Welcome to Tubi Tuesday. An ongoing experiment where we dig into some of the weird, underrated, and downright abysmal movies we don’t think our real life friends would let us talk at length about. At the time of writing, this movie is streaming for free on Tubi, the home of Super Bowl LIX!
Directed By: Charles Band
Starring: Footage of a car and a woman in a hospital bed
Screenplay By: Marc Marais
For Fans Of: 1970’s TV movies, B-Roll of car stunts
Thing I Find Funny: Band is either legally or spiritually not allowed to make a movie with a psychic.
That’s right, there’s a third weird movie called Crash! (1976). We’re NOT talking about sex in cars (1996) and we’re NOT talking about the famous Oscar best picture winner that EVERYONE really likes (2004). We’re talking about the second (first released) film by legendary cult director and producer Charles Band.
Band was the man behind Empire International Pictures (Arena, Robot Jox, like 10 other pretty good movies), and is still the head of Full Moon Features (Demonic Toys, The Gingerdead Man, Evil Bong, 400 more movies). Band has a few different genuinely beloved movies and franchises tucked away inside his literal hundreds of B movies he’s produced and/or directed, with the most well-known arguably being Puppet Master series.
The thing about Puppet Master, a movie I like, is that the entire selling point is “we will have little puppet guys run around and cause chaos.” That’s basically the only hurdle the move HAD to clear to deliver it’s promise of being worth a one-night VHS rental from a blockbuster. That is why I’ve always found it baffling and funny that the movie is not about some random idiots that stumble onto a house of evil puppets and deal with them.
Instead, the movie is about a group of psychics that are gathering for the first time in years because one of their other psychic friends died. There are like six psychics in this movie from minute three. They go to the house to find that the titular puppet master has lured them there as part of his nefarious plot. SPOILERS, but their psychic powers are not integral to the plot, which basically turns into a standard slasher mixed with strange lengthy melodramatic monologues by a guy dressed like the invisible man.
Now allow me to bring your attention away from 1990’s and tell you about one of Band’s earlier low-budget successes, Ghoulies. Ghoulies is a Gremlins ripoff that makes the promise that if you give them 80 minutes of your time they will give you some footage of the ghoulies. The only hurdle the movie has to clear is to have little puppet guys run around and cause chaos.
That is why it is so funny to me that Ghoulies is about psychics battling an evil wizard. There are also some magic teleporting dwarves (Grizzel and Greedigut) and a zombie. There are (technically) ghoulies in there too, but genuinely way less. We WILL be doing on of these posts on Ghoulies and it’s important to me that I let you know I wrote it almost three years ago with no idea what I would ever get to do with it. This series started like three weeks ago and I just had that one sitting in a folder. I was almost certainly in a really good place when I wrote it.
Fine! I’ll talk about Crash! We’re going back another decade. There are about ten years between all three of these movies, which I find interesting as someone that changes what he’s interested in every four weeks. Crash! is Band’s second film, and his first foray into the world of low-budget horror designed with the sole purpose of making money. He will never diverge from that path again in his still ongoing career. I love this man.
According to Band’s own memoir, which I read and have decided to believe wholeheartedly for some reason, “car crash movies” were dominating the drive-ins. Band had the idea that if he could raise a little money and buy a fleet of scrappable cars, he could make a movie he could sell. So he did. He bought a dozen junkyard cars, and filmed them crashing. He claims he did this before writing any kind of script or planning any of the more narrative elements of the film. You can tell!
The crashes are all short car chases featuring a black car, and then the junkyard car. So there’s a nice through-line of consistency where this sleek black car with tinted windows is causes all of the crashes. I actually think this is a cool way to make a movie. Why not! We want to see crashes! You can figure out a story later! In fact, it’s so easy. You can come up with any simple premise for why these chases and crashes are happening. A patrol officer talking about the renegade smuggler they can’t seem to catch. A transporter that always gets his product to it’s destination despite the mob trying to stop him. Hell, you could probably just have a newscast say a car maniac is on the loose and be done with it. YOU could do that, but that’s because you’re not Charles Band.
Instead, the premise of this movie is that a woman was badly burned in a house fire. She’s wrapped in bandages in a hospital bed for the majority of the film’s runtime. The thing is, as these things often go, the fire was so traumatic that it awakened her dormant psychic powers. So now, she can control a fast black car using her mind, which she uses to get revenge on everyone she doesn’t like. This is conveyed by cross-cutting from all the car chases to her writhing around in her hospital bed doing her best to sell the idea that she is controlling a car with her mind. It doesn’t even come close to working. It absolutely rules.
There’s so much I love here. I love the audacity and strangeness of having the hard part of your cheapy movie done and then somehow overwriting the other half because you just tend to like science fiction stuff. I love that it isn’t an abstraction, but instead it’s the first of many times Band will make this exact same creative choice. At the time, it likely did nothing other than make this movie confusing and off-putting to it’s core audience, but now, it makes it a fascinating thing to revisit, and (I assume) an accidental calling card for a filmmaker that will spend literal decades refusing to not put psychics at the center of movies that really don’t need them.
Never change, Charles.