307. The Van

307. The Van (1977)
Director: Sam Grossman
Writers: Robert J. Rosenthal and Celia Susan Cotelo
From: Cult Cinema

A young man gets the custom van of his dreams, but will it win him the heart of the girl of his dreams?

A Marimark Production. I knew from the start that this was going to hurt, but, as always with Marimark, I failed to anticipate just how the film would disappoint and enrage me.

When I looked this flick up before, I learned that it was the start of the “Vansploitation” movement of films which also include the semi-unofficial sequels to this flick, Malibu Beach and Van Nuys Blvd. (both also part of this set). Remember vansploitation? Me neither. I’d also forgotten Malibu Beach which, after a quick skim of my review, turns out to be a sequel with the same characters doing the same being really fucking horrible. My comment on that movie was:

I’d go through the plot, but there’s no plot. No goals, no struggles, no thwarted desires. No structure, no callbacks, no throughline. There’s just stuff that keeps happening without any weight or consequence.

and I’d say the same largely applies here.

Our horrible hero from Malibu Beach, Bobby, starts off here. He’s a scumbag who’s just graduated high school and his ambition is to have a tricked-out custom van. So he buys one with his graduation money.

That’s it, by the way. He wanted this special van and he bought it. No struggle, no effort, no getting a basic van and building it up himself, he just buys it already tricked out and customized.

So he drives it around, tries to pick up girls with it to screw in the back, always being thwarted and always with “hilarious” consequences. Like the first girl who agrees to hang out in his van and smoke a joint. He tries to get gropey, she says no, so he jumps on her trying to force her to make out with him, eventually tearing her shirt off and pulling out part of her bra.

Comedy, by the way. Main character is a rapist and this is a comedy.

So Bobby is infatuated with Tina, a girl with no patience for his bullshit so you know he’s not going to change or do anything to demonstrate that he’s worthy of her attention or time and she’s going to end up in love with him. Unfortunately for Tina, her best friend is dating Bobby’s best friend so she ends up stranded on the beach with Bobby and his van. Again, he tries to rape the girl he’s with, but fails. Later, after she’s told him to fuck off in no uncertain terms (after warming to him, having to tell him to piss off after he tries assaulting her again, and then learning, after forgiving him, that he’d hooked up with someone else the night before), he kidnaps her, threatens to drive the van off a cliff unless she agrees to listen to him, and then tells her he loves her. She says she feels the same and it’s so happy, isn’t it? Psychological torture? “Say you love me or I’ll kill us both. You can stop this any time so it’s all your fault.”

While all this is going on, Bobby’s boss, Danny DeVito, who is almost unrecognizable in this movie because it’s so bad you’re thinking, “That can’t possibly be Danny DeVito,” runs a sideline as a bookie. He took a bet that he can’t pay off so Bobby gives him the difference. Unfortunately, that money was Bobby’s next payment on the van. To cover the costs, Bobby agrees to race Duggan, the villain of the movie who’s not really in the movie or talking to Bobby at all ever. Duggan has already caught Bobby at Duggan’s girlfriend’s place (the girl he hooked up with while trying to make up with Tina) and so wants revenge. They race with a $200 pot. Cops who’ve been chasing Bobby the entire movie because he keeps drag racing his van show up, end up crashing Duggan’s van, which makes Bobby the winner. He rolls his van, though, so I don’t see how anyone makes out well here. DeVito shows up with the money he owes Bobby and Tina drives away with him, laughing over Duggan’s girlfriend having told Bobby his dick was bigger than Duggan’s. THE END.

Unlike a lot of Marimark movies that have the occasional spark and then fail to live up to that moment again, this is just plodding and pointless. On top of that, the hero is an entitled smirking shitfuck rapist. His character can be summed up by a whiny, “But I want it!” He rolls the van that’s meant so much to him, but doesn’t seem to care at all. After all, he got the girl by doing nothing so why worry?

Regarding him being a rapist, the movie has this strange ideology that a lot of these 70’s and 80’s movies had, specifically that there’s something wrong with consent. Bobby’s always trying to get girls to hook up with him in the back of his van, and when one is not only willing but eager to, then Bobby’s turned off and doesn’t want it to happen. And this happens a lot. In that movie I always trot out when I’m talking about how much I hate a movie, Cavegirl, the same situation arises. The hero keeps trying to trick one woman into sex while actively fleeing another woman who wants to have sex with him. It’s like the movies understand consent functioning in only one direction.

I said of Malibu Beach that it filled out the trifecta of awfulness with Cavegirl and Going Steady and was hands-down the worst Marimark movie I’d seen. This one’s worse, not so much for its content. That’s on par with these others. Instead it’s for what Marimark movies generally do—show a hint of something interesting and then fail, on every level, to deliver upon it. Here, it’s custom van culture.

Yeah, I’m saying it, I wanted an actual vansploitation flick. I remember those days of airbrushed wizards on the side of panel vans. There was something stupid amazing about those things and a movie about people in that scene that dramatized what was going on with these folks and what they were trying to do would have been pretty awesome. Well, it’d at least have been something.

There’s one sequence here where Bobby drives his van to the beach and it’s just lined with custom vans and all the custom van people walking up and down looking at what everyone else has done with their rides. What is that community? What do they find impressive? Why are they impressed by Bobby’s van? How is it special? We don’t get that, though. Instead, it’s just the trials and tribulations of the walking rape whistle Bobby.

Missed the subtext: Fuck this movie. Skip it.