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Review

TLA Guide:
David Carradine once again stars in a Bartel-directed trans-American car race comedy. Many feel that this second version is funnier as the comic-book style gets increasingly frantic. While not much of a plot line, the comic vignettes are quite entertaining.

Danger After Dark:
Hmmm...here's a strange notion: producers want to capitalize on the surprise success of a sleeper hit, so they opt to hire the same filmmakers to essentially remake the hit in question, only this time consciously removing the very single ingredient that made the initial film so distinctive and successful. Unfortunately, that's largely what's going on with Cannonball, the action/exploitation movie that director Paul Bartel made for Roger Corman in 1976, to capitalize on the success of the previous year's Bartel-Corman collaboration Death Race 2000. The late Bartel, probably better known as a portly, balding character actor (Gremlins 2, The Usual Suspects, Rock N'Roll High School, Escape from L.A., et al) than as a director (unfortunate, since several of his films -- most notably 1972's Private Parts and 1982's cult favorite Eating Raoul -- are excellent), was principally a comedic filmmaker, and he brought a satirical sensibility to Death Race that elevated the film from being just another Corman car chase drive-in B-movie, and made it into a surprise hit and enduring cult film. Corman, who was apparently initially displeased with the comic nature of Death Race, asked Bartel to helm a second automotive opus - but this time with less emphasis on humor, and more on straightforward action; Bartel reluctantly complied, and while Cannonball is certainly quite far in tone from a Michael Haneke gloomfest or anything, this second effort does suffer from a certain neutering of Bartel's anarchic, iconoclastic wit.

David Carradine (yes, yes, Kill Bill) stars as the eponymous race car driver, attempting to win back his tarnished reputation by participating in a cross-country free-for-all auto race from L.A. to New York (think Gumball Rally or Cannonball Run...or, better yet, don't). As a late-night-viewing slice of 1970s Southern California drive-in cheese, Cannonball is undeniably satisfying, its vehicular antics less interesting than its bizarre cast of characters and offbeat cameos: in addition to Bartel and Corman appearing in small roles, Corman stock directors Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, and Jonathan Kaplan appear, and -- in one scene that might make an impressionable viewer doubt their sanity -- Martin Scorsese and Sylvester Stallone play mafiosos who try to cheer up Bartel on the subject of his weight. And Bartel does manage to integrate some comedic elements into the generic car chase material, most notably another reliably amusing turn by Gerrit Graham as country western singer Perman Waters. But Cannonball is ultimately a rather disappointingly pedestrian follow-up to Death Race, a film with a similar storyline that managed to be much more original in approach.

Discussing the film during the interview that appears on the DVD, Carradine also isolates a serious flaw in the film that rightly troubled him, namely that this otherwise breezy, tongue-in-cheek genre picture climaxes with a massive multi-car freeway pile-up in which it is implied that dozens of innocent drivers uninvolved with the race would likely be killed or seriously injured. Ironically, Bartel could have gotten away with such a sequence in the more imaginative and stylized Death Race, but it's just one more element that doesn't really gel in this film, marking Cannonball as a sporadically diverting B-movie from the era, but little more.