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Love bigger than a Cadillac, as the song goes. The beast at birth is a vintage Plymouth Fury on the assembly line (cp. Malle's Humain, Trop Humain), red among its pearly sisters, already biting the hand that feeds it. Next seen two decades later rusting away in a backyard, it's the perfect vision for the high-school geek (Keith Gordon) who's himself about to undergo a retooling. "Good hands. Bad taste in cars." Adolescence and its fears and desires, a singular emotional state summarized in the unforgettable image of a packed lunch bleeding yogurt once stabbed. Comfort comes then with a chrome engine, femme fatale and "mechanical asshole," the purr in the ear is an all-oldies radio that gleams malevolently green. "You're mine, and we belong together..." In John Carpenter's rebuke to the asinine teen comedies and greaser nostalgia of the Eighties, nothing is sadder or more withering than the young misfit tenderly resting his head on the demon's steering wheel, scored to "Pledging My Love" and framed through a dusty windshield. Felled jock (John Stockwell) and foxy bookworm (Alexandra Paul) witness the metamorphosis from bespectacled weakling to dead-eyed Mr. Cool, obsession and revenge are part of love's "voracious appetite." Stevenson's The Love Bug and Spielberg's Duel are in the back of Stephen King's mind, Carpenter adds Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos in the remarkable scene of the totaled vehicle voluptuously repairing itself before its owner's bewitched gaze. The grille that's a fanged widescreen smirk one moment and a flaming skull the next, the joyless joyride at night resolved at last in the deserted garage. A keen rejection of pop regression ("God, I hate rock and roll"), down to the final view that makes an abstract canvas out of villainous mangled metal. With Robert Prosky, Harry Dean Stanton, Roberts Blossom, Christine Belford, William Ostrander, Malcolm Danare, and Kelly Preston.
--- Fernando F. Croce |