The year was 1977. Jimmy Carter was sworn in as the 39th President of the United States. Snow fell in Miami for the only time in recorded history. George Willig climbed the South Tower of the World Trade’s Center. The first Star Wars movie premiered in theaters. Elvis Presley played his last concert ever.
Also that same year, an American icon was hoping to start a film career by releasing his first action movie.
Evel Knievel was a real-life superhero to kids in the 60s and 70s, a daring stuntman who inspired Americans of all ages with his spectacular motorcycle jumps. His many crashes and numerous injuries created an aura of toughness and invulnerability around him, and his colorful outfits and bold stunts made him a hit with the younger crowd, so naturally Hollywood was keen to cash in on his popularity.
There was already a biopic made in 1971 called “Evel Knievel” starring George Hamilton, whom you might remember from the Ritz Toasted commercials.
But by the late 70s, Knievel’s popularity was starting to fade, and he decided to try and hold onto his glory days by starring in his own motion picture, possibly envisioning himself as the next Steve McQueen or Charles Bronson, or some other guy from your parents' generation that you’ve probably never heard of.
How or why this movie ever got produced, I’m not exactly sure, but let me just get this out of the way right now; DO NOT watch this movie. It’s worse than my words can do it justice. It’s one of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had.
I’m begging you, dear reader, if you value your sanity at all, stay away from “Viva Knievel!”. You’ll enjoy life better.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let’s start with the movie’s poster. Before the internet, where we now have teaser trailers for movie trailers that tease you with clips of the movie before teasing you with clips of the movie, posters were the main thing that got people to put their asses in sticky, sweaty movie theater seats. So as you might expect, a lot of work went into making these posters, many of them handpainted by very talented artists.
This particular poster is incredibly misleading, and not just because the dashing, blonde-haired tough guy who’s head is floating in the background looks strikingly dissimilar from the sweaty, bloated, middle-aged and decidedly unblonde hero we see in the actual movie…
No, the poster is deceptive because the action we are led to believe is in this movie by looking at the poster is practically non-existant. It looks like the movie is filled with fast car chases and cool motorcycle jumps, but don’t bother looking for any of that in this fucking movie. You won’t find much of it at all, and by the time you do, it’s not even worth what you have to endure to get there.
No, instead, this “action” movie opens with our daring middle-aged stuntman sneaking into a Catholic orphanage…in the middle of the night…
A kid on crutches shows Knievel that he can walk a little better, and Knievel responds by grabbing his face and telling him how proud he is of him while rubbing his neck…for an uncomfortably long time…
After getting caught by a nun, Knievel promises to bribe her silence by bringing her some baked goods the next time he sneaks in to rub orphans in the middle of the night.
When she makes a comment about the baked goods making her fat, he reassures her by telling her, “No one will notice". And we’re expected to believe that she finds this charming instead of punching him in his fucking face.
Just why is Knievel there in the first place? Why did he have to sneak in at night instead of just showing up during the day like a normal person?
Throw away any questions you might have, because this movie answers none of them (and you may not want any answers anyway).
Don’t worry, bucko, we’re just getting warmed up…
The plot of this hideous trainwreck, if there even is one, is so all over the place that I needed a GPS to keep track of what was happening, and it’s totally batshit insane, but I’ll do my best to explain it; an evil drug lord wants to murder Evel Knievel so he can use his death as cover to transport a large shipment of cocaine while Evel Knievel is trying to get his mechanic to reunite with his estranged son whom he abandoned after his wife died during childbirth.
Still with me?
So after Knievel does a stunt or some shit and signs a bunch of autographs for his adoring fans, a young woman offers him a pen and asks, “Can I tell you what to write?” to which Knievel responds, “Honey I’ve known what to write to pretty girls like you since I was in kindergarten.”
Pfft, you mean since they were in kindergarten, Evel?
Afterwards, he goes to hit on a reporter played by Lauren Hutton, who should’ve gotten a fucking Oscar for pretending to be attracted to be this creepy sleazebag that feels the need to eerily wink at everything with a vagina that gets within five feet of him.
I think it’s worth mentioning at this point that Evel Knievel was very much married in 1977, but his wife and two sons are never mentioned in this movie…
All of a sudden, this random 11 year old just shows up unsupervised and somehow immediately knows exactly where to find his long lost dad (played by Gene Kelly) who abandoned him years ago.
The kid tells him that he just graduated 6th grade and says he’s ready to go into Middle School, even though his dialogue is very clearly dubbed over by a 20 year old young man. No, I’m not kidding.
His dad yells at him for being in this godawful movie and storms off.
It’s your typical estranged dad subplot that smacks of lazy writing, but then, out of nowhere, our intrepid hero shows up and says this brilliant line right here:
He then takes the boy by his shoulders and walks him offscreen. No, I’m not making any of this up. This is an actual scene in a serious film produced by Warner Bros. And it’s rated PG.
And that van he mentions? We never actually see it…you’d think there would be a scene afterwards that reassures the audience that he didn’t just take this kid to rape him in his van but no, we just move right along with the movie and the van is never seen or mentioned again…
Anyway, this movie is filled with people who would rather be doing anything else with their lives, like Dabney Coleman and Leslie Nielsen (seen above, pretending that Evel Knievel can act), neither of whom are allowed to do any of the funny stuff they do in films like “9 to 5" or “Airplane" because this is a serious action movie.
