Etiquette dictates that you don’t mess with someone else’s “old lady” and that you take turns with the “mama.” Also it appeared that once an old lady’s man croaked, she was then eligible for the position of “mama” and by “eligible,” I mean, all the biker dudes raped her until she attained the coveted “mama” status. None of this really matters to the main story in this film, but the story is so thin, you have to really latch on to everything that goes on to get any mileage out of it.

The movie is about some Hell’s Angels and how their buddy gets killed and they have a big party at his funeral and bust up the church, then brawl in the graveyard with townies until the cops show up and crash the festivities.

The rest of the movie is mainly filler with biker parties, scenes of bikers riding, and Heavenly Blues posing and being a lot more angst-ridden than any real Hell’s Angel ever was. Also, would the president of a Hell’s Angel chapter really be called Heavenly Blues? Yes, he would – if he was really Peter Fonda.

Blues discovers that his buddy Loser’s stolen chopper is being held in Mecca out in the desert by some Mexicans. Blues, Loser (Bruce Dern), and the rest of the gang drive out there to see if they can convince these dudes to give Loser’s motorcycle back.

After they rumble with the Mexicans, a couple of motorcycle cops show up on the scene and Loser steals one of the motorcycle cop’s bikes and drives off with the other cop in hot pursuit. I’m not real sure what Loser’s plan was, but Blues assures everyone that Loser can outride the heat anytime.

Unfortunately, he may be able to outride the heat, but he isn’t as swift outriding the heat’s bullets. The cop shoots him and Loser eventually crashes his bike and gets caught by the police.

Blues and the rest of the gang find out that Loser is being held in the hospital and so a summit at their local pool hall is called. To me, it didn’t look like they were all there having a meeting on Loser’s behalf so much as they were all there playing pool, getting soused, and tiring out mamas and the whole Loser aspect only came up because Loser’s old lady Gaysh appeared and bothered Blues about it.

Finally, Blues gets done running the table and everyone starts talking about what they should do. Blues says that they could bust him out of the hospital if they were smart about it. Everyone agrees, but this is a biker gang that has guys with names like Ugly, Frankenstein, and um Heavenly Blues, so you just know that when they bust him out of the hospital, they’ll be everything, but smart about it.

A fairly silly effort that merits watching due to the absurd miscasting of Fonda and Dern. Director Roger Corman paints a fairly prettied up picture of the Hell’s Angels, especially the fact that someone like Heavenly would ever be in charge of a biker gang.

As portrayed in this film, the Hell’s Angels are really nothing more than rowdy frat boys, who get wasted, break stuff, and assault the occasional woman. Despite the fact that members of the Venice Chapter of the Hell’s Angels were in the film, none of it rings true.

The dialogue is a laughable catalog of slang from the era, that doesn’t lend the proceedings a sense of authenticity so much as makes you think you’re watching a late night parody of a biker gang.

Aside from the casting missteps the other big problem is that this movie is built on such a nothing story. Nothing seemed to be happening and the movie felt like it had long stretches where time was just being filled with scenes of riding and partying that went on way longer than necessary because the script had nothing for anyone to do.

Once Loser died, the movie’s momentum went with it since there wasn’t really anything left to do except bury him. Accordingly, Heavenly didn’t do much but brood and make his speech that unconvincingly tried to justify his pointless existence.

You probably won’t feel cheated though if you went into this expecting nothing more than a few good laughs at the attempt to clean up the Hell’s Angels enough to feature them in a movie without any explicit scenes of violence, drug use, sexuality, swearing, and every other thing a biker gang in real life is involved in.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Terry has just moved with her two square folks from Manhattan to whatever scurve part of the east coast it is where guys in leather jackets carry switch blades, hang out in restaurants, and gossip endlessly about what group of goofs rumbled with what other group of goofs the Saturday night before.

Back in Manhattan, Terry was the deb of the leader of the Golden Falcons, but then her parents had to move so now she’s looking to join the Rebels. Just how cool are you if you have switch gangs like changing schools every time your parents move? And why aren’t you living with the leader of the Golden Falcons anyway? You are his deb, aren’t you Terry?

