Originally known as Wilkolakin its native Poland, this film was written and directed by Adrian Panek.
After the end of World War II, a temporary orphanage has been established in an abandoned palace surrounded by forests. There, eight children liberated from the Gross-Rosen camp and Hanka, a former inmate, are attempting to create a new home and remember what it is like to be normal. However, the feral dogs of the SS have been released into the wild and have now come to the orphanage in search of food, which means that the terror of war never goes away.
While not a perfect film, the idea of the dogs being abused into abusing and killing humans being reflected on the children, who must escape a similar cycle of abuse, is a really solid idea that underpins everything in the story. There’s plenty of tension and some harrowing animal on human moments of violence. There are also some terrific performances by the young cast that are worth watching.
Arch Hall, Jr. appears in seven movies — all uniformly pretty rough going, to be honest — but I kind of love the guy. He’s game for whatever comes his way, whether it’s this film about chopping up cars, battling a caveman in Eegah, conquering the music industry in Wild Guitar, being a maniac in The Sadist or taking advantage of the Eurospy (The Nasty Rabbit) or Western (Deadwood ’76) genres, Hall always seems just so happy to be there.
This time around, he’s Jack “Cruiser” Bryan, part of a gang of poor teens who cruise the town and rip up cars and sell the parts for money. He’s joined by Playboy September 1959 Playmate of the Month Marianne Gaba.
The Choppers will only take up sixty-six minutes of your life, which isn’t a big commitment. It was made in 1959 but not released until 1961, because producer — and obviously, the dad of Arch Hall Jr. — Arch Hall Sr. was unable to get a distribution deal that could make him his money back. He was able to release this on a double bill with Eegah.
You also get two Arch Jr. songs! We should all be so lucky!
Who is missing from this list: Robert Blake. And, for additional credibility: he brought along pro-drivers Bobbie and Donnie Allison, Buddy Baker, Richard Petty, and Cale Yarbourgh. Way to go MGM Studios! Ticket sold! Uh-oh. The producer wants his name removed?
The man behind the lens is TV director Leonard J. Horn: name a ’60s or ’70s TV series and chances are Horn directed at least one episode. And outside of a couple of TV Movies (1970’s Lost Flight with Lloyd Bridges is the one I remember), this was Horn’s lone theatrical film — that was regulated to the drive-in circuit. Screenwriter Eugene Price also primarily worked in television, but occasionally ventured into theatricals (I remember him for the 1975 TV “disaster movie” Smash-Up on Interstate 5). The producer behind this — his first foray into film — was Bruce Geller, who you remember as the creator behind Mission: Impossible. In the TV movie realm, he gave us the 1978 “when animals attack” classic, The Savage Bees.
Unlike the biographical The Last American Hero starring Jeff Bridges, this race epic is a faux-epic: a celluloid fugazi, so much so that Geller and MGM butt heads to the point Geller wanted his name removed, which was refused.
Blake is Corky Curtiss, a Texas race-car mechanic and sometimes dirt track racer (how Tom Cruise’s Cole Trickle in Days of Thunder got started) from a small Texas town who shares his dreams with Billy (Christopher Connelly of Atlantis Interceptors) of getting out of the grease pits and into the cockpit of Patrick O’Neal’s (Silent Night, Bloody Night) race team.
Oh, and Corky’s a skosh of a sociopath with a soupçon of a drinking and gambling problem. To win: he runs his competitors off the track. When he wins: he drinks and pisses away the winnings on the green felt, much to the chagrin of his wife (a miscast Shakespearean-proper Charlotte Rampling of Zardoz goin’ “suthern”) and two kids. Corky eventually makes it to the bigs in Atlanta, but his self-destructive ways finally catch up to him.
If you thought Blake’s anti-hero in the biking epic Elektra Glide in Blue was dark, well, Kolwaski from Vanishing Point and “Driver” and “Mechanic” from Two Lane Blacktop have nothing on Corky: this is one of the darkest race flicks, no, the darkest, race flicks we’ve reviewed across our two “Fast & Furious” tribute weeks. Regardless of Geller’s displeasure with the finished product, which MGM wrestled from him, and the fact that it bombed during its brief run, Blake is excellent — as is the rest of the cast — throughout. And a plus: in addition to the NASCAR stars in the film, the cars, including Blake’s Plymouth Barracuda SXB Formula S Fastback, were built by George Barris Customs, the shop behind many of the iconic cars in ’60s and ’70s TV and film.
