Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best biker movie ever, 27 Jan 2004
Peter Fonda was Blue, before he became Captain America. But what reason he had to be blue is beyond me. He was the leader of cool gang of outlaw bikers (played by some of the real Hell's Angels, including Sonny Barger) and on the back of his chopped Harley was riding Nancy Sinatra. Does life get much better?In this film Fonda utters the immortal and oft-borrowed line 'We wanna ride our machines without being hassled by the man. And we wanna get loaded!' Recognise it? Primal Scream and Mudhoeny both sampled it. Great riding sequences, great fights, great lines, typical Corman directing, great Sixties instrumental theme (by Dave Allen and the Arrows - if you like Dick Dale...). I'm going to sit down and watch it again.
|
|
|
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sensational but sobering, 1 Nov 2009
Since the script is by Corman's best regular writer, Charles H Griffith ("A Bucket of Blood", "Little Shop of Horrors") you would expect something tight, with a bit of depth and subtlety. "The Wild Angels" isn't exactly tight, because Corman needs to pad his film out to 89 minutes (single feature length) and so dawdles on some rather uninteresting bike rides, and some "orgy" scenes which are very tame by today's standards. However, it does have depth, because Griffith and Corman are deeply troubled by the Wild Angels he is supposedly celebrating to reflect his youth audience. There is a lot of fooling around in the early scenes, and the Hell's Angels come across more like slightly deviant Boy Scouts, strong on hierarchy and clan loyalty. However, the film busts apart after the death of Loser (the bikers' abduction of him may or may not have contributed to his death), when his funeral service turns into a party, ending in a riot. The Unitarian pastor is tied up, Loser is hoicked out of his coffin to watch the "wake", cigar in mouth, and his girlfriend is raped. There is a wonderful moment on the soundtrack here, where the camera follows the dazed girl through the crowd, while the mournful mouthorgan solo being played previously unnoticed in the background by a stoned biker is suddenly brought forward, discordant and haunting, against the crass heavy rock. There's no doubt that any sympathy we might have had for the bikers' harrassment is fundamentally qualified by the realisation that though they crave freedom, they really, as Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda) unconsciously gives away, have no idea what they want freedom for.
At the end of the film, he is the only one who has any sense of loyalty to Loser. While the police sirens approach after yet another brawl, in the cemetery, and the rest of the gang (including Blues' girlfriend Monkey (Nancy Sinatra)) turn tail to escape arrest, Blues is left alone to dig his friend's grave, certain that the police will get him. It is a sad, haunting image; only one Angel has true loyalty, and showing it, he has grown up.
|
|
|
2.0 out of 5 stars
Taste changing mediocrity, 25 Jul 2009
The Wild Angels was very influential, and was also wildly controversial and popular when it was released. The film successfully captured the imagination of the teenage audience that it intended to exploit by setting up the figures of authority as the `bad guys', and the fairly nasty gang of bikers as anti-heroes to be cheered for. Director and writer Roger Corman saw the 1953 biker movie The Wild One starring Marlon Brando ("What're you rebelling against Jonny?", "What you got?") but thought that his target audience would prefer to see a similar movie from the perspective of the biker gang, and not the townsfolk.
Corman quickly became the king of the exploitation movie as he realised that providing an edgy alternative would bring masses of disenchanted teens back to the movie theaters. Exploitation movies were called so for that very reason: They exploited the curiosity of their core audience. Corman played up sex, violence and anti-establishmentarian themes in order to attract those rebellious teens, while overhyping the promotional material. The Wild Angels, the most successful exploitation movie ever released, was no exception. The teenage audience lapped The Wild One up, having never seen scenes of rebellion such as this on the big screen before.
However the film is inexcusably bad. Even if we take the mindless sex and violence out of the equation, it's still bad. Exploitation movies never won awards for their scripts and here it shows. Check out Fonda's "We wanna be free" speech for some of the most awkward dialogue ever committed to celluloid. Barring Fonda, the acting is also atrocious. And fairly predictably, it seems that the movie doesn't know what it wants to be. Corman's aim was to make a movie that was both sympathetic to the biker community and glamorised lewd behaviour, and yet the moral message at the end of the film is `if you act outside the law, you will get caught.'
To be fair Corman's direction often borders on the skilled, and a young Peter Fonda puts in a great performance, but even at this early stage in his career it's clear to see Fonda was destined for better things. Even the real-life Hells Angels that were hired as background artists deserved better than the representation they got in the finished movie. Clearly they agreed, because after they saw the finished flick they attempted to sue production studio AIP.
Nevertheless, the teenage audience loved it. The movie took a staggering 5.5 million dollars at the box office and the people were hungry for more, and the exploitation movie studios were happy to give it to them. The Wild Angels influenced a string of similar genre-within-genre biker exploitation movies all looking to cash in and exploit the audience.
Looking at The Wild Angels in isolation, viewed in 2009, it's barely watchable. Bad script, bad acting, annoying story, pointless rape and violence. But in its day The Wild Angels was like nothing seen before at the movies. It was a far cry from the sanitised middle-aged output being released by the major Hollywood studios of the time, but the output of exploitation movies such as this made those big players sit up and notice, and eventually change their ways.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
![The Wild Angels/Hell's Belles [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/617Y7V71WGL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Hell Ride [DVD] [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61kG8cYjPcL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Bikers From Hell, Triple Feature: Run Angel Run/Hell's Angels 69/Hell's Bloody Devils [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/6109WTYJ1PL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Hells Angels On Wheels [Video to DVD conversion] [1967]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5109N7GP7gL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Hells Angels On Wheels [Video to DVD conversion] [1967]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5109N7GP7gL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
![Angels Hard As They Come [DVD] [1971]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/4110HSMVNEL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
![Easy Rider [DVD] [1969]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518HM74SRPL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
![Bikers From Hell, Triple Feature: Run Angel Run/Hell's Angels 69/Hell's Bloody Devils [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/6109WTYJ1PL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
![Northville Cemetery Massacre [DVD] [1976] [US Import]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51bE5WJbO6L._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
