Two-Stroke Tuesday

Personally, I don't believe anyone is ever surprised when their TS185 blows up...

Image - Picasso Trigger (Andy Sidaris,1988)

#SuzukiTS185 #TwoStrokeTuesday #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday - Megaforce

Voted the worst movie of 1982. Fantastic poster though!

Image - Unknown

#VHSWednesday #Megaforce #Discosphere #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

Sorceror

 

Image - Sorceror (1977) Dir. William Friedkin

#VHSWednesday #Sorceror #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MerenaryGarage

HDATMM

I went to see Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man in an empty movie theatre on its opening night in 1991. It didn't get a lot of publicity in advance of its debut and what reviews there were, weren't good.

But I had to see it. And I came away torn. On the one hand I felt it was cheesy, but on the other it was deeply, deeply cool. So it has always had a special place in my heart, of which I've always been slightly ashamed.

I've watched it many times, but not for many years and so I chose to watch it again a few nights back. And the strangest thing happened...

Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, seen through mature eyes and in the context of all that's going on in the world right now, is a great movie! Not just okay or good. Great!

It's well acted and fast paced and nicely shot. It doesn't rely on CGI explosions and a dozen mega-star actors and superhero franchises to churn out cookie-cutter blockbusters. It's its own thing. It's now closer in time to the bikesploitation movies of the late '60s than it is to the fucked-up future we now inhabit and yet it still feels futuristic and fresh.

And strangely, it's somehow lost the cheesiness that had made me ashamed to love it, in its place a newfound gravity. There is depth to the principal characters that had previously eluded me, which reveals more about their relationships and motivations.

Ultimately, it is a movie about love and friendship and finding your own way in life. And some 35 years after its release, I feel Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man is owed a reappraisal.

Read more - https://www.mercenary.ie/2013/05/harley-davidson-marlboro-man.html

Image - Unknown

#HDATMM #HarleyDavidson #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday

 

Image - Unknown

#EscapeFromNewYork #JohnCarpenter #VHSWednesday #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage #Mercenary

Glitch/VHS Wednesday

 

Image - Unknown

#Glitch #Cyberpunk #VHSWednesday #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday - Survival Run

 

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#SurvivalRun #VHS #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

Stand By

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#TheEighties #VHS #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage 

VHS Wednesday - Cycle Vixens (1978)

If you watch this movie expecting it to be '80s trash, you'll be disappointed. It's '70s trash repackaged to look like '80s trash...

Image - VHSCollector.com

#CycleVixens #VHSWednesday #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday - Wheels on Meals (1984)

#JackieChan #MealsOnWheels #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage 

VHS Wednesday - Maxell (1983)

 

Image - Maxell Commercial 1983

#VHSWednesday #Maxell #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday - Streets of Fire (1984)

The '80s were the first decade to really fuck around with Retro. Partly driven by boomer nostalgia and partly (and not unironically) driven by its own novelty, Retro pervasively infiltrated the mid-eighties zeitgeist. From fashion to music to movies, you can't really make sense of the eighties without understanding the influence of the '50s/'60s on popular culture at that time.

Some of those retro artifacts can be hard to parse from up here in the post-future. From such a distance it can be difficult to separate the style from the content. A good example of this is the movie Dirty Dancing. Ostensibly set in the 1950s with '50s cars and '50s clothes, the movie is overwhelmed by its own eightiesness with a synthy '80s soundtrack and an unmistakeably '80s cinematic style. Is it the '50s? Is it the '80s? Can a young modern audience even make that distinction?

Probably the best way to understand Retro is not as a literal historical reference to the period in question, but more a reference so some idealised version of that period. So the Wayfarer sunglasses and Levis jeans and Brando jackets that we wore in the actual '80s weren't really authentic recreations of the actual '60s, just references to a kind of Velvet Underground version of that decade. And similarly, modernday references to the the '80s aren't authentic either. They're just retro.

So this movie is Retro as fuck. It was made in 1984 and set in some other ambiguous time period - it's not important when but it looks a lot like the '50s but it sounds and feels a lot like the '80s. 

