Welcome to B-Movie Enema. I’m Geoff Arbuckle and this is the blog you come to when you’re taking a shit, or looking for a website run by a guy you’re pretty sure you are far more cultured and smarter than, or, I dunno… you have nothing better to do on a weekend night with nowhere to go. Hmmm… Maybe I’m not doing a good job at promoting my site. Let’s see if I can do better.

The 80s! That’s the decade of Ronald Reagan, cocaine-fueled American exceptionalism running rampant, and bitchin’ music. But you know what else the 80s had? Fuckin’ monster trucks! Monster trucks rolled out of the late 70s trend of modified pickup trucks in various specialized motorsport competitions. By the end of the 70s, one truck in particular, named Bigfoot, was so modified from its original 1974 Ford F-250 that it became known as the world’s first monster truck. Following that, other popular monster trucks were USA-1, Bear Foot, and King Kong. These trucks became the star of various events like Monster Jam where they’d do high-flyin’ jumps and crushing beat-up cars under their giant wheels. If you were a little boy at the time Monster Jam started up, and word on the street is I was, or if you are a grown man, and people tell me that’s what I am, you LOVED the mayhem, the majesty, and the machinery of giant trucks smashing beaters under their tires.

Apparently, Canada was into it too because, in 1987, Steven Hilliard Stern made this week’s movie – Rolling Vengeance.

Steven Hilliard Stern is the pride of Timmins, Ontario. To my surprise, we’ve seen one of his movies before. Way back in April 2017, I looked at 1983’s Baby Sister which was part of my Phoebe Cates Month here at the blog. That little TV movie wasn’t all that bad. That said, Stern is known for making a few stinkers. In 1979, he made a nearly forgotten Michael Douglas film, Running. I wouldn’t know anything about that if I hadn’t just recently seen it featured on an old episode of Sneak Previews with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. It didn’t go over too well. They thought of it as a pretty cheesy and vapid movie, and Siskel himself said it was one of the year’s worst movies.

Two years later, Siskel was one of the few positive reviews for Stern’s The Devil and Max Devlin starring Bill Cosby and Elliott Gould. This was during the time in which Disney movies, particularly their live-action films, were widely panned. Stern’s best-known film, for maybe not-so-great reasons was 1982’s Mazes and Monsters which starred Tom Hanks.

Now, rumor has it, I’m old enough to remember this but once upon a time, there was a pretty major uproar over Dungeons and Dragons. Both the United States and England were going through a period of a re-emergence of religiously-fueled social conservatism. I would argue that conservatism was a response to some of the liberal-leaning counterculture, feminism, and civil rights stuff from the 60s and 70s. But, you see, whenever a wave of conservatism starts to rise, the religiously conservative nutjobs will push real hard for their ideals to be highly represented. This created “Satanic Panic” and they targeted everything from horror films to toys to cartoons to rock music. Of course, that also landed on anything that used “magic” or “witchcraft” which means Dungeons and Dragons was targeted.

Holy cow did this get stupid fast. I’ll be as concise as possible. This got far enough to the point that 60 Minutes did a whole thing that featured D&D founder Gary Gygax defending the game and the community it built while also having people who opposed the occult and perceived mind-altering elements of the game featured telling their story. Gygax basically said the game is make-believe. There was nothing in the game that would turn people into killers of others or themselves. But let’s talk about Mazes and Monsters. This was based on a book that was loosely based on a largely speculative story of the suicide of role-player James Dallas Egbert III who sadly killed himself after a bout with clinical depression. Still, everything was linked to his enjoyment of playing D&D. While it was early in Tom Hanks’ career, making it still somewhat relevant in terms of movie trivia, the story has since largely been debunked and kind of put on the same level as what Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent did to comic books. However, I would say Mazes and Monsters was nowhere near as detrimental to D&D.

Okay, let’s get back on track here of monster trucks! This movie was released in October 1987 and didn’t really do particularly well. Contemporary reviews were mostly negative. That said, more recent reviews have been much kinder to this movie. I mean… how can you not appreciate a movie with a monster truck that is going to get revenge on drunk drivers?!? So with that, let’s just get into this bad mamma jamma!

When you have an 80s movie that will eventually have a guy driving a monster truck to wreak vengeance upon drunk drivin’ Canadian hillbillies, how do you start the movie? You start with a song about driving all day and all night as a long-haul trucker and you show our lead, Joey Rosso, played by Don Michael Paul (3x FIRST-NAME COMBO!!!) driving said long-haul trucker. Right away, too, you get to see the five drunken hillbillies at a truck stop drinkin’ Buds and being goofballs by spraying each other with beer and having a good ol’ definitely-not-gay laugh about it. But what is Joey truckin’?

