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Sunday 2 October 2011

Burl reviews Fast Company! (1978)


Ha ha, hi! Burl here with another review, this time of the famous drag racing “David Cronenberg directed THAT?” movie Fast Company! Hold your horses, everybody – no exploding heads or a*al parasites here! I thought at least somebody would try to have int*rcou*se with the cars, but that never happened, not entirely!

The story is of Lonnie the Lucky Man Johnson, who is played by big Bill Smith; and a lucky man he truly is, for he can walk away from any crash, no matter how explosive, and he’s got Claudia Jennings waiting for him just past the finish line! Good-natured Lonnie has a great crew, including Don Francks, the sheriff from My Bloody Valentine, and a young Nicholas Campbell! Too bad the representative from Fastco, the oil company that is Lonnie’s corporate sponsor, is played by John Saxon! This means he’s either a slimeball or a cop – and I can tell you he isn’t a cop!

Lonnie’s great rival – actually, apparently his only rival, since we never see any other opponents – is Gary the Blacksmith Smith, who drives a black car and has a crew of nogoodnicks named, ha ha, Stoner and Meat! (Actually Stoner doesn’t seem like such a bad guy – and you know what, in the end Gary’s not so bad either!) There’s some track romance, some betrayals, some arguments, a few fights, a sabotage attempt and some timely reconciliations, and it all ends pretty happily! Ha ha, spoiler alert, they even get John Saxon as he tries to fly away by chasing him with a funny car and making him crash his plane into a trailer! Kaboom! It reminded me a little of Charley Varrick, but the other way around!

Fast Company sure was an entertaining little picture, and it gave me a pretty good idea of what life on the drag racing circuit was like in the 1970s! It looked good too, with lots of shots of the big shiny cars hitching and bucking their way up to the Christmas tree, ready to race! And the sounds they make, hoo boy! I give this picture at least three waves of the checkered flag!

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