In this teen comedy about the kids who cruise the Van Nuys Blvd. strip in Los Angeles and race each other and moon each other and make love connections at gas stations and drive-in burger joints, it’s all about the cars. Except for when it’s about the breasts. Or when it’s about extended scenes of riding roller coasters at Magic Mountain and disco dancing. You could say this movie has filler, but what doesn’t have filler? Hey, LIFE is filler.
I’m digressing. Probably because there’s not a lot to talk about with this movie without rewriting my review of The Pom Pom Girls all over again. It’s classic drive-in junk. If you’re looking for a point, you’ve already missed the point.
The bad stuff: The jokes get a little too cutesy-pie at times and the story breaks its back stretching toward a Love Conquers All message.
The good stuff: If you’re into that shag carpet van interior mega-70s vibe, this movie is some angel dust that you need to try. The nudity is cheerfully gratuitous—not to mention, frequent—and big-eyed brunette Melissa Prophet is cute enough for me to endure a thousand bad jokes. I think I could watch a whole movie of her playing pinball. Also, among all of the hot-rodding kids there’s an older guy who cruises the strip. His name is Chooch (busy character-actor David Hayward), he rides a bitchin’ souped-up classic, sports a mustache and we’re all ready for him to be a huge jerk (at first he comes off like a forebear of Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson in Dazed and Confused), but then a funny thing happens. The movie treats him sensitively. He’s not a creep. He’s a big likable dork, earnest and awkward around women only because he’s soberly looking for love in a setting where everyone else just wants sex. He’s not fully grown-up yet, but he’s ready to do it as soon as he meets the right little firecracker. Chooch is adorable and so is his storyline here.
This is a light, but entertaining film that deserves extra credit for pulling it off despite being a classic B-movie rush job. The drive-in mavens at Crown International wanted a teen cruising movie. That’s all they cared about. Writer/director William Sachs wrote the script in about a week, did all of the casting and pre-production in similarly short order and shot the film in eighteen days. About two months later, it was out in theaters. I’ve taken more time to answer e-mails than Sachs did to conceive and complete an entire movie that turned out alright. I raise my drink to him.