Mag Wheels (1978).
“If chicks were supposed to be tough, God would’ve given ‘em muscles.”
Directed by Bethel Buckalew
Written by Bethel Buckalew
Starring John Laughlin, Shelly Horner, Verkina Flower, Phoebe Schmidt, vans, and trucks
The Stage.
A group of guys in vans and a group of girls in trucks go back and forth in a cycle of stupidity as Anita, a stupid girl who just wanted to lay on the beach, gets caught in the middle of it.
The Review.
Mag Wheels (also known as Summer School, which makes zero sense because the students are just in regular school) was a short run drive-in film that was later a mainstay on USA’s Up All Night block. It feels like a cheesy teen film about kids who like to hang out on the beach all day until it takes an oddly dark turn in the last twenty minutes.
Steve is part of a gang of beach bums who drive around in colorful vans. They also have a “pledge” (like some kind of fraternity) who seems like he’s about 40 years old that they bully and push around. We get to see these jocks play frisbee for about 3 minutes of the film as they just literally horse around next to the water. Jill is part of her own gang of female beach bums who drive around in colorful trucks. They don’t like the van boys because they don’t know how to park correctly. Anita is the new girl in town who meets both groups while sitting on the beach when she (and the rest of the degenerates) are supposed to be in class. Steve sees Anita and takes a liking to her, much to the chagrin of his bulldog girlfriend Donna.
Most of the rest of the film takes place in and around the Boogie Bowl, a roller rink filled with skaters and other high schoolers who just come to hang out. A lot of the back and forth between the two groups is pretty innocent aside from Donna trying to run Anita off the road on her way home from work. About 45 minutes in, Donna decides to really turn things up a notch. During one night at the rink, she calls the police and informs them that Steve is dealing cocaine out of his van. Of course he’s not, and when confronted by the cops, it’s put into his ear that Anita is the one who ratted him out. He’s obviously not pleased about this possibility. He and his van crew follow Anita and Jill from their house, pull a Mad Max style move on Jill’s truck to slow them down as one kid jumps from the van into the back of their truck and tosses ropes to the other vans to anchor and stop their ride. They then rip the women out of their truck and attempt to rape them in the middle of the fucking desert. Luckily they called in the truck gang on their CB radio earlier in the sequence and the girls roll in to save the day.
Back in class, a teacher is having a bizarre class discussion about cause and effect and uses rape as the example, which sets off all of the students involved. Steve tells her to just ‘laugh it off’, but instead Anita and Donna get into it and fight in class. Anita is suspended as a result.
In a last ditch effort to provide consequences for the males, the females devise a “drag-off”, a redneck sport in which the trucks line up on one side of a small canyon and the vans line up on the other with a rope tying the vehicles together, leading to a vehicular tug-of-war. The winners of this game win the prize of pride, while the losers wreck their vehicles and are probably dead. Anita doesn’t know about the game until it’s already started, so she drives out to stop them because she doesn’t want anyone dying. Unable to stop the game, she instead hits the gas and launches her dad’s station wagon into the canyon in a bizarre suicide attempt. Steve rushes down and pronounces, “She’s alive!” as the van rapists and the truck ladies both celebrate like their favorite baseball team just went up 1-0 in the second inning and Steve cradles the love of his life that he both almost lost moments ago and almost gang raped a two days before.
From a filmmaking aspect, the skill used to create this confusing slice of sleaze was minimal. Shots are static and nothing feels dynamic. There’s really only about 45 minutes worth of actual content here, the rest is padded out by long scenes of people skateboarding, playing pinball, or pointlessly running around on the beach.
The End.
Mag Wheels is a bad film with a frustrating narrative. The van crew is filled with mean spirited rapists who are never held accountable for their actions, nor is Donna, the woman who sparked all of this craziness. The director presents perhaps the most morbid “happy ending” that I’ve ever seen on film as a woman who just tried to end it all is held by the man who sicked his entire gang of rapists on her as a song that calls her out by name swells over the credits. At the same time, it’s hard to feel bad for Anita, who says Steve is, “Not that bad” after the attempted rape when Jill calls him out for being a total piece of shit. Maybe if she had died at the end, the crew would have seen that there are consequences to their actions. What happens after they drag Anita out of the canyon? She dates the rapist and her dad murders her for destroying the family car?
The most interesting part of the film is the female truck gang, and we simply don’t get enough of them on screen. One of them shows up to stop the gang rape and beats the shit out of the guys using karate moves (and of course she’s the Asian one in the group). I wanted more of that actress.
It’s hard to recommend this to even the most ardent viewers of grindhouse drive-in cinema. It’s mean-spirited, chauvinistic, and utterly stupid.
