WHILE out cruising one night, young couple Mark (Hinton) and Lynn (Peterson) sucker local tough Billy (Hampton) into losing $550 in a street race between Mark’s Pontiac Firebird and Billy’s raked-out Mercury Cougar. While Billy does a runner on the night, the pair spot him the next day and give chase, leading to them meeting the rest of Billy’s gang, the Hi-Riders, a bunch of misfit street racers and local yahoos who raise the rear of their hotted-up muscle cars to crazy levels.

After winning another race against Billy to settle the debt, Mark and Lynn start hanging out with the Hi-Riders, heading off to a bar to chill with them. The town’s local hothead spies the gang’s cars while cruising by and challenges Billy to a race for $100.

After losing to Billy, the hothead ups the ante by challenging him to race for pink slips, and this is where everything goes bad. Both racers and their passengers perish in a fiery crash caused by Billy playing his normal dirty tricks.

Strangely, the Hi-Riders go back to Red’s bar in town and start partying to mourn their mate Billy and the girl riding with him. The unnamed local driver’s father, Mr Lewis (McNally), is understandably somewhat miffed by the untimely transformation of his beloved offspring into flaming street pizza and storms into the bar to confront the gang.

After the town sheriff (Ferrer) explains to Lewis there is nothing he can do, Lewis puts a $50,000 bounty on the Hi-Riders. Can the group get out of town and back to safety before some vigilante thugs exact a bloody revenge?

Hi-Riders was written and directed by Greydon Clark, whose previous opus was titled Satan’s Cheerleaders, so don’t expect good acting, scriptwriting or even stuntwork. But hey, there are cool cars aplenty. If you’re a fan of super-raked muscle cars wearing fatter-than-a-sumo slot wheels or Auto Drags, sidepipes, vinyl roofs, shag interiors and all the groovy stuff that makes late-70s American street machines awesome, there are definitely worse ways to spend 90 minutes.

VERDICT: 3/5

Hi-Riders was written and directed by Greydon Clark, whose previous opus was titled Satan’s Cheerleaders, so don’t expect good acting, scriptwriting or even stuntwork. But hey, there are cool cars aplenty. If you’re a fan of super-raked muscle cars wearing fatter-than-a-sumo slot wheels or Auto Drags, sidepipes, vinyl roofs, shag interiors and all the groovy stuff that makes late-70s American street machines awesome, there are definitely worse ways to spend 90 minutes.

VEHICLES:

• 1968 Dodge Charger
• 1968 Pontiac Firebird
• 1967 Mercury Cougar
• 1971 Dodge Duster
• 1957 Chevy
• 1961 Oldsmobile Super 88
• 1969 AMC Javelin
• 1970 Mercury Cougar
• 1970 Dodge Challenger
• 1963 Chevy II

STARS:

• Darby Hinton
• Diane Peterson
• Mel Ferrer
• Roger Hampton
• Stephen McNally

DIRECTOR:
Greydon Clark

ACTION:
Heaps of faked-up races, as well as some cool cruising sequences of real 1970s street machines. Fans of classic pick-up trucks will likely wince at some of the jumps

PLOT:
A young street-racing couple gets pulled in with a gang of racers and find themselves in all sorts of mischief
AVAILABLE: Free on YouTube

COOL FLICK FACT: Mark’s girlfriend Lynn is played by Diane Peterson, a stuntwoman with a 40-year career in movies, including plenty of vehicle stunts. She also drag-raced competitively in her Corvette at age 17!