Since it’s hot as HELL outside, I figured I may as well throw you readers a bone in the form of a film with a lot of heat under its hood that won’t burn you (unless you’re expecting it to blow you away with stellar acting and a memorable plot.) If you take it at all seriously (and it’s VERY hard to do so, mind you), 1977’s THE CAR isn’t a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it sure as hell is a really and unintentionally hilarious one.

It’s more or less a nasty-tasting cake made up of equal parts of single-word title films (JAWS, DUEL), a dash of devil possession from some other popular 70’s flicks, a custom George Barris ride that looks like a tricked out rolling bathtub and some (as in too many) scenery chewing lead and character actors having at the jumbled script and its crazy plot diversions.

This is a “Yours is not to question why…” flick, plain and simple. Small run down desert town gets visited and its citizenry terrified (and run down) by a mysterious driver-less evil car from hell (more or less). Sheriff and crew take on car with mixed and amusing results until they realize that good old fashioned explosives and a few tons of boulders solve many problems. Crash, Bang, Boom… The End? Yeah, it’s that simple enough to be a thirty minute episode of some sort of horror anthology on TV (or as part of a much better film anthology), but THE CAR is padded with a number of dopey subplots that don’t really go anywhere because after too many minutes of greasy buildup someone usually gets killed (and taken out of the picture as a result), leaving that screen door swinging in the breeze until the next victim shows up…

The again, this is a film in which there’s no blood, no real scares and no surprises until the ending when James Brolin and a few other actors playing law enforcement types blast that super fast and invincible demon auto into a fireball that takes on the shape of some sort of demon vomiting flames (well, that’s what it looks like to me every time I see this flick). Like every other demise in the film, it’s probably going to make you laugh more than wet your pants (unless you laugh so hard you wet your pants). But it’s also one of the more inconsistent “horror” films I can recall thanks to the titular troublemaker behaving erratically in some key scenes.

This ultimate road rager mows down civilians with impunity throughout the flick, yet it taunts Brolin’s sheriff character by allowing him to get close enough to check out the lower than normal roof and those tinted glass windows and even lets him try to take a peek inside once it decides to pop open one of those handle-less doors. You see it speed up to run some victims over and even launch itself THROUGH A HOUSE to kill another character (one of the more amusing kills in the film), yet it can barely keep up to a bunch of kids and adults practicing for a parade and of course, can’t leap over a knee-high wall to get to them. Granted, that cemetery is “sacred” ground, so that’s why you don’t get that mid-movie death count jumping up into the teens or twenties.

Finally, the best smash in the film comes during an chase sequence when two sheriff’s cars and their occupants are taken out by a spectacular crash where the devil machine slides sideways before tumbling into the law cars like a bathtub-shaped bowling ball, causing a tremendous blast (and probably making you blast out a laugh in the process) then landing unscratched and blazing away, its weird horn tooting out that six-note atonal blare that will make you chuckle each time it’s heard (which is quite frequently).

As lousy as the movie is, it’s actually very watchable because of the special effects and amazing stunt driving. Seeing that chopped and channeled black bathtub do angry donuts outside that cemetery it can’t get into or pull some sharp turns for a car so chunky is pretty impressive and no mean feat considering the design of the ride raised the body and lowered the tinted windows to sinister effect. The big round headlights, custom body, vertical grille and thick double bumpers give the thing a “face” that’s both menacing and (unintentionally) amusing, but not ever frightening. I think the TV commercial scared me as a kid the first time I saw it, but as I was fascinated with cars, any fright I felt was steamrolled by curiosity.

I’d say catch this with Spielberg’s far superior extended version of Duel for some perspective and/or Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse, the brutal (and brutally funny) “Death-Proof” just to see how menacing a crazed vehicle/driver flick should play out in terms of delivering the expected goods…