Movie Review Race With The Devil

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1975 - Spoiler alerts An obscure low budget horror movie that might be pretty average apart from its climatic car chase sequence, a well staged pursuit that might well have influenced the Mad Max movies. Plot wise, it is simple fare. Two married couples travel across the US in an SV camper van headed for a ski-ing holiday in Aspen. The men have their motorbikes attached to the back of the SV. They never get anywhere near Aspen. The men are played by Peter Fonda & Warren Oates. The women by Lara Parker (a minor TV actress) and Loretta Swit (best known as Hotlips from the MASH TV series). The couples unwittingly witness a Satanic ritual that ends in murderous sacrifice and the Satanic cultist realize they have been seen. The couples flee to a nearby town to report the crime to find zero co-operation from the local sheriff (for the obvious reason that he is himself a Satanist). The couples find their motorbikes sabotaged, their pet dog is hanged and rattlesnakes are put inside the SV, but they flee, leading to a spectacular car chase on the State Highways. Thinking they are clear, and in need of some basic rep[airs to the SV, the heroes pull over in a field only for the Sherrif to lead a final attack on them. The SV is totally surrounded in a circle of flame and the expressions on the faces of the four main characters tell us they know they are doomed as the film ends. There are no supernatural events. This is just a crime drama about a murderous cult, and the bleak sense of hopelessness of the ending just suggests there was no real sense of how else to wrap up the story. We know nothing about the Satanists other than that they are Satanists. We don't get any insight into how or why any of them act as they do. They do create some great images of small-town redneck paranoia though. The prolonged car chase still holds up as one of the best of its kind. Youtube - The Movie Trailer Arthur Chappell Stopping in a quiet isolated mea