A Great Ride (1979)

          Amazingly, ten years after the release of Easy Rider, indirect knockoffs of that seminal film were still getting made. A Great Ride, which presumably zipped through theaters before landing on home video sometime in the ’80s, borrows basic elements from Dennis Hopper’s iconic film, particularly the trope of two dudes traveling America via motorcycles while on a search for—well, A Great Ride never makes that clear, but since so many aspects of the picture’s storytelling are vague, the absence of a thematic concept is to be expected. In lieu of a big idea (really, even a small idea would have sufficed), A Great Ride has colorful episodes, a peculiar antagonist, and strong cinematography. For some viewers, these bits and pieces might be enough to warrant a casual watch, though nothing in A Great Ride truly demands or rewards attention.

          When the movie begins, experienced professional biker Steve (Michael Sullivan) and his hot-tempered young buddy Jim (Perry Lang) set out from the Mexican border for a long journey to the Canadian border, fully intent on illegally crossing federal land along the way. Viewers learn nothing about these dudes before their journey begins and very little afterward. Following a few inconsequential vignettes, Jim agrees to an off-road race against an obnoxious young biker who accidentally dies during the race. Steve and Jim flee the scene, but the dead kid’s father (Michael MacRae) vows to hunt and kill them. To aid his quest, the dad uses a souped-up truck complete with a scorpion painted on the side and a fantastical onboard computer that spews such data as “estimated range to target.” (It’s always a kick to see dopey ’70s movies giving computers the equivalent of superpowers.) Unaware of impending danger, Steve and Jim continue their adventures, at one point hooking up with two ATV-driving hotties who service the lads in a quasi-softcore sequence replete with arty star-filter shots and goopy soft rock.

          Excepting David Worth’s muscular cinematography, none of the craft contributions are of note beyond one item of trivia—the film was edited by none other than Steve Zaillian, who cut several exploitation pictures before commencing his storied career as an A-list screenwriter. As for the cast, by far the most familiar face belongs to Lang, whose many acting credits (1941, The Big Red One, Eight Men Out, etc.) precede his extensive work directing episodic TV from the 1990s to the late 2010s.

A Great Ride: FUNKY

The Windsplitter (1971)

          Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) was one of those generation-defining hits that inspired countless homages, so it’s tempting to dismiss all of them as faint echoes of the original. Yet doing so would overlook respectable efforts including The Windsplitter, which borrows iconography and themes from Easy Rider without directly copying that film. And while in many ways The Windsplitter is clumsy and obvious compared to Hopper’s picture, it’s not as if Easy Rider is the most articulate and refined piece of popular entertainment ever created. In fact, The Windsplitter expresses certain notions even more effectively than Easy Rider does. The key difference between the pictures is that the hog-riding rebels of Hopper’s movie live and breathe the hippie ethos, whereas the main character of The Windsplitter is merely mistaken for someone who does that.

          Set in small-town Texas, The Windsplitter explores what happens when hometown boy Bobby Joe (Jim McMullen) returns after a 10-year absence. During that time, he’s become a Hollywood movie star using his proper name, Robert Brandon. Town officials invited Bobby Joe home for a celebration in his honor, expecting the same clean-cut kid they knew a decade ago. Instead they get a longhair with a fringe jacket and wraparound shades who zooms into town atop a powerful motorcycle. Town officials, particularly the local Reverend (Paul Lambert) are aghast, but local kids embrace Bobby Joe like he’s an ambassador from a foreign country. Writer-director J.D. Fiegelson, who later had a middling career in television, takes a meticulous approach to dramatizing conflict. Bobby Joe’s  father (Jim Siedow) views everything about his son’s new lifestyle with contempt, even revealing that he didn’t see Bobby Joe’s hit movie. Bobby Joe tries to pick up where he left off with Jenny (Joyce Taylor), but she’s the daughter of the Reverend, who fears that Bobby Joe’s influence will lead the town’s youth to ruination. Bobby Joe also reconnects with boyhood friend R.T. (Richard Everett), but the town’s other blue-collar types offer a much different welcome—threats leading to real violence. Everything moves steadily toward a public assembly where Bobby Joe is scheduled to crown the high school’s homecoming queen.

          In its broad strokes, The Windsplitter is contrived and predictable, pitting a with-it seeker against close-minded dolts. But in its specifics, the movie reveals depth and sensitivity. The Reverend isn’t just a fire-and-brimstone hatemonger. Jenny isn’t just a small-town girl beguiled by the promise of the outside world. R.T. isn’t just a simpleton grease monkey. And Bobby Joe, who eschews drugs and meaningless sex, doesn’t match the image formed in the minds of those who judge him. To be clear, Fiegelson’s storytelling is not sophisticated. Some of his dialogue thuds, and his most villainous characters are one-dimensional. But because The Windsplitter explores an interesting culture clash from a thoughtful angle, the movie’s grim finale feels organic rather than preconceived.

