Truck Stop Women (1974) Reviews

• Classic CAMP on the highways of New Mexico!

  tron-121999-08-30

  A great piece of early 70's film: this gem has it all. Some special moments: •The beautiful Claudia Jennings in go-go boots or naked throughout most of the film! •The truckin' music video inserted about mid film! •The overt violence peppered throughout (from the opening execution in a bathtub, to the final battle featuring machine gun toting hookers and lots of tragic death)... all set to some great CB-era country music and a few bit that they had left over from "Land of the Lost"! •The southern New Mexico locations that cradle our heroes in their struggle! •The turncoat, Seago, getting trampled by 30 head of cattle in the back of a weaving truck! Any way you slice it, this movie has it all. Sex, violence, bad acting, found locations, and a wacky plot that just keeps coming. I watch it often and inflict it on friends as a sort of, "bad-movie baptism". As long as I can watch Truck Stop Women, Gator Bait, and Unholy Rollers, Ms. Jennings will not be forgotten.

• john martino where are you?

  mstock-12002-09-03

  this movie falls in to the"its so bad its good catergory" bad acting,terrible corny dialog,a first class laugh riot!! pick it up if you get a chance. this film is blessed by the presence of the great john martino, and i couid never figure out why he disapeared after just a handful of movies,i thought he was great in this film,and as joey amato in capone, and of course paulie gatto in the godfather.

• One of Claudia Jenning's finest drive-in flicks

  lazarillo2007-02-02

  This is a pretty decent 70's drive-in flick featuring the undisputed queen of 70's drive-in cinema, Claudia Jennings. Claudia and her hard-as-nails mother run a truck-stop brothel in New Mexico which they use as a base to get information on valuable loads that they can later hijack by pretending to be stranded female motorists (the sight of Jennings in short-shorts or hot pants is obviously enough to make any male driver slam on his brakes), hitting the poor guys over the head, and stealing their trucks. Jennings grows tired of her domineering mother, however, and teams up with a slick East Coast Mafioso who is trying to take over the operation. This leads to a violent show-down between the rural hicks and the "citified" urban mobsters. This movie contains a lot of violence, exciting car chases (actually semi-truck chases) and general rural mayhem. There is plenty of topless-ness (if an unfortunate dearth of bottomless-ness) by Claudia and her female cohorts. For some reason the main mobster played by John Martino is named "Smith" (perhaps because this was the era of the so-called "Italian-American Anti-Defamation League",ironically created by infamous mob boss Joe Colombo), but he is nevertheless still the complete Italian Mafia stereotype("Fuggedbaboutit"!). Busty bimbo Uschi Degert has her best role ever--she isn't fully dressed for one minute of it but doesn't utter a word of dialogue (lest viewers wonder what a thickly-accented Swedish immigrant is doing in rural New Mexico). Director Mark Lester does a good Cormanesque job of combining feisty feminism with gratuitous sexism (and frankly it's a lot more believable to see a woman like Jennings use her feminine wiles so she can conk a guy over the head with a crowbar than it is to see Peta Wilson or some other 100 lb. fashion model beating up musclebound guys three times their size with martial arts like in today's version of these faux feminist movies). I would recommend ANY movie with Claudia Jennings, but this is one of her best

• Another Claudia Jennings 70s drive-in classic.

  sonya900282009-03-15

  This movie is as authentic as it gets, as far as 70s B movies go. It's got plenty of gratuitous nudity, violence, tacky locales, slimy bad guys, and ubiquitous vulgarity. In other words, everything that makes these sorts of movies such a guilty pleasure. The setting for this film, takes place in a dusty, out-of-the way town in New Mexico. A woman named Anna, runs a truck stop/diner/motel there. It's just a front though, for Anna's smuggling operation. With the help of her bodacious daughter Rose (played by Claudia Jennings), Anna and her henchmen waylay truckers on the road, steal their trucks, and then repaint them. Anna does okay, running her smuggling ring for a while. But then some east coast mafia types, decide that they want to take over Anna's territory. The head mobster takes an interest in Rose, and tries to seduce her away from working with Anna. Rose is tempted by the city-slicker mobster, and his offer of a lucrative partnership with her. Rose tries to undermine Anna and rebels against her, as Rose gets in deeper and deeper with her mobster beau. It's up to Anna and her partners, to try and turn Rose back to Anna's side, while fighting to keep the mobsters from taking over her smuggling ring. Claudia is in a supporting role as Anna's daughter Rose. It's not her best movie. But Claudia sure has the physique and the fiery charisma, to portray the sexy, renegade Rose. Only Lieux Dressler as Anna, gives as compelling a performance as Claudia does. The rest of the cast is basically forgettable. Truck Stop Women is tacky, campy, 70s B movie fun. It's a real loose-cannon, of a 70s low-budget film. Fans of Claudia Jennings, won't be disappointed.

