Van Nuys Blvd. (1979)

Van Nuys Blvd. is a Crown International release so you have a fair idea of what to expect - it’s not going to be Citizen Kane and there’ll be plenty of nudity. But as Crown International releases go this 1979 movie is quite enjoyable.

This is a movie about cruising night on Van Nuys Boulevard. Every Wednesday night during the 60s and 70s kids and car nuts would do the cruising thing - just driving around, picking up girls (or in the case of the girls, picking up guys), getting a burger at a drive-in restaurant, maybe having a few drinks and doing a bit of partying and just generally hanging out. It’s clearly a movie with a strong American Graffiti influence. It’s less ambitious and a whole Iot cheaper but it has much of the same sense of innocence, but with lots of nudity. In some ways you might see it as a precursor to 80s teen sex movies but it lacks the crassness of that genre. This is very much a good-natured feelgood movie.

There’s not much in the way of plot but that works in the movie’s favour. It’s about cruising, which is by its very nature rather aimless.

Bobby (Bill Adler) lives in a small town and even though he has a hot and wiling girlfriend he’s bored. He wants to go to the big city. He wants to go to LA. Not in search of fame and fortune. He just wants to cruise on Van Nuys Boulevard. One day he decides he’s had enough and he just jumps in his van and heads for Los Angeles.

He makes some friends there. The first friend he makes is Wanda, a waitress at a drive-in restaurant. All he asks for is a burger, fries and a triple shake but he gets a lot more than that when she joins him in the back of his van.

He also meets Moon (Cynthia Wood), who challenges him to a drag race. He meets Greg (Dennis Bowen), who’s just a memorable car fight (he and the other guy don’t beat each other to a pulp, they beat each other’s cars to a pulp). He meets Moon’s friend Camille (Melissa Prophet). And Chooch (David Hayward). Chooch is really a bit too old to be still cruising but he’s never really grown up. His life revolves around his hot rod.

We’re also introduced to the villain of the piece, Officer Al Zass (Dana Gladstone), a humourless cop who gets his jollies from hassling the kids. He’s basically a comic villain.

Bobby, Moon, Greg, Camille, Wanda and Chooch hang out. They cruise. They go to an amusement park. They pair off and there’s lots of sex. And eventually they all learn a bit more about life. Officer Al Zass gets his comeuppance. That’s absolutely all there is to the plot but their innocent antics provide a reasonable amount of amusement.

The acting is, surprisingly, generally pretty good. What matters is that all the characters are likeable (apart from Officer Zass who is merely petty rather than evil). It’s hard to pick a standout performance - all the cast members are effective in what are pretty undemanding rôles. It might be worth noting that Cynthia Wood was (as Cyndi Wood) Playboy's Playmate of the Year in 1974.

William Sachs proves himself to be competent as both writer and director. He didn’t have the time or the budget to do anything fancy but he gets the mood right, he gets the pacing right and he achieves the mix of comedy, romance and titillation that Crown International wanted and that drive-in audiences wanted.

Despite all the nudity this movie does not have a sleazy feel. And, happily, the humour avoids crassness.

Apart from being enjoyable in its own right Van Nuys Blvd. is a fascinating slice of Americana, and provides a glimpse of an innocent and now vanished America. It’s amazing how much fun people used to have before they had cellphones and social media. There’s some effective use of LA locations, including Van Nuys Boulevard itself.

Van Nuys Blvd. was quite successful at the box office.

This movie is included in Mill Creek's Drive-In Cult Classics 32 Movie Collection. If you don’t have this set then buy it immediately. It’s superb value for money and while it includes a few clunkers it includes some genuinely wonderful drive-in movies such as The Babysitter (1969), Malibu High (1979) and some fascinating oddities such as Pick-Up (1975) and Blue Money (1972).

Van Nuys Blvd. gets a very good anamorphic transfer and an audio commentary by the director.

Van Nuys Blvd. is no masterpiece but it’s an intriguing time capsule and it’s amusing. It’s probably a better film today than it was in 1979 since it now benefits from very substantial nostalgia appeal and for this reason it is highly recommended.

