Monday, March 23, 2020

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 12

More Biker Movies: William Smith Edition 

Angels Die Hard (1970): William Smith gets co-lead billing alongside Tom Baker (not the Dr. Who guy), but man it takes a good while before you even realize he’s in the movie. Also the online plot synopsis on this one, about “bikers coming to the rescue of miners,” doesn’t really happen – in fact, the first hour or so of the flick is comprised of the bikers running roughshod around some small town in the Californian countryside. That being said, there’s more biker footage in this one than practically any other biker movie I’ve yet watched: copious sequences, set to music by various obscure rock groups, of bikers driving along the roadside in their tricked-out hogs and choppers. There’s a lot of cool equipment on display, and my favorite’s probably the trike with the drooping hood, which is driven by this dude that looks for all the world like a Satanic hermit.

While the biker footage is primo, the flick itself has that usual muddled low-budget vibe; dialog is captured by a single boom mic and sometimes the voices of the actors are either inaudible or so shrill that they send the levels into the red – William Smith in particular. And no character is properly introduced, no story set up. Blair (Baker) and Tim (Smith) roll their club into some hayseed town and run afoul of the portly sheriff, and one of the club’s put in jail overnight. He’s let go the next day, but crashes as he’s driving past the county line, apparently run off the road by a local – you can tell the budget was low because we don’t even see the crash, the producers clearly not wanting to actually destroy one of the choppers. Indeed it’s hard to understand initially why the guy even crashes, as it’s a clear day, there’s no other traffic on the road, and he’s just choppering along, giving the finger to the town sign on his way out…and a sudden freeze frame and we hear a poor recording of a vehicle crashing.

Speaking of freeze frames and whatnot, director Richard Compton makes up for the low budget and the unknown actors with lots of inventive angles and artsy directing touches. Some of it is in the vibe of TV director Sutton Roley (aka “the Orson Welles of television”), with stuff like the camera sitting behind latticework so that the actors are partially obscured, or the camera put up on a casket while the bikers carry it into the cemetery. These biker movies are such a strange breed, because often you can tell that the director at least wanted to try something unusual, no doubt inspired by Easy Rider, yet the script as ever is a mish-mash of jarring styles. I mean their biker brother is dead and they’re all dour and then suddenly the plot’s about them drugging up an uptight undertaker and wooping it up while a couple mamas dance nude (not that I’m complaining about that last part). But at least we get to see William Smith deliver a sermon, complete with his massive arms bared and his voice redlining the boom mic with a shouted “Brothers!” Plus he seems to have gotten his clothes from Billy Jack. 

It's curious because there’s no “plot” per se for the first hour of Angels Die Hard, which is pretty incredible when you consider that the film’s barely 90 minutes long. But at the hour point, after being hassled once again to get the hell out of town, the bikers get word of a mine collapse and decide to go to the rescue. This is due to Smith’s character, Tim, who overhears some local yokels talking about it; Tim chuckles at the plight of the miners when he hears of the collapse, then sobers up when he’s told it’s a little kid that’s been trapped in the mine. Curiously this for soft spot for children parallels the attitude of another biker character Smith would play, in The Losers (reviewed below).

But man, talk about a poorly set up and even more poorly executed plotline: the bikers race on over to the mine and we have some shaky camerawork showing the locals trying to pull on a rope that’s going down into the mine. William Smith hovers over the proceedings…then we see some random biker come up out of the mine, carrying the kid! Who the hell the biker was I don’t think is ever even stated, but it sure wasn’t Blair or Tim. This, the event which is stated as the entire plot of the movie on some websites, comprises about five minutes of the film’s runtime. After this we get another go-nowhere subplot where a local beauty seems to fall for Blair, but her boyfriend gets jealous and tries to intervene. Burly Tim beats him up but feels bad about it…then the kid runs to the cops and the locals come in with firebrands and shotguns. The finale is hilariously inept in its staging, with major characters gunned down in an almost nonchalant manner; the ending too leaves it vague who survives and who doesn’t – and I watched the climax twice and I’m still not sure who causes the villainous sheriff to crash.

Eagle-eyed viewers will catch the occasional glimpse of Dixie Peabody (Dag in Bury Me An Angel) as a biker babe – briefly seen riding a chopper when the club heads for the funeral – and Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty as another biker, but neither get any dialog and are mostly just in the background. Hell if you wanted to, you could pretend that Bury Me An Angel is a sequel to this one, as Dixie Peabody’s character isn’t even named, so if you were bored or drunk or high or whatever, you could pretend she’s also playing Dag in this one, and maybe Dag’s ill-fated brother is one of the bikers we never get to see (it’s not like any characters are actually introduced, after all)…and hell, Dan Haggerty also appears as a background biker character without any dialog in Bury Me An Angel, so that just ices the cake.

C.C. And Company (1970): Former football star Joe Namath (whose sideburns radicalized Grandma Simpson) briefly tried his hand at acting, and I believe this was his first starring role. Co-starring Anne-Margaret and William Smith, the movie seems to have enjoyed a bigger budget than most other biker flicks, but hasn’t been served well by history; the copy I saw was sourced from VHS, and there doesn’t seem to be a better version out there. Quentin Tarantino featured the trailer for this movie in his recent Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, so maybe this will result in someone doing a proper restored release. Definitely more of a mainstream picture than most other biker movies – there isn’t even any violence or nudity! – C.C. And Company clearly strives to capture the counterculture spirit of the day, with various “sticking it to the man” sequences in its 90-minute runtime. We even meet titular C.C. Rider (Namath) in the process of sticking it, helping himself to a self-made sandwich in a grocery store (including a Twinkie for dessert!) but only paying for a pack of gum on his way out. Later in the film he’ll steal a dirt bike from a used bike lot, giving the hapless owner five bucks as “down payment.”

But otherwise C.C. is a good guy, or at least we’re to understand he is, given that he doesn’t rape beautiful, busty Ann-Margaret when he and his two biker buddies come across her stranded limo in the desert. Instead C.C. comes to her defense, decking his two pals, one of whom’s ever-sleazy Sid Haig (in a Mongol helmet, aka “the Yul Brenner look”). Anne-Margaret’s character is named Ann, and she bats her eyes prettily at C.C. for saving her, even joking that they’d better hurry with the sex before the Triple-A repairmen arrive. C.C. just smiles and drives off, and finds he’s gotten himself in trouble with club president Moon (Smith), who really lords it up, sitting in a “throne” and kicking around the club mamas. Smith as ever gives his performance a tongue in cheek vibe, including a funny bit where he complains that C.C. doesn’t really jibe with the club, which by the way is called The Heads. C.C. continues to run into Ann over the next few days, and I think Tarantino nicked some of the dialog here – there’s a part where she says how it’s interesting they keep running into each other, and I think the hippie girl with hairy armpits says much the same thing to Brad Pitt’s character in Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood.

Eventually we learn that C.C. just joined the Heads a month ago; Moon’s mama hits on him one night, basically demanding he screw her because she’s “twenty-nine days overdue” for some C.C. lovin.’ C.C. tells her no, but changes his mind when she mocks him for being afraid of Moon. But again there’s no nudity afoot, even during the infrequent “bath” sequences where the bikers and their mamas hop in the river to clean off. His sights though are clearly set on Ann, and when he discovers she’s a fashion photographer (or designer…or something), doing a shoot for a motorcross race, he even gets a dirt bike so he can take part in the race and impress her. Pretty certain it’s not Namath himself in the race scene – which features an awesome climax of C.C. literally pulling his bike across the finish line – but he does clearly drive the dirt bike and a zebra-painted chopper in other sequences. And looks pretty cool at it, too. I’m due for a mid-life crisis so these movies really have me thinking about a vintage custom chopper.

But curiously C.C. And Company is more of a romantic comedy than a biker movie; the plot, such as it is, centers around the unfathomable concept that gorgeous, jet-setting Anne falls in love with grungy, jobless C.C. There’s even a part where she asks him how he “gets along” without work, and here we get a vague backstory for C.C. – he was a mechanic who fixed up the club’s bikes, and when they wouldn’t pay him he fought them…then decided to join them. One wonders why, as he clearly doesn’t get along with the nigh-socialist makeup of The Heads; when C.C. comes in third at that motocross race, Moon demands that he give the entire proceeds to the club. C.C. refuses, leading to a brawl between the two, after which C.C. manages to again score with Moon’s mama…and steal back his money from her purse.

This leads into the finale, which has Moon and the Heads holding Anne hostage until C.C. can raise a thousand bucks. Instead C.C. manages to challenge Moon to a race, which is also ridiculous, something the script at least acknowledges with Moon’s flustered reply to C.C.’s challenge (“I mean, what is this??”). The ensuing race seems to go on forever, and climaxes with Moon suffering a spectacular crash; it’s unstated whether he survives, and the last we see of him his mama is cradling his limp ragdoll of a form. After this it’s on to a Happily Ever After for C.C. and Ann! Overall C.C. And Company is somewhat fun at least in its bright ‘60s colors and fashions, and has some good dialog in spots (when Moon’s girl makes a passing query on C.C.’s skills in bed, he laconically replies, “I manage to hang in there”). I don’t think it’s worth watching more than once, though.

Chrome And Hot Leather (1971): This might be one of my favorite biker movies yet, but for an exploitation flick it’s surprisingly tame on the, uh, exploitation angle; the violence is minimal and, even more shockingly, there’s no nudity! Otherwise it is a well-made grindhouse bikersploitation piece which comes off like the film version of a men’s adventure magazine yarn: badass Green Berets take on a biker gang. In fact if I’m not mistaken that is a storyline that shows up in at least one of the men’s mag stories excerpted in Barbarians On Bikes. The concept is actually well handled, though lacking in the blood and thunder you’d expect from such a setup, with even the final conflagration featuring smoke grenades and tear gas instead of full auto hellfire. There’s even an annoying tendency toward quick cuts during the plentiful fistfights, with director Lee Frost cutting the frame seconds before fists connect with faces. My assumption is this was intended to make the fake punches look “real,” giving the action a sort of pop, but unfortunately it just looks like something off Benny Hill.

