The Car (1977)

From https://i.jeded.com/i/the-car.24421.jpg

Director: Elliot Silverstein

Screenplay: Michael Butler, Dennis Shryack and Lane Slate

Cast: James Brolin as Captain Wade Parent; Kathleen Lloyd as Lauren Humphries; John Marley as Sheriff Everett Peck; Elizabeth Thompson as Margie; Ronny Cox as Deputy Lucas "Luke" Johnson; R. G. Armstrong as Amos Clemens; John Rubinstein as John Morris

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #129

I knew of The Car tangentially as an adolescent, because Futurama explicitly referenced this curiosity of seventies American horror when anti-hero robot Bender was turned into a "werecar" in an early episode, the creators blatantly mimicking the visual look of the Lincoln Continental Mark III of the film in the werecar design. Contrary to the potential silliness of the material, and that it feels like Jaws (1975) on a country highway, the only dated kitsch aspect on display is the hints to the titular vehicle being Satanic in origin. Inexplicably Anton LaVey, founder of The Church of Satan, was a technical consultant. Barring the fact the Church of Satan is actually a sceptical atheist belief system based on the notion of free will, this alongside the other horror films LaVey was involved with (like The Devil's Rain (1975)) must've been the easiest pay checks the man had, deserving all of them for how square the film productions were in their view of Satan, and how all LaVey contributes here is an opening text more appropriate for a 70s occult rock album.

Aside from that curious touch, The Car was a memorable genre film from the period for me, part of a great period where, even as a significantly bigger production, it was almost all shot in various places in Utah and has, like the lower budget regional productions, the idiosyncratic personality as a result of its environment. The one thing lost of these older films and greatly missed is the real locations. It's patronising to the likes of Toronto, Canada and the entirely of Bulgaria, for more recent examples, that they are chosen for film productions to shot there but not for their own vibrant landmarks and cultures, but to wear a sheet over their heads pretending to be the expensive US locations, as if the genre productions of now were jilted lovers of these types of on-location shootings that are out of most's price ranges. With The Car it's never explicit but the Utah environments add a verisimilitude. The prominent Native American cast in side roles, in the police force with Captain Wade Parent (James Brolin) dealing with a mysterious car running people over, and as members of the small town, never explicitly pointed out but matter-of-factly making up a diverse cast of personalities, including another office hiding the fact his alcoholism hasn't been cured and an abusive husband hated by the station, which appear in the cast. As the car can just seemingly appear and disappear on will, the country roads and sprawling mountainous regions surrounding the isolated, small town location add immense scale as the first scene follows a young teenage couple on bicycles, a pair suddenly met with a car trying to ram them off the road, adding a sense of dread that the absurdity of the premise on paper doesn't have onscreen.

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Whilst automobiles are just as obsessed over in Australian cinema, and cars have played cultural significance in other nations' cinema, the motorway and long, sprawling country roads are as American as apple pie. They're the hot bed for countless nightmares in American horror from ending up in an isolated region full of maniacs, or picking up a hitchhiker who's insane and tries to set a fire in the van after you've refused to buy a Polaroid from them. The Satanic angle is absurd as it's so much more insidious to imagine that, like for most of the film, the car is merely alive for "no reason", likely the inspiration for French director-musician Quentin Dupieux's Rubber (2010) when he decided to have a car tyre in desert Americana come to life with telekinesis for no explainable reason. It's scarier, and for a film in the UK appropriate for twelve year olds to see, it doesn't hide that fact people are dying due to hit and runs by the monstrous car, just never showing actual collisions.

From http://bmoviefilmvault.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/the-car-01.jpg

Having  cast taking it seriously helps, particularly James Brolin as a lead you care about, a loving single father of two daughters who is as confused and mortified by these auto-related deaths as everyone else is, to the point that (in the one supernatural aspect which does work) he constantly even to the end denies anything beyond the metal and petrol of the vehicle is there. It explains how his son Josh Brolin is as cinematically charismatic as he is seeing his father here, able to have switched them around and both starred in seventies American cinema, his father James managing to make a film about a homicidal car more credible than it should be. The strength of the cast, having walked off a serious drama, helps particularly as the antagonist is a figure with one unmoving face, able to get away with breaking physics that even its real life creator George Barris (who devised the 1966 Bat Mobile for the sixties series) couldn't provide the hydraulics to pull off. Even when you get to aspects like the car being unable to go into consecrated ground, herding a group of kids into a cemetery, having a cast that emotionally sympathetic is able to make the threat credible and far from silly. Considering that I went into The Car as this weird move from the era whose only frame of reference before was a Futurama parody, what I got went beyond expectations. 

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