Another car film where the car is the star and the guy driving it is secondary to the gears. Kowalski is a car transporter and insists on a quick turnaround when he hits his latest stop in Denver. As he stops off for a few drugs to keep him awake he bets his dealer that he’ll make it to the drop in California in fifteen hours. That’s the entire plot and he’s off to the races.
He evades some motorcycle cops (stopping to make sure they are alright after they crash) and finally captures the attention of the cops at the dispatch center. He drives the white 1970 Challenger top speed and outsmarts the police at every turn. A blind local DJ picks up on the chase over the police radio and tips the driver off to police barricades and road blocks. The driver runs into various adventures with a naked motorcycle driver, a snake charmer and a few others. As the final chase takes place, Kowalski runs up onto a police barricade of bulldozers. He turns around and runs into the ops chasing him from the back. He turns around again and hits top end. He approaches the bulldozers and just about the time you wonder where he’s going to go, you realize that this is his final run. He slams into the dozers in a fiery crash. The end.
I LOVE movies that don’t have the standard happy ending. The radio DJ was Cleavon Little, Sherriff Bart from “Blazing Saddles”. Every time he was on the screen all I could hear were his lines as Bart. It was a fun movie. Lots of fast car scenes but or all its hype, relatively few chase scenes. It was billed as one of the originals and I’m sure it inspired a lot of the later movies but it falls a little short in the action department.
5 of 11 Skulls
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