Monday 5 May 2014

In Hot Pursuit (1977)



Most films, when they have a dangerous stunt to do, employ professional stuntpeople in carefully controlled conditions.  In this movie, they get the cast liquored up and have them do the thing for real.

It's important to understand the above when you watch In Hot Pursuit (also known as Polk Country Pot Plane), because it transforms the movie's many high speed chases and many, many crashes from 'ho-hum' to 'holy hell!'.

And to be honest, the movie needs that frisson of 'lives were really at risk' to lift it.  The parts of the movie where cars and trucks aren't smashing into each other (or in one memorable case, through a house) are not terribly good.  There's a lot of scenes of people driving from place to place, or sitting in cars and waiting for other people.

The plot?  Well, such as it is it's mostly a light action film about a pair of not-terribly bright brothers, Oosh and Doosh, who work as drug couriers in rural Georgia.  Every caper they're involved in seems to go awry in some way, likely because most of their colleagues aren't any smarter than them.  The film was apparently inspired by a real life event in Georgia, where a criminal cartel managed to land a DC-4 on a makeshift runway they'd bulldozed out of a forest mere hours beforehand.  The actual DC-4 in question plays a fairly significant role in the film, and is even billed as a cast member.

At the end of the day, however, this is only worth seeking out if you really, really want to see a lot of cars get genuinely smashed into each other.

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