The Windsplitter: GROOVY

How Come Nobody’s on Our Side? (1975)

          If you’re willing to overlook a huge problem—the absence of a real story—then you might be able to groove on the silly pleasures of How Come Nobody’s On Our Side? A wannabe farcical comedy about two bikers who try to score bread by running drugs across the Mexican border, the picture stars two veterans of ’60s/’70s biker flicks, Larry Bishop and Adam Roarke. Here, they work in the mode of classic comedy duos: Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis, etc. Although Bishop and Roarke put forth mighty efforts, the jokes aren’t strong enough to sustain interest, and their characters aren’t sufficiently differentiated to create strong friction. Worse, the plot lacks forward momentum until the climax, which resorts to that dullest of clichés, a madcap chase scene. It’s fitting that the movie features a scene of our heroes escaping trouble in a hot-air balloon, because from start to finish, this whole thing runs on fumes.

          After Brandy (Bishop) and Person (Roarke) quit a job playing bikers in a low-budget movie, they hit the road looking for new opportunities. Enter Brigitte (Alexandra Hay), Person’s freethinking sister. For some reason she has a groovy house on the beach in Los Angeles, so the bikers hang out there for a while. Eventually someone has the bright idea to run dope, triggering complicated schemes—Brigitte seduces a cop to get the use of his uniform so Brandy, posing as a policeman, can squeeze information from a border guard, and so on. Some of the schemes are mildly amusing, and the film’s banter is periodically entertaining, but the lack of narrative focus grows more and more frustrating as the picture drags on. Plus, some bits just don’t work, like the vignette of the bikers buying drugs from a couple played by Penny Marshall and Rob Reiner.

          Apparently filmed in 1972 but shelved until 1975, How Come Nobody’s on Our Side? is a missed opportunity, because Bishop and Roarke render such an appealingly cranky buddy-picture vibe that better material might have resulted in success. But in addition to constructing a flabby plot, writer Leigh Chapman shows a weakness for sitcom-style jokes. The aforementioned balloon scene involves the bikers begging a little person for a ride before resorting to physical threats. At that point, the little person exclaims: “Why didn’t you say that in the first place? Look at all the time you wasted trying to reason with me!” As with so much of How Come Nobody’s on Our Side?, it’s enough to make you almost laugh.

How Come Nobody’s On Our Side?: FUNKY

Wild Riders (1971)

Vile trash about soulless bikers brutalizing women, Wild Riders is unwatchable except for a few bizarre scenes featuring the great character actor Alex Rocco, who plays the film’s second lead. His offbeat behavioral choices give vitality to a handful of moments, as when his character freaks out because he thinks a woman has compared his appearance to that of an unsightly sculpture—watching Rocco scream, “Do I look like this shitty frog?” is about as close to enjoyable as Wild Riders gets. The film opens with Pete (Arell Blanton) and Stick (Rocco) molesting and murdering a young girl, whose body they leave strapped to a tree. Turns out she was Pete’s lady until she dallied with a black guy, which was enough to turn Pete homicidal. The killing gets Pete and Stick ejected from their gang, so they cruise the California highways looking for their next thrill, eventually discovering a house occupied by two women. Pete seduces one of them while Rocco rapes the other—as in, these actions happen simultaneously in adjoining rooms. Eventually the home invasion degrades even further, with the bikers murdering a neighbor who stops by to hit on the women. Later still, the bikers terrorize the homeowner, a classical musician married to one of the ladies. If cowriter/director Richard Kanter envisioned some sort of edgy close-quarters thriller, he missed the mark—especially during the gory, over-the-top climax, Wild Riders is a hateful mixture of softcore and ultraviolence.

