Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Bereamic Awesome Movie

GarnettTeenage The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Ian (Flash Review)Thin on story, heavy on Duke Boys style chases in some southern state. Fonda's character has dreams of becoming a NASCAR racer and he has a mechanic friend both in need of cash to build a car together. So these two idiots, rob a store to get money to build their car. At some point, a gal Fonda shagged, comes along for the ride as she was mad he thought of her as a one night stand. The characters aren't annoying and sprinkle of some light humor amongst the several long chase and crash scenes. High quality car stunts with no CGI and without speeding up the footage, led to fun excitement, lots of smashing and even a brave helicopter pilot getting in the mix. Will they escape to pursue their dreams or will they get outwitted by some pure southern cops? Not a good movie overall but is a very good movie early in the car chase genre.

Leofwine_draca DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY is a film that cashes in on the '70s-era craze for road movies and in particular car chase flicks. This decade saw the likes of VANISHING POINT and GONE IN 60 SECONDS wowing audiences with their depictions of high-speed pursuit, something that this movie is keen to work with.The result is only semi-successful, however, and the reason for its slightly lacklustre playing out is purely down to the script. This is the kind of dialogue that must already have been cheesy and dated on first release, with the characters spouting unbelievable 'counter culture' style lines as they 'stick it to the man'. It makes the whole thing feel incredibly dated and not necessarily in a good way.Still, there's stuff here to be enjoyed, not least another one of those laid-back stoner type performances from Peter Fonda. Watch out for Vic Morrow, chewing the scenery with relish, although you also need to be warned: this film features copious amounts of Susan George, giving the worst approximation of an American accent that I've yet to hear. Imagine Keanu in BRAM STOKER'S Dracula; yep, it is that bad.As expected, the film features plenty of car chases and some good stunt crashes that reminded me of the likes of LIVE AND LET DIE. It's no classic, to be sure, but it's not bad as a fitting product of its era and that ending still packs one hell of a wallop.

Robert J. Maxwell I wasn't able to catch all of this but I saw enough. Did they still have drive-in movies in 1972? I don't remember. If they existed, they must have been one of the first venues in which this movie was shown.Briefly, Peter Fonda is a race car driver manqué who is mostly busy laughing his way through life. He and his taciturn mechanic, Adam Roarke, rob a store and zip away in their souped-up Dodge Charger with the intention of breaking into the NASCAR circuit. Along for the ride is the toothsome Susan George, whose sun-tanned midriff is nothing less than astonishing. A pleasing desktop wallpaper might consist of nothing more than a close up of her belly button. She's wide eyed. And those teeth -- she could eat a lobster, shell and all.There are endless scenes of this lime-green hot rod speeding down the back roads between groves of walnut trees. It's impressively scenic, really. And Fonda puts the pedal to the metal even when he doesn't have to. Every time the car is set in motion it burns rubber. I'm telling you, there's real power under this baby's big forty-foot hood.Sometimes in hot pursuit is an eager deputy who has had his squad car souped up, but he's in the picture only to provide more thrills than a single speeding automobile can generate. The deputy zooms along at warp speed and tries to bump the Dodge off the road, muttering to himself -- "Eat this for LUNCH, you scum bag!" Things like that. Also in pursuit from the air is the sheriff in charge of the case, the sour puss Vic Morrow with his evil features and pursed lips.In the end, although Fonda, Roarke, and George have outrun and outwitted the law, they learn their lesson. The lesson is, "Never take your eyes off the road when you're traveling at Mach 2." If you like pool games, small-time crooks, a loathing for authority, and fast cars, you'll love this.

MARIO GAUCI I hadn’t intended to watch this just now but a couple of coincidences made it inevitable – once again, Vic Morrow has a featured role (it’s chilling how the actor feared that, having to spend about half the running-time inside a chopper in this case, would be the end of him!) and it re-united director Hough and co-star Susan George from EYEWITNESS (1970). This is among the most popular road movies from an era full of such efforts, complete with a memorable title and matching theme tune; Peter Fonda and Adam Roarke, both of whom had flourished in biker movies during the late 1960s, here exchange their typical vehicle for a racing car. In this respect, it resembles most closely VANISHING POINT (1971) – as per one of the trailers on the Anchor Bay SE DVD, the two were even re-issued as a double-bill! – though largely eschewing that film’s philosophical overtones.As can be expected, it’s generally fast-paced, tyre-screeching and stunt-heavy fun; the film (Englishman Hough’s first in the U.S. and which manages to capture that peculiar mid-American flavor), however, provides more than just the obvious kind of thrills. To begin with, the narrative opens with a supermarket caper (the one scene in which an uncredited Roddy McDowall, fresh from the same director’s scary ghost story THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE [1973], appears) but we also get plenty of confrontation scenes (and not just between fugitives and law enforcers, but within each individual group). This occasions some hilarious dialogue exchanges, such as when George rejects Fonda’s advances – he quips that the night before she had no qualms about it and, in fact, kept begging for more…but she retorts that that ought to have clued him in about just how little she was actually getting! Similarly, veteran cops Morrow and Kenneth Tobey often clash about how to approach the manhunt: at one point, the former argues that the latter’s obsession with apprehending the fugitives is merely a middle-aged man’s grasping to hold on to his job but he’ll only be physically worn-out by the experience (Morrow, then, believes that Tobey doesn’t want to put all he’s got into the chase simply because he’s been promised a new set of police cars – which, most likely, won’t be forthcoming if he proves overly efficient!).As a matter of fact, one of the reasons the film (which, according to the accompanying featurette, was partly improvised) works so well is because each of the principal roles is perfectly cast – thus ensuring that characterization isn’t lost amid all the hair-raising action; incidentally, the IMDb lists additional footage (extending a couple of scenes) that was utilized for the film’s network showings. Among the most notable stunts are: the one in which an impulsive young police officer’s car (which he has “souped up” – after the original engine overheated – in order to keep up with Fonda et al) is crushed by a falling telephone pole; another flies through a billboard; one more runs off the road backwards and ends up in a stream; the fugitive’s own ‘classic’ Dodge Charger (which they exchange midway through the chase) leaping across a drawbridge; and, of course, its climactic crash into a speeding train – giving the whole a fashionable, yet appropriately sobering, downbeat ending (ominously, Morrow’s relentless chopper itself often looms perilously close to its quarry before ultimately running out of gas!).I haven’t listened to Hough’s full-length Audio Commentary, but the half-hour documentary was nonetheless a pretty solid affair which covered most of the bases; highlights included Fonda’s declaration that he idolized former sci-fi/B-movie hero Tobey (despite sharing no scenes with him in the actual film!), as well as the star’s surprised admission that DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY out-grossed even his signature effort EASY RIDER (1969), not to mention the expected (albeit brief) but well-deserved tribute to Morrow – of the three titles I’ve watched with him over the past week or so, his contribution in this one was clearly the most substantial and satisfactory (definitely proving him worthier of greater attention than merely for his acclaimed debut performance as the disaffected punk in BLACKBOARD JUNGLE [1955] and his ill-fated swan song). Finally, having enjoyed this so much, I was reminded that I’ve probably got scores of other films from the iconoclastic and eclectic 1970s in my collection which I’ve yet to go through…