Dear friends. This year has been difficult. Cough-cough. The movie won’t be the best either. At least, according to film critics, who gave him only 28 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience delivered almost twice as much – as much as 52 percent, and the audience’s opinion is closer to me. Personally, I think The Car from 1977 is somewhat better than, say, the movie I wrote an article about on last year’s Day of the Dead – Sometimes They Come Back. In other words, from my point of view, the film is quite good.
The Car looks like a bi-movie made for pennies. The action takes place somewhere in the desert, the scenery is minimal… It seems like there was money after all: they spent 84 thousand dollars on the antagonist of the film alone, and the main character is played by James Brolin, a very big actor who was at the peak of his career in the second half of the 70s. Plus we have Robert Golden Armstrong and Ronnie Cox here, who also seemed to be famous guys at the end of that decade… But, anyway, the budget was clearly not enough to create full-fledged Hollywood-level products. Therefore, we have extremely cheap special effects here, including everyone’s favorite accelerated playback, and most of the actors are diligently replaying.
I do not know the director of the film. According to his Wikipedia page, he shot mostly TV shows, having produced only a few full-length films throughout his career. Nevertheless, the film was shot well: on the one hand, in general, there seems to be nothing outstanding here, but on the other, several scenes have sunk into my memory reliably. To be more precise – two scenes. For comparison, in the movie Sometimes They Come Back there was only one such scene, and this is exactly two times less.
There doesn’t seem to be a real plot in The Car: an evil custom black Lincoln Continental just appears out of nowhere and starts wetting the residents of a small town. Well, the law enforcement officers – as befits the right law enforcement officers – are trying to stop this lawlessness. Such minimalism seems to be a minus, but on the other hand… Carpenter’s Christine turned out to be a rather ambiguous character: each of her murders can be justified, especially if you take into account deleted scenes. The antagonist of this film, however, turns out to be a true evil, which Christine is far from: The Car brand Lincoln does not need reasons, it just kills people. And I want to say that both approaches are good in their own way, and to draw from this statement the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with the simplicity of the plot of The Car movie.
The sound of the film does not seem to be anything outstanding, except, perhaps, the horn of the killer car. The Car’s special horn – a certain Hadley Ambassador Rectangular Bell Horn – at first seems unremarkable and inconspicuous, but after a few tens of minutes it eats into the ear and begins to cause certain associations. Especially memorable is the unusual, if I may say so, melody that Lincoln signals after each murder. As it turned out, this is nothing more than the Latin letter X in Morse code – a long beep, two short ones, a long one again. It’s a small thing, but for some reason I remember this moment when watching, and today I found out that it was not just like that, but the idea of the director.
In general, despite all the shoals, The Car looks quite simple and fascinating. Editing errors do not bother, bad actors do not infuriate. At the same time, the good aspects of the film are pleasant to watch, which leaves only positive feelings after watching. This film is not considered a cult classic for nothing, it’s not for nothing that motorist fans build copies of the killer car from this film, and it’s not for nothing that in 2015 – almost forty years after the release – this movie was re-released on Blu-ray as 1080p. Moreover, in 2019, even a kind of sequel was released! In other words, the 1977 film is remembered and loved after four and a half decades – not every picture achieves such success.
It remains to tell only about The Car itself – of course, I could not write an article about such a film without devoting a couple of paragraphs to the car around which everything that happens on the screen revolves. The embodiment of evil in this movie is a 1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III. Customization was done by none other than the patron of the entire Hollywood automotive industry, George Barris. Comrade Barris, as everyone knows, is an ambiguous figure. Some consider his creations tasteless and blasphemy, and some – bold experiments and masterpieces. The Car from this movie is no exception: it is easy to find both those people who want to see this car, and those who build copies in the image and likeness of what they saw.
Personally, I consider The Car to be one of the most modest and sophisticated creations of George Barris. There is no gold, there are no crazy colors on board and there are practically no radical solutions. There is only pure work with the body lines, and although Barris definitely has projects that seem extremely unsuccessful to me, at the same time I can’t understand people who don’t like The Car. Among the works of Comrade Barris, it is difficult to find something less radical than this Lincoln.
In general, The Car – or, to be more precise, The Cars, since three full-fledged cars and one empty body were built for filming – were assembled in about ten months. Seven and a half centimeters of the roof were cut off from the standard Continental Mark III, after which Comrade Barris completely redesigned The Car’s body features in order to give it a more sinister look. All cars were built of steel – no fiberglass was used. The end result was 6 meters long, 2.8 meters wide and almost 2.5 tons in weight.It is known that in one of The Car’s stunt cars there was a 7.5-liter Ford engine – exactly the same, but wasted to eight liters, is in one of the fan copies. It is not known what else is under the hood of that copy, but the power unit carries two and a half tons of steel over a quarter mile in just 13.16 seconds.
That seems to be all, there is nothing more to tell. Should I watch this movie or not? Honestly, I don’t know. Of course, there is no horror here. Well, to be honest, if we talk strictly about the genre, then it’s generally difficult for me to say what exactly is in this movie. As I have already said, I personally still have certain positive emotions after watching it, despite the genre uncertainty of the film. However, I am the type of person who could well enjoy The Car appearing on the screen of a custom car, and therefore I don’t have the courage to recommend this movie to anyone other than fans of the American car industry. In any case, it is worth saying that out of The Car built, only two were destroyed. The latter was auctioned off in 1983, after which its trace is lost. And this means that The Car is still alive and waiting in the wings. Enjoy your Halloween!