In addition to Warner’s official upload-reissue clip/trailer, we also found these two behind-the-scenes clips to enjoy, HERE and HERE.
Corky is truly forgotten and lost — as it never made it to UHF-TV syndication or pay-cable replays or VHS. Luckily, I watched it twice in the late ’70s as part of a drive-in double feature. DVDs were once available via the Warners Video Archives in the online marketplace — if you search for them. If there’s ever a film that needs to be made available as a VOD, it’s this entry in the Robert Blake canons.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Also known as Nam Angels, this Jack Starrett-directed film (he also made Run, Angel, Run!, Race with the Devil and Hollywood Man, among others) has a great high concept: a biker gang called The Devil’s Advocates is sent to Cambodia to rescue an American diplomat because they are the only ones who can get the job done.
They’re led by a Vietnam vet — and the brother of the Army Major who has recruited them — Link Thomas, played by the always dependable William Smith. They’re under the orders of Captain Johnson (Bernie Hamilton, who was Captain Harold Dobey on Starsky and Hutch) and include fellow vets Duke (Adam Roarke from Dirty Mary, Crazy Larryand Frogs) and Dirty Denny, as well as Limpy (Paul Koslo, Vanishing Point) and Speed (Eugene Cornelius, who was Space in Run, Angel, Run!).
They head to Vietnam, but come on, we all know it’s the Philippines because the mechanic who works on their bikes, Diem-Nuc, is played by Vic Diaz. It doesn’t matter because by the time you start trying to figure out locations*, our heroes are doing wheelies and blowing things up with rocket launchers and machine guns while they do wheelies.
This movie does have some basis in reality. Sonny Barger, the Maximum Leader of the Hells Angels, sent LBJ a telegram offering the skills of his club in the Vietnam War. That inspired Alan Caillou, who originally wrote that The Losers would live. Starrett and Smith rewrote the script to the ending we know now.
If you watch Pulp Fiction, you can see a scene from this movie being watched by Butch’s girlfriend the day after his fight. When he asks what she is watching, she says, “A motorcycle movie, I’m not sure the name.”
Damn you, Burt Reynolds! Damn you, Mel Gibson! And damn you, Canadian film industry! For we blame each of you for this utterly dumb collision of Smokey and the Bandit and Mad Max*. And does anyone remember 1979’s Americathon with “Mr. President” John Ritter? And we’ll blame Burt twice because, since this is a cross-country race to a “free zone” in California where there are no vehicular rules, we have a touch of Cannonball Run. What the hell: let’s blame David Carradine, too. For if 1976’s Cannonball had a jet plane, we’d have The Last Chase.
Yes. You heard us right. This is a movie about a car vs. a jet plane. For in a petrol-void world, the last chase will not be between a futuristic, Spaghetti Westerneque cop and punk-mohawked warlord: the end shall be waged between a Porsche driven by an ex-bionic man and a fighter jet piloted by an ex-penguin.
Remember Firebird 2015 with Darren McGavin? Well, if you thought that future was FUBAR’d. . . .
Warning: The Logan’s Run-inspired city may not appear in the actual film.
In this futuristic tale set in 2011, Lee Majors (who, no matter how hard he tried, couldn’t transition out of TV into film) stars as “The Bandit” and Mickey from Rocky, yes, Burgess Meredith,” stars as “Sheriff Buford T. Justice.” Only the Pengy is a burnt-out, ex-hot shot Air Force pilot assigned to fire up a mothballed fighter jet and chase down Major’s gas scofflaw.
And I, desperate for entertainment in my youth, went to my town’s little duplex to see this.
Shame on me.
Argh! No freebie uploads. This is a Crown International Pictures production. Isn’t their entire catalog in the public domain? Oh, well. We did find this 3:00 opening credits clip, alternate-extended trailer, and a segment of the first 30-minutes, with Part 2 and Part 3. The Last Chase was originally released on VHS by Vestron Video (now a division of Lions Gate Entertainment), which licensed the film to DVD in May 2011 through Code Red Releasing.