BOOZE!

Joey must be new at the whole trucker thing. One guy escorted him into the county and was razzing him about returning from his first trip out of town. Then, when he arrives at the bar to deliver the shipment, which is two hours late, he accidentally runs into the dock and it causes a couple cases of Jack Daniels to fall out and get ruined. Vic Doyle, one of the drunken hotheads who works at the liquor store has a conniption fit about it. His dad, Tiny, played by the always awesome Ned Beatty, comes in and plays negotiator to get things cleared up with Joey and his father, Big Joe.

So, basically, this is the tale of two families in a small town. The Doyles are headed by Tiny who has a considerable amount of pull in this small town. Then you have the Big Joe Rosso. Big Joe, aside from Joey the truck driver, also has a couple younger daughters with his wife Kathy. You can basically tell that Big Joe is the amiable one and Tiny is a prick. Big Joe runs a trucking company while Tiny smarmily runs the rest of the small town. At the very least, he also owns the bar and he’s a prick to some women who come to the bar to protest drunk driving.

However, I kind of feel like the stuffy ladies bitching about drunk drivers have a point because Vic and his friends are CONSTANTLY drunk and driving and fucking with people on the roads.

The first people we see them mess with are Big Joe and Joey. They harass Big Joe and then get between the two Rossos and start chuckin’ beer bottles at Joey’s truck. Joey initially wants to mess with them right back and even rear-ends Vic’s pickup. Big Joe calls off his kid.

But see… Here’s where there’s a bit of a problem with his kind of movie. I understand that a small town will have a different way of doing things with the law and whatnot. I understand it’s kind of easy for one fish to get pretty big in that small pond. You can find a whole lot of movies like this and this one, though coming out first, is similar to Road House in terms of its small-town politics and strife. But when you have this kind of structure where maybe the police aren’t going to be as effective, do you really think a bunch of redneck assholes who are constantly doing crazy shit while driving drunk can get away with it without a little bit of vigilante justice coming back to bite them or their boozy driving will kill them?

Yes, yes. I know that is what this movie is ultimately going to do. That said, it seems as though EVERYONE knows that Vic and his buddies are total monsters and have been for… decades? That shit does not fly for that long without someone coming along and knocking these assholes down a peg. Hell, you can see how Joey reacted in this movie because when they mess with the two Joes, Joey tries to run them off the road himself. He cannot be the first person in this town to have wanted, or tried, to do that.

Are you ready to get where the real drama is going to play out in this movie? After Joey comes home with Big Joe, we see that 1) Big Joe has a new big rig and has changed the name of his company to Big Joe Rosso and Son which the two of them are quite proud of, 2) we see Joey’s mom and his two younger sisters who are celebrating the birthday of the youngest and everyone is so happy and great, 3) one of the girls trying to hand out flyers about drunk driving, Misty, is Joey’s hot girlfriend and Joey sure would like to get in her pants but she’s holding out, and 4) Big Joe and Kathy are really really in love with each other and we get to see how much they like each other when she shows him a new jacket she created with the new company name on it. I’m going to give you a chance to see how all of those things are going to spell tragedy for the Rosso family and what it means for them to get revenge.

The next day, the Joes head out for work. When they leave, Kathy and the two little girls, Alison and Kristin, leave because they have a dentist appointment. Meanwhile, Vic Doyle and his dumbass drunk buddies are playing Beer Football (no shit, they are playing sort of football in a barn, but after the ball is hiked they have to pound beers before they do some dumb definitely-not-gay tackling of each other. Tiny comes to speak to Vic and when Vic sasses his old man, Tiny tells him he’s not going to tolerate that shit. He’s also not exactly tolerant of his son and his buddies, all of whom work for Tiny, carry on as drunken fuckbros.

So how do they blow off the steam of getting their asses chewed by Tiny? They go for a drive. They cut out right in front of Kathy and the two girls and then don’t allow her to pass them. They then bomb her car with beer bottles and force her to stop to accost her. The drunk fuckturds BREAK HER WINDOW and then attempt to rape Kathy in front of her daughters. She’s able to drive away from them but they chase after her.

