Race with the Devil

Plot synopsis:
Roger Marsh and Frank Stewart own a successful motorcycle dealership in San Antonio, Texas. Together, with their wives Kelly and Alice, along with Roger and Kelly’s small dog, they leave San Antonio in a recreational vehicle (RV) for a much anticipated ski vacation in Aspen, Colorado.
Along the way, they set up camp in a desolate meadow of central Texas, where Roger and Frank race their motorcycles together. Later that night after their wives retire to the RV, the men witness what turns out to be a Satanic ritual human sacrifice a short distance from their campsite across a river.
After being chased by the Satanists and barely escaping with their lives, they report the incident to Sheriff Taylor, who investigates their report but attempts to convince them that they probably only saw hippies killing an animal. Unbeknownst to the sheriff, Roger steals a sample of dirt stained with the murder victim's blood, intent on delivering it to the authorities in Amarillo. At the same time, the wives find a cryptic message-a rune-pinned to the broken back window while cleaning, and steal books about occultism from a local library to further research the incident, unknowingly spied on by an unseen man in a red truck. One such library book reveals that the ritual is what Satanists often perform to gain magical powers. As the foursome leaves town, the sheriff notices a red truck that begins to follow them making it clear that he is either aware or part of the Satanic cult.
When the couples arrive at a trailer park, Kelly is stared at by its residents while in a swimming pool and wants to return home. A couple at the park invites them to dinner. While at the restaurant/nightclub, Kelly is stared at menacingly by one of the musicians. When they return from dinner at the club, they discover that Kelly's dog has been killed and hanged causing them to immediately leave the park. Shortly afterwards, they're forced to fight off two rattlesnakes planted in their RV by the cultists. The frightened Kelly and Alice begins to scream and goes off in a panic, causing Frank to accidentally drive into a tree before the snakes are killed. The next day Kelly's dog is buried. Roger and Frank then purchased a shotgun and head towards Amarillo while being spied on by a steadily increasing number of cultists who seem to be networked throughout numerous small Texas towns. When Roger tries to call long distance for the highway patrol, he finds one dead payphone and another with a "bad connection" and is told long distance service is down throughout their towns by a "big wind from up north".
The couples then leave for Amarillo and staged a showdown with the cult members during a high-speed chase that pits their RV against numerous trucks and cars. Roger and Frank kill and injure most of the attackers and escape, including from a school bus trick "accident" that Frank sees through since it's done on a Sunday.
The foursome stop in a field at nightfall as they cannot continue until morning since the RV’s headlights has been damaged during the chase. They begin to celebrate when they pick up a radio signal coming from Amarillo. In the middle of their celebration, the foursome hears chanting outside the RV and find themselves surrounded by cult members wearing black robes with hoods, including the sheriff and the couple they had dinner with. The film ends as the cultists light a ring of fire around the RV trapping the couples inside while the chanting continues.

Tags: cult, gothic

Review:
We sit back to watch Race With the Devil, an obvious B-grade horror flick we've heard great things about from friends.I haven't seen Jack Starrett's RWD since that night in the summer of '75, but I distinctly remember how good it was, how merrily hell-bent-for-leather the action was, and the way it tied into our goofy fear of Satanic cults and human chains thirty years ago.
This flick was shot in the southwest, but with all the rural versions of urban legends clanking about the Idaho Panhandle, Race With the Devil seemed like a home movie.I believe the movie made a gob of money that year.I recommend Race With the Devil in no small part for the fact that it's obvious the people involved are having a great time, a must for a low-budget movie.
This is classic, exhilarating *and* suspenseful drive-in entertainment, man!Real-life good friends Peter Fonda and Warren Oates play buddies Roger and Frank, who embark on a vacation with wives Kelly (Lara Parker) and Alice (Loretta Swit) that includes, or will include, activities such as camping, motorcycle racing, and, hopefully, skiing.
This will have the audience thinking, "Just how many people are in on, or could be in on, this whole damn thing?" You'll wonder, too, if there's *anybody* trustworthy in the cast of characters.Particularly exciting scenes are those where Roger and Frank have to rush to get their vehicle going again before the villains can catch up, and where they and their wives must deal with an attack by a pair of rattlers.
Oates and Fonda entertain with brisk and airy performances, though Swit and Parker are really only directed to be screaming banshees waiting to be saved by their burly men.Best served with lashings of Bourbon and Coke, and not designed to be scrutinised for moral or ethical worth, just enjoy the ride and try and stay one step ahead of Old Nick.
