and false-release which intensifies every frame as few films can do today.

With a handful of dollars, cast and crew of Road Movie give us a real movie, entertaining, heartbreaking and full of false hope. Astonishing achievement.

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Occupying that particular niche where the grindhouse and the art-house overlap and sharing an ambiguous air of the American dream turned South with such distinctly 70's underground classics like TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and VANISHING POINT, ROAD MOVIE, although far from a rousing success even as a cult exploitation movie, its obscure, almost forgotten, status fully justified, enhanced by haphazard directing and storytelling deficiencies of all calibre, is a peculiar beast: moody and evocative enough to dismiss as without merits, but too technically challenged to ever come into its own or become visceral or absorbing enough to make its roughshod nature work in its favour.

The story of two independent truck drivers making their way to Chicago to deliver a meat cargo who pick up on their way a whore all out of luck plays second fiddle to the moody portrait of the squalid underbelly of 70's industrial America captured through grainy guerilla tactics. Huge factories smoking in the distance, old iron barrels rusting away in garbage heaps, derelict warehouses, small, nameless towns and cheap motels - all captured from the windows of a moving truck give to the movie a raw, bleak atmosphere that ends up being its strongest point. The director tries for something 'artsier', and while he's no Werner Herzog and the movie is no STROSZEK, the found locations in all their seemy glory enhance an otherwise lackluster film.