Angels' Wild Women

Angels' Wild Women
1972
D: Al Adamson (also wrote and produced)

Notable: Scenes shot a Spahn Ranch

There is not enough of a plot to merit a plot summary... Bikers feud with a Manson type figure; meanwhile, their women go on a small rampage.

Where to even start with this Al Adamson messterpiece... It's important to know ahead of time that this was shot in about 1970-early '71, and looked to capitalize on the Manson trials. By the time it was actually released, wild women pictures were making big coin at the drive-ins, so it was reedited into one. Hasitly, it appears.
It opens well enough, jumping between two scenes. In the first, a stuntman, Turk (Preston Pierce, whose hair is a wee bit long for the WWII film he's supposed to be in), gets a little fresh with Donna (Jill Woelfel), a girl on set. Biker Speed (Ross Hagen) shows up to save the day, and the two go at it in a hilarious brawl, with dubbed over voices that immediately remind one of Popeye and Bluto. It ends in a motorcycle chase, with Turk making a jump that Speed can't follow (swiped from "Angels from Hell"), but his reaction indicates "no hard feelings."
Meanwhile, some bad guy types are about to rape a black girl (Maggie Bembry, who looks amazingly like Oprah Winfrey and has nice tits). She's saved by whip-toting Margo (Regina Carrol) and her pals, obvious Adamson-versions of "Manson girls" (especially the one who reminds me of Ouisch); after one (Claire Polan--Mrs Ross Hagen) first bares her breasts, they attack.
The girls, who also "rape" a Jethro Bodine type, beat up a cop, and so forth, just kind of go off in their own direction and have almost nothing to do with the plot for a while. It's explained away with the story that the gang they're with is going on a men-only run.
Ah, yes. The gang. After a Speed and Donna love scene in which Hagen reminds me of David Koresh, Speed gets jumped by members of an unnamed club, kicks their asses, and zipzip, he's the leader now. Off they go on their run, ending up camping not far from Spahn Ranch.
Unknown to the bikers, Spahn is also where Terry, Donna and the rest of the girls are--and so is Turk, as it happens. All are guests of the camp's guru, King (William Bonner, who is surprisingly bad) and his right hand man Slim (Arne Ward) (and filling in for Shorty Shea, Kent Taylor as ranch hand Parker). Though King seems the peaceful type at first, things go very, very badly for all involved. Viewers included.
The whole thing is an utter mess, with the editing particularly bad in every way. Storylines are abruptly dropped and resumed out of nowhere, and shots are painfully obviously reused. Some scenes are simply out of order: The girls, on foot, seduce a farm boy after one of their bikes breaks down, and then comes the scene where the bike breaks down. Much of the plot concerning King & Slim was cut in favor of shots of the girls, so none of it completely makes sense. The bikers are a bore (though Gus Peters's Preacher character had potential), and the music is mostly pretty bad.
Still, it's somehow entertaining in that Adamson way. It's good trashy entertainment, even if it doesn't really hang together. For the boobs, the Manson connections (including that some Family types still at Spahn were used as extras), the stilted dialogue, and Al being Al, this dumpster run yields three bags of good, usable stuff.

Satan's Sadists

Satan's Sadists
1969
D: Al Adamson

Claim to fame: That really violent one with Russ Tamblyn

Sicko biker gang heads into the desert, chasing two witnesses to their rapes and murders

A bike gang out riding happens upon a couple fooling around in the woods. They rough up the guy, and pull a train on his girl. Gang mama Gina (Regina Carrol, looking like a trashier version of Sinatra in "Wild Angels") tells her to just relax and enjoy it, which she seems to quickly do. When the gang's through with them, their bodies are put in their car, which is then rolled off a cliff. And this is before the cool opening credits, which are of course accompanied by "Satan," far and away the best theme song from any biker movie.
Cuts show three parties headed toward their destiny at a remote cafe. Besides the Sadists are a vacationing cop and his wife, who pick up Johnny (Gary Kent), a young vet hitchhiking, and college student Tracy (Jackie Taylor), who works there.
The Sadists arrive after the others, and begin acting all wild-bikery --except for leader Anchor (Tamblyn), who has the cool detatched thing going on. Eventually things get out of hand--the cop (Scott Brady) has his gun taken and Johnny is knocked out. While Tracy is forced to clean up a wounded biker, the cafe owner and the cop and his wife are herded outside to an auto graveyard (nice shots). The cop's wife is "brutally" raped (not very convincing) by Anchor, who then gives a self-righteous speech and shoots all three of them dead.
Meanwhile, Johnny comes to and busts out Tracy, and the two flee in her dune buggy with the bikers behind. They break down and have to head into the desert on foot. Fortunately for them, the bikes can't handle the terrain and they'll have to hoof it as well. Only Anchor, Firewater (John Cardos), Acid (Greydon Clark), and Gina remain. And off we go from there.

