Andy: That’s an interesting point about the music. I thought it was a variation on Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique. But that symphony apparently also contains the Dies Irae. Very interesting, and a great piece of music too.

I found the use of under-cranking the camera effective, particularly in scenes when the car only needed to move a short distance. It made the car seem very nimble and ultimately, more deadly.

Ashlon: The under-cranking was reminiscent of the Adams Family and The Munsters television series, making that quality silly to me. However, the design is choice! I love that one of the confusing points for the cops in the movie is that they can’t tell what make or model the beast is. And… it has no tags! If only they could get a license plate, the bungling cops could stop all the mayhem, yeah right!

Bill: As a teenager, when I first saw this movie on the big screen, I found the car to be pretty intimidating. The opening where it kills the bicyclists had a pretty strong impact, as did the scene where Brolin realizes it’s with him in his garage.

Stewart: Do you think we’re meant to accept Amos’s (R.G. Armstrong) daring feats of heroism in helping defeat the car as some sort of redemption for beating his wife, berating a French horn-toting hitchhiker and cursing Chase? It seems that sucker gets away scot-free. I fully expected him to end up under the rubble with the car or at least between the rubber and the road. But I suppose given the hellacious behavior of the vehicle Amos is merely the lesser of two evils. His sins are lost in shuffle. Perhaps that’s the cars MO. The car is only after the innocent and unassuming leaving the wretched of this isolated canyon community to carry on as usual.

Andy: Now that IS an interesting theory. Did any “bad guy” get run down? The two cyclists in the beginning seemed innocent enough, and the sheriff seemed to be an upstanding guy. Of course, if the Devil is driving the car, would it not seek the innocents?

Ashlon: Andy, your point about the locale of the picture is interesting, especially since the characters fight so hard to preserve it. It seems that the town is stuck in a literal sort of purgatory and yet, instead of fleeing, they fight to preserve their spit of land against the car.

Bill: Interesting theories, guys, but I’m not sure I’m willing to go there with you. More than likely, the lifeless town is the result of a low budget and the lack of punishment for the bad guy is sloppy (or indifferent) screenwriting.

THE CAR is a throwback to the old 1950s science fiction genre; it’s a close cousin to IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, TARANTULA and THE MONOLITH MONSTERS - films set in isolated desert towns where the hero is usually a sheriff or a doctor, but in either case he confronts a monster of some kind. By film’s end, the menace must be defeated lest the rest of the world face Armageddon.

It’s also more directly a fusion of two Spielberg films (how he must have been flattered): DUEL and JAWS, with a pinch of the Satanic (in 1977 we were still feeling the fallout from THE EXORCIST and THE OMEN). It was perhaps a small leap to go from the truck whose driver you never see in DUEL to the car with no driver at all in THE CAR, though we might also give a nod to the TV movie KILLDOZER as an influence - a premise where an alien intelligence takes over a bulldozer.

JAWS was also heavily influenced by those 1950s science fiction films as well - I mean, the same small-town character archetypes are there.

When you think about it, the Satanic aspects of THE CAR are very underdeveloped. With just a few of the outrageous stunts taken out, this could have very easily been about a psycho on a tear rather than a demonically possessed machine.

Andy: Leave it to you Bill to lay it all out. It is fun postulating all these theories, but I think we all know that the low budget was to blame. I just didn’t have the audacity to say it.. Heheh.

I probably would have enjoyed the film more had it just been some psycho driving the car. That would have eliminated the supernatural angle and taken the stunts to an even more ridiculous, bombastic level (Even though we wouldn’t get the screaming demon in the end). Like the cop in DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY (”I’m gonna eat your lunch, you long-haired [edited]!”), who was uttering maniacal curses at his quarry, I would have loved to hear the choice mumblings the driver of THE CAR’s vehicle would have offered.

Ashlon: I couldn’t agree more with the allusions to Jaws. The picture is obviously trying to capitalize on the success of Spielberg’s earlier film. It’s essentially beaching the shark, wrapping it in metal, and chumming the desert highways with young lovers on bicycles, musically motivated middle-schoolers, teachers best described as Van Halen video vixens, and overly dramatic policemen who apparently lack a basic understanding of public safety.

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