Edwige, my steadfast kangaroo companion, and I were interrogating a punk resembling Waldo from Where’s Waldo?. I slapped him until he confessed the whereabouts of the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. 

“Okay—okay,” he said, spitting up blood. “They’re holding him in The Beyond exhibit.”

“One more thing,” I said, Edwige and I giving him a cold stare. “Did you deface the statue of Carl Weathers?”

“I—I did,” he confessed, squinting his eyes as braced for the payback that was about to come.

— To be continued. 

Happy New Year from all of us over here at The Museum of Schlock. Tonight’s feature is 1977’s The Car from director Elliot Silverstein. It’s about a car that murders people. A driverless car that murders people. Apparently, the producers wanted a movie like Jaws, but with an automobile. Take that, Steven Spielberg. You may have cornered the market on sharks, but what about killer automobiles? Oh, wait. You directed Duel which is basically Jaws, but with a truck. And that’s a great movie.

The Car isn’t so much. 

The movie begins with a quote from Anton LaVey, founding member of the Church of Satan. I’m getting some serious Race with the Devil vibes from this picture. Maybe it’s the score by Leonard Roseman. We get a scene of a teenage boy and girl riding their bikes and then getting run off the road to their deaths by a black car with tinted windows and no driver. Is it wrong that I found this scene amusing? Maybe I’ve been conditioned by the media to think that teenagers in the 1970s kind of had this coming with their need for fresh air and exercise.

James Brolin plays a police captain named Wade Parent and he’ll be the one investigating these cases of vehicular homicides. The car runs over a hitchhiking hippie, the chief of police, and terrorizes the local school marching band. And I guess it can’t drive on the hallowed ground of the local cemetery leading the police to figure the driverless car is demonic in nature. 

I’m sorry, but I need more. The car is evil because it’s evil isn’t enough of an explanation. Can’t we get an origin story? Maybe an old man is driving a car as it conks out. It’s raining and he can’t get the engine started again. He curses, “To the devil with this car!” And that’s how the vehicle gets possessed and becomes an agent of evil on this planet Earth. And I know there isn’t an explanation for why the car in Christine is evil, but I like that movie better!

I can’t help, but feel if this movie was being made today that there would be no demonic explanation for this evil car. It would be a malfunctioning artificial intelligence created by corporate negligence. Expect a murderous AI car movie to be released before the decade is over. It will be all the rage upon release, but will eventually fall into obscurity like this piece of schlock from 1977. 

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.