Stick to “Friday the 13th” for summer horror you know. I’m also a fan of the interracial cast - unusual for early ’80s horror - and the 83-minute run time. Much of the action takes place in the wild, giving the thrills a sweaty, survivalist edge, but Davis still pauses to paint quiet moments with artful, spectral spookiness. What makes this a terrific summer scare is how the director Andrew Davis (“The Fugitive”) simultaneously finds beauty and menace in the season’s natural pleasures: rushing waters, campfire camaraderie, sunlight through towering Redwoods. The final reckoning with the maniac is so eye-poppingly directed, you’ll forgive the abrupt ending.
The kids should have listened to their bus driver (a wild-eyed Joe Pantoliano) when he warned them not to take this trip, because a hulking sicko, camouflaged in a cloak of forest detritus, is killing their friends. The story is pure formula: Young folks from a rural camp go to the woods to have sex, test their survival skills and share ghost stories, including one about a deranged woman who lives among the trees. The film’s signature scene, in which Jack and Annie escape the vehicle, wrapped in each other’s arms as they glide atop a floorboard across an airport tarmac, is the swooning stuff that action movies are made of.
Jack and Annie’s passion grows with every hairpin turn, bracingly stitched together by the editor John Wright, and every intimate close-up of Jack guiding Annie through Payne’s multiple bids to destroy the bus. What separates the film from others of its ilk, however, is the dynamic and youthful romance shared by Reeves as Jack and Sandra Bullock as the unassuming wildcat, and the bus’s accidental driver, Annie Porter. In those ways, the director Jan de Bont’s “Speed” is emblematic of other big, 1990s blockbuster action-thrillers, such as the “Die Hard” series or “The Rock,” wherein major explosions and grand chases are instigated by terrorist foes. Pop quiz, hot shot: Why is “Speed” a fantastic, rip-roaring summer spectacle? Maybe it has to do with a manic Dennis Hopper playing Howard Payne, an embittered, retired police officer planting bombs around Los Angeles so he might reap a reward far higher than the flimsy gold watch he received from the department upon his retirement? Or maybe it’s the kooky, murderous glee he displays when he manipulates the young and whip-smart SWAT officer Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) onto a bus primed to detonate if the vehicle stops, slows below 50 miles per hour, or if Jack tries to evacuate any of the hostages?
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