The Fast and the Cronenberg

That sounds like it's just embarrasing.

I was expecting the car to turn into a pulsating phallus at some point in the movie, but it was not to be. It was a fairly cheesy story, but I think he put together some nice shots of them driving through Canada and the racing footage was really good. The way he shot the cars and the engines showed how much the racing scene means to him. I remember Fangoria doing an interview with him on the set of Nightbreed and the reporter had to wait for thirty minutes. Cronenberg had spotted a grip with a racing magazine and he couldn't continue the interview until he had read all of it. In the commentary, Cronenberg mentions how he did some road racing in his younger days and I found it interesting to listen to him. I had to buy the special edition DVD just to see his two early film, 'Stereo' and 'Crimes of the Future' that are on the second disc. It was cool to see the Cronenberg style develop and the interview with his director of photography covered a lot of his great films. To me, it was a very worthwhile purchase.

laughably bad?

i think thats a bit harsh.

i too saw this only a few days back. the race scenes were remarkably gritty and authentic..
true it was only drag racing, adn theres only so far you can go with that in terms of depth, but i hardly think "laughably bad" is appropriate.

the main actor dude did a good job too, and whereas saxon was your pretty standard villain, he was fun to watch as well. And it wasnt written that badly either.

keep in mind im not comparing it to the rest of cronenbergs filmography, merely judging it for what it is.
Certainly Fast Company sticks out like a sore thumb if one puts it in the greater context.

i just saw Two Lane Blacktop as well, and the races in Fast Company are quite a bit better. (TLB was more than a decade earlier tho, so thats probably that)

i think Fast Company suffered most from the pat hollywood ending.

I dig this cheesy exploitation flick. Saxon makes a great oily villain. So totally different from Cronenberg's other work.

Yeah, and Cronenberg got right back to business after it was made, so it's pretty easy to write off as the unintentionally charming exploitation film that it is (Dig that Springsteen-knockoff theme song! It's so slavish it's got imitation Dan Federici glockenspiel, for God's sake!).

Further, when he talked about it in Chris Rodley's Cronenberg on Cronenberg, he explained that, due to the realities of Canadian film funding at the time, it was almost literally the only film available for him to direct in Canada that year, so with his then-meager reputation he couldn't have done much else besides go south and hit up New World for a job (and if he'd done that, he might have gotten sidetracked and made more shit like this).

Speaking as a completist, the two-disc edition is worth buying, if only for the inclusion of the experimental films, which are so strongly reflective of Cronenberg's style that even if you walked in in the middle of them with no prior explanation, you could recognize them as his.

Crimes of the Future is especially strong. For a largely improvised short film with an amateur cast and no dialogue, it's remarkably clever and often funny, and a great nose-tweaking of trendy '70s dystopias. It's set in a world in which most post-pubescent women have been killed by a brain-degenerating pathogen and the remaining men have had to compensate for the loss of female influence; feyness and sexual ambiguity in dress and manner have been subsumed into standard masculine behavior, and heterosexual pedophilia has grown into a troublingly large subculture. In spite of all this, the film is still full of absurd ideas like the Oceanic Podiatry Institute, a group of psychologists trying to treat paralysis by reviving patients' animal sense-memory of the first land-dwelling organisms. It's great stuff.

I'm intrigued to see Cronenberg's shorts, too. Here's a recent one that just came out on a compilation...

From http://microcinema.com/programResult.php?program_id=268

According to IMDB, "Camera" was created for a film fest back in 2000: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0260776/

If you're into low budget racing movies, check out Jack Hill's "Pit Stop." The Anchor Bay DVD is usually priced around 7 bucks, with a commentary from Jack Hill and Johnny Legend. Surprisingly good story, plus the wonderful Sid Haig plays the bad guy. The only movie I know about car racing on a figure 8 track.

Camera is also included in the new Videodrome criterion disc

i managed to catch it when it made the repertory rounds after the Toronto Film Festival
its quite brilliant

search for it on emule if youre interested.

i have a small 20M divx version which is pretty watchable

That's something you don't read every day...

come to think of it.. thats the only cronenberg flick ive yet to see..

how was it, Wetbones?

I had a blast with this dragster flic. Sure it's far from heavy handed in the Cronenberg sense, but if you want to get analitical, his obsession with machines as extentions of the body (Videodrome, Crash, etc..) is present here.

Saxon's performance was actually effective for me. Sure he's a dumb bastard, but man I hated his character. I loved the totally over blown ending!