I read something recently about how many conspiracies can be dismissed out of hand because 1) people inherently have a compulsion to talk, and 2) the more people in on a secret makes it that much more difficult to keep it under wraps. I am reminded of the old adage that two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.
1975’s Race with the Devil takes place in deeply rural Texas, where a great many of the residents are in a Satanic cult. Heck, maybe everybody in the area is in the cabal. And this isn’t the modern type of “Satanist” which seems to be more of a jokey affair meant to get under the skin of conservatives. Instead, these are your dues-paying, “let’s occasionally sacrifice a human being” kind of worshippers.
There’s a weird code that seems to unite devil-worshipping sects across such pictures, and that is they almost exclusively sacrifice either babies or comely young lasses. This is a movie that opts for the latter, which results in some female nudity I never stop being surprised is in PG-rated movies of that era. I also wondered how they often they do these rituals. Regardless of the frequency, I imagine it would be difficult to regularly replenish your supply of attractive, shapely women who are willing to be sacrificed.
A group of four vacationers find themselves pursued by the cult after accidentally witnessing the cult’s most recent sacrificial ritual. The remainder of the film is our heroes trying to get to the authorities in Amarillo. Naturally, they don’t just go directly to their destination, because there wouldn’t be a movie if they did that. Instead, they take a stopover or two along the way, despite this conspiracy seemingly involving a great many people across a large area. See point #2 in my opening paragraph for why this seems unlikely.
Our protagonists are two couples: Peter Fonda and Lara Parker, and Warren Oates and Loretta Swit. They are in a high-end RV out to the middle of nowhere on a vacation. They just want to get away from the noise of the city so they can have some peace and quiet where the boys can race their ungodly loud motorbikes.
Curiously, those motorbikes barely factor into the plot. At the beginning of the film, we see a fair amount of Oates’s bike dealership and we also see Fonda competitively racing. However, in the pursuit that is the majority of the runtime, the RV is all that is used to evade the bad guys.
And I never thought a RV could be such an action vehicle. This one can go faster than many vehicles smaller than it. It can corner far better than I thought was possible in such an unwieldly monstrosity. Heck, it doesn’t roll in some circumstances that flipped what I suspect are more nimble vehicles.
If one can suspend their disbelief sufficiently, the chase scenes are effective and engaging. There were enough explosions in one bit that gives this the feel of an early made-for-TV Fury Road. You even have people leaping onto the RV. Alas, some of those moments are ridiculous, such as the guy who smashes the rear window, only to be pummeled by Fonda wielding what appears to be vacuum cleaner attachment.
Race with the Devil is enjoyable for the right kind of audience, and in the right frame of mind. It has some exciting and well-executed moments of high pursuit. On the other hand, it also has the villains hiding rattlesnakes in various compartments of the RV, because that’s just what Satanists in this caliber of film were always doing at the time.
And these are villains who were daft enough to think nobody would notice their small public library has a curiously large number of books on witchcraft. Then again, our heroes aren’t smart enough to question this when Part and Swit steal a couple of books from there. As a book collector, I suspect our protagonists aren’t being chased because they witnessed a murder. I think the Satanists just wanted their books back.
Dir: Jack Starrett
Starring Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, Lara Parker
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray