Pot Planes, Car Chases and Regional Cinema

There were so many things that I should have been doing yesterday.  So, obviously, I didn't do any of them and instead ended up watching a load of shoddy old movies, the best of which had the fantastic title of Polk County Pot Plane.  To be fair, it was being shown under its alternate title of In Hot Pursuit.  Which is far too generic.  Besides, I always love a movie that that describes its entire plot in the title, (I mean Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman is, in my opinion, of the greatest film titles, ever).  Because that is what the film is about - it culminates with a plane full of pot (and coke) being landed on a makeshift mountain-top runway in Polk County, (which, as far as I could tell, was meant to be in Georgia).  Leading up to that, the movie consisted of a series of lengthy car chases, a helicopter prison break and a heist - all featuring a bunch of guys with beards and southern accents.  There was no sex, nudity or even a hint of romance - the focus was entirely upon 'Good Ol' Boys' and action.  Yes folks, with Polk County Pot Plane, I found that I had unwittingly stumbled into the world of low-budget regional movies.  Once popular in the US, these were locally shot films (usually in the southern states) which were, at the best, semi-professional and intended for distribution to local drive ins.  They covered every imaginable genre, but the action/chase format seemed particularly popular.  Watching it was fascinating - it could, in no way, be described as 'good' on any level, yet remained curiously compelling.  This particular film boasted in its credits that no stuntmen were used.  Nor were any actors, judging by the performances of the obviously non-professional cast, improvising awkward dialogue and busking their way through a loosely constructed plot that existed merely to string together the action sequences.

It has to be said that the action sequences are, on the whole, quite impressive, with the plethora of car chases and crashes, (including a truck driving through a house), were done for real.  Particularly impressive is the landing of the titular 'pot plane', which really was landed in a clearing prepared, apparently without permission, on a mountain top.  We're not talking about a light plane here, either - this was a C54, a four engined transport version of the DC4 - it can be seen to clip the tree tops as it makes its final approach, (it did the same thing on take-off, according to people who worked on the film).  I was struck by the film's cheerful amorality - the heroes are a bunch of hairy drug smugglers and the villains the local cartel they work for, who keep double crossing them (and each other).  Then again, the mainstream equivalents to these kinds of b-movies around this time frequently featured Burt Reynolds playing cheerfully amoral smugglers and moonshiners, so it wasn't much of a leap to heroic drug runners.  Looking as if it had been shot on exceptionally grainy 16mm stock, the thing that most surprised me about Polk County Pot Plane was that it had been made as late as 1977.  The look, along with the clothes, hairstyles and late sixties/early seventies vehicles gave the impression of it having been made at least five years earlier.  (The old cars, especially the ancient and beat up Mopar cop cars, undoubtedly rescued from scrapyards, were to cut costs, as most of them end up written off in spectacular crashes).

The immediate reaction to seeing a film like Polk County Pot Plane is that such regional films are a US phenomena and that somewhere like the much smaller UK has no equivalent.  But that isn't strictly true.  Most obviously, those films made and predominantly set in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (sometimes in the local language) could be argued as constituting regional cinema, (although they tend toward the artistic end of the spectrum rather than the schlocky).  But even England itself has some history of regional film making - back in the 1940s the 'Somewhere in' series of comedies (Somewhere in England, Somewhere in Camp, etc), made by Mancunian Films and featuring popular Lancashire comic Frank Randle could be argued to be regional films, designed to appeal primarily to a North WEst of England audience.  In more recent times we had Cliff Twemlow and his Manchester-based low budget direct-to-video film making empire.  Other contenders might be those films produced by Jack Parsons, (often in association with Robert Lippert), which were cheap black and white productions designed to provide content for his small chain of cinemas.  I'm sure that there are many other examples.  My big regret is that there never appears to have been a regional film making movement in my native West Country - I could just imagine something like Polk County Pot Plane with the action transplanted to Somerset or Wiltshire.  Lots of illicit cider-brewing bearded types with West of England accents flying drugs into framer's fields - their illegal runways cut in the corn mistaken for crop circles.  Not to mention lots of furious car chases involving tractors, combine harvesters and beat up old Ford Capris and Opel Mantas.  Ah, what might have been...