My review of Wheels of Terror (1990): (SPOILER ALERT)
This movie was a made for television film that originally debuted on the USA Network in 1990. It starred Joanna Cassidy as mother who was a "hot-shot courier driver in L.A." who moved her daughter to a small town in Arizona and took a job as a school bus driver. Ms. Cassidy had some celebrity appeal in 1990 as she was in Blade Runner and Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the previous decade.
This movie is directed by Christopher Cain, who two years earlier had box office success directing Young Guns. The movie was re-aired under the alternate title Terror in Copper Valley.
The first 50 some minutes of this movie is a rather bland true crime dramatization. There is no horror involved in the majority of this movie. Instead this movie plods along at a slow place as we watch this bus driver become increasingly alarmed about a dirty black car that is always turning up at the scene when little girls are abducted. The bus driver tries to scare off the driver of the dirty black car and tries to warn the police about looking for the dirty black car and even attends funerals for dead girls who were suspected to have been abducted by the driver of the dirty black car.
But right around the 55 minute mark, this movie takes a bi-polar switch in tone. This movie stops being based in reality and gives up all pretenses of being a true-crime dramatization. Joanna Cassidy's character, while driving kids on her school bus, witnesses her daughter being abducted and driven away in the suspicious dirty black car. That is when the real movie start. The remainder of the film is an extended chase (about 33 minutes!) between the dirty black car and Joanna Cassidy's school bus, with the school bus being the pursuer. But that synopsis actually gives this movie too much credit. What actually takes place is that this movie becomes incrementally more bonkers and unbelievable every one of the successive 33 minutes until the credits abruptly roll. Both the dirty black car and the school bus defy physics, logic and most laws of reality as they duel each other in demolition derby style. The action is punctuated by multiple explosions, multiple crashes off cliffs and way too may females hanging precariously off of the school bus as the dirty black car rams into the bus. Joanna Cassidy's character needlessly risks the lives of her school bus passengers, her daughter and herself as she becomes simplemindedly obsessed with catching the dirty black car and "rescuing her daughter".
SPOILER ALERT. The mystery of the dirty black car's driver is never satisfactorily concluded. The driver is never seen in the film. No description of the driver or how many people were in the dirty black car is ever given. The victims never recount if there was even a driver involved with the dirty black car. Is the dirty black car possessed like the car in Stephen King's "Christine". Does the dirty black car contain a group of rapists. Many of the scenes in this movie seem to logically require ether the dirty black car to be magical or that there are multiple villains in the dirty black car. The motivation behind the dirty black car's driver's obsession to kill Joanna Cassidy's character is never explained. If his motivation was simply to kidnap and kill girls, he could have easily escaped Joanna Cassidy's bus when it was teetering off a cliff, pulled over by the police or stuck half in a barn. But the dirty black car keeps returning to smash into Joanna Cassidy's bus and attempt to kill her. There is no explanation as to why the driver of the dirty black car allows Joanna Cassidy's daughter to climb out of the sun roof of the car and then matches the speed of the bus and drives real close to it so that the girl can leap from the roof of the car to the side of the moving bus. At any time he could have slammed on the breaks or swerved away and surely killed the escaping daughter.
SPOILER ALERT. The mystery of the dirty black car's driver is never satisfactorily concluded. The driver is never seen in the film. No description of the driver or how many people were in the dirty black car is ever given. The victims never recount if there was even a driver involved with the dirty black car. Is the dirty black car possessed like the car in Stephen King's "Christine". Does the dirty black car contain a group of rapists. Many of the scenes in this movie seem to logically require ether the dirty black car to be magical or that there are multiple villains in the dirty black car. The motivation behind the dirty black car's driver's obsession to kill Joanna Cassidy's character is never explained. If his motivation was simply to kidnap and kill girls, he could have easily escaped Joanna Cassidy's bus when it was teetering off a cliff, pulled over by the police or stuck half in a barn. But the dirty black car keeps returning to smash into Joanna Cassidy's bus and attempt to kill her. There is no explanation as to why the driver of the dirty black car allows Joanna Cassidy's daughter to climb out of the sun roof of the car and then matches the speed of the bus and drives real close to it so that the girl can leap from the roof of the car to the side of the moving bus. At any time he could have slammed on the breaks or swerved away and surely killed the escaping daughter.