The flick opens with what will be the only death in the movie: two pretty young women are driving around the California countryside when they encounter a pack of bikers: The Wizards, who are led by brawny T.J. (William Smith, who chews scenery like it was a protein bar – the dude’s seriously ripped in this one, by the way, and also receives top billing). One of the bikers, Casey (Michael Haynes, who looks so much like Ben Stiller in a bad wig and fake moustache I laughed out loud a few times), comes on to the women and demands they pull over. When they try to escape, inadvertently knocking Casey off his bike, he hops back on and hits ‘em with his chain, causing the car to careen down a canyon and roll a couple times. The Wizards take off and both girls have been killed in the crash.

Unfortunately for the bikers, the blonde in the car was the fiance of Green Beret drill sergeant Mitch (lanky Tony Young, the epitome of the Marlboro Man look). Without dithering over the point – again, I love how lean these vintage action movies are – Mitch rounds up three other Green Beret sergeants to dish out some payback: Gabe (Larry Bishop), Al (Peter Brown, but I spent the entire film thinking it was Monte “The Seven Million Dollar Man” Markham), and Jim (Marvin Gaye – the Marvin Gay, not just some random actor with the same name). Soon enough they decide to go undercover and do what the cops can’t: find the biker scum who killed Mitch’s girl. This entails buying bikes (red Kawasaki dirt bikes, but as it develops they have a reason for wanting dirt bikes and not choppers), learning how to ride them (a humorous sequence), and getting some biker duds with sergeant stripe patches and visored sunglasses.

Meanwhile the Wizards run around the countryside and fight each other; there’s a balance of power between TJ and Casey. As mentioned Smith receives top billing so there are a lot of otherwise-unnecessary subplots or scenes with him, clearly there so as to give him more screentime. Because really TJ makes for a poor villain; Casey’s the only killer in the gang, and indeed TJ tried to stop him from chasing after the girls in the opening sequence. There is an intentional sense of humor here which makes up for this, most notable in the rapport between TJ and spaced-out gang member Sweet Willy (Bob Pickett), including a very funny bit where TJ tries to lean on Mitch (undercover as an outlaw biker who just wandered into the Wizards’s bar). When an oblivious Sweet Willy continues to play pinball, Smith calls over to him, “Can’t you see we’re trying to menace someone?”

It’s little touches like this that make Chrome And Hot Leather so much fun. Also Mitch and his comrades are given enough personality to be memorable and fun to watch working together as a team. Marvin Gaye does very well in his role – his character’s the one who makes the random demand for red dirt bikes, perhaps as a payoff for an earlier line that he never even had a bicycle as a kid – but there’s a total miss when his first line is, “What’s happenin?” It should’ve been “What’s going on?” which would’ve made for such a lame in-joke that it would have instantly become legendary. Hell, he could’ve even hummed a few lines of the song afterwards. That being said, Gaye does provide a song to the movie, but otherwise the score is composed of the fuzzed guitar rock you’d expect.

Mitch gains the graces of the Wizards, long enough to hop in the sack with sexy Susan (Kathy Baumann), who just happens to be Casey’s mama. As mentioned there’s no nudity; when Susan disrobes for Mitch her body is completely hidden save for her shoulders and head. Even when they’re rolling around in bed she’s careful to keep herself covered by the sheets. This leads me to believe that Baumann either had a no-nudity contract or the producers were shooting for a more mainstream market than other biker films of the day. That’s not to say Susan isn’t slapped around and roughed up, though; they skipped on the nudity and the violence but the producers at least still delivered on that bikersploitation staple. Casey storms in on the two post-boink, knocks out Mitch, and slaps Susan around good and proper. This leads to another of those otherwise-random scenes with William Smith, where TJ asks Susan if she wants to stay in the gang after he’s kicked out Casey. A scene which ultimately has no impact on the plot…other, that is, than to give Smith more screentime.

The finale unfortunately drops the biker angle. Mitch and team head back to base and, in another comedic scene, order up a bevy of training weaponry, from smoke grenades to a mini-rockets. They put their Green Beret training to use and segregate the Wizards in a remote canyon and rain smoke grenades and tear gas missiles on them, then run roughshod on them on their dirt bikes while wearing gas masks. This leads to yet more fistfights, which is also how Mitch handles Casey, the murderer of his fiance – unsatisfyingly, there’s no fatal comeuppance for Casey. Instead it’s off to jail with TJ and the rest of the gang – including even Susan! But otherwise Chrome And Hot Leather moves at a steady clip, featuring fun characters and a self-mocking tone, and it’s a shame there was never a sequel. The whole “Sergeants” dirt bike gang was ripe for more exploitation.

The Losers (1970): Like Chrome And Hot Leather, the plot of this biker flick seems to have been ripped from the pages of a contemporary men’s mag: bikers in ‘Nam! This one’s even more in the men’s mag realm than the other flick, with plentiful violence and nudity; the opening sequence alone features spectacular blood quibs at work as we see the Viet Cong massacring various people. Likely this rugged pulp feel is courtesy veteran adventure writer Alan Caillou, who handled the script. However this one’s really more of a war movie than a biker movie, and the budget was also a factor because the fireworks are saved for the climax. This means that characterization takes more of a precendence than in other biker flicks…but at the expense of the fun, pulpy sort of stuff we expect from a true biker movie. Hell, there aren’t even any Harleys – let alone any choppers – in the film. The bikers ride dirt bikes! (Another similarity to Chome And Hot Leather). As one of them puts it: “That’s a girl’s bike!”

William Smith stars again as a biker boss: Link, who heads up the Devil’s Advocates M.C. We don’t get much background on Link, but there seems to be some particular reason why he’s so driven to rescue a CIA agent who is being held by the Red Chinese in Cambodia. Also we’ll learn he has a bit of a sensitive side; there’s an odd but touching bit where he picks up a poor little hunchbacked kid in a Vietnam village and gives him a quick ride on his bike. That being said, we clearly see Link blow another kid away in the climactic action sequence…so, uh, he’s an anti-hero at least. In fact Smith doesn’t get much opportunity to do anything emotive until late in the movie, with most of the runtime being given over to his fellow club members: There’s Duke (Adam Roarke), who seems to have taken this CIA job so he can hook back up with his Vietnamese girlfriend and bring her home as his wife; Limpy (Paul Koslo), who is of course named for his limp and also finds love here in Vietnam; Speed (Gene Cornelius), who wears a swastika bandana and doesn’t really do much but make racist comments; and finally Dirty Denny (Houston Savage), who comes off the most “true biker” of the lot, here in ‘Nam to check up on the whorehouse he opened and to in general raise some hell.

The movie opens in ‘Nam (aka the Philipines – and yes Vic Diaz shows up!), and there’s no flashback or anything to their previous life in the US, where we could actually see the Devil’s Advocates in biker action. Instead they show up and are given their orders, then it’s off to some godforsaken village where they can plan out the assault of the fortress in which the CIA asset is being held in Cambodia. The asset is named Chet Davis (director Jack Starrett himself), and our heroes know going in that they’ll be greatly outnumbered by VC and Chinese soldiers. But the place is only accessible via dirt bikes, so they go about the business of arming and armoring their motorcycles; Limpy gets an armored trike which looks cool but not nearly as sci-fi as depicted on the film poster. However way too much runtime is given over to various subplots; love is truly in the air for these grungy bikers, with both Duke and Limpy falling in love with local gals. Limpy’s subplot in particular is goofy because the girl in question is just some random hooker he picks up in Dirty Denny’s old bordello…and she has a kid! Sure we get some toplessness here, and I’ll never complain about that, but it’s hard to buy these badass bikers getting so lovey-dovey. Even harder to buy that Limpy’s new girl is actually the old girlfriend of their army contact, Capt. Jackson (Bernie Hamilton)…and that Jackson’s the father of the hooker’s kid!! This goofy-ass subplot reveal isn’t even much exploited.

I found a good bit of The Losers to be hard going. There’s an interminable bit where Dirty Denny goes nuts in his old bordello and raises hell; apparently this wasn’t far from the actor’s normal life, with “Houston Savage” often getting in trouble in the Philipines. He was mysteriously murdered about a year after this film was released – eerily enough, in much the same way his character in the film meets his fate. And yes, that Dirty Dozen riff in the film poster is pretty much a tip-off, as it’s clear going in there will be some biker casualties. Starrett really unleashes hell in the finale, with the armed bikes running roughshod over the Cambodian village. But there’s a definite “war is hell” vibe that gets in the way of the fun, with as mentioned shots of innocent kids getting gunned down in the melee. Indeed the film ends with a maudlin montage of various bloody deaths from the film while sad music plays, the producers clearly trying to decry man’s inhummanity to man…but meanwhile check out this cool machine gun on my motorcycle! As John Lennon declared years after starring in How I Won The War, it’s impossible to make an anti-war film. Sort of like how Hollywood elites are so anti-gun…yet fetishize guns in their damn movies.