Wild Riders: LAME

The Rebel Rousers (1970)

Filmed in 1967 but shelved until 1970, The Rebel Rousers is a bland biker flick distinguished only by the presence of several actors who became famous after the picture was shot: Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton. Nicholson is barely in the picture, Stanton has a couple of amusing throwaway bits, and Ladd mostly shrieks or whimpers while playing a pregnant woman terrorized by bikers. Of the bunch, only Dern gets a part with dimension and size, though there’s not much he can do with the brainless material. He plays the chief of a scooter gang whose jackets bear Confederate flags (though none of the bikers sounds Southern). Yet his character’s behavior is befuddling, and one gets the sense of a rushed production inhibiting Dern’s ability to contribute his signature idiosyncratic flourishes—virtually every shot feels like a first rehearsal, or even a loose run-through, rather than a recording of fully developed performance. The threadbare plot revolves around portly architect Paul (Cameron Mitchell), who rolls into a dusty town and, by coincidence, encounters high-school buddy J.J. (Dern). Paul traveled to the town in search of his runaway girlfriend, Karen (Ladd), who fled during a rough patch in their relationship. Eventually, Paul’s car breaks down near a beach, at which point J.J.’s biker buddies menace Paul and Karen. J.J. tries to intervene, leading to power struggles within the gang. All of this is exceptionally boring to watch, especially when the plot degrades into a repetitive pattern of motorcycle races up and down the shoreline. There’s also a huge charisma gap separating Dern’s earnest performance and Mitchell’s drab work.

The Rebel Rousers: LAME

The Young Cycle Girls (1978)

Years after biker movies had lost their relevance, porno filmmaker Peter Perry, making a rare venture into the mainstream, offered a distaff take on motorcycle mayhem. He wasn’t the first person to stir up the genre by putting women atop scooters, but that’s not the only reason why The Young Cycle Girls (also known as Cycle Vixens) feels so trite. In some ways, the flick is a bland riff on the biker genre’s biggest hit, Easy Rider (1969). In that film, two hippies celebrate a drug deal with a cross-country trip, but in The Young Cycle Girls, three teenagers trek from Colorado to California because they’re bored during their summer break. Everything about The Young Cycle Girls is as mindless as the setup. Priscilla, Sheila, and Sherry set out for adventure, only to encounter clichéd drug fiends, perverts, and rednecks. The girls make foolish choices, such as flashing a peeping tom and inviting strangers to their campsite in the middle of nowhere, and they pay terrible prices for their naïveté. Yet if Perry and co-director/writer John Arnoldy meant to put across some sort of cautionary tale about the dangers of the open road, they failed completely. The Young Cycle Girls takes place in an alternate universe populated almost exclusively with rural predators, and the “shock” ending is so derivative and pointless as to render the whole movie ridiculous by extension. Even before that point, the picture is amateurish, dull, and repetitive, with the same country-rock theme song popping up again and again, often to complement boring shots of road signs seen from the perspective of moving vehicles. In fact, the movie’s only praiseworthy element is the hip opening title card establishing when the story takes place: “The Time—Like Now.”

The Young Cycle Girls: LAME

The Bloody Slaying of Sarah Ridelander (1973)

After having watched countless low-budget ’70s movies about the brutalization of women, it’s hard to know what to say about them anymore. These are vile movies catering to vile appetites. To be clear, there’s a world of difference between something like Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), which explores horrific psychosexual terrain as a means of exploring difficult questions about what makes people tick, and something like The Bloody Slaying of Sarah Ridelander. While far from the worst movie of its type, not only because it’s made with a modicum of skill but also because the exploitation scenes aren’t stretched out to fetishistic length, this picture is still so fundamentally grimy as to make the sensible viewer feel sullied by the time the closing credits roll. Anyway, to get a sense of what to expect, consider the flick’s various titles: In addition to The Bloody Slaying of Sarah Ridelander, the picture is known as Cycle Psycho and Savage Abduction (hence the above poster). In fact, put those titles together, and you get the basic plot: A bloody slaying leads to cycle psychos committing a savage abduction. After a woman named Sarah Ridelander is murdered, her husband, Dick Ridelander (Tom Drake), escapes police scrutiny because of an airtight alibi. Yet he’s actually the guilty party, since he hired a maniac named Harry (Joe Turkel) to kill his wife. (Harry violated the corpse afterward.) Dick’s dreams of getting away with crime are derailed when Harry blackmails him with audio recordings of Dick ordering the murder. The price for silence is a pair of pretty girls Harry can rape and murder for kicks, so Dick enlists a group of bikers to kidnap would-be victims. Unpleasantness ensues. For those who care about such things, this movie provides a good showcase for offbeat character actor Turkel, familiar to cinema fans for his work in movies ranging from Paths of Glory (1957) to Blade Runner (1982). His performance isn’t imaginative, but his characterization is sufficiently loathsome and twitchy to create a few unnerving moments.

