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HOT RODS TO HELL 1967
Well, if you’re going to hell, I guess a hot rod is as good a means of transportation as any. 1967 was a banner year at the movies for me. I was just ten-years-old, but in that single year I saw Casino Royale; Valley of the Dolls; Bonnie& Clyde; Wait Until Dark; Far From the Madding Crowd; To Sir, With Love; Up the Down Staircase; Barefoot in the Park; Thoroughly Modern Millie; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?; and The Happening. Barely a kiddie movie in the bunch! Each was a film I was dying to see, and each, save for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, has become a lifelong favorite (Good intentions notwithstanding, that movie really hasn’t aged well for me. 108 minutes of watching human paragon, practically-perfect-in-every-way, Sidney Poitier having his feet put to the fire for the privilege of marrying, as one critic put it, “vapid virgin” Katharine Houghton, begs a tolerance of a sort different from that which was intended).
On the Road Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac...or an unreasonable facsimile thereof
These days, I’d consider it a small miracle if I see even TWO memorable films in the same year, much less the bumper crop of greats 1967 yielded; but thanks to the lax admission policies of movie theaters in those pre-ratings code days I was able, in spite of my tender years, to see practically any film I had a mind to…and usually did. But no matter how mature I imagined myself to be at the time, I was still only a kid, so upon occasion, my budding aesthetics didn't always steer me toward the quality stuff. For example: in spite of my weakness for movies with mature themes that were way over my head, The Graduate, Two for the Road, and Reflections in a Golden Eye – films I now consider to be among the best that 1967 had to offer – held absolutely no interest for me during their
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initial theatrical runs. Instead, my imagination and attentions were seized by two Drive-In caliber B-movies that were being given the big push on TV back then: Born Losers and Hot Rods to Hell.
Get Your Kicks on Route 66
Why, you ask? Well, for starters, the commercials for Born Losers (Tom Laughlin’s biker flick that marked the debut of his Billy Jack character) prominently featured a girl on a motorcycle in a bikini and go-go boots (Elizabeth James) who looked a lot like Liza Minnelli (oddly enough, a crush of mine even at that early age). While Hot Rods to Hell had, in addition to that simply irresistible title, commercials showcasing a screaming teenager (Laurie Mock) who bore a strong resemblance to another one of my preteen, gay-in-training crushes, Cher. Unfortunately, both films came and went from the local moviehouse so quickly that I never got to see them until many years later.
Psycho-Chick
While my interest in Born Losers dissipated as Billy Jack grew into a pretentious vigilante franchise during the 70s (I finally got around to seeing Born Losers on TCM a year or so ago, and while it’s a lot of lurid fun - especially fullfigured gal, Jane Russell, in a small role – once is definitely enough), Hot Rods to Hell, which I was lucky enough to see at a revival theater in Los Angeles sometime in the 80s, was well worth the wait. An example of Grade-A, DriveIn kitsch at its finest, Hot Rods to Hell-arious is a camp hybrid of 1950s drag race exploitation films and those reactionary, youth-gone-wild, juvenile delinquency social problem flicks - all with a suburban midlife-crisis “reclaim your manhood” domestic melodrama thrown in for good measure. It’s a gas!
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Dana Andrews as Tom Phillips
Jeanne Crain as Peg Phillips
Laurie Mock as Tina Phillips
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Mimsy Farmer as Gloria
After suffering a spinal injury in a nasty Christmas season auto accident, Boston traveling salesman, Tom Phillips (Andrews), emerges a broken and shaken man (“It all came back to me. The horns blowing, the lights, the brakes… ‘Jingle Bells’…”). On the mend from his external injuries, Tom nevertheless carries within him an ugly, shameful disease. A pitiable malady bordering on the abhorrent if discovered, even in minuscule traces, within the stoic, bread-winning, man-of-the-house, post-50s suburban macho American male. That disease is insecurity. Yes, folks, Tom’s self-image and the entire foundation of his 60s-mandated, nuclear family teeter on the verge of collapse under the strain of Daddy actually having an emotional reaction to almost losing his life in an auto accident. How dare he! Men just don't DO that! Passages of Hot Rods to Hell's screenplay read like a Ward Cleaver lecture on the perils of middle-class/middle-aged men having their masculinity usurped due to the enfeebling act of having feelings. To make his humiliation complete, not only is wife Peg the one who decides to make the move California, but en route (*gasp*) she does all the driving!
