Actually, if you're expecting a high octane journey into the depths of the fantasy realm of Lucifer a la Highway To Hell like I was, prepare to be disappointed... unless you hated Highway To Hell, in case you can still get your hopes up... or unless you've never seen Highway To Hell in the first place, in which case feel free to remain indifferent... Either way, this is far from being the most action packed flick you'll ever see, unless your life's viewing habits consist of infomercials and personal hygiene films. Sure, there's action, but there's a lot of stuff to wade through until we get to it, leaving the last 20 minutes or so for the adrenaline to start dripping, though not without it's faults, some minor while others will gnaw on your ass until you have to bat them off with a dust pan. And with that said, enough chit-chat, let us sally forth into 90 minutes of devil worshipers and RV abuse.

Frank (Oates) and his wife Alice (Swit) and their friends Roger (Fonda) and Kelly (Parker) head out from their home deep in the heart of Texas for a road trip to Aspen, Colorado and a little fun in the powder. Getting them there will be their brand new motor home, $36,000 and 60 feet in length, stocked with bunk beds, four burner stove, color television (plus antennae), stereo system, full bar, not-so-micro microwave and self-contained bathroom facility, it's the ultimate antithesis of "roughing it". Why leave the comforts of home when you can just toss the thing on four wheels, slap in an engine and take it all with you? Along the way the quartet pull down a secluded piece of off-highway highway to take a rest. While the guys get out their dirt bikes and tear up some landscape (with some action camera angles that DON'T suck... I'm looking at you Battlefield Earth), the girls go for a leisurely stroll and a chat. Though everything looks like sunshine and lollipops, there's an underlying threat in the wings, as noted by their disturbed canine Ginger... somehow the animals always know... then they die... or save the day... eh, who cares.

That night, while suckin' down some brewskies at a little table in front of their RV (what else do you expect them to do in the middle of nowhere?), Frank and Roger discover they're not alone, as they've set up shop a stone's throw away from none other than Satanist party central, as their nosy neighbor ways set them up with cheap seats to a game of nekkid devil worshiper Duck, Duck, Goose. What the two mistake as an orgy (hey, they're from Texas, just let 'em bask in their ignorance) soon turns ugly, when a lovely blond broad is offered up as sacrifice for their dark lord Satan. This is also where Alice decides to condemn them all by turning on all the lights in the motor home and call out to the boys at one half octave lower than her highest pitch, getting the attention of not only Frank and Roger, but the robe-clad hellspawn and their masked scout leader of the damned! Thus begins their Race With The Devil...

Despite getting stuck momentarily in the river and being swarmed by a posse of shirtless goons in capes and cheesy porn moustaches (who Roger beats off the RV with a vacuum cleaner attachment... and no, I'm not blowing smoke up your ass here), the quartet escapes to the local house of pork and the yokal PO-lice are on the job at the break of day. While a team of crack bumpkins go over the motor home with a fine toothed spork, dusting for prints and taking blood samples from the broken rear window, the Sheriff Taylor (R.G. "Legend Of Hillbilly John" Armstrong) and a few Deputy Barneys (Clay Pigeons ref... as if anyone cared) escort Frank and Rog back to the scene of the attack in the hopes of verifying their story. Left in the wake of the ritual is a big pit of smoldering ashes, a large patch of blood stained dirt and a dead dog suspended from a tree. Whereas he was all interested in solving this case before, the Sheriff suddenly (and mysteriously) turns pessimistic about the whole thing, blaming the sacrifice as a mutual hallucination the guys had as a result of excessive alcohol consumption, inadequate lighting and an everyday hippy dog killing drug binge, throwing the fingerprints and DNA smeared all over the RV out the window, never to be mentioned again...

