Hot Rod Rumble

Should have been made in 1956 with guys and dolls in early Johnny Cash dos. You know, when he had prominent Roy Orbison hair over that same dour Man-in-Black visage. When everybody Walked the Line, baby. Even June Carter when the Grand Ol' Opry said no to John after busting out some footlights with his big toe.

But that's another story, Kemosabe. (You sabe? to borrow two words from Naked Lunch, which was published in 1956 BTW)

Hot Rod Rumble is a JD film starring Richard Hartunian and Leigh Snowden. Hartunian is "Big Arnie," a slobbish Marlon Brando ripoff with James Dean issues and a look that vaguely smacks of a second career as backup guitarist for Social Distortion. His coif is a ragged mess, and his sideburns aren't quite pork enough to cut the chops. Or some such.

He swaggers around confusedly, and he's just "waiting to sell my rod so's I can get my clothes." I remember Charlie Starkweather once is said to have said (by Serial Killers video documentary director Nick Bougas), "They all want to do something something to some sumbitch that ain't never done nothing but raise chickens." Okay, that's not exact, but you get the point.

Good Golly Miss Molly

Starkweather rolled around with winsome jailbait galpal Caril Ann Fugate, who was quoted by someone else as saying, 'Them hamburgers was awful. We oughtta go back there and shoot all of them people, Charlie!" But maybe she was just teasin', huh?

Okay, so anyway, the off-brand Brando is a mess, and the sweater-wearing, bobby-soxers at the swinging dance, all them hep cats and hep kittens, don't like his foul, greaser exterior (leather jacket accessorizing) one. Little. Bit.

And everyone is in the same gang here, even. The Road Devils. Yeah, with a name like that, you know they're all on the Highway to Aitch-E-Double Hockey Sticks. (Cue Angus Young guitar riff.)

--You ever hear Tiny Tim's cover of that, BTW? No. Okay, go listen to it. Or better yet, his cover of "Do Ya think I'm Sexy?" Or compare his cover of "Staying Alive" to the one done years later, by Anal C-nt.

So Big Arnie is in love with the Good Girl Arguably Headed for Trouble, Terri Warren, whom he finds DANCING WITH GOODBUDDY HANK. And this is, most definitely, NOT To his liking. So, he tries to drag that beeyotch out the door, but Benny (Joey Forman) tries to break it all up, and Hank takes Terri home, no doubt his head filled with the sort of twisted hypersexualized fantasies only available to mankind decades later, after Satan invented Pornhub.

But, in those days, Good Girls just said, "No."

And then comes some long sleek Road Devil, in a souped-up rag top convertible with a V8 engine (okay, not really); careening out of the night, sideswiping Hank and Terri and killing Hank and wounding Terri and then some unidentified assailant takes her to the hospital and leaves a Road Devils vanity plate. In the dark.

And everyone thinks the Arnster is guilty. To that end, fellow Road Devils conspire to stomp a mudhole in his third-rung James Dean imitation Wild Ones ass. They beat him senseless (actually, no), and Terri is in the hospital but gets out and then there's the bigtime Hot Rod Rumble which starts out on a death-defying dragstrip then proceeds through California hills and down harrowing canyons and then something happens and it was all about winning fifteen HUNDRED dollars--which was an astronomical amount by 1960 dollars.

I could give away the ending but I haven't seen it yet.

Oh, but I will. Just Effing Watch me, okay. I'm a bad motor scooter. You say Road Devils. I say Road Deviled Ham.

That's me. Road Hog. Terrorizing the Eisenhower-Era, thrusting my leather-jacketed-and-Brylcreamed badassery up the backside of America for all and sundry. Man in Black. Bitch, puhleez. I'm not just a Man in Black. I'm a Man in Fifty Shades of Blue.

Oh, and the movie? Well, it's alright, you like Dragsploitation flicks from damn near sixty-five years ago. It was and is, they say, a mirror into adifferent world.

They missed a golden opportunity, though. Would have been much, much tastier to have the Hankster and Terri accosted by some masked maniac with a hooked hand while necking in Lover's Lane. The Strangler we call him. The "Road Hog," perhaps.

Cue "Let's Twist Again," by Chubby Checker.

(I don't think Tiny Tim ever covered that one. But, you know, nothing in life is perfect.)

Chubby Checker Let's Twist Again

Hot Rod Rumble - hot rods and juvenile delinquents!

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