Boss Finley Can't Cut the Mustard Or so wrote Miss Lucy in lipstick on the ladies room mirror at the Royal Palms Hotel in "Sweet Bird of Youth." The topic then was sexual impotence, and Tennessee Williams couldn't address it with any more frankness in 1963 than this 1966 TV-movied (Hot Rods to Hell was originally intended to be as a television release). There's a lot of talk about Tom's bad back, but its pretty clear there's also something going on with his front. Here Dana Andrews uses his semi-stiff, trembling hand as a metaphor for his underperforming man parts. Jeanne Crain's look sums it up.
Under advisement of his physician to take things easier (“What does the doctor think he is, a MENTAL case?” bellows Tom’s compassionate brother), Tom agrees to leave Boston and assume management duties at a thriving motel in the small desert community of Mayville, California. On board with the whole relocation thing are supportive wife, Peg (Crain), and freckle-faced,“all-boy” towhead son, Jamie (Jeffrey Byron). The sole holdout is daughter Tina: an early prototype of the sullen, eye-rolling Goth teen and walking Petrie dish of festering hormonal agitation. "All the kids drag, Dad!" she spews, with typical adolescent bile, in reference to short-distance car racing, not (unfortunately)
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a fad in teen cross-dressing.
Little Jamie's dominant character trait is taking frequent passive-aggressive swipes at his father's masculinity
Loaded into their pre-mandatory-seatbelts station wagon, the Family Phillips motors cross-country to Mayville; the unseen, presumably uneventful, first leg of their roadtrip taking an instant turn for the melodramatic once they hit California. Depicted as a vast landscape of open roads devoted to car culture and thrill-seeking teens, 1960s California takes on the feel of the Old West once the Phillips’ gas-powered covered wagon catches the attention of a trio of exceptionally clean-cut juvenile delinquents (they all come from "good" wealthy families).
The Mild Bunch Gene Kirkwood as Ernie / Paul Bertoya as Duke
What follows is a comically escalating game of cat-and-mouse where what began as high-spirited, run 'em off the road kicks (“Everybody’s out for kicks. What else is there?”), gets rapidly out of hand. Soon the road-hogging hotrodders make it their business to see that Tom Phillips and family never reach their destination (square Mr. Phillips plans to crack down on the "fun" once he takes over that motel), or get the chance to squeal to the police (or “Pohlice” as Dana Andrews peculiarly intones). Passions flare, dust flies, tires screech, rock music blares, and everybody either overacts shamelessly or unconvincingly. Meanwhile, many questions arise: Will Peg ever stop treating Tina like a child? Will good-girl Tina succumb to the skeevy lure of bad boys? Will little Jamie’s respect for his father ever be restored? Does Tom still have the ol’ poop, or has he lost it forever? The answers to these, and several other questions you don't really care about, are answered in Hot Rods to Hell. WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE Hot Rods to Hell is based on a 1956 Saturday Evening Post short story ( The Red Car / Fifty-Two Miles to Terror by Alex Gaby) and every frame feels like it. Adapted from a story written at the height of the mid-50s juvenile
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delinquency panic that spawned Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, Hot Rods to Hell elicits laughs and inspires giggles because it feels so out of step with the times. It really should have been one of those 1950s American International cheapies shot in black & white with Mamie Van Doren. There once was a time when feature films and TV sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver promoted suburban life and middle-class values as the American ideal. But come the 60s and the New Hollywood youthquake, counterculture rebellion was in (The Graduate, You’re a Big Boy Now), and uptight, staunchly judgmental, middle-class suburbanite “squares” like Hot Rods to Hell’s Tom and Peg Phillips, were out. In just a year's time, offbeat movies like Angel, Angel, Down We Go and Wild in the Streets would normalize the onscreen depiction of outlaw teens as the heroes, while members of the over-30 set were always cast as the villains. PERFORMANCES If you've never seen veteran actors Dana Andrews or Jeanne Crain in a film before, I beg you, don't start with this one. Hot Rods to Hell will leave you wondering how they ever had careers in the first place. This is their fourth film together (State Fair - 1945 / Duel in the Jungle -1954/ Madison Avenue 1962), and to say the photogenic duo went out with a whimper would be a gross understatement. Andrews, hampered by a makeup artist trained during the days of the silents, is so unrelentingly stiff and gruff, he's a figure of derision long before his character has a chance to be made sympathetic. Hammily scowling and grimacing in his Sansabelt slacks, this is far from Andrews' finest hour, but he's awfully entertaining.
