As the movie opens, a local woman named Mona Dearly ( Bette Midler) speeds down a country road and directly into the Hudson River when her brakes fail. Americans are a funny lot.I am not sure what $4000 in 2016 money equates to but you can these days get plenty on the used car lot if you look carefully for roughly the same money as anything in the light car class or it can be can be a car you dreamed about when it was new but couldnt afford at the time.We Australians never saw the Yugo but $12,000 before you factor in things like automatics and on roads plus good condition gets you better than most of these cars from foreign lands and brands which dont exist anymore.I suppose the modern day equivalent of this would be something like a Suzuki Celerio or a Mitsubishi Mirage in my part of the world new,used equivalent buying gets you a three year old Corolla or Pulsar or one size smaller a well kept Yaris or Mazda 2. At that time, Bricklin was probably best known for the eponymous car that he launched amidst much fanfare in 1974. Even here in the Land That Rust Forgot, I rarely see anything from the 70s. Always. Its not like Fiat designs were anything special, quite the contrary in many instances. Jamie Lee Curtis' character looks like she has some colorful insights to share but isn't given the dialogue to do it--she's more a plot marker than a person. I mean, cmon, its an Eastern Bloc car. Director Nick Gomez Writer Peter Steinfeld Stars Danny DeVito Bette Midler Neve Campbell I test drove one of these brand new when they hit the market. In fact, it was through the good offices of Lawrence Eagleburger that all of the political red tape was navigated in order to make the project feasible. Bricklin was kicked out in the first (of two) bankruptcies, true. No regrets and better than any $1500 alternatives at the time. Zastava only collapsed in 2008, and its decline was NOT due to mismanagement, but the trade embargo on Serbia, which starved them of devlopment funds. In the small, white-trash town of Verplanck, N.Y., a loathsome woman named Mona Dearly (a dour and ugly Bette Midler) drives her car over a cliff and into the river. The problem is, there's not a single person in town who DIDN'T have a motive. It has been a while since I have seen a Yugo on the road, but a local car wash has one with signs mounted on it. She claimed that once you knew and understood them, they were not bad cars for what they were. who collected Yugos for pennies on the dollar and used the collection as a parts supply to keep ONE of them running. Required fields are marked *. if (window['UnicI'].geo === 'CA') { To be said, Jasons book is 90% about Bricklin. I also bought a new Yugo in 1989, and had to replace brake master cylinder immediately because brakes would fail after about 10 km on the road. I was discussing cars with a woman in my office building one day, when she remarked that she had owned a Yugo, and got an incredible number of miles out of it. Mine was still only about a year old, so I was in denial about its performance. after about 30 years of having the car rust off of the frame. Why are there so many Yugo in this movie? Also spare parts were inexpensive and any mechanic and his nephew would fix it. https://chrisoncars.com/yugo-victim-or-victimizer/: (Time Magazine said it best: The Yugo has the distinct feeling of something assembled at gunpoint), I found quite a few articles from later years, quoting the same sentence over and over again (https://www.carkeys.co.uk/news/the-story-of-the-yugo-the-worst-car-in-the-world, https://www.ocregister.com/2017/01/03/the-best-worst-cars-ever/ , https://blastmagazine.com/2014/05/13/truth-10-cars-never-hit-road/), And there you have it: everybody knows for fact that Yugo was actually assembled at gunpoint. Also in that time, poor workmanship wasnt exclusively Yugos problem. I owned two. 2. There are many causes for poor management. But of course, a parking lot fender bender would be enough to total these cars. It is my understanding the latter Yugos were much better than their earlier counterparts, but still not up to snuff with the worst(?) Too many people in this country have this mentality that if its cheap, treat it as such and yes, a fulfilled prophesy. Since mine had been in a rental fleet, it was actually pretty well taken care of, it had an OK aftermarket radio and A/C. It cut costs, and as was the concern then (as now) it was Green using the parlance of today. Edit: Gah! When they all disappeared, I surmised it was because he had been caught by the police for driving unregistered vehiclesmore likely they all just died from their terminal junkiness. of record for a Yugo. The thing that I remember most was the shifter and the transmission. Or perhaps the murderer was her husband, Phil (William Fichtner), who is having an affair with Rona (Jamie Lee Curtis), a waitress at the local diner (who is also having an affair with Jeff, so maybe she killed Mona just because she was tired of hearing about her from both men). It is the cheapest person that spends the most. