H.B. "Toby" Halicki lived for cars. One of a dozen children in a large Polish family, he grew up helping out in the family auto repair and junkyard business in Dunkirk, New York, before hitch-hiking to Los Angeles with an uncle, where he set up his own business. Much of his work was in repairing Cadillacs and other luxury cars for movie stars and others with show business connections, and he also established a web of contacts within the racetrack and law enforcement networks.
All this came in handy when Halicki began work on realizing a dream of his: to create the best car chase movie ever made. Unwilling to surrender his vision to any established movie studio, Halicki took a shoestring plotline about the leader of a car theft ring that is betrayed by his associates and directed, produced and starred in GONE IN 60 SECONDS (1974). For a novice filmmaker, Halicki had amazing visual instincts as well as a wonderful sense of audience reaction, and the footage he produced cut together into a terrifically entertaining action picture that subsequently became a huge hit around the world.
Having distributed the film himself, Halicki reaped all the benefits and built himself a little empire, investing in real estate, antique toys, and of course, cars. Films like SMOKEY & THE BANDIT and GRAND THEFT AUTO were rushed into production to cash in, making the late 1970s drive-ins a popular place for car accidents, but no other picture was able to equal Halicki's raw style. Inspired by his own success, Halicki's follow-up picture THE JUNKMAN (1982) was a semi-autobiographical story about a car wrecker named Harlan B. Hollis who made a fortune as a filmmaker. The action starts in footage of Hollis' latest picture, a sequel to GONE IN 60 SECONDS, and continues when someone within his company hires a team of assassins to kill him. The result is wild action that still stands in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most vehicle crashes in one film.
Halicki always maintained control of his own movies, and the release of the 2000 remake of GONE IN 60 SECONDS prompted Halicki's widow Denice to have these two action classics fully restored for DVD release. Complete with new Surround soundtracks, and accompanied by audio commentaries with crew members, interviews, and other extras, both GONE and JUNKMAN are excellent discs that did very well. This release of Halicki's final work is meant to complete the DVD trilogy, but produces mixed feelings.
Ostensibly the movie shown being made in THE JUNKMAN, DEADLINE AUTO THEFT is not really a sequel to GONE IN 60 SECONDS, but kind of an odd alternate version. It begins with an extended version of the stunt chase sequence shown in JUNKMAN, with Hoyt Axton introduced as the police nemesis to Halicki's master car thief Maindrian Pace, much as Jackie Gleason served to harass Burt Reynolds in SMOKEY. However, over 90% of the film is recut footage from GONE, and good as it is, it just feels like a cheat. Most film guides, if they mention it at all, consider the film to be merely a re-release of GONE IN 60 SECONDS.
The real reason to get this disc is to see the surviving 35 minutes of GONE IN 60 SECONDS 2. Halicki died while filming a falling water tower that's part of the film's climax, but the greater part of the big chase finale of what might have been his greatest film was already in the can, and has been finished here for our enjoyment. Denice Halicki introduces the plot something to do with Pace uncovering evidence of a conspiracy that has him on the run before cutting to the chase. The sequence begins with Pace jumping onto a speeding semi-trailer truck while being chased by an ever-growing army of police cars. Pace takes control of the rig, running over, around and through everything in his way before crashing the truck into that water tower to make his escape. He then steals a famous impounded concept car called "The Slicer," which according to the story was built by pranking frat boys. The Slicer, an amazing vehicle that looks like a speeding wedge, is worth the price of admission alone, as it goes zipping across parking lots, upending every car in its path.
As with the other two Halicki films discs, the digital restoration has been beautifully done on both features. Purists may quibble with the fact that some of the original music had to be sacrificed for video release, but as evidenced by the existence of DEADLINE AUTO THEFT, Halicki himself would be unlikely to be among those purists. Unfortunately, neither feature here is afforded a commentrak a real shame in the case of GONE IN 60 SECONDS 2 - leaving a lot of unanswered questions about both. One special feature that helps make up for this is the fun "crash counter," which keeps the score for you onscreen.
The disc also includes the 45-minute TV special SHOESTRING SHOWMAN, which covers Halicki's life and career, as well as how Denice's efforts to get the sequel footage out of probate led to the making of the remake, which one interviewee says would have been a disappointment to Halicki. He has a point the original ended with a hair-raising 40-minute car chase, while in Jerry Bruckheimer's version, it only lasted about eight minutes. This only goes to emphasize that the likes and times of H.B. Halicki are unlikely to be seen again, at least on this planet.
The DVD is rounded out with trailers for all three features, which would've been great had they been the original theatrical trailers and not the video release versions. DVD-ROM content includes a large gallery of photos, including shots of Halicki's toy and car collections, and behind-the-scenes snaps from all his movies.
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