Not a classic movie perhaps, but a good little thriller with some very tense moments (like the fight with the snakes - I wonder how they did that) and a few spectacular car chases (the stuntwork is excellent).
Peter Fonda and Warren Oates create two believable, down-to-earth characters that you can easily root for; on the other hand, the women are reduced to useless screamers during the moments of danger, in what I seriously consider the biggest annoyance of this film.
It is a very creepy and believeable film, and I've got to commend a movie that makes car chases exciting when I can't remember the last time I ever gave a crap about a single one.
Race With the Devil is a seventies road movie/satanic horror film about a group of holidaymakers who get more than they bargained for when they witness the brutal murder of a young girl by a group of devil worshippers.
Race With the Devil was clearly never meant to be a shocking horror film, as most of the movie is spent dealing up suspense, and this is good also as it ensures that Ride With the Devil is one exciting trip through the wastelands of America.
The acting isn't brilliant, but cult stars Warren Oates and Peter Fonda make for enjoyable leads as they try their best to stay alive.
Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit (M*A*S*H) and Lara Parker (Dark Shadows) are the couples in question, and R.G. Armstrong is the local sheriff they enlist to help them.
The ritual was suitable creepy (I loved the shot of the fire being started, as well as the flaming tree later on) and the chase scenes were tense, exciting, and action-packed (great stunt work).
It's the old cliché - they don't make them like this anymore.Peter Fonda, Warren Oates and their wives are on vacation in their RV, finding one desolate spot to spend the night on their way to their ski vacation.
Starts off a little slow, but once you see the bonfire start, things pick up.Roger (Peter Fonda) and his buddy, Frank (Warren Oates) take their wives, Alice (Loretta Swit) and Kelly (Laura Parker) on a nice vacation in a large motor-home.
Does tick quite a few boxes of the period: satanic rituals, luxury campers, motorbikes, car chases and stunts (did they forget kung fu?) but this is one of the best - if not thee best - horror of it's type.The best laid plans of mice and men go to hell when our heroes-like-zeros spy on some Devil worshippers just to get a hazy flash of a young woman's upper charms.
And when you start to think: well that was that, now things will go flat - you're just a wrong person living in negative town.This film has so much: the satanic thang, the automobile chases / fight action, the relentless threat, and Polanski-esk paranoia and claustrophobia.
I found it highly entertaining, a little campy yes, but over-all very enjoyable.The satanic ritual scene is great (Loretta Switt's hair-brained act of turning on the light and hollering never ceases to annoy the hell out of me), nerve wracking escape and subsequent encounters with the cult members fuel the energy and suspense.
I'm sure this movie did well on its initial release because all the elements were there, and the trailer would have made anyone pack up the car and head down to the local drive-in.Peter Fonda had "Dirty Mary Crazy Larry", Warren Oates had "Two-Lane Blacktop", and now here they are on the run from murderous Satanists.
RACE WITH THE DEVIL is a solid horror action movie that takes place entirely on the road.
These films, albeit forgotten at the time, are now being rediscovered as minor gems, and frequently distributed through satellite as they have encountered a new popularity.Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, Peter Fonda and Lara Parker form the believable cast of RV vacationers, traveling from Texas to Aspen.
Race with the Devil is a 1975 occult thriller and action film starring Peter Fonda (Easy Rider), Warren Oates (Two-Lane Blacktop), Loretta Swit (M*A*S*H) and Lara Parker (Dark Shadows).
The film was a B-movie hybrid of the horror, action, and car chase genres.
A remake was planned in 2005, written by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan, with Chris Moore (of Project Greenlight fame) to serve as director SUMMARY: Roger Marsh (Peter Fonda) and Frank Stewart (Warren Oates), with their wives Kelly and Alice (Lara Parker, Loretta Swit), leave San Antonio in a recreational vehicle for vacation in Colorado.
Now "classic film" great, but great as in extremely entertaining and fun.Peter Fonda and Warren Oates (excellent jobs) are best pals who take their wives on a vacation in their massive motorhome.
Fonda's wife has some good creepy scenes especially as she realizes there's definitely something not right with the people they encounter.If all that weren't enough, the film explodes into a series of fantastic car chases and crashes as the devil worshippers try to stop the couples with vehicular muscle.
Unseen Gem. Race with the Devil (1975) *** (out of 4) Peter Fonda and Warren Oates take their wives on a camping trip in a RV but they witness a Satanic cult killing and soon the cult are after them.
En route to Colorado in a top-of-the-range RV, two married couples (Peter Fonda & Kelly Marsh and Warren Oates & Loretta Swit) decide to spend the night parked up by a tranquil stretch of river that offers an unobstructed view of the beautiful surrounding countryside.
