It has been an interest of mine for over 35+ years.
Back in the late 80s, early 90s, I was friends with some guys that were into improved handling in their cars and trucks. We has lowered suspensions and wide tires. We'd sometimes take caravan drives on curvy roads at night to rip around the curves at speeds that most people wouldn't do. I wanted to make a short movie back then about that stuff but video cameras were expensive. We spent our money on the cars and bills so the idea never went anywhere.
In the late 90s, I was making better money and I fell into some good luck here and there so I made a VHS movie with some car stunts and wrecks. I made a second movie a year later, it was a sequel to the first. Both movies ran nearly 2 hours and included actual plotlines, bad acting, stunts-wrecks-car JUMPS and even rollovers. I had family members and friends help out with the stunts and playing roles in both movies. It was a great time and I have fond memories of that time. Several family members from the movies have passed on so the movies are special to me.
In short, in the first movie, a favored car of mine is stolen, I go through a sad spell then snap out of it and through a series of events, get the car back in the end. The second movie shows me seeing the thief of my car on a Wanted poster so I play an amateur bounty hunter to get the guy and exact some revenge. What it all really was in truth was some really thin plots to justify some silly car stunts that I wanted to do.
I have no illusions about the quality of the movie or the acting. It was ALL amateurs, nobody in these movies is at risk of being handed an academy award. This was barely above a High School Play in terms of acting and such but it was a lot of fun.
As far as stunts, I jumped several cars, wrecked a few in various ways, We sideswiped a few stunt cars, rolled two over, popped numerous tires, bent numerous control arms and ball joints, One broken vertebra, some cuts and scratches. I found open fields, deserted paved roads and dead end roads to shoot all the stunts. I made jump ramps with lumber from the job. I made fragile fences to crash through. The VHS cameras of the 90s were still the size of a shoe box but I made mounts to attach the camera to the sides of cars and to my truck to get angles like you'd see in real movies.
The movies were crudely edited with multiple tapes using 3 VCRs wired together. This is an extremely slow and imprecise method. For years, I have wanted to transfer all of the tapes to DVD to REdo the two movies while editing from a computer. I just haven't made the leap to do that yet.
Here it is, 2024 and I have more free time than ever. I may want to do another movie.
