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After Smokey And The Bandit cleaned up at the box office — par­tic­u­larly in the south­ern states — every­body wanted a piece of the southern-fried car chase genre.  Roger Corman was right there in the mix: adapt­ing to the genre’s pop­u­lar­ity was no prob­lem for him since he had already pro­duced car-centric quick­ies like Death Race 2000 and Eat My Dust.  In a par­tic­u­larly ambi­tious moment, he tried to port the genre over to tele­vi­sion by pro­duc­ing Georgia Peaches, a t.v. movie that brought the car crashes and smokey-dodging to the small screen.  Unfortunately, the results show that the lim­i­ta­tions of tele­vi­sion work against the nature of b-movie fun.

Georgia Peaches plays it safe by build­ing its plot from famil­iar south­ern and car-chase flick ele­ments.  Our heroes are hot-rodding moon­shiner Dusty Tyree (Dirk Benedict), his mechanic girl­friend Sue Lynn (Terri Nunn) and Sue Lynn’s sis­ter, singer Lorette Peach (Tanya Tucker).  When Sue Lynn refuses to sell her gas station/auto shop to wealthy crook Vivian Stark (Sally Kirkland),  Vivian gets them arrested.  However, they are saved by Randolph Dukane (Lane Smith), an ambi­tious gov­ern­ment man who is try­ing to bring down a cigarette-smuggling oper­a­tion that Vivian is tied in with.

Pretty soon, Dusty is try­ing to infil­trate the smug­gling ring while Sue Lynn and Lorette pose as a singing act to do under­cover research on the well-to-do crim­i­nals who are work­ing with Vivian.  If that’s not enough, a stolen dia­monds deal is also thrown into the mix.  It all gets resolved in a tidy, Dukes Of Hazzard–style fash­ion, com­plete with car chases, crashes and a few explo­sions, too.

The premise is ser­vice­able enough but the exe­cu­tion falls into the competent-but-indifferent vari­ety.  The script is weak-tea stuff, over­play­ing a stale brand of corn­pone schtick in the dia­logue and lean­ing on a num­ber of unfunny jokes (for exam­ple, Tucker tells a story about singing at a nud­ist camp that is beaten into the ground via a string of sub­se­quent nudist-camp ref­er­ences).  It doesn’t help that the plot is the kind of for­mu­laic stuff that could have func­tioned as a B.J. And The Bear episode with a few name changes.

As for the act­ing, the cast is game but the lack of authen­tic Southern types hurts it.  For exam­ple, Benedict has the right kind of charm for his char­ac­ter but his accent and man­ner­isms are about as south­ern as a del­i­catessen.  It’s also unin­ten­tion­ally amus­ing to see Nunn, future new-wave chanteuse for Berlin, vamp­ing it up along­side Tucker in neon-colored Urban Cowgirl gear as she adds back­ing vocals to sleek coun­try­poli­tan tunes.  Tucker is pleas­ant enough and con­vinc­ingly south­ern but doesn’t show any spe­cial flair for act­ing.  Meanwhile, Lane Smith is tech­ni­cally solid but does some kind of weird pseudo-Jimmy Stewart accent that is very dis­tract­ing.  Kirkland fares bet­ter as the show’s main vil­lain as she was more of a char­ac­ter actress type by this point in her career.

Finally, Daniel Haller’s direc­tion is con­fi­dent and well-paced but imper­sonal.  That said, t.v. movies rarely offer the oppor­tu­nity for a per­sonal touch — and in fair­ness to Haller, he does a solid job with the car chase scenes, includ­ing a few clever cam­era angles.  The best he could hope to do was make some­thing fits into its cho­sen genre — and Georgia Peaches achieves that mod­est ambi­tion if noth­ing more.

Ultimately, the main thing that works against Georgia Peaches is its t.v. ori­gins.  T.V. movies are done on tight bud­gets and sched­ules and have to fit rigid for­mu­las and lev­els of con­tent.  All of those format-specific lim­i­ta­tions work against the kind of go-for-broke wild­ness and energy that define the best the­atri­cal Corman pro­duc­tions.  As a result, the watch­able but bland Georgia Peaches comes off as second-bordering-on-third-division material.

Action-Packed Collection [Triple Feature]

Action-Packed Collection [Triple Feature]

var addthis_config = {“data_track_clickback”:true};Georgia Peaches: Two sis­ters run­ning an auto repair shop and their moonshine-running boyfriend are extorted into becom­ing under­cover gov­ern­ment agents to out­wit the Dragon Lady of the Southern crime belt. Starring singer Tanya Tucker, Dirk Benedict (The A-Team), Sally Kirkland and Terri Nunn (lead singer for the group Berlin), this action-packed com­edy was pro­duced by Roger Corman as a pilot for a pos­si­ble tele­vi­sion series.The Great Texas Dynamite Chase: Candy (Claudia Jennings, Gator Bait, DeathSport) and Ellie Jo (Jocelyn Jones, Tourist Trap) are a pair of sexy bank rob­bers who blast their way into small-town banks with a car­load of dyna­mite! When they take Slim (Johnny Crawford, Valley Of The Giants) hostage, it begins a thrill-packed crime spree across the state of Texas.Smokey Bites The Dust: fol­lows the rivalry between a small-town Southern sher­iff and a small-town delin­quent who steals cars and then destroys them with the sheriff’s daugh­ter by his side. Starring Jimmy McNichol (Night Warning), Janet Julian (King Of New York, Humongous), William Forsythe (Raising Arizona) and Walter Barnes (High Plains Drifter).