For years I've listened to nitpickers attack the ending. "Why didn't they just drive away?" If you recall, the attendant at the last gas station they stopped at warned, "You got a busted headlight on that thing". Not to mention half of the front end torn off, exposing the engine compartment.

Fonda's character pulls off the road to repair the headlight "while there's still enough light to see what I'm doing". The cultists last contacted them at the roadside construction project, and followed them to where they stopped -- at twilight.

When night fell, they either smashed the other headlight or disabled the engine by quietly pulling a cable or belt. In the dark, with no headlights, surrounded by hills and dales and rocks and streams and trees, that big behemoth isn't going anywhere, if it's even still running.

The couples originally see their $26,000 Vogue as a castle on wheels -- king of the road. "We don't need anything. We are self-contained, baby!" They quickly realize that it is in fact a lumbering, vulnerable deathtrap that makes them easy prey in isolated, unfamiliar territory. This refusal to accept that they are so out of their element -- in a race that they can't possibly win -- is the movie's entire point.

Two couples vacationing together in a new Vogue R.V. from Texas to Aspen, Colorado are terrorized after they witness a murder during a Satanic ritual.

Some of the decisions made by the characters in this film defy all reason. The bad driving, the ritual sacrifice within view of others campers... and some just silly mistakes. But all the silly plot is made up for by the action, chases and explosions. This is sort of like "Duel" in an RV.

The most interesting thing is how the film starts with dirt bikes and you quickly assume the "race" must involve the dirt bikes. And yet, not even halfway in, the bikes are destroyed and serve no real point to the plot. A tank of oil (or gasoline) does, though.

A very inspired and briskly effective handy dandy genre-blending combo of your typically creepy devil worship fright flick and a slam-bang exciting Southern-fried downhome car chase action thriller about two vacationing married couples traveling cross country in a deluxe, self-contained luxury RV who accidentally witness a black-robed Satanist cult in the bloodthirsty act of making a human sacrifice. The cult, whose members are frightfully legion, immediately realize that their allegedly secret ceremony was seen and pretty soon everything goes to hell, with pay phones proving to be inoperative, the couples' dog getting strung up, rattlesnakes springing forth from the cabinets, and the cult giving hot, tire-squalling, dust-kicking, metal-twisting pursuit in pick-up trucks.

Directed with customary "no muss, no fuss, no pretense whatsoever" headlong efficient battering ram style by B-movie ace Jack ("Run, Angel, Run!," "Cleopatra Jones") Starrett, who took over the direction a few days into the shoot after original director Lee Frost got canned by the producers for doing too much in-camera editing and refusing to overshoot a single scene (Frost still receives a co-screen writing credit for the tightly constructed script he penned with longtime collaborator Wes Bishop, who also co-wrote Frost's "The Thing With Two Heads" and "Dixie Dynamite"), "Race With the Devil" works like a charm, thanks to Starrett's fiercely economical directorial finesse, Robert Jessup's lively, constantly active cinematography, breakneck pacing, Leonard Rosenman's pile-driving score, dynamically staged car chases (the final chase with several Satanists hopping onto the speeding RV especially smokes), punchy editing, an increasingly tense and moody sense of all-pervasive dread and paranoia, fine acting all around, and a splendidly black, nihilistic surprise twist ending.

After teaming up in the excellent, unusually sensitive feminist Western "The Hired Hand" and Tom McGuane's terrifically off-kilter seriocomic delight "92 in the Shade," Peter Fonda and Warren Oates in their third cinematic pairing have developed a warm, easy, comfortable rapport that translates beautifully well on screen, making the friendship between their characters seem completely believable and engaging. "M.A.S.H." 's Loretta Swit and Lara Parker of "Dark Shadows" fame also hold their own as their wives. Popping up in nifty bits are veteran character actor R.G. ("Evilspeak," "Children of the Corn") Armstrong as a disbelieving sheriff, Bishop as Armstrong's dippy deputy, Starrett as a curious gas station attendant, and Paul A. Partain (the obnoxious fat cripple in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre") as a member of Fonda's motorcycle pit crew at the very start of the picture. Often given extremely negative reviews in most film guides, "Race With the Devil" is a whole lot better than its undeservedly poor reputation would suggest and well worth checking out.