For this week’s Fast Film Friday we searched for a Halloween-themed movie, and ‘The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow‘ ticked all the right boxes. Just look at the promotional poster! Hot rods, rock & roll, juvenile delinquents and spooky ghosts!
Unfortunately, the poster is the best thing about this movie! Maybe it’s supposed to be a spoof of monster-movies and hot-rod flicks that were so popular in the ’50s, but it has not aged well. It just seems so silly, like those beach party movies of the ’60s, but without the charm.
The opening scene of two hot-rods racing through the LA River culvert is the high point of the movie for gearheads. Yes, you’ve seen that shot in many movies like ‘Grease‘ and ‘Drive‘ but remember this was shot in 1959, so there’s points for originality.
But the movie isn’t very original. It’s like they started filming another JD / hot rod flick, then tacked on a ghost story to the end.
It starts off with the same old story of conservative townspeople pitted against the speed-demon kids who want a drag strip. Most scenes take place in a juke joint, so the movie producer could include rock & roll music. But the kids are just stock characters that you’ve seen before; the cool guy in the leather jacket, the nerd in the thick glasses, the catty girlfriend, the over-protective parents. We’ve seen this before.
But the producers at American International Pictures must have known the formula for success. Halfway through the picture, there’s a slumber party where all the girls dance around in negligees to that devil music. Quite racy!
Then out of the blue, 40 mins into the runtime, the hot rod gang decides to move their club into an old abandoned mansion, which obviously is going to be haunted! The whole sequence is right out of a Scooby Doo cartoon with eyes looking through spooky portraits, secret passageways behind the fireplace and a ‘ghost’ blowing out candles. The gang even captures the bad guy and pull his mask off to reveal he wasn’t a supernatural apparition after all!
The ‘Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow‘ adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Cool cars, drag racing, sexy girls, tough guys, dance parties, ginchy ’50s slang and a talking parrot (like Scooby!) are just a let down. At the final credits you’ll find yourself wishing you could get those 65 wasted minutes of your life back! But since this was just a B-movie for the drive-in theatre, maybe all the teenagers were too busy making out to care about whatever was on the big screen.