Stone (1974)

I’m still catching up on 1970s ozploitation movies. This time it’s Stone, a biker movie that built up a huge cult following in Australia.

A political assassination is witnessed by a member of an outlaw biker gang, The Grave Diggers. Well he sort of witnesses it - in fact he’s so out of it on drugs he doesn’t even remember it. But the assassin is taking no chances. He’s not sure which member of the gang was the witness, so he sets out to kill off the entire gang one by one (in very creative ways).

The police don’t get much co-operation from the bikers in trying to crack the case until they send in Stone. Stone is a long-haired cool guy hip young motorcycle-riding cop, although in fact he has a university degree and a very upper-class girlfriend. Stone’s job is to go undercover with The Grave Diggers. They’ve very unimpressed with the idea of having a cop joining their gang, even on a temporary basis, but when Stone saves one of the gang from a murder attempt by crossbow they reluctantly accept him.

Stone is a good cop, but he has a bit of an anti-authoritarian streak. Yes, he’s a bit of a maverick loner cop! He takes a bit of liking to the gang. He see them (and the film portrays them this way) as a genuine alternative society with its own moral rules and code of honour. This is going to cause him major problems, since his loyalty to the gang isn’t always going to be consistent with his equally strong belief in justice and the due process of the law. Especially when The Grave Diggers make it clear they intend to execute their own brand of justice.

It’s an ultra-low budget movie, but like so many Australian movies of its era (it was released in 1974) it’s quite spectacular, with some frighteningly dangerous stunts and some pretty impressive high-speed motorcycle scenes.

The plot includes some interesting ideas, and the ending (which I can’t say anything about since it’s really the whole point of the film) brings Stone’s divided loyalties and their consequences into sharp perspective. Unfortunately the plot includes some silly ideas as well, but its sheer energy more or less carries it through.

The acting is a real problem. Ken Shorter is OK as Stone. Writer-director Sandy Harbutt tries hard as Undertaker, the gang leader, but he doesn’t quite have the necessary charisma. Hugh Keays-Byrne gives one of his usual unintentionally campy performances - how this guy gets taken seriously as an actor in Australia is beyond me. Most of the gang members aren’t totally convincing, although VIncent Gil is very good as Dr Death (and having him as The Grave Diggers’ resident Satanist priest is an interesting touch that turns out much less embarrassingly than you might expect).

This is very much a guy movie. The women characters are there to provide the nudity that any 1970s exploitation movie required (although strangely for the 70s there’s actually as much male nudity as female). Rebecca Gilling must have appeared in just about very Australian movie of the 70s! And she must have taken her clothes off in every one of them. She’s a good actress but she’s wasted in this one. Sandy Harbutt clearly has zero interest in his female characters. It’s all about male bonding and loyalty and male codes of honour, which gets pretty tedious after a while.

At least it isn’t afflicted with the drug-addled hippie nonsense that made Easy Rider almost unwatchable.

There are some memorable scenes, such as The Grave Diggers’ funeral procession early in the film. It’s well-made, but whether you’re going to enjoy it or not depends on how much tolerance you have for such extremely male-oriented movies, and for the glamourisation of violent outsiders. It didn’t really appeal to me, but it’s still an interesting example of the sheer variety of ozploitation movies. It would make an interesting double feature with Mad Max - dealing with similar subject matter but taking a diametrically opposite approach.

Chrome and Hot Leather (1971)

American International Pictures put out a string of biker exploitation movies in the late 60s and early 70s. The best of them by far was the Roger Corman-directed The Wild Angels, but the two released on DVD by MGM as a Midnite Movies double-header - The Mini-Skirt Mob and Chrome and Hot Leather - are both fun in their own ways.

Chrome and Hot Leather isn’t as delightfully camp as The Mini-Skirt Mob but it’s still engagingly trashy. A biker gang called The Wizards become involved in an altercation with a couple of young women in a car. When one of the bikers is accidentally knocked off his bike by the car he takes revenge by smashing in their windscreen with a chain. The car plunges out of control over a cliff, taking the two women to their deaths. Unfortunately for the bikers the driver was the girlfriend of Mitch, a tough Green Berets sergeant from the local army training camp. Mitch and three of his fellow sergeants set off in search of the bikers, determined to bring them to justice.

They decide to go undercover. They apparently think that wearing incredibly dorky biker outfits with sergeant’s stripes on the back of their jackets and riding small Japanese motorcycles will make them look exactly like bikers. As you might expect, the responses they get from the bikers they encounter range from amused derision to even more amused derision. They do eventually find The Wizards. Mitch’s idea that sleeping with the girlfriend of one of the bikers would be a good way to get information turns out to be an exceptionally bad idea. The fact that she’s the girlfriend of Casey, the very biker who killed his own girlfriend, makes it an even worse idea and predictably enough he gets a particularly vicious beating for his trouble.