Even worse is the finale, which I found incredibly frustrating. For one the assault on the village peters out too quickly. We have some explosions and racing around and some casualties for our heroes, and then Link gets into the tent in which Chet Davis is being held. And proceeds to start arguing with him. With egregious stuff like Link complaining about how bikers back home just want to “feel free,” and Chet Davis bluntly stating that he “represents America.” And meanwhile a minor-scale war’s still going on out there in the village! Davis proves to be a very ungrateful rescuee, trying to run away from Link and get him killed. Hell, during a later firefight he even tell Link he hopes he’s killed. Apparently in the backstory Davis got Link and his men arrested for being bikers or somesuch; I sort of lost the thread on this because I was so irritated by it all. The finale is also goofy with the US army showing up and sort of shooting at the VC and whatnot while Link, Davis, and the surviving bikers make their slow way to the border, with Davis again going out of his way to get the bikers killed. Anyway I’ve meant to watch this one for years, even got the DVD over a decade ago, but have only now watched it – and I really only liked some of it. And finally I think I’m bound by law to also point out that Quentin Tarantino featured a brief clip of this movie in Pulp Fiction; it’s the movie the annoying French girl was watching in the Bruce Willis segment of the film.

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Dr. Death (aka Nick Carter: Killmaster #100)


Dr. Death, by Nick Carter
No month stated, 1975  Award Books

This was the first of two volumes of Nick Carter: Killmaster written by the mysterious author Will Murray designated as “Craig Nova” in his landmark Killmaster article, in the The Armchair Detective (volume 15, number 4, 1982). But as mentioned in the comments section of my review of the other “Nova” installment, The Nichovev Plot, it appears that the real Craig Nova disputes this and says neither book was written by him. So we either have a case where it’s just some other writer of the same name, or Will Murray was perhaps given some bad info. In instances like this I just assume J.D. Salinger wrote the book. (Plus there’s a scene where Killmaster dreams he’s standing in a field of rye!! Okay I made that up.)

The paperback itself is stuffed to the gills: we’ve got the title story Dr. Death for the first 160-some pages, followed by Run, Spy, Run, which was the first volume of the series. After that we’ve got a reprint of an original pulp-era Nick Carter tale. But as with the final volume, I’m assuming Dr. Death got the vaunted “100th volume” spot just out of sheer luck, as there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it. Like Dragon Slay, it’s really just business as usual, with Nick Carter – who now narrates the tale for us – going about the latest globe-spanning espionage case.

But it’s just “Carter,” now; gone is the “Nick” of the earlier, Lyle Kenyon Engel-produced years. Only the women who are about to hop in bed with him refer to our narrator as “Nick.” Killmaster would still be referred to by his last name when the series switched back to third-person narration in the mid-‘80s, but I kinda prefer the casual “Nick” of the ‘60s installments. Not that any other sane person would give a damn about such trivialities. Also the gadgets have been whittled down; Carter himself just sticks to his trusty trio of Wilhelmina (the Luger), Hugo (the stiletto), and Pierre (the gas bomb), and the plentiful gadgetry of the Engel years is gone. Strangely though, Carter’s two companions have all the gadgets, even though one of them’s the enforcer for a Chinese tong and the other’s an AXE stringer agent.

The title I found to be very misleading: “Dr. Death” gives connotations of some super villain Killmaster will go up against, sort of like the Mr. Judas of yore. But the titular doctor is an elderly Frenchman whose nickname was given to him back in World War II due to his skills with explosives; now he’s the head of some underwater weaponry research project and he’s been abducted by the OAS, a fascist French terrorist group composed of former soldiers. So Dr. Death is actually a victim, not a villain, and it’s another of those times where I assume the writer was catering to an already-devised title and plot and just failed spectacularly to reap the potential. I mean if you title a friggin’ book Dr. Death, you put a friggin’ Dr. Death in it! It’s not rocket science, is it?

Anyway the dude’s named Dr. Duroche and Carter is informed by a typically-gruff Hawk (who as ever has called his top agent away from his latest sex-filled holiday romp) that Duroche was on the tip of some groundbreaking underwater weaponry work. Whoever has him has issued some threats and the concern is all of the US’s offshore oil rigs will be destroyed. Carter when we meet him is in Tangier, meeting up with an old French intelligence contact named Remy. True to the lurid trappings of mid-‘70s Nick Carter, the meeting takes place in a “hashish club” with a hotbod brunette doing a strip dance in the background. Whoever this author is, he (or she?) is truly a gifted writer, bringing people and places to life with aplomb.

Remy does the heavy lifting of informing Carter of this latest threat, which means that his plot function has been fulfilled and he’s expendable – and true to staple a couple guys with Sten guns barge into the club and start blasting. “Nova” has successfully worked in the hot dancer throughout this scene, with her sexual gyrations increasingly distracting Carter and Remy, to the point that she’s half-nude when the bullets start flying and soon she’s got blood all over her suddenly-bared breasts. This sequence ends with a nicely-handled surprise reveal where the dancer turns out to be a chacter that’s integral to the plot. As with The Nichovev Plot, the violence might be intermitent but when it happens it’s very gory, with Remy’s head exploding and showering blood and brains everywhere. 

Soon Carter is aligned with lovely young Michelle Duroche, daughter of Dr. Death – the nickname, by the way, rarely if ever used in the actual novel – and they run into another trap; Carter has some acquaintance here in Tangier and figures he can use the guy’s club as a safe house, but enters through the rat-infested secret tunnel to find his friend tortured half to death. He takes out the torturers and gets a few clues from his dying friend, and then it’s off to the more pressing concern: sex with Michelle Duroche. I can’t recall how explicit the previous installment from this author was, but this one goes for more of a lyrical and metaphorical approach, with lines like, “Secret female places of her body opened to me.”

We do get the firm understanding that Michelle is practically insatiable, and she’ll serve as Carter’s prime female companion throughout the novel. Unfortunately though there’s nothing much memorable about her character. The other main female character is a lithe Chinese gal named Li-Chen, who has much more sparkle to her character, trading one-liners with Carter even when bullets are flying. Initially she appears as a potential threat, tailing Carter and Michelle as they make the long flight back to DC so Carter can meet with Hawk. Soon enough we learn that Li-Chen is part of a major Chinese family, aka a crime tong, and she’s here to represent the family, which has a vested interest in many of those offshore oil rigs that have been threatened. Even more ridiculously, Li-Chin – who you won’t be surprised to know is a kung fu “mistress” – has vast resources at her disposal, including gadgets like earrings that serve as radios.

Li-Chen doesn’t properly enter the narrative until the action moves to Puerto Rico, where the author gives the novel a bit of a horror vibe – again, similar to in The Nichovev Plot. Various plot contrivances have Carter looking into a leper colony, and we’re treated to a late-night sequence in which he enters the nightmarish compound and starts grilling some poor deformed guy who is missing some of his limbs. It’s all very Island Of Lost Souls as a group of lepers try to kill Carter, some of them armed with knives but most of them just reaching out to touch him, as they’re contagious and could Carter himself into a leper. This is where Li-Chen makes her big appearance, wiping out leper-creatures with her Sue Shiomi skills.

Surprisingly though, the author holds off on the expected shenanigans between Carter and Li-Chen; instead he goes back to his hotel for some off-page stuff with Michelle. She is jealous of Li-Chen but grudgingly gives in to Carter’s insistence that Li-Chen will be helping them out now. Another new character is introduced here, more interesting than any of them: Sweets Hunter, a black AXE stringer who owns a boat and has a fondness for chocolate, hence his nickname. He also has a host of gadgets, including a necklace with beads that are actually mini-grenades. Sweets is given more personality than any of the characters, and what with him and the similarly-memorable Li-Chen it’s like Carter is a guest star in his own novel.

The final third takes place in Martanique, where the OAS have headquartered themselves in a volcano, an element that’s almost casually handled. Instead more focus is placed on the Mardi Gras that occurs outside while Carter and team discuss their plans inside a restaurant. Soon enough garrishly-costumed celebrants come in, separate the group…and make off with Michelle. This sequence does feature the memorable image of Carter blowing away men in papier mache animal masks. But “Nova” pulls a fast one on readers; Carter and Li-Chen stage an assault on the OAS HQ, and after blowing away a few soldiers they’re caught and are taken to the OAS leader. Here Carter learns that one of his comrades was really a traitor all along, but what’s annoying about it is that we learn Carter’s already figured this out, without the reader being aware of it, and has devised a backup plan.

Thus Carter and Li-Chen just stand there smugly while an off-page Sweets runs amok in inside the OAS compound, blowing up computers with his mini-grenades. Hell, Carter even informs the OAS boss that he’s called in the army – again without the reader being aware of it until this very moment. It just all comes off like lazy deus ex machina, made all the worse by the fact that Sweets, a one-off character, does all the heavy lifting while the series protagonist just stands there. Indeed the big climax isn’t very, uh, climactic, with Carter and comrades escaping the HQ bunker while gas-bomb Pierre kills everyone unlucky enough to be stuck in there. Then we have Carter in scuba gear and chasing after that former comrade who has been revealed to be an enemy, dishing out payback with his stiletto.

We of course learn that Li-Chen and Carter will be hopping into bed soon, but at this point Dr. Death comes to a close, and on a dour note at that, with a former comrade now turned into shark food. But overall Dr. Death is competently written and fairly fast moving, though it lacks the fun charm of the Engel years. I guess the greater mystery is who wrote the damn thing. There is something vaguely familiar about the writing style, so maybe it was just one of the usual Killmaster writing stable who somehow got misattributed by Will Murray when he researched the series. Probably we’ll never know.

Finally, the book features what I believe is called a stepback cover; here is the uncredited painting of Killmaster on the inner cover:

Monday, March 16, 2020

The Scarred Man


The Scarred Man, by Basil Heatter
June, 1973  Fawcett Gold Medal

Treading a similar path as another Fawcett Gold Medal biker novel, The Blood Circus, The Scarred Man comes off like one of those men’s adventure magazine bikersploitation yarns taken to novel length – and if the excerpts in Wyatt Doyle and Bob Deis’s awesome Barbarians On Bikes are any indication, many of those men’s mag biker stories were indeed first-person yarns about vets taking on bikers. Basil Heatter was a veteran pulp writer, and I’ve picked up a few of his paperbacks, but this is the first one I’ve actually read. He definitely has all the skills to be admired in a veteran pulp writer, delivering a lean, taut tale with memorable characters. The only misstep is that the final third seems to come from a completely different novel.

