{"id":11101,"date":"2014-05-20T10:15:15","date_gmt":"2014-05-20T16:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=11101"},"modified":"2014-05-20T10:15:15","modified_gmt":"2014-05-20T16:15:15","slug":"the-great-texas-dynamite-chase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=11101","title":{"rendered":"The Great Texas Dynamite Chase,"},"content":{"rendered":"

For my 18th birthday, my uncle, to whom I owe much of my love for movies, gave me Danny Peary\u2019s classic 1981 book\u00a0Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful<\/i><\/a>. In that book (the first in a series of three), the author writes short essays on 100 films that had, according to him, earned a place in the cult canon.<\/p>\n

The book became a bible of sorts for me, an introduction to all kinds of movies that would become important to me: The Girl Can\u2019t Help It<\/i>; Aguirre, the Wrath of God<\/i>; I Walked With a Zombie<\/i>; Shock Corridor<\/i>; The Tall T<\/i>; The Warriors<\/i>; Two-Lane Blacktop<\/i> and many others. Though the cult canon has changed a lot since 1981, and though Peary has a distinct preference for postwar American films, the book was still a great primer on the many ways in which films could be odd.<\/p>\n

So of course I sought out\u00a0Cult Movies 2<\/a>.\u00a0As I had in its predecessor\u2019s table of contents, I put a little black dot next to the title of each film after I\u2019d seen it. Both books are pretty heavily dotted now. It was always a great thrill to be able to mark off another of Peary\u2019s selected films.<\/p>\n

I remember marking off, for example,\u00a0the 1976 film\u00a0The Great Texas Dynamite Chase<\/i><\/a>\u00a0at some point in high school, when cable television was still pretty weird. I was introduced to the film by “Joe Bob Briggs\u2019 Drive-In Theater,” the Movie Channel show that he hosted for years and that was responsible for a great deal of my cinematic education. (Joe Bob<\/a>\u00a0remains one of my film heroes and is a major reason why I dedicated my academic studies to film.) I\u2019m sure that the film played at 2 a.m. on some weekday. I was usually pretty groggy for my first-period classes.
\nThe Great Texas Dynamite Chase<\/i>, to the extent it\u2019s remembered at all, is known for any one of three things. First, that it stars\u00a0Claudia Jennings<\/a>, the 1970 Playmate of the Year who died in a car wreck in 1979. Second, that it was produced by New\u00a0World Pictures, the quasi-studio presided over by Roger Corman, the master of American exploitation pictures. And, finally, that the film is often cited as the inspiration for Ridley Scott\u2019s 1991 film Thelma & Louise<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Jennings really was a pretty talented actress. In The Great Texas Dynamite Chase