Terry wastes little time making friends with the kids in her new school, I mean gang, once she sashays into their hangout and accepts Nino’s invitation to stay awhile. Johnny, the charisma-impaired leader of the Rebels immediately takes a liking to her much to the consternation of his current deb, Pigface (I think that’s what Terry called her anyway).

Johnny fires Pigface as his broad, but gang rules state that if some new deb wants to move in on some other deb’s old man, they have to settle it Rebel-style. Okay, all together now: CATFIGHT!

What follows is a rather silly affair involving these two rolling around the pool hall floor, pulling each other’s hair, wrestling, tearing up clothes, and even biting! It’s pretty much as funny as it sounds, but also demonstrates one of the movie’s more annoying traits. During scenes like this one, it’s like the scriptwriter and the editor decided that it would be a good time to take a breather.

Like the DJ who puts on “American Pie” late at night, so that he can go take a dump, the movie almost urges its audience to go off and make a sandwich during these lengthy interludes. There’s no dialogue or plot advancement during these sequences and you’re treated to more of the same during scenes of knife fights, rumbles, and most frightening of all, at the big dance. Clearly added to pad out the minimalistic story, these bits only serve as an unwelcome interruption to classic gang dialogue and the laughable schemes that Terry cooks up in her quest to become queen of Gangland, U.S.A.

Once Terry becomes Johnny’s deb, he demands that she let him carve his initials into her because he always marks his women. It doesn’t sound like a bad idea, because that way if you happen to leave your deb laying around the clubhouse, you don’t have to worry about Nino mistakenly picking her up.

In spite of all the rights and privileges that go along with being the main squeeze of the Prez (including exclusive access to Johnny’s private room where he keeps trophies like different blades, a cheesy sign on the wall saying something about how great the Rebels are, and what looks to be a pair of black lace bloomers tacked up on the wall above the bed), Terry decides that her avenue towards greater powers lies with Nino.

Johnny is Nino’s best friend and is reluctant to succumb to Terry’s advances, but all thoughts of friendship and repercussions are tossed aside once Terry plays her trump card. That would of course be her asking Nino if he wasn’t man enough to handle her and Johnny. The next thing we know, Nino is in Johnny’s private suite making time with the First Lady of the Rebels!

It doesn’t take long for Johnny to wonder just what the devil is going in his trophy room and demands that Nino come out and explain himself. He does just that with a blade that Terry hands him from the trophy room. Oh, the irony! Betrayed by not only your own deb, but by one of your own blades! Oh, and by your best friend, too. Et tu, Nino?

Nino becomes the new Prez and Terry asserts herself as the power behind the throne by demanding that Nino’s old deb be taken to a back room and lined up for the rest of the guys in the gang. That should make her popular with the male contingent of the gang if not with the remaining debs. Terry provides some great lines during all this, going on about how Nino’s old deb was dirty and that she’s just a “crud.”

But Terry isn’t going to allow her second term as First Lady to be consumed by such administrative matters as disposing of the crud in the gang. She wants Nino to make a play for more territory and power, though she never is able to provide much of a reason for it. Her attempts to orchestrate a rumble with a rival gang as well as her setting up some other Rebels eventually lead to the sort of disaster that reminded me of the biblical saying “the cruds shall inherit the Earth.”

Fans of movies containing dated hood slang and hilarious dance crazes will no doubt want to join the Rebels for this particular DVD rumble. One song in particular (the catchy “Black Belt”) provides us with the best moments of the film when you get to see the Rebels do a dance that incorporates kung fu moves into it. I think you’ll agree that that was one pointless scene that didn’t go on nearly long enough.

This is another double feature, extra-loaded DVD from Something Weird, so even if Teenage Gang Debs by itself is fairly unremarkable, the fact that it’s also served up along with Teen-Age Strangler, a couple of shorts about VD and delinquents, trailers, and other stuff means that you will have little trouble getting plenty of gang bang for your buck.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Tom is the leader of a biker gang called The Living Dead. We immediately recognize Tom as not just your regular run of the mill biker leader when he interrupts a make out session with his old lady (Abby) at the local cemetery so that he can catch this really big frog. Though you make think that Tom must have been about eight years old, I assure you that he wasn’t and that he actually had a very good reason to catch this big frog.

