Stab Truck 1970

There is still a lot of confusion over where Stab Truck began. Chronologically (and logically) the 1970’s movie must have come before the 1980’s TV show, and the comic book was in between somewhere. Nothing with ST is simple. Argument still rages in the community over the relationship between the movie and the TV show. This page focuses only on the unreleased 1970 film Stab Truck starring Dennis Weaver and an as then yet unknown young actor called David Hasselhoff. As we’ll see with most of the talent related to Stab Truck their involvement was not straight forward.

Weaver had spent all summer filming Stab Truck in the Nevada deserts only to learn that by late 1970, the project had been scrapped. Bits and pieces were edited, but never even completely finished.

Coincidentally, right about the time Stab Truck was getting ditched, a little known movie maker named Steven Spielberg was working on a truck movie of his own, and was in talks with Weaver about starring in it. Weaver, none too pleased with doing “another damn truck movie” reluctantly agreed after being screwed out of his paycheck from Stab Truck. Frustrated, upset and not excited about working with this unknown director, Weaver often did not show up for shoots, and this left much of the movie with empty scenes.

In order to recoup a few bucks, the producers of the Stab Truck movie sold all the footage and rights to Steven Spielberg, who used much of the footage in his 1971 “made-for-TV” movie, which we all know as Duel. He used this footage to fill in where Weaver had failed to turn up.

Hasselhoff meanwhile was attempting to break into acting and would take anything.

Stab Truck is a three act movie. The first act revolves around Weaver’s character, Jim Vanity, rounding up young children with a stolen school bus in order to take them back to his lair to do God knows what to them. Before he can complete the plan, a truck comes out of nowhere and after a convoluted chase sequence (in which many of the children die) Vanity eventually meets his doom in a bloody rubber-on-flesh death scene.

When shooting was completed, much to the director’s dismay, all the raw footage only added up to 67 minutes. When the first edit was complete the film came in and just over 27 minutes long. The producers knew the project was a failure. Despite the trailer (which has recently acquired a whole new generation of fans in the wake of the Tarantino/Rodriguez movie Grindhouse) focusing heavily on Weaver the film is now remembered for the other two acts, mostly because of their violent content.

Most film fans remember the final scene best of all and it’s worth noting here in a little detail. The carnage is over and we cut to a quiet county morgue. We zoom in on a toe tag that reads VANITY, J. DOA. A morgue attendant comes in followed by a plain clothes detective and a doctor. They nod to the attendant and the sheet is pulled back to reveal Vanity’s corpse. We don’t see the face but this is obviously a body double for Weaver. The torso of the corpse is riddled with puncture and skid marks. One of the detective’s asks for an official cause of death, but the doctor just shakes his head. “Well?” asks the cop. The reply became a Truxploitation classic:

“At first we thought it was a simple hit and run. This man had obviously bit hit by a very large, very heavy vehicle at speed. But upon further examination there was much more intensive trauma than could be caused in a pedestrian vehicular accident. Officer, this man was stabbed to death… by a truck.”

Despite the film’s success on the grindhouse circuit (where it was often part of a double bill with newer movies like Shift In Africa, 1974) both Weaver and Hasselhoff took their names off the credits. Indeed Stab Truck is to this day missing from both their IMDB profiles with Hasselhoff now making his debut in 1973 as ‘British Guard’ in The Dean Martin Show. Weaver never made another Truxploitation movie, but it was the younger actor’s destiny to meet the truck again more than a decade later.