Warren Oates and Peter Fonda versus …. SATAN!

Roger (Peter Fonda) and Frank (Warren Oates) are lifelong friends and business partners who, along with their wives Kelly (Lara Parker) and Alice (Loretts Swit), are planning on taking the “best damn vacation we ever had.”  Traveling to Colorado in Frank’s RV, they decide to camp for a night next to a river.  Not only do Frank and Roger witness what appears to be a human sacrifice but they also have to run for their lives when they are spotted.  The local sheriff (R.G. Armstrong) tells them that they probably just saw a bunch of hippies killing an animal but Peter Fonda knows hippies and those were not hippies.  Taking some blood-stained dirt so it can be analyzed by the authorities, Roger and Frank try to drive on but find themselves being pursued by Satanists.

A relentless and entertaining B-movie, Race With The Devil is a hybrid of Rosemary’s Baby, Smokey and the Bandit, and Easy Rider, with some Parallax View-style paranoia mixed in as well.  Eventually, it seems as if everyone in rural Texas — from the sheriff to the gas station attendant to the residents of an RV park where our heroes try to spend the night — is a Satanist.  (Even a wrecked school bus turns out to just be an excuse to get the RV to slow down so the Satanic rednecks can attack, leading to Warren Oates’s classic line, “I don’t believe in a school bus on Sunday.”)

A big part of the fun of Race With The Devil is getting to watch Peter Fonda and Warren Oates acting opposite each other.  (A lot of drive-in patrons probably left Race With The Devil with a crush on the lovely Lara Parker as well.)  Friends both on and off-screen (Oates previously co-starred in Fonda’s directorial debut, The Hired Hand), Fonda and Oates are a lot of fun to watch playing off of each other in Race With The Devil, with Warren Oates’s natural intensity providing a good contrast to Fonda’s laid back style.

It may not rank up there with the movies that he appeared in for Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman but Race With The Devil is still one of Warren Oates’s most entertaining films.