Unfortunately, it also offers a pretty good view of the Satanic human sacrifice that takes place on the opposite bank of the river; when the devil worshippers conducting the ritual realise that their activities have been observed, they set off in pursuit of the terrified foursome, who waste no time in fleeing the scene.The rest of the film is a masterful exercise in suspense, paranoia and excitement as the horrified holiday-makers attempt to make it to the safety of civilisation, unable to trust anyone they meet along the way.
Director Jack Starret ignores the fact that the plot is occasionally rather preposterous (we are supposed to believe that almost everyone in the area is in league with the devil and that the antagonists are able to set up elaborate traps at a moments notice) and instead wisely concentrates on delivering the requisite thrills and spills; this he does brilliantly, slowly but surely cranking up the tension until the frantic action-packed final act in which our beleaguered friends are forced to fight back, with spectacular results.The cast are uniformly excellent, with Fonda and Oates ably playing the stoic and resourceful heroes, who cope manfully with everything from rattlers in the RV to all-out road war, whilst Marsh and Swit are totally convincing as their ineffectual wives who handle their predicament by screaming hysterically at every available opportunity.
Seasoned character actor R.G. Armstrong also puts in a fine performance as the local sheriff who is just a little too blasé about the possibility of Satanists in his backyard.From the creepy-as-hell sacrifice scene to the unforgettable 'shock' ending, Race With The Devil is top-notch 70s movie-making and really deserves greater recognition than it currently seems to get.
I've just seen Race With the Devil for the first time and found it very creepy in parts.Two couples head off into the countryside in their new motor home on a vacation, which turns out to be the vacation from hell.
They then set off again and just when they think they are safe, several vehicles try to push them off the road and they then leave the main road just as it is getting dark and then loads of Satanists appear and light a fire around the camper...Race With the Devil has some good chase sequences and, at times, a haunting music score.The cast includes Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swift, Lara Parker and R G Armstrong.
There is a thread of innocence running through them and even though they are low budget they are enjoyable to watch.I think of Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and The Great Texas Dynamite Chase which I believe were made around the same time although the script and acting here are better.
This movie is about 2 vacationing couples who are going from San Antonio, TX to Aspen, CO to go skiing and they bought a $36,000 motorhome, I bet you that $36,000 would be like $80,000 nowadays, once when they stop for a night, they see a bunch of satanists across the lake and they witnessed a murder and they're caught by the satanists and they're on the run, meanwhile the satanists follow them everywhere they go, then they stop somewhere else the following night and their dog Ginger is killed by a bunch of satanists and the people who were at the campground didn't hear anything about it, then we get to the best part of the whole movie when they get into a hot pursuit with the satanists and we see a bunch of car wrecks like one truck flies off the road and it catches on fire in mid-air or a Oldsmobile Delmont 88 doing a bunch of flips.
But this film is well done and worth watching.Peter Fonda and Warren Oates play men taking their wives skiing in a new camper on vacation.The film is slickly directed with enough action to keep viewers interested.
Peter Fonda and Warren Oats head this slick and often chilling chase movie, that has one of the most sinister endings you'll see.
During the first night of their long-anticipated motor home vacation with end destination Colorado, two couples witness the murder of a young girl during a bizarre satanic cult ritual.
After witnessing a human sacrifice there, they become the prey across the back country.In the spirit of road thrillers like "Duel" and "Vanishing Point," with dashes of down-home horrors ala "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Race with the Devil" is a solid low-budget horror movie that has more or less been forgotten by time—its devotees are either people who saw it as children in the eighties on television, or genre fans to whose notice it came over the internet.
Contemporaneously, it likely relied on the star power of Fonda and Oates, but over forty years later, it stands as an effective and thrilling slice of the era that is still suspenseful; and while it's chock full of moments that will have the audience cheering, there is still a dark underpinning to the entire film that both begins and ends it, rendering it difficult to forget.
Roger (Peter Fonda  Easy Rider) and Frank (Warren Oates  The Wild Bunch) are on holiday with their wives (Lara Parker  Dark Shadows and Loretta Swit of TV's M.A.S.H.) in a lovely $30,000 motor home (a microwave and 4-channel stereo even  swanky) hoping to do some skiing in Colorado and maybe a bit of dirt biking along the way.
Released in 1975, "Race with the Devil" stars Peter Fonda, Lara Parker, Warren Oates and Loretta Swit as two couples harassed in their RV by a group of Satanists in central Texas after accidentally witnessing a sacrificial murder.This is a decent horror/thriller with quite a bit of action, mostly of the car-chase variety, but it's held back by its lack of depth and routine style.
