Driving Force (1989)
Driving Force is one of those movies that reaffirms your faith in the B-grade movie. It’s a thoroughly mediocre film staffed by thoroughly mediocre actors who are nonetheless noteworthy. When they’re all in the same place at the same time, their noteworthy mediocrity reaches a kind of lousy movie critical mass, creating a chain reaction that results in a film you might actually watch all the way through… even though you have no reason to do so and you won’t be sure why you did once you have.
It is the future, sort of, and things are really bad out there, kind of. The future is made up of slums and chicken wire and sheet metal, except where it’s not, and the roads are all kind of Mad Max-like and dangerous, except they aren’t really. And the roads turn from roads to dirt to gravel pits to other various deserted locations seemingly at random, because, well, that’s just what roads do. Don’t they?
Sam Jones plays “Steve.” You may remember Sam Jones from 1980’s Flash Gordon.
Sam was also in an action series called The Highwayman very briefly, back in the 1980s, and his sidekick was the guy from the Energizer commercials of the day, who used to run around knocking things over and shouting, “Oi! Oi! Oi!” for no reason. That fellow’s name was Mark “Jacko” Jackson, but his name on the show was not “Jacko.” It was, inexplicably, “Jetto.” But I digress.
Steve is a single parent, trying hard to take care of his daughter, whose name I forget and whose presence in the movie is fairly unimportant save as a plot device. In this dystopian future, the only job Steve can get is as Post-Apocalyptic Tow-Truck Driver (PATTD). It is the task of PATTDs to take chicken-wire-covered tow trucks out onto the open roads to recover wrecks, which somehow generates money for all involved, though we’re not really sure why.
Steve gets his job from a nice old lady whose voice is the worst bit of dubbing I’ve seen this side of a Godzilla movie. Unfotunately for him, he almost immediately runs afoul of Don Swayze.
Don Swayze plays “Nelson.” Nelson is a competing Post Apocalyptic Tow-Truck Driver. He runs with several other Post-Apocalyptic henchmen, one of whom is played, badly, by martial-artist-turned-cardio-kickboxing-exercise-video-guru Billy Blanks. (Tae Bo, people. Tae Bo.)
The gang of thugs does what gangs of thugs do — they rough people up, help Don Swayze do bad things to Steve, and generally stink up the place. One of the henchman is this strange, face-painting oddball who reminded me of Bubba Zanetti in Mad Max. I’m quite sure the similarity was intentional, too. What is it about these gangs of post-apocalyptic goons that they always have that one really sexually ambiguous guy? Is it an attempt to be politically correct? Is this our horrific, dystopian near-future — a world in which even biker gangs and scavenger thugs have to meet affirmative action quotas for ambiguously gay henchmen?
Don Swayze also happens to be Patrick Swayze’s brother. He sounds like him, and even looks like him if you squint hard. See, Don Swayze is what you’d get if you cooked Patrick Swayze for a few hours — sort of boiled him down to reduce his liquid content, then laundered him and forgot to fold him in a timely fashion so that he got wrinkly while crumpled up in the laundry basket on top of the machine.
“Nelson” has a bad attitude throughout the film, and for good reason. He’s dying of cancer, and his gang of thugs don’t really respect him any more, and one gathers the life of a tow-truck driver is not exactly how he pictured spending his twilight years after some vague worldwide disaster reduced the planet to a B-grade movie set. He’s probably still pissed at whichever guidance counselor told him to channel his love of automobiles and his desire to work outside into a life of towing wrecks from the open cab of a sheet-metal-armored pick-up truck.
Anyway, Nelson and his ne’er-do-wells cause Steve to lose his job, and Steve’s evil in-laws try to take custody of his daughter. Then the daughter runs away and goes back to be with Steve, and the evil grandparents just give up and decide to be reasonable. Oh, and there’s a love interest for Steve, badly acted by none other than Catherine “I was Daisy Duke” Bach, to whom the years were not being kind even in 1989 when Driving Force was made.
Somewhere in there, Steve starts his own tow truck business, or something, and builds a truck and actually develops half a brain, and he defeats the evil tow truckers, and Nelson gets bored with being in the movie and sets himself on fire rather than spend any more time with Sam Jones. It’s hard to blame him. As the film closes, Sam Jones is coming to terms with the fact that Catherine Back wants to be his girlfriend and, while that’s not particularly appealing to him, he hasn’t got anything better going on. Exuent.