After years of viewing constant cinematic monsters, Race with the Devil is the first film in a long time to give me not only chills, but thrills and spills. A classic of ’70s satanic film starring Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as a pair of motorcycle enthusiasts who run afoul of demon cultists on vacation, it awoke those sleeping memories of farm-boy fears growing up in rural Texas.
Sure, nothing like this ever happened to me but, possibly due to numerous episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that said it would, I was always terrified of robed devil worshippers in our old pasture during the dark ages of the satanic panic; Race really does play into those night terrors the only way a flick written by exploitation engineer Lee Frost possibly could.
Taking their (then) state-of-the-art RV off-road for a drunken night with their wives near a familiar Texas river, in the distance a group of Luciferians not only hold a typical nude ritual, but sacrifice a woman to whatever gods they choose to worship. When Fonda and Oates get spotted, they take off in a pulse-pounding race where, it turns out, everyone in Texas is a damn satanist.
From local swimming pools to area bus accidents, the sweet RV gets torn to shreds as devilish evildoers jump from trucks to smash out the windows, douse with gasoline and, saddest of all, to hang whatever random animal is just hanging out. With nowhere to escape to, you can bet this’ll have a completely downbeat Fonda-era conclusion, though it is creepily earned.
Both Fonda and Oates are, of course, always watchable, but it’s the killer script by the aforementioned Frost — of Love Camp 7 and The Thing with Two Heads fame — and his usual collaborator, Wes Bishop, that is a true test of suspenseful fear and unabashed terror that, like an unearthed memory, has unwillingly taken me back to a freaky time when followers of the cloven hoof were around every corner and there was nothing I could do about it. —Louis Fowler