Strong and Moving!

Fresh and Exciting

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Mother, Jugs & Speed concerns a rivalry between two ambulance companies and their cutthroat efforts to muscle the other out of business. Allen Garfield's company the F&B Ambulance Corporation seems to be losing out. Then again with some of the help he's got do we wonder why.For those who are used to seeing Bill Cosby as lovable Cliff Huxtable you're in for quite a change. Cosby is almost stepping into Richard Pryor territory as the cynical and flippant Mother, a nickname no doubt abbreviated from something else.No doubt who Jugs is. Raquel Welch plays Garfield's secretary who wants to go out in the field as a paramedic. Garfield being the chauvinist that he is just won't go for it. Later on however Raquel proves her worth and her being a female paramedic helps Garfield in a crisis moment.Speed is a young Harvey Keitel who is a policeman facing pending charges. He needs an income and police training gives him a leg up in the hiring department.Let's just say that Garfield's company cuts a lot of corners, doesn't follow a lot of rules. They've even got a working agreement with an ambulance chasing shyster played by Severn Darden. This man is literally chasing the ambulances for clients. Biggest rule breaker is Cosby. You can't conceive of Cliff Huxtable doing what he does.If your sense of humor tends to black comedy Mother, Jugs & Speed is your kind of film. It could use a remake, I could see this as a Brangelina project myself.

Black comedy, about a ragtag ambulance company out of Los Angeles battling their competitors while picking up an eclectic group of needy passengers, could best be described as schizophrenic (quirky bordering on outrageous). It manages to match its silly, yet surprisingly catchy, title with a well-written script and an excellent cast. Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel make up an easy starring trio (another surprise), and Welch in particular seems extremely comfortable in the chaotic surroundings. Supporting players Allen Garfield, Valerie Curtin and Dick Butkis as the Texan are all fun, though there's perhaps too much of live-wire Larry Hagman (having a permanent meltdown). Peter Yates directed, and while he's quick on his feet he's not always adept at managing the viewer's responses through the morass; these entangled vignettes needed a bit more subtlety and class. Still, there are big laughs in the picture, a few tender moments, not to mention Los Angeles looking bright-and-shiny. I saw this in the theater in 1976, and the audience--probably having expected a full-on slapstick comedy--filed out looking bewildered. The movie wasn't ahead of its time ("MASH" prepared us for this messy mix of dark laughs), but it seems to play better today than it did upon its release. Remade as a TV-movie in 1978 (with an extra 'g' in Jugs). **1/2 from ****

**SPOILERS** Getting $42,50 per client and .50 per mile it take to get him, or her, to the nearest hospital is the life's-blood of the H&B Ambalance Company and the more bodies it hauls the more cash rolls into to it's coffers. Mother, Bill Cosby, is the wise old man of H&B who's seen just about everything there is to see in the ambulance business and doesn't mind seeing some more. As good as an ambulance driver Mother is he still has some hang ups, like we all do, in life. Mother carries on his rig a loaded .357 Magnum and a case of ice cold beer that he constantly sips as he drives wildly through the streets of L.A. Mother also has a very bad habit of buzzing the local nuns, scaring the hell out of them as they cross the streets outside their chapel. Jugs, Raquel Welch, is the pretty and busty, like her name suggests, dispatcher of the H&B Ambalance Company who has a dream of becoming an ambulance driver herself. Which is taking a toll on her social life by studying nights to get a diploma and license to be behind the wheel; and roll up and down the city streets at 60 to 100 MPH without worrying about red lights or being pulled over by police squad cars.Speed, Harvey Keitel, is a cop on suspension and awaiting trial for selling uppers and coke, not the bottled kind, to high school students on his beat which later proves that he didn't. Speed also has a way with the ladies in his sensitive way of sweet talking to them that has the almost unapproachable and untouchable Jugs falling for the cute and cuddly ex-cop as fast as it takes her to dispatch a rig to pick up a stiff off the street. Hilarious 1976 black comedy that has it's share of real drama and tragedy in it as well.There's Mother's partner Leroy, Bruce Davidson,gets shot to death a by a junkie, Toni Basil, because he didn't have the drugs that she so desperately craved. There was also a very graphic delivery scene of a baby on a H&B ambulance that was trying to get to a county hospital. This happened when the two ambulance drivers, Speed & Jugs, were told a snotty doctor at a local hospital emergency ward that they don't take obstetrics there. The baby was successfully delivered, by Jugs, but the mother died in childbirth. There's a very wild and bloody shootout at the end of the film when two of the H&B drivers Murdouc & Walker(Larry Hagman & Michael McManus) both drunk and doped up took over the company's office and held the boss' wife Peaches Fishbine, Valerie Curtin, hostage. The shoot-out ending with one of the drivers, Murdoc, getting shot to death by the police and the other badly burned. Allen Garfied was an added treat in the movie as H&B's owner Harry Fishbine who acted as if he were a general and that his workers were an advanced infantry unit about to storm the Normandy beaches on D-Day.

I am not going to say that afore mentioned message by some guy in oklahoma is wrong, but he is. This movie is by EMT's, For EMT's and firemen, and about EMT's and firemen. Yes this movie is an exaggeration in some points, but think of it this way. One of the great comical ( and touchy feely with his hands) comedians in our time does a fine job in showing us what the heart and soul of EMT's and Firemen are like. We are people, just like you, and you, but apparently not like sissy girls like the man above. We are the most professional and customer service oriented in the industry ( customer satisfaction for us is the customer living, not selling old men their underwear like oklahoma boy does). We love what we do, but once in a while, after months and years seeing what we see, things like this movie portrays happen once in a while. And it keeps us going the next day to save someone you love. God bless this movie. It lets us laugh when all we want to do is cry.