The Savage Stack - ROLLING VENGEANCE (1987)
There’s always going to be – for lack of a better term – a stack of films we’ve been meaning to get to. Whether it’s a pile of DVDs and Blu-rays haphazardly amassed atop our television stands, or a seemingly endless digital queue on our respective streaming accounts, there’s simply more movies than time to watch them. This column is here to make that problem worse. Ostensibly an extension of Everybody’s Into Weirdness (may that series rest in peace), The Savage Stack is a compilation of the odd and magnificent motion pictures you probably should be watching instead of popping in The Avengers for the 2,000th time. Not that there’s anything wrong with filmic “comfort food” (God knows we all have titles we frequently return to when we crave that warm and fuzzy feeling), but if you love movies, you should never stop searching for the next title that’s going to make your “To Watch” list that much more insurmountable. Some will be favorites, others oddities, with esoteric eccentricities thrown in for good measure. All in all, a mountain of movies to conquer.
The forty-fourth entry into this unbroken backlog is the Canadian monster truck revenge saga, Rolling Vengeance...
In the storied annals of Canuxploitation, few films are as ridiculously silly and risingly fun as Rolling Vengeance ('87). Part rednecksploitation revenge romp, part working class teen melodrama, part monster truck slasher movie, Steven Hilliard Stern (The Park Is Mine ['85]) has cobbled together 90 minutes of autumnal schlock, where the blue collar truck driving Rosso boys (portrayed by consummate Canux player Lawrence Dane, and Albert Pyun refugee Don Michael Paul as a father/son short haul duo) must battle against Ned Beatty's brood of backwoods, beer swilling miscreants. Perhaps the most charming element of Rolling Vengeance is its utter lack of pretense, as Stern (along with lowbrow action scribe Michael Montgomery [Eye of the Tiger ('86)]) never aspire to deliver anything more than a parade of cheap thrills and vehicular slayhem.
The most unusual element of Rolling Vengeance (outside of the massive weaponized monster truck, obviously) is how long it lingers on the opening familial character beats before getting into the meat of its pulp fiction. Stern and Montgomery make you fall in love with the Rosso clan - as Big Joe (Dane) is the cock of the walk on the local rig scene, carrying huge loads of liquor to the roadhouse titty bar Tiny Doyle (Beatty) operates in the middle of their small town. Even when Joey (Paul) drops a few cases of Jack off the back and Doyle's cronies get in his face, Big Joe's about half-a-hair away from making the toothless thug eat glass in the dirt parking lot for spitting any sort of attitude in his kid's direction. He knows that boy works his ass off, and should be attending college. Yet it's love for his mother (Susan Hogan), father, and little siblings that kept him in the family business, slaving away while Big Joe worries he's making the wrong decision. It's all presented like the Molson Ice version of a Springsteen song; these o-dropping members of an "Ohio" family coming together to scrape off a living from this world's boot the only way they know how.
The awful acts of violence perpetrated by Tiny's boys against the Rossos are almost utterly unprovoked, as the gang of slimy scumbags really only seem to fuck with Mrs. Rosso and the tots because they're there. Sure, there's a minor run-in with Big Joe and Joey, but nothing that warrants the attack that results in the family's station wagon being T-Boned by a fellow semi driver's rig. Of course, being prominent members of this shitheel community leads to the judge letting the madmen off the hook with a $300 fine and suspended jailtime, causing Big Joe to fly off the handle, charging into Tiny's place of business throwing fists. These ruffians cost him the loves of his life, and now Joey's the only person that can hold him back from swinging a Bronson-esque flaming sword of retribution. When Tiny sees the fire in the man's eyes, there's only one choice: take him down for good, leaving the eldest son standing in the wake of a working man's war that can only end once Tiny and his hooligans are six feet deep in the dirt.
So, Joey does what any rational person would - he constructs a massive monster truck (complete with a gigantic, phallic drill on the front) and hunts down the evildoers who rained misery on his family, one-by-one. The actual building of this intimidating vehicle is shown during a Balboa-esque montage, as chugging, down home Sly Stallone-inspired rock (most of which was written and performed by Lost Boys ['87] composer Timmy Cappello) blares in the background. None of this is scary, instead mostly staged for fist pumping thrills, as Joey runs over the entirety of Tiny's used car lot (which just happens to be right next door to his bar), practically daring these animals to come after him. Once they do, it's a rural showdown; Joey has blood to spill in the name of his family's honor, and that ruddy plasma is going to be smeared all over his new truck's oversized tires.
Truth be told, if it weren't for some nudity and swearing (plus a late in the game act of unnecessary sexual violence), Rolling Vengeance would almost feel like a rather badass TV Movie - a MOW take on righteous action against bullies and rude dudes. Hell, it even opens with Tiny kicking a collection of women off his property because they're there to protest drunk driving in the community. Stern's picture is so unapologetically black and white in its morality that once the engine on that beast fires up and things take a turn for the weird, it can't help but transport that after school special preaching into its odd brand of bone crushing violence. Lost for years to VHS obscurity, it's great to see Rolling Vengeance restored and ready to destroy a whole new generation of lo-fi junkies, as there's a purity to its desire to steamroll all obnoxious punks in its path.
Rolling Vengeance is available now on Blu-ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.