Okay, either these hicks are living up to the Hollywood stereotype of stupid redneck cops, or they're instead living up to the predictable horror-paranoia movie "everybody in town's in on it" cliche. Whatever the excuse, the girls find a slip of paper left on their broken rear window while cleaning up the RV, no doubt left by one of the cops, considering they were the only ones in contact with it, thus confirming my claim that the police force is into Satanic family values. The small parchment is covered with various runic symbols, which the girls happen to recognize enough of to go to the library and seek out books on witchcraft... and steal them... but they'll mail them back later, so I guess it's okay... After leaving town, the four set up camp in an RV park to calm their nerves and rest up for the drive to Amarillo, where they hope to bring in some big city outside pigs to investigate. Kelly's paranoia is only heightened when she takes a swim and finds herself the target of unwelcome attention by some of the elderly residents, all with shit-eating grins on their faces like they've all been a part of some communal John Wayne hallucination. Tensions are eased later though, when the couple in the RV parked next to theirs takes the gang to a honkytonk bar for some beer, bad dancing and a little bar brawlin'... okay, those two are WAY too cheery to be anything BUT hardcore worshipers of the prince of lies!

Once more my hunch (and ability to stave off ignorance at every turn) is correct, as the four return to their roaming apartment to find that yapping hairball Ginger corpsed up and suspended from the front door! Then again, it can't be said that Satanists were the only suspects, as that dog was an annoying little fuck and it could have been any human being interested in preserving their sanity that killed the bitch. Many a tear is shed and temper flared my the incident, as the group pack up and beat rubber to asphalt out of there, as observed by the residents of the park, who stand around in their night clothes like white trash zombies on Prozac. While truckin' down the highway, the girls open the not-so-micro microwave to discover two massive rattlesnakes! Yeah, trust me, I know what it's like not only to stuff something in the microwave and forget all about it until it's long since gotten cold (as in "blooded" in this case) again, but to misplace your deadly reptiles too. My Komodo Dragons pop up in the strangest places sometimes...

All Hell breaks loose and Frank goes off-road, neglecting a little mechanism called a "brake" and driving a good 60 or so yards out of control before finally coming to a stop thanks to a big tree. As for the venomous worms, Rog bashes one repeatedly against a kitchen counter and Frank vents the other's head with a ski pole after it gets a mouthful of his (pant) leg. The next day our hapless witnesses make their way to a service station in hopes of making a call to the Amarillo PD and getting the RV checked out. Despite wrapping the steel monster around a tree the night before, there are NO visible signs of impact, bringing about the first of many automotive fuck ups to occur from here on out. Though the phone's out thanx to a "big wind up north" (i.e. a sudden bullshit storm), the men arm themselves with a newly purchased 12 gauge and plenty of ammo... a tip to these demon worshipers for future manhunts: don't arm your target! They'll pay for this mistake later, and rightfully so... dumbass Satanists... and I thought their Christian counterparts were pathetic...

Frank loads his boomstick and Roger sharpens his hunting knife in anticipation of future conflicts with the two-legged minions of everyone's favorite goat man. No sooner said than done either, as their RV falls into Mad Max territory following a short stop at another gas station with another non-working phone. A pick-up, moving truck and tow truck surround our heroes, bumping, crashing and manipulating their course, trying to no avail to force them off the road to a violent, driver's ed film ending. For the most part the automotive action scenes are well done as far as the initial moments of car-on-car impacts, and I highly praise the drivers who probably didn't get nearly as much for their work as they deserved. However, these scenes are ruined by the bad impact action inside the motor home as the cast need to work on their physical acting for situations like this. Oh yeah, and the director's continuity is in need of a severe nipple tweaking, because the vehicles seem to magically jump positions between the quick cuts, which is hard for me to swallow like an Asian school girl in a tribal gangbang... Warning! this gag may have offended some or all of the people viewing and should not be taken as racism on the author's part, but as just another example of his unfunny sense of humor.

As if the continuity and physical acting of the road rage stuff wasn't enough to turn you off, the story-based physics are also so far off the mark that they're droppin' nukes on Massachusetts when they were aiming for Rhode Island. Examples? (1) The moving truck is sent careening from the road when Frank unloads a few rounds of shot into it's storage compartment, then adds a couple of speed holes to the passenger side door. Those magic bullets, not just for turning presidential officials' heads into corn beef hash anymore! (2) When the pick-up refuses to back off despite the vanquishing of it's much larger octane burning brethren by the unstoppable juggernaut of a motor home (seriously, it's almost like watching David vs. Goliath, only this time David's the bad guy), it's sent head long and high speed off of a bridge and into a river. It's a good thing it lands in the river too, as the truck itself EXPLODES UPON IMPACT with the guardrail... must've been a Chevy...