I never did catch on to what his good reason for catching that big frog was, but as soon as he brought it back to his mom’s house, his mom’s butler Shadwell (Sanders) seemed duly impressed. In fact, Shadwell really had a thing for frogs (or at least jewelry featuring them) and this big frog was kept under a glass container until the end of the movie when he ended up sitting on a chair, presumably mocking me for being dullwitted enough to have been taken in by all this frog-reincarnation-cult-biker nonsense.

Tom’s mother is something of a medium and is just wrapping up a séance when Tom comes motoring back home with his frog. Tom’s intentions that night are to get some answers to some of his longstanding questions.

Among these questions are what’s in the locked room in the house and what’s the secret to life after death. Even though the room has been locked up for 18 years (even since Tom’s dad died), Shadwell and Mom realize that Tom will not be denied, so Mom reaches into her blouse, pulls out the key to the room, and hands it to Tom. (If I was Tom, I would probably just have had her unlock it for me after that.)

What happens in that room can only be described as muddled. Tom finds his dad’s eyeglasses and has a vision of the past. He sees his mom out at the local strange rock formation known as the Seven Witches and she has this baby there (must be Tom) and she’s signing some contract with a mysterious guy with a frog ring (must be Shadwell).

Tom also sees a giant frog starring at him. Tom finally succumbs to these heinous apparitions and freaks out. Outside the room, he hears Shadwell and his mom babbling about how Tom’s dad died when he tried to cross over because he just didn’t believe in life after death hard enough. Tom instantly recognizes this as that vital bit of info he needed to carry out his plan and it isn’t long before he drives his bike off a bridge into the river below to his apparent death.

Tom’s death leads to a funeral highlighted by one of the Living Dead singing a protest rock song called “Riding Free” as well as Tom being buried upright and seated on his bike. It looked a little silly when they were doing it, but there was no way you could argue that it didn’t look super cool when he was busting out of his grave on his cycle, dirt flying in every direction!

Following the not unexpected bar fight his first night back, Tom spends the remainder of the film attempting to convince the rest of his crew to kill themselves so that they too can live forever without ever being hurt. This leads to one of the stranger montages you’re likely to see as gang members kill themselves in a variety of ways.

You’ve got a guy jumping out of a multi-story building. There’s guy who loads himself up with chains and flops into the river where he drowns. Another guy takes a swan dive off a highway overpass into the path of an oncoming truck. And then there’s the dude that sky dives out of an airplane without ever opening his parachute. The unimaginative Abby was just trying to overdose. Of course she fails because she wants to live. What kind of girlfriend is that?

With his mostly zombie team of biker pals, Tom begins to execute his master plan. So they all head to the local grocery store and drive around knocking over boxes of cereal, displays of canned goods and plowing into baby carriages!

Tom and the gang head back to his place where Tom tells Abby they should each drive through a brick wall. Tom does this, but Abby fails to do so and Tom realizes that their relationship is in trouble. She confesses that she is actually alive and Tom is understandably miffed at this complete lack of support of his undead lifestyle. It’s off to the Seven Witches where Tom tells her that she either kill herself or the gang will do it for her.

The fact that this is when the big wrap up to everything takes place kind of shows you how little went on in the movie. It’s basically the “boy meets girl, boy kills self, boy comes back from dead, boy wants girl to kill self” plot we’ve all seen before, but you know, with bikers. And frogs. And Oscar-winning film legend George Sanders.

The ending probably only made sense if the beginning made any sense to you. I never understood Shadwell, his frogs, his bargains, or how any of this related to coming back from the dead simply because you wished for it to happen.

But then again, I didn’t need to since I had a bunch of grubby bikers peeling around the English countryside crashing semis and outrunning the fuzz. I mean, these guys wore helmets with skulls painted on the front, complimented with big white goggles. So what if there were some amphibians and washed up actors milling around in the background?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Is it the corrupt and perpetually pissed off police chief with bondage gear and photos of dead girls in his trailer? Is it the mayor who’s trying to keep a lid on the killings so as not to hurt business? Is it the reverend who constantly nags his ugly daughter to go to church and stop drinking Old Milwaukee?

