Plymouth Fury Cop Car
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Even The Christine Cop Car Is Bad To The Bone

The California Kid

The California Kid

We all love a good car chase/road movie, especially when the 5-0 get involved. It’s even better when the cops are bad, twisted and corrupt. When the cop’s car is a Plymouth Belvedere, a car very similar to Gargling Gas’ top movie car, Christine, I’m pretty much in police brutality heaven.

The poster above is for a 1974 movie about a psychotic town sheriff who finds his excitement in the desert by forcing speeders to their deaths.

Take Collie Entragian (pictured below), the possessed cop from Stephen King’s Desperation, and team him up with another of King’s creations, the 1958 Plymouth Fury from Christine and you have the foundation onto which The California Kid is built.

Collie Entragian Meets Christine

Collie Entragian Meets Christine

After a few unfortunate hot-rodders meet the maniacal Sheriff Roy Childress’ (Vic Morrow), Martin Sheen and his 1934 Ford make an appearance to try and end the cop’s evil ways.

A simple storyline, yet one made very cool by the choice of characters and cars.

Vic Morrow

Vic Morrow

At first glance, the Plymouth Belvedere looks a little odd wearing the colours of a patrol car, especially with the incongruous red lamp ruining the glorious lines and its overall sleekness. The thought of such a long and heavy car giving chase to a hotrod is rather amusing, too… until you watch it in action.

Plymouth Fury Cop Car

Plymouth Fury Cop Car

Check out the psycho cop and his Plymouth in the clip below and tell me how cool it looks as a cop car. I have also added the entire film below if you enjoy the clip.

Fifty Shades of Grey?

Nah, I think this Plymouth is way more erotic and bad.

Evil And The Automobile

My favourite kind of films are road movies or movies in which cars are heavily featured, or better still, if the star is the car. The cream of the crop will be in the horror/crime genres, so with this in mind, it led me into thinking about which cars were evil and what types of cars evil drove. No Herbie The Love Bug here (although I was traumatised as a 6-year-old witnessing No. 53 trying to commit suicide off a bridge), just the dark and the mysterious, the evil and the damning.

I’ll start with my favourite Stephen King novel and movie, Christine. This ’58 Plymouth Fury wasn’t just cool, she was possessive over her owners, choosing love songs on her radio to serenade them. If anyone else came into their lives, Christine would kill them. You could take a metal bar to her or defecate on her dash, but that wouldn’t stop Christine; it would just make her mad enough for her to come looking for you. Despite sounding like a corny horror, the film does have more depth than most, although it doesn’t quite depict the relationship a kid has with his/her first car like the novel.

Okay, this movie falls into the corny category, although it is entertaining because the main star is an psychotic custom Lincoln. The movie’s tagline: Is it a phantom, a demon, or the Devil himself? pretty much sums up The Car and its storyline, but because I’m a car freak, I loved watching it take people out.

Drive Angry is worth watching just for Amber Heard and her murdered-out Charger. Despite being uber cool, the Dodge isn’t the evil one here. The story involves a father coming back from hell to prevent his daughter going with a Satanic cult who eventually want to sacrifice her child. However, he isn’t the only one who has come back, as he’s being pursued by a man in a suit who calls himself the Accountant. At the end of the movie the Accountant summons a ’57 Chevrolet One-Fifty from hell, the car the two of them go back in.

Another creation of Stephen King involves this superb ’55 Chevy Bel-Air in Sometimes They Come Back. This is another favourite of mine – it doesn’t get any cooler than dead greasers driving a fire-breathing black Chevy with flames on the side.

This Devil is easy on the eye in Bedazzled. Liz Hurley (Satan) drives this apt Lamborghini Diablo.

Yet another Stephen King adaption in Maximum Overdrive. This was given a bit of a bashing by the critics, but if you’ve read the short story, you’ll understand how hard it was to make the transition to film convincing. Trucks come to life and surround a gas station/diner full of terrified on-lookers. If you’re not into the whole “cars have feelings too” like me and Gargling Gas, then I’d give this miss.

hybrid

Although this article features the evil and the dead, I will include this next car as, although it’s an alien, it’s a nasty bit of kit. Super Hybrid is about a mysterious car that ends up in a Chicago police impound garage after a deadly traffic accident. The on-call mechanics discover the car has a mind of its own, and with its hundreds of horsepower, it starts killing people.

If I had to make a movie and feature a car I think the Devil would surf eBay for, I’d have to go for a slammed black ’66 Cadillac Deville.