Race with the Devil. Jack Starrett, 1975.
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Edition screened: Included on Shout! Factory Double Feature Dirty Mary Crazy Larry/Race with the Devil Blu-ray, released 2013. English language. Runtime approximately 88 minutes.
Summary: Violent killing of animals
Details:
1) A dog has been killed and hanged from a tree, 34:33-34:38. We see bloody fur looking generally like a German Shepherd.
2) Another dog is found, hanging dead from the door of an RV at 56:33. The dog’s body is carried inside and mourned through 57:12.
3) A pair of huge rattlesnakes are discovered in the RV at 58:17. The snake confrontation that follows is extremely tense and violent, including clear images of the snakes being beaten to death through 1:00:50.
Pairing Dirty Mary Crazy Larry with Race with the Devil enhances the perceived quality of the latter somewhat, but it remains a moronic movie. Specifically notable is the dull-witted presentation of ‘witchcraft’ that runs through the film. A midnight Satanic ritual complete with bonfire incantations and a black-masked horned priest is understood as a bunch of nekked jumpin’ around, until it is later explained – several times, with a picture book on the subject – as an Aztecan ritual. Then a piece of paper is found with a threatening note written above some runes. It is explained – several times – that the message written in English is called a ‘rune’ and the strange symbols are a witch’s spell. Sigh.
I realize that films like this were created for drive-in titillation, but really now. Race with the Devil was made eight years after Sybil Leek’s Diary of a Witch gave everyone a working knowledge of Tarot cards and paganism, and during a time when rock stars had grown tired of pretending to be satanists. Yet our hipster costars Peter Fonda and Warren Oates jes’ don’t know what to make of all this-here Tom Foolery.
Race with the Devil begs comparison with a drastically superior film that also prominently features the hanging of two dogs, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011). If nothing else, the comparison makes clear why one should not beg.
1973 Bally Sky Kings in the bar.
