Full Moon by the Numbers #2: Crash! (1976)

Cody is making his way through all 400+ movies made by Charles Band. This time, Band mixtures horror and vehicular mayhem.

Car race and chase movies were big business in the 1970s: Smokey and the Bandit, The Car, Race with the Devil, Carquake; Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, and a whole lot more. Not all of the movies I just listed had been released by 1976, but the car movie craze was already in full swing – so it makes a lot of sense that filmmaker Charles Band’s inner circle suggested that he make a car movie as his third feature film.

Band had wanted to get his career started with a horror movie, but was convinced to make his directorial debut with a comedy instead: a parody of Last Tango in Paris called Last Foxtrot in Burbank. That had been a disaster, but Band got to make a horror movie as his second feature, producing Mansion of the Doomed while Last Foxtrot in Burbank star Michael Pataki took the helm. He was open to the idea of making a car movie – but if he was going to do so, he was going to put his own twist on it. And that twist was to make a car horror movie.

Band said he didn't direct Mansion of the Doomed because he wasn't ready to take on something like that, but he was ready for the challenge when Crash! rolled around, and made this a much bigger movie than its predecessors.

Written by Marc Marais, the story begins with a wealthy man named Marc Denne (José Ferrer) – an odd choice of character for a writer to name after himself – attempting to kill his wife Kim (Sue Lyon) because their relationship has crumbled since an accident confined him to a wheelchair. 

Ferrer was 64 and looking every minute of it when this movie was made, but Marc is so bitter and hateful toward his much-younger wife (Lyon turned 30 in 1976) about his condition, you’d think he was as youthful and vigorous as she is. There’s implication that she was accidentally responsible for the event that crippled him, but damn, you don’t have to be such a bitch toward the woman who loves you, especially when the audience is given no reason to understand why she would ever love him. He’s an evil bastard from the moment we meet him, but she cares enough about him that she even buys him an occult trinket from an open-air market (from a character played by Reggie Nalder, who was the lead vampire in Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot) because he’s into that sort of thing. He doesn’t even accept the gift when she offers it... and that decision will come back to haunt him.

His murder attempt is quite an epic one. As Kim drives away from their home in her black convertible, Marc sics his doberman on her... and the dog has to run a long distance to catch up with the convertible before it jumps into the vehicle and attacks her. Kim crashes her car and ends up hospitalized, suffering from amnesia.

Eventually Marc and Kim will be reunited so he can try to finish her off, but in the meantime we get several scenes of a driver-less convertible motoring through the countryside, causing crash after crash, killing citizens and the police officers who give chase. By the end of the film,  we'll find out that this car is Kim's convertible, and that the occult trinket, which she added to her keyring after her husband rejected it, is now in control of the car.

These trinkets can make anything with wheels come to life; in one scene Marc and his dog are even attacked by his wheelchair. Still, the explanation causes some confusion, because by the time we see Kim crash her convertible due to the doberman attack we've already seen a couple scenes of the car driving along by itself, causing crashes and deaths. 

There's some non-linear trickery going on in here, to the detriment of the story. Mansion of the Doomed also got off to a shaky start due to some non-linear storytelling, and Crash! goes even further with it. This movie has probably confused the hell out of a lot of people over the decades.

In between scenes of car smash-ups and Marc scheming against his wife (at one point, he even tries to finish her off while she’s unconscious in the hospital), Kim is taken under the wing of Dr. Gregg Martin (John Ericson), who’s trying to figure out what’s going on with her. Who is she? What is this trinket she had in her hand? Why does she occasionally have demonic freak-outs where her eyes turn red? His investigation brings him into contact with a couple of occult experts: genre regular John Carradine and, what do you know, a wealthy fellow named Marc Denne, who makes no indication that he knows the woman Martin has in his care.

Honestly, anything with the human characters is kind of a drag, but the car crashes are really cool, and – after decades of watching very low budget Full Moon movies – I was quite impressed that Band was able to pull these things off at the beginning of his career. Anyone who likes watching stuntmen smash up vehicles will probably like at least some moments of Crash! For a movie that was made in three months on a budget of $300,000, it has some dazzling moments of carnage.

Band hadn’t made any money from Last Foxtrot in Burbank or Mansion of the Doomed, but he still had plenty of disposable income on hand because his side hustle was quite successful. He was selling people leather-bound copies of the New York Times that were published on the day they were born, and apparently a lot of people wanted these birth date newspapers. Some of his New York Times money went into the budget of Crash!, allowing him to buy all of the cars that are used for the crash scenes. I didn’t count them, but Band says it was something in the range of fifty cars. He would buy these vehicles in his own name, film them being destroyed, then dump them in the nearest junkyard. This turned out to be a bad idea in the long run, because he didn’t realize that any newly purchased vehicle had to be registered with the DMV, whether he had destroyed it minutes after buying it or not. 

There were assessments and fines, and Band soon discovered that he owed the DMV something like $8000. Paying thousands for wrecked vehicles wasn’t something he was interested in doing, so he ignored the bill. And earned a spot on the DMV’s Most Wanted list for years until he finally settled his debt.

Crash! didn't help him pay that debt. It was released by Group 1, the same distributor that was behind Mansion of the Doomed, and Band didn't see any money from this movie, either. Group 1 got his movies in front of audiences, but the distribution deals Band had with them were not beneficial to his bank account.