Director: Charles Band
Cast: Jose Ferrer, Sue Lyon, John Ericson

I assume that if you are a regular reader of the reviews I write for The Unknown Movies that you enjoy and appreciate movies from all sorts of different genres. And since you are reading this particular review, I think I can safely assume that you have an interest in the horror genre. Now that I know you pretty well, at least when it comes to your taste in movies, I want to ask you a question: What makes you feel uneasy, or makes you downright scared? Well, since I know a bit about you, dear reader, I think it's only fair that I should now tell you some stuff that puts a shiver down my spine. One thing that has always made me feel uneasy is being in a place that is very high off the ground. However, for some reason I can't think offhand of any horror movies that have exploited that particular fear that I have. (Well, I guess that the idea of Jason Voorhees slaughtering one by one a bunch of youthful tightrope walkers simply would not work.) So moving on, I will reveal another fear that I have that I know has been used many times in horror movies. That fear is seeing someone's mind get taken over by some sort of malevolent force. I've never personally encountered this, thank goodness, but I know that if it were to happen in front of me, I would be seriously freaked out. If it happened to a loved one of mine, in a way it would almost be like a death in the family for me. My mind would be racing a mile a minute, wondering if the spirit of that loved one was wiped out or in some kind of hell. But I would also be concerned about the malevolent force itself - what would it be up to? Would it next have me on its list of evil things to do?

No doubt about it - the idea of possession can make for a great and effective horror movie in my book. But I feel that I should point out that the kind of possession I am thinking about that makes for a good horror movie is the possession of people. When it comes to inanimate objects being possessed, well, I think it's a lot harder for a horror movie to be scary. Oh, it can be done - for example, there is the famous segment in the classic made for television horror movie Trilogy Of Terror about the Zuni fetish doll coming to life and terrorizing actress Karen Black. But that's more the exception than the rule. Let me give you an example as to why this is so. Imagine a bar of soap, for example. Then imagine that it's possessed by a malevolent spirit. From that point on, the idea becomes quite silly. Thinking about a bar of soap sliding around from room to room and pouncing on humans and killing them is a ridiculous idea. You have to then sell the idea as a horror comedy rather than a straight horror movie. Indeed, when an EC horror comic book decades ago tackled the idea of someone who was murdered and turned into bars of soap, but managing all the same to get revenge against the person that killed him, the treatment of the story was done in a definite tongue-in-cheek style. This kind of thing also seems to apply when given the movie treatment. You might remember from several years ago the movie Rubber, which was about an old and abandoned car tire suddenly picking itself up and rolled around from place to place with murder on its mind.

I guess that practically any object made out to be possessed by some deadly force could come across as terrifying, at least if it's portrayed in the right way. Though with some objects, it is a lot easier to make them creepy. While it's hard to think of a tire possibly being scary, if you take it up a few notches and imagine an entire motor vehicle, you have a lot of potential. Motor vehicles can move fast, can inflict serious damage to people, and if you look at them directly at the front, you can almost see a face. So it's not a surprise that a few filmmakers have over the years chosen motor vehicles to be possessed, with movies like Killdozer, The Car, and Christine. The problem I've had with those aforementioned movies is that they are pretty well known, so I couldn't review them for this web site. That all changed when I got a copy of Crash! as a gift. Until its release on DVD a few years ago, it was all but impossible to see since it was in theaters and on the drive-in circuit, and even now it's quite obscure despite being a production from the legendary B movie producer/director Charles Band (The Dungeonmaster). Anyway, the plot: At the start of the movie, we are introduced to a May-December married couple with the name of Denne, first names Kim (Sue Lyon, Evel Knievel) and Marc (Jose Ferrer, Bloody Birthday). The wheelchair-bound Marc resents his wife, and with a trained Doberman enacts a plan to kill Kim. The Doberman attacks Kim while she is driving her car, and she gets into an accident. She is badly injured, but manages to crawl away and get the help of a passing motorist, who takes her to the nearest hospital. At the hospital, Kim is comatose and cannot be identified, but when Marc finds out that Kim is still alive, he plans to permanently silence her before she wakes up. But what Marc, as well as the hospital staff and local police, don't know is that Kim had bought a strange artefact earlier on the day she had her accident. It's still in her possession, and it may be somehow connected to the fact that Kim's car is now driving around the area driverless, causing many car accidents. Local anthropologist Dr. Edwards (John Carradine, House Of The Long Shadows) is eventually called in when the hospital staff want the artefact identified, but can he not only identify what's going on, but know how to stop it?

