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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume. 34, Number 14. July 21, 1971

Vanishing Point

Vanishing Point

We are on the road again with Vanishing Point (Fox), something of the phenomena of the debauched outsider existing in the Nevada and what not where spaces, and on the desert line to SF, chased by the Phredly Kops, and the ESP'd-off Super-soul, a blind disco responsible for beaming Delaney Bonnie & Friends, Big Mama Thornton, Mountain (you name it?) towards the rocketting hero. Through directional anaesthetis of monotony taken as the freedom of the soul through speed, in essence (pace Hagemann) the ingrediant taken for purposes only known to the bitz und pices, who hang around this fresh, beaming desert like the snakes that are poured in slow writhing motion into your lap. No advance notice about this one, an R 18 uncut classification, banned across the river for violence, drug abuse and incitement to crime, and a GP (General Patrons) classification in the States, and coming to us so soon? Having a feeling that a sensa may have dozed off (he's bin fed quite alot of this you know) or only played a few reels, and throught that pill-popping (oral speed?) was non-addictive to freaks anyway. But these aren't freaks, not the sorts one associates with these speedy, dusty yarns, anyway.

Director Richard C. Sara fian, has done a few strange things before, even with a child's charmer, Run Wild, Run Free (mentioned in this journal 1969) and the thriller. Fragment of Fear (which missed me) and taking those Cupid Financiers, with the Quarrier consortium (or under the spiritual guide of loveliness!) resting after their Godard Stones effort, couldn't go anywhere except up and up, into the beyond. What to talk about then? Um, maybe it's a more exciting sort of thing than others of its ilk (makes one eagerly await Monte Hellman's Two-lane Blacktop, for CIC) but for once we don't really give a fuck about its aggressively normal hero, who's only a reject bum, who once was wounded in the Mekong Delta, and turns into a cop who gets busted (tho, heavens, he saves a young lass from pawings from a real randy pig in the back seat) who was a stunt carman, who is now on the move, move, move for no reason at all, except he's go in from there to there, but seems to take the armpit highway into his brain and ends up mowing down cars and Kops, and gets lost, and meets a snaky beardo saint called St Jagger, and witnesses an Oasis of revivalists who don't care for strangers, and has a few flashbacks (including some nauseous beach goo with a girl who was lost in the Pacific, as she wiped-out and the surfboard comes to shore) and who gets poor Super Soul and his mate bashed up by the atypical movie-of-this-type-thuggers, but after firing his revs to the ultimate, vanishes, in a con flag, and his white ego contacts two dozer blades, while a disinterested crowd gaze on, and on. Barry Newman's mono maniacal Kowalski, isn't so much a character but a seedy sort of representation of one. He's wiry and cheeky enough to warrant interest, but he don't use his tongue, I don't think. See it though for chase scenes and rock combined, and those fantastic orange plains, and yellow hills and green people, which aint seemed so heavy since oirisher McFord sucked them dry many moons ago.