Byleth: The Demon of Incest (1972)

Byleth: The Demon of Incest is a very obscure Italian gothic horror movie (with a dash of giallo) from 1972.

It opens with a prologue in which a prostitute is brutally slain with an unusual three-pronged murder weapon (which we will later learn is a significant detail).

Then we switch to the palatial country home of the Shandwells in Italy, sometime in the late 19th century. Young Duke Lionello Shandwell (Mark Damon) is overjoyed that his sister Barbara (Claudia Gravy and no I don’t know why she chose that as a stage name either) has returned after a lengthy absence. He is delighted until she tells him she has married. This is quite a blow to him. As a child she had promised that she and Lionello would never be parted). This is our first hint that there is an incestuous attraction between Lionello and Barbara although we’re not quite sure whether Barbara is as sexually attracted to him as he is to her. That’s one of the many things that the movie is ambiguous about and it’s the ambiguity that makes this film interesting.

We soon discover that Lionello has quite a few issues with sex. He likes to watch couples making love. It’s implied that he has some sexual performance problems which could of course mean that the only woman who is capable of arousing him is his sister.

Spying on Barbara having sex with her husband Giordano (Aldo Bufi Lando) threatens to tip Lionello right over the edge.

Giordano, who is a pretty decent guy, tries to fix Lionello up with his beautiful cousin Floriana (Silvana Panfili). For a while that looks like it’s going to work. They hit it off well. But, alas, it ends badly. Floriana is a very pleasant and very attractive young lady but she is not Barbara.

There have been some other murders as well. The local priest suspects that a demon named Byleth is involved. That three-pronged murder weapon is apparently one of Byleth’s trademarks. Byleth is a demon who specialises in arousing incestuous desires. Barbara has a childhood memory of Lionello muttering the word Byleth to himself repeatedly.

It sounds like Lionello may be possessed by Byleth, and may in fact have summoned the demon. Years earlier his father had to leave England to avoid a scandal in which witchcraft was involved.

This is where the film’s ambiguity kicks in again. Lionello is a very disturbed young man with some major sexual hangups and some major sexual guilt. He is sufficiently unstable and disturbed for it to be plausible that he is simply a murderer. But he’s also quite crazy enough to try stuff like summoning demons. There’s also the possibility that the demon was originally summoned by Lionello’s father. Whether the murders have simply been committed by a very disturbed young man or whether there are supernatural forces involved is the big question and the movie leaves this this an open question.

There’s also the fact that we’re mostly seeing things from Lionello’s point of view, so we can’t be sure whether there’s a real demon, or whether Lionello thinks there’s a real demon, or whether we’re just seeing the delusions of a very disturbed young man. It can also be asked whether Lionello has been made crazy by his incestuous longings for Barbara or whether he’s been made crazy by demonic possession, possession by a demon who is notorious for inducing incestuous lust.

Yet another layer of ambiguity is added by Barbara. Is she aware of Lionello’s sexual obsession with her? Does she, to some extent, share this obsession?

There are some hints of the giallo genre here although this is essentially gothic horror.

There’s surprisingly little gore. There is however plenty of sex and nudity. On the other hand, despite the subject matter, this is no crude sleazefest. It’s a movie that makes an attempt to explore the links between madness and the occult and to ask whether madness leads to an obsession with the occult or whether occult forces ca drive people to madness.

Mark Damon is pretty good as Lionello. Lionello is a tortured soul but he’s not entirely unsympathetic. He may be a monster or a victim. Damon does a decent job of teasing out the complexities of the character. Claudia Gravy is also very good as Barbara, a woman who means well but may be unwittingly driving her brother further into madness.

Director Leopoldo Savona paces the film in a somewhat leisurely manner but he keeps us interested by keeping us uncertain. The fairly high production values help. It’s a handsome film but unusually for Italian genre cinema of that era it appears to be trying to avoid being a mere exercise in style.

Byleth: The Demon of Incest isn’t one of the great Italian gothic horror flicks but it’s worth a look if you don’t mind the fact that the violence is very restrained. Recommended.