As I told you earlier, Crash! was a Charles Band production, so if you have seen your share of movie from him as I have, you may understand that my hopes weren't extremely high. But the idea of a killer car movie drove (ha!) me to soldier on, since those three other killer vehicle movies I mentioned in the previous paragraph had their goofy charms, and even some chills. But I'll start with the main meat of the movie, the horror. Is the movie scary? Well, although there were two or three (brief) moments in the movie that did give me a little surprise, enough to make me remember them long afterwards, even then I didn't really feel any chills, let alone scares. One reason was the depiction of the possessed car. Sure, there are plenty of shots of the car driving around without a driver behind the wheel, but even then I felt that this phenomenon was much more car than demonic possession. The car looked weathered and dirty, it often didn't seem to be speeding along too fast, and it was often depicted with quick or awkward editing that made it hard to absorb. But the horror sequences not directly using the possessed car weren't really that much better. While I did previous mention some memorable images (such as when the comatose Kim first opens her eyes), otherwise the attempts at horror just don't work. Some scenes are simply directed in a mundane fashion, like when Marc sneaks into the hospital and attempts to make Kim bleed to death in her hospital bed; it comes across as a matter-of-fact moment rather than anything else. Other supposed horrific scenes come across as unintentionally funny, like a couple of scenes where a wheelchair is possessed and starts to move violently on its own. The movie can't even redeem itself with its horror climax, which manages to be rushed and without any punch or imagination at all to make the previous eighty or so minutes worth slogging through.

Possibly why the attempts at horror in Crash! are pretty much worthless is that director Charles Band had to at the same time devote a good amount of work choreographing and directing one of the selling points of the production: speeding and crashing cars. Certainly, there are a lot of car accidents in the movie, complete with some fiery explosions. Unfortunately, the direction... editing... choreography... and pretty much everything else essential is severely botched. There were a couple of slow-motion crashes, I admit, that looked somewhat visually pleasing. But otherwise, the frequent use of slow motion just bogs down the vehicular stunts and crashes, and also makes it extremely clear to see that there are just dummies or stuntmen with crash helmets in the crashing cars. Not only that, quite often the question of just what exactly causes the cars to crash is not clearly answered (a police car, for example, goes off the road and through a billboard in one scene for no apparent reason). While this may sound bad by itself, what makes it worse is that near the end of the movie, we are forced to again sit through the seven or so scenes of extremely lame vehicular mayhem in a very long flashback sequence. Clearly Band was forced to cheaply pad out the movie to an acceptable running time somehow, and this cheap technique pretty much sums up his other directional touches. The outdoor locations look drab and completely alike, the cinematography is washed out and slightly out of focus, interior lighting is often extremely subdued, and the dialogue sounds hollow and is clearly looped at times.

Not only is Band to blame for those aforementioned shortcomings, his incompetence also spreads with his handling of the script. There are plot turns in the movie that make so little sense that it's stunning that apparently he nor anyone else in the production could see them. The movie starts off with the possessed car forcing a van off the road... which is before the character of Kim gets her hand on the artefact. Later, after Kim completely overturns her car when the Doberman attacks her, it's never explained how her car turned itself back the right way, with no damage to boot. There are other unanswered questions, such as why the possessed car is hunting innocent people... why the multiple car crashes are not making headlines or panic with the public... or why it takes days for the car to drive about twenty-five miles in its hunt for Kim's husband. But it's not just the story portion of Crash! that is badly written, but also the characters. The characters of Kim and her husband Marc only get about a minute to introduce their characters and explain their motivations before Marc starts his plan to murder Kim. It's so little time, that you won't be able to believe that they ever had any attraction to each other in the first place. In fact, Marc is forced twice in the movie to speak out loud in great length his plans while alone so that the audience can guess his motivations. Later on in the movie as Kim is recovering in the hospital, she and her doctor (John Ericson, Bedknobs And Broomsticks) start to build something akin to a romantic attachment, but at the end of the movie, the fate of this relationship is simply forgotten about and never comes to a satisfying conclusion. As you can see, this movie doesn't just crash, it burns. But at least I know for certain now why the movie had been all but impossible to see for years.

(Posted May 9, 2023)