Fast Company (1979)

Fast Company is a lighthearted romantic action thriller drag-racing drive-in movie directed by David Cronenberg. This is definitely not the sort of thing one associates with Cronenberg.

This is a Canadian movie shot entirely in Canada.

Cronenberg was just finding his feet as a director at this time. This is a movie he did for a pay cheque but he is in fact a drag-racing fan.

Lonnie Johnson (William Smith) is a well-known popular drag racer. He drives the fastest dragsters, the “fuelers” which run on nitromethane and alcohol. Or he did, until his car exploded. Now he has to drive a “funny car” (front-engined dragsters with fibreglass body shells). Which means that his protégé Billy Booker (known as Billy the Kid) misses out. Lonnie feels bad about this. He likes Billy. But Lonnie had no choice. He races for the FastCo team and his boss Phil Adamson (John Saxon) insists.

We know Adamson is going to be the bad guy because he’s played by John Saxon. And Saxon is in full-on nasty slimy super-villain mode.

Lonnie’s chief rival is Gary "The Blacksmith" Black (Cedric Smith). Gary resents Lonnie’s success but while he’s hyper-competitive we should not jump to the conclusion that he’s going to be a bad guy.

Lonnie’ girlfriend is Sammy (Claudia Jennings). She’d like him to give up racing and she knows he won’t but she loves him anyway.

Billy the Kid is sleeping with Candy (Judy Foster), who is a kind of drag racing equivalent of a Formula 1 grid girl. Adamson is trying to force her to sleep with clients.

Adamson has plans to get rid of Lonnie because Lonnie won’t grovel to him but he has to have a plausible justification for firing him.

It all comes to a head with a big race for the Funny Car championship.

There’s some satire here about the corrupting effects of commercialism in sport but FastCo is not a giant corporation. Adamson has a private plane but it’s not a LearJet. It’s a little single-engined Cessna. FastCo and Adamson are just not big enough or important enough to be truly sinister, which makes the satire lighthearted and amusing. Despite his ruthlessness and unscrupulousness Adamson is ridiculous rather than truly scary.

There’s plenty of cool drag racing action. There are crashes and there are exploding dragsters. Lonnie is nicknamed Lucky Man because of his extraordinary knack for walking away unscathed from spectacular crashes. There’s some suspense. There’s an over-the-top villain. There’s a bit of humour. There’s a lighthearted feelgood vibe. There’s some romance. There are bare boobs. This is a total drive-in movie.

One thing I like about it is that it takes these people seriously. Drag racing is their life. The movie isn’t mocking them. Lonnie isn’t a ridiculous figure. Sammy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving him. Candy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving Billy. These people have a passion and they follow it. They are doing what they love. Sammy respects Lonnie for that.

With motor racing there’s always the sneaking suspicion that the attraction for the spectators is the possibility of witnessing a fiery crash. It’s a kind of primitive ritual - men courting violent death. It’s a dance of death. It’s interesting that although on the surface Fast Company doesn’t seem at all Cronenbergian 17 years later Cronenberg would deal with similar themes in a very Cronenbergian way in Crash. And while Fast Company doesn’t deal with the erotic aspect of this attraction overtly we do see some very hot babes who are obviously at least to some extent keen to have sex with men who may be marked for death.

John Saxon is delightfully fiendish. William Smith makes a good sympathetic hero. He’s not perfect but basically he’s a good guy. Claudia Jennings, a fine actress, is very good but isn’t given enough to do.

Fast Company is a fine above-average drive-in movie.

This movie looks great on Blu-Ray.

Moonshine Love (1969)

The Sod Sisters is a very obscure American hicksploitation movie also released as Head for the Hills and later reissued as Moonshine Love. It was directed by Lester Williams.

It’s included as an extra on one of the old Something Weird DVD releases.

I really can tell you very little about this movie. I can’t even tell you where it was shot.

It begins with three of the most incompetent criminals who ever drew breath bungling a daring daylight robbery. It should have been easy - an old guy carrying a bag filled with banknotes. One of the trio, Tom (Tim E. Lane), decides to double-cross the others. He makes his getaway by jumping onto the back of a pickup truck but he manages to lose the loot. The loot is found by somebody, which will become important later.

He ends up lying unconscious by the side of a remote country road after falling from the pickup truck.

He’s found by Zeb (Hank Harrigan) and his two girls, Jeannie (Genie Palmer) and Lily (Breege McCoy).

We find out that they’re a close family.

Zeb is a moonshiner. He’s a cheerful likeable rogue.

Tom has amnesia after his fall from the truck. He’s wandering through the woods when he sees Jeannie and Lily frolicking naked in the river. It turns out that they’re nice girls and they take Tom home with them. Jeb doesn’t mind. Tom could be useful to have around. Jeb is easy-going but he’s a bit on the lazy side. If Tom is willing to work for his keep he’s welcome to stay.

Living in a cabin in the woods with only her daddy and her sister a girl can get a mite lonesome. And a healthy young girl like Jeannie has certain urges. Normal female urges. It’s at times like this that a girl is thankful for her carrot. A carrot can be a great comfort for a girl. I don’t know what it was like for the carrot but Jeannie is now feeling much more content and much more satisfied.

Pretty soon Tom and Jeannie are getting along really well and Jeannie doesn’t need her carrot any more. A man can do that job much more enjoyably.

Of course Tom’s erstwhile partners-in-crime will show up eventually and then things will get interesting.

This is the only credit for director Lester Williams and screenwriter Stan Potosky. In fact it’s the only screen credit for just about everybody involved. This is one of those regional exploitation movies made by people who were not much more than amateurs who had managed to get together a few thousand dollars (or sometimes, a few hundred dollars) and decided to make a movie. It’s very rough around the edges and the acting is terrible.

On the other hand the plot is actually quite decent. The pacing is good. There are a couple of amusing moments (such as the scene with the nosy revenue man) and they’re clearly intentionally amusing and reasonably clever. And there’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek feel which also appears to be intentional. The script is quite a bit better than the amateur hour effort that the movie’s micro-budget might lead one to expect.

There’s a bit of low-level violence. There’s a lot of nudity, including frontal nudity. There’s quite a bit of fairly graphic simulated sex. And that female masturbation scene with the carrot is surprisingly explicit. It helps that the two girls really are pretty and really do look nice without their clothes on.

I like the ending. It just seems right.

The print was clearly in less than pristine condition which is why Something Weird threw it it in as an extra bonus on their Common Law Wife/Jennie, Wife-Child double header DVD. The transfer really is perfectly acceptable.

If you can get past the very stilted acting Moonshine Love is a lot more entertaining than it has any right to be. I certainly wasn’t bored. This is good sexploitation/hicksploitation fun. I’m a sucker for hicksploitation and I like movies about moonshiners and this movie does have quite a bit of charm. I’m going to go out on a limb and give it a highly recommended rating.