Director: William Sachs
Writer: William Sachs
From: Cult Cinema (only 4 remain!)
A group of people meet each other around Van Nuys Blvd. and form relationships.
The final entry in the “Vansploitation” trilogy that includes The Van and Malibu Beach and, I think, the final Marimark production. I haven’t watched it yet, but I can tell you it sucks and you should skip it.
Now I’ve watched it and I can say… I didn’t hate it. The two previous entries in this sort-of trilogy, frankly, were pretty rapey and encouraged you to root for the creepiest characters in the picture. This one still makes the mistake of rooting for the creep, but sidesteps rape by having *shock* consent!, those ignoring consent being coded as the villains, and the creep being called a creep. If anything holds the movie back, it’s that there’s no plot. We just watch these people hang out for a few days.
Anyway, here’s what happens. Bobby likes drag racing his van, but there’s no competition in his town so he heads out to Van Nuys Blvd. to live it up there. As soon as he arrives, he hooks up with Wanda, a waitress at a drive-in. Moon pulls up next to Bobby in her van and challenges him to a drag race. Unfortunately, they’re stopped by the cops before they can figure out who won. Camille is riding with Moon and also gets arrested.
In the jail cell, they meet Chooch, an older guy who drives his hot rod up and down the strip. He’s been arrested by the primary asshole cop, Zass, who he grew up with. Also arrested is Greg, the creep. He saw Camille earlier and told her he’d dreamt of her. This leads to a fight between him and the guy she’s with that ends with them destroying each other’s cars. Greg continues to be a creep in the jail cell, suggesting they all go to the amusement park the next day once they get out since that was part of his dream too.
To be fair, Greg is not as much of a creep as some of the other guys in these Marimark productions. It’s just that his inciting incident of having dreamed of Camille and feeling entitled to tell her this and expect that she’ll throw over the guy she’s with to be with him feels like a not-great variation on the “nice guy” trope. “He dreamed of her so he doesn’t have to do the work of actually appealing to or attracting her.”
The five of them do go to the amusement park the next day, though, and generally start pairing off—Greg with Camille, Bobby with Moon. Greg keeps giving Chooch grief because he’s not a fan of roller coasters and that leads to Camille and Moon calling him a creep.
Meanwhile, Officer Zass has picked up Wanda, driven her to an isolated stretch of beach, and is trying to rape her in the back of the cop car. She suddenly starts being into it and I was about to say, “Fuck this movie,” but it’s a ploy to screw over Zass. She ends up handcuffing him to his car wearing just his boxer shorts and abandons him. He’s there for the rest of the movie begin tormented by various passers-by.
Wanda is picked up by Chooch and they fall in love. When he introduces her to the other four, there’s a hint that there may be trouble since Bobby hooked up with her, but everyone keeps their mouths shut and just giggles about it to themselves. At the end of the movie, Chooch and Wanda announce they’re going to get married and move to his dad’s ranch in Tennessee.
Greg and Camille hook up, but there are “hilarious” shenanigans in the process. He’s supposed to sneak in through her bedroom window, but goes into her parents’ instead and starts making out with her mom. Later, Camille smuggles him in dressed in drag claiming he’s one of her friends. The dad gets excited and sneaks into the guest room while Greg and Camille are both there, and starts molesting Greg. The characters are acting like they think it’s hilarious even though the idea is that Camille’s dad would try to molest one of her friends.
Finally, Bobby and Moon hook up, but still need to resolve the drag race from earlier. They race, Bobby wins, but Moon is mad that he took the race seriously, that, implicitly, he cares about his van more than her. So he pushes it off a cliff. Everyone leaves together and we close with a montage of Van Nuys Blvd. that we saw earlier in the movie, except Zass has bought Chooch’s hot rod and is now being pulled over by the cops. THE END.
So, yeah, not terrible, but not much of a point to any of it either. The movie was written and directed by the guy behind Galaxina which likewise felt like it had some promising ideas but just didn’t do anything. Also, like Galaxina, this had lots of pointless nudity right from the start. In a way it was nice because it’s the movie giving you its raison d'être. Why does this movie exist? Titties. If you’re going, “Titties and…?” this is not the movie for you.
And I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. While it was better than I expected, I expected something really awful. To put it in perspective, when I sat down to watch this, I planned to see the re-release of Schindler’s List immediately afterwards to wash the horror of this movie out of my head. In other words, I expected this to be so bad that I’d need a Holocaust film as a pick-me-up. I was wrong (although it was nice to see Schindler’s List again, a movie that’s legitimately good and done well). Van Nuys Blvd. isn’t good, but it’s neither terrible nor particularly offensive either. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but, unlike a lot of Marimark productions, it didn’t make me angry. That’s the highest note I’m going to end on for those bastards.
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