Aaron Beck: Badass Defined

Plymouth Cuda

Plymouth Cuda – Aaron Beck

If you read yesterday’s hearse post, you’ll have seen the image of a rather mean, stretched and black Dodge Challenger. The rendering is by a talented individual called, Aaron Beck, a guy who obviously knows and understands what makes a car badass. His twisted and sinister vision is capable of possessing a collection of nuts and bolts with the kind of presence that gives Gargling Gas goose bumps.

Take the Plymouth Barracuda above, for example, a car I could see myself cruising along Nevada back roads in, body parts in the trunk, wads of cash on the passenger seat, the throb of V8 the perfect soundtrack as I headed towards the horizon.

Rocket Bunny Cuda (Nissan S13 front end) - Aaron Beck

Rocket Bunny Cuda (Nissan S13 front end) – Aaron Beck

If someone were to ask you to imagine what the love child of a 70s Cuda and an early 90s Nissan S13 would look like, you’d assume they’d left their medication in the cabinet that morning. Ask Aaron Beck and he’d answer, “It would like a Rocket Bunny drift car, of course.”

The lines all work, as does the front end, and as far as the usual LS V8 engine swap the drifters all go for today, leave the original Hemi in it and call it perfection.

Rat Cuda - Aaron Beck

Rat Cuda – Aaron Beck

The Rat look is a phenomenon that just keeps growing, its rusty insidious tendrils reaching out past the usual fare of American iron to German soil and the VWs and Bimmers. The Rat Cuda above is a rendering done for the up and coming Mad Max: Fury Road movie. This is another reason I feel Aaron is worthy of a post, the fact he is associated with one of my favourite road movies.

Mad Max Vehicle - Aaron Beck

Mad Max Vehicle – Aaron Beck

 

Aaron Beck's Kuda

Aaron Beck’s Kuda

From his renderings to reality, Aaron’s three dimensional ride is his Kuda pictured above. His eye for detail and talent make it extremely hard to tell what is 2D and what is real, but if you take a look at beckkustoms, you can witness the Kuda’s build and the labour of love that is the car’s interior.

So I doff my cap to you, Sir Aaron Beck, for your creations are sinister and the epitome of ‘badass’ – I’ll certainly be paying extra attention when I sit down and watch Mad Max: Fury Road.

 

 

Plymouth Fury Cop Car
Video

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.