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. These cars came with an optional AM/FM cassette deck that was very basic, only 5W total if I recall right, or was that 5W per channel? I remember seeing new Yugos at the (I think 1990) Chicago Auto Show. Mona, played by Midler, drowns when the brakes in her Yugo fail and she catapults through a guardrail into the lake below. Needless to say, it wouldve been better if Bently had just gone ahead and let them have the Mulsanne. Yugo-mania also swept through Hollywood for a time and was the star car in movies such as The Birdcage, Drowning Mona, Die Hard 3, The Crow, Inspector Gadget and 101 Dalmatians. The battery required water to be poured into it. And as any living myth, this one spreads into other areas as well: He was a priest for several small parishes in the mountains of a N. Eastern state, I forget which and came around a bend to get from one parish to another when he hit the poor animal and it was enough to total that car out but he got that many miles out of it. Good account. Drowning Mona - An explanation informs viewers that the setting (Verplanck, New York) was a test market for Yugos. Not too long before I sold it, it had started to develop noisy CV joints, but by then the car was 8 years old and 100,000 miles. Or wasting half a grand. or all of the Ladas.As has been mentioned already this kind of cheap car ownership Beads of sweat formed on his forehead, it wasnt that he didnt want to learn, it was where he was sitting that had him scarred. i find it interesting that visionary vehicles still lists 172 duane st. in tribeca as their headquarters. Just started slipping, on a highway as flat as a calm oceanand over the next five hours I had to shift into lower and lower gears just to minimize slippage. My point is more that while suited for its home market, the Yugo was a cynical attempt by its promoter to make a quick buck by appealing to the most fickle, least loyal of all purchasers-the price shopper.It is only coincidental that the car was built in Yugoslavia. The film also stars Neve Campbell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Affleck, William Fichtner, Marcus Thomas, and Peter Dobson. Thanks for your first hand account ! The Italian Government and the Unions forced Fiat to cooperate. I knew I wasnt buying a Lexus. Ive got a couple of rusted out British cars one of which I repaired The rust was caused by poor window sealing on both water rusted it way out however the spares one was driven full of rust which spread it all through the unpainted box sections. The process, alone, of a car manufacturer as a unit of government, is suspect. Hell, he only paid something like $500 for a beater commuter car and this was in the late 1990s. Casey Affleck has gone on record saying that both this film and Soul Survivors (2001) were his two least favorite films that he has worked on. One day I put the key in and nothing happened, it was dead and wouldnt turn on. Almost everyone in town is a suspect. All four brake drums were tampered with, the brake fluid was drained, and the perp also drained some other fluids just to be on the safe side. I attach a picture of a 1100,the previous model,(5 door too! I know this is hardly the point of your blog entry, but as someone with a passionate interest in the region, Im compelled to mention that Yugoslavia broke apart mainly due to its heavy debt burden. In fact, as it became evident that the Yugo was heading toward failure, Bricklin tried to modify and import the Proton from Malaysia to take advantage of low wage rates and favorable exchange valuations that would have made that car an asian version of the Yugo. (We also wanted to stick a finger in the eye of the USSR, which was at odds with Yugoslavia anyway). There are heaps of suspects ranging from her husband, her son, her son's friend, her son's friend's fiance and so on. i cant imagine where bricklin would get the approximately $35k/mo rent. Mona Dearly (Bette Midler) is an anagram for "only a dream". Any idea where the Fiat 128 stopped and the 127 started in the Yugo? This is all fictional of course. What kind of sicko lives there? The little cars--all Yugos--are almost identical; they only differ in color, and Rona's has a sunroof. That explains why everyone was driving them then. Now Rash has to decide who killed Mona Dearly. i found this article about the space: I saw this movie. I presume the folding roof is there just in case the doors jam shut because of a sagging body! I would be *shocked* to see a single one moving under its own power in 2011. The biggest thing Ive heard was the timing belts were supposedly good for 30K miles and many owners were caught off guard, mostly due to not reading and/or heeding the maintenance intervals and boom, they croaked as they were not non interference motors like most OHC motors arent. @EdDan: How do you double the value of your Yugo? there used to be a sign on the front that said visionary vehicles but that came down at least two years ago. After the death of Marshal Tito in 1980, long simmering Balkan feuds became a way of