As I read The Scarred Man I was under the impression Heatter was British; the characters use the occasional British-ism (ie “bloody,” or an inordinate fondess for the adverb “quite”), and in general the narrative style gives off the vibe of British pulp. Plus there’s the name “Basil.” But Heatter was American, and his characters here are also Americans: William Shaw, a 40 year-old “brilliant young corporate lawyer from New York,” narrates the story for us, which given internal evidence takes place between September and November of 1972. Shaw is a veteran of the Korean War and now lives basically the life of a men’s mag protagonist, going on random global adventures with his beautiful 30 year-old wife Stacey. Their current getaway is a ketch they’ve bought near Miami, with plans to take it on a cruise to Jamaica.

But when the story opens Stacey and Shaw have decided on the spur of the moment to rent a Honda motorcycle and go riding through the Everglades. The Honda breaks down and Shaw has to fix it in the dark; just as it’s fixed they see a trio of bikers go along the road. When Shaw and Stacey get the Honda moving, they round a corner and find the three bikers waiting for them in ambush. They’re all on chopped Harleys but I’m not sure what sort of self-respecting outlaw bikers they are, given that they each wear leather jackets and helmets with the visors down. Shaw crashes to avoid hitting them, and then the nightmare begins; the brawny biker boss smashes Shaw in the head with a chain, knocking him into a stupor, and then he and his buddies get down to the business of gang-raping Stacy. Or as the big biker puts it, “We’re just gonna fuck your little chick.”

One thing that undoes The Scarred Man in this opening quarter is the snarky, ironic sense of humor in Shaw’s narration, which jars against the nightmarish aspects of the plot. For example Shaw wakes up in the hospital after passing out from the blow to the head, and he’s making ironic comments in his narration about being hounded by traffic cops in the afterlife. The reader’s like, “I know laughter’s the best medicine and all, but dude your wife was just gang-raped two pages ago!” This jarring humor wears out its welcome, but curiously disappears once Stacey’s left the narrative. In hindsight I wondered if all this was intentional and Heatter’s motive was that Shaw’s humor was a way of masking his true feelings over Stacey, her fate, and his own guilt. This could be it, as Heatter is definitely a quality writer, but still the ironic humor doesn’t sit right when you’re actually reading the book.

Shaw for his part now has a scar on his face, and presumably he’s the “scarred man” of the title (though confusingly a villain later in the book also has a scarred face), but Heatter doesn’t much describe the scar nor bring much attention to it throughout the book. For a couple months Shaw and Stacey try to rebuild their life, with Stacey slowly coming out of her catatonic shell. There’s a nicely-handled sequence where Stacey comes to Shaw’s bed one night – the first time she’s done so since the rape two months before – but Shaw pretends to be asleep, too wrapped up in his own hangups. She says nothing and gets back into her own bed. When Shaw comes back from getting breakfast the next morning, he discovers that Stacey has jumped off the balcony of their hotel suite to her death 18 floors below. After taking care of the funeral, Shaw gets around to what he’s subconsciously known he was going to do from the beginning: hunt down the three bikers and kill them.

Heatter as mentioned is a skilled writer, and he successfully works Shaw’s law background into the revenge scheme. While the cops seem unable to find out who raped Stacey, stating that there are too many outlaw biker clubs tearing through Florida, Shaw takes matters into his own hands. He reads about a gang that’s gotten in trouble down south, almost running over a little kid. Shaw flies down there – to represent the bikers in court. The club is called the Beaks and their leader, a cruel-looking bastard named Stud, distrusts this lawyer who claims to want to represent the Beaks at no expense. But Shaw ends up winning his trust and, hating himself for it, gets the Beaks exonerated on all charges, save for the biker who nearly ran over the kid – and he manages to just get that one a light jail sentence.

This succeeds in getting into Stud’s good graces, and Shaw starts hanging out with the club, hoping to get info. A problem with The Scarred Man is that coincidence too often comes into play; sure enough, Stud starts boasting about how women “want to be raped” by bikers, especially that one time in the Everglades when Stud and two buddies came across a guy and his girl on a Honda… Heatter plays out Stud’s fate in flashback sequences, with Shaw having drawn him alone into the Everglades and blowing his knee out with a .38. Here Shaw will grill Stud on who the other two rapists were and then blow his head off.

The action moves to Boston, which opens with an otherwise-random bit that I found very interesting from the perspective of 40-plus years later:



Here Shaw buys himself a chopper (which isn’t much described) and gets some biker clothes at the Army-Navy store; he completes the look with an “Indian headband.” There’s some good dialog here with various one-off characters wondering what the hell straight-looking Shaw is up to. This section of the book is really the only true “biker fiction” part of the entire novel. Thanks to Stud’s info Shaw has learned that one of the perpetrators was a biker named Soldier, who likely will be up here to take part in the East Coast Rallies, held in New Hampshire. Shaw gets on his chopper and joins up with the army of bikers that have descended on the small town that’s hosting the event – and again, coinicidence be damned, he strikes gold fairly quickly, finding himself singled out by a suspicious biker named Tiny. 

Gradually Shaw works his way into Tiny’s group, among them Tiny’s sixteen year-old mama, Pearly, and also a mysterious blond biker with a slight build but hard eyes. Pearly emerges as the most memorable character in the novel; she’s the first girl to get close to Shaw since Stacey, proving herself to be wise beyond her years – not that 40 year-old Shaw has any sexual designs on the teenaged girl. Instead Heatter succeeds in giving this more of an emotional resonance, with Pearly breaking through the icy façade Shaw has built for himself. There’s also nicely-done dialog about how her dad back home is more worried about the TV reception than where his daughter is.

The townspeople are terrified of the bikers, the local law trying to segregate them in a remote camping site, and soon enough it boils over and the assembled bikers are as “stirred up as Apaches on a rampage.” They descend on the town, and here Heatter too quickly brings this sequence to a close; that mysterious blond biker at Tiny’s side is Soldier, of course, and Shaw gets his revenge by challenging him to a chopper joust. But even here coincidence intervenes again – a random dog runs out in front of Soldier’s bike and proves his undoing. It’s little things like this that keep The Scarred Man from greatness; Shaw should be the deliverer of bloody payback, not some poor little dog that gets in Soldier’s way.

For some reason the final third drops the whole biker angle and goes for a marina mystery vibe; now it’s a taut thriller as Shaw heads for Jamaica on his ketch with a pretty jet-setting blonde named Mary Caldwell. And when I say the biker angle is dropped I mean it’s dropped. It’s almost as if Heatter is using the finale of some earlier, unpublished yarn and has just clumsily welded it to his biker revenge story. To say it’s dissatisfying would be an understatement. Shaw’s gotten to this point due to the final lead Stud gave him – the third and final biker is named Skid, and all Stud knew was that Skid was from somewhere in the Palm Beach area. Surprisingly, Shaw makes nothing out of the fact that all three bikers have a name that starts with “S” (as does Shaw himself – at least his last name), and also it seems ridiculous that Shaw was just in Miami and then went to Boston before coming back down to Florida.

Again it’s all like a completely different novel; Shaw goes into a notorious bar owned by a guy named Red, who dispenses drugs from upstairs, and makes up some story about having a line on a few hundred pounds of “Jamaican Gold.” The belabored setup has it that Shaw’s heard some guy named Skid is good for acting as security on drug deals, and he wants Red’s help in finding him. All very ridiculous and overly-complicated, and again just seems like Heatter had another unfinished story laying around that he decided to weld onto the end of this one. After meeting with Shaw encounters the lovely Mary Caldwell, who comes over to visit him at his ketch; she’s worldly and beautiful and claims to be Skid’s sister. Again Shaw finds himself becoming attracted to a woman for the first time since losing Stacey.

Eventually it builds to Mary and Shaw on the ketch, bound for Jamaica; Mary claims that Skid’s actually there, Heatter at this point deciding to go all-out with the coincidental nonsense. But he’s also peppered enough foreshadowing into this sequence that the reader kind of has an idea where it’s going. This sequence is also the most gory in the novel, with Red showing up to pull a heist on Shaw’s (nonexistent) drug money and Mary coming to the defense with a pistol. But the big “surprise” reveal just falls flat – as mentioned the reader at this point has a good idea who Skid is, and the inevitable comeuppance isn’t suitably retributive. There’s also stuff here that would offend the readers of our #metoo era, with declarations that Stacey enjoyed her gang-raping.

All in all, The Scarred Man makes for a fun read, but I definitely enjoyed the biker portions more than anything else. Heatter puts in enough biker details that you suspect he consulted an issue or two of Easyrider Magazine. The sequence in New Hampshire with the biker rally is especially entertaining, not to mention Shaw’s dialog with young Pearly, but it’s resolved too quickly – especially when you consider that the final sequence isn’t nearly as entertaining. But as mentioned Heatter’s writing is skilled and economical and he successfully pulls the reader along, though there is a strange tendency to randomly slip into present-tense at times; this happens on page 65, at the New Hampshire rally, and comes and goes so quickly in the narrative that I assume it had to be something Heatter missed in the editing stage.