There is a lot going on in this scene that is utterly insane. First of all, remember all that shit I said earlier about how none of these guys should have been able to do this very long before someone has had all they could handle of them? Well, they apparently like to terrorize everyone in broad fucking daylight. They also have no problem with endangering literal children. Like, LITTLE children. Okay, maybe these girls aren’t babies but they aren’t even teenagers. They break Kathy’s driver’s side window and try making out with her. Wh-wha… what was the plan there? Just some non-consensual kissing? Were they going to try to pull her out to rape her? What was the plan, you moronic hilljacks? The scene begins when it is raining. In fact, there are several times in which the weather in these early parts of the movie is just awful. Driving rain, cold, cloudy skies. But then in this chase sometimes it was raining, sometimes it was just cloudy and shitty looking, sometimes it was actually sunny. I understand this is a small budget film, but c’mon, movie!

But maybe the one thing that proves these guys are absolutely the WORST drunks? They throw their beers at cars and trucks! Why wouldn’t they, you know… Drink those?

But let’s get a lot more serious, though. Vic and the boys ultimately trap Kathy on the other side of the road where a truck comes at them. Kathy tries to drive off the road to avoid the big rig, but her car is t-boned and she and the two little girls are killed. In the aftermath, very obviously, Big Joe is not doing great. Joey gets some comfort from Misty.

It’s kind of funny. This movie is rated R (and earns it from having topless dancers inside Tiny’s bar). However, it’s built a little more like a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week melodrama. In fact, it even looks like that era’s TV movies. There’s a haze to the interior shots at the Rosso home. It’s even kind of shot with soft focus. There’s a whole lot of emotion with Big Joe and Kathy earlier on being very much in love with each other in a very saccharin way. Big Joe and Joey are obviously directed by their morals in a way that reveals a very obvious set of values that are juxtaposed to the obvious lack of morals and values from Vic and his crew. What I’m getting at is that it’s very black-and-white in how it’s set up. We very much fucking hate Vic and his gang of drunk fuckturds. While Tiny is an asshole, at least he’s trying to straighten out his kid and his buddies. I should hate Tiny for running the town through smarm and money, but he’s nowhere near as much of an asshole as Vic and his crew.

To double up on the made-for-TV melodrama feel, we get some courtroom drama. Vic is put on trial for vehicular manslaughter. He very clearly lies about how much he had to drink. When the truck driver testifies, he says it seems as though Vic sped up to not let Kathy back into her lane, but the defense lawyer traps the driver, who is another truck driver that Joey knows and was goofing off with him at the start of the movie, by asking if he actually saw Vic step on the gas to prevent her from merging back. This gets the judge to say there is insufficient evidence for a manslaughter charge, so he sentences Vic to a $300 fine and a year in prison, which he commutes upon the completion of a trip to the hospital to get rehab.

A seething Big Joe decides he wants to stop off at Tiny’s bar for a beer. He stashes a wrench in his boot. Vic drinks one of the beers himself and tells Big Joe that he can get it from him in piss form. He pours the other on Joey’s head. This leads to a big ol’ brawl at the bar. The other trucker, Steve, comes in and joins in on the fight. That wrench Big Joe brought? He uses it to smash Tiny’s arm to make him drop his shotgun. So this ultimately begins the whole Doyles vs. the Rossos War that has been brewing like a case of Budweiser beers since the first few minutes of the movie.

So what does Vic and crew do as the next volley in this war? Something UTTERLY INSANE. They position themselves on an overpass and wait for Big Joe and Joey to drive by. When they do, holy fucking shit, Vic and his hillbillies drop cinder blocks off the overpass onto their rigs. This doesn’t just cause Big Joe to wreck his truck, but it also causes some innocent bystanders to wreck too. When Big Joe’s truck jackknifes, he is sent to the hospital in a coma.

It’s time for Joey to work on whatever he’s been working on in the barn. It’s… It’s a monster truck. That’s what he’s working on. Because it’s an 80s movie, we see him building this creation of the monster truck in montage format. What he creates isn’t just a monster truck… No, it’s more of a war machine. Like, think of Killdozer and Dead Reckoning from Land of the Dead had a baby. But it’s still a baby? Because it’s big but it’s not very long like its parents were.

I dunno what I’m talking about because I know nothing about trucks or, well, monster trucks, but what Joey builds is fucking awesome.