This is probably the best known movie by Adamson, and one of the most notorious biker flicks overall. For an Al Adamson movie, it's extremely simple and coherent. And like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," for instance, it's not as violent as its reputation, but still manages to live up to the hype.
While it's really not all that violent, especially by current standards, it's the tone that sets it apart. It ranges from a detatched, "Oh, is this really shocking to you?" to a sort of campy glee. Nothing is ever cut for shocks, but to come across as just another moment in the lives of the Satan's Sadists. Though Anchor eventually takes things too far for much of the gang, it takes a lot to get to that point.
Adamson also mines the psychotic bikers as militant wing of the counterculture vein, portarying them as a violent reaction to the Establishment's treatment of the hippies like the Klan emerging from the Reconstruction.
For a film with such a tiny budget it looks pretty damn good. There's very little obvious padding, and except for some awful in-out-in-out zooms during a party, the gimmicks are kept to a minimum. The only thing that really comes off looking cheap are the club's colors. The soundtrack is great, featuring three versions of "Satan."
Adamson also did, for the most part, an excellent job casting it. Tamblyn, of course, was an exploitation film vet for a decade before this, and is perfect here as Anchor--a coldly aloof complete bastard, a hepcatish older than the rest of the gang. Though only John Cardos as the tough but more tempered than Anchor Firewater and Greydon Clark as the drug casualty Acid are major characters, just about every other character --biker and non-- is played by someone who had and/or would do this again. This is almost a who's who of cycle movie character actors.
A notable exception is Jackie Taylor, who is jaw-droppingly bad. Had I researched this, I would probably find a connection between Taylor (aka Jacqueline Cole) and someone who fronted money for this film. While scrambling up a mesa with psychotic bikers in persuit, she asks Johnny if he thinks they'll make it. She asks as though little more than mildly curious; the way she delivers it the line might as well be "Do you think it'll rain?" or "Does my hair look ok?". Her acting is bad enough to be distracting.
For any other complaints, I really have to pick at it... One of the college girls, complaining about her boyfriend's busy hands, says, "I keep telling him its geology, not biology"; it's a line a few years behind --"gynecology" would have been funnier, and trust me, certainly not "too much" in this film... I'm sure Tamblyn looked very cool in that hat in '68, but I first saw it 20 years later so he always just reminded me of Chuck Barris... And it's not the film's fault, but I've never seen a particularly good print of this.
This is one you just keep coming back to. Anyone who says they don't like this does not like biker movies, because tasteless trash like this is what it's all about. As important to my impressions of 1969 as Altamont, the "Manson murders," the Doors Miami concert, and the first Stooges album.
An absolute must see. Over and over. A perfect 5 outta 5.

The Hard Ride

The Hard Ride
1971
D: Burt Topper (also screenwriter and producer)

Black biker killed in Vietnam leaves his custom bike to his white Marine buddy, to be delivered to his former MC leader--who isn't the only one who wants it.

Lenny, black former outlaw biker, ends up a dead Marine in Vietnam. For some strange reason, his death means his closest buddy, Phil (Robert Fuller), redeploys stateside. Phil gets Lenny's "in case I don't make it" letter, leaving everything to the orphanage that reared him, except for a nice bit of change for Phil, and a request that he deliver his chromed out custom bike Baby to his old club leader, Big Red.
Phil meets up with Sheryl (Sherry Bain), Lenny's ex-(white) girl, who clearly doesn't trust him. At the (great) bar and grille where Sheryl works, he meets some bikers who promise to take him to Big Red. They take him instead to their cool-ass desert hangout, and "Big Red" is actually their own leader, Grady (William Bonner*). Not tricked for long, Phil fights his way out.
The bulk of the middle of the film is the Phil-Sheryl relationship, and heavy-handed liberal themes. He's a square, she's a free spirit; he's no racist, Lenny was like his brother, darn it, etc. A cop pulls them over just to check out the bike (squares ain't so bad), a black thug figures she's an easy piece who just digs dark meat... All the straights/heads, black/white tedium you'd expect.
Finally out of the reach of Grady's gang --Big Red made it clear that he'd kill any of them who came near his territory-- Phil and Sheryl finally track Red. He turns out to be a prick who never particularly cared for Lenny, but Phil lays the will on him: Show up at the funeral, and Baby is yours. Red agrees.
Will it be that easy? Grady and his boys look to make sure it isn't...

Other than Baby, the only thing here particularly exceptional was the soundtrack by Harley Hatcher. The only word that comes to mind is competent. It's a pretty original story for the genre, and moves along at a decent pace. Early use of the Vietnam flashback device, I guess, when Phil fights Red and war sound effects are used. But the messages hit you with less subtlety than the most overwrought episode of a Norman Lear tv show. And everything just begs to be just a little better. Mike, the tough padre who runs the orphanage, should have been a bigger character, for example. A good watch, but nothing special. I'll give it a hard 2.5.


*Didn't want to clutter shit up with such an aside. Bonner was also in "Angels Wild Women," another one I've seen recently for the first time. Seeing this, I immediately recognized him as the biker in the dreadful "Dracula vs Frankenstein." I saw that movie once--on "Creature Double Feature" when I was about 8. No clue why, but it's seared in my mind like no other horror film. Weird.