Used Cars

Savagely funny...taken as a rancid, festering slice of Americana, it seems more potent than ever. Read full review

For once a comedy in the Animal House school that knows what it's was about: the vulgarity of the gags matches the vulgarity of the subject, and this 1980 film becomes a fierce, cathartically funny celebration of the low, the cheap, the venal—in short, America. Most of the time, I didn't know whether to laugh or shudder, and I ended up doing a lot of both. It was Steve Martin who said, “Comedy isn't pretty,” but it's Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the writer-directors here, who prove it; this is the Dawn of the Dead of slapstick. Read full review

A classic screwball fantasy - a neglected modern comedy that's like a more restless and visually high-spirited version of the W.C. Fields pictures...Set in the world of competing used-car dealers in the booming Southwest, this picture has a wonderful, energetic heartlessness; it's an American tall-tale movie in a Pop Art form. The premise is that honesty doesn't exist; if you develop a liking for some of the characters, it's not because they're free of avarice but because of their style of avarice.

A foul-mouthed, bumpercrunching farce that is often funnier in theory than in fact but, even so, is a movie that has more laughs in it than any film of the summer except "Airplane!" It wipes out "The Blues Brothers," "Caddyshack," "Up the Academy," "Where the Buffalo Roam" and just about every other recent comedy aimed, I assume, at an otherwise television-hooked public. Read full review

With their unerring eye for potential, the distributors didn't release this hilarious black comedy to cinemas in Britain. Zemeckis subsequently went on to make Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and loadsa money. Infinitely more caustic than these blockbusters, Used Cars runs on a contemporary screwball motor with a slapstick chassis Read full review

Before director-writer Bob Zemeckis found success with blockbuster hits ROMANCING THE STONE and BACK TO THE FUTURE, he directed this raunchy, hysterically funny comedy. Kurt Russell turns in a brilliant performance. Read full review

There are so many different characters and story lines in the movie that it's hard to keep everything straight, and harder still to care. Read full review

For a terrible movie, Used Cars certainly has its moments. Anyone braving the sleezy ad campaign will be treated to some wonderfully funny gibes at a larger-than-life target: the used-car-industry. The question is, do a few moments of satire justify an hour and a half of naked ladies, car stunts and chase scenes? That's what most of this movie consists of. [11 July 1980, p.27]

Used Cars, a mean, spirited farce about cutthroat rivalry between ruthless used-car salesmen somewhere in the Southwest, recalls the worst tendencies of "Ace in the Hole" crossed with the worst tendencies of "One, Two, Three." It's assiduously nasty and hard-driving too, a double-duty excess. Director/co-writer Robert Zemeckis has undeniable energy and flair, but it's being misspent on pretexts and situations that seem inexcusably gratuitous and snide. Read full review

Scripters have provided very little context or societal texture for their unmodulated tale, which disagreeably seeks to find humor in characters’ humiliation, embarrassment and even death. Nonetheless Robert Zemeckis directs with undeniable vigor, if insufficient control and discipline. Read full review

Used Cars is full of used characters, used ideas, and used jokes, many of which are in astonishingly bad taste. Read full review