Warren Oates and Peter Fonda give solid performances as their characters and wives are being chased by satan worshipers.Overall a satisfying flicks that has alot of filler.
Two married couples (Peter Fonda/Lara Parker and Warren Oates/Loretta Swift) take a recreational vehicle on vacation, heading for Colorado.
Peter Fonda, Lara Parker, Warren Oates, & Loretta Switt star in this supernatural hybrid horror/chase picture about two couples taking a trip in their RV from Texas to Colorado when they accidentally come upon a group of Satanists whose human sacrifice they interrupt.
They could have been better written.The background music, while very effective in the scary parts, has a generic, TV-movie quality in the slower scenes, and some of the supporting characters are kind of silly (like the sheriff, deputy and librarian).There is a good sense of action, with lots of chase scenes and some motorcycle riding (although there maybe should have been a motorcycle chase scene with the satanists).All in all, a somewhat dated, but much better than average occult/action film which still holds up very well today..
A very inspired and briskly effective handy dandy genre-blending combo of your typically creepy devil worship fright flick and a slam-bang exciting Southern-fried downhome car chase action thriller about two vacationing married couples traveling cross country in a deluxe, self-contained luxury RV who accidentally witness a black-robed Satanist cult in the bloodthirsty act of making a human sacrifice.
The cult, whose members are frightfully legion, immediately realize that their allegedly secret ceremony was seen and pretty soon everything goes to hell, with pay phones proving to be inoperative, the couples' dog getting strung up, rattlesnakes springing forth from the cabinets, and the cult giving hot, tire-squalling, dust-kicking, metal-twisting pursuit in pick-up trucks.Directed with customary "no muss, no fuss, no pretense whatsoever" headlong efficient battering ram style by B-movie ace Jack ("Run, Angel, Run!," "Cleopatra Jones") Starrett, who took over the direction a few days into the shoot after original director Lee Frost got canned by the producers for doing too much in-camera editing and refusing to overshoot a single scene (Frost still receives a co-screen writing credit for the tightly constructed script he penned with longtime collaborator Wes Bishop, who also co-wrote Frost's "The Thing With Two Heads" and "Dixie Dynamite"), "Race With the Devil" works like a charm, thanks to Starrett's fiercely economical directorial finesse, Robert Jessup's lively, constantly active cinematography, breakneck pacing, Leonard Rosenman's pile-driving score, dynamically staged car chases (the final chase with several Satanists hopping onto the speeding RV especially smokes), punchy editing, an increasingly tense and moody sense of all-pervasive dread and paranoia, fine acting all around, and a splendidly black, nihilistic surprise twist ending.After teaming up in the excellent, unusually sensitive feminist Western "The Hired Hand" and Tom McGuane's terrifically off-kilter seriocomic delight "92 in the Shade," Peter Fonda and Warren Oates in their third cinematic pairing have developed a warm, easy, comfortable rapport that translates beautifully well on screen, making the friendship between their characters seem completely believable and engaging.
The cinematography at times is quite flashy and jumpy, with plenty of zoom in to capture the character's expressions.There are solid and down-to-earth performances by Warren Oates, Peter Fonda, Lara Parker and Loretta Swit as the two couples.
It works real well.And it's not just the two icons of the road movie, Fonda and Oates, who make the film such a classic.
The Satanists will stop at nothing to keep the couples from escaping.Race with the Devil is an excellent mix of horror and action.
In the film, two couples--Warren Oates (who just about steals the picture for me) & Loretta Swit (how nice to see her away from the Pusan Perimeter for a change!) and Fonda & Lara Parker--pack some dirt bikes aboard their new $36K motor home and drive off into the wilds of rural Texas (which, ever since a certain 1974 film involving chain saws, has seemed like a pretty scary place).
This is the kind of 70's creepy that I would rank very highly up there with 'Burnt Offerings'.While on a winter vacation/road trip with their wives stoic sexual beast, Peter Fonda, and lovable curmudgeon, Warren Oates, accidentally witness a girl being murdered by a satanic cult.
One of the quintessential Satanist films of the 1970s, RACE WITH THE DEVIL is a B-movie which is up there with the best.
Great fun B-movie drive-in type action thriller (not bad car chase scene).
Starring Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as the likeable leads, 'Race with the Devil' is about two vacationing couples who find themselves pursued by a satanic cult after witnessing a ritualistic murder.
Any movie in which Peter Fonda and Warren Oates are the GOOD GUYS has to be!