Cinema's craziest car chases – part three

With the release of petrol-head actioner 'Fast & Furious', Time Out look back over some of cinema's craziest car chases

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Film: Back to the Future
Vehicles: VW Camper Van vs Delorean
Custom features: Camper Van has sunroof that allows for easy launching of rockets, Delorean has time machine.
Those pesky Libyans are at it again, understandably miffed at being sold a bomb casing full of pinball machine parts by Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown and so (somehow) tracking him to an out-of-town JC Penney carpark, machine gunning him to death, then chasing Michael J. Fox around in a Delorean. This scene was, sadly, deemed too politically loaded to be used as the basis for the 'Back to the Future' ride in Universal Studios.




Film: Vanishing Point
Vehicles: 1970 Dodge Challenger, moped that needs a wipe
Custom features: Spurious insight into the ‘car delivery business’
“Kowalski! Vanishing Point!” Primal Scream groaned, ensuring a brief vogue for the movie poster in Camden boozers and giving the film’s narco-libertarian pretensions an undeserved credence. As Barry Newman grinds his muscle car across the States, stopping only to watch a naked hippy ride a motorbike, its hard not to be amazed that a film this good looking can be as much fun to watch as a Gumball Rally jumbo’s video diary. What trailers were made for.




Film: Death Race 2000
Vehicles: ‘The Bull’, the matador
Custom features: Red cape, horns
A neat kill! Okay, so the entire film is basically one pretty whacked-out car chase in that the participants are out to kill pedestrians and score points. But the most surreal moment has to be this speedster-vs-Spaniard jousting contest between Calamity Jane in her cowpat-coloured coupe and a hippy toreador who looks suspiciously like the 3rd key grip who got talked into it.



Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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