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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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Angel
Unchained
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3 |
Cycle
Savages
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5 |
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6 |
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The
Biker Film returns to the venerable Midnite Movie label
almost two years after the release of Roger Corman's The
Wild Angels. This time MGM pairs two inferior examples of
the genre, Angel
Unchained (1970) and
Cycle
Savages (1969), on
a double feature DVD.
Angel
Unchained: Reclassified
with a PG-13 rating, this is the tamest biker flick I've ever
seen. If not for a couple of curse words it could easily be
rated G! Sorry, but I think movies about outlaw motorcycle gangs
need to be a tad rougher around the edges... Otherwise, what's
the point?
Angel (veteran
character actor Don Stroud, in an early starring role) is a
biker who's grown disenchanted with the Vikings-On-Wheels lifestyle.
After a rumble with a rival gang at an amusement park, Angel
gives up his colors and heads out alone to ride around the country
Then Came Bronson style. In rural Arizona he befriends
a group of agrarian hippies, hooking up with a new girlfriend,
commune member Merilee (the very young Tyne Daly), in the process.
The hippies are loathed by the local rednecks, who plan to drive
the peaceful flower children off their land, if necessary by
force. Pacifists unwilling (and unable) to defend themselves,
the hippies turn to tough guy Angel for help. Despite misgivings
Angel enlists his old biker gang buddies to defend the commune
against the increasingly hostile rednecks. But the Harley-riding
barbarians, buzzin' on drugs and alcohol, might take the hippies
apart before the locals do! It's up to Angel to keep the peace
until the final showdown takes place.
Now I suppose
I should've known something was wrong from the get-go when the
movie's biker dude hero is prematurely balding, sporting a hideous
comb-over. Stroud isn't very likable in the role; he and everybody
else (except Daly and familiar B-movie face Bill McKinney, as
"Shotgun") turn in lousy, even nonexistent, performances. Angel
Unchained amounts
to a succession of tiresome vignettes, accompanied by truly
awful songs, strung together between fight scenes. There are
a couple of decent stunts during the rednecks vs. bikers climax
—
the locals attack the commune in a fleet of brightly-painted
dune buggies —
but the majority of the film is a real yawner. Some unintentionally
funny dialog should leave you laughing, though, as will the
leathery Indian guru who likes to chant with a mouth full of
"whammo" (a.k.a. peyote) laced cookies. So it's not a total
loss by any means. Still, this is an exploitation flick inexplicably
missing the essential ingredients... namely, exploitation.
There's neither a single frame of nudity nor hardly a drop of
blood to be seen. And you call this a biker flick?
Cycle
Savages: Well, they
are savage... though they don't spend a whole lot of
time on their motorcycles.
Bruce
Dern —
then deep into his 'scraggly, wild-eyed maniac' phase —
plays Keeg, crazed leader of a small band of bikers known as
Hell's Chosen Few. In between picking up girls for the prostitution
ring run by Keeg's gangster brother (American Top 40
DJ Casey Kasem!), the gang generally likes to drop acid and
orgy at their run-down clubhouse. Naturally they also enjoy
roughing people up. When they find out that a new guy in the
neighborhood, sketch artist Romko (Chris Robinson), has drawn
numerous pictures of them and their activities, Keeg and Co.
decide to make his life miserable. Lea (Melody Patterson), an
attractive young woman who lives in Romko's building, is used
as a decoy to keep him occupied while his apartment is ransacked
for the offending pictures. Later Keeg plots to kidnap Artist
Guy and crush his hands in a shop vise. (That'll teach him to
draw things!) Amidst all this our hero and Lea fall in love,
the biker gang parties at their hangout (gang raping a very
stupid teenage girl), and the improvising Dern mugs and scowls
uncontrollably at the camera.
For a movie
virtually without a plot there's an amazing amount of backstory,
all of it improbably ludicrous. Romko earns his living doing
artwork for a "How To" sex manual (!) —
just why he bothers sketching the bikers in his spare time isn't
explained. He also happens to be a Polish émigré who escaped
with his parents over the Berlin Wall as a child; his dad was
a war hero at Normandy, presented a ceremonial sword by famous
American general Mark Clark (who was the U.S. commander in Italy
and never served in France). Keeg's thugs steal this military
heirloom so Romko beats 'em up to get it back. (It then disappears
from the story altogether.) Though she hates him and his filthy
biker pack, Lea does Keeg's bidding because her sister is one
of the unfortunates incorporated into Casey Kasem's white slavery
ring and she wants to keep her from further harm. (Or something.)
There's also a disgraced, alcoholic ex-doctor who works at a
flower shop, the dumb-as-a-brick, ice cream-loving teen who
thinks it might be fun to party with the bikers, and a hard-boiled
vice cop (the unbilled Scott Brady) who shows up to fill us
in on much of this. A lot of the dialog is as stupid as you'd
imagine it would be having read this. ("I spit on you!" Lea
tells a taken aback Romko during the low point in their relationship.)
A very cheap
production, apparently they couldn't afford much gas for the
motorcycles... Why else make a biker movie virtually devoid
of any hog-ridin' action? Dern and his fellow savages are only
briefly seen on their cycles as they transition from one seedy
locale to the next. Everything is strictly low-rent in this
movie; even Romko and Lea's apartments are fleabag shit-holes
with big greasy stains all over the walls. The direction is
crude, the editing haphazard and the sound looping amusingly
inept. (During the fight scenes, gut blows and jaw-snapping
punches are heard even though no one's being hit. At
first I thought it was my DVD player going out of sync!) The
incredibly abrupt, "That's it?" ending may well leave you wearing
the same expression as does Bruce Dern in his final scene.
So is this
entertaining? Well, yes —
mildly so, provided you have the capacity to enjoy genuinely
bad movies. Cycle
Savages is certainly
sleazier than Angel Unchained,
which turns out to be its most redeeming quality. (Does anybody
really want to watch a biker flick that isn't sleazy?)
Just keep in
mind that at least two points of my "5" rating for
the film is conditional on having a couple of good bong hits
before watching it.
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MGM DVD is pretty much par for the course, with only the two films'
theatrical trailers included as extras. A/V quality isn't quite
as high as that of other titles in the Midnite Movie line,
particularly in the case of the somewhat grainy-looking Cycle
Savages, but they come off much better than your average
Something Weird double feature — and at almost half the price,
too. (Around $10 at brick-and-mortar retailers.) 5/14/03 |
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