>If you’re Chad Lowe, this must be the Highway to Hell.

>

Highway to Hell

(R ~ 1991)

An eloping bride is taken into Hell, and her fiancée must pursue. (IMDB)

Director: Ate de Jong

Writer: Brian Helgeland

Stars: Patrick Bergin, Kristy Swanson and Chad Lowe

Yes- Chad Lowe here – no no- Rob’s brother. His agent lets me take his call forwarding runoff when’s he’s at the gym. What’s that? A project? A supernatural thriller with Kristy Swanson as my girlfriend? Four-day shoot with full craft tables? I’m in. Such a conversation must have preceded the making of Highway to Hell, a cheap queasy fever-dream of a movie that fumbles its intended quirky/scary ratio so badly that it pulls off a rare trick – it simultaneously sucks and blows. If I told you every member of the Stiller family made cameos, and that Gilbert Gottfried played Hitler, would you watch this shit? Go ahead, but you’ll still need a hot cleansing shower immediately after.

From the opening scene, the audience must suspend disbelief, as nice guy Lowe and Swanson play a naughty couple on their way to Vegas to elope, going at it hot-and-heavy in the back seat along a side a of a dark desert highway. She reveals that she’s still a virgin (yup), saving it for their big night. But soon they wind up in a bad (in fact, evil) stretch of highway guarded by a cop from hell (C.J. Graham as Sgt. Bedlam). They seek refuge at a deserted service station run by old codger Richard Farnsworth (The Straight Story), who coaches them on the only way to beat the demon-cop – racing him through a wormhole into hell or something. (He also wants them to find his Amelia Earhardt-looking sweetheart) They even take his souped-up cherry white antique roadster for luck.

So they follow his advice, punching the car straight into ‘Hell,’ and taking the movie with it. Some of the characters they pointlessly meet there are supposed to be famously ‘bad’ (like Medea, Hitler) while others are randomly stupid and evil. The aforementioned Stiller cameos fly by in a diner scene – Ben Stiller fries an egg on the sidewalk (cause it’s Hell). The couple has some car trouble, so they take it to a mechanic who later turns out to be Satan (bland Patrick Bergin, a poor man’s Kevin Kline) So Swanson gets kidnapped (Satan luvs virgins) and replaced with monster saggy-breasted succubus. 

Lowe must get her back, traveling across the River Styx (guarded by three-headed dog Cerberus). Then the Devil challenges them to one last race back to their dimension. They win somehow.

As I said, in trying to mix quirky Repo Man-esque moments into its Ghoulies-esque scare-story, the movie just comes across a wtf mashup you can’t wash off quicky enough. But if you’re a Stiller completist, you had this coming.

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>All the chicken you can eat!

>

BLAST-OFF GIRLS (1967)

Written and Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis

Starring: Dan Conway, Ray Sager, Tom Tyrell etc.

w/music by ‘The New York Square Library,’ performances by ‘The Faded Blue’ & ‘Charlie’

A sleazy record promoter tries to make it big with a local Chicago garage band and plans to make them famous while keeping the profits for himself. (IMDB)

Fuck Almost Famous. There is a select few films that actually ‘get it’ when it comes to the experience of being in a rock band, and meeting Lester Bangs doesn’t immediately qualify you as a rock muse (though divorcing Nancy Wilson might.)  Low-budget schlock-slinger H.G. Lewis’ 1966 ‘exploitation’ cheapie Blast- Off Girls joins this elite group, along with the untouchable This Is Spinal Tap (natch), that tell it like it is- summarizing the rise and fall of an ‘everyman’ American garage band in the 1960s as they are chewed up and spit out by ‘the biz.’ And yes- the ACTUAL COLONEL SANDERS makes a cameo!

The film follows real-life Chicago garage shlubs The Faded Blue, as they are ‘discovered’ by the slimy ‘Boojie’ Baker (Dan Conway), a slimy sandy-haired Svengali with a cane who’s always on the lookout for the ‘next big thing’ to rip off. In Brian Epstein-fashion, Boojie remolds the band’s image, dressing them in matching suits and rechristening them ‘The Big Blast.’ Boojie’s go-to promotional strategy is (of course) blackmail- in order to secure the recording of The Big Blast’s first single, he snaps photos of a recording engineer being seduced by one of his ‘Blast-Off Girls’ – loose ladies in his employ. The record sails up the charts with a bullet, but the group becomes disgruntled at Boojie not sharing the wealth. After giving the band his blessing to leave, he invites them to a hotel party, where he and his main flunkie (Ray Sager) set up the boys up to be busted for pot and liquor, complete with fake ‘police’ paid off by Boojie. The band must sign on with Boojie again to stay out of the clink.

Along their path to fame, we get some amazingly inept (but groovy) pop ‘60s montages, and the infamous promo performance outside a certain chicken chain restaurant, where the Colonel himself! pays them (lunch for a buck each) and the audience with fried chicken from a bucket and frugs with the crowd. (Bitchin’ organ solo!)

In addition to being an amazing coup, this scene captures the shallow rewards of a band on the road, not seeing any fruits of their talent as their rich manager gets richer. It all becomes too much for the boys, (this shit isn’t fun anymore!) as a second recording session breaks down. They decide to get back at Boojie just for the hell of it (see below), and show up soused to a TV promo appearance, where they play a goof song and flip him the bird repeatedly. They walk out on Boojie and rip up their contracts, willing to take their chances on their own, and leaving him to seek out the next bunch of saps in the circle of life.

Sometimes it takes a cheap drive-in flick to summarize the cheap truth – in this case the music business and its rigged roller-coaster of pop success. But I’m sure it’s much different now, with the internet and everything.

Blast-Off Girls is available in a 2-movie ‘Drive-In Double-Feature’ DVD w/Lewis’ awesome teen-delinquent film, Just For The Hell of It from Something Weird Video and our delicious sponsors below.

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