* While we’ve never reviewed Mad Max itself, we certainly reviewed all of its knockoffs with our “Atomic Dust Bin of Apocalyptic Films ” Part 1 and Part 2 round-up featurettes packed with links to all of our reviews.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Editor’s Note: This review previously ran on October 14, 2020, as part of our 2020 Scarecrow Video Psychotronic Challenge month of reviews. We’re re-running the review as part of our “Fast and Furious Week, Part Deux.”
The B&S staff had this on our shortlists for our “Fast and Furious Week I” and our upcoming-December “Fast and Furious Week II” tribute weeks to the well-weathered leather, hot metal, and oily rubber burners of the home video-era. Well . . . we lie. This one was on our long-list actually, as we kept avoiding this used celluloid clunker. Then the Scarecrow gang had to come up with theme day #15 for the 2020 Psychotronic Challenge. So let’s just yank this one off like the icky-sticky, puss-soaked band-aid that it is and get it over and done with. . . .
How did Roger Corman NOT make this?
So you’re Harry Hurwitz, aka Harry Tampa, and your genre-meshing of disco and vampires with Nocturna, Granddaughter of Dracula was a critical and box office failure. So, what do you do for your next picture? You team up with ’50s television producer Jules V. Levy (The Rifleman, The Big Valley), who was one of the (of the many) co-producers on Smokey and the Bandit (as well as John Wayne’s McQ and Brannigan, and Burt Reynolds’s White Lightning and Gator), to mesh the ol’ the Bandit with The Cannonball Run (1981). And, what the hell: while we’re at it, we’ll clip from The Gumball Rally (1976), because, why not? The Cannonball Run clipped ’em.
As you can see: there’s not an original part under this hood.
Okay, so the “script” is locked (we think), but who do you get to star in your road racing rip-off? Well, John Wayne and ol’ Burt aren’t signing up for this non-sense, especially after you unleashed Nocturna on the masses. Well, what the hell, Christopher Lee — who’s always grateful to get out of the horror genre — is game for a villainous role.
But who do you get for the lead: the guy who starred in Death Race 2000 (1975) and Cannonball(1976), of course, because, well, this Harry Tampa gas-guzzler isn’t that far removed from those films.
And who will be our Sally “Frog” Field to get our Bandit into a mess: Stockard Channing, aka Rizzo, from Grease.
Okay, now we need a “Sheriff Burford T. Justice” for this rubber-burning tomfoolery, only he needs to be a bit more regal . . . and he needs to be a “Count,” but who . . . yes, Mr. Lee, of course! He’s Count Lorenzo Borgia, an African horse rancher who’s also a racing fetishist. But wait . . . are they . . . ripping off Star Wars . . . and foreshadowing Lee’s work as Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus? Alright, Harry! You ripped off Paul Hogan and George Lucas films that weren’t even made yet. Way to go, Mr. Tampa! This movie is going to . . . crash and burn.
Because I am Harry Tampa and I just can.
“Hey, R.D! Is that Rick Moranis, who played Dark Helmet in Spaceballs, standing next to Christopher Lee — wearing a “dark helmet” on his head?”
Nope. That’s Hamilton Camp . . . yes, he was in Smokey and the Bandit. And Starcrash. And Evilspeak. . . . Anywhoo, back to the plot.
There really isn’t one. At least one you haven’t already seen before. But the real “plot twist” is that this rips off Crocodile Dundee — which wasn’t even made yet! But since Linda Kozlowski wasn’t up for a Sue Charlton sidequal, well, prequel, we got Rizzo.
J.J Dalton (Channing) is your obligatory, ambitious richy-bitchy photojournalist (where’s Kay Lenz when you need her) for Playboy Magazine (she the type who, when doing an expose on prostitution, ends up arrested for prostitution). And she concocts a new story pitch: she’ll be a navigator for a race car in the 5th African International Road Rally. And she hires movie stunt driver Carradine as her driver. And Carradine’s ex-boss? The good ol’ Count. Yep, another “Frog” screws over another good ol’ boy.