Not far up the road, our heroes run smack into another roadblock, this time a school bus had been side-swiped by a pedestrian auto. Luckily though, Frank is a little more alert than his buddies and doesn't buy a school bus on the road on a Sunday, and trucks straight through! HA! TAKE THAT PUBLIC EDUCATION!! HIGHER LEARNING BE DAMNED!!! The next chase scene begins and away we go. This time a small gang of cars gather to attack the motorized monster, including several gnats who jump onto the beast and attempt sabotaging the wheels, only to be discarded via shotgun blast and a low hanging overpass that makes me laugh in warm reminiscence of Dennis Hopper's fate in Speed. Watch him fly! Heh heh. This scene of course is not to be without it's own visual errors and badly timed pyrotechnics either, as we see (1) Roger blows up a couple of cars with exploding canteens of gasoline, even though he should only have one he took from that flying Satanist with the splitting Bayer™ strength headache, not that this would explain how a bag of gasoline would explode in his hand, NOR how it would send piece of flaming debris flying everywhere like it were a molotov cocktail. (2) One car, already in the process of starting a corkscrew, explodes AFTER two of it's tires had already left the ground... good example of BAD timing. (3) Satanists must recruit a lot of stunt drivers into their dark ranks, as made example of when one of their evil pick-up trucks is put up on two wheels... and the driver holds it for 60 to 70 yards before finally falling to his side when he hits a discarded dirt bike... that he clearly turns a hard right so he can go out of his way to hit it... excellent drivers yes, intelligent drivers, uhm, not on your life...

Following one last barrel rolled car, it looks like a clear road into Happyland for our heroes from here on out. Back on their way to Amarillo, the four must pull off down a second secluded road (as if they didn't learn their lesson the first time?) when darkness falls and their headlights don't work. Safe in the self-imposed delusion that their danger is over and safety is within arms reach, they settle in for a drink and a good night's sleep... until the cloaked, chanting Texans reveal themselves from the depths of darkness, highlighted by a lovely torched Joshua Tree and surrounding the Winnebago of doom with a ring rhombus of fire as ominous finale music plays and the end credits roll... and evil triumphs again, heh heh. The worst part? Now the library will never get their reference books on witchcraft back. Hope the Satanists have additional copies, otherwise they won't know what to do come Anti-Christmas and they'll have to abandon their community hobby in favor of barn raisin' or 4H... provided someone hasn't already stolen their 4H manual on raising emu...

Okay, this movie... this movie... There were things that stood out, like the great camera work and... well, I guess the acting was okay... The story is something that's been done time and again, more recently with the Tim Thomerson cameo vehicle Devil's Prey, but it's the little touches that make me smile. Did I say smile? I meant "foam at the mouth with frothy displeasure"... just wanted to make that clear. Someone explain the logistics of these Devil worshipers, who for some reason couldn't have just killed the witnesses back when they were conveniently located in the city limits? There were SO many times they could've taken our heroes out that it wears on my brain why they didn't just take them out here or there along the way: at the gas station where they got their window repaired, at the RV park where they were surrounded by Satanists, and easiest of all, when they were at the police station, first filing the complaint! The cops could have impounded the vehicle for "evidence", set the couples up at a local motor lodge and slaughtered them in their sleep! How is it that a borderline psychotic, schizophrenic, 20-something, college dropout, internet lame-ass like myself is far more astute in the ways of disposing of unwanted guests than an entire population of cultists?!

And now boys and girls, it's time for "Anubis's Tips For The Movie Reviewer To Be". Once more we're treated to the 1970s system of movie ratings, made so much fun by flicks like Barbarella and Tales From The Crypt, where a movie with violence, disturbing images and the always enjoyable naked boobs get labeled under the 'PG' category, which would normally be a bad movie no-no if not for instances like this. So remember kids, if you're under 12, but have some fairly lenient parents, show them Race With The Devil or scan the aisles for any other '70s productions with the 'PG' label next time you hit the video store and be sure to watch it while they're at work to get some cheap preteen thrills that mom and/or dad will be payin' for!... possibly in more ways than one...