Or maybe it’s the biker leader who got the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit. Or perhaps it’s the alcoholic doctor who shoots himself while he’s on the phone with the mayor. Okay, it’s probably not him.

It really isn’t much of a mystery since we know that if evil police chief Strycher (John Saxon at his surliest best) wants someone to die, he’ll just frame them and send them to the electric chair and the mayor probably isn’t killing people and dumping their bodies in front of city hall.

There isn’t a whole lot to the investigation into unraveling the killer’s identity either since he just has his motorcycle helmet ripped off during a fight with the heroine at her daddy’s old abandoned junkyard. But you aren’t coming into this one trying to outwit Sherlock Holmes or Encyclopedia Brown, are you?

Hell no! You’re here for the big bad eighties hair! You’re here for the rocking theme song by pop princess Kirsten! You’re here to see skanky broads get electrocuted! And set on fire! And melt! And fat guys get strangled! And you’re here to see the wet T-shirt contest!

Some of you real weirdos may even be here to see Strycher’s dog get maced! Me? I wasn’t here for any of that tripe.

It was all about Skip Banacheck for me. Skip is a man haunted by his past. What awful secret does he have to shoulder that tears him up so bad that doesn’t even want to go on “beaver patrol” as his best friend so eloquently puts it?

Skip threw the game-losing interception in the Orange Bowl, costing his team the national championship! And just to pile it on poor old Skip, his pal helpfully points out that anyone could throw five interceptions in a game! Yeah, anyone who was really sucky!

When Skip’s pal gets beat up by the local biker gang (the Demons) and then electrocuted by the killer’s souped-up motorcycle, Skip must use all his football acumen to uncover the horrifying truth.

He does this by hiding in a doctor’s car and holding a screwdriver to the guy’s throat until the doctor coughs up the location of Skip’s pal’s corpse. Next stop: the old phosphate mines!

Strycher catches Skip at the mines after Skip has dug up his friend (he’d been dumped there by the doctor to avoid bad publicity for Spring Break) and whacks him in the gut with a shovel handle before ordering him to leave town. He also threatens to pin the murder of his friend on Skip, too!

Where the movie shines is in the depth of the characterization of the Strycher/Skip relationship. Why does Strycher have so much antipathy toward Skip? He lost $50 on the Orange Bowl because of that stinky Skip!

Skip hooks up with a local barmaid (Gail) whose sister was murdered, supposedly by the leader of the Demons, Diablo. Strycher and the mayor though knew that Diablo wasn’t the real killer, but they needed a fall guy since they couldn’t solve her murder. But now Diablo’s body is missing and the killings have begun again.

Skip and Gail’s efforts to catch the killer involve rifling through Strycher’s trailer for evidence that he is the killer. This doesn’t lead anywhere other than to have Strycher trying to kill Skip before Strycher gets shot and dragged off by the biker gang.

By this point in things, the real killer was probably feeling a little left out. Here he is all decked out in leather with a really snazzy black and red motorcycle helmet and Skip, the Demons, and Strycher are all involved in their own little movie!

Luckily, Skip remembers that he needs to catch the killer so he hatches the only sure fire plan there is in such a situation: use the old lady as bait!

And like all really great plans, it all comes to a satisfying conclusion with Skip standing around watching as the killer’s motorcycle hits a big tire and throws the killer into some power lines where he gets electrocuted! Oh the irony!

Director Umberto Lenzi of similarly trashed-out late-80s Josie Bisset slash epic Hitcher In The Dark fame, effortlessly delivers another cheap and scuzzy violent video wet dream!

Nightmare Beach succeeds as standout Lenzi fare because in addition to its killer’s awesome fashion sense he cribbed from the killer in Strip Nude For Your Killer it also features plenty of pointless and offbeat characters such as the guy who steals stuff from everyone, the guy who keeps pretending to be dead (until he actually is dead), and the guy who keeps running around painted orange and blue and yelling “Gators!” at the top of his lungs. He’s particularly offbeat since Spring Beak is going on in Miami Hurricane country and not in Gainesville where the Florida Gators make their home. How did that guy not get killed?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

If ever there was a demonstration that there is beauty in simplicity, then Hell’s Belles is it. While Tom Stern gave himself a brain hernia coming up with the ridiculous concept of using the Hell’s Angels as a way to help rob Caesar’s Palace in Hell’s Angels ’69, Hell’s Belles merely remakes the old Jimmy Stewart flick, Winchester ’73, but with motorcycles.

