Dragstrip Riot is a 1958 US teen-oriented sportscar club and motorcycle gang film[1] produced by O'Dale Ireland and directed by David Bradley.

Dragstrip Riot was released in the US by American International Pictures as a double feature with The Cool and the Crazy (1958), and distributed in Canada by Astral Films and in the UK by Anglo Amalgamated.

The clean-cut members of the local sportscar club are enjoying summer in Malibu, California - driving their Corvettes, going to the beach, hanging out at the malt shop.

Rick Martin (Clarke) and Bart Thorson (Bob Turnbull) both consider Janet Pearson (Lime) to be "their" girl.

Rick lives with his mother, Norma (Wray), a war widow, and Gramps (Ted Wedderspoon), his paternal grandfather.

The stern Gramps believes that Norma is coddling Rick by giving him an expensive sportscar and letting him loaf away the summer.

She wears tight pants instead of dresses, and smokes cigarettes, and when she and one of the sportscar girls collide rumps while dancing, she says angrily, "Pull in your bumper, sister!"

After several misses, Rick stomps on his brakes and Silva accidentally hits fellow gang member Gordie (Barry Truex) on the head.

When the sportscar kids read a newspaper article about Rick, they're shocked that he had spent six months in reform school for beating a boy when he was 14.

Then to make doubly sure that their product commanded the attention they had foreseen, they started pairing them, thus giving unprecedented importance to the so-called package deals which have proven so financially successful (...)."

"[14] It was playing at the time of the review at the Paramount Theater in Rochester on a 10:30 pm "Twin Rock 'N Roll Show" as the first film on a double bill with The Cool and the Crazy.

[15] Academic film historian Peter Stansfeld contrasts the train drag in Dragstrip Riot with the over-the-cliff chicken race in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

"The film's lack of affect, however, was more certainly a consequence of the fact the filmmakers did not have the resources to produce the kind of finely-honed cinematic rendering of danger, suspense, and thrills that was achieved in Rebel.

[16] In 2019 film critic Rob Craig described Dragstrip Riot as being a "trite melodrama of the soap opera variety" and "a wheezy, long-winded affair which seems to go on forever.

"[5] Music for Dragstrip Riot was composed and conducted by Nicholas Carras, with song lyrics by Carl Eugster.

[2] According to the website Ringostrack, the songs "Teenage Rumble," "Rock & Rollin Joe" and "Only One to a Customer" were performed by the Rip Chords.