I love genre cinema. I will always have a soft spot for horror, action, sci-fi, and all the subgenres that exist inside those larger categories. What I have never felt any real connection to are those films that exist in the realm of pure sleaze. You know the ones: the films from the ’70s and ’80s, filled with ugly violence and sex that is the opposite of titillating, usually shot on cheap film stock with semi-amateur casts. But knowing these films have a large following and several companies devoted to restoring them makes me wonder what I am missing. With that in mind, I am going to do a deep dive into the world of sleazy exploitation. This is My Exploitation Education. This month’s entry is WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS.
A long held belief of mine is that no matter the film, it can be improved with the inclusion of either werewolves or motorcycles. Just imagine how brilliant the already great CITIZEN KANE would have been if the scandal that put an end to the political career of Orson Welles’ Kane was not an affair, but that he turned into a wolf at the full moon. What if the ending to THE SEARCHERS had framed John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards through the doorway of the farmhouse as he fired up his Triumph Bonneville and rode across the Monument Valley into the sunset? I honestly get chills thinking about it. By that reasoning, you would think that WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS would be an automatic masterpiece of the highest order. For the love of all things lycanthropic, it promises werewolves on motorcycles! Unfortunately, like most exploitation movies, it promises much more than it can deliver.
Released in 1971, WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS finds the biker movie at something of a crossroads. After EASY RIDER forever altered the American independent film movement at large, but more specifically changed the way biker flicks were normally done in 1969 by using the genre as an existentialist exercise about the malaise that followed the flame-out of the hippie era, it was hard for biker movies to return to their core interests of sex, violence, and drugs. While the genre always had an uneasy kinship with the counter-cultural movement in the ’60s, EASY RIDER fully embraced the counter-culture, offering up gentler, self-reflective bikers who are treated like scum by small-minded rednecks.
WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS tries to pick up on some of the counterculture steam of EASY RIDER. The motorcycle gang at the center of the film embraces drug use and there is an implied free love element, but the rest of their behavior is a combination of the types of biker gangs seen in the straightforward ’60s biker flicks and the portrait painted by Hunter S. Thompson in his excellent book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. In all honesty, WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS is probably a more accurate representation of biker gangs in 1971 than the more esoteric road movies of that era in which they were presented. But it feels a little like the movie is behind the times from the opening credits.
If the biker element of the movie was a bit of a letdown, at least there was still the promise that these bikers would turn into werewolves. Not only that, these werewolves were going to do battle with a Satanic cult. Time to make some popcorn, crack open a PBR, and put on the motorcycle jacket hanging in the back of the closet, because we’re about to ride into exploitation movie Nirvana!
Right? Right? …right?
WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS is actually not a bad movie. It’s just that the sense of disappointment when it fails to capitalize on its title and premise is so acute that it feels like a bad movie while you’re watching it. After giving myself a week to step back and consider it, I can appreciate it for the weirdly mystical, occasionally raunchy, attempted head-trip of a flick that it actually is.
The reality of the movie is that the biker gang never actually fights a Satanic cult. Instead, after they beat the hell out of the driver of a truck that causes one of them to wreck his bike, they wind up hanging out with the Satanists, getting drunk on their wine. While the bikers are passed out, the Satanists perform a ceremony with biker Helen (D.J. Anderson) where she dances naked with a snake above a roaring bonfire—as one does in a film called WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS. After Helen’s jealous boyfriend—and leader of the gang–Adam (Steve Oliver) breaks the spell of the ceremony and takes Helen back out on the road, members of the gang starting getting ripped to shreds at night by an unknown animal.
It doesn’t take a road map to follow what is happening and who is killing the bikers, but the killing sequences are stylish and bloody with ripped out throats and spraying blood caught in some very nice slow motion sequences. Director Michel Levesque finds beauty in the grimy, ferocious world of the bikers and the cult. In some ways the film might actually be too visually well-done as the slicker touches take away from what should be a messy, gritty action-horror movie. But I’m not sure that it’s the best idea to fault a director for trying to instill a style beyond simple point-and-shoot.
It isn’t until the final five minutes when WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS actually provides a werewolf riding a motorcycle. By that point, it’s too little too late for what the title promises. But the movie you get instead never fails to hold interest and tries to find some sort of honesty in the outlaw biker lifestyle. Whether that movie is of interest to the viewer depends on how much they really want to see a werewolf burn rubber down a back road. While I’m bummed I never got that visual here, I can appreciate the movie as a pretty decent biker flick trying, yet not altogether succeeding, to break out of the shadow of changing times.
Tags: Biker Flicks, D.J. Anderson, Michel Levesque, My Exploitation Education, Satanic Cults, Steve Oliver, Werewolf Movies, Werewolves on Wheels
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