• "My head's still swimming!" A true Claudia Jennings 70's drive-in gem

  Woodyanders2006-04-25

  With her lovely, delicately sculpted face, lustrous long red hair, sparkling blue eyes, slender, shapely figure, ceaseless vivacity, and strong, assertive, engaging personality, the late, great, much-missed former "Playboy" Playmate of the Year turned surprisingly good actress Claudia Jennings was undoubtedly the Venus of delightfully low-rent nickel'n'dime white-trash 70's grind-house grunge -- and quite possibly the Ultimate Drive-In Movie Goddess. Her untimely, unfortunate death at the tragically young age of 29 -- she was hit head-on by a truck while driving her car en route to an audition for a part in a film which might have crossed her over into the mainstream -- has left a yawning void that no other actress could even begin to fill. Luckily, Claudia left behind a most formidable legacy of top-rate Me Decade exploitation bilge, with such gloriously greasy'n'grungy goodies as "'Gatorbait," "Unholy Rollers," "The Great Texas Dynamite Chase," and this choice chunk of righteously raucous'n'raunchy sleaze-ball fun doing their part to keep Claudia's legend alive in $.99 cent two night rental bin eternity. Claudia's in peak spitfire, take-charge, no-bulls**t form here as Rose, a spoiled rotten little strumpet b**ch who wants to take over the highly successful restaurant cum prostitution, car-jacking and smuggling ring that's sternly run by her equally redoubtable, domineering, tough-minded mother Aunt Anna (a rip-snorting slice of fat, juicy, lip-licking prime A-cut ham from veteran soap opera actress Lieux Dressler, who also popped up in the indispensable fright film favorites "Grave of the Vampire" and "Kingdom of the Spiders"). Rose hooks up with a couple of slick'n'slimy Mafia hoods in order to take over Aunt Anna's prosperous, eminently desirable and highly illegal operation, with the whole thing culminating in a bitterly ironic mother/daughter gunslinger-style showdown which actually transpires in a dusty, desolate abandoned ghost town! Spirited, rowdy and immensely good-natured despite its scuzzy subject matter, "Truck Stop Women" makes for an insanely enjoyable affair that's loaded with all the right eager and aiming to please exploitation feature ingredients, namely ample gratuitous female nudity (Claudia in particular looks completely stunning sans shirt), shoot-outs, bloody rub-outs (watch for the scene where two dastardly fellows get trampled to death by irate cows!), double and triple crosses, a suitably lowbrow sense of rollicking, trashed-out humor, a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-frying-pan "liberated women gleefully stick it to smug sexist oppressive dudes" feminist subtext (almost all the gals in this one use and abuse unsuspecting patsy guys for their own greedy self-serving reasons), deliciously ludicrous plot twists, and more gear-grinding, smoke-spewing, rubber-roasting full-throttle stomp on the gas mondo destructo truck chases than you can shake a rusty monkey wrench at. Highlights include one 18-wheeler taking the almighty plunge off a steep embankment and the corrupt, corpulent gutbucket sheriff having his beloved police car turned into an asphalt flapjack by a speeding Semi. Director/co-screenwriter Mark ("Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw," "Class of 1984") Lester pumps the pace into hyper-kinetic overdrive and allows the infectiously enthusiastic actors to cheerfully emote their crazed heads off. Tubby sourpuss Gene Drew and scrawny goof-ball Dennis Fimple supply hilariously bumbling'n'fumbling comic relief as Aunt Anna's inept flunkies, John Martino lets the smarmy charm ooze freely as an excessively oily sludgewad mobster, familiar 70's TV movie face Paul Carr appears as a character so shady he even gets his own cheesy recurrent spaghetti Western-style twangy guitar theme, and generously over-proportioned Russ Meyer starlet Uschi Digard proudly displays her substantial wares as a perpetually topless truck stop trollop. The steady succession of blow-your-speakers-out boisterous country music from both the fantastic Rod Hart (the theme song's a real doozy) and the simply stupendous Big Mack and the Truckstoppers seriously smokes. All in all, what we've got here is a bona-fide four-star both thumbs way up 70's drive-in celluloid landmark of tremendous cultural importance and artistic integrity, meaning that it's flat-out mindless trash with absolutely no pretense or delusions of grandeur to speak of.