What’s amazing about this auto-salvaged mess is that it isn’t just some low-budget schlock studio production. No. This isn’t a Roger Corman Eat My Dust-cum-Grand Theft Auto-cum-Smokey Bites the Dust stock footage recycler: MGM/United Artists — obviously hoping for some Smokey stank on the ol’ celluloid — ended up with a knock off Disney’s The Love Bug. But not all is lost: Christopher Lee is wonderfully deadpan and is adept at comedy. Who knew?! And Stockard Channing is quite the champ dealing with all of the baboons. And ol’ David is Dave: he never disappoints. But he was probably pissed he starred into two “3000 movies” — and they both sucked tailpipe (Deathsport, aka Death Race 3000). But hey, at least he didn’t star in America 3000 . . . but David A. Prior sucked Dave into Future Force (1989) and Future Zone (1990), so, Dave still got slammed in the ol’ celluloid hoosegow.
The VHS tapes on this, released between 1984 to 1987, are bountiful in the online marketplace, while DVDs were issued in 2011 by both MGM and 20th Century Fox Home Video. You can watch a pretty clean rip on You Tube and you can stream it Amazon Prime. Our advice: watch the You Tube one for free, as the Amazon print is of a pretty low quality.
We express our gratitude to the individual who, in an updating of this film’s Wikipedia entry, referenced and pull-quoted our review.
Burt Reynolds created a cottage industry with Smokey and the Bandit . . . and with the “Big Three” television networks still in the movie business, they wanted a slice (or is that a wad of tobacco spit?) of that good ol’ boy pie.
So we get the always-welcomed Greg Henry (The Patriot), Robert Culp (of the Fast and Furious precursor — and also awesome TV movie — The Gladitor), Grant Goodeve (who replaced Mark Hamill in TV’s Eight is Enough when Hamill got Star Wars), Robin Mattson (TV movie Return to Macon County and the long-running daytime drama General Hospital), and Pernell Roberts (TV’s Bonanza and Trapper John, M.D.).
For once, the theatrical one-sheet, well, the “splashy” TV Guide ad says it all. For he came to town on a horse (hot rod) with no name — and you ain’t gonna win against “The Bandit,” there Sheriff Buford T.
And it’s all brought to you by the Roger Corman-raised George Armitage (ah, no wonder this is so goooood), who gave us Gas-s-s-s, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses, and Darktown Strutters . . . and the we-still-haven’t reviewed Kris Kristofferson and Jan-Michael Vincent epic, Vigilante Force. Oh, and as part of our upcoming “John Doe Week” (no, not flicks about unidentified dead bodies, wise ass — it’s a tribute to the acting career of the leader of the Los Angeles punk band, X), we review Pure County, a film which he co-wrote.
Oh, man . . . forget Farrah. It was Robin Mattson torn out of a magazine and scotch-taped to my teen bedroom wall, alongside those Roger De Coster and Don “The Snake” Prudhomme mag spreads. And don’t forget the Runaways ripped out of a CREEM mag. Good times. Sigh, Robin . . . competing with Sandy West for my heart.
Based on Tony Award nominee and multi-platinum recording artist Sam Harris’s critically acclaimed book, Ham: Slices of a Life, this is an original stage production in which Harris himself plays twelve different characters and shares the stage with only his accompanist Todd Schroeder.
The stage version was developed and directed by Tony and Emmy-Award winning actor — and Pittsburgh native — Billy Porter, who said “When Sam asked me to help him develop his critically acclaimed memoir Ham: Slices of a Life into a musical theater piece, I jumped at the chance to work with my friend of 25 years. Sam is a tsunami of talent and the work we did in New York resulted in a production that showcased all of Sam’s extraordinary talents — as a writer, songwriter, actor, and of course, that voice! It got phenomenal reviews and went on to play Los Angeles in an award-winning production directed by Ken Sawyer. The film reveals Sam Harris as one of the great showmen of our time, who can have you in hysterics one moment and break your heart the next. Ham is more than Sam’s personal story — its message is universal. It is hilarious, it is raw, it is inspirational and above all, it is human.”
