Smokey and the Hotwire Gang (1979) User Reviews

First Movie I Ever Walked Out On

[DoubleWhitey · 2/10 · 11 August 2002]

It was my friend Mike Lamb's 11th birthday, in 1980. How bad does it have to be for 6th graders to walk out on it? This movie has yet to get the five votes to have the rating listed, but if it does, I can bet that the 4 votes will be from the kids we were hanging out with, because we are the only people who will ever remember this thing.

The overlooked "Smokey" movie. Good for a 20-year flashback.

[emm · 3/10 · 15 February 1999]

This ain't no SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT! The IMDb, having left this title without a clue, finally has a long lost item for "Smokey" fans to check out. Through my best guess, a releasing company that specialized in Z-grade material apparently wanted to cash in on the incredible success of the Burt Reynolds movie, resulting in blatant rip-offs. Here's what the scoop is, the once-future basis for THE DUKES OF HAZZARD involving big vans, C.B. radios, rowdy sheriffs, mountain road chases, catchy character names, and broads in "Daisy Duke" hot pants, making this a unique and trendy twenty-year flashback that is all but no more today. Find this one while you can, but I have a feeling that after one single viewing, it's another trip back to the store rushing to put the video into the drop box and to forget it forever. You know how it goes, a very low-budget picture offering little plot and big confusion that is hard to have a fun time. Too bad about that dismal scenario, but if you're looking for a little nostalgia, give this a shot before it vanishes off the shelves. And who wrote the terrible lyrics to that god-awful "Hotwire" song?

Oh the pain....

[kolchak25 · 9 October 2001]

I picked up this movie as I was in the mood for a seventies car movie that would not be very good, and this looked like it fit the bill. When I brought it to my friends house, he pointed out Anthony Cardoza's name on the box. As fans of Mystery Science Theater may remember, Cardoza worked on several Coleman Francis films. Francis is a film maker in the realm of Ed Wood - no budget, poor acting and bad scripts. So with Cardoza all over this movie, we were pretty excited to see Smokey and the Hot Wire Gang.

There is no way to tell you how horrible this movie is. I mean, I love bad movies, but this one was unbelievably horrendous. About half way through the movie, I literally grabbed my head and screamed. Cardoza rivals the worst film makers with this wretched mess. There are about five different groups of people all in different story lines. The only common point between them is that everyone has a car and drives...a lot. People are in one location, then another without any explanation of how they got there. You'll forget some of the people even exist until they show up again later in the movie. In some scenes no one's lips are moving and yet someone somewhere is talking. Who is it? Is the dialogue relevant?

The movie makes no sense whatsoever. Absolutely none. If you like Coleman Francis or Ed Wood, I would recommend you watch it if only to be completely dumbfounded that a)this movie could even get made, and b)that there is no way to comprehend the bone chilling awfulness of this film without having seen it.

Worst Movie Ever

[ridgerunner72160-609-362419 · 1/10 · 27 April 2017]

This has to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I bought it because it has Alvy Moore, Mr. Kimball from Green Acres, in it. And of course I liked the fact that it has women running around in Daisy Duke shorts in some of the scenes. But that doesn't account for the fact that the movie has no plot whatsoever. It's just a bunch of characters driving around with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. I thought about bringing this movie to a pawn shop to get a few cents for it, but it's so incredibly lousy that I think I'll keep it instead.

An amiably silly piece of 70's drive-in piffle

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 23 November 2006]

Here's a perfectly brainless, senseless, shiftless, witless, virtually plot less and basically pointless 70's drive-in car chase comedy time capsule relic that's ripe to bursting with all the right rotten stuff so it can measure up as a fine bit of lobotomized "we're all just having a little fun" dippy entertainment. We've got Stacy Keach's forever trapped in a B-movie grind brother James and no-name numbskull Stanley Livingston as a pair of nitwit drifters who bumble, fumble and stumble their aimless way throughout the entire picture. Then there's groovy disco music and even groovier disco dancing. Moreover, for your viewing pleasure there's lots of good-looking gals in tight cut-off shirts and hot pants. The hilariously dated CB lingo makes for mighty funny listening (my favorite lines are "We're going 10-7" and the often repeated "See you in a short-short"). "Green Acres" TV series regular Alvy Moore portrays a feckless hillbilly sheriff. Familiar 70's exploitation feature face Albert ("The Hard Ride," "Sweet Sugar") Cole appears as a greasy hood. Funky wah-wah guitar riffs rip away on the soundtrack. Two mellow dudes who sell grass for a living figure as secondary characters.

But that's not all. There's more. A 70's feminist strong-minded chicks pushing around wimpy-willed dudes subtext ala "Truck Stop Women" gets clumsily tossed into the ramshackle brew. An armored car robbery occurs in such a quick and cursory manner that it seems tacked on as an afterthought. An endless "running around in circles" search for a stolen van owned by blustery Kustom Kar King George Barris takes center stage as the key piece of the action. A sub-Mickey Rooney raspy-voiced speed demon middle-aged guy who helps the sheriff by driving him willy-nilly all over the county and a rascally midget provide comic relief. Busty brunette Carla Ziegfeld fills out her role in more ways than one as "Hotwire," a nasty wench socialite who runs a combo drug, stolen car and prostitution ring. Hey, what's missing? Oh yeah -- a story. Well, there ain't one. Instead, director Anthony Cardoza and screenwriter T. Gary Cardoza allow the sloppy, digressive, permanently stuck in park free-form narrative to grind its wheels into the ground in a strangely amiable and hence oddly enjoyable fashion.

Fails in every way you can think of

[Wizard-8 · 5 September 2015]

I remember I kept seeing this movie at my favorite video rental store as a teenager, but something about it suggested it was a real stinker, so I never rented it. But a few days ago, I got the DVD of the movie as a birthday present, so I thought I might as well watch it - it was free after all. It didn't take long into watching the movie to realize my instincts all those years ago were correct. This is a bad, bad, BAD movie! There is almost no plot, and what little plot there is is made to be utterly confusing with the movie's penchant for cutting back and forth to a huge number of characters. Speaking of the characters, the level of acting is extremely amateurish, even by the one so-called name actor of the entire cast (James Keach). When it comes to vehicular action, the movie is dead in the water - there are almost no chases or stunts, and the little there is has been staged with no passion at all. And while the movie is advertised as a comedy, the only laugh I got was during the closing credits, which list a huge number of people who worked on the movie with the last name "Cardoza" - the same last name of the director and the producer. I wouldn't be surprised if the Cardoza family does not bring up this movie during family reunions.