Something I’ve never confessed: I fell asleep during the opening credits of Easy Rider. It was neither the first nor last time I’ve slept through a pillar of the American pantheon; my blasphemous home-video narcolepsy is nothing I’m proud of, and I avert my eyes when others join in chorus, extolling Hopper’s work as the apotheosis of Sixties countercultural celluloid expression.

You snooze, you lose. Especially when it comes to the appreciation of crappy spin-offs of the all-American road movie—my lack of nostalgic connection to Easy Rider has proven detrimental in my encounters with car-chase flicks starring Peter Fonda from the following decade. And so, in my boundless ignorance, I can’t make sense of Anchor Bay’s decision to release John Hough’s Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and Jack Starrett’s Race With the Devil on DVD.

Feeling confounded and dissatisfied after a cursory viewing of Hough’s film, I looked for clues to its merit within the cover art. According to an unnamed source at the Baltimore City Paper, cited amidst splashy graphics on the Dirty Mary Crazy Larry DVD box, “You can taste the sweat, feel the heat, and smell the gasoline right up until the best ending any movie ever had!” Preposterous: Baltimore has child labor laws that prevent them from staffing their weeklies with fourth-graders. Replete with syrupy foreshadowing, the “plot twist” in question employs the most audaciously lazy form of conflict resolution fathomable—freak accident kills everyone, credits roll. Race with the Devil, though with a different writer-director team, mysteriously ends in identical tragedy (although in this case, Anchor Bay declined to fabricate critical acclaim for the back of the box).

If you must know, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is a car-chase flick about the robbery of a generic Wal-Mart-type store in the South. While the brazenly unpunctuated title suggests a sexy couple-in-crime, the bandits are actually a triumvirate. There’s a third wheel, Deke, whose presence is superfluous and confusing. Fonda and Susan George are appropriately costumed for the parts of ex-NASCAR driver and bad-news jailbait but, for reasons unexplained, Deke (Adam Roarke) dresses as a beat poet.

Touted (believably) as featuring longest high-speed car-chase in history, DMCL is rife with explosions and stunts of derring-do, replete with a bonus crash-course in NASCAR linguistics (“Truck got in his way so he pancaked off a dozer ramp!”). Fonda’s performance, which mainly consists of gum-chewing, is forgettable; Susan George steals the show as the borderline-retarded Mary, a sexualized version of the Tagalong Li’l Sis who seems to have escaped from a John Waters movie. With a mouthful of horse teeth and a voice like a car alarm, Mary may be one of the purest Ugly Americans in cinema history, though through it all she manages not to cross into the realm of lovable antihero. There’s something about Mary (also referred to as Dingbat, Supercrotch, and Rover) that makes it easy to forget the facts about Susan George: a) at this tender age, she’s already given the most important performance of her career in Straw Dogs and b) she’s fucking British.

Fonda’s costar in Race with the Devil is another face familiar from the Peckinpah set, Warren Oates. The star-studded cast, which also includes M*A*S*H‘s Loretta Swit and Lara Parker from Dark Shadows, is the film’s only highlight. The premise, a camping vacation ruined by Satanists, has crossover potential, but Starrett abandons his flaccid effort at scaring the audience and allows the story to unfold like a sped-up version of The Long, Long Trailer (1954).

Both DVDs boast an abyss of extra features to suffer through, including director commentary, making-of documentary featurettes, multiple trailers, radio spots, and cast bios that read like Russian novels. I spent some time poring over this claptrap, searching for answers, and finally discovered the truth: When Dirty Mary Crazy Larry was released on video, it surpassed Easy Rider‘s domestic rentals. Okay, Anchor Bay. Loud and clear. I’ve paid my penance to Peter Fonda.
—LEAH CHURNER