Death Car on the Freeway (1979)

Los Angeles. A mysterious driver kills young, pretty women by crashing into their cars with his van while playing some mean fiddle music via outside speakers. The police, as represented by one Lieutenant Haller (Peter Graves), has no clue how to stop what’s going on, seeing as they are stumped by incredibly fiendish tricks from the perp – like the killer repainting his van and using new licence plates. Victim blaming seems the best solution to Haller.

Fortunately, up and coming TV reporter – and at this time the “reporter” part of TV reporter was actually still relevant  – Jan (Shelley Hack) gets in on the case even before the police does. While she doesn’t have the resources of the authorities, she actually owns a functioning brain. Alas, Jan also has to cope with The Patriarchy as well as The Man. Not only is Haller an idiot, her bosses don’t really appreciate her public criticism of car culture, and last but not least, she herself still has doubts if anything she has achieved until now is only because her separated husband Ray (George Hamilton) once gave her her first break. Then there are Ray’s 70s macho attempts at getting her back…

I came to Death Car on the Freeway for Hal Needham directed death car on the freeway action on a TV movie budget but I stayed for some rather good mainstream late 70s feminism (as written by a guy). Which is to say, if you’re expecting this to be much of an action film, or a thriller, you might end up disappointed, for while the killer’s modus operandi is pleasantly silly, and what there is of the car action and suspense scenes is directed by Needham with the vigour and competence you’d expect of the guy who directed Smokey and the Bandit, about eighty percent of the film really concern Jan’s personal struggles against crusted society structures trying to hold her down.

To my surprise – I’m not much of a guy for films mostly interested in talking through issues even when I agree with their politics - I found myself rather engrossed in the proceedings. It certainly helps that William Wood’s script is as pointed as a US 70s TV movie script needs to be but still presents its case without too much melodrama. It’s not exactly kitchen sink realism (praise be to the Old Gods), but outside its sometime thriller plot, this is not a film of grand melodrama but one sympathetically portraying the sort of crap a young, talented and engaged woman has to fight through for no good reason whatsoever. Obviously, there’s also a rape metaphor sitting practically in the open, which again the film treats with dignity. Needham is a much keener director of this sort of thing than I had him pegged as, too, keeping things moving even when there are no cars on screen and visually centring on Jan in quite a few subtle ways.

All the while the film also provides a very nice feel of its time and place, subtly hinting at the weirdness of living in LA (at least people living in LA tell me it’s weird) and doing one of the things popular culture can do so well: explaining the world or a place at a specific moment in time through slight (or large) exaggeration. There’s a feeling of veracity to much going on in the film that again surprised me.

On the acting side Hack presents herself as sympathetic, never overplaying or underplaying Jan’s frustrations and keeping us rooting for her in the drama as well as the thriller parts. Hamilton’s performance as that most unmanly kind of guy, a man who can’t cope with his supposedly beloved wife being a muck-raking truth-seeking reporter who cares, is hilariously on point, going from the smug, to the sleazy, though mostly ending up with a facial expression of vacant arrogance whenever Jan tells him what she wants and feels in opposition to what he tells her she should want so perfect it’s as funny as it is infuriating. Whoever cast these two actors is at least half responsible for Death Car’s success as a film.

So Death Car on the Freeway ends up not just being a rather different film from the one I expected but also better in ways I’d never expected of it.

Megaforce (1982)

The secret international military force MEGAFORCE (whose name just might be a tiny bit of overcompensation) fights the good fight against evil. Yep, that’s their mandate, so when the military leader (Edward Mulhare already in Knight Rider mode of pretending he’s not surrounded by utter bullshit) and the president’s daughter (Persis Khambatta) of one beleaguered state somewhere ask for help against some sort of revolutionaries that went and hired themselves the mercenaries of one Duke Guerera (Henry Silva), their answer is of course hell yes.

After a romance subplot between Khambatta and MEGAFORCE commander Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick), there’s a tiny little night raid followed by some sort of betrayal by POLITICIANS(!) (ewww), and MEGAFORCE has to fight their way out, because, umm, seriously, the film’s ideas of politics and military tactics don’t make a lick of sense, so you’re on your own here.

If this hadn’t been made in 1982 just when the toy line was re-configured, I’d have sworn this was Golden Harvest’s and some unlucky US investors’ attempt at jumping on the G.I. Joe bandwagon without the help of minor geniuses like Larry Hama, so I suppose something like this was just in the air. Of course, where some of the G.I. Joe stuff (at the very least Hama’s comics) was actually a whole lot of fun, Hal “Smokey and the Bandit”’ Needham’s Megaforce just looks like a turkey to my eyes.

I know, the film does by now have some minor cult film reputation in the camp-loving part of the community but I don’t really see it. At least, I’ve seen many a film a lot better at being bad and without Megaforce’s long stretches of boredom. The film’s first half in particular is just a terrible drag, with little of interest happening beyond the film repeatedly telling the audience how awesome MEGAFORCE is supposed to be without ever laying down anything that makes you believe their awesomeness or doing it so badly you’ll find yourself laughing or even a tiny bit interested in their hilarious misadventures (of nothing happening). Sure, everything about and around MEGAFORCE is patently ridiculous, from their stupid motorcycles to their stealth mode dune buggies, but the film isn’t very good at actually making use of that in any interesting way, instead letting actors deliver horrible dialogue, play absurdly “rousing” music, and show nothing that’s actually worse seeing apart from Persis Khambatta’s legs, and those aren’t reason enough to drag yourself through awesome plot developments like Ace Hunter (tee-hee) testing her for her ability to work with MEGAFORCE, she making the grade, he don’t taking her anyway, and so they both deciding to go to a London hotel once the film is through, which is a) stupid, b) time-hogging and c) not a very good distraction from the fact that there’s little of interest happening.

And really, that’s mostly how the rest of this thing plays out too: the scenes of military action mostly consist of music, smoke, and if you’re really lucky some explosions, but excitement really dwells somewhere else; the plot is about as exciting (let’s not even start on the logic) as watching dough rise; and the “humour” is courtesy of the director of films like Smokey and the Bandit. To my eyes, it’s the sort of cult film you enthuse about when you haven’t encountered the actual good stuff, and pretty much a waste of anyone’s time.

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