Racing Films

What a film, let’s set the tone from the beginning, full frontal boobs within the first two minutes of the film, this is always a good start.  Needless to say, this film is loose.  While watching it there were times where I wondered whether I was even watching a film or just watching some footage of a drunken party.  Hi-Riders was directed by Greydon Clark with a total budget of $125,000 USD, after seeing the boobs I would immediately lower your expectations from that point onwards.  While the budget was never at the scale of an Academy Award winner, this film does manage to pack in plenty of action loosely tied to a very disorganised storyline.  While doing my background research for this one I came across an IMDB review written by ‘Anxietyresisters’ which immediately got me interested. 

Anxietyresisters IMDB

You're gonna love this movie!! It's got the lot: Dudes burning rubber, chicks taking their tops off, teens getting blind drunk, fat guys dancing, cops being blown up... and all in the space of 90 slammin' minutes!! This is totally the best film ever!! Rent it today!! It's bodacious, peeps…

With the review already so comprehensively written for me there is little left to say really but I’ll have a go at explaining why Anxietyresisters was so excited by this film.

Plot, this is not going to be easy, it is a challenge to find a coherent plot thread amongst all the chaos of this film.  It starts with two young car enthusiasts Mark (Darby Hinton) and Lynn (Dianne Peterson) rolling into LA to look for “some action”.  They soon find it and hustle a street race with a local racer called Billy who is a bit of a hot head.  Mark loses the first leg of the race but challenges the Billy to a second round, Mark makes a sneaky tweak to his car and wins the second leg.  Billy, feeling he has been hustled doesn’t pay the agreed bet and takes off.  Mark and Lynn eventually track the racer down and chase him back to an old abandoned town out in the desert, it turns out the racer is part of a bigger gang called the ‘Hi-Riders’.

Mark and Lynn find themselves trapped by the Hi-Riders in their HQ, which is actually the Paramount Ranch film set in Santa Monica.  It becomes more apparent that the name of the gang is Hi-Riders because they modify their cars to give them an incredibly high rake with huge rear wheels and lifted rear suspension.  Presumably these modifications are made to improve the performance of their cars by raising the centre of gravity?  Hi-riding aside, Mark and Lynn are in a tight spot until the leader of the gang appears and decides that the best way to resolve the dispute is for there to be another race.  It is deemed that Billy cheats in the third race and Mark is deemed the winner by the gang leader.  The decision causes a bit of a rift in the gang, but this is all settled after they go off and get pissed together in the bar at the Hi-Riders base.  Much nudity and debauchery follows.

Following the drunken shenanigans Mark and Lynn are accepted as part of the Hi-Riders crew and start hanging out with them.  Lynn uses her good looks to charm some of the less enthusiastic members into bonding with them.  She is so good at this she manages to convince one of the Hi-Riders to cut the top off his cherished car to turn it into a convertible.  The guy immediately regrets this but ends up resigned to the fact he will now be cruising around without a roof.

The Hi-Riders decide to go for a cruise and roll into a small town where they take roost in a local saloon.  A wealthy kid who is keen for some racing wanders into the bar and makes a challenge for a race.  The kid is pitched to race against Billy, who true to character, races dirty resulting in a big fireball creating crash.  The kid is killed.  His father, a wealthy local businessman, comes into the bar seeking out the culprits who contributed to his son’s death.  He demands action from law enforcement but is informed the Hi-Riders haven’t really done anything illegal.  Despite this the local cops suggest it is time for the Hi-Riders to move on and roll out of town.

The kid’s Dad is not satisfied and gets some local farmers to hunt down and kill all of the Hi Riders.  A number of them are killed but Mark, Lynn the leader and his girlfriend survive and decide to get their revenge with a plot to track down and kill the Dad.  The plan is put into motion which pretty much involves sending in the two blokes to kill the Dad while the chicks wait outside.  I won’t ruin the plot too much further as there is a pretty decent twist at the end that would be spoiled, but needless to say the perfect plan is not perfectly executed..

I am not sure how popular this film was at the time of release, but it has become something of an underground cult classic.  Weirdly I think the film was very popular in Germany and Scandinavian countries, maybe because these cultures believe in the values the film promotes or perhaps these audiences thought this was a hilarious portrayal of real Americans. In the present day this film could be criticised for many reasons, it is does not progress the rights of women, it does not promote safe driving, it encourages binge drinking but ultimately it does have a moral in that all this fun and debauchery will eventually lead to tragedy.  Ironically tragedy occurred in the making of the film wen a stuntman, Vic Rivers, was killed in a scene where he jumps a truck off a bridge.  The scene was left in the final cut and there is a touching credit to Rivers at the beginning of the film.  Aside from this it looks like all of the people involved had a hell of a good time making this film.

The cast is mainly full of unknowns and I suspect is made up of a bunch of people that were pulled out of a local bar.  In my opinion the most interesting actor in this film is Dianne Peterson.  Peterson continued an acting career but her real calling was being a stunt woman after working on Hi-Riders.  She has worked in 85 films and 45 television series and is currently the President of the Stuntwomen’s Association of Motion Pictures.  She started doing stunt work in the 1980s at a time when stunts for females were usually performed by men wearing wigs, even though unions discouraged this to give more opportunities for women to work in the field.  In Hi-Riders there is a scene where Dianne Peterson takes a skinny dip.  She was initially conflicted about doing a nude scene so consulted with her Mother.  After explaining to her what skinny dipping was her mother said “Well, that’s not so bad.”

All told, is this a good racing film? No.  Is it a well-made film with an excellent plot? No.  Is it a good family movie to watch with the kids? No.  Are there at least some cool cars to look at? Not really.  Is it worth spending 90 minutes of your time watching?  Probably not.  The film is reasonably entertaining and as the world makes big advances in clean living and ensuring everyone has a camera in their hand the film is a good reminder that there  was once a time where people could have no holds barred unadulterated fun without any major consequences except for maybe losing your life.  Does it really need to be a “good” film to enjoy it though? As they say in the film, sometimes, “It ain’t the power in the pants, sometimes it’s how fast you can get the zipper down.”