Six Degrees is a regular feature that utilizes one of the web’s many recommendation engines to find and examine films that are related to Hollywood’s biggest new releases—but removed by six entire degrees of other cinematic features.
The Path: Spy —> Johnny English Reborn —> Spies Like Us —> The Cannonball Run —> Smokey And The Bandit II —> Cannonball Run 2 —> Speed Zone
The Recommendation Engine: Jinni
Jinni is my new best friend. It’s easy enough to use other online recommendation engines, like Netflix or Amazon, to find films similar to other features that they offer for viewing (read: films that are already out on home-video or available for streaming), but finding suggestions for new movies is much more tricky. Jinni, as it happens, is brilliant and I love it, even as I snicker over its precise keywords like “chases and races” and its less-inspired keywords like “friends.”
Through the use of Jinni’s recommendations (more on that here), this week’s new release, Spy, connects to another bumbling spy film (Johnny English Reborn), which takes us over to Spies Like Us (pretty good, right?), whose recommendations then take us in a zippy new direction: bumbling films about driving. With just a few clicks between recommendations, Jinni gets us to 1989’s Speed Zone, loosely billed as the third entry in the decade’s Cannonball Run franchise.
To say that Speed Zone boasts an all-star cast is to profoundly undercut whole swathes of ’80s-era pop-cultural sensations and essential tastemakers. Taking in the film’s opening credits for the first time is nothing short of boggling, as it steadily metes out huge names in a seemingly endless stream: Peter Boyle, Donna Dixon, John Candy, Eugene Levy, The Smothers Brothers, Alyssa Milano, Brooke Shields, Tim Matheson, John Schneider. The film is basically its own time capsule for who was hip and now in 1989.
Speed Zone is—ostensibly—a Cannonball Run sequel, and it’s referred to variously on assorted sites as Cannonball Fever, Cannonball Run III, and Kanuunankuularalli jyrää taas (well, in Finland), but the film is mostly its own wacky spin on the cross-country race mythos. It retains just one character from the first two films (Jamie Farr’s Sheik Abdul ben Falafel, who cameos), and is mostly unconcerned with continuity or franchise appeal. Instead, the film functions as a big-screen outing for a number of members of the SCTV crew (like Candy, Levy, and Joe Flaherty), and was directed by SCTV regular Jim Drake from a script by, you guessed it, SCTV regular Michael Short.
It’s not a Cannonball Run movie. It’s a Cannonball Run movie told by SCTV talents.
The film takes a bold approach to rebooting a familiar storyline, basically jettisoning the constraints of the race as we know it during an elongated first act (the film is 90 minutes long, and the race doesn’t even really get under way until around the 34-minute mark; it’s a racing movie that’s weirdly concerned with jawing about the action, rather than getting it literally moving). The annual race attracts all manner of big racing stars (a tossed-off mention is made of Richard Petty), and as they gather the night before the event gets into motion, a pissed-off local police chief (Boyle, just perfect casting) arrests every single driver at the kick-off party.
If only every comedy franchise was daring enough to try the whole “everyone got arrested, oops” method of narrative freshening. (Although, Ernest Goes To Jail did try that exact move, non-reboot-style, in the comedy franchise’s fourth film, a switcheroo that we should all hail as being progressive and wild, now that we know about Speed Zone.) Chief Edsel’s actions are surely illegal—he calls the whole thing a “preemptive strike” against the race, which runs from Washington, D.C. to Santa Monica, California—but no one really cares about the ins and outs of the law, they’ve got a race to run. Cue motley crew.
It’s clear from the start that Speed Zone isn’t going to chronicle a bunch of professionals driving cars across the country, if only because the action, even pre-mass arrest, is focused on the strange group of hangers-on, sad-eyed employees, and actual criminals who are all in the general vicinity of the action (which, again, takes a third of the film’s runtime to really get cracking). It’s unlikely that these people (including Levy as a creepy ladies man, Candy as a meek valet parker, the Smothers Brothers as spoiled millionaires, and Melody Anderson and Shari Belafonte as MTI grads who use technology to stack the deck) would ever be assembled in the same room, much less driving a cross-country car race together, but that’s the magic of the movies. (Well, it’s the magic of cheap reboots.)
Most of the race itself is delivered via montage, with the various participants zipping past important landmarks or long stretches of recognizable landscape to signal the passing of time and location, a necessary evil for a film that’s mostly about how boring road trips can be. Occasionally, a head-to-head match-up will unfold, and we’ll be treated to some of the racers passing each other on a random road. Edsel and his deputy reappear, because the film needs a villain who isn’t made out of asphalt and an ending that doesn’t choose favorites from among its large cast of mugging comedians.
Instead of going for genuinely thrilling action throughout (the best chase scene actually unfolds during the film’s opening credits, when Schneider skips a car across a lake, like a stone, like a stone), Speed Zone aims for broad laughs. When the Smothers’ Van Sloan bros hatch a hare-brained plan to just fly across the country, their plane is promptly hijacked, which results in a Brooke Shields (as herself!) knocking out a terrorist with a food tray and the entire plane crashing through a highway underpass. Candy is accompanied on his trip by baby-voiced vixen (Dixon) who apparently suffers from narcolepsy. There’s a gag about gay sex in a bathroom. A lot of cars crash, but none of them blow up. It’s wacky!
The film concludes with a whiz-bang chase to the Santa Monica Pier—can you guess how many people fall off the pier? Guess high!—all resulting in an exceedingly outlandish winner, a lot of professions of love borne of the road, and the Van Sloans arriving on roller skis. It ends merrily, with everyone gleefully bopping into each other in bumper cars, clearly an attempt to kickstart a carnival-set sequel that tragically never materialized.
Previously on Six Degrees:
Tomorrowland to Sky High
Speed Zone is (sometimes) available for DVD rental on Netflix, (sometimes) available for VHS purchase on Amazon, and apparently does brisk business over on EBay.