life and continue there to this day. Jason Vuic details this in his book The Yugo of how management refused plans for premiums for top-grade work or extra effort; of how primitive and shoddy were the paint booths, of how design goofs went uncorrected for years. Diversity was their strength!!!!!!!!!!! France, to use your example, had a protected market with tariffs on American cars (disguised as a horsepower tax). "She's dead," he confirms to Chief Rash (Danny DeVito), who nods grimly and begins a murder investigation. Here, it is well known that you change the timing belt every 40K miles. Me and my friend Jerry (from Sam Bonds) drove a Yugo at a wrecker yard in Coburg some years back. Back in another shop (an independent who specialized in Fiats) there was some general loose talk about popping a 128 engine in there; but given a verbal estimate, I cut it off. Around the same time we had a similar thing in Australia the FSM Niki, which was a Polish-built Fiat 126, so a ~700cc rear-engined s-box. The civil war in the former Yugoslavia was the finishing blow, but wasnt the reason it wasnt brought over. And when longtime resident Mona Dearly (BETTE MIDLER) drove her Yugo into the river to her death, no one really seemed to care. The philosophy behind Drowning Mona is not good clean fun, or even intelligent nasty fun. I must admit that I own a Yugo. Since Yugo America was basically just a collection of cheap office furniture and unanswered phones, creditors received essentially nothing for their interests in the company. Anyway, you got 2 I think 6.5 door speakers standard and an option for 2 46 oval speakers, mounted in the rear cargo covers side panels for a total of 4 speakers and an optional AC unit that replaced the console stack, just below the heater and the floor and it I think augmented the weak heater in these things. Motor Trend reported that their hand picked press ringer broke down during testing. Learn how your comment data is processed. His shaky little import business was marketing Bertone X/19s after Fiat said arrivederci in 1982, but the end of that venture was in sight. That means that all Yugos in this movie are from 1986. Destination was Las Vegas; and by the time I got there the only way to get it to move was in First. Dan beat me to it. Its avoidable with regular replacement, true. Since it had the potential to continue the well-regarded reputation of the Autobianchi A112 base car as a small model in markets like the US compared to the SWB Fiat 127 derived car that become the infamous half-baked small Yugo. ), it was quite good. I cant think of another car that disappeared off the roads faster. The Little SuBARu Wow!, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLPp-NFInXw. Paid less than a thousand for it, thought at the time it was a good buy. When the coroner first jumps into the water to check Mona's dead body, he is neck-deep in water. They didnt always start, and they DID always rust away. But the reason it hit the Japanese cars harderwas that while many American cars were still frame-on-platform, and had some beef in the underbellyand even the unibody models were over-engineered for rigiditythe Japanese models had pared weight and beef to a minimum. Maybe Bricklin had caught lightning in a bottle. The Yugos bait was a stunningly low MSRP of just $3990. There are, to be fair, other theories about how Jeff (Marcus Thomas) lost his hand, although in every scenario he was reaching for a beer. The writer of Drowning Mona thought it would be hilarious to fill a 2000 crime caper with Yugo vehicles. But before Bricklin made a virtue of safety, he all but made a mockery of same just a half decade before. The Yugo was not always viewed so favorably, although its $3,990 price ($9,900 in today's dollars) grabbed headlines on its introduction in 1985. . if (!readyGEO) { Drowning Mona is one of my favorite comedies, and its currently available on YouTube for free. My best friend had for a brief time, a rusted 1980 Civic DX hatchback that ultimately blew out its 2 upper gears in the 5spd manual tranny that did it in even though his mechanic could not get the bolts out to replace the clutch due to rust. The space efficiency was great too- it really is tiny- and is NOT a fiat. The movie was directed by Nick Gomez, who, in "Laws of Gravity" and "New Jersey Drive," brought a John Cassavetes touch to working-class crime and confusion. Technically if its going downhill it wasnt moving on its own power. Also in Drowning Mona's favor, at the heart of the movie, is a genuinely positive character, Verplanck Police Chief Wyatt Rash (Danny DeVito).He's possibly the only principled citizen in town. In the 1970s the PCI (Italian Communist Party) reached its all-time maximum electorally: 34.4% in the 1976 general election (12,600,000 votes, 3 million more than in the previous election in 1972). if (window['UnicI'] && window['UnicI'].geo && window['UnicI'].geo !