This bleak story of a biker gang who raise hell everywhere they go and sometimes die for it was one of the most influential exploitation films of the 60s, but it’s aged about as well as stuff from the farmer’s market that you put in the bottom drawer of your refrigerator and then forgot about for two years. Who’s the dumbest member of The Angels? It’s hard to tell. They’re ALL good candidates. The slow pace is what really kills this, though. Director Roger Corman has a lot of interesting accomplishments to his name and one of those is how he manages to make a scene in which the bikers rip apart a church like it’s Pleasure Island in Pinocchio while a gang rape goes on in the same room and a fresh corpse is propped up on a chair in another part of the room TEDIOUS. But he does it. Then again, this was the 60s. Maybe you’re supposed to get high for this.
The best reasons to see this are for its cast of young actors who’d go on to have long careers, as well as the film’s museum piece imagery and attitudes (notably the gang’s taste for swastikas) that no one would be able to get away with in a film today.
This hit the drive-ins at around the same time that Hunter S. Thompson’s terrific book about The Hell’s Angels came out and both helped usher in a renewed fascination for biker gangs in pop culture. After this, dozens more films about psychopaths on cycles were produced.