James Bryan's Hell Riders is the amazing, sublime pinnacle of a very bad movie genre, the outlaw biker gang film. Hell Riders takes every single cliche of that weary, predictable genre and blows it up bigger than life, to glorious effect. The characters are absurdist caricatures of their prototypes, and act accordingly. Action takes place for little or no reason at all, and the ramshackle plot lurches along in fits and spurts. Where Hell Riders excels is in its use of very strong content, making the bigger, better biker films look downright timid by comparison. The Hell Riders gang have no redeeming qualities whatsoever - they are the embodiment of evil incarnate, an engine of destruction manifested to wreak havoc on polite society. Their attacks on hapless citizens are vicious and brutal, their treatment of women barbaric, their main goal the total annihilation of civilization. Set largely in a small, quiet Western town, the use of an old Wild West setting is appropriate, because all of these biker films were really nothing more than allegorical Westerns in modern garb. The finale, in which the beleaguered townsfolk gather heavy artillery and slaughter the bikers with extreme prejudice, is a righteous, cathartic massacre worthy of a Peckinpah film. TV stars Adam West and Tina Louise stand out admirably in what could easily have been thankless roles, and the extraordinary Renee Harmon is delightful as a very unlikely, indeed cartoonish, leather-clad biker moll. Hell Riders takes a shopworn genre and clarifies it to the point of film poetry, and as with Bryan's other films, Hell Riders is photographed brilliantly, and looks far prettier than it has any right to. Not exactly a satire, but certainly something bigger than a straight melodrama, Bryan does in Hell Riders what he did for the slasher film in Don't Go In The Woods, and the urban crime thriller in Executioner Part II - enlarge and expand genre tropes until they literally burst at the seams, creating magnificently bizarre and unforgettable cinematic experiences which defy all attempts to pigeonhole them as merely "bad movies." For my money, this puts Bryan in that august canon of indie filmmakers who create beautiful outlaw cinema on the skimpiest of budgets, along with folks like Ed Wood and Andy Milligan, leaving most similar bloated Hollywood trash in the dust. If Hell Riders is the "worst" biker film ever made, I'll take the worst over the best any day.
Review of Hell Riders