== '-' ) { The Mopar fuselage cars were not too bad, but the 71 on up B bodies were not so good. The real reason why Crvena Zastava went into this adventure was that they were desperate to get some foreign currency to keep assembly lines alive. Several actors in this film have ties to the Batman films. A 2000 American crime comedy film directed by Nick Gomez that has a police chief ( Danny DeVito) investigate the death of a woman named Mona ( Bette Midler ), an abusive and spiteful woman who was hated by everyone who knew her. AMC, in its last years, went so far as to have Ziebart license its procedure for use in the factory. 1. He later served briefly as acting Secretary of State during the last months of the first Bush presidency). But the little Yugo turned out to be a lot less than the sum of its parts. There was something wrong with every single facet of this car. Drowning Mona (2000) is a never remembered black comedy that I absolutely love. But Bricklin assured his erstwhile investors that the car could be made ready for the U.S. market with some minor tweaks. Wyatt finds no shortage of suspects. Parts are no problem, because it is basically a FIAT. } It was amazing (to me) how they found a solution so quickly. Thanks for telling it. All in all, Monas jaunt into the river could have been described as a pretty fortuitous accident for everyones lives she touched, or in Monas case, bludgeoned. Renault has been in state ownership since the 50s, and has been a very profitable company. Every vehicle in town that is not a truck is a Yugo, except the police cruisers, which are Plymouth Horizons., And lastly, I recall seeing a comedian on TV talking about Yugos. Not a bit ! There are like 100 YUGOs in the movie, which I think came out around 1998. Knobs came off in your hand, the sliding radio marker on a string would get stuck and not move off of from where it landed. if (window['UnicI'].geo === 'EU') { Ive never felt safe in any car that light so would never have considered owning one, no matter how cheap, even if they had been decently made vehicles. With the pullout of Fiat, Renault and the British makes just a few years before,. European manufactures give guarantee for lets say 50k-250k km (~30k-150k mi) and 5-10 years, whatever come first (in practice mileage is more important), but previous owner could use some product with shorter life thats why this saving of couple* Euros isnt worth a risk. Although I tested it in the summer, the car sputtered and hesitated like it was cold. Before I moved to Atlanta in the early 90s, we sold off our other cars before moving. Visit Dealer Website. Found it! Every vehicle in town that is not a truck is a Yugo, except the police cruisers, which are Plymouth Horizons. About two years ago there was a Wall Street Journal article about a guy who drag races a Yugo. Show more Yugo America. I didnt mind helping friends and neighbor with problems they had with their cars. Ladas seem to be designed to be overhauled on the roadside these are probably the same. The Yugo got its biggest role in 2000, in Drowning Mona, starring Casey Affleck, Neve Campbell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Danny DeVito, and Bette Midler, with Will Farrell making a delightful cameo. I spotted the ones in the picture while out on a bike ride a few years ago. At least until the inevitable head gasket problems caused by an Iron head and alloy block. New York (where "years ago," according to an opening caption, "the Yugo Car Company chose to test market its new breed of vehicle.") Directed by Nick Gomez (Laws of Gravity), . Nevermind that their cars are horribly unreliable, people still buy them. An older Yugo, since the car hasn't been manufactured since its country went out of business. And the gas cap would not come off. @Jeff Nelson: I think youre a bit dismissive of Zastava, they have been around for quite some time. Theres a fellow in the NorCal chapter of The Fiat Club first names Dan, I think who owns a pristine Yugo in a burnt orange color. I was scarred for her to be driving it. In 1968, Bricklin thought that what America needed was an air cooled two cylinder car that could make zero to sixty in thirty seven agonizing seconds. I actually checked out a Yugo about the same time I was looking at Sundances, Colts and similar vehicles and decided: No, I didnt have the time for the do-it-yourself maintenance it mightve required my current cars took care of that at the time! I think I remember this! Down shifting was scary, sometimes you just had to bypass second, sometimes it refused to even go into gear or it would get stuck in gear. Thanks for your detailed experience. I took all of the fun stuff off of the red one (Italian Cromodora wheels and the AM/FM Cassette) and put it on the blue one. Comments are property of their authors. I think it's worth keeping them separate because it's a in-joke of the film that almost everyone has a Yugo. Rather, I see him as an irrepressible optimist who went into his various ventures believing everything would turn out well and he was blind to the shortcomings of the cars he imported. The only way to get it to move was in first interesting visionary... 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