A dark car is running over pedestrians in an isolated rural community.
It falls to local cop Wade (James Brolin) and his department to chase this speed demon down and find out who is behind the wheel...
Released in 1977, The Car takes the basic template of Jaws, swaps out the water for the open road and the killer fish for a killer car.
I watched this movie after John Carpenter's Christine, another killer car flick, and it might have been a better idea to watch it beforehand.
The Car is not a good movie. The dramatic storyline is just a group of vaguely defined characters reacting to the car amid their own boring lives. The acting is fine but the movie drags every time the titular car is offscreen.
Ala Jaws, the movie crisscrosses between car attacks with the police investigation and sequences of Wade’s relationship with his daughters and a local school teacher. Unlike Jaws, these scenes do not deepen our understanding of the characters, and feel like cheap ways to make us care about people who will die in the next scene. There is a subplot involving a local man (RG Armstrong) who abuses his wife which ends with said guy becoming the Quint of the movie, using his suspiciously large supply of dynamite to help Wade defeat the Car. It is bizarre.
Mixing the Jaws plot (small town terrorized by a monster) with a car almost makes the film feel like a dare. It almost reads as parody as our heroes try to dodge a vehicle that growls and lunges like an animal.
And while the Car is a great antagonist, certain scenes come off as cartoonish rather than scary - the Car’s somersault(!) into the path of charging police vehicles is awesome, but not in the way the filmmakers intended.
Leonard Rosenman provides an atmospheric score, and Gerald Hirschfeld’s daylight photography - with its dutch angles and exaggerated use of perspective - adds to the movie’s uncanny vibe.
It is pretty cheesy, but on its own terms, The Car is pretty entertaining.
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