AIP can never be accused of giving up on a formula easy – worried about declining box office receipts for the beach party movies, they shifted Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon and Harvey Lembeck (not to mention William Asher, Floyd Crosby, Dan Haller and Les Baxter) into stock car racing, throwing in Fabian as an extra box office lure. The result is initially light, frothy entertainment with a totally decent plot that centers around the rivalry between Fabian and Frankie - partly over Annette, partly over racing - and their involvement in moonshine running. But it soon gets a bit leaden and loses its way.
This is a bit more adult than the beach party movies: Avalon is busted in a hayloft with a farmer’s daughter, 50% of Julie Parrish’s dialogue is sexual innuendo, the plot deals with serious stakes and concerns the death of a driver.
Old habits die hard, though: there are some claymation credits, Frankie Avalon sings the title track while driving during the opening credits, Annette sings at a carnival sequence, Frankie does a double take to the camera, Frankie sings at a dance (an inappropriate sequence in the film, as he’s investigating a death), at the end of the film Frankie duets with Parrish. This means the film never quite gets its tone right – it starts of bright and poppy then gets serious. Indeed the ending is a bit depressing, with Fabian injured in a crash never able to drive again (but he gets Annette and presumably will give up his groupies… yippee). I think it would have been better off keeping things either less serious all the way through, or make it serious from the start.
Frankie is fine in a more challenging and dramatic role than he was normally required to play by AIP. Annette seems a little at sea - she really doesn’t have anything to do apart from watch anxiously from the side of the racetrack and harp about wanting her boyfriend to settle down, just like she’d do in Beach Party; though at least here the boyfriend is Fabian and she winds up with him at the end, giving things a bit of variety. Fabian gives a confident, pseudo-Elvis performance as a scoundrel Southerner; it was liked well enough to see him cast as a stock car racer in Thunder Alley and The Wild Racers – and he played a moonshine driver in The Devil’s Eight.
It’s great to see Harvey Lembeck play a more serious role and Chil Wills and Julie Parrish add class. Story-wise the moonshine plot is quite interesting, but the race stuff less so. The final race sequence is really just stock footage of a racing cars driving around in a circle, cutting away far too often to a commentator in sun glasses and not enough to close ups of our stars. Most racing car films have this problem – how to dramatise basically driving around in circles? Having solved it – make it about moonshine runners – they then ignore that towards the end and the film suffers. Who cares who wins the final race? (Especially as Fabian and Frankie are friends by then.)
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