The Bloody Slaying of Sarah Ridelander: LAME

The Jesus Trip (1971)

          The virtues of this biker flick are relative. Firstly, the picture gets points for being slow, moody, and understated, since most movies about scooter trash opt for noisy collisions of raucous music and unsavory behavior. Secondly, the film has an unusual look, even by the standards of other low-budget ’70s flicks, because to my eyes, it seems as if virtually no artificial lighting was used. Nearly the entire story takes place outside, often during dawn or dusk, and the few interior scenes involve practical lights, such as candles and overheads. Combined with some imaginative camera angles, this visual approach gives The Jesus Trip an appealingly handmade quality. It’s worth noting that director Russ Mayberry spent most of his long career directing episodic TV, so the style of this movie is about as far away from his work on, say, Ironside or The Partridge Family as one could imagine. The downside to all this praise is that, ultimately, The Jesus Trip is just another biker flick. The title refers to the fact that a biker gang hides out in a church and kidnaps a nun. Otherwise, from the long montages of guys driving their hogs down open highways to the subplot about a humiliated cop stalking bikers so he can exact revenge, the beats of the storyline are as ordinary as the look is unusual.

          Led by Waco (Robert Porter), a gang of bikers cruises through a small town and gets into a hassle with highway patrolman Tarbaro (Billy “Green” Bush). The particulars are murky, but the gist is that the bikers accidentally stole motorcycles filled with heroin, making them targets for both corrupt and legitimate cops. The bikers seek refuge with nuns, and Sister Anna (Tippy Walker) bonds with Waco while nursing him for a gunshot wound. Later, after the bikers abduct Anna during a getaway, she develops romantic feelings for Waco even as Tarbaro, who’s hung up on her, chases the bikers. Many viewers will lose patience with The Jesus Trip, and understandably so—for long stretches, nothing much happens. Those who stay with the picture will encounter some interesting things, notably a horrific scene during which Tarbaro buries people in the sand, leaving just their heads exposed, then leads his buddies in riding their motorcycles past the buried people’s heads with just inches to spare. (Kudos to the stunt players for their fearless work.) The Jesus Trip also gets darker and darker as it goes along, portraying bikers as victims and cops as savages, so it gains a certain crude toughness by the time the grim ending arrives.

The Jesus Trip: FUNKY

The Tormentors (1971)

Answering the question of how many over-the-top plot elements is too many for one bad movie to contain, The Tormentors is a biker movie about neo-Nazis and a would-be Christian messiah, with an orgy and a revenge angle thrown in for good measure. To be fair, this synopsis makes The Tormentors sound like a lost Russ Meyer flick, and, indeed, had Meyer applied his wild energy to the same material, he could have rendered something shamelessly exciting. Alas, director David L. Hewitt (credited as “B. Eagle”) provides lethargy instead of stimulation, so even with an abundance of action, intrigue, sex, and violence, The Tormentors is boring to watch, its scant 88 minutes comprising a cinematic ordeal. The film’s acting, camerawork, dialogue, and pacing are all terrible, and the characters run the depressing gamut from ciphers to clichés. The execution is so overall rotten that Hewitt even manages to make the aforementioned orgy dull. Here’s the setup. After his fiancée is killed by an organization called “The Fourth Reich,” Dan (William Dooley) tells police he wants justice. (Conveniently, cops know the neo-Nazis were responsible but can’t make charges stick.) Dan pretends to be a wannabe Nazi and infiltrates the group, which is some hybrid of a biker gang and a political organization. Meanwhile, “Fourth Reich” leader B. Rockwell Kemp (Bruce Kimball) frets that he can’t win over the local hippie kids because they’re preoccupied with a guy who calls himself “The Messiah.” This dude dresses in robes, wears a beard, and preaches about peace and love. Predictably, Kemp tells Dan to prove his loyalty by killing “The Messiah.” One gets the sense that writer James Gordon White periodically forgot he was writing a revenge picture, getting distracted by assassination schemes, conspiracies, internal squabbles, and even the sorry spectacle of a pain-freak fräulein torturing a distaff traitor. It’s all very random and stupid and ugly, with only the final 20 minutes or so providing the compensatory value of cartoonish excess. 

The Tormentors: LAME

J.C. (1972)

          If you’ve ever felt something was missing from your life because you’ve never seen a biker movie with religious themes, then J.C. is the answer to your prayers. That is, if you’re willing to overlook the fact that beyond its periodic blending of Christian imagery and rebel-cinema iconography, J.C. (sometimes known as The Iron Horsmen) is an inept vanity piece by writer, producer, director, and star William F. McGaha, whose obscurity is entirely deserved. McGaha’s only qualifications for playing a hog-riding messiah appear to be a shaggy beard and some with-it lingo, since he lacks charisma, formidable physicality, and rhetorical style. One gets the sense that if he hadn’t put this picture together, he’d be one of the interchangeable slobs in the background instead of the main focus. Reflecting its auteur’s shortcomings, J.C. is derivative, jumbled, and sluggish. That said, the notion of a savior on a Harley is so peculiar that it’s fascinating to watch J.C. partially to see if it fulfills the promise of the premise, and partially to marvel at the myriad ways McGaha bungles the storytelling. Plus, it’s not as if J.C. totally lacks the pleasing tropes of the biker-movie genre, although these tropes are delivered clumsily and in small doses.