So, with that out of the way, Streets of Fire is a pretty good flick with cool bikes and '50s lead-sleds. It has a straightforward plot and some cartoonish violence and it has lots explosions and trenchcoats and pump-action shotties ('cos the '80s). It also has a pretty solid cast (including Lee Ving from LA hardcore band Fear), an eighties-tastic soundtrack and it's beautiful to look at.

What more could you want?

#VHSWednesday #StreetsOfFire #LeeVing #Retro #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday - Warrior of the Lost World (1983)

AKA Mad Max Rider. You just can tell by the pixels that this is going to be sheer class...

Image - Warrior of the Lost World (1983)

#WarriorOfTheLostWorld #MadRider #The80s #TheEighties #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday - ROTOR (1987)

I know we did this one before, but just look at the poster and imagine how great the movie that had such a poster would be! It would be Mad Max rolled into Terminator but better than either! It would be the greatest sci-fi-bikesploitation movie the world has ever known and you would watch it every single VHS Wednesday evening since 1987 and never tire of it!

Just imagine!!

Sadly, that movie doesn't exist and the movie that got this poster is complete horseshit...

Illustration - R.O.T.O.R. (1987)

#VHSWednesday #ROTOR #Bikesploitation #SciFiMovies #Horseshit #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday (1978)

At this point, this is looking like a pretty plausible future...

 

#Deathsport #RogerCorman #Destructocycles #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday (1985)

Not the worst motorcycle movie ever...

#TheDirtBikeKid #DirtBikeKid #VHSWednesday #YamahaYZ80 #YZ80 #The80s #TheEighties #MercenaryMotorcycles #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday - Nightmare Beach (1989)

 

#NightmareBeach #TheEighties #VHSWednesday #The80s #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday - Timerider (1982)

Timerider - The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982)

VHS tape cassette box art is generally a pretty poor indication of the quality of the movie contained within and Timerider - The Adventure of Lyle Swann is no exception. 

I took a look at the cover art and expected this to be complete trash and was surprised to find that it's not. This is a good movie! Not just good in a cheesy VHS kind of way, but objectively good.

Yeah, its got a eightiestacular synthy/metal soundtrack, but this is mostly at the start. It gets more synth/metal/cowboy as the film progresses and it actually works well. The acting is good, the costumes are good, the plot is good and it's action packed without resorting to ridiculous stunts. How has no-one heard of this movie?

It predated other '80s time travel flicks like The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), Terminator (1984) and Back to the Future (1985) and as soon as I get my time machine back working again, I'm going back to the '80s to find out if it had an influence on the Terminator movies, cos it sure looks like it.

This movie is (Spoiler Alert) exactly what would happen if you entered the Baja 1000 and accidentally strayed off course into a Top Secret Government Time Travel Experiment that zapped you and your motorcycle back to the Wild West of 1877 where you became your own grandfather. 

Exactly!

#VHSWednesday #TimeRider #YamahaXT #YamahaXT500 #XT500 #TimeTravel #TheEighties #Mercenary #MercenaryMotorcycles #MercenaryMotorcycleWorkshop #MercenaryGarage

VHS Wednesday - Cyclone (1987)

Are you tired of all the VUCA shit at this end of the timeline? 

Tired of Covid, the fires, the riots, the murders, the murder-hornets and the lies?

Do you long for a simpler time, a time when nothing surprising or awful ever happens?

You do!?

Well, MERCENARY invites you to travel back to 1987, to a movie in which only one* surprising thing happens. 

Well, two surprising things happen if you count the mildly surprising murder of the protagonist's geeky boyfriend, but if you read the back of the VHS box you already knew that was coming.

That's not to say that Cyclone doesn't raise any questions. Indubitably no! It raises many questions.

Questions such as, why can't a 400 horsepower motorcycle outrun a XL600 on knobblies? If you have a motorcycle equipped with laser blasters and rear facing rocket launchers, why wait 'til the very end of the movie to use them? And the big question, what the fuck is going on with all these betrayals and double crossings? 

Apart from being unsurprising, Cyclone has a couple of other things to recommend it. It has the same sort of production values as an episode of the A-Team  or Nightrider and it's shot in and around LA so it will be deeply familiar to anyone who grew up watching American TV shows in the '80s.

