The Hellcats

A very lame attempt to show what the motorcycle culture of the late 1960's was like, the Hellcats was just plain bad. The audio was very hard to hear, the plot meanders aimlessly, and most of the time doesn't make sense. About the only redeeming feature for me was the hot babes in skin-tight clothing. Ross Hagen lives out a fantasy of his by getting to "bed" several women in one movie.

The idea may have looked good on paper, but the execution was awful.

Avoid this one unless you're watching the MST3K version.

I've seen a lot of these 1960's biker movies. They are one of my favorite movie genres. Only a few left that I haven't checked out. If you check my other reviews, you'll see this to be the case.

This one is a complete mess, but if you're looking some primo ATMOSPHERE, this clunker has it in spades. Plenty of filthy bikers, hot biker chicks (including Cyclops, the bad-ass chick with an eye patch!), drinking Miller high Life, selling dope, and like most biker films, implied rape.

But if you want a good plot, 'fraid you're too square for the room, fella. What plot there is involves Ross Hagen (late of The Sidehackers, The Devil's 8, and Speedway, plus an infinite number of TV guest shots...and still acting, bless him! UPDATE 2012: Ross was still acting when I wrote this review, but he is no longer with us, R.I.P.) as a gormless straight who "goes undercover" and infiltrates a sleazy biker gang to get his own personal brand of revenge. (A tired plot device shared with several other 60's biker flicks, including the Mini Skirt Mob, Hells Angels '69, and my personal favorite, The Tormentors.) See, his brother got offed by these unshaven scumbags and he's gonna take them down! Payback is a bitch, man. He's joined by his brother's foxy, but not too foxy, fiancé. They're just waiting for the right moment to get their revenge! Meanwhile, they ride around on bikes, fist fight, and drink Miller High Life.

There's some other nonsense regarding dealing large quantities of narcotics and the police attempting to keep an eye on the gang's nefarious activities. Of course, these plot threads, threadbare as they are, join up at the end. Or do they? The plot is so weak it was kind of hard to tell exactly what was going on. In fact, the cruddy VHS dub I had featured muffled sound, making most of the dialog hard to fathom.

I have to say I gave this movie a 4 because I thought the music was pretty cool; some actual '67 garage band cuts, plus some really lovably overdone canned production background music that was probably left over from 77 Sunset Strip. Plenty of bongos in evidence. There was even a soundtrack LP released, which I believe somebody recently reissued in the past couple years. "Groovy, man."

So there you have The Hellcats. No plot at all, but plenty of Sixties biker gang atmosphere and neat music. If that's enough to intrigue you, give it a try. If you haven't seen any of these Drive-In motorcycle movies before, start off with a better one like THE WILD ANGELS, or better yet, THE TORMENTORS, which is utterly preposterous, but hilariously so.

This incredibly shoddy 60's biker flick is a real mess. It features Ross Hagen as a man who infiltrates a bike gang called The Hellcats in order to find out who killed his brother. The plot has about as much focus as the blurry camera-work. It's all over the place. Random events sometimes happen for no discernible reason, for example, the scene where the artist and his model are attacked by bikers doesn't seem to have any relevance to anything. On the other hand, when a potentially half-interesting moment is about to happen, it's not shown at all; like when the bike race between to two gang leaders happens off-screen, wow the excitement. The scenes with The Hellcats are pretty sloppy in general and often just seem to consist of them muntering around while the psychedelic pop of the never-popular Davey Jones and the Dolphins plays endlessly in the background. The theme tune may nefariously make its way into your subconscious, so please beware. Despite the presence of authentic looking bikers, this is not exactly convincing stuff. When Ross Hagen first meets The Hellcats, he wins their respect by defeating their leader by simply pushing him over. I'm not certain that manoeuvre would've worked with The Hell's Angels to be perfectly honest but hey this is the movies eh? Our gang do incorporate some harder initiation rituals however, such as the strange limb stretching procedure so fair play but, sadly, they also have a member who goes around annoyingly playing a bugle at every given opportunity, so less respect on that score.

At the end of the day this film is all over the place. The camera-work is out-of-focus and badly framed, with peoples heads often off-screen. The acting is really terrible. The story is badly put together. And the action scenes are terribly presented (you would be forgiven for not even noticing when The Hellcat leader is shot, it's so shoddily done). Overall, it wasn't all that entertaining and can only be described as a truly Z-Grade counter-culture clunker.

Budget Steve McQueen (AKA Ross Hagen, of "Sidehackers" fame) romps his way through this tour de force as an undercover agent infiltrating a motorcycle gang in the hopes of avenging his brother's murder. And the very fact I could glean that much information by watching this movie is amazing given the complete lack of plot coherence (what am I saying? I mean complete lack of plot!) in this movie. Well, OK, I'll come clean. I cheated - I read the back of the video box.

Although not as pointlessly violent and nihilistic as "Sidehackers", "Hellcats" is a squalid film, showing the sixties in all its greasy grimy trashy squalor. This film and others like it are useful antidotes for the prevailing baby boomer nostalgia that would characterize that decade as one of peace, love, idealism, and truly selfless devotion a to great causes serving all of humanity. Let's not kid ourselves - the sixties reeked! Just ask Budget Steve! He was there! Right, B.S.?

By the way, it was interesting to see all the Coleman Francis alumni here, particularly the film's producer, Anthony Cardoza as a hapless artist.

Another film that starred Ross Hagen and was featured on the cult show, Mystery Science Theater 3000 this is yet another film featuring motorcycles, beer and revenge! Like another Hagen film, "Five the Hard Way" or "Sidehackers", but it does not feature the completely pointless side hacking. That being said, it was the worst of the two films as it was rather incoherent and while "Five the Hard Way" is not an award winner, at least once the side hacking portion of the film was wrapped up it made perfect sense. This one takes forever to get where it is going and goes a very round about way to do so and this is why instead of a cut and dry revenge plot we go by getting drunk at a bar, hanging out in the field, rival gang wars before stopping at our final destination revenge. The film actually preceded "Five the Hard Way" and it pretty much looks like it was shot almost right before they started filming that movie as you can see they used a couple of the same locations. I know that the small cabin in the middle of what looks like a rock quarry was the same place that JC was holed up in at the end of "Five the Hard Way".

The story has a gang that is wild or something and one of their own has been killed or something. A detective is trying to nail some drug dealer or something that uses the biker gang as sort of a delivery service; however, the detective is killed leaving behind a fiancé and his brother, Ross Hagen! Ross must infiltrate the gang and find out who is behind the death of his brother. However, he has plenty of time for beers and having sex with some of the members of this rowdy biker gang who spends most of their time drinking and occasionally having all out fights with rival gangs that can apparently be stopped by someone jumping in and going 'no war'.

This made for a rather funny episode of MST3K as they referenced the fact this film was kind of a lot like "Sidehackers". Sometimes, during the Joel seasons they would do films that were similar or sequels to films and at times the jokes would become stale; however, not so much the case with this one. The main problem I had with this one was the bumps which featured them flashing back to earlier episodes which seemed kind of lazy.

So this film was not good...not by a long shot. I did not care about Hagen's character in this one as much as I did in "Five the Hard Way" as he seemed to be enjoying his time undercover and not really finding anything out while the fiancé was doing all the work. In "Five the Hard Way" he could not talk clearly at all, but I knew his wife to be was killed and I wanted him to beat the crap out of JC because he was annoying! This one, I just wanted it over as at times he seemed to forget his brother.