05/06/10 - Stingray

Stingray (1978, 100 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078323/

Another Wednesday means another oddball movie pick. This week it's Stingray which actually sounded pretty fun. Quality wise this film was bound to be better than The Cheerleaders.

The movie is about a group of criminals that hide some drugs in a car while they're fleeing the cops. As it turns out, two guys buy that exact same car the next day before the criminals can get back and this starts a hot pursuit. The cops eventually catch on to this as well and we have three groups hunting each other down.

The best thing about this film is the stunt driving. It really is crazy good and really really fun to watch. One of the stunt drivers was at the cinema talking about his experience on this film and he said how top-notch and professional the whole thing was. It really shows through. The film really paces itself from chase scene to chase scene and these chase scenes are worth every minute. Though I'm not going to say they rival some classic in the genre they're still just really fun which is what they're more going for here. The tenseness or over-the-top action of other car movies isn't present here as Stingray relies more on entertainment.

The second best thing about this film is a small thing really but I have to say that the female lead (Sherry Jackson as Abigail Bratowski) is absolutely beautiful. She's not a high quality actress or anything and she's really not beautiful probably by anyone else's definition but whatever "it" is from my perspective is something she has. To be quite honest, it did make the movie a little bit better. Really, all the characters are unique. There being the three groups of people in the chase, there's quite a bit of characters to keep track of. The film handles this well never trying to focus on too many at any one time. But anyway, the other characters are all fun in their own way and really create a cool and balanced cast.

The bad thing about the film is the pacing and the length. At 100 minutes it's probably about 20 minutes too long. Like I mentioned above, the film goes from scene to scene really based on the fun chase scenes. While they're all fun as I said and even the in between scenes aren't that bad, it's just a bit too much of the same formula. I felt that especially near the end that the film was dragging. The conclusion takes a few minutes too long to really wrap everything up.

Overall, I gave this film a 4/10. It really is fun to watch which is what I think it was going for. Sadly, the 100 minutes is just way too long to be a movie that's worthy of a 5/10.