Made when Jaws was still the most successful film of all time, The Car has almost exactly the same premise, but replaces the ocean with the Utah desert, and the shark with a Lincoln Continental Mark III of possibly supernatural origin. When two teenage cyclists and a hitch-hiking musician are killed in apparently deliberate hit-and-runs, the police department of Santa Ynez investigates, whereupon the seemingly driverless vehicle turns on its hapless officers as well. And when the car strikes rather too close to the home of Captain Wade Parent (James Brolin), he vows to stop at nothing to defeat it. Director Elliot Silverstein (Cat Ballou, A Man Called Horse) keeps everything as slick and streamlined as the car itself, turning the desert landscape into a powerfully mythic backdrop for a potent clash between the forces of good and those of inexplicable but clearly implacable evil.
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