After EASY RIDER was a big hit there came a whole slew of these outlaw biker flicks and many of them, like this one here, had an all-star cast. Cameron Mitchell is our main main, not looking nearly as bloated as I'm used to seeing him, as a fellow who runs across some bikers led by Bruce Dern who he went to college with. This doesn't stop the gang from beating the shit out of him just for the hell of it. These are the kind of bikers that I don't think are necessarily evil but they don't really give a fuck about what they have to do to have a good time or a cheap thrill. Dern is the only one of them who has any kind of conscience at all regarding his actions and this leads to some bickering and bike-racing on the beach. Their disregard for decency might eventually lead our gang of knucklehead hog-riders into the neighborhood of rape and murder as the movie goes on and things get more serious. Diane Ladd, who is in a few of these biker flicks and later on the mom in WILD AT HEART, is Cameron's lady friend and the object of Jack Nicholson's molesting hands and tongue. Nicholson is pretty awesome here as a sleazeball in awesome stripey-pants who will fuck over his best friend for a thrill. Harry Dean Stanton is also part of the gang in a stupid-looking suit and pork-pie hat. While overall this film teases a lot more violence than you actually get onscreen(you mostly just get a lot of general mayhem and anarchy) it's still a neat little low-budget, time-capsule, throwback, drive-in semi-classic that would play all the time on TV back when I was a kid and broadcast TV had a reason to exist.
This was actually filmed in '67 and not released until after EASY RIDER to cash in on the Nicholson connection.
“With the unbridled passion of men possessed, they blasted their way through all opposition in a campaign of sexual self-indulgence that left nothing but burned-out shells of humanity strewn in their path.”:
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