Severin have released this movie on both DVD and Blu-Ray. They’ve given us the German cut which is the only surviving uncut version and while the transfer isn’t stunning due to problems with the source material it still looks pretty good.

Over 18... and Ready! (1969)

Over 18... and Ready! is a 1969 American sexploitation flick. Now if you were making a sexploitation movies in the 60s you couldn’t just shoot footage of naked women. You had to come up with with sort of vague plot that would explain why the girls kept taking their clothes off. Some sexploitation film-makers came up with genuinely inventive ways of doing this but if you didn’t have a really clever idea the easiest thing to do was to make a movie about sexploitation movie-making. There was a whole sub-genre of such movies and Over 18... and Ready! is one of those movies.

Barney Merritt (Larry Martinelli) makes skin flicks in Hollywood. He’s having trouble casting the female lead for his latest picture. There are plenty of girls available but Barney is choosy - he doesn’t want just any girl. She has to be the right girl.

At this point his secretary Lyn (Mary McRea) comes up with a bright idea. Why can’t she play the lead rôle? Barney isn’t sure that this is a good idea. Lyn is a nice girl and the movie will involve lots of sex and nudity. Which is interesting - in this sub-genre the sleazy film producer is usually the one actively trying to lure some innocent girl into taking her clothes off for the camera. But Barney tries to talk Lyn out of it.

Barney agrees to think about it over the weekend but when he gets home he remembers he left his briefcase at the office so he has to ring Lyn to ask her to get it for him. Lyn is in the bath when he phones (thus providing the movie’s first nude scene).

Lyn decides that if she’s going to persuade Barney to cast her she’ll need some photos to show him so she arranges a nude photo shoot shoot with a photographer acquaintance, thus providing the movie’s second nude scene. At this rate it looks like we’re going to get a prodigious amount of nudity. And we do.


Of course she sleeps with the photographer which leads to complications later when he decides he’s in love with her.

Lyn gets the part but then she discovers that Barney isn’t so moral after all. Not only is She expected to sleep with him, she’s expected to sleep with his wife as well. And maybe the maid as well (Barney and his wife are both sleeping with the maid).

The movie turns out to be a roughie but Lyn doesn’t mind because it’s her first step on the road to stardom. She doesn’t even mind the bondage and the whipping. It’s only acting after all and she’s an actress.

What she does mind is the idea of having sex with Barney’s wife. And after a while she decides she’s not particularly keen on having sex with Barney either, especially when she figures out that maybe she really likes the photographer after all. None of this stops her from moving in with Barney and his wife (she has her career to think of). And she’s not going to give up that glittering career. Sure, most girls who appear in skin flicks don’t go on to be major Hollywood stars but she knows that it will be different for her.

The script is pretty basic but it’s serviceable. The acting is bad, which you expect, but unfortunately it’s very restrained bad acting rather than entertainingly over-the-top bad acting.

Of course audiences at the time weren’t watching the movie for the acting or the writing. As for the modern audience for these movies, they’re definitely not watching for the nudity (although there is plenty of frontal nudity in this one) or the sex (which is of the ridiculously tame variety in which the guys always keep their shorts on). People today watch these movies in the hope of seeing a delicious campfest or an exercise in cinematic weirdness (and 60s sexploitation movies do very often deliver on both counts). This one just doesn’t have quite enough of either camp value or weirdness. It’s just a very basic stock-standard skin flick.

This movie is paired with The Alley Tramp in a Something Weird double-header release. The fullframe transfer is reasonably OK with some very minor print damage. It’s quite grainy, but that just makes it seem more sleazy so it’s really a feature rather than a bug. The aspect ratio is correct. Like most sexploitation flicks this one was shot in black-and-white.

Unfortunately The Alley Tramp is also a rather uninspired exploitation feature so this disc is just a bit of a disappointment (and it has to be said that it’s a rare disappointment from Something Weird). Over 18... and Ready! is really for sexploitation completists only. If you want a really really good sexploitation movie dealing with the same subject matter then Career Bed is the film you need to see.

