Originally posted on 5/24/21
Currently rewatching: FIREBALL 500 (1966). I hadn't seen this one since a primetime TV showing back in the 60s and didn't remember much about it except that it had the same kind of production values, music, and other elements, along with stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, as the "beach party" movies from which it had evolved.
But despite an opening featuring stop-motion animated cavemen inventing the wheel (courtesy of Art "Gumby" Clokey) and a jokey introduction to Frankie's character as he outruns a pitchfork-wielding farmer defending his amorous daughter, any misconceptions I had about this being a lighthearted comedy farce were soon dispelled.
What "Beach Party" director William Asher and co-writer Leo Townsend have concocted here is about as serious and gritty as this kind of candy-coated thriller can be, with Frankie (now "Dave Owens") a California daredevil descending upon the American South for some of that stock car racing action. He's met with resistance by local racing hero Leander (fellow teen idol Fabian), an arrogant chick magnet who moonlights as a moonshiner.
Annette's back as the niece of race track owner Chill Wills, but this time her "Jane" character is all in for bad-boy Leander while Frankie has a yen for the more mature Martha (Julie Parrish, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, "Star Trek: The Menagerie") who wants him both as a lover and a high-speed driver for her illicit booze business, which is overseen by none other than Harvey "Eric Von Zipper" Lembeck in menacing redneck mode as cigar-chomping Charlie Bigg.
The rivalry heats up between the two alpha males both on and off the track, a highlight being their figure-8 "chicken race." When other moonshine drivers start getting run off the road (one is rather grimly killed), Frankie suspects Fabian of playing chicken with them on those dark mountain roads in order to advance his own illegal alcohol business.
Obviously, this high-octane adrenaline rush of a teen flick goes way beyond simply replacing surfboards with race cars, especially when we see Frankie actually having off-screen sex with Julie, in addition to that young driver plummetting to his death off a steep cliff. None of the adults are played for "old fogey" laughs either--this time, everyone in the cast is a bonafide member of the adult world.
Frankie finally gets to play a cool badass here, standing up to IRS agents who want him to go undercover for them and taking on Fabian in a doozy of a fist-fight after getting knocked off the track during a big race. He doesn't even really try to win Annette, preferring Julie's more worldly charms instead.
The former beach bums each get to sing, with Annette luring customers into her uncle's hootchie-kootchie show and Frankie seranading the patrons of a local nightclub. (Fortunately, we're spared Fabian's tone-deaf warbling.) Many familiar faces from the previous films are carried over here either as Leander's groupies or race drivers.
Once the vehicular manslaughter mystery is cleared up, the film ends with a final championship race that offers car lovers roughly ten minutes of exciting actual footage (filmed, according to IMDb, "at the Ascot and Saugus Raceways near Los Angeles with local color shot in Charlotte, North Carolina") with added rear-projection inserts of Frankie and Fabian going at each other amidst the fiery, fender-bending action.
Thinking this to be simply a dead-end attempt to keep beach-party viewers interested, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed FIREBALL 500 on its own terms as a more serious and at times hardball action flick. Of course, the production values are just as flimsy and TV-movie-level as ever, and the dialogue just as corny, but somehow it all manages to deliver an hour and a half of pulpy fun.
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