I think it’s safe to say this truck will be called Rolling Vengeance for the rest of this review. So Joey takes Rolling Vengeance to Tiny’s. Not Tiny’s house (though I would), but Tiny’s combination bar/grill/titty bar/used car lot. I would almost expect him to roll over some titties or beer, but he smashes every single used car on the lot, and, as a grand finale, he crushes Tiny’s car. Either the music or the boobs are so loud inside the bar, they don’t hear the commotion going on outside, like, at all.

Maybe we had to wait for the halfway point of the movie to get to Rolling Vengeance, but, boy oh boy, it’s kind of worth the wait. I’m not going to lie. This isn’t that bad of a movie. It’s sort of inoffensive in terms of its kind of goody-goody values. Yeah, we had to wait to get to the monster truck, sure, but the first half of the movie does fly at a pretty good pace.

There’s a pretty good balance between the “action” (I put that into parentheses because sometimes the action isn’t your typical car chase or fist fight or whatever) and the melodrama. Family time all nice and sweet? Well, here comes crazy drunk assholes to kill the matriarch of the family. Bummed out about the prosecution not being able to find culpability in that killing? Let’s have a fuckin’ bar fight! Cinder blocks falling from an overpass turns into Big Joe being hospitalized which leads to Rolling Vengeance taking his bow to destroy cars which is followed up by Joey and Misty fuuuuucking. Good balance.

Believe it or not, there are some actual cops in this small town in Ohio. Yeah, this is supposedly in Ohio, and, being from the Midwest, I can say I 100% believe this could happen in Ohio. They are present the next day to take a look at the destruction that Rolling Vengeance wrecked upon the lot. The cops ACTUALLY question Tiny about Big Joe’s truck jackknifing. Of course, Tiny says it sure was a shame that Big Joe had his accident. When the cop asks about the sling on his arm from that wrench crashing into it, he says he tripped over his own dick. Tiny is determined to deal with this feud themselves.

The first person they go after is Steve. They drive up on his truck one night and start shooting it with a shotgun to, I dunno, run him off the road? Kill him? Send a message? Flag him down to sell him some Girl Scout Cookies? Anyway, Steve gets on the radio and calls for help. Joey hears this and hits the road with Rolling Vengeance.

One thing I actually didn’t know until Tiny tells Vic what he wants the gang to do is that all five of the dumbass drunks are ALL Tiny’s kids. But they are all like maybe half-brothers? He tells Vic that all his brothers’ mothers were sluts. That’s why he has the most faith in him. Plus, the actor who plays Vic looks like Steven Crowder so I guess Tiny has the most faith in him being just the worst. But I digress.

Joey kills a couple of the Doyles. When he arrives with Rolling Vengeance, he sees them shooting at Steve’s rig. When he comes down the road, one gets in his van to drive away as fast as possible while the other gets rolled over by the monster truck. Rolling Vengeance then runs down the van and crushes it with the guy still inside. It is confirmed by the highway police that they aren’t in need of an ambulance or body bags, but a street sweeper and a pair of doggy bags.

Since Vic sent the first two idiots after Steve, that means that either Steve got to them first or it’s Joey Rosso who giving them trouble. The next two are going to give Joey problems first. If they fail, Tiny says he’ll kill them himself. He then offers up a prayer for the dearly departed. This is maybe the reason why you get a guy like Ned Beatty for your movie. As he does the prayer, he does not remember the two guys’ names who died. That’s how much of a shitbag father he is. It’s actually a legitimately funny moment in the movie and showed this movie really did try to be something real and not just some crap exploitation shit.

Anyway, Misty has been trying to call Joey all day and night. When she gets worried, she goes to his place to try to see if he’s okay. She gets to his house but only finds two of the Doyle brothers who brutally rape her. Joey comes home to find Misty in pretty bad shape. Joey says he will kill the bastards. You know what? I believe him. Besides, he has killed twice already.

Just to make sure you really want these two fuckers dead for what they did to Misty, they are bragging about how much fun they had and how 1) it’s her word against theirs if she goes to the law and 2) if she goes to Joey, they ain’t worried about a loser like him. That’s when Joey comes with Rolling Vengeance to chase these guys down. The two brothers take off running in different directions. Joey chooses to go after the moron in the Confederate flag shirt first… mostly because he ran straight ahead like the idiot he is.

He gets run over pretty quickly by a smiling Joey. The other guy runs toward an abandoned warehouse where Rolling Vengeance busts through the door and smushes that guy but good too. However, I do like that before he gets run over, they make sure to put a bunch of empty wooden crates and plastic barrels between him and Rolling Vengeance so the monster truck can run over those too. He even destroys the warehouse’s office.