Sorceress (1982)

After following an interesting if up-and-down trajectory Jack Hill’s career was all but over by 1975 but he did make one last film for Roger Corman in 1982 - the sword & sorcery flick Sorceress, shot in Mexico. Corman had seen Conan the Barbarian and concluded (correctly) that this was a bandwagon worth jumping on.

An extremely nasty wizard named Traigon (Roberto Ballesteros) wants to sacrifice his first-born child to his evil goddess but he has a problem - his woman had twins and she won’t tell him which one was the first-born. If he guesses right he will gain immense power but if he guesses wrong he will suffer horrific consequences. Just as he’s trying to find as solution to his problem a white magician named Krona shows up, kills Traigon, and spirits the twins away.

To protect their lives the twins are raised as boys.

Twenty years later Traigon has been reincarnated (his goddess has gifted him with three lives) and he is determined to find the twins. His followers find the farmhouse in which they were brought up and butchery ensues, leaving the whole of the girls’ adopted family dead. The twins, who have been off skinny-dipping in the river, turn up too late to save their family but they do manage to slaughter the bad guys. You see Krona endowed the twins with awesome warrior prowess as well as sorcerous powers.

The girls hook up with a grizzled but friendly wandering warrior named Baldar. Baldar thinks they’re boys, which tends to indicate that he’s led a very sheltered life and has never seen an actual girl. Baldar has a sidekick, an amiable centaur. Baldar and the twins then hook up with barbarian adventurer Erlick (Roberto Nelson). When the twins undress in front of them it finally dawns on Baldar and Erlick that they’re girls. But the twists is, the twins don’t know that they’re girls. They always just assumed they were boys.

Traigon’s goons are trying to hunt down the twins for Traigon’s blood sacrifice while the twins are trying to hunt him down to kill him. There are lots of narrow escapes, Erlick almost gets impaled and one of the twins discovers that if you’re a girl you can have a lot of fun with a guy. This part is handled with wit and style - while one twin is losing her virginity the other twin gets to experience all the same pleasures.

There are epic fights. There are special effects that are mostly very good by low-budget 1982 standards. There are cool costumes (the beaked helmets on Traigon’s goons are a nice touch). The ape makeup effects on Traigon’s mistress’s man-ape pet are remarkably good, and the centaur is done pretty convincingly as well. The risen dead fights are excellent and creepy. There are lots of babes and lots of nudity. Even the special effects that wouldn’t quite pass muster today are at least clever and well thought out. The sets are good and the whole thing looks much more expensive than it was.

It’s what you expect from a Jack Hill movie - it’s done with a bit more cleverness and a bit more style than you expect in a movie of this type. And a bit more wit.

The twins are played by real-life twins Leigh and Lynette Harris, former Playboy models who made two films in the early 80s and that was the extent of their film careers. They’re not exactly great actresses but they’re not called on to demonstrate anything demanding of real acting skills, just take their clothes off and wave swords around (both of which they do quite satisfactorily). In fact they acquit themselves pretty well. In fact the performances of the entire cast are more than adequate.

Jack Hill’s directing credits including the brilliant, fascinating but strange girl gang movie Switchblade Sisters, the excellent blaxploitation classic Coffy, the entertaining women-in-prison film The Big Doll House and the indescribably bizarre Spider Baby.

Unfortunately Hill and Corman disagreed strongly over the editing of the movie and Hill cut his ties with New World Pictures, and even more unfortunately that had the effect of ending his career - the market was changing and the opportunities that he hoped would open up for him failed to eventuate. The tragedy of it is that Sorceress was a major hit and Hill could have gone on to make lots more movies for Corman.

Scorpion Releasing have put this movie out on both DVD and Blu-Ray, with very nice transfers and quite a few extras - there are interviews with Corman (who is quite proud of the movie), writer Jim Wynorski, post production supervisor Clark Henderson and makeup artist John Carl Buechler (whose work in this movie is outstanding).

