Varoom Without a View

The Wild Angels. Across the flats of southern California hustles a big mean hog. Ape bars, twin exhausts, chrome on everything except the rubber, this Harley is doing a ton and still hot to trot. At the stomper sits Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda), a cool fool dragging a black leather jacket, bronk boots, hair as long as a girl's, and a German Iron Cross. With his free hand, H.B. picks his nose and then thoughtfully scratches his crotch. On the stingy seat, wearing a grab-me sweater, sits his sheep (Nancy Sinatra). Behind them 20 other double-straddled sickles varoom.

Make the scene? For the first time since The Wild One (1954), Hollywood has moved in for a closeup of the big barbaric motorcycle gangs of Southern California. Directed by Laslo Benedek, The Wild One was a sociological shocker that in the main effectively described a sick subculture. Directed by Roger Corman, a cut-rate master of the macabre who seems to work better with spiders than he does with actors, The Wild Angels is a sleazily synthetic retread that will probably take a long skid through U.S. grind houses. However, the film may well make a mark in Europe--the

Italians have selected it to represent the U.S. at the Venice Film Festival --where a large audience likes to be shown how beastly Americans are.

Beastly is the word for the people in this picture. Out beyond Palm Springs, six of the sicklers solo off and chainwhip a couple of stompers from another hogpen. In the peel-off, Loser (Bruce Dern) puts the burn on a police bike, catches a slug in the back, lands on the critical list. H.B. and his buddies bust him out of the hospital, but back at the clubhouse Loser dies of shock while puffing pot. As the fuzz move in, the choppers move out for Loser's funeral in a chapel draped with Nazi banners. The-rite soon turns into a riot, during which the stompers stomp the preacher, wreck the chapel, and gang rape the dead man's grieving girl friend.

Such things happen, but in this picture they don't happen in a believable way. There is too much hoke in the violence, too much duh-duh in the dialogue. And the hog stompers, when not actually stomping somebody, are played for cheap laughs as a fright-wigged cast of slum-dumb characters. In real life, man, they are something else.

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