Not Quite a Van Movie: Midnight Madness, 1980.

Not so much a vansploitation film as it is a scavenger-hunt race film that happens to have a van. In a way, it is not dissimilar to the following year’s Cannonball Run, of course based off of a real even that featured a 1971 Dodge Sportsman, or even It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World. The cast is impressive, we have David Naughton from An American Werewolf in London, Dorfman from Animal House, the voice of Teegra in Fire and Ice, the nerd from Grease, a young Detective Hitchcock from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, goddamn Peewee Herman, and Michael J Fox. Holy baby jesus who directed this? What kind of company could unite such a force? This is a DISNEY FILM? What the fuck am I doing in my life that I’ve managed to include a Disney film in a vansploitation-exploration. What stars aligned to bring us this insane creation? I wonder why no-one talks about this. Perhaps that’s a bad sign of things to come. As an aside, in a minor role is the voice of Piglet who, much more importantly, played Jack the Ripper in that one episode where the Enterprise gets possessed by his ghost.

the actual van that ran the real Cannonball Run, Moon Trash II

We open off with a bespoke theme song (or perhaps an already existing song titled Midnight Madness) and two girls in short-shorts and knee-highs roller-skating around campus. It is perhaps very emblematic of the 1980 release, a transitional period between the groovy seventies with their tight blue jeans, plaid, and lack of bras with the electric-neon colours of the eighties. We get a single van in the background during this scene, a VW Bus of some unknown year but those are for hippies – we only care about proper AMERICAN (disclaimer, I am Canadian) vans like FORD and CHEVY and OTHER MANLY VANS. This film does not disappoint, giving the “bully faction” of scavenger hunters a 1978 Chevy Van with a custom flame paintjob, turbo-charged engine, an “observation bubble,” a telephone, build in computer that solves scavenger hunt clues, a chess-table, an Atari 2600, and a double-double-coloured vinyl interior. Shame it had to go to the bad-guy faction. The other vehicles are dull including some scooters, a Beetle, a Nissan truck, and a Land Cruiser which is actually pretty cool. The interior of the van kind of reminds me of the Enterprise-D.

This is actually a fairly kid-friendly film. There’s some zany hi-jinks, breasts are only hinted at, no-one is called a “fag” which is un-common for an 80s film, there’s clearly-established good guys and bad guys to assist in the moral upbringing of the youth, the two fat characters are mocked within reason, and there’s product placement for PBR. Wholesome!

Unfortunately, while the film is rather PG, the van doesn’t win which makes this deserving of an X rating. Other crimes this film has committed include casting some guy as a tow-truck driver who isn’t Dick Miller. He’d be perfect for the part. As well, you don’t get to see too many of the pinball machines when they’re at the arcade – just a Death Race racing game and an X-Wing Fighter knock-off. There was a blurry frame of some cool-looking machine with a Tarzan jungle babe on it that was way too fuzzy to identify.

I guess I can’t really call this a van film. While there’s definitely a sweet van, the van isn’t the reason for the adventure. It’s a symptom, not a cause. With 5 competing teams, the van doesn’t get enough time to shine. That said, for an accessible film that’s suited to showing your kids so they get into vans, I guess it’s serviceable. At no point was I cringing in embarrassment at the film’s quality or lame jokes. Is it a certified classic? Certainly not, but it’s not really bad. Sort of forgettable really. I don’t know if I can even give this a rating considering the content. A Disqualified Thumb Up of Non-Applicability due to it being a Disney comedy. Give it a watch. It’s a bit long though. Probably could have handled being 100 minutes but what are you gonna do?