Thursday, March 12, 2020

The Specialist #10: Beirut Retaliation


The Specialist #10: Beirut Retaliation, by John Cutter
August, 1985  Signet Books

The penultimate volume of The Specialist unfortunately loses all the oddball touches John Shirley imbued the previous ones with; Beirut Retaliation is for the most part a standard “terrorist of the week” yarn that would’ve been at home in the Gold Eagle line of books. Previous installments featured such pulpy aspects as Jack “The Specialist” Sullivan gaining super strength and even killing subway trolls with throwing stars, but this one doesn’t feature any of that, and in fact comes off as pretty dispirited. Maybe Shirley knew the writing was on the wall for the series and just phoned this one in.

It’s about three months after the previous volume and when we reconnect with Sullivan he’s on a flight to Beirut. For the past few months he’s headed up Project Scalpel, a Defense Department initiative that’s been created to revenge terrorist attacks on the US. Sullivan we’re told has never taken a contract from the US government, or any government, but in this case he has made an exception; over 200 Marines were killed by radical Islamic terrorists in Beirut three months ago, and Sullivan’s burning with the desire to dish out bloody payback. Shirley saves us the trouble of reading all the red tape and planning Sullivan’s had to go through to get here, doling out chunks of backstory in various flashbacks.

I’m probably the only men’s adventure reader in history who kept wondering, “Yeah, but what about that little girl Sullivan adopted in the last volume?” Shirley does bother to fill us in on that, eventually, in another of those flashbacks – a flashback in which he almost perfunctorily dispenses with that other series mainstay, Sullivan’s hardcore shenanigans with his latest girlfriend. This is Bonnie, who lives in Manhattan and I believe first appeared in the second volume, but I was too lazy in my review back then to note the name of the main female character in it. I think it was Bonnie. Anyway, she’s now becoming more of Sullivan’s “main woman,” to the point that our hero’s afraid he’s falling in love. In the flashback he visits Bonnie, who is the official guardian of little Melinda, who as we’ll recall Sullivan rescued in the previous volume.

Sullivan’s brought the little girl a Cabbage Patch Doll (which cost him eighty bucks!!), finally having gotten away from the busy prepping of Project Scalpel in DC, but Melinda’s in school. However Bonnie’s there, which makes for the prime opportunity for some “afternoon delight.” While previous volumes have featured (intentionally) comedic purple prose, this one’s basically over and done with in a few sentences, though we do get this memorable line: “[Sullivan] pumped and pounded like an M110 self-propelled howitzer.” Surprisingly, this will be it so far as Sullivan’s sexual activities go – save that is for a surprise bang late in the novel (which happens to be one of those precious few “oddball” moments). 

But all this was in the past; we meet Sullivan while he’s flying in to Beirut…and then a PLO terrorist tries to hijack the plane. In the incident depicted on the cover by artist Mel Crair, Sullivan’s able to bullshit his way into the cockpit, where he almost casually disposes of the terrorists. But he’s undercover, the secrecy of Project Scalpel of prime importance, so the nebbish businessman who was seated beside Sullivan is given credit for foiling the hijacking. This is a subplot Shirley later plays out, when the businessman – made famous by the media for his “heroic” actions – becomes a target of terrorists and Sullivan has to go to the rescue.

Sullivan’s hand-picked team for the Beirut retaliation features series staples Merlin and Rolff, commandoes who have helped Sullivan in previous exploits but who have now, for plot contrivances, gotten soft: Merlin’s “hooked” on marijuana and Rolff drinks all day. Then there’s Rialto Block, a tough black vet Sullivan fought with in ‘Nam; Sullivan’s recruiting of Block for Project Scalpel features an interminable flashback of Sullivan going into the “black Mafia” of Washington, DC and finding Block, who now acts as a mob enforcer. And finally there’s slackjawed yokel Boots Wilson, a southern racist who hates Block, and vice versa. And heading up Project Scalpel is military moron Colonel Mitchell, whose prime motivation is covering his own ass and ensuring that he keeps Sullivan in check. He’s also the one who insisted that Boots Wilson be part of the commando team.

In other words the team’s a mess, and Sullivan, who is particularly driven this time, blows a fuse when he sees what a shitty state they’re in. We take an unwanted detour into military fiction as Sullivan puts the team through hellish boot camp, pushing them into a self-sustaining unit. This does lead to one of the oddball touches that we took for granted in previous books: Boots, who takes off from the team after a grueling hike through the desert, runs afoul of “desert bandits.” Clearly inspired by the Sand People of Star Wars, they wear masked turbans and ride in Jeeps that have skulls on them. This leads to the best action scene in the book, as Sullivan and the others come to the rescue in armed dune buggies, climaxing with a gory sequence of Boots beating one of the bandits to death with his bare fists.

But otherwise Beirut Retaliation lacks the dark humor of the previous books, and just comes off like any other men’s adventure novel from the ‘80s. Even the villains are sadly typical: the Holy Warriors of Islam, who are known for using self-explosive devices to wipe out people, places, and things. And again we get a sad reminder of the progressive movement of radical Islam: Sullivan has to explain to his comrades that these particular terrorists don’t care about their own lives, and indeed look forward to martyring themselves if it means they can wipe out a bunch of innocents. They’re led by the mysterious Hassan the Red, so named because he wears a red turban; he claims to get his orders directly from Allah, and only informs his underlings of their latest target days before the attack will be scheduled. Hence, Sullivan and team know another attack is coming, they just don’t know where or when.

The bit with the nebbish businessman who took credit for the airplane rescue is another fun moment; he’s being kept in a bakery, and Sullivan and Moshe (a Mossad agent Sullivan’s worked with before) stagger in, pretending to be lepers. This part features Sullivan rushing through flames and fooling the superstitious terrorists into thinking he’s a demon from hell. Later in the book Sullivan looms over another captured terrorist, one that’s been drugged so that his body feels nothing, and pretends to be a ghost. Oh and the best bit of all is a random, eleventh hour sequence in which Sullivan takes the virginity of a pretty female terrorist they capture; when Moshe says no torture will make the girl talk, Sullivan says he has another idea in mind. Unfortunately brief, this sequence is on the level of other craziness in previous books: “[Sullivan] suddenly thrust deep within her once again and ground his dick into her sore, bloodied twat.” Good grief! But she’s game for it: “Having tasted a real man, she was a junkie for Sullivan.”

Otherwise too much of Beirut Retaliation is padding, with Sullivan and team going around Beirut and trying to get a lead on Hassan the Red’s plans. The climax involves them chasing after a four-man suicide party that’s planning to wipe out a US Navy ship in Alexandria, Egypt. The climax sees some dire repercussions for some of Sullivan’s team (spoiler alert – it’s none of the recurring characters), and even worse Hassan the Red escapes into Iran. The novel ends with Sullivan vowing to chase into Iran and wipe him out, government be damned. Sadly this means the next novel will continue with this bland Gold Eagle vibe – and even more sadly, the next volume would be the last. 

Bonus factoid: Each volume of The Specialist has featured a “next volume preview” sort of thing, excerpting a few pages of the next installment. We’re told in this one that the next volume will be titled “Iran Retaliation,” but the actual published title was American Vengeance. I’m curious if this sheering away of the pulp aspect and going for more of a blasé, generic “Muslim terrorist of the week” angle was due to the publisher…maybe sales were dwindling and they figured just aping Gold Eagle might help. If so, the plan failed.

Monday, March 9, 2020

Tropical Detective Story


Tropical Detective Story, by Raymond Mungo
No month stated, 1972  E.P. Dutton Books

A novel in only the loosest sense, Tropical Detective Story is a piece of hippie literature I picked up several years ago but am only now getting around to reading. Raymond Mungo was famous in the counterculture at the time for his nonfiction books about dropping out and starting a commune (Total Loss Farm, etc), but it would appear this publication didn’t resonate with readers as his previous ones had, never even garnering a paperback edition.

For some curious reason, Mungo here delivers what is a sequel to Total Loss Farm, but all character names are changed – he himself, though he narrates the novel and is cleary the same guy from the previous books, is now known as “Dennis Lunar.” I’ve not read Mungo’s other books but they must be a struggle if they’re as pretentiously “literary” as this one is. Mungo seems to have attempted a “Proust for the LSD Generation” or something, and any of the stuff you want from a novel – relatable characters, a sensible plot that builds to a resolution, etc – is not to be found here. Stuff just happens, characters and incidents are introduced with little setup or payoff, and nothing makes an impression on the reader.

Other, that is, than the annoying qualities of Dennis Lunar. As is typical with the other hippie lit books I read back in the day, our narrator is so obsessed with himself that he succeeds in invoking the reader’s wrath. So much of Tropical Detective Story is given over to ruminations on how love is the other side of hate, how hard it is to truly love someone, how love is this impossible concept…and I’m like of coure it is when all you think about is yourself twenty-four hours a day. But then the hippies were for the most part self-obessesed, and our narrator is no different from the other protagonists of the hippie lit I’ve read. Just be warned that, if you choose to struggle through this novel, you will be suffering 160-some pages of egregious navel-gazing.

The book is subheaded “The Flower Children Meet The Voodoo Chiefs,” and years ago when I first discovered this book while hunting for hippie literature I hoped it would be like a psychedelic adventure tale, with a sort of acid illuminati going up against voodoo practicioners or something. Maybe like a men’s adventure take on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. But my friends no such luck. The subhead is just a lame in-joke because, later in the novel – and as usual without any plot development or resolution – we learn that “Lunar” is hired to write a script for Robert Redford (here too appearing under a pseudonym), and this is the title Lunar comes up with for it. We don’t even get an idea of what the friggin’ story’s about.

No, even the actual title itself has nothing to do with the novel Mungo delivers – “Tropical Detective Story” just being another random phrase Lunar comes up with in the course of his incessant navel-gazing and self-obsessing. Other contemporary reference points for this one would be Confessions Of A Hope Fiend, or even Shards Of God, but where both of those at least had stuff going on in them, ie plots and characters and action, Tropical Detective Story is basically just a prolonged ego-stroke. Whereas Leary and Sanders took their respective stories and mythologized them, providing a bit of fantasy with their psychedelia, Mungo delivers what is really just a nonfiction book about his travels around the world, with the middle section coming off like Brokeback Mountain for the Woodstock set.