Instead, Dabney Coleman is a nameless doctor and Leslie Nielsen is the drug lord who wants Knievel dead so he can smuggle a bunch of cocaine.
Where is he smuggling it to? Why does he need Knievel dead to pull this off? None of these things are ever explained. They just keep trying to kill him in the most inept ways imaginable.
So after a bunch of pointless nonsense, Knievel goes to do another stunt in some random city we’re never told the name of, and the bad guys rig his stunt ramp so he’ll crash during the stunt. Which they have plenty of time to do, because Knievel spends like fifteen minutes boring the crowd to death with a fucking anti-drug PSA.
Too bad it wasn’t a PSA warning kids about getting into strange vans with creepy, sweaty men…
Now logically, if you were going to kill a stuntman during a jump, you’d rig the first ramp, the ramp he jumps off of, causing him to miss the jump and crash, right? That’s how I’d do it anyway…and I think about this sort of thing a lot.
But not these guys. Nope, instead, they rig the landing ramp, causing our hero to successfully land the jump, and then tumble for a few feet before safely crashing on the soft, cushiony, green grass…which of course causes everyone in the audience to scream and panic as if they’d just watched Knievel get decapitated by his own fucking wheels…
They should be so lucky…
Knievel survives, much to the chagrin of his would-be killers (and yours truly), and as he’s writhing in mild pain on the ground, he says to the reporter lady (who’s name is simply “Miss" in this movie because they didn’t care enough about her character to give her a fucking name) that she “better get some more film” for her camera, because he is not quitting! (Damn, I really had my hopes up for a minute there).
But then as he’s being carried away, he tells his fans that he’s…retiring from stunts? Say it ain’t so!
This is a very dramatic scene, leaving the viewer to wonder just what will become of our intrepid hero as he’s whisked away by an ambulance, and for a moment I think maybe I’m saved and that the movie is over, but all of it is undone by the very next scene, where Knievel informs the reporter lady from his hospital bed that he’s not quitting after all.
Make up your fucking mind, you goddamn drama queen!
Knievel then goes to do a stunt in Mexico for some reason that’s never explained to us, where the first thing he does when he gets off the plane is a shot of tequila.
Wait, didn’t you just tell a bunch of kids at your last stunt show that drugs were bad? The fuck do you think alcohol is, Knievel?
In fact, Knievel makes no secret about his disdain for drugs in favor of alcohol. At one point, the doctor attempts to get Knievel to take care of his deadbeat dad friend after he goes on a drug binge of some sort over the guilt of abandoning his son, to which Evel responds “Nuh uh! If he’s been drinking, that’s fine! But dope? No way!”
Wow, what a great fucking friend this guy is...
So anyway, Knievel is in Mexico for some reason, where he never interacts with a single person of national origin, and he goes to jump over 100 feet of flaming death.
And I know this because it’s told to us by the very American announcers they’ve hired for this stunt that, again, is taking place in Mexico.
So the bad guys finally get it right this time and rig the takeoff ramp, and Evel Knievel crashes and burns once and for all, saving women and children all over America from his sickening sleazy scumbaggery.
Nah, I’m just kidding, they do the same fucking thing that has already failed them like two or three times in this piece of shit movie.
From there, everything dissolves into utter chaos that is just impossible to follow or care about. The big stunt in the final act is when Knievel jumps his motorcycle onto an 18-wheeler, but let’s just say it’s not at all what it looks like in the poster…
Which brings up another interesting fact that I think is worth noting; the more dangerous stunts in this movie were performed by stunt coordinator Gary Davis. His name even appears in the credits.
It’s a movie about a stuntman, starring a stuntman that plays himself, who doesn’t even do his own stunts.
Try to wrap your mind around that one.
The movie was produced by Irwin Allen, who owed somebody at Warner Bros a favor after producing disaster- films “The Poseidon Adventure" and “The Towering Inferno". Which I guess made him the perfect guy to produce this fucking disaster of a movie.
But nobody could have anticipated the distaster that was to follow…
Three days after the film’s release in theaters, Evel Knievel went onto the lot of 20th Century Fox Studios with three hired muscle heads and a baseball bat, and attacked Vice President Shelly Saltman, a former fight promoter who had just published a book that Knievel ironically claimed would have tarnished his image.
Saltman had been using a tape recorder to record conversations with numerous sports figures, which they were very much aware of at the time of the recordings, and Saltman had a lot of quotes from Knievel musing about his takes on “broads” and bragging about how many of them he’d “laid”, among other unsavory things…
Knievel had one of his thugs hold Saltman down while he caved Saltman’s head in with a baseball bat, screaming “I’M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU!”, according to several eyewitnesses. The attack left Saltman unconscious and with a broken arm from trying to defend himself.
When Saltman’s elderly mother heard about the attack on the news, she went into immediate cardiac arrest. She would die three months later.
“Viva Knievel!” was immediately pulled from theaters, as Warners didn’t want Knievel’s damaged reputation anywhere near them, and all reels were recalled and placed deep in a vault at Warner Studios until it was released on DVD some decades after America had forgotten about the incident.
But if you ask me, it should have fucking stayed there, along with everyone who had anything to do with the making of this celluloid catastrophe. Knievel included.
And they should’ve gotten a baseball bat to the head for good measure…