Sorceress was the movie that launched New World’s successful cycle of sword & sorcery films, most of which (such as Barbarian Queen) are thoroughly enjoyable.

Sorceress is stylish and it’s enormous fun. Highly recommended.

Tango of Perversion (1974)

Tango of Perversion (AKA Tango 2001) is a 1974 Greek exploitation movie and it’s certainly the first Greek exploitation movie I’ve ever seen. Thanks to those wonderful folks at Mondo Macabro we can now get to see such exotica in our own living rooms. It was directed by Kostas Karagiannis.

Tango of Perversion tells the story of Joachim (Vagelis Voulgaridis), a young man who suffers from impotence. As as result he’s obsessed by sex. During the opening credits sequence Joachim is siting in a night club watching people dance and he imagines that all the girls are naked. Which gives Karagiannis the opportunity to show us bare boobies in the first few seconds of the movie. Which shows that Karagiannis understands what the exploitation movie biz is all about - you need to get the attention of the punters right at the start.

Joachim gets his jollies by filming people having sex. He films them through a one-way mirror. He lets his friend Stathis (Lakis Komninos) borrow his apartment whenever he wants it so that Stathis can have sex with his various women. Stathis has no idea that his sexual escapades are all being captured on film.

Joachim’s doctor has assured him that there’s nothing physically wrong with him. His impotence is caused by fear. It makes sense that Joachim would be afraid of women because he seems to be afraid of just about everything.

Stathis earns his money as a gigolo. He is having trouble with his girlfriend Joanna (Erika Raffael). He hasn’t got the money to buy drugs for her and if she can’t drugs from him she’ll get them from a lady friend. A lesbian lady friend named Rosita.

One memorable night Joachim lets Rosita borrow his apartment. Rosita and Joanna are just about to get down to some serious lesbo loving when Stathis shows up and things get all crazy and violent.

The upshot of all this is that Joachim makes an amazing discovery. He’s too frightened to have sex with living girls but dead girls aren’t frightening at all.

It’s all very sleazy (as you may have gathered) but it’s sleazy in a slightly tongue-in-cheek off-kilter way that makes it less offensive than it sounds. There’s just a hint of black comedy to the proceedings. It’s subtle but it’s there and it makes things more interesting. The fact that it’s hard to tell just how seriously we’re expected to take the movie that makes it intriguing. I suspect that we’re supposed to approach it in a slightly ironic way. On the surface it seems serious and then again it’s just too outrageous to be taken seriously.

While this is not a sex comedy Joachim is the kind of character who’d be right at home in that type of movie. He’s shy and awkward and decidedly nerdy. I liked Vagelis Voulgaridis’s performance. It’s low-key and I liked the subtle glee he takes in his new-found depravity.

Lakis Komninos as Stathis is also good. Stathis is a very nasty piece of work and yet he’s slightly absurd. He tries very hard to be a tough guy but he’s such an obvious loser that you don’t really believe he could ever be totally successful as the hard man he thinks he is.

Erika Raffael looks gorgeous. She had a brief career in the 70s, mostly in Britain. I know nothing at all about Dorothy Moore, who plays Rosita.

There’s plenty of violence but no gore. There’s quite a bit of nudity and sex although by 1974 western European standards it would be considered to be pretty tame.

The major influence at work here is obviously the giallo and Tango of Perversion does have a giallo look to it. It’s not quite a giallo though. To my mind there’s a slight Theatre of the Absurd feel to this film. At times it reminded me just a tiny bit of Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac.

The transfer is fullframe. Mondo Macabro warn us upfront that the source print was problematical but the transfer is actually very good. Both Greek and English language versions are provided (the former with English subtitles). Extras include a documentary on postwar Greek cinema which is actually pretty good.

Tango of Perversion doesn’t have the punch that the best giallos have but it’s sexy and kinky and twisted and enormously entertaining with some rather nice plot twists. Highly recommended.

Centrespread (1981)

Centrespread is a very odd 1981 ozploitation movie. It’s a movie that consistently fails to go in the direction you’re expecting.

