Friday, January 29, 2010

Angels' Wild Women (1972)



It’s cult director Al Adamson’s surreal mish mash of bikers and brawny chicks on the run. Try to imagine Easy Rider and Helter Skelter meet a half dozen Russ Meyer films edited together by a madman with the essential points of the storyline excised for time constraints and you’ll start to get the idea.

The movie opens with a frantic black woman running through the hills trying to evade a couple of racist rapists. The men make a point of telling her exactly how they feel about the civil rights movement before wrestling her knife away and pinning her down. Cut to our hero Speed, played by Ross Hagen, cruising through the desert on his hog with his girl Donna in tow. They are on the way to the set of some sort of Nazi war film production where one unfortunate crew member tries to make a move on Donna. Speed don’t like it and fists fly. Cut back to the aftermath of the rape scene where the “wild women” arrive and exact vengeance on our non-progressive-thinking perpetrators.

After a few more fights, some bike chases and the entrance of the pill-pushing Preacher the film disintegrates into a montage of super wide-angle motorcycle stunts, creepy heartfelt introspective monologues, involuntary I.V. drug use and a sort of Manson family type subplot that is nearly impossible to follow. The overuse of the super wide lens gives it a hypnotic acid trip feel that is compounded by dialogue looping that is as bad as any low rent kung fu movie. Throw in a funkadelic soundtrack and it's an exploitation kaleidoscope that will make you dizzy.

2 comments:

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