An entertaining relic of that period in the 70s when the trucking lifestyle fascinated people enough to have its own movie genre and when Jan-Michael Vincent was poised to be a star. It’s full of sweat, country music and menacing good ol’ boys. This is a trucker exploitation movie about, well, trucker exploitation. A young and smoldering Jan-Michael is your regular rock solid straight-shooter who wants to earn an honest living and start a family. He’s got big dreams and a big rig that will be all his someday when he pays off the mother of a bank loan he took out to buy it.
He very quickly finds work only to very quickly realize that the company are crooks who want him to haul illegal goods such as untaxed cigarettes. Jan-Michael refuses to take the risk and storms off. The bad guys ain’t letting him get away with that so they send their bruisers after him to rearrange his ribs with a tire iron.
Even worse, they also tarnish his name in the industry. Now Jan-Michael can’t get a job anywhere. The debts pile up, the wife gets pregnant, the hustle is on and our hero gets pushed to the kind of edge where he’s got pick up a shotgun and put the bad guys out of business.
Columbia Pictures released this, but this feels like a New World movie right down to Dick Miller featured in a small part. All of that’s for good reason because director Jonathan Kaplan got his start churning out drive-in fodder for Roger Corman. He learned how to make a film move at 100 mph. He applied those lessons here and scored a big hit.
Great cast, too. Our circle of Southern-fried villains, played by the likes of L.Q. Jones, R. G. Armstrong and Slim Pickens, are good and nasty.