I never intended to read so much of Hick Flicks, but like a shine-runner rollin’ into Knoxville with a trunk full of white lightnin’, sometimes you just can’t stop yourself.

Just about everything you need to know about this semi-scholarly little burp of film history is contained in its subtitle: “The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema.” Almost everything else you need to know is in the preface: Hick Flicks is a half-serious dissection of “hixploitation cinema,” and writer Scott Van Doviak is deft and witty, mixing sociological observation with ready references to Evel Knievel, CB radio, and the Ned Beatty scene in “Deliverance.”

Never heard of Hixploitation? Neither had I, until I read Von Doviak’s book. While Von Doviak reaches as far back as 1914 (“Moonshine Molly”) and as far forward as 2001 (“Joy Ride”), most of the movies he writes about were made in the 1970s, when regional distributors catered to a rural, mostly Southern market that was dominated by drive-in theaters. Think “White Lightning,” “Thunder Road,” “Walking Tall.” “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Gator,” “The Legend of Boggy Creek.” The list goes on and on. As Von Doviak puts it, “if a movie revolves around a pair of large-breasted ex-roller derby queens in cutoff shorts driving an 18-wheeler loaded with moonshine from Atlanta to Long Beach... and they’ve got a monkey with ‘em... it might be Redneck Cinema.”

If Von Doviak limited himself to hillbilly jokes and honeysuckle sap, I would’ve stopped reading after Chapter One. Instead, he mixes film criticism with cultural respect, and while he admits that many of these flicks are terrible, he never talks down to the artists or the audience that made them possible. Rather, he makes the point that rural America had been neglected by the film industry for decades, and while Redneck Cinema might not have been high art, it was a helluva joyride for a culture that had been defined by outsiders for too long.

Bad plots, ludicrous villains, and hillbilly caricatures aside, the hick flicks Von Doviak explores did play a role in constructing an alternate vision of the South. Early cornpone comedies featured backwoods mountain men as fodder for cheap laughs, but with the rise of Redneck Cinema, those caricatures evolved. “It would take decades,” Von Doviak writes, “for the slack-jawed yokel to morph into a sort of folk hero: the rugged individualist whose outlaw activities harm no one, but who must eventually fight back against the corrupt forces that seek to destroy him.” If you don’t see at least a little Burt Reynolds in that sentence, you must not have gotten to the drive-in much.

At the same time, Von Doviak resists the urge to overanalyze these populist films, coming across more as an insightful friend than an insufferable professor. It’s a wise choice: wise enough, at any rate, that I’m giving Hick Flicks two columns. Next week: the garish details of Von Doviak’s 24-Hour Hillbilly Horror Marathon, and the 10 Lessons he learned as the dark night turned to day again.

(Jay Hardwig can be reached at smardwig@charter.net.)