Defacto celebration of the Hell’s Angels’ lifestyle posing as vicious exposé, Roger Corman’s smash low-budget/high return film plays even more oddly today than it must have on release. The first thing to note is how much better directed it is than your typical cobbled Corman-directed production, though close action stuff remains dicey. (Having Peter Bogdanovich & Monte Hellman as assistants helps.) The second is the dramatic gulf between the horrific behavior of its demon bikers and its tone of nodding approval as they proclaim their freedom-loving ways while tearing up towns, bashing Mexican-American ‘taco-benders,’ wrecking church interiors, even gang-raping the widow of one of their own behind a Swastika-bearing altar as his funeral service collapses into a free-for-all orgy of violence & screwing. No doubt, the basis of the film’s commercial appeal, especially as Drive-In fare. With Peter Fonda, deep-think bike-riding nihilist to a gang of bike-riding anarchists (he’s theoretically redeemed thru his blunt demeanor and bitter/honest-to-a-fault truth telling), and Nancy Sinatra as his intensely inexpressive main squeeze. Fonda pal Bruce Dern gets the big showy death scene along with a slice of morbid corpse comedy when he dies after being ‘rescued’ from his hospital bed. (The hospital abduction featuring the film’s most repulsive moment when a biker bud stops to rape a nurse. One of the few atrocities we’re not meant to cheer on.) Plus Diane Ladd, Dern’s wife at the time, playing his wife in Methody Actor manner before she too gets raped, or rather, gang-raped at his funeral service. Altogether, one peculiar pic, and with major historical curiosity value.
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