Lunar hops around in time; the book opens with him in New York City, aka “The Moon,” reflecting back on a “crime” he committed last year, ie the Fall of 1970. The crime, we learn, is falling in love, and Lunar will act as a “detective” to figure out how the crime was committed. What we won’t learn for a while is that Lunar fell in love with a dude, a ranch hand type named Jake who doesn’t appear until the second half of the nove;. “I used to write books then,” states Lunar when briefly recounting his time at a commune farm he started in Vermont, apparently striving for a meta-fictional approach in that this pseudo-novel is a sequel to Total Loss Farm but never outright declares itself as such. Lunar claims he is guilty of “the sin of pride” and has committed “the crime of love,” and already within the first few pages we know the beating we’re about to endure.

First though we have this random trip to Europe Lunar takes with big and busty Eustacia Vye, presumably a recurring character from the previous book(s). While it would appear these two were in a solid relationship earlier, now it’s on the rocks, and they spend the first leg of the trip to Europe on bad vibes. There’s copious dopesmoking and acid-dropping throughout, but Mungo doesn’t really get into the details, likely because he assumed his readers were in a similar state of chemical influence. Using Lunar’s dwindling proceeds from his previous book, the two hook up with some other girl named Marie and hopscotch around Europe, Mungo doing precious little to bring the characters, situations, or locations to life.

There’s also a lot of messiness to the plot, such as it is – we’re told that Eustacia “loses her mind” in Belgrade after a fight with Lunar and takes off, yet without any explanation she’s still with him and Marie when they visit the next country. But it’s like that throughout, as if Mungo did a couple tabs and hit the typewriter and then sent the publisher his first draft. Lunar of course finds the opportunity to make it with both women – each of whom are grossly undescribed – but surprisingly it’s all left off page. I say this because a lot of the hippie lit I’ve read had some hardcore shenanigans in it. Not so here. Indeed, there’s a part where Lunar lays in bed between the two women, knowing he could have either (or both!) of them, but decides not to partake. This is a definite “hmmm” moment which will have repercussions later.

The Europe stuff just sort of drags on, culminating in a trip to Scotland where the gang hangs out with a rich guy named Jason. Here during an LSD trip Lunar sees a dead friend come to life, a guy named Fox who took his own life the year before. This too will have repercussions later. Finally Lunar returns to America, hanging out again on the commune farm, and here’s where the Brokeback Mountain stuff begins. In another “hmmm” moment which will pan out, a guy named Jake is given more description and setup than any female character in the novel, indicating that he has captured the author’s eye more than anyone else. For my friends it will turn out that Lunar has been “hetero-hiding” all his life and suddenly wants us to know he’s in love with studly ranch hand-type Jake. 

Humorously though, this homoerotic obsession is not shared. In brazen disregard of the identity politics that would one day consume the progressive movement, Jake points out that Lunar can’t be in love with him…because, you know, he and Jake are both men. I find this stuff interesting because it shows that even the progressive movement of the past would be deemed conservative when compared to the progressive movement of today. But I guess that’s “progress,” so to speak, and it makes one wonder how much more progressive the movement will ultimately become – I’m assuming Greg Egan type stuff with multiple genders. Anyway, Lunar is not to be swayed, and spends the rest of the novel badgering Jake with his declarations of love. For some inexplicable reason, Jake goes along with him on his next round of adventures around the world, despite showing no interest in giving in to Lunar’s homosexual advances.

First we have the mentioned bit with the Robert Redford analogue hiring Lunar to write a script. We don’t get much about this and don’t find out what happens with it. Nor is a big deal made out of how Lunar has become a darling of the elites; he flies to New York to meet with his agent and has a few meetings with the Redford stand-in, but absolutely nothing’s made of any of it. But then Lunar flies around the globe so much that it just comes off as yet another brief stop on his interminable trip. Marie from the earlier section shows up at the farm in Vermont, but now she’s no longer Lunar’s soul-mate (that’s Jake, now); instead she too has a thing for Jake! This would seem to set up a bizarre love triangle, but (and you shouldn’t be surprised at such a statement now) Mungo does nothing to exploit it.

Eventually Lunar and Jake go to Costa Rica, then to Panama, where dead friend Fox again appears – this time in “a new body.” After a “second voodoo attack” (ie a bad trip), Lunar is stunned to see dead Fox Rosen now posing as “Louis Caprichio, poet of obscure US background” who happens to live down here in Panama. This is also around the time that Jake and Lunar’s “karmic struggle” has caused an earthquake in South America, their war of wills – Lunar badgering Jake for some gay sex, Jake saying “no thanks” – actually affecting the Earth itself! But things cool down with the arrival of Fox-Louis, who by the way has no knowledge of Fox Rosen, of course – but Lunar and Jake insist he is their dead pal reborn in a new form, and thus Louis Caprichio is referred to as “Fox” throughout. 

Lunar and Jake achieve some sort of LSD gnosis and Lunar seems to imply they might’ve done the deed after all, or at least there’s no need for them to screw because they’ve achieved some sort of oneness or something. Really I don’t know what the hell to think. Anyway the action moves to New York City, where Lunar befriends the mysterious Zagg, a young mage with heavy duty acid that kills the ego. Here we get nonsensical, unexplored surreal bits like Lunar and Jake discovering they can “become invisible” at will and running around town. Zagg is by far the most interesting character on display, but – have you guessed it yet? – Mungo does little to explore the character or bring him to life.

Tropical Detective Story features one of the most humorously random “climaxes” I’ve ever read; after his acid-borne self-awareness, courtesy Zagg’s drugs, Lunar hops on a cargo boat with a newly-introduced fellow hippie named Tresspasser’s Will. Their destination: The Far East. Their mission: To defend US currency against the ever-strengthening yen!! I’m not joking, that’s really how the novel ends. Presumably Mungo planned a follow-up, but I’d wager given the failure of this one to draw in a sufficient audience no further adventures ever materialized for Dennis Lunar.

As a piece of hippie lit, Tropical Detective Story at least scores in that it shows where the headspaces of hippies were in the late ‘60s. But as a novel it’s a grand failure; Mungo seems at times to be attempting a Nog sort of stream-of-conscious thing, while also doing his “Proust for the LSD generation” thing, but neither aspect is sufficiently developed to make an impact on the reader. I’m assuming Mungo’s straight-up nonfiction books are better – I mean, they’d have to be. He is a good writer, though, at least in the flair of the prose itself, it’s just that I was hoping for an actual novel – particularly one about friggin’ Flower Children facing off against Voodoo Chiefs!

Thursday, March 5, 2020

The Sadist (aka Ryker #6)


The Sadist, by Edson T. Hamill
No month stated, 1975  Leisure Books

This was the last installment of Ryker to sport a painted cover, and as usual with Leisure Books I figure it was commissioned for a different novel – the guy that’s supposed to be Ryker has blond hair and is toting what appears to be a .45 automatic, and the white-haired doctor looming over the naked woman on the operating table doesn’t exist in the book. In fact, the villain of the piece, the titular “Sadist” (though he’s never actually referred to as such), has dark hair and is relatively young. There is a part where Ryker visits the morgue and views the burned corpse of a female victim, so maybe the cover artist just got his wires crossed.

At any rate The Sadist is a slow-moving chore of a read, lacking the spark of the earlier De Mille installments. Ryker here has been emasculated into a cipher, with none of the blowhard assholery of the De Mille original, nor even the fiery gumption of the version Len Levinson gave us in #3: The Terrorists. He lives only for his job, and when not at work sits at home and watches TV or reads magazines. He doesn’t fight with his fellow officers, and indeed has a friendly, respectful rapport with his commanding officer, Lt. Sal Fiscetti, referring to him on a first-name basis. But otherwise the same recurring characters and locations appear as in the De Mille novels –  there’s fellow cop Bo Lindly, and Ryker works out of the same fictional department, the Twenty-First Precinct on West 68th Street – which leads me to believe that series editor Peter McCurtin at least tried to retain some order of semblance with the original De Mille installments. Ryker even reads with his lips, a habit De Mille noted in his books. The Sadist also follows the late ‘60s/early ‘70s settings of the De Mille novels, taking place in 1970.

Thanks to Lynn Munroe we know that the first writer to serve as “Edson T. Hamill” was Paul Hofrichter, who turned in the fifth volume, The Child Killer. I have that one but likely will never read it, or at least not anytime soon – a novel about a creep who rapes and kills little boys just doesn’t sound like something I want to read. As Bill Crider so aptly put it, “It’s probably best that some books remain forgotten.” And thanks to Lynn we also know that Hofrichter wrote this volume as well – and it’s on the same level as all his other work. There’s hardly any action and the book is mostly comprised of arbitrary situations featuring the main villain or Ryker just sitting around and brainstorming about the case.  There is a bland, meat-and-potatoes narrative style and zero spark to the characters or the situations.

And as with most other Hofrichter books I’ve read, the supposed protagonist is a supporting character in his own book. The true star is Michael Marlin, a professional hitman in his 40s or 50s who has spent the past few decades killing women – older housewives in particular. We meet him in action, in an overlong sequence in which he chases some poor woman to her death in the Columbus Circle section of Manhattan, which we’re informed at night becomes a no man’s land of junkies, rapists, and pickpockets. Marlin forces the woman to climb an endless series of stairs to the rooftop, holding her at gunpoint, and then throws her down the chimney stack. After this folks we get a 32-page backstory on who Marlin is and how he got into this particular game; a specialist, he charges twenty thousand bucks a hit to rid wealthy husbands of wives they no longer want.