          The picture opens in a city, where hirsute J.C. Masters (McGaha) gets into various hassles because of, you know, society. For instance, he quits a job on a construction crew after the supervisor has the temerity to critique J.C. for smoking dope at the job site instead of working. Also tormenting J.C. are occasional visions of a “giant winking eye” that he perceives as the voice of God. Eventually, J.C. announces to the members of his gang that he’s had a holy vision and wants to spread messages of peace and love. His people dig the idea and agree to accompany J.C. on his journey. However, the journey somehow morphs into a casual trip to J.C.’s hometown in backwoods Alabama, where J.C. reunites with his sister, Miriam (Joanna Moore). The bikers hang out at Miriam’s farm for several days, but the presence among their number of a black man irks the redneck locals. Enter racist Sheriff Grady Caldwell (Slim Pickens) and his vicious deputy, Dan Martin (Burr DeBenning), who vow to run the bikers out of town.

          By now, of course, the plot has devolved into nonsense, since it’s unclear why someone out to spread peace would beeline to the most intolerant place he knows and deliberately antagonize people who already hate him because of youthful transgressions. What’s more, the bikers’ version of “spreading peace” involves trying to rape Miriam, getting into fights with townies, and threatening to tear up the town if the Man gives them any shit. Very late in the picture, McGaha provides a threadbare explanation for the religious stuff, revealing that J.C.’s father was an evangelist who trained his young son as an apprentice, thereby making a mess of the boy’s mind. Or something along those lines.

          J.C. is discombobulated right from the beginning, and it’s also weirdly casual because McGaha’s performance is easygoing to a fault. Still, there are minor compensatory values. In one scene, J.C. introduces the folks on his crew, and their names include Beaver Bud, Beverly Bellbottoms, Dick the Disciple, Happy Von Wheelie, Mr. Clean, and Shirley the Saint. Later, J.C. opines to his sister about how silly it is for adults to use made-up names, justifying the behavior under the general rubric of being “free,” whatever that means. Your guess is as good as mine whether McGaha meant to celebrate or satirize counterculture behavior, but the most interesting moments in J.C. capture . . . something.

J.C.: FREAKY

Bury Me an Angel (1971)

Sometimes the poster is better than the movie. Beyond the kicky graphic of a curvy woman brandishing a shotgun, the one-sheet for Bury Me an Angel offers this priceless copy: “A howling hellcat humping a hot steel hog on a roaring rampage of revenge.” If you insist on learning whether Bury Me an Angel lives up to his hype, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Although the film’s underlying plot is serviceable—after a biker kills her brother, badass mama Dag (Dixie Peabody) hops on a scooter and hunts down the killer—the execution is atrocious. From the first scene, which depicts aimless debauchery in a garage, writer-director Barbara Peeters displays pure ineptitude, failing to give scenes focus while also failing to define characters. It even takes a while to realize that the victim was Dag’s brother and not her boyfriend. Given the sloppy start, it’s no surprise the movie regularly veers off course. Dag recruits two male bikers, Bernie (Clyde Ventura) and Jonsie (Terry Mace), to accompany her on the road, but the scenes involving the trio lack purpose and urgency. About the only cogent fact to emerge is that Dag has some sort of sexual hang-up. (Scuzz-cinema fans can rest assured that Dag’s hang-up doesn’t prevent Peeters from filming Peabody in the altogether.) In the dullest sequence, Dag interacts with a biker artist named Ken, who’s played by Dan Haggerty, the biker-movie regular who later found fame playing mountain man Grizzly Adams. Also of minor interest is an appearance by gangly character actor Alan DeWitt, previously seen as an undertaker in the biker flick Angels Die Hard (1970). Anyway, you can see the problem—not only is the poster for Bury Me an Angel more interesting than the movie, even the IMDB credits of the supporting actors are more interesting than the movie. Sure, there’s a kinky twist at the end, but it’s so sudden and unearned that, like everything else about Bury Me an Angel, it’s not worth investigating.