Later, the cops discuss who they think might be doing all this. They both know it’s very likely Joey Rosso. After all, Tiny and his kids have done nothing but torture that family. The deputy thinks they should go get him. You know, the law and all… But the sheriff says if he goes and picks up the vigilante, and then takes his early retirement, who is going to stop all the drunk driving that goes on in and around this town? The deputy says that it’s all great and good that bad people are getting their comeuppance, but eventually, it could lead to innocent people getting hurt.

The sheriff goes to talk to Joey, who is having a pretty rough day. Big Joe has taken a turn for the worse and Joey is at the hospital. The sheriff says that if he catches the vigilante, it is his job to bring him in. He’s just kind of hoping that the vigilante decides to “retire” on his own and that will be that. Oh, and Misty has heard about the deaths of her attackers. She figures out pretty quickly that Joey killed them. She thinks they need to leave town immediately. But first, Joey is told his father has died. He tells Misty to go home because he’s got a lot more killin’ to do… Namely Vic and Tiny.

Considering there are 12 more minutes to go in this movie, these killings ain’t going to be quick.

The scene at Tiny’s bar is not so good. Tiny and Vic are holed up there. Tiny implies that Vic is a fuck up and a chicken shit. His brothers are all dead and he’s still here. Tiny believes Vic sent his brothers to do the dirty work because he has no balls. But it’s time to put up or shut up because Rolling Vengeance is here and Joey blasts it through the walls of Tiny’s bar and drives right through it. Joey takes it through for another pass and another and another until there is nothing left.

As Joey brings the place down, Misty shows up with the sheriff. Joey, thinking he’s done enough now, gets out and embraces Misty. Tiny rises out of the rubble and he and the sheriff shoot each other dead. Vic gets inside Rolling Vengeance and begins chasing Misty and Joey. Misty hides in a drainpipe, but Vic starts cutting it open and sends a drill down the pipe slowly. Joey forces Vic out of the cab of Rolling Vengeance by smoking out the cab by setting his jacket on fire and putting it into the engine. Vic and Joey fight as Rolling Vengeance slowly creeps closer and closer to drilling Misty to death. Finally, just as the drill is about to drive into Misty’s torso, Joey pushes Vic under the truck’s tire and it kills him. He saves Misty and tomorrow will bring with it years and years of counseling to come.

The sheriff actually ends up surviving his wound and his deputy says he got an ID on who was driving the monster truck – Vic Doyle. The sheriff is like, “Yeah, cool. I guess he didn’t much like his family, huh?” Joey and Misty walk off down the road toward the rising sun. But… yeah, a lot of psychological care will likely be necessary for the two lovers. The future is gonna be… rough.

Again, Rolling Vengeance is not that bad of a movie. It’s totally implausible. I mean there are cops, right? We meet them halfway through the movie. But to believe these totally capable cops willing to do their work to uphold the law would have no power to stop the Doyles? That’s totally unlikely. I feel like there has to be some sort of scene missing that explains that Tiny Doyle constantly bailed his sons out of trouble by paying off witnesses or juries or something. It was mentioned that two of the dead Doyles had racked up several DUI arrests but never once convicted. They, like Jim Gordon in Gotham City, realize there is so much in-grown corruption, that they need to rely on a vigilante to bring it all down… I guess. The deputy isn’t so hot on the vigilante idea but whatever.

The movie is, like I said, in the same vein as a Road House type of action movie from the late 80s. You’re sticking it to the man and sticking up for the good people who are constantly terrorized by the shitty kids of the man. There’s nothing wrong with that in a movie at all. It’s not the greatest movie but it is far from the worst I’ve seen on this blog. Big bonus points go to there being an actual monster truck with a drill and a metal cutter and it spits fire out of its smokestacks. That’s just good old fashioned badassery.

That might do it for Rolling Vengeance, but it’s not the end of the road for this weekend’s business as tomorrow’s B-Movie Enema: The Series has a real classic for us to watch. Join me and my partner-in-crime, Nurse Disembaudee, as we watch the 1962 classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die! You can catch that here on B-Movie Enema’s site, or you can go to YouTube to check it out, or you can go to Vimeo to watch it. You can find the links to YouTube and Vimeo at the top of the right-hand column on this website. Next week, the next B-Movie Enema review article takes us to camp where we have to survive the overthrow of a shitty religious camp in Summer Camp Nightmare.

Until then, finish your monster trucks and let’s get to avenging some drunk driving deaths!