The hospital Dana Andrews convalesces in (top) previously served as a High School in the "Ring-A-Ding Girl" episode of The Twilight Zone -1963
The Saga of an Emasculated Male Personal faves are B-Movie starlets, Mimsy Farmer and Laurie Mock, each playing yin and yang ends of the exploitation movie female spectrum (they would reunite with co-star Gene Kirkwood in 1967s Riot on Sunset Strip ). As actresses, both are severely limited, but what they lack in talent they more than make up for in their grasp of knowing exactly what kind of overheated histrionics George Ives (giving the only decent performance in the film) as motel proprietor, Lank Dailey a movie like this requires. Farmer in particular gives her discontented small-town teen the kind of edgy Ann-Margret overkill that's the stuff of bad-movie
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legend. But a special Oscar should have been awarded to Jeanne Crain, who not only looks lovely in her matronly Sydney Guilaroff coiffure, but overacts so strenuously she takes the entire film to a level of hilarity unimaginable without her devoted contribution. Let's take a moment to pay tribute: It's A Grand Night For Screaming
Judging You The dramatic stakes of Hot Rods to Hell are seriously undermined by the pleasure to be had in watching this smug suburban family being taken down a notch.
In this artfully composed shot worthy of Kubrick, Tom nurses his bad back while being silently mocked by his wife's handbag
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Tom threatening to scratch out the eyes of his tormentors?
Showing respect and giving props to her homegirl
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THE STUFF OF FANTASY Aside from the creaky source material, what further contributes to Hot Rods to Hell feeling like a movie made at least ten years earlier is the fact that its 55-year-old screenwriter, Robert E. Kent (co-writer of Dana Andrews' vastly superior 1950 film, Where the Sidewalk Ends) was probably drawing his knowledge of teenage behavior from screenplays he wrote for a slew of early 60s / late-50 rock & roll exploitation films. Movies with sound-alike titles (and look-alike plots): Twist Around the Clock (1961), Don't Knock the Twist (1962), Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Don't Knock The Rock (1956). All containing portrayals of teenage life firmly entrenched in the Eisenhower years. Similarly, Hot Rods to Hell' s potential for even a moderately authentic depiction of teen behavior was nodoubt hampered by having a director in his 70s at the helm (John Brahm, surprisingly, the man behind the marvelous 1944 version of The Lodger).
Burlesque star, cult figure (John Waters' Desperate Living) and mobster sweetheart, Liz Renay appears all-too-briefly as a bar patron.
The many decades of behind-the-camera moviemaking experience involved in Hot Rods to Hell lends the film a professional gloss frequently at odds with its small-budget incompetence. The film's poorly-executed day-for-night effects play havoc with the time-frame continuity of the film's third-act action setpiece. What time of day is it actually is it dawn...is it dusk...is it midnight?
Random sexual assaults are pretty much regulation for 60s exploitation movies
THE STUFF OF DREAMS A prime ingredient for the enjoyment of any bad film is often the degree of earnestness displayed by those involved. Like Joan Crawford in the Grade-Z cheapie, Trog, I don’t believe anyone in Hot Rods to Hell had any illusions about the caliber of film they were making, yet that didn't prevent them from pulling out all the acting stops and carrying on as though they were appearing in The Grapes of Wrath. Professional ineptitude without some kind of artistic aspiration or pretension is simply boring, so what qualifies Hot Rods to Hell as one of those top-notch bad movies I
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can watch over and over again is the sense that everyone in it is clearly giving it all they've got...and THIS is the best they were able to come up with.
Mickey Rooney Jr (right) & His Combo contribute several (un)memorable rock tunes to the soundtrack, here they perform that timeless classic, "Do the Chicken Walk"
As stated, Hot Rods to Hell has long been a favorite of mine, but an extra layer of enjoyment has emerged now that I'm almost as old as Dana Andrews when he made the film. It cracks me up when I catch traces of my own reactions to today's youth in the humorless outbursts of our stuffed-shirt hero (don't get me started on teenagers and their smartphones). Happily, my fussing and fuming is mostly an internal harangue or confined to the relative safety of social media. These days, road rage is risky and traffic here in Los Angeles is already far too congested and cutthroat to even think about getting involved in automobile skirmishes.
BONUS MATERIAL A great review of Born Losers can be found HERE Mickey Rooney Jr. guests on the pop music variety show SHINDIG HERE Copyright © Ken Anderson About Ken Anderson LA-based writer and lifelong film enthusiast. You can read more of his essays on films of the ’60s & ‘70s at Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For
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