Hell’s Belles was one of those movies that even as I was thinking about how it wasn’t about all that much, I was enjoying quite a bit. The entire movie is just about this guy (Dan) chasing this biker gang through the desert in an effort to recover a motorcycle he won in a race that they stole from him.

Much of the movie consisted of Dan standing on top of rocky hills yelling down at the gang to give his bike back to him, while the leader of the gang (Tampa) yelled that he wouldn’t give it back.

Admittedly, that doesn’t sound like anything you could feel comfortable recommending, since it felt more like a couple of kids not wanting to share rather than brutal bikers battling over bodacious babes (which is what the title and movie poster would have you believe), but aided by Jeremy Slate’s unwavering conviction that he would have that bike no matter what as well Les Baxter’s catchy score, the movie whips up a good wad of entertainment out of these unremarkable ingredients.

Dan wins a race and first prize is a really sweet ride (and a medal) that Dan intends to sell to help pay off the note on his ranch. One of the guys he beats in the race though wants the bike for himself and after lowballing Dan, arranges to steal Dan’s bike by playing possum in the middle of the road one night.

Dan traces the guy and his bike to another location, but the bike has been stolen again, this time by Tampa and his biker gang. Dan doesn’t much care who stole it because he’s not ending this movie until he gets it back, but Tampa explains that Dan has “swapped” the stolen bike for Tampa’s old bike as well as Tampa’s old girlfriend, Cathy.

I don’t know anything about motorcycles and I know even less about women, but after getting a gander at Cathy, if I was Dan, this movie would have been finished right then. Cathy is played by Jocelyn Lane, a babe so hot that in real life she went and got herself hitched to a Spanish prince and any time this movie threatens to slow down, there she is decked out in her knee-high go go boots and black leather mini skirt to kickstart things!

Cathy is one of those motorcycle mamas that’s fallen out of favor with her man because of some misunderstanding where she tried to make her man jealous by pretending to fool around with another member of the gang and then he got jealous and ditched her. Hindsight being what it is, I would normally say that the plan backfired, but it actually seemed to work out exactly as she set it up, so I’m not sure what to make of that whole affair.

Tampa shows us the same lack of brains as Cathy when he dumps her for an older, less attractive gal named Cherry. Cherry is the sort of girl that complains when Tampa pays more attention to his stolen bike than to her. What is wrong with that Mama? Doesn’t she know that us cycle savages have only one love in our life and that’s our wheels, man!

Like Hell’s Angels ’69, I found myself wondering how it was that the vast stretches of desert involved were so small that these guys could be tracked without any problems. Cowboy Dan explains to Cathy that this part of the desert is his stomping grounds and he knows every inch of it, which is great for navigating here and there, but how would that tell him where these people are hiding out at?

I suppose if he knows where they are headed that maybe he knows the route they would take, but at some point you would think that Tampa and his gang would realize this (from the nightly attacks by Cowboy Dan on their camp if by nothing else) and change their plans.

Tampa’s strategy is limited to schemes involving cartoon-like traps like setting a snare and uh, um, trying to climb a couple of hills. To be fair, Cowboy Dan’s traps are also cartoonish, involving starting avalanches on Tampa’s gang, and stringing a rope between two trees to knock guys off their bikes.

Fans of movies where the couple starts out hating each other and then ends up liking each other will find a little something for them as well as fans of movies where guys fall into caves of rattlesnakes, blow up a gas station, and fight each other with chains while riding their motorcycles in a final, apocalyptic showdown that can only end when one guy takes “the Last Ride.”