It starts off with a bit of a Mad Max vibe. This is a futuristic society and you’ve got the desert to increase the Mad Max feel. Gerard (Paul Trahair) is a photographer for a girlie magazine. The photos he takes are weird and violent and brutal, but as the movie progresses we find out why. This is a kind of totalitarian society but it’s a society that has taken drastic measures to stamp out violence. Violence is only permitted in the magazines, the reasoning being that violence has to have some outlet and that if violence is allowed in the magazines there won’t be any violence in real life. And that’s how things have worked out. This is a dystopian society in which most people enjoy a very low material standard of living but at least violence has been kept totally under control.

Of course there are elites who live lives of luxury and Gerard is one of those elites. He even owns a car (a cool Ford T-Bird convertible),

Central has decided that the magazines need a new look. They need a new model for the new century. All the models who appear in the magazines look pretty much the same. They need a fresh look. Gerard is given the job of finding a new girl.

He finds her in an antique shop. Which shocks him - he had no idea that antique stores were still legal. The shop is full of forbidden items from the past. Nobody wants to be reminded of such things. Or at least Central doesn’t want them to be reminded of such things. But he is sure that Niki (Kylie Foster) is the right girl.

The problem is that Gerard is changing. He doesn’t want to take the same kinds of photos any more. He doesn’t mind taking nude photos but he wants them to be natural. Even worse, he increasingly has the idea that he’d like them to be romantic. Central is not going to like that idea.

He wants to photograph Niki but he wants to photograph her in an arty romantic style. He begins to be obsessed with her. He may even be falling in love with her.

Given that Mad Max vibe that the film gives off early on you keep waiting for some sudden outburst of violence. But it doesn’t happen. Just as in this future society violence is confined to the magazines so the violence in the movie is entirely confined to the photoshoots (which are interestingly shown as successions of still images). Outside of the photoshoots there’s not a single violent act in the movie.

This is a science fiction film but don’t expect any special effects or explosions, or any high technology. This is a future society that uses 1980s computer technology and the magazines are old-fashioned print magazines. Printed on actual paper, with still photographs. Even in 1981 you’d expect some more imaginative ideas on future technology but perhaps that’s the point - perhaps this is a future society that has survived some sort of cataclysm and now has only the remnants of a technological society. It’s significant that Gerard’s car is not some futuristic air car - it’s a 1960s Ford Thunderbird which is apparently as high-tech as it gets in this future world.

The details of the future society are only filled in gradually and we are only told as much as we need to know. This is a science fiction film that has no interest at all in technology. The focus is on the stifling effect of the tightly controlled future society. It’s a society that offers security, as long as you don’t question anything.

Gerard wants to be able to take the photos that he wants to take, but Central decides what kinds of photos are acceptable. Arty romantic photos are not acceptable.

This is an unconventional dystopian science fiction film, but it’s also a sex film. There is an enormous amount of very graphic nudity. The sex is, oddly enough, very restrained but the nudity is practically non-stop.

Paul Trahair gives an oddly distanced performance which works rather well. Kylie Foster is sweet and charming.

The sets are very effective, especially the photographic studio in the middle of a huge warehouse. Visually this is an impressive film.

Centrespread has been released by Umbrella Entertainment on a region-free Blu-Ray two-movie disc, paired with Felicity as an Ozploitation Erotica set. Which is both appropriate and inappropriate. Felicity is simply an Emmanuelle clone (although it happens to be a very very good Emmanuelle clone). Centrespread has just as much nudity but it’s an entirely different sort of movie, although the one thing it has in common with Felicity is that like Felicity it’s either a love story masquerading as a sex film or a sex film masquerading as a love story. And like Felicity, insofar as Centrespread is a sex film it belongs very much to that fascinating 1970s sub-genre of sex films aimed at couples.

Centrespread looks and sounds terrific on Blu-Ray and there are some worthwhile extras as well, including an excellent 47-minute contemporary featurette on the making of the film and an interview with the producer.

