Crash! (1976)

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Crash! from independent film director Charles Band is an energetic but almost totally nonsensical entry in the possessed vehicle stakes. It even throws some wild and woolly occult magic into its jumbled brew, just to tangle its disparate elements a little further. One thing it does have going for it is the presence of horror veterans José Ferrer, John Carradine and Reggie Nalder, although only Ferrer gets any meaningful screen time. Sue Lyon is here too, though seeing her in a cheapjack genre film like this seems dispiriting after the early promise she showed in Lolita and Night Of The Iguana.Pretty young lady Kim Denne (Lyon) buys a curious trinket from a flea market. Later it becomes evident the trinket is a Hittite charm which can give its owner strange powers. Kim is married to the much older Marc (Ferrer), a bitter and twisted wheelchair-bound professor who holds his young wife responsible for his condition. Theirs is a totally broken relationship, and it's no surprise when Marc sets his ferocious Doberman upon Kim while she is driving, hoping to kill her and make it look like an accident. Kim survives this attempt on her life but comes out of it a disfigured amnesiac. While the police and doctors try to ascertain who she is and what has happened to her, Marc learns of her survival and tries to kill her again. Using her newly-acquired powers, Kim summons her car to come to her rescue. The driverless vehicles tears across the miles, destroying everything in its path as it races to its mistress's aid.Crash! is a complete muddle of a movie. It throws in everything but the kitchen sink yet, crucially, fails to tie it all together with any real sense of logic or narrative flow. There's nothing particularly frightening in it, despite efforts to make Lyon look creepy and otherworldly with her scarred face and orange-glowing eyes. The car is certainly not scary at all. It roams, rams, wrecks, smashes and destroys everything it comes into contact with… but the overwhelming impression is more of a Hal Needham/Burt Reynolds-style demolition derby than an ominous chiller in the tradition of Duel. Plus, of course, there's the gaping plot hole that the car is under the control of Lyon, one of the film's supposed 'good' characters. If evil Ferrer was the one guiding the killer automobile, things might make more sense. But in order to save her own life it is actually Lyon who causes the death of countless innocents. How are we meant to empathise with her when she's responsible for the death of half the road-users in the county?!? A strange, senseless and largely unsuccessful film, Crash! does not shine brightly in the possessed vehicle canon.

Not to be confused with Cronenberg's sex drive epic, this is Charles Band mixing demonic possession with car crashes. Housewife Kim Denne (Sue Lyon, far away from LOLITA [1962]) is shacked up with bitter professor Marc Denne (José Ferrer). Wait, is this a LOLITA sequel? Anyway, he is angry because she caused an accident where he has to use a wheelchair a lot of the time. So when she buys him a African-looking trinket (from Reggie Nalder at a flea market; never buy from Nalder!), he rejects it and moves forward with his plan of having his Doberman pinscher kill her while she is driving in a convertible (!). She survives, but is hospitalized with no memory and refusing to release the tiny mystical idol. Somehow it possesses her and her car (!), which rumbles around town driver-less and causes tons of crashes. I'm willing to bet Band's second feature came together after someone showed him the crazy gimmick car that looks like it has no one driving it. Oh, and after he watched THE EXORCIST (1973). Surprisingly, this beat THE CAR to theaters by a few months. The film makes absolutely no sense, but is worth seeing for some crazy car stuff. So at least he delivered on the title.

Not a bad mix of horror and massive car-crashing B-movie - for better appreciation, you see the crashes twice, once in parts, injected into the story, once mostly blocked and through some sauna haze. One point I could not figure out is that the initial accident of Mr & Mrs Denne seems to be already caused by the black Camaro.Historically, this seems to be the first movie Charles Band directed under his own name. As some funny parallel, Steven Spielberg's first was "Duel" (1971) in which a demonious truck chases cars off the road... I was thrilled to see that Charles Band had also acted, 15 years before, in "La leggenda di Enea" (1962).As several users asked for DVD availability: I bought it yesterday (at EUR 1 you don't risk much). German sound only (German title "Draculas Todesrennen" which isn't such a bad fit), no frills, Laser Paradise 1997889, production year not evident. Colors and sharpness are not perfect (maybe the DVD was made from older video tape), but OK to watch.

This combination of occult-horror and speeding car chase film somewhat effectively merges two of the more popular genres of the 1970s. I saw this back in 1977 when it first came out on a hunch that it might be fun, and it was the only horror flick playing at the time. As I remember, Jose Ferrer is an invalid with a younger wife, and she wanted to get rid of him, and visa versa. Somehow an occult figurine with evil spirits within comes into play and takes control of a Camaro/Firebird speedster, and goes around wrecking other cars and offing folks without a dent of it's own. Obviously a Charles Band low budget take on other slicker studio occult horror such as THE CAR. It's a good example of the Charles Band exploitation style and I remember it being fast-paced and fun, without any real memorable moments, but a nice way to spend a couple of hours, and made before Band started to become a bit pretentious. However, I have not yet been able to find a copy of it in any format anywhere yet! Any ideas out there?