Not every sophomore movie can be Pulp Fiction, but then, not every film has to be. Sometimes a budding auteur needs a throwaway film or two in order to find their voice and get used to the world of helming a movie made with actuals professionals rather than a bunch of gathered buddies. As Sam Raimi had the negligible experience of Crimewave to bridge the gap between The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, Robert Rodriguez used the little-seen tv movie, Roadracers, to hone his craft in the interim between his homemade debut, El Mariachi, and the far more polished Desperado.
Not only is it a minor goldmine for early appearances from the likes of David Arquette and Rodriguez’s legendary muse, Salma Hayek, but its fairly fascinating watching one of the leading lights of the 90s essentially use a TV movie to get his directorial shit tight before launching into a career full of guitar cases full of guns, vampire titty bars and flawless adaptations of comic book super noir.
Sometime in a kookily exagerated 1950s, we are introduced to Dude Delaney, a leather jacketed, greaser type who predictably has rejected the usual rules of society and drives around in his car sneering at every square he can see. Flanking him is devoted girlfriend, Donna, a mexican girl with white, adopted parents and resident paranoid geek, Nixer, who recently has become utterly obsessed with the movie, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers that he has watched obsessively at the local picture house.
Of course, because Dude is a lone wolf (with a girlfriend and a sidekick), trouble seems to stick to him like shit to a blanket and number one on his hate parade is the disapproving Sarge, who has vowed to run this young punk out of town if it’s the last thing he’ll do. However, ranking at number two is Sarge’s out of control son, Teddy, who vows to get even with our chain-smoking hero after a freak flick of a match sets fire to the hair of his nemesis’ girlfriend’s. To be honest, Teddy doesn’t really need much more of a reason to despise Dude as his dad’s been poisoning him against his rival for years, but every time he makes a move against the brooding greaser, he always seems to end up one step ahead.
However, while the future has never been something that’s interested Dude, the fact that he is able to play the guitar means he has a shot with joining a local rockabilly band he really respects and all of a sudden, he and Donna have chance to leave a town that refuses to understand them. Of course, this wouldn’t be an “angry youth” movie if fate didn’t suddenly swoop down and plant a steel toecap boot square in the squishy testicles of of Dude’s fragile hope and dreams and before you know it, shit goes horribly south for all concerned.
So, like most Robert Rodriguez movies, a quick word of explanation makes the experience far more rewarding, be it the Grindhouse influences of From Dusk Till Dawn or how he donated his body to medical science in order to finance El Mariachi – and Roadracers proves to be no different. Back in the mid-nineties, the Showtime channel decided to stage something called the Rebel Highway series which saw ten directors tasked with picking a title from the filmography of cult 50s producer Samuel Arkoff and then fashioning an entirely new movie that still paid homage to the decade. While other seasoned directors such as Joe Dante and William Friedkin took up the challenge of knocking up a movie based solely on a title in twelve days on a $1.3 million budget, Rodriguez was not only the only young director courted, but his movie kicked the whole season off and when you consider what he achieved with his debut, you can understand why. However, while Roadracers can hardly be described as Rodriguez’s forgotten masterpiece, fans of the director’s work may find this movie a fascinating glimpse into how he went from a guy shooting a movie with his family and friends to the guy who convinced Antonio Banderas to leave off a roof backwards while firing dual pistols.
For a start, that wildly kinetic camera work that’s usually performed by sticking Rodriguez and the camera in a wheelchair and whizzing him around, is in full effect and so is that spiteful, Loony Tunes tone that infused the director’s early work. The movie opens with a scene of a woman sitting in the back of a speeding roadster, utterly unaware that her do is ablaze and the running joke of Dude styling his hair with literal handfuls of grease pays off during a rumble in a roller rink that sees him creating an oil slick by dragging his unfeasibly slippery hair on the ground. In case you haven’t guess, this is a cartoonish, absurd version of all those Rebel Without A Cause type movies that usually sees a disenfranchised youth rage against every authority figure he can see.
As a result, everything, from the characters to the humour is a broad as a barn and barely stops short at plunging into full blown spoofery, but the fact that the director truly loves the time period he’s poking fun at is overwhelmingly obvious. David Arquette’s brooding anti-hero barely enters a single scene without sparking up a cigarette in a way that make John Travolta’s ridiculously cool smoking in Broken Arrow seem relatively sensible, Hayak obviously smulders and William Sadler’s stoney-faced cop could do this stuff in his sleep, but it’s John Hawkes’ Nixer that obviously is the character closest to Rodriguez’s heart. A movie loving oddball who follows Dude around like a puppy, he also waxes lyrical about the his place in eternity using a french fry as a greasy metaphor and handily provides wise cracks when necessary – but his adoration of Don Siegel’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers leads to the movie’s finest moment that offers up a near perfect Kevin McCarthy cameo.
It’s about as deep as a puddle of hair grease and the characters are about as realistic as an episode of Tiny Toons Adventure, but this is obviously all by design – not just because of the stringent rules set by the limited time and budget – but because Rodriguez simply wanted to make an immensely silly movie about a sub genre of film that’s famous for taking itself far too seriously.
Hardly essential Rodriguez – but the music fucking rocks.
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