Gas

(Les Rose, 1981)
Some kind of mutant beast - this gas-crisis caper oozes money from every frame, yet it's as shoddily conceived as the worst zero-budget hack job. Its manic smut smells vaguely like the lowbrow commercial cinema of European lore, and there are frantic memory cues to everything from Curly Howard to the Keystone Kops to...Robert Altman? But it's as though everyone involved were promised a second draft that got lost in the mail. Donald Sutherland, Sterling Hayden, Susan Anspach - they all look desperate and depressed. Somewhere buried under the unrelenting clutter is Sandee Currie's potentially appealing love interest, but even she's sandwiched between a barely-there Howie Mandel and Peter Aykroyd doing Kung Fu. Down below that are three skids full of vile regurgitated race humour, mainly generating horrified empathy for the performers; an orgy of crashing cars standing in for a third act; and let's not forget the fat ladies. Such an absolute piece of shit that its technical competence compounds the waste.