Bury Me an Angel: LAME

Angels Die Hard (1970)

The most amusing moment in this dreary biker flick feels like an accident. During one of the picture’s shapeless fight scenes, someone cracks two-by-four over a biker’s head, and part of the board gets impaled on the spike of the biker’s SS helmet. Conversely, the least amusing moment in the picture seems like it was envisioned as the apex of rebellious hilarity. The motorcycle gang at the center of the story kidnaps a spindly mortician, dragging him along throughout various adventures, so writer-director Richard Compton periodically cuts to the mortician calmly sipping an adult beverage while his biker acquaintances gang-rape a waitress nearby. Yuck. Shot on a meager budget and constructed with a borderline-incompetent approach to continuity, narrative logic, and screen direction, Angels Die Hard vomits its story out in chunks. Events happen that seem vaguely related, so the onus for connecting the dots falls onto the audience. Essentially, the bikers roll into a town, get into a hassle with locals, briefly redeem themselves by helping to rescue a kid who fell into a mine shaft, and then rumble with the locals. Various people get kidnapped and murdered and raped along the way. It’s never clear which character is supposed to be the protagonist, though Tom Baker and B-movie fave William Smith, both of whom play bikers, share top billing. While Baker’s character romances a local girl, Smith often stands around with nothing to do or say, a victim of the filmmakers’ ineptitude. It’s tempting to say that Angels Die Hard is for biker-movie fanatics only, but even those viewers may tire of the endless fisheye-lens shots and fuzz-rock scoring, seeing as how the movie these elements decorate is so aimless and dull.

Angels Die Hard: LAME

Black Angels (1970)

It almost goes without saying that most biker movies are terrible, since nearly all of them were low-budget exploitation flicks, but it’s still dismaying to encounter a flick like Black Angels, which has meaty moments but is so discombobulated, grungy, and vapid that it lacks  impact. In fact, it’s even difficult to identify the main character, not that any of the people onscreen emerge as distinct individuals. As for the title, while Black Angels features a scooter club exclusively comprising African-Americans, they’re not the main focus. Plus, whenever the term “black angel” is used in dialogue, it’s a derogatory term referring to insidious cops. Whatever. The picture gets off to a confusing start when an African-American biker breaks the window of a bedroom where a white biker is making out with his mama. An epic chase through Los Angeles ensues, with some cool POV shots, but things get even murkier thanks to choppy editing and incomprehensible screen direction. The takeaway is that biker-hating cop Lt. Harper (Clancy Syrko) saw the whole chase and its explosive conclusion. Lt. Harper then visits an all-black gang and an all-white gang, hoping to foment conflict so the bikers kill each other. Or something like that. Lots of stuff happens, though the importance of events and the relationships between them are not explained well, but every so often a colorful piece of dialogue pops. When a biker bitch-slaps a queeny delivery guy, the victim’s prissy reading of the line “Oh, that smarts!” is perfect. Later, when biker Frenchy (John Donovan) mockingly urinates on thuggish Big Jim (James Whitworth), Big Jim exclaims, “This time I’m gonna kill you, Frenchy, you filthy, no-good, egg-suckin’, finger-lickin’, snot-pickin’, scuzzy-faced rat!” Finger-lickin’? Really? The picture also includes a racially charged rape scene (“Soul brother, we gonna have us a honky tonight—a dynamite honky!”), lots of fuzzy-guitar rock music, and a bizarre climax involving a rumble, a baby, snakes, and a mountain lion.

Black Angels: LAME

Angel Unchained (1970)

          Despite going slack for a while during the middle, Angel Unchained is a fair compendium of late ’60s/early ’70s signifiers thanks a plot that combines a biker gang, hippies living on a desert commune, and nasty rednecks who don’t like either of the preceding social groups. There’s not much in the way of thematic material, beyond the protagonist’s angst when he finds himself torn between the biker and hippie lifestyles, so it’s not as if director Lee Madden and his collaborators tried to reinvent the cycle-flick formula. That said, Angel Unchained has clearly defined characters, a paucity of seedy exploitation elements, and unhurried pacing, so it’s perhaps best described as a biker picture that people who don’t normally like the genre might find palatable. By the same measure, those who groove on wild scenes of scooter freaks unleashing mayhem would do well to get their kicks elsewhere, since Angel Unchained is tame by the genre’s normal standards. There’s a fair amount of brawling and drinking and riding, but the leading character is a thoughtful dude who takes a principled stand, rather than an outlaw who stirs up trouble by antagonizing authorities.

