VanNuysBlvd

Van Nuys Blvd. (1979)

So the copy of Van Nuys Boulevard that I have is from the Drive-in Experience box set volume 3. Included on the DVD are a Popeye cartoon (lame) and some trailers. You can either just watch the movie or get the drive-in “experience”. This means watching the Popeye cartoon (did I mention it was lame?) and then being treated to some trailers. The first trailer is for a stock car movie called Hell on Wheels that I have absolutely no interest in. But then I never figured out why watching someone make a left hand turn for three hours was fun anyway. Then we get a trailer for the 80s flick Chauffer, starring Deborah Foreman. Two things here, one I must see this movie and two Deborah Foreman was incredibly hot. The trailers are finished off with another 80s sex comedy called The Beach Girls. Never seen it, but it looks like something I would have enjoyed when I was in high school. So now I guess we should get onto the movie.

The movie opens with a happy go lucky kid named Bobby who is completely bored with his hometown. While watching the T.V. he sees a report about the cruise nights along Van Nuys Boulevard where the cool kids get together and hang out. So he packs up his smoking cool van and takes off to check out the scene. When he arrives he meets up with cool characters like Moon, Camille, Chooch, and others when they all end up spending the night in jail together. After quickly bonding they head off to an amusement park, go dancing, have a drag race, and Bobby falls in love with groovy chick Moon. After crashing his van to show Moon his devotion they all live happily ever after.

Listen most of these movies made for the drive-ins by the smaller companies (in this case Crown International Pictures) just weren’t very good. Once in a while you find one that is way better than it should be and sometimes, like is the case with this movie, they are so bad that you question why you sit thru them. Of course in my case I do so in order to protect you, my readers from doing the same. This movie is a mess that really doesn’t have a narrative. It is more like a series of funny situations that are really only connected together by a couple of characters coming and going. I suppose if I found some of them funny I would have maybe liked the movie more, but I didn’t so there you go. The humor ranges from a boyfriend that gets in bed with the girls parents on accident (not as funny as it sounds) to gag with a cop being handcuffed to his car that goes on way too long. Speaking of long this movie also has a couple of scenes with people driving around endlessly (so much so they start to recycle the footage!). After a while I was bored to death. Of course the other staple of this sort of drive-in flick is the nudity. Now that the movie does pretty good, never going too long without showing some skin. But for me no amount of nudity can save a bad movie, and this is a bad movie.

There really isn’t much acting to be done in this one, so the cast really doesn’t figure much in either the movie or for my review. The movie does make far too much use of a single disco tune that even someone who is a fan of disco music (not me for sure) will find annoying.

I got the distinct feeling that this movie was trying to be a disco version of American Graffiti with some teen sex comedy stuff tossed in for good measure. Maybe someone should have tried to spend some time writing a script.

1 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer