The Angry Breed

James MacArthur (classic actress Helen Hayes's adoptive son) worked hard to shed his squeaky-clean Mouseketeer image from his '50s childhood acting days. In 1961 episode "Death for Sale," of "The Untouchables," he plays a clean-cut, preppy, baby-faced college student who is in reality the mastermind of an opioid-smuggling and -selling conspiracy. In the 1967 counterculture-exploitation flick "The Love-Ins," James turns up as an alternative newspaper journalist who becomes disillusioned by the hippie cult he has helped build around a Timothy Leary-like guru to the hippies (Richard Todd). In this trashy film, substandard even by the low bar of the biker-exploitation flick, James is the alpha male of a gang of neo-Nazi bikers, with a sideline in acting as an extra in Hollywood productions. This film has a lot of potential- duplicitous Hollywood film execs, innocent-blonde-in-peril, the menace of LSD, the heroic Vietnam War vet, and the aforementioned bikers, who look completely over-the-top-campy when dressed in costumes for a Halloween party. Veteran comedian Jan Murray turns up as a particularly despicable sleazebag. Yet despite the presence of quality acting talent- Murray, MacArthur, William Windom, Jan Serling, inter alia- it is boring and silly beyond belief. Fortunately, James would go the same year to his long-term TV role as "Dano" Williams, second in command to Steve McGarrett of the eponymous "Hawaii Five-O," and his restrained actor would serve as a welcome counterpoint to Jack Lord's hammy scowling and grimacing.

I saw this movie in NEW York city. I was waiting for a bus the next morning, so it was 2 or 3 in the morning. It was raining, and did not want to wait at the PORT AUTHORTY. So I went across the street and saw the worst film of my life. It was so bad, that I chose to stay and see the whole movie,I have yet to see anything else that bad since. The year was 69,so call me crazy. I stayed only because I could not belive it.........

Some Nazi bikers attack a girl (Lori Martin) on a beach. She's rescued by a local "war hero" (who looks way too clean-cut to have served in Vietnam). It turns out the girl's father is a producer, and the war hero just happens to have written a script. However, while the slimy father (who is married, but is rutting around with his Asian gardener's teenage daughter)is excited about the script, he's less happy about casting the young vet in the lead role, and he's REALLY unhappy about the romance burgeoning between they young couple and goes to great lengths to sabotage it.

As biker movies go this is pretty lame (perhaps partly because the gang seems to consist of at most half a dozen bikers). There is a cool scene where the vet and the daughter go to a swinging psychedelic costume party, which the bikers plot to disrupt by spiking the punch with LSD, hardly necessary though as this whole scene is already like a bad acid trip. The acting is uniformly terrible (you know you're in trouble when Melody "F Troop" Patterson gives one of the better performances). William Windom is OK as the father, but Murray McLeod is severely miscast as the "war hero", and the father's "Asian" concubine is played by a brunette caucasian girl(fortunately, she never talks). Lori Martin, who had played Gregory Peck's nubile and menaced teenage daughter in "Cape Fear" (a role later assayed by Juliette Lewis) nicely fills out a bikini and naturally looks even more "juicy" (as Robert Mitchum's character said of her in that film) at 20 than she did at 14. Unfortunately, her acting had not risen much above the level of godawful during that time.

There is a ridiculous conceit at the end involving a "dangerous" malfunctioning cable car that goes a whole twenty feet down to the beach from the producer's house. Between this, the pathetic motorcycle gang, and generally dire acting performances, it is REALLY hard to take this movie at all seriously, but it is somewhat entertaining nevertheless.

Yes, this is a really trashy flick. Bikers, neo-Nazis, scumbag movie producers, Hollywood wanna-bes, go-go chicks, etc. It was written by Rex Carlton, whose script is so uneven that character motivations change, not only between scenes but sometimes WITHIN scenes! William Windom plays the sleazeball movie producer who indulges his sexy daughter's lust for a young Vietnam vet who's an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter. Unfortunately, the writer gets on the bad side of James MacArthur, a supporting actor who leads a biker pack of neo-Nazis between acting assignments. The non-stop exploitation elements offer delirious fun, if you're in the mood for a trash wallow. The cast includes MacArthur, Windom, Jan Sterling, Melody "F TROOP" Patterson, Lori "CAPE FEAR" Martin, and comedian Jan Murray, who earlier took a dramatic walk on the wild side in 1965's WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (another nearly lost sleaze masterpiece). There's some cool California rock and roll on the soundtrack, and a great freak-out party sequence that may well have inspired the climax of Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. Some DVD label should rescue this film from obscurity.

This movie is not going to win any awards for its acting or its plot. However, the acting and plot are most appropriate for the overall texture the film provides. This movie is the late 60's in a nutshell. The language, the cinematography, the music, everything is what 1969 was all about. If ever somebody asked me:

"Emmett, what did 1969 look like?" I would give them a copy of my tape to view. What is best about this movie is that the makers were not trying to encapsulate the 60's. It just ends up that way.