          The picture starts stylishly with a rumble at an amusement park, and then Angel (Don Stroud) says he’s ready to quit the biker-gang scene. He relinquishes leadership of his gang to Pilot (Larry Bishop), then hits the road until he encounters hippie chick Merilee (Tyne Daly). After Angel helps her out during a hassle with rednecks who dislike having a commune near their town, Merilee invites Angel to groove on their back-to-nature trip a while. Later, when the rednecks make serious trouble, Angel recruits his old biker pals for help, leading to an interesting strange-bedfellows passage during which the bikers and the hippies attempt coexistence. Nothing surprising happens in Angel Unchained, but the picture is shot fairly well, and the performances generally hit the right notes, although it’s peculiar to see Luke Askew—who usually played scumbags and thugs in the ’70s—portraying the leader of the hippie commune. That said, the scumbag quotient is more than amply filled by character actor Bill McKinney, who plays a violent biker named Shotgun with his usual gleeful menace.

Angel Unchained: FUNKY

Hell’s Bloody Devils (1970)

Even by the bottom-feeding standards of director Al Adamson’s usual fare, Hell’s Bloody Devils is unwatchable garbage. Apparently a slapped-together compendium of footage from two (or more) incomplete features, the movie is part biker flick, part espionage caper, part romance, and part brain-melting sludge. Watching this picture is like staring at a TV that changes its own channels, because scenes stop abruptly, characters drift in and out the picture, and the vibe toggles between clean-cut ’60s (some of the footage was shelved for years) and sleazy ’70s. At its weirdest, the movie stops dead when two characters visit a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise for lunch and Colonel Sanders himself enters frame to ask the characters how they’re enjoying their meal. Familiar actors John Carradine and Broderick Crawford make fleeting appearances in Hell’s Bloody Devils—or, to put a finer point on it, in The Fakers, the espionage picture that Adamson commenced in the ’60s and repurposed for about half the footage of Hell’s Bloody Devils. Whatever. Hell’s Bloody Devils cuts from pointless vignettes of bikers festooned with Nazi regalia to a truly bewildering storyline about an Israeli secret agent teamed with a U.S. operative to do—something. Eventually, the spy stuff leads to a chase scene through a theme park, which comprises drab shots of people running through crowds to the accompaniment of overbearing music. Presumably, diehard schlock archivists have catalogued the components of this disastrous film’s ironic appeal, but for mere mortals, this is about as wretched as grade-Z cinema gets.

Hell’s Bloody Devils: SQUARE

The Dirt Gang (1972)

More biker-flick trash about brawling, debauchery, and rape, The Dirt Gang presents all the clichés of a low-rent genre without any of the redeeming values found in the genre’s best pictures. Set to crappy, horn-driven rock music that sounds like it was recorded in 1962, rather than a decade later, The Dirt Gang depicts the violence that occurs when a group of bikers stumbles onto a movie company shooting in a western ghost town. Initially hassling the Hollywood folks for free food, the bikers then hold the movie company hostage, raping every woman in sight and beating the tar out of the one tough guy who dares to rebel against the bikers. Notwithstanding some backstory about how the tough guy used to be a biker himself, plus a subplot about the movie’s leading lady using sex to mollify the leader of the biker gang, that’s pretty much the whole narrative. The Dirt Gang is so enervated that a major narrative thread gets abandoned for no reason—during the first act, the bikers murder several cops, but after the bikers escape the crime scene, the incident is never mentioned again. Huh? Performances in The Dirt Gang range from serviceable to substandard. Sporting an eyepatch, Paul Carr invests the role of gang leader Monk with forgettable menace. Playing a loutish biker with a taste for parading around in his tighty-whiteys, B-movie stalwart Michael Pataki offers his usual mixture of growled vulgarities and silly movie-star impressions. Nominal leading man Michael Forest, as the tough guy, provides little except an imposing physique, although Jo Anne Meredith—playing the aging actress who employs her wiles for self-preservation—conveys an enjoyable hint of cynicism before her role becomes mere eye candy during a long nude scene. Fitting its title, The Dirt Gang is grungy enough to make the viewer want a shower.

The Dirt Gang: LAME

Outlaw Riders (1971)

If the best biker movies are the equivalent of powerful machines speeding across the landscape, then this flick is the equivalent of the grease stains those powerful machines leave behind on America’s highways. A mindless compilation of the genre’s most clichéd elements, from the fuzzy guitars on the soundtrack to the inevitable rape scene, Outlaw Riders is an 86-minute slog that lacks any detectible traces of excitement, novelty, or quality. The story is more or less coherent, but because the characters are so interchangeable and uninteresting, viewers aren’t given much reason to bother tracking the narrative. Stuff in Outlaw Riders just sort of happens, and the onscreen events neither convey any special meaning nor leave any lasting impression. Quite frankly, the filmmakers would have been better off purchasing outtakes from other biker flicks and splicing that footage together, because the “original” material filmed for Outlaw Riders is beyond enervated. Not that it matters, but the picture begins in Fulton, Arizona, where a biker gang led by Waco (Bryan “Sonny” West) robs the payroll at a mill. The remainder of the picture concerns the gang’s attempts to escape, as well as police efforts to apprehend the criminals. The vacuous nature of the picture is epitomized by a moment in which Waco and his pals run out of gas while cruising down a remote roadway—just as the crooks pay the price for insufficient preparation, the movie regularly sputters to a halt because the filmmakers failed to imagine colorful scenarios before turning on their cameras. Even diehard fans of the biker genre will have difficulty making it all the way through Outlaw Riders, and no one else should bother trying.

