Cult movie producers Michael and Robert Findlay, the people responsible for the immensely enjoyable “Flesh Trilogy” bought an obscure Argentinean biker flick (called “The Slaughter”) and re-dubbed it, re-edited it, and re-named it Snuff.  Then they tacked on a new gory ending and tried to pass it off on the public as a “real” snuff movie.  The results were kinda weak but thanks to a great advertising campaign, Snuff, went on to become one of the most notorious exploitation movies of all time.

The “plot” follows a Manson like cult leader named Satan (it’s pronounced “Sah-Tan”) who gets a bunch of hippie biker chicks to do his bidding.  Satan has his sights set on a cute pregnant actress (shades of Sharon Tate) who he wants sacrificed.  After the biker babes murder the poor chick, a director yells “Cut” and things switch over to the “real” world of a movie studio.  The “director” then entices his “actress” (who is clearly not the same broad from the biker movie we’ve been watching for the last 70 minutes) to stick around the set.  He then proceeds to torture and murder her while the crew films everything.

To me, Snuff is one of those movies you’d have to watch while under the spell of the marketing campaign to get the full effect.  I mean have you tried to watch The Blair Witch Project years later after all the media hoopla died down?  It sucks.  But, if you caught it in the theater during the height of Blair Witch Mania, you have to admit it worked.  Snuff is kinda like that.  33 years after the fact, you already know this isn’t real.  However, if you saw the flick during its original run, you might’ve entered the theater asking yourself, “is it or isn’t it real”, which coulda been fun.

I didn’t hate the movie really.  The biker portion of the flick (7/8 of the film’s running time) was OK I guess.  I mean it featured hilarious fake “Born to Be Wild” music, foot slicing, back stabbing, grandmas dying in slow motion, severed hands, a pregnant woman getting stabbed in the belly, and a bunch of hippie chicks getting naked and frolicking in a pond; so it’s not like it was unwatchable or anything. 

The “Snuff” scene isn’t particularly bad either, it just loses a lot of its intended impact because we already know it’s fake.  This scene is gory to be sure.  It features the girl’s fingers and hands getting cut off and she even gets her guts ripped out too.  It’s pretty cool and stuff but the blood looks too much like Ragu to be realistic. 

The flick moved too slow and probably featured one too many useless characters and/or flashbacks for it to have really worked.  I must say though that the atrociously dubbed dialogue was good for a couple laughs.  (Wait until you hear the little girl whose voice sounds like it was dubbed by Mr. Bill.)  I also enjoyed hearing the familiar voices of the Findlays numerous times playing different characters.  Of all the laughable lines, my favorite had to be:  “Pig!  Filthiest of all animals!  I will cut out your heart and feed it to the dogs!”

AKA:  American Cannibale.  AKA:  The Slaughter.

If you've seen the Alex Rocco biker movie, The Wild Riders then you've pretty much seen this flick too.  The plot is the same.  Two greasy bikers force their way into a suburban home and molest a couple of housewives and force them to drink, party, and (of course) have some stinky biker sex.  The fun stops though when hubby comes home early and grabs his shotgun.

I really wanted to like The Takers, but in the end, I just couldn't.  Although the premise seems ideally sleazy and scummy, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.  The bikers (who look like Jerry Reed and Colin Ferrell respectively) aren't very menacing and the housewives submit way too easily to their scuzzy needs.  Also, the sex scenes go on FOREVER and are staged rather clumsily to boot.  Honestly, if you're going to have a twenty-some minute sex scene, you might as well show it XXX style just to keep us from being bored.

Still, the flick is much better than The Wild Riders.  I particularly liked the ending when the husband shows up and gets his "revenge".  I'm not going to reveal what exactly happens, as it's one of the few truly worthwhile things about the picture; just know that it's pretty unexpected and even a bit "arty" too.  The husband was played by none other than Booby Trap star Carl Monson, who also made his directing debut with this flick and would go on to direct the inane John Carradine thriller, Blood Legacy the next year.

The Jerry Reed looking biker gets the best line of the flick when he says, "Okay you classy cunts, who wants to party?"

Quentin Tarantino produced this terrible homage to 60’s biker movies directed by Larry Bishop.  If you’ve seen Bishop’s Mad Dog Time you may know what to expect:  Lots of unpleasant people reciting bizarre, childishly written dialogue before blowing somebody away.  This time, the characters ride motorcycles though. 

Basically what happens (there’s no way I’m going to use the word “plot”) is that this bad biker gang called “The 666ers” are hunting down another gang called “The Victors”.  The 666ers want a key to a safety deposit box and will set you on fire if you don’t tell them where it is.  The Victors are led by Pistolero (Bishop) and their new recruit, Comanche (Eric Balfour) is the rightful owner of the safety deposit box because his mother was the first person that the 666ers set on fire.  Or something like that.

Bishop tries to tell the story in a Tarantinoesque fashion by hopping back and forth between the present and 1976, when the one chick got torched.  All this does is pointlessly muddle a story that was pretty thin to begin with.  There are a lot of montages of bikers riding down the highway to pad the running time.  The problem is that Bishop films EVERY scene like a montage so it’s hard to tell what the Hell is going on.

You would think that a movie that features so many supporting characters from Tarantino’s repertory company would be at least fun to watch from an acting standpoint.  While Michael Madsen, David Carradine, and Dennis Hopper all have roles in the film, none of them are given much to do besides say stupid soliloquies about God knows what.  I don’t know if Bishop was trying to ape Tarantino’s style when he wrote the script or what, but all the characters say the dumbest shit.  Like the scene where Bishop and Madsen say the word “six” like 57 times in one conversation.  It’s supposed to be funny.  It isn’t.  Or the scene where Bishop talks about pussy but uses “fire” as a euphemism.  He says “fire” about 300 times and all he does he beat an already unfunny joke into the ground for about three minutes.

