cult film freak: BILL ADLER AND CYNTHIA WOOD CRUISE CROWN'S 'VAN NUYS BLVD.'

Title: VAN NUYS BLVD. Year: 1979 Rating: ***

The first five-minutes of Crown International Pictures' cruising movie VAN NUYS BLVD sums up the entire movie... a closeup of a beautiful blonde putting on mascara, coinciding with Crown's usual skinny stud Bill Adler in a van heading towards where Susanne Severeid's waiting, half naked... as if they'd be the primary couple...

But in another five-minutes, he's taken off without her... to the titular boulevard where it seems writer/director William Sachs was recreating AMERICAN GRAFFITI not only for the cruising up and down the night-street full of headlights/taillights, but the characters: like an awkward geek falling in love with a beautiful dream girl in car, instantly knowing he has to meet her... and a cocky dragster who's too old for hanging around a nowhere town...

Melissa Prophet in VAN NUYS BLVD.

Until a bizarre game-changing twist when the red-haired geek (Dennis Bowen) becomes a goading kind of jokester bully to the seemingly cool David Hayward's Chooch, after randomly hooking up with/having sex with a leather clad biker chick, before landing that dream-brunette Melissa Prophet, who's hanging out with bubbly blonde Cynthia Wood, much too quickly, and easily...

As VAN NUYS BLVD departs from the all-night-cruising routine when the five characters end up visiting Magic Mountain followed by a busy arcade and then a funky discoteque: in what feels like twenty long minutes worth of parenthetical tourist trap locales...

Tara Strohmeier in VAN NUYS BLVD.

Meanwhile the token jerk cop's handcuffed to his prowler at the local beach care-of cult starlet Tara Strohmeier who, by the time she hooks up with seemingly cool dude Hayward, this pasted-together low-budget exploitation's done anything but what it promised to do...

Drive around aimlessly, leading to a rushed finale drag-race finale and yet, miraculously, VAN NUYS BLVD is still guiltily entertaining since the actors seem to gel together decently enough... but more as actors than characters, who all deserved a much better deliberately plot-less ride.