Sure, I watched Star Search when I was a kid, but I had no idea of the real story behind one of its most famous stars, Sam Harris. This film follows him from his childhood in Oklahoma’s Bible Belt, searching for belonging in Jewish and black communities before discovering who he really is. He becomes famous, but even that doesn’t feel like enough. He has a hole inside him that nothing — not even show business — can fill. So what happens next?
I came away loving Harris and really enjoying his story. I imagine that you will do the exact same.
Ham is currently playing — through December 17 –virtually at the Laemmle Theater. It will then be playing digital on demand starting January 7.
An American-International Pictures release along with Daddy-O, Roadracers is all about Rob Wilson (Joel Lawrence, who mostly worked in TV), who has a racing accident that causes his father to disown him to the point that his rich pop sponsors a rival racer, which doesn’t seem like good parenting at all to me.
Liz Renay was originally going to be in this movie, which would have been more exciting than what ended up on the film, which is more about depression and alcoholism. Then again, the title Roadracers is way more exciting than Drunken Depressed Rich Kid, right?
The tagline for this was “Actually filmed at the American Grand Prix.” So yes, it was filmed on a track, in case you were wondering.
Skip Ward, who would one day be in the Andy Sidaris movies Do or Die, Hard Huntedand Fit to Kill, shows up. So does Sally Fraser from War of the Colossal Beast and It Conquered the World.
This was remade by Robert Rodriguez as part of the Showtime Rebel Highway series, but it was an entirely new story made with the title and under the Roger Corman banner. David Arquette, Salma Hayek and William Sadler are in that one, which was originally to be directed by Wes Craven.
Well, at least the theatrical one-sheet doesn’t suck . . .
Ron, who is struggling to find a stable job after being fired from his mechanics gig, cannot afford to buy the Porsche 911 of his wild dreams.
Then his dream cars appears . . . and it’s owned by Annie, an old high school girlfriend. They make a date to catch up, but Ron learned that Annie is using him to make her boyfriend jealous. So he steals her Porsche and takes the cross-country (Australia) trip of his dreams.
But those dreams didn’t include meeting his “Frog” (yes, Smokey and the Banditis afoot, here) in the form of a single mom, Sally (see, what I mean?), stranded at a roadside station; he falls for her sob story (natch) that she needs to get to Sedan, South Australia, to get her son out of foster care. Kidnapping assumptions, mistaken attempted murder, cars chases and crashes, ensues — while Michael Hutchence of INXS offers music backing with “Speed Kills” to the soundtrack (which was the sole reason I rented the film; I held a portable cassette recorder to the TV speaker to record the song).
Worst VHS photoshopping job of all time. Way to encourage a rental, Mr. Distributor.
Poised for a career as a Down Under-version of Tom Cruise, actually, in an Australian perspective, the next Mel Gibson (there was talk of another Mad Max film with him — Freedom intended to elevate Jon Blake’s career beyond television. Sadly, the film was a critical and commercial bomb in its homeland and failed in its limited, and brief, U.S theatrical run.
Critics cited the film’s failure was its ambition to be “like Terrance Malick’s Badlands” (1973; a similar “lovers on the run” film starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, along with Warren Oates), but concentrated too much on car chases and crashes and not enough character development; thus the film became a Smokey and the Bandit-clone — without the class of the first nor the charm of the latter. (And I have to add: Corey Haim and Corey Feldman in 1987’s License to Drive . . . and going all the way back to 1977’s Grand Theft Auto with Ron Howard.)
Blake’s career was ironically cut short by a tragic car accident on the last day of filming the biggest film of his career, the 1987 WW I war drama, The Lighthorsemen. The feature film directing debut for Scott Hicks, he fared much better with the Academy Award-nominated and winning Shine (1996) and Snow Falling on Cedars (1999).
Good luck finding this one on U.S. shores: freebie-digital streams are nil. The rare ’80s VHS tapes are out there in the overseas markets from Rigby Entertainment and VidAmerica in the States — if you want to venture across the online marketplace. But for DVDs, at least in the U.S., you’re out of luck. Australians can get their copies via an Umbrella Entertainment 2000-issued DVD. You can purchase those DVDs (know your regions) or watch it as a VOD at Umbrella Entertainment’s website — and You Tube has the trailer.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.