However, Cyclone's single biggest attraction is Heather Thomas. Heather Thomas is probably best known for playing Jody in the TV show The Fall Guy and she plays a similar character here (Teri).

Teri's geeky boyfriend has built a 400 horsepower combat motorcycle in his secret lair cleverly hidden behind a retractable panel in his apartment. The bike has radar resistant paint, laser blasters and rocket launchers but none of that is very important because the machine's real killer app is how it is powered. It can run on regular gasoline, or alternatively by tapping hydrogen in the atmosphere using a free energy device called the Transformer.

Why is it called the Transformer when that name has already been taken by y'know, transformers? Why is the geeky boyfriend fucking about with motorcycles at all when clearly this technology has a much wider application? Disappointingly, these questions aren't addressed and the Transformer is just a MacGuffin that the various back-stabbing parties are trying to get their hands on.

Just as the geeky boyfriend is about to finish the motorcycle he is unsurprisingly murdered in a moderately discomfiting, apparently random, punk-rock-club murder. Teri, who was deeply in love with the geek is now understandably upset. But she's a trooper, so she returns to the secret lair where the geek has presciently left instructions on a VHS cassette on how to finish the motorcycle, arm the various weapon systems, install the Transformer and hand off the finished bike to a secret government agent, who is the only person that Teri should trust.

Teri makes arrangements to meet the secret government agent, whereupon he too is murdered by punk rockers. Teri finds herself alone in the industrial wastelands of LA, forced to survive, armed with nothing more than her wits. And a 400 horsepower motorcycle with laser blasters and rocket launchers.

The rest of the movie unfolds in a blur of motorcycle chases, kidnaps, crosses and double crosses before Teri finally deploys the laser blasters and the rocket launchers in a coup de grâce that pretty much wraps everything up. Except the Transformer, which Teri later casually discards into a very shallow puddle causing the thing to self destruct.

This raises the final unanswered question of this movie - Why didn't the geeky boyfriend manufacture this world-changing device to at least IP66 standard? I mean, it was installed on a motorcycle FFS!

Heather Thomas really shines in this movie and without her, it would be entirely forgettable. She rides motorcycles, takes out a trio of LA rednecks (!?) with a tyre iron, bravely resists torture and spits in the eye of evil. She is by turns funny, sassy, gutsy and sexy. In short, she's adorable.

Essentially, this movie is Heather Thomas, the familiarity of 1980s TV, and a low stress, made for VHS story-line. It's deliciously nostalgic, unchallenging and fun.  

In these Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous times, this just might be the movie you need.

#HeatherThomas #Cyclone #TheEighties #VHSWednesday #VUCA #VolatileUncertainComplexAndAmbiguous #XL600 #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage

*SPOILER ALERT - The only real surprise in this movie is the first betrayal where Teri finds her gym trainer is not who she purports to be. I'm still reeling from this revelation so I just thought I'd put that out there in the interest of reducing anxiety.

VHS Wednesday - Death Wheelers (1973)

So, you want to see a movie about  a murderous hot chick riding around the LA underground on her CX Turbo in a catsuit that won't close?

Doesn't everyone!

Unfortunately, this isn't that movie.

Unbelievably, this cover art is for the 1973 UK made Psychomania AKA The Death Wheelers.

Whereas the cover art featured is very much out of the futuristic '80s, the actual movie has more in common with bikesploitation movies of the '60s. It's a sort of genre blend of British horror and American biker movie but somehow doesn't work particularly well as either.

The bike featured in the cover art is a Honda CX 500 or 650 Turbo which places the artwork post 1982 when the CX500 Turbo was released. Clearly the bike doesn't belong in a movie made in the early '70s and if I had rented this movie expecting a CX Turbo, I would have been devastated to discover that the movie is populated by boring old Brit twins leaking oil all over the British countryside.

It's pretty common for VHS cover artist to take liberties but this has to be one of the most extreme cases ever. The artwork is for an entirely different movie and I still haven't overcome my disappointment that that movie doesn't exist.

#DeathWheelers #Psychomania #Mercenary #MercenaryGarage