User Reviews

A simply atrocious and excruciatingly unfunny would-be frenzied over-the-top comedy done in a horrendously ham-fisted wannabe Robert Altmanesque multi-storied ensemble cast fashion. It's about the crazed pandemonium which besets a quiet, peaceful small town when the populace gets wind of an artificially created gas shortage. Director Les Rose pitches all the noisy, anarchic, off-the-wall facetious mayhem at a loud, overbearing, gratingly strident level of high-flown hysteria, staging a never-ending series of shrill mondo destructo slapstick gags with an appalling lack of skill and crack comic timing. Worse yet, Richard Wolf's sloppy, idiotic, severely witless and desperate script resorts to such cheap, groan-producing tactics as crude racial stereotypes, leering sex jokes, dumb double entendre dialogue and constant out-of-control car chases in its strained attempts at milking laughs from a basically unamusing premise, inevitably culminating in the expected last reel grand scale car chase and subsequent multiple automobile crash up which proves to be both painfully protracted and very irritating in comparable measure.

Moreover, there's no insight offered herein to provide any necessary illumination on why folks would act so wretchedly in the midst of such a crisis and the allegedly pointed satire remains blunt and obvious throughout. Perhaps the film's most heinous cinematic sin is its dismal misuse of an excellent big name cast, all of whom portray broadly drawn, one-note, disgustingly grotesque caricatures and mug it up to an unbearable degree in a dire effort to inject some much-needed life into the flimsy goings-on: Sterling Hayden in one of his patented fanatical roles as the greedy, ruthless oil tycoon who secretly hordes petrol in order to jack up gas prices and make himself a bundle, Susan Anspach as a bitchy, opportunistic TV reporter who's a total terror behind the wheel (a bad woman driver; now that's a clever and novel joke -- NOT!), the lovely, throaty-voiced Helen Shaver as a sultry, saucy hooker who services customers in the back of her custom van, the always annoyingly infantile Howie Mandel as a dorky salesman, Sandee Currie as a sweet libidinous tramp, an especially obnoxious Peter Aykroyd as Currie's over-protective karate-choppin' jerk of a brother, and, the saddest sight to behold in this depressingly awful spectacle, a criminally wasted Donald Sutherland as Nic the Noz, a sickeningly smug and patronizing hipster disc jockey who surveys all the carnage in his helicopter and serves as the picture's murderously haughty and condescending Greek chorus. A truly pitiful and unmitigated abomination.

I stumbled into taping this movie off Saturday TV back around ~1985, and have treasured it ever since. Never seen or heard of it since, 'til just now.

Sutherland certainly did this as a half-day lark, and had tons of fun with his cameo.

Duke Stuyvesant (who really isn't as much brighter than his two idiot sons as he would like to believe) creates the local gas crisis. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that milk is a parallel story that gets braided in quite satisfactorily, as is the Arab Sheik, and a half-dozen other lines and characters.

The martial arts world takes itself too seriously. Peter Ackroyd's portrayal of Ed, the deranged kung-fu brother of the pretty girl, is great.

'Gas' is an unsung masterpiece.