Outlaw Riders: LAME

Angels’ Wild Women (1972)

With all due respect to Ed Wood (if “respect” is the right word), a strong argument could be made that Al Adamson is actually the worst director of all time. Working in the exploitation realm from the mid-’60s to the early ’80s, he made consistently awful pictures that ripped off current box-office trends and were distinguished by incoherent plotting, shoddy production values, and terrible acting. Take, for instance, Adamson’s execrable biker flick Angels’ Wild Women, which comprises little more than 85 minutes of boobs, bikers, and brawls, with a little bit of sensationalistic Charles Manson imagery thrown in for no discernible reason. The movie starts with a violent rape, continues with a vignette of Nazis slaughtering victims (the “Nazis” are actors participating in a movie shoot), and later features such overused B-movie tropes as a bad drug experience, a messianic cult leader, and a murderous crime spree. Said spree is committed by curvaceous ladies who quit dating bikers in order to form their own outlaw outfit, but then get distracted from their activities every time some young stud crosses their path. How tacky is Angels’ Wild Women? Adamson shot the scenes involving the cult leader at Spahn’s Movie Ranch, the real-life hideout of the Manson Family. No threshold of bad taste was too forbidden for Adamson to cross, and yet there’s nothing truly rebellious or wild about his filmmaking. Throughout Angels’ Wild Women, he simply gathers counterculture signifiers without any sense of how to contextualize or energize them. Worse, Adamson can’t even make all the lurid garbage that he throws onscreen exciting. As it grinds through an undercooked “plot,” Angels’ Wild Women slips almost immediately into nothigness, with interminable dialogue scenes and laughably “artistic” love scenes pointlessly consuming screen time.

Angels Wild Women: SQUARE

Hollywood Man (1976)

          The basic narrative gimmick underlying Hollywood Man is terrific—a desperate filmmaker turns to the Mob for financing, only to have mobsters deliberately undermine his production because they want him to default so they own his entire life instead of just one movie. In fact, a similar concept appeared, probably by sheer coincidence, in Elmore Leonard’s 1990 novel Get Shorty, which became the delightful 1995 comedy film of the same name. Anyway, Hollywood Man loses its way very quickly because the filmmakers get sidetracked with a boring subplot about friction between the enforcers hired by the mob to bedevil the indebted director. Moreover, characterization is not a strong suit in Hollywood Man, so even with charismatic B-movie titan William Smith playing the main role, it’s hard to get engrossed in what should be the story’s primary emotional journey. That said, the movie has some mildly entertaining high points, it moves along fairly well, and costar Don Stroud has a blast playing an arrogant stuntman.

          The picture starts in Hollywood, naturally, where actor/director Rafe Stoker (Smith) has invested $125,000 of his own money into a new biker movie, even though the genre—which made him a star—has mostly gone out of fashion. (There’s an element of autobiography here, since Smith, who cowrote and produced Hollywood Man, came up through biker movies.) The mogul who financed most of Rafe’s previous flicks refuses to give the director end money, instead referring Rafe to a mobster with deep pockets. Fully aware of the attendant dangers but desperate to complete his opus, Rafe offers his profit participation in other movies as collateral, thus motivating his benefactor to sabotage principal photography.

          Unfortunately, the makers of Hollywood Man, including veteran B-movie director Jack Starrett, lose focus once they introduce Harvey (Ray Giardin), an unhinged thug leading a team of brutal killers. In fact, the picture’s most dynamic scene—an epic slow-motion scene of Harvey slaughtering people on a beach with a machine gun—has very little impact on the main story. More relevant are fun behind-the-scenes bits, such as the vignette of Rafe debating with a stuntman over whether a shot of a bike jump is useable since the stuntman’s fake moustache came off partway through the gag. Hollywood Man isn’t a total loss, but it represents yet another missed opportunity to channel Smith’s animalistic intensity into a storyline as muscular as the actor himself.

Hollywood Man: FUNKY