“Well, gentlemen, you’re now the owners of the finest Stingray in St. Louis.”

Drake’s rating: I’ll take “Justifiably Forgotten Flicks from the ‘70s” for $500, Alex

Drake’s review: I’m going to blame Smokey and the Bandit for this one. After all, the Hal Needham action-comedy had been a huge hit in 1977, coming in at #2 in the year’s box office earnings and trailing only a little flick called Star Wars. From the outside, it must have looked like a fairly easy formula to emulate: Throw together a fast car, a bunch of chase scenes, and some humorous bits — and you’ve got yourself a movie, right?

Well, to be fair, Smokey and the Bandit also had one of the biggest stars of the era in Burt Reynolds, a charming leading lady in Sally Field, veteran comedic talent with Jackie Gleason, and one of the best stuntmen in the world sitting in the director’s chair. In contrast, Stingray had one of Robert Mitchum’s kids, a former TV child actress, a few Playboy Playmates, and a novice writer/director clearly out of his depth.

One of these things is definitely not like the other.

To be fair, my guess is that Stingray may have started life with a very different concept. There are bones here that, when unearthed, make me believe that this was originally supposed be a much grittier movie, more along the lines of earlier ‘70s car chase flicks like Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, or Vanishing Point. There’s a fair amount of gunplay, for example, but not the sort you might find in the A-Team.

In Stingray, the psychotic Abigail (Sherry Jackson, The Mini-Skirt Mob) opens up on a pair of policemen with a semi-automatic Armalite rifle, killing both and blowing up their police car with explosive rounds. Then, minutes later, we have a car chase with that light, semi-wacky ‘70s music that wouldn’t be out of place in a Don Knotts comedy.

And that’s Stingray. It’s an uneven movie at best, thanks to the stilted juxtaposition of violence and comedy. The plot, such as it is, involves a gang of drug dealers trying to get their stash back after they hid it in a Corvette Stingray. The new and unwitting owners of the car then find themselves on the run from the criminals and from the cops who think they’re involved.

It’s not a bad premise, and could have worked well a few years before Smokey and the Bandit hit it big, but the execution is fatally flawed by the intrusive attempts at levity and humor. And it doesn’t help that, for all the chases and crashes, the movie never really goes anywhere.

If there’s a high point here, however, it’s the stunt work. Stingray works best when cars are peeling rubber, tearing down the road and crashing through the local scenery. The stunt scenes are well shot and all in all it’s a pretty good-looking flick. But it’s the parts that don’t work that bring this one to a screeching halt and, at 105 minutes, there are far too many of these parts.

Cut 15 minutes or so and eliminate the attempted humor, and Stingray might have become a cult classic. As it stands, however, it’s just another ‘70s flick that you might see once, and then forget about by the next day.

Intermission!

• Hey! An A&W drive-in! I remember those.
• She packs quite the punch, even for a fake nun.
• What? You have a problem with a nun smoking a cigarillo?
• For an ostensible action-comedy, this flick has piled up quite the body count by the 18-minute mark.
• Rosco might be the first member of her own gang that Abigail guns down, but he won’t be the last.
• OK, nice trivia bit: The fellow Abigail lights on fire in the bar is John Carl Buechler, director of Troll and a makeup effects artist on a ton of genre flicks.
• Lots of dead bodies by the end of this one. But, hey, there’s that perky music again! This all feels like a Dukes of Hazard episode gone horribly, horribly wrong.