VIDEO: The Belgrade Phantom trailer

Posted by Richard Robello on September 25, 2009

Aren’t coincidences funny sometimes? Just two days ago I was watching Vanishing Point and I was thinking to myself, why is it that modern day car movies suck so much? And then thought how great it would be to have a remake of Vanishing Point; after all how hard could it be to make a new version just as good, you would just copy it with new technology and possibly modern cars. But I’m sure Hollywood would screw that up, trying to make it more contemporary and appeal to today’s market, totally missing the point.

And then today I come across the trailer below for a Yugoslavian film called The Belgrade Phantom, based on real events from 1979 Belgrade. The Belgrade Phantom was the nickname of small time thief, Vlada Vasiljevic, with a fancy for sports cars. The story evolves over the course of 15 days, where the “Phantom” would tear through the streets of communistic Belgrade in a stolen white Porsche Targa S, making circles around Slavija Square where crowds would gather every night to cheer him on; he had become a hero of sorts.

If Vanishing Point hadn’t been made eight years earlier, I would think they based it on these events as they a quite similar, from the “Phantom” calling radio stations and announcing his exploits all the way up to the very abrupt ending.

There is much mystery surrounding this event. Some say that he stole the Porsche from Goran Bregovic, others from the Danish ambassy, and yet other reports claim the original owner was Croatian tennis player Nikola Pilic. And as for why he did it? Theories range from Vasiljevic making a symbolic statement against the communist regime to he simply hated cops and wanted to make them look bad, or perhaps he was just bored. My favorite theory is he did it for a girl; there are stories that while running from the police he would pick one rose every night from the center of Slavija square. Reminds me a lot of C’était un rendez-vous where the films hero races through the streets of Paris to meet his date.

Vasiljevic died a few years after being released from prison, in a stolen Russian Lada.

OFFICIAL TRAILER:

DOCUMENTARY OF THE ORIGINAL EVENTS:

SOURCE: YouTube via Autoblog