A celebration of Fifties delinquency, Roadracers is an American story about identity and conformity. Appropriately and emphatically, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is playing at the local theatre. This is a brilliant popular culture jam, a combining of visual, narrative, and symbolic elements into a hell boiling over drive-in smash. Hackneyed and predictable, it is a brilliant and funny exploitation movie and very much of its genre. It is the perfect Roger Corman movie, the one he never made himself.
Cinema is visceral.
Ingmar Bergman and Russ Meyer both give me headaches because, despite the differences in their work, their styles are similar. Both overload the screen with meaning Bergman austerely and Meyer excessively. As carefully as he builds his films narratively, he is even more inspired in the way he builds them visually. Rodriguez has style to burn. Roadracers is an exercise, a working out of conceptual ideas but it is also a barreling tribute to its AIP predecessors.