Welcome back to my Dark Corner of this Sick World
‘My wife Ethel has to wax ‘em down once a week'
'walls ceiling everything’
Well that’s more than I needed to know.
This week we’re looking at occult thriller Race with the Devil.
'Now what the hell is that.'
Which starts as a mobile version of the Price is Right.
'Color television'
'Four burner stove'
'microwave oven'
'couple of bunks for the kids'
and turns into a Satanic version of Duel
‘You’d have to be crazy to try a stunt like that’
Happy couples Roger and Kelly and Frank and Alice are on holiday
‘Here’s to the best damn vacation we may ever have in our lives’
Well that ought to jinx it.
‘What the hell are they doing?’
Things get weird when they witness a ritual sacrifice
‘No joke, no bullshit, murder!’
And the local police are no help at all
‘We get there and these kids killed 5 cats, I mean skinned em’
I guess you had to be there…
‘Damnedest thing you ever saw’
The couples spend the rest of the movie on the run from the vengeance of the Satanists
who seem to be everywhere.
Even perving on them in the pool.
But they’re determined not to let it ruin their holiday
‘We’re going skiing!’
Until...
'Oh my God, they killed my dog.'
'It’s the same people’
Well, obviously; you’d have to be pretty unlucky to run into 2 groups of Satanists on the same holiday.
'Oh, I see.;
It’s not a terrible set-up, but the film is maddeningly inconsistent
‘Quck Quack!’
particularly in the escalation of threat, so we go from Snakes on an RV...
pretty high level of threat, to...
'Can you me?'
''We must have a bad connection sir, i will report your phone as being out of order'
now it just seems like these Satanists aren’t trying.
'What the hell are they doing.'
That’s another thing, for a film called Race with the Devil the occult content is very low.
'I'll sure give it a try'
If you forget the sacrifice there’s nothing to distinguish this from Deliverance or Straw Dogs or any other film about of bunch of locals ganging up on the city folk.
‘They deserve it’
They do cast a spell at one point
‘Any evil you do will be returned 9 fold’
but nothing comes of it, they just attack.
They’re not even good at it.
But the big question is; who’s after them? Who’s in on this?
'Did anybody hear anything?'
'Didn't anybody see anything?'
The paranoid ‘trust no one atmosphere ought to add to the tension
'That funny, she never acted like that before.'
but only if at some point it pays off. And as it turns out they’re not being paranoid at all,
the entire county would seem to be in on this.
'I tell you buddy, this place gives me the creeps.
They have contacts in garages,
the police,
'Go on your trip, have a good time, leave this up to me.'
the library,
‘I’m sorry these are reference books, they can’t go out of the library’
country music bars
‘You don’t mean witches?!’
they organise fake accidents, diversions, every car on the road is driven by yet another Satanist!
So if everyone is in on it, why not just kill them?
Who’s gonna report you? And to whom?
'We are self contianed babe.'
We end on a public safety message;
if you are on the run from satanists and you decide for perfectly logical reasons to hide off the main road,
in the middle of nowhere, where no one can hear you scream,
'Looks like there is an open spot down there.'
a) don’t tempt fate
‘It’s all over now’
and b), don’t park in the middle of the ring of fire.
It really does seem like they could have done that at any point in the movie.
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