Meanwhile Ryker sits around in the precinct house and gabs with “Sal” and Lindly about the case. There’s a gruesome bit where he and Fiscetti visit the morgue at Bellevue, all of it uncannily similar to the part in Death Squad where Keller views a corpse being embalmed. In fact this part goes aboveboard in the “too much information” department, Hofrichter clearly striving for legitimacy in his otherwise lethargically-paced procedural, as Ryker views the horrifically charred body of the woman killed in the opening chapter and we get to know every little detail of what he sees.

Marlin is the star of the show, even picking up a woman for himself, a “sleazy” blonde go-go dancer who lives next door at the grungy hotel he’s staying in. (Ryker for his part goes without a woman – but he’s such a cipher he wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway.) Marlin despite his killing specialty is a hit with women – you might even say he’s a lady-killer if you were into lame puns – and he picks this babe up with ease, though Hofrichter keeps the tomfoolery squarely off-page. Eventually she figures out there’s more to her mystery neighbor than she suspected, leading to another gruesome sequence in which Marlin employs one of his fallback termination methods: Drano.

Women fare very poorly in The Sadist; it only occurred to me after I read the novel that every single female character in it is killed! In fact on the same night Marlin uses his Drano technique, he also flat-out strangles a woman he’s been hired to kill, another “sleazy” type who comes on to him. It’s all very lurid but undone by Hofrichter’s typical penchant for page-filling and padding. For example, Edward Marcel, the husband of the woman killed in the opening chapter, is giving his own inordinate subplot in which hardly anything happens. What makes it all the more annoying is that his name, Marcel, is so similar to “Marlin” that you can’t help but confuse the two characters.

There isn’t much of an attempt at bringing sleazy ‘70s Manhattan to life. Occasionally we’ll get the mention of a certain street, or maybe a topical detail like “a seedy hotel on Ninth Avenue,” but there’s no feeling of grungy veracity like you’d get with Len Levinson. But anyway Ryker and “Sal” basically just drive around the New York area and interview people who knew Mrs. Marcel, leading to reader annoyance in that they go over stuff we readers were privy to way back in the first chapter. What’s worse is we have lots of brainstorming sequences where the two cops try to figure out how Mrs. Marcel was killed and who might’ve hired her killer. This does at least lead to Ryker detecting a pattern; there are a few other murdered housewives in Manhattan, and Ryker begins to suspect they’re courtesy the same serial killer who has been offing housewives across the United States over the past few decades.

But there’s no action, nothing memorable. The “climax” involves Ryker rounding up Marcel and a few other husbands whose wives were “mysteriously murdered” and grilling them for info. Eventually he finds the bookie who arranged the hits, a sleazy character named Poagie. There’s a lot of stuff where Fiscetti – a police lieutenant, mind you – questions Ryker on basic investigative method and delivers bald exposition on this or that. And again as is typical with Hofrichter the book features an abrupt switch to “action” for the harried finale…poorly-handled action that doesn’t deliver a jolt because it’s so unexploited.

Marlin has relocated to another hotel, and a dragnet has surrounded him there without his knowledge. Ryker, Fiscetti, and Lindly go in with guns drawn and try to get the jump on Marlin, but he sees them and starts shooting with his .38. Lindly is hit in the chest, and the last we see of him he’s lying on the ground with a pale face.  Hofrichter never bothers to inform us if he lives or dies. This is another interesting paralell, because the “real” Lindly, ie De Mille’s original creation, was also killed in the line of duty, in Death Squad (despite appearing without any explanation in The Smack Man, which took place after Death Squad!). So I guess Bo Lindly just can’t catch a break. 

Anyway Ryker’s knocked out but then chases Marlin up to the roof, where the two get in a knock-down, drag-out fight in which Marlin kicks Ryker in the balls twice. Finally our hero, who has been instructed to take Marlin alive (the dude’s killed literally thousands of women and they want him to get the chair), decides to hell with it and hoists Marlin in the air and tosses him. And then delivers a lame one-liner, calling Marlin a “devil,” which seems incredibly underwhelming given how many innocent lives the guy has taken. And that’s it for The Sadist, and I guess that’s also it for me and Ryker…unless I ever decide to read The Child Killer.

Monday, March 2, 2020

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 11

Biker movies: 

Bury Me An Angel (1971): More of a drive-in exploitation flick than a true biker movie, Bury Me An Angel is notable for featuring one of the more memorable trailers of the grindhouse era, sporting some of the most outrageously alliterative hyperbole of all time (“A howling hellcat, humping a hot steel hog on a roaring rampage of revenge,” etc). Unfortunately the movie does not live up to the trailer, the plot, or even the friggin’ title! This one’s also notable for being written and directed by a woman (Barbara Peeters, who’s probably spent her whole life saying, “No, it’s spelled with two Es”), something that would likely be made into more of a big deal today than it would’ve been then. Peeters injects a bit more pathos into the film than typical – foreshadowing, as it turns out, for the sick reveal at the climax – but truth be told she’s hampered by a nonexistent budget and the movie’s as scatterbrained as an Angel on meth.

Speaking of Angels…there isn’t one to be found here, much less buried. The movie opens with about three minutes of various bikers sitting around and drinking, smoking pot, and snorting coke. No one’s introduced, and we just sort of meet what will become our protagonist: Dag, an Amazonian blonde with some of the biggest hair you’ll ever see in a movie (an incredibly wooden Dixie Peabody, delivering some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen in a lead role). Her brother Dennis (Dennis Peabody, presumably Dixie’s real-life brother) opens the front door and some mangy dude with shaggy hair and moustache tries to barge in with a shotgun. Dennis shuts the door on him and the shotgun goes off and there’s this awesome half-second clip of a mannequin getting shot in the head and red syrup flying everywhere; we’ll see this clip again and again throughout the flick as Dag flashes back on these events, as well as a close-up glimpse of Dennis’s bloody face.

The killer freaks out and runs away…and then the movie settles into a plodding rhythm until Dag can exact her revenge nearly 90 minutes later. Dag finds some info on who the killer was and where he might’ve headed and then sets out on her awesome purple chopper to kill him. She brings along two male buddies, both of them annoying as hell. The movie is so cheap, folks, like shoestring budget: all the interiors are drab white-walled affairs with maybe a pair of curtains. The film only seems cool when we get to see Dag and pals on their choppers, riding along to the original soundtrack by obscure rockers East-West Pipeline. Perhaps this is why Peabody even got cast in the role; maybe she was the only six-foot stacked blonde Peeters could find who knew how to ride a chopper, and it must be said that Peabody looks pretty damn good riding her chopper, even doing a little stunt work.

But sadly so much of Bury Me An Angel is tedious. There’s a total lack of understanding of how to tell a revenge thriller; it opens with Dag hellbent on revenge, but then she’s on the road and taunting redneck cops or meeting random “witches” who live in the desert. We also get that old standby of cheap movies everywhere: the interminable bar fight that’s played for laughs. Peeters doesn’t skirt on the exploitation, despite being a woman and delivering a “strong female character:” Dag goes skinny-dipping at one point and Peabody bares all. This sequence also illustrates the subtext of Dag’s true relationship with Dennis…the way she keeps freaking out over his memory, even unable to have sex with some dude she randomly picks up (ten minutes before the end of the film!), makes the viewer wonder what the hell was really going on between her and Dennis.

There’s no big action finale, no biker gang war. As mentioned there isn’t even an “Angel” for Dag to kill. We learn that Dennis actually stole that purple chopper, and the moustached killer was trying to get it back. When Dag finally corners him in the last few minutes of the film, the killer cowers and pleads for his life, swearing that he didn’t mean to kill Dennis. At this point we see that Peeters’s motive all along was to show us how sick Dag is, something we’d already gotten foreshadowing of thanks to the aforementioned witch appearance. But given this the delivery of “justice” is unsatisfying, and Dag’s final scream that she must “bury” her victim seems only to exist so Peeters could justify the title. All told, I’d suggest just watching the trailer for Bury Me An Angel instead of the movie itself. Oh, and Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty briefly appears as a biker, which if I’m not mistaken he actually was in real life before getting into the whole “TV actor” game.

Naked Angels (1969): First of all, this one features the most fuzzed-out soundtrack ever, courtesy future Mothers of Invention guitarist Jeff Simmons (it even scored an LP release on Frank Zappa’s Straight Records). Like some others on this list, the movie received a better production than I expected…I mean so many of these ‘60s/’70s biker movies were cheap exploitation, but Naked Angels clearly has at least a few artistic inclinations behind its low budget. Also, this one’s got more bike footage than most of the others reviewed here; there are lots of sequences of vintage choppers tearing along desert roads while fuzzy guitar rock blasts on the soundtrack. Even better, a couple such sequences feature topless biker mamas.

The plot follows a revenge angle which is unfortunately muddled. Mother (brawny Michael Greene, who legitimately looks like he could beat the tar out of just about anyone) returns to his club, The Angels, and drafts them into a run. I didn’t quite get the gist of the backstory, but apparently Mother’s been in jail the last couple months due to the actions of a rival biker gang. He wants his club to get on their bikes asap and head for the desert headquarters of the rival gang and dish out some bloody payback. The only other bikers of prominence here are Fingers (Richard Rust), Mother’s second in command who gradually becomes a Doubting Thomas, and Marlene, Mother’s mama (Jennifer Gan, who looks like a biker Stevie Nicks and wears hot lace-up jeans).

