Cycle Vixens

This film begins with three teenage girls named "Sheila" (Daphne Lawrence), her younger sister "Sherry" (Deborah Marcus), and "Priscilla" (Loraine Ferris) asking their parents for permission to ride their motorcycles from Colorado to the Pacific Coast of California. While Sheila and Sherry's father reluctantly agrees, Priscilla's father is much stricter, and as a result, she ends up defying him and joining her friends anyway. At first, everything goes smoothly, but things take a turn for the worse when they pick up a couple of hitchhikers farther down the road. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this low-budget project had several weaknesses, including bad acting, a poor script, and some very dull action scenes. To make matters worse, the ending was also quite bad. On that note, I'm not sure what the director (John Arnoldy) was aiming for, but if he was trying to be funny or artistic, then maybe he should consider a different career. Having said all of that, I must admit that there were parts of the movie that weren't too bad, and it's because of this that I have rated it a little higher than it probably deserves.

Three young girls living in a small Colorado town decide to take a trip on their motorbikes to California "to see the ocean". Two of the girls are sisters and go with the blessing of their widower father. The third has to sneak away from her strict parents. What follows is a long series of tragicomic misadventures. These "female hitchhiker" movies are one of my favorite 1970's exploitation genres(if they can really be called a "genre"). This is a little different in that the girls are on motorcycles rather than hitch-hiking, but otherwise this is in very much the same vein as movies like "Thumb-Tripping", "Girls on the Road", "Joyride to Nowhere", "The Hitchhikers", "Teenage Hitchhikers", etc. As in these other movie, there isn't so much a plot here as a random series of picaresque adventures.

This particular movie is really a confused mixture of feminism and exploitation. The girls get peeped on, molested, and even raped by about every guy they meet, but they also manage to stick together and eventually take revenge on all these loutish males. In some ways this very low-budget movie actually anticipates the later Hollywood blockbuster "Thelma and Louise". It's too low-budget and exploitative to quite be the feminist fantasy that movie was, but it's not entirely just a male fantasy either (despite the tight shorts and somewhat loose morals of the three protagonists). In a typical scene, for instance, two of the girls are rolling a number in a gas station bathroom when they see a male pervert spying on them, so they respond by flashing theirs breasts and asses at him (yeah, THAT'LL teach him). But after he (perhaps understandably) actually approaches them, they beat the hell out of him and run him off.

This movie definitely has its problems. It's even more low-budget than most of these type of films. The dialogue is very banal and the acting is atrocious. The single theme song gets very irritating and the end is both an egregious rip-off of a much more famous movie and is also very weak to boot. As an exploitation film it's pretty tame compared to some of the other "female hitchhiker" movies (like "Teenage Hitchhikers"),and it's definitely tame compared to many of co-director Bethel Buckalews other films (like "Sassy Sue" and "The Pigkeeper's Daughter"). Still, it's pretty unfair to criticize a low-budget movie simply for being low-budget. And while I'm not going to say it's technically a better movie than "Thelma and Louise", I find its confused message and its strange mixture of feminism and exploitation far more HONEST (with the exception of the crappy ending anyway) than that of the slicker, more "politically correct" Hollywood film.

Cycle Vixens is, as another user comment has said, one of the worst films ever made - but that's only half the story. While it is truly an act of will to get through the entire movie, the wait is incredibly worth it. Cycle Vixens shrugs the usual Hollywood thinking by actually fulfilling your desires for the three "biker chicks" in the final scene. Of the five people that started watching it, I was the only one left in the room for the finale. Once I was able to stop my uncontrollable laughter (after the end credits) I rewound the tape to just before the final scene and found the other four friends who had meandered to other places. They all sat and watched the end and agreed: it was the best ending of any film.

Only gave it a 1 because there IS no zero on this scale.

I saw the movie on post at Fort Bliss in 1981, and I still can't get the horrible thing out of my head.

Pathetic acting, screen writing, directing, and continuity editing make this the quintessential icon for material that should never have been filmed.

Watch this movie once, and you'll never see another bad film again in your life.

For this reason and this reason alone, it is probably worth watching . . . ONCE.

Seeing it more often could be hazardous to your taste.

This movie is what you would get if you crossed Easy Rider with Thelma and Louise, and had a 14-year old write the script. The ending is so odd that I sat in my bean bag frozen in awe of it's sheer lunacy. I only wish enough of you would see this movie to actually make the Worst Movie List, but doing so would probably double the total viewers who have ever seen this film.