These Green Berets are tough though and Mitch escapes and he and his buddies then mount a well-planned full-scale military assault (well as full-scale as you can get with only four guys) on the bikers’ hideout in a remote canyon, using rocket launchers and various other equipment borrowed from the US Army.

The plot is ludicrous but amusingly original. The stunts, fight sequences and the action scenes at the climax, as well as the numerous motorcycle chases, are pretty competently executed. The acting is bad, but it’s good bad acting. Seasoned cult movie fans know that there’s a vast difference between bad bad acting (which is merely boring) and good bad acting (which is highly entertaining). William Smith as the leader of the biker gang does some memorable scenery chewing.

The DVD transfer is widescreen and looks superb. And it’s a great double feature. An absolute must for fans of biker exploitation (bikesploitation?) movies and well worth a look for any cult movie lover.

She Devils on Wheels (1968)

Herschell Gordon Lewis’s She Devils on Wheels is based on an idea that really should have made an outrageously entertaining exploitation movie. Unfortunately it just doesn’t happen. It’s the story of an all-female biker gang, The Man Eaters, and their conflicts with rival male gangs. The obvious movies to compare this one to are Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels and Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Corman’s and Meyer’s movies were able to transcend the limitations of low-budget film-making, but this is something that She Devils on Wheels utterly fails to do. The problem isn’t that it’s trashy. It’s supposed to be trashy, some of my favourite movies are trashy movies, but it’s also slow, it’s dull, it’s disjointed, it has no dramatic tension whatever, and it looks ridiculously amateurish. Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is an object lesson in how to make gloriously entertaining trash, and She Devils on Wheels is an object lesson in how not to do it. It’s totally lacking in the style and imagination, and the genuine sense of the bizarre, that makes Pussycat a true classic.

She Devils on Wheels does have a few things going for it. Betty Connell, who plays the leader of The Man Eaters, has a real presence and she puts some real heart and enthusiasm into her performance. Most of the gang members were (apparently) actual female bikers, and they do at least look dangerous. The Man Eaters are girls who don’t need men to rescue them when they get into trouble, and these women manage to carry that off quite convincingly. It’s also quite fun to see the gang members recreational activities with the stud line. It’s not the fault of these amateur actresses that the movie just lacks that vital spark.
It’s an interesting curiosity piece, though, and probably worth a look as long as you don’t expect too much.

The Wild Angels (1966)

It was the mid-60s, and youth rebellion was in the air. Hollywood could see opportunities for profits in this, but at this stage the studios were still very nervous about dealing with such a potentially controversial subject. No such fears held back Roger Corman, and in 1966 he made his outlaw biker epic The Wild Angels, complete with real Hell’s Angels as extras, and with Peter Fonda (three years before Easy Rider) creating a new kind of youth icon. Fonda is Heavenly Blues, leader of the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels. He and some of the Angels set off for Mexico to retrieve his buddy Loser’s chopper, stolen by a Mexican gang. A brawl ensues, Loser steals a police motorcycle, is shot by a cop. And ends up in hospital. Blues decides that it would be a really fine idea to bust Loser out of the hospital before he can be transferred to prison. Well it seemed like a good idea at the time.
This is a remarkably hard-hitting film. There are several rapes, a church gets trashed during a funeral service, a preacher is beaten up, and there’s plenty of other incidental violence. Not all the violence is committed by the bikers either – the police are shown as being disturbingly willing to gun down people who are unarmed. The movie doesn’t flinch from examining the belief systems that motivate Blues and his pals – they not only wear the symbols of fascism, such as swastikas, they live out a fascist fantasy of power, violence and nihilism. But at the same time the movie doesn’t merely demonise them. They have a dream of freedom, and their behaviour is a weird mix of loyalty and viciousness, of idealism and selfishness. When Blues is asked what he believes in, and can come up with nothing better than vague mumblings about freedom and the right to get loaded, we can see his awareness of his own tragedy, that he knows the emptiness of his own rhetoric. His alienation is complete, and it’s real. He isn’t evil – he simply doesn’t have enough awareness to be evil.

Corman does a great job as director. The scenes of the bikers partying, and of the drunken orgy in the church, have a frenetic and rather frightening energy to them. The unpredictability, the potential for sudden explosive violence, is conveyed very effectively indeed. Peter Fonda’s very considerable limitations as an actor don’t matter at all – he’s an icon, icons just have to look iconic, and he does that extremely well. Much the same argument applies to Nancy Sinatra’s performance as his girlfriend. The movie doesn’t have the embarrassingly dated look that most 1960s movies about youth have – the fact that bikers still look pretty similar to the way they looked in 1966 certainly helps, and Corman’s bikers look dirty and dangerous. The Wild Angels works extremely well as a film about alienation, about being young, and as a film about the 60s. In fact it works on every level, and may well be one of the very best movies of its type ever made.