Vroom vroom, it’s me, Burl, here to review a racing-car
picture for you! It’s called Fireball 500,
and it’s essentially one of the AIP beach pictures given a different setting
and some higher stakes! It tries to be tough at times, which sits hilariously
with the scrubby-clean hangovers from movies like Beach Party and How To Stuff
A Wild Bikini!
It was apparently Frankie and Annette’s last team-up! And,
in fact, though there’s certainly some flirting and huggerjugger and other assorted
quasi-romantic byplay between them, they aren’t actually a couple in this
movie! No, she’s a girlfriend of that other teen singing sensation, Fabian, well known from his role in Get Crazy!
The movie is set somewhere in the American South, in some
county adjacent to Hazzard and whichever one Thunder Road is in, where hicks
battle hayseeds for dirt-road supremacy and jars of mountain dew are apparently
indestructible! Frankie, in the role of Dave Owens, an up-and-coming racer from
Cal-i-for-nai-yay and owner of the famed Fireball 500 auto, arrives and immediately
begins a hard-hitting campaign of competition with local hero Leander, played
by Fabian! Chill
Wills, the voice of Francis the Talking Mule himself, plays Big Jaw, the local
promoter who benefits the most from this rivalry!
Dave beats Leander in their first race, and most of their
subsequent competitions, including a figure-8 chicken race and a bout of
fisticuffs that runs about three times longer than the donnybrooks of The Quiet Man and They Live put together, end in a draw! Leander ultimately wins the
quest for Annette’s affections, but this seems a Pyrrhic victory to me since
she comes off as an annoying scold for most of the picture, and a prude too! Ha
ha, and anyway, Leander is constantly surrounded by ladies sporting shorts with
“We Love Leander” embossed on the bums! Any one of those ladies would probably
have been more fun to date than the former Mouseketeer!
Ha ha, but I haven’t even really mentioned the main plot
yet, which is that both Leander and Dave, being drivers, get caught up in the
local moonshine-running business, which is apparently run by the unlikely team
of Harvey Lembeck (who played
Erich Von Zipper in the beach movies) and a rich, sexy blonde lady! And not only are
a pair of revenooers making trouble, but some mysterious party has seen Goldfinger and is using the art of
maxi-reflection to run the ‘shine deliverers off the road to their fiery doom! (But
the ‘shine itself always survives somehow, ha ha!) I was pretty sure Chill Wills would
turn out to be behind it all, but I was wrong!
Well, the picture ends, and then there’s another fifteen
minutes of road racing, which is a little boring I must admit! I’m just not a
fan of the Non-Athletic Sport Centred Around Rednecks, so it’s just as well I
don’t live in the South! But despite the fact that it’s Dave’s car that sports
the name Fireball 500, it’s Leander’s car that turns into an actual fireball in
the grand finale! I thought his goose was cooked for sure, but it turns out he
just gets a really bad sunburn from the ordeal!
It’s a pretty entertaining picture in many ways, even though
it’s dumb at best and suffers from some yawny patches, especially when it gets
onto the oval! But the constant tension between adherence to the Beach Party
innocence and the urge to move beyond into sexier, more adult territory, is
fascinating! It is and could only be a product of its exact, precise historical
time, and ol’ Burl always appreciates that! I give Fireball 500 two unexpected Claymation openings!
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