Crash! 1977
Movie - Review & Info

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Film Review:

Ah, the 80s - great times, I remember you could hardly go a week without turning up in your local VHS rental parlour to see yet another enticing looking film cover with the name Charles Band or Empire Studios proudly emblazoned on the front. Cheap actioneers, cheesy sci-fi's, low rent fantasy and cute creature features. The man deserves a medal.

This early directorial number by the man himself passed me by at the time, and was in fact a recent eBay purchase (upon seeing the proud Charles Band moniker in the listing. This one's a real mixed bag - part possession horror, part Christine and part Smokey And The Bandit (seriously). A lot of the film consists of ponderous slow motion car wrecks whilst the other sees the human side of the story played out and on a collision course with the mysterious car of the slo-mo bits.

Basically, wheelchair bound man (José Ferrer) tries to kill sexy young wife (Sue Lyon) as he's jealous of her, she survives a car crash with only a weird little fetish to hang on too as her memory is lost. All the time a mysterious car is plowing across the land causing chaos, death and destruction to any motorists in is way.

There must be some connection as every now and then the memoryless woman's eyes glow red and inanimate objects at her scheming husband's house start to try and attack and kill him in revenge. He thwarts them and gets his wife back where things happen and he tries to kill here again until... The big finale.

Throw in a clueless Doctor (John Ericson) who slowly unravels the plot to kill his favourite patient, a(nother) brief cameo by genre hero John Carradine and several moments of unintentional hilarity and you have a fun little film. At times it plays more like a made for TV movie than a big buck feature, but it does have an undeniable charm, not to mention more car crashes than a year's worth of the Dukes of Hazzard. Charles Band, this writer solutes you!

AKA
Death Ride
Akaza, the God of Vengeance

Video Capture Comments:

One of my earliest captures, which means the resolution is too high, there's lots of noise and its quite a blocky encode - but, as my VHS tape is so old I would sooner watch the not too hot digital video rather than loose this little gem to the ravages of time. No sign of a DVD release in the near future. One or two dark moments as well - but as a fledgling effort, its passable.

	Rating Out Of 5:
Video Quality:		2
Cheese:		4
Film:		3
Specificatons: Duration: 01:25:20 (127,994 fr) Video Codec: DivX 5.0 Resolution: 640x480 (1.33:1) [=4:3] Bitrate: 925 kb/s FPS: 25.000