download the new version for ipod Death Drive: Racing Thrill

Though quite different in tone and style, the Fast and Furious movies owe a lot to this bubbly cult classic. Most importantly, the central heist and its ludicrous aftermath are delightfully well-executed.

It’s an odd, silly little movie, but it’s filled with charming bits, from Noel Coward as an aristocratic gangster to Benny Hill as a pervy prof to Quincy Jones’s jazzy score. “ You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” Cockney con man Michael Caine, recently released from the clink, puts together a truly ludicrous heist to steal $4 million in Mafia gold bullion from the middle of Turin using Mini Coopers. Give him a hot rod, and he’s suddenly cooler. The film may not have the authentic details of those classic car movies that would start to come out a decade or so later, but Mitchum is, and will always be, the coolest cat onscreen. This wasn’t a fanciful movie creation it was an actual subculture. In this classic 1958 noir set in the world of illegal mountain moonshiners, Robert Mitchum plays a young vet working as a transporter - one of “those wild and reckless men, who transport illegal whisky from its source to its point of distribution,” using souped-up cars. Plus, let’s face it, the soundtrack is cool.

And using an almost comically inexpressive Ryan Gosling (playing a stunt-driver-cum-getaway-driver, not unlike Ryan O’Neal in The Driver), he builds elaborate, deadpan set pieces that are unnerving in the way they promise graphic, brutal horrors that the film only occasionally shows. Director Nicolas Winding Refn knows how to shoot violence, but more important, he knows how to anticipate violence.

This movie isn’t quite the masterpiece it was billed as at the time, but it is a fascinating blend of pop influences - the terse gearhead classics of the ’70s, the New Age stylings of the ’80s, the hip irony of the millennial era. Directed by Elliot Silverstein, this cult horror flick was a late-show mainstay: Any kid switching channels late at night in the ’80s when those ominous “Dies Irae” chords came on knew he or she was in for something special. But that’s kind of its genius, too: Because this car does all sorts of things a car could never actually do, you never quite know what to expect. Utterly ridiculous, at times laughably so. A black automobile, presumably from the depths of Hell, terrorizes a small town, and it’s local lawman James Brolin’s job to stop it. This is basically Jaws with a car, and it’s just as loony as that sounds.

Download the new version for ipod Death Drive: Racing Thrill