Twister’s Revenge! (1988)

Twister’s Revenge! (USA, 1988) 89 min color DIR: Bill Rebane. SCR: William Arthur, Larry Dreyfus, Bill Rebane. PROD: Larry Dreyfus, Bill Rebane. DOP: “Ito” (aka- Bill Rebane). MUSIC: M. Hans Liebert. CAST: Dean West, Meredith Orr, David Alan Smith, R. Richardson Luka, Jay Gjernes.

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A change of pace from director Bill Rebane’s usual backwoods thrillers, this rural action flick however was perhaps made a few years too late to cash in on the “good ole boy” hick flick craze, although monster trucks were still “a thing”. The film’s title refers to the computerized, talking monster truck (just what we needed- a country and western version of Knight Rider), which is masterminded by the truck-rally circuit-traveling couple of Dave (Dean West) and Sherry (Meredith Orr). Sherry gets kidnapped on their wedding night (when the marriage is about to be consummated in a truck, no less), and so Dave and the truck speed to her rescue.

The culprits of this crime are three dorks with names like Bear (R. Richardson Luka), Dutch (Jay Gjernes) and Kelly (David Alan Smith), who couldn’t steal water from Lake Superior. While obviously this zany trio (Rebane himself refers to them as “Dumb, Dumb and Dumber”) is played for laughs, as they all act like rubber, but their endless “comic” routines (they spend minutes of screen time arguing over which way is left, right, north or south) are even below what the Three Stooges’ gag writers would’ve thrown in the wastebasket. And sadly, little is done with the novel premise of a talking monster truck with a Cylon voice and sassy attitude, other than its huge wheels flattening cars, swimming pools, houses and (yes) outhouses, which gets tiresome real fast. Whenever they do make use of its sassy attitude, often its Cylon voice is unintelligible.

Hey- I like hick flicks, and while this was a genre seldom known for Shakespearian wit, a little of this film goes a long way. Rebane’s earlier serious films were more clever satires of rural life. That said, its heart is in the right place.

The film has one clever running gag: when the truck plows down a shack with the girlfriend of one of the crooks, she runs away at top speed, and occasionally throughout the movie one will see her still running through the background, even during the end credits. There is also a visual wink to Rebane’s earlier hit The Giant Spider Invasion. The memorable scene where people run up a hill, then back down, once we see a giant arachnid at the top of it, is repeated here with the monster truck and one of the three stooges.

Admittedly, I was quite hostile to this film when I first saw it a decade ago on the Mill Creek 50-movie pack, Drive-In Classics. Several years ago, Rebane had recut the film for a festival (its negative is in the county dump, but one print survives), and now he says, “I can watch it without cringing.” I presume this is the version now available on Blu-ray in Arrow’s awesome boxed set, Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection, with good colour and in widescreen. It’s been a minute since I viewed that smeary old Mill Creek copy (itself probably lifted from a VHS), and without doing a side-by-side comparison, it appears that this one moves better. (Or maybe I’m just getting more tolerant.) At the time, I thought it was worse than his horror films, but now it’s at least better than Rana.

Among the Blu-ray extras is a smeary 3-minute trailer, obviously edited on VHS (since the film’s meager business was fated to video sales that late in the regional sweepstakes), and the short Straight Shooter: Bill Rebane on Twister’s Revenge! allows the filmmaker to shed some light on its production history. He recounts that at the time, they decided, “Let’s do something stupid and strange”, and now “I don’t even know why I put in what I put in”, but admits that after having recut the film “now I can watch it without cringing”. He admits having so much fun working with the three guys (that he refers to as “Dumb, Dumb and Dumber”) that he intended to do more work with them.

Alas, Twister’s Revenge! would be the director’s final feature, as he had suffered a stroke. His exit from the screen coincides with an end of an era when drive-ins, once the home for regional productions, were being replaced by strip plazas. As with the director’s earlier regional offerings, it does capture a unique time and place, as evidenced in the five-minute music sequence featuring Liz Gray and The Love Birds at the local watering hole, all prancing on stage decked out in spandex, while the ubiquitous Pabst neon sign glows beside them.