Before Paul Walker and Vin Diesel’s exploits in The Fast and the Furious, there was Harry Hamlin and Joseph Bottoms in this film that first chronicled the real life street racing communities of Los Angeles. However, in this tale, they don’t pull a “Point Break” and use their street racing exploits to front a crime wave: they’re just a group of competitive friends who race their high-powered cars up and down a dangerous and deadly mountain road known as Mulholland Drive — to become the “King of the Hill.”

Here, we get all of the actors we care about: Joseph Bottoms, Deborah Van Valkenburgh (The Warriors), Seymour Cassel (Trees Lounge), William Forsythe (Smokey Bites the Dust). Yeah, this rocks. Oh, yeah. And some guy name Dennis Hopper (The Last Movie) shows up.

So, did Neal H. Moritz, Rob Cohen, Paul Walker and Gary Scottt Thompson pinch this forgotten VHS-to-HBO obscurity? Well — did they — as Sam pointed out, pinch (even more so) 1987’s No Man’s Land starring D.B. Sweeney and Charlie Sheen thirteen years before (also reviewed this week, search for it)? Nah, it is surely coincidental: their film was a film where Days of Thunder collided Donnie Brasco — and those were released waaaay after King of the Mountain and No Man’s Land.

Leigh Chapman based the screenplay on “Thunder Road” written by David Barry for Los Angeles’ New West Magazine. The characters of Hamlin’s Porsche-obsessed driver and Dennis Hopper’s Corvette aficionado were based on the article’s real-life subjects of Chris Banning and Charles “Crazy Charlie” Woit. Director Noel Nosseck made his debut with the Richard Hatch-starring, Crown International Pictures’ vansploitationer, 1975’s Best Friends, as well as the 1981 TV Movie biker flick, Return of the Rebels, which starred Barbara Eden, Don Murray, and Christopher Connelly (Atlantis Interceptors).

You can watch this on You Tube . . . and wet your whistle with this clip of the final race.

While this played in theaters — where I saw it — it made its way to HBO — where I saw it again — then eventually to VHS in the ’80s. The film found its way into the grey market via VHS-to-DVD rips sold on eBay. However, in 2016, the film was officially released in the U.S. for Digital HD and Video On Demand services through iTunes and Amazon Prime.

Update: As we went to press, we discovered Kino Lorber acquired the rights to King of the Mountain with plans to re-release it to Blu-ray on November 24, 2020. The brand new 2K Master also features interviews with star Harry Hamlin and director Noel Nosseck. You can learn more about Kino Lorber’s complete roster of films at their official website and Facebook, and watch the related film trailers on You Tube.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

Prohibition bootlegging of the 1930s gave birth to NASCAR: that’s a fact. And one of those bootleggers — and the sport’s biggest success stories — was Junior Jackson, who got his start behind the wheel hauling illegal liquor through the North Carolina foothills.

The script by Williams Roberts (The Magnificent Seven, The Devil’s Brigade, one of Charles Bronson’s better post-Death Wish movies, 10 to Midnight) was based on Tom Wolfe’s (Bonfire of the Vanities) award-winning article, “The Last American Hero,” published in a 1965 issue of Esquire (which is how William Harrison’s “Roller Ball Murder,” aka Rollerball, got its start). It’s all directed by Lamont Johnson, who gave us the war drama (The McKenzie Break, the military-paranoia drama The Groundstar Conspiracy, and, wait for it . . . one of the better Star Wars clones: Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone).

Jeff Bridges (on his way to an Academy Award “Best Supporting Actor” nod for next year’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot with Clint Eastwood) stars as Junior Jackson, a moonshiner and amateur stock-car driver that stays one step ahead of the law — until he experiences an epiphany when his father is sent to prison for moonshining.

His new commitment to racing faces obstacles from Ned Beatty as a cheapskate promoter and Ed Lauter as a race-team owner who refuses to let Junior field his own pit crew led by his brother, played by Gary Busey. Romantic entanglements come in the form of Valarie Perrine who plays her affections against Junior and his main competitor on the track, played by William Smith (who jumps behind the wheel again in David Cronenberg’s Fast Company). In case you haven’t noticed: that’s all of the actors we care about at B&S About Movies.

This movie has it all: a great cast backed by a great script courtesy of Tom Wolfe and Williams Roberts, along with solid direction by Lamont Johnson. And . . . while the film didn’t exactly light up the box office for 20th Century Fox, it helped catapult Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name,” which served as the film’s theme song, up the charts (a process that was repeated when it was used in that same capacity in the Mark Walhberg’s 2006 football drama, Invincible).

Not everyone remembers this early entry in Jeff Bridges’s career, but it slides into the DVD racks nicely, right alongside fellow A-List race epics Red Line 7000 with James Caan, Grand Prix with James Garner, Le Mans with Steve McQueen, and Winning with Paul Newman. For me, it’s as good, even better, than Days of Thunder with Tom Cruise (no offense, Tom; it’s due to drive-in nostalgia with pops).

You can learn more about Junior Johnson with this eulogy published upon his December 2019 death at NASCAR.com. You can read a digitized version of Tom Wolfe’s article as part of the University of Virginia’s archives.

Rarely airing on ’70s UHF-TV and ’80s pay-cable, and poorly distributed as a hard-to-find Fox Home Video VHS, The Last American Hero finally made it into the digital marketplace as high-quality DVD in 2006 and is readily streamable on all the usual platforms — but we found a copy on You Tube. Watch the trailer, HERE.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

The A-List Major Studio Car-Racing Check List:

• Red Line 7000 with James Caan
• Grand Prix with James Garner
• Winning with Paul Newman
• Le Mans with Steve McQueen
• The Last American Hero with Jeff Bridges (reviewed this week)
• Cannonball with David Carradine

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.

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. . . .

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. . . .

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.

“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 5^th 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 20^th 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.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

Will you look at that one-sheet. That’s not too blatant of a Smokey and the Bandit rip off, is it? Or is it Smokey and the Judge. Or Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws? Or Smokey Bites the Dust?

To be honest, this movie is really dumb. Fun. But dumb, in a Lee Majors The Last Chase kinda-way (yep, we reviewed that ditty this week; search for it). Take one part Mad Rockatansky and one part Burt Reynolds. Strip away the story and characters — and just focus on the cars. Vroom-vroom: yer git yerselves a movie, Hoss.

So, “The Bandit,” aka Cliff Roberston (yep, Grand-pa Ben Parker from the Spider-Man franchise), is Judd Pierson, a down-and-out stock racer slummin’ on the carnival circuit-for-a-buck as a daredevil driver with his sidekick, The Snowman, aka Casey Lee (yep, ex-teen idol Leif Garrett of Thunder Alley, who’s actually very good here) at his side.

Then they meet their “Frog” in the form of Dr. Christine Ruben: she decides to double-cross the New Zealand government and smuggle a lethal bio-agent out of a military-backed research facility — and she needs The Bandit and The Snowman. And when you’re hard up for cash, and a hot doctor bats her eyelash-sob story, you take the hook. Sucker. Then nice, loooong car chases — and the ensuing crashes — takes us eastbound and down.

Unfortunately, there’s no freebie uploads on any streaming platforms. We found this extended sequence of the car crashes, as well as these extended 8:00 and 20:00-minute You Tube clips that break the film down into what we came for: the car chases. And since this was a New Zealand-shot film, that country’s NZ On Screen website offers up an 10:00 excerpt from the film. If you like what you see, you can stream over on Amazon Prime.

Shaker Run is easily had on Mill Creek’s Excellent Eighties 50-Film Pack (Amazon purchase link), which we’ve reviewed in full.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.