Hell Ride only exists as an opportunity for Larry Bishop to film himself having sex with 20 year old strippers.  No less than six girls throw themselves at Larry during the movie (I’m counting the fourway he has during the biker party).  The girls actually finding the decrepit looking Bishop sexually desirable constitutes as the best acting in the film.

This is one ride that deserves to go to Hell.

Pink Angels is the first gay biker movie.  Imagine if Gregg Araki directed Easy Rider and this might be what you get.  The flick is all about the titular motorcycle gang taking a road trip to a drag queen ball and along the way they predictably get hassled by The Man.  In the film’s best scene, The Pink Angels play a prank on a bunch of straight bikers by putting make-up on them while they’re passed out.  In the end, the transvestite bikers run into a deranged general on a hippie hunting mission who strings them all up by their necks for being a little bit… different.

What separates The Pink Angels from other biker movies of the era is that instead of getting harassed for having long hair and being hippies, the bikers get harassed for being homosexuals and cross dressers.  The overly swishy performances will ensure that this film won’t win any GLAD Awards, but at least it doesn’t paint its gay characters in a negative light, the way most films at the time would’ve. 

On the downside, the episodic nature of the film leads to a choppy narrative and sloppy pacing.  The extended scenes of gay bikers partying while irritating hippie music plays in the background is just as annoying as the similar scenes found in straight biker movies like The Hellcats and The Wild Rebels and the long ass montages of people driving around on motorcycles only helps to pad the running time.  Despite the fact that the movie is all about gay bikers, that doesn’t stop the filmmakers from tossing in a moderate amount of topless women into the mix, which is always a good thing. 

Michael (Rocky IV) Pataki and Grizzly Adams himself, Dan Haggerty co-star as hetero bikers.

Don Henderson (AKA:  Tom Laughlin of Billy Jack fame) directed this uneven tale of a successful District Attorney (producer George E. Carey) who lusts after his sexy babysitter, Candy (Patricia Wymer).  While the hotshot lawyer is out tomcatting around with his nubile trollop, a biker’s moll takes pictures of him slipping the babysitter the old salami surprise and uses it to blackmail him into releasing her scumbucket biker boyfriend (biker movie staple and the original Mr. Clean, Robert Tessier) from prison.

The Babysitter was popular enough to spawn a semi-sequel, Weekend with the Babysitter two years later.  Like that flick, this one features way too much plot for its own good.  At least The Babysitter features lots of scenes of the old geezer actually balling the Lolita-esque Candy.  The weird thing about these films is the continuity.  In Weekend with the Babysitter, the role of Candy is played by another actress (Susan Romen) and even though both films star Carey, he plays an entirely different character in each movie. 

Not that any of this matters.  As with its sequel, The Babysitter is a pretty ordinary softcore May-December love story.  I’ll give this one the edge over Weekend as this one features a lot more titties than that flick did.  If you are a die hard Laughlin fan, you may want to check it out.

Bikers were the villains in a lot of early 90’s action movies.  There was Another 48 Hours, the great Charlie Sheen actioner, Beyond the Law and this flick, which signaled the arrival (and departure) of ex-football player Brian Bosworth as an action star.  The “Boz” plays John Stone (he’s “Stone Cold”, get it?) a burned out undercover cop with a serious bleach blonde mullet who gets picked by the Feds to infiltrate the drug-dealing “Brotherhood” of bikers led by Chains (Lance Henriksen).  He impresses Chains at a beach bash where he beats up some WWF reject.  Stone is easily welcomed into the ranks of the Brotherhood and he slowly starts to take it apart a piece at a time.  When his cover is blown, Stone must stop Chains from assassinating a biker hating politician. 

Craig R. Baxley, the director of Action Jackson, was at the helm of this puppy.  He handles the action scenes competently and films the barroom brawls, fist fights, shootouts and motorcycle chases in his usual workmanlike manner.  The opening grocery store action scene is not the definitive supermarket action sequence ever filmed (that would be Cobra in case you are wondering), but it’s still pretty good.  (“Clean-up on aisle four!”) 

Actually, this scene typifies what Stone Cold is all about.  It does stuff you haven’t already seen hundreds of times before in an action movie, but it does it just well enough to keep you entertained for an hour and a half.  The ending is nothing but wall to wall mayhem with people getting mowed down by semi-automatic weapons, tossed out of buildings and blown up.  There’s also a great motorcycle-into-a-helicopter stunt (which was done before T2, I might add) tossed in there too.  It may not be great, but honestly, where else are you going to get to see Lance Henriksen dressed like a priest gunning down judges in a courtroom? 

But the best scene in the movie comes during a biker funeral in which a grubby biker is put on a pyre, propped up on his bike, covered in gasoline and then set on fire.  Man, I’ve heard of Viking funerals before, but never Biking funerals!

The thing that prevents the flick from really cutting loose and becoming a classic is The Boz.  He LOOKS like an action star but he just doesn’t have the chops necessary to carry the film.  To top it all off, he’s got the screen presence of a Chevy hubcap.  His big emotional scene is the one where he purees a Snickers bar, some potato chips, a few bananas, a couple eggs, and orange juice in a blender and feeds it to his pet lizard. That’s okay though because any movie in which Lance Henriksen and William Forsythe play bloodthirsty bikers is okay by me.   

Forsythe gets all the best lines; my favorite is when he calls Bosworth, “A grown up version of Bam Bam!”