This immensely lively and entertaining 70's tongue-in-cheek cross country road race romp stars Michael Sarrazin as the rich businessman who sponsors an illegal event from New York to Long Beach, California which attracts a colorfully flaky assortment of hardcore nutty car race enthusiasts. Among the race's kooky participants are the always great Tim McIntire as Sarrazin's bitter, yet amiable rival, an especially hilarious Raul Julia as a hysterically lecherous womanizing Italian driver (the lovely Colleen Camp pops up as a sweet young honey Julia happily jumps in the sack with), Nicholas Pryer as Sarrazin's anxious college professor co-pilot, Susan Fannery and Joanne Nail as a pair of sassy'n'sexy good-time gals, Gary Busey in his usual wild redneck yahoo role, Harvey Jason as a maniacal motorcyclist, and Vaughn Taylor and J. Pat O'Malloy as a couple of lovably laid-back doddering old guys. Norman Burton gives an uproariously broad performance as the ramrod killjoy police detective determined to stop the race. Director Chuck Bail keeps the pace zipping along at a speedy rate, staging the copious vehicular carnage with a genuinely rousing rip-snorting panache, stoking the sidesplitting silly humor to a cartoonishly high-pitched degree and eliciting engagingly spirited performances from a uniformly solid cast. The opening third is a tad drawn-out, but once the race itself gets underway the film kicks into third gear, pops the clutch, and puts the pedal to the metal by really delivering the expected tire-screeching, rubber-burning, automobile-wrecking goods with infectiously carefree and giddy go-for-it abandon. Both Richard Glouner's vibrant cinematography and Dominic Frontiere's delightfully sprightly score greatly enhance the overall irresistibly goofy and good-natured merriment. To sum up, "The Gumball Rally" makes for a sound source of exuberantly wacky and light-hearted fun.

When bored executive Michael Bannon utters the word 'Gumball' various people across the United States drop whatever they are doing and head for New York City. They are all going to take part in the highly unofficial and highly illegal Gumball Rally; a race from New York to Long Beach, California. With the exception of one man on a motorcycle each team is made up of two drivers in a car; mostly high performance sports cars but also a van, a Rolls Royce and a fake police car; the only rule to the race is that there are no rules! Not everybody is there to enjoy the event; Lt. Roscoe, a California policeman, is determined to arrest as many of the drivers as he can... he just has to catch them first. Not all of the competitors will make it to California; in fact some of them won't get out of New York and those that do make it will have to go through various scrapes involving the police, other competitors, a motorcycle gang and even a flock of butterflies!

This film isn't chock full of A-list actors, the only ones I recognised were Gary Busey and Raul Julia, however everybody performed well and because of the lack of big names it was hard to guess who would get to the end and who would drop out near the start. The race itself had plenty of hilarious incidents and as the drivers approached the end it actually got fairly tense as the viewer wills their personal favourite to win; my personal favourite was Lapchick the Mad Hungarian motorcyclist... he was hilarious! Filmed long before CGI the stunts are all real and for the most part performed by the actors making it seem far more real than more modern films where the director would no doubt give in to the temptation of adding lots of CGI explosions and crashes! The premise of an unofficial race had been done before and has been done again since but this is one of the best examples of the genre and because it contains no offensive material it can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

Bored wealthy businessman Michael Bannon (Michael Sarrazin) instigates the Gumball Rally with the code word "Gumball". Various people from differing backgrounds accept the challenge for an illegal cross country rally car race.

This is Cannonball Run with less comedy. It doesn't have Burt at its center and the crazy cast has no wacky fun. What it is is one of the progenitors of that genre. It follows It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World but it cuts out the need for a buried treasure. The race is the goal and any money is just extra. They can't go 55 and they won't accept any rules. It takes a few tries and a few years before we get to the much funnier Cannonball. There are a lot of crashing here but they all start looking the same after awhile. There aren't any characters to care about and that is its biggest deficiency.