Along the way they stop in Vegas, and we’re treated to some cool shots of the contemporary sleazy glitz and glamor. There is a definite Easy Rider influence here, as there is with most other flicks on this list, with “artsy” angles and even still photography interspersed with the action. However an unfortunate tendency toward random runtime-filling hampers the movie. I mean Mother picks up some gal with no explanation, we’re treated to some good T and A, and then dudes in suits bust in and chase Mother out of the hotel room. Who they are is never explained. As for Mother’s random picking up of this chick, right in front of Marlene, it’s to demonstrate how he is increasingly becoming a psychotic prick in his quest for revenge.

Mother makes for one of the most unlikable lead characters I’ve ever seen; he pushes his club to the limits, making them chopper through the desert without stopping for water breaks. Even when a couple of his bikers crash out he wants to keep moving at all costs. He pushes things too far when he “turns out” Marlene because she questions his authority – “turning out” meaning that she’s now become the gang mama and prime for an initiatory raping. Fingers stops this and kicks Mother out of the club…and the movie becomes bizarrely flabby with interminable, poorly-edited scenes of the various bikers driving across the desert and meeting random people. And even worse the big brawl at the end is anticlimactic; we never get a good understanding of the rival gang, nor even what exactly they did to Mother. Hell, one of the gang even has to tell Mother who their president is, so Mother knows who to beat to death. Stranger yet the movie climaxes with a Mother-Fingers brawl, even though Mother’s just saved his former gang.

At any rate Naked Angels moves fairly quickly and features enough vintage biker action to keep you happy. And as mentioned there’s occasional nudity, which should please all my fellow sleazebags, though for some damn reason a late scene, where a blond Angel mama gets full-on nekkid (“Property of the Angels” written on her behind), is obscured by heavy shadow. There’s also a random psychedelic sequence in the latter half where Mother, apparently suffering from extreme dehydration, imagines himself in a Wild West saloon. Anyway I enjoyed Naked Angels, but I’d advise not making it your first bikersploitation movie; the editing is sometimes sloppy, the characters and plot are not fully developed, and the finale is underwhelming. But other than that it’s a pretty cool.

The Peace Killers (1971): My gateway drug into the biker exploitation universe, The Peace Killers melds Easy Rider artsiness with grindhouse sleaze, and does well on both counts. I really enjoyed this one and it was a lot better than I expected it would be. What I love about these vintage exploitation films is they don’t waste your time with backstory and setup – we learn from the get-go who is good and who is bad. This one’s a revenge thriller with the bikers being the bad guys (and another gang serving as the anti-heroes), thus the bikes themselves aren’t as central to the plot.

Kristy (a very attractive Jess Walton), a former biker mama, is trying to live the dropped-out life on a commune run by Alex (Paul Prokop, looking a little like Trapper John M.D. meets the Beach Boys’s Mike Love). One day Kristy and her brother Jeff (Michael Ontkean) run into a few members of Kristy’s former gang. Word of warning for modern sensitive types: women are treated incredibly poorly in these vintage biker movies, there to be fondled, exploited, raped, etc. Kristy’s backstory has it that, as the mama of nutjob biker president Rebel (a truly menacing Clint Richie), she witnessed a brutal gang-rape carried out by Rebel’s gang on some poor girl (we of course get some full-on exploitation material in a flashback sequence). After this Kristy escaped the biker life, and Rebel has vowed that if he ever finds “the dirty whore” he’ll rape her to death, too.

There’s a definite sense of danger that Rebel and crew will catch Kristy, but humorously no one else’s safety is a consideration; she hides in the commune farm at one point while the bikers run roughshod over everyone, even attempting to rape one of the women (there’s plentiful toplessness in this one, but it’s always as a result of a woman’s shirt being torn off by a biker attempting rape). When Rebel’s men catch Kristy there’s some crazy stuntwork, with her bundled up and strung between two choppers as they tear along the road. This leads to some cool unexpected plot detours, though; Kristy manages to crawl from where Rebel’s stashed her outside a bar and onto a road, hoping to stop whatever traffic happens to come by…and finds herself surrounded by another biker gang. What’s worse, one that has a score to settle with her from her days as Rebel’s mama.

This rival gang has gotten its Diversity and Inclusion checklist decades before anyone else; it’s a multi-racial mix of men and women, led by a fierce black lady called Black Widow (Lavelle Roby, sporting a perfectly spherical afro). Hell, there’s even a sexy Asian babe in the mx, but the camera never really captures her face and her dialog is clearly dubbed. Even more “D&I before D&I,” she appears to be in a lesbian relationship with Black Widow. This movie would perplex all the Safe Spacers of today; the diversity and female empowerment is through the roof…but the women are constantly being fondled, stripped, and raped. Oh and also in this new biker gang is Albert Popwell, who of course is most remembered for his appearances in the first three Dirty Harry flicks; his character gets the most focus outside of Black Widow, and he wields a nasty pitchfork in the final battle to memorable effect.

The cool thing about The Peace Killers is that it strives to be more than just a simple revenge film; one could argue Bury Me An Angel tried the same, but that one constantly fell on its face with jarring tonal changes, going from revenge thriller to slapstick comedy and back again. The Peace Killers delivers a slew of strong characters – strong in context of the genre, that is – and has them react in ways that cause for change and growth. For example commune leader Alex preaches against violence and turns his other cheek to Rebel and his men as they tear up the commune, to the point of course where Alex starts to look like a foolish coward. But baby when push comes to shove…maybe you should put your money on the rail-thin pacifist hippie guru instead of the brawny speedfreak biker.

The climax is great and everything Naked Angels should’ve been; in a prefigure of John Milius’s Conan The Barbarian the communers (is that a word?) sharpen stakes and set up a series of deadly booby traps to snare the bikers. A busty brunette communer really kicks some biker ass, but Black Widow and her gang don’t come off so well, Black Widow in particular. But as stated Albert Popwell gets to pitchfork someone, but this too has an extra element, as the victim, who himself has murdered innocents, starts pleading for mercy. I mean I liked this one a lot, but wish the finale had paid off a little more…we only learn what happened to Jeff, for example, due to some off-hand dialog, and I would’ve preferred to see more of a comeuppance for Rebel.

Werewoles On Wheels (1971): I was familiar with this title from various grindhouse trailer compilations, and also several years ago Andy Votel released the fuzzed-out soundtrack on his Finders Keepers label. I was under the impression this would be a campy biker-horror cash-in, but as with The Peace Killers I was surprised at how good Werewolves On Wheels really was. It’s more along the lines of Easy Rider with an overlay of the Satanic renaissance that was going on at the time in the counterculture; I mean if Kenneth Anger ever made a werewolf biker film it would’ve surely been like this. Somehow this low-budget bikersploitation picture captures the burned-out, occult-heavy vibe of the early ‘70s, and it does so incredibly well.

The focus is more on mounting suspense and terror, and while we do get to actually see a werewolf on a chopper, it doesn’t happen until the very end of the film. But man the bikers in this film seem legit, even if one of ‘em was a former child actor on Father Knows Best! (Billy Gray as “Pill,” who doesn’t get any lines until the third act.) Our heroes are the Devil’s Advocates, an outlaw biker gang who when we meet them are tearing through the desert roads of California and raising hell. These aren’t the peaceniks of Easy Rider; the movie opens with a pair of yokels running a couple bikers off the road, and the gang goes for some beatdown revenge.

There’s a subtle bonkers vibe to the film, too, I mean there just happens to be a friggin’ Satanic temple in the countryside (hey, it was California in the early ‘70s), and the bikers carouse on the temple grounds and raise hell. Then a bunch of robed monks come out and serve them bread and wine. The bikers partake gluttonously and then pass out. Here the flick goes full-on Satanic Psych, with a surreal sequence of the monks doing a ritual (complete with a sacrificed black cat!) while the soundtrack goes into an unhinged bolero that sounds like the last part of The Doors’ “The End.” Then the main biker mama (ultra-sexy Donna Anders, here credited as DJ Anderson, herself a former TV actor) wakes up in a trance and, as the “Bride of Satan,” doffs all her clothes and does a Satanic go-go before the assembled monks. Cool stuff and very well staged – and Anders is hot stuff for sure. You know I like my sexy Satanic chicks.

After getting his woman back, Devil’s Advocates president Adam (Steve Oliver) leads the bikers back off into the desert. Here the bad trip sets it – and I forgot to mention, but one of the bikers is a spaced-out cat named Tarot (who gives ridiculously literal readings of his tarot cards), who keeps warning the others that they’ve gotten into some heavy shit. At this point the werewolves show up, mostly kept to the shadows, appearing with the full moon each night and killing a few of the bikers. There’s some brief and well-done gore here, too, including a half-second shot of a female biker’s eye slashed out of her skull.

The werewolves don’t make a big appearance until the final minutes, and they’re along the linese of how Lon Chaney, Jr. looked back in the day, if maybe a little hairier. What I also enjoy about these old exploitation flicks is there’s no belaboring the point; the bikers realize that two of the gang are werewolves and give chase, determined to destroy them. It’s all just handled matter of factly and almost casually. There’s a fair bit of motorcycle stunt work here, with werewolf bikers on fire and doing mad leaps off cliffs and such. The finale delivers the mandatory downbeat ‘70s ending, but the shock reveal at the end is a bit muddled because we’re supposed to be surprised to see certain characters hanging out with the monks, but given that they no longer have beards or wear sunglasses and the like it’s hard to tell at first who they are.

Director Michael Levesque does a phenomenal job of keeping the film moving while delivering on both the exploitation and the Easy Rider-esque artsy angles. Some reviewers have complained the film is flabby in the midsection, but I thought it moved at a snappy pace, mostly because I just dug the vibe. It’s a mystery why this one isn’t better known; I’d guess it suffered from poor VHS or DVD releases in the past and no one felt like sitting through a film they could barely see – so much of it occurs in the dark that I could imagine a subpar print would render most of the action and actors invisible at some points. Anyway I really enjoyed this one and will certainly be watching it again in the future.