It’s not a particularly rough movie, the biker element isn’t that important, and the whole business of biker chicks is barely touched upon (other than Cathy hanging out with Dan), but as long as you aren’t put off by the false advertising of the movie, it’s a well photographed effort that makes good use of its locations and Jocelyn Lane and parlays it all into some above average kicks.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

I don’t recall seeing anything in the way of real drug use, cheap biker sex, cussing or any violent crime sprees. The only questionable conduct they engaged in always involved protecting a fellow biker and us guys who spend the weekend on our hogs know that’s no sin.

Even when Tramp sold his woman to one of the guys duping him for a mostly empty pack of smokes, it was treated fairly nonchalantly. And besides, she wanted to be sold!

I don’t know if all this taming down of the Hell’s Angels was because Sonny Barger saw this as some type of propaganda tool to make his crew look good, but how are you able to claim you’re anti-authority and outside the mainstream when you’re busy making movies?

How does getting your make up put on, sitting around waiting for a take to be set up, and memorizing lines jibe with being wild and free and living to ride and riding to live and all that road monkey jive?

I’m not saying that when they weren’t waiting for their close ups, that they weren’t living some type of alternative lifestyle, but don’t claim to be “doing your own thing” while doing everything you can to make sure your image of “doing your own thing” is being put forth in the media.

If you’re really the rebels you say you are, why should you care how the public sees you? (Any doubts you may yet retain as to whether it’s more about brand awareness than anything else need only look to Sonny’s web site where you can purchase a variety of licensed gear that proclaims your independence from less cool licensed gear.)

Of course, all these problems I have with the Hell’s Angels getting involved with a movie merely to get themselves over as freedom loving rebels wouldn’t even be an issue if their movie was any good. But it isn’t. In fact, it turns out to be quite boring as well as being fairly crudely made.

From badly choreographed and shot fight sequences, to interminable scenes of motorcycles riding around in the desert and on the streets, to sissy music that no self-respecting biker would ever be caught listening to, all the way to a story so dunderheaded on so many levels, you can’t help but wonder if it was conceived by the Hell’s Angels after many, many cases of the Olympia beer they seemed to favor when they weren’t also favoring Coors and Budweiser.

Wes and Chuck are a pair of half brothers who are always looking for some kicks. Their latest scam involves robbing Caesar’s Palace of $600,000 and using the unwitting Hell’s Angels to help them pull it off.

Wes and Chuck disguise themselves as bikers, wreck one of their bikes so that one of their legs is hurt and get an in with the Angels who being the Good Samaritans they are, immediately rush to the injured biker’s aid.

Once back at the Angels’ clubhouse, Wes and Chuck convince them to go on a ride out to Las Vegas where Wes and Chuck will secretly use the bikers as a distraction while they hit Caesar’s.

By the time they get to Vegas, this biker chick named Betsy has attached herself to the two brothers and there’s small talk about how she ran away when she was fifteen and how she wonders what she’s going to do with her life and all sorts of stuff that women like to prattle on about while you’re busy scheming to knock off a casino.

She wants to go the casino with them, but they tell her no and head off to make their score. She hitchhikes her way there and once the heist has been pulled off, is able to parlay her knowledge of the heist to ride along with the two after Sonny tells them to get lost.

Sonny kicks them out because they just didn’t fit in, but it takes the local sheriff to tell Sonny they were had by these two con men and this sets Sonny and the boys off into the desert after them.

After the heist has been completed (it wasn’t very convincing or elaborate and required that a guy being interrogated by security be held in the same room where all the money was laying around and being counted) the movie goes from borderline-lame straight into dullsville, man!

It’s just a bunch of guys riding around in the desert until they run into each other as well as the expected falling out between the two brothers because of the psychotically co-dependent Betsy.

Years of repressed anger between Wes and Chuck boil to the surface and it isn’t long before they’re rolling around in the desert, exchanging fake looking and fake sounding punches. I don’t spend a lot of time hiding out in the desert so maybe I don’t understand its size, but is it really small enough that Sonny and his boys could just ride around out there until they get to a spot, decide to wait and lo and behold, here come the three people they’re looking for?

This one is action-impaired and the Angels don’t add anything beyond a series of stilted line readings. Sonny’s delivery in particular can be charitably described as robotically laconic.

© 2009 MonsterHunter