Centrespread is a very offbeat movie, the kind of offbeat movie that just doesn’t get made any more and that’s a shame because it’s offbeat in a very good way. It’s a total original. It’s also an extremely well-crafted move which was, sadly, Tony Patterson’s only feature film as director. Highly recommended for its oddness.

Given that Felicity is a skinflick, but a very classy upmarket skinflick with some real emotional depth, this two-movie Blu-Ray set is also highly recommended.

Vanishing Point (1971)

Vanishing Point is a 1971 road movie, a genre for which I have some fondness. It’s a few other things as well, some good and some bad, as we shall see.

It was a fairly low-budget movie, directed by Richard C. Sarafian, and it gained quite a cult following which to some extent it still retains.

There’s virtually no plot. Kowalski (Barry Newman) is a former cop and former racing driver who now makes his living delivering cars cross-country. Having just finished one gruelling delivery he immediately embarks on another, delivering a souped-up Dodge Challenger from Colorado to San Francisco. He makes a bet with his drug dealer that he can deliver the car in fifteen hours, which is apparently impossible but Kowalski is so full of speed he figures he can do it anyway.

Not surprisingly he infringes a few traffic laws along the way but he’s in a hurry so he outruns the Highway Patrol. Eventually there’s a massive manhunt across four states to catch him, even though he’s been guilty of nothing other than a few traffic violations. You see the Establishment is out to get him because he’s a Rebel. He just wants to be free, man, and the Establishment won’t let him.

He forms some kind of crazy telepathic bond with a hyped-up blind black DJ (played by Cleavon Little) known as Super Soul. Super Soul offers him advice over the airwaves but Kowalski seems to hear the messages whether his radio is turned on or not. Super Soul is not just giving him advice on evading the cops but also acts as a kind of spiritual guru.

Kowalski has a few adventures along the way - a race with an E-Type Jaguar, an encounter with two very fey carjackers, a meeting with a crazy old man in the desert who collects rattlesnakes for a living, a meeting with some Jesus Freaks and a friendly biker who offers advice and drugs. And there’s also a nude girl on a motorcycle.

Kowalski also has flashbacks to pivotal events in his life, such as his girlfriend’s death and the events which got him kicked out of the police force.

Vanishing Point starts off pretty well. The first half of the movie is mostly high-speed car chase stuff and the stunt driving was quite superb by the standards of the day and still holds up pretty well (and has the advantage of being much more realistic and plausible than later car chase movies).

Then we get to the halfway point and it all falls apart. It starts to get into hippie-dippie counter-culture stuff and becomes unbearably pretentious and dull. All the excitement disappears and the pace slows to a crawl. And we get some quasi-mystical nonsense as well as some incredibly heavy-handed political stuff that serves no purpose other than reinforcing the whole “the evil Establishment wants to stifle our free expression” vibe.

Even the nude girl on the motorcycle is unlikely to keep you awake during the movie’s second half.

Barry Newman’s performance is odd but effective. Much of the time Kowalski is just staring into space and we wonder if he can even see the road. Maybe he’s not seeing it with his eyes but with his soul, man. It’s a performance that works within the context of the film. The rest of the acting is ham-fisted and generally embarrassingly obvious.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s screenplay is mostly just incoherent and self-indulgent. I think the movie is trying to say something about different planes of existence and how the material world is just one of those planes.

John Alonzo’s cinematography is at times quite stunning.

Director Richard C. Sarafian handles the action sequences extremely well and that’s the most positive thing I can say about his directing.

This move has been given a luxury two-disc Blu-Ray release which includes both the US theatrical version and the British theatrical release (which is apparently even longer which is a truly horrifying thought since the US version is already way too long). There’s an audio commentary by the director.

If you’re looking for a 1970s road movie that is actually worth seeing, watch Two-Lane Blacktop instead.

Another movie similar in style to Vanishing Point but which does the arty road trip thing much more successfully and is much more worth seeing is Jack Cardiff’s Girl on a Motorcycle (with Marianne Faithfull).

If you liked Easy Rider you’ll probably like this film. For me it was just too pretentious and too pseudo-mystical and too long and too boring and I can’t recommend it.