Director: Richard Kanter
Writers: Richard Kanter from a story by Sal Comstock
From: Cult Cinema
Two bikers, after being kicked out of their gang, kidnap and assault two women.
Opens, literally, with a sexual assault of a woman who’s left naked, bleeding, and tied to a tree. So, yeah, fuck this movie. THE END. I don’t even have a title card to show you because the woman bound to the tree is part of it.
Turns out the woman was Pete’s girlfriend who’d been caught having sex with another man—a black man—so, you can understand why he had to do what he did. However, the women in his motorcycle gang aren’t too happy about how he treated the woman and the cops are looking for the gang in response to the assault. They tell Pete and his accomplice, Stick, to disappear for a while.
And the n-word at the four minute mark. Four minutes! All of this is within the first five minutes of this movie!
So Pete and Stick are kicked out of the gang, go riding, and find a house with two women sunning themselves by a pool. They inveigle their way in. Pete hooks up with the woman of the house while Stick rapes her friend. Pete defends Stick saying he wouldn’t do something like that without a reason. The pair end up occupying the house and holding the women prisoner. Pete leaves occasionally to try to sell things from the house and Stick abuses the women in various ways.
Eventually the husband comes home. The women had just convinced Stick that Pete was going to abandon him to take the rap, but the husband’s arrival prevents them from leaving. Then Pete shows up, convinces the husband to play the cello, and we learn that the husband’s parents died in the Holocaust. Pete is so enraptured by the husband’s playing that the husband is able to put his bow through Pete’s eye. Then he beats Stick to death with the cello. The husband comes back in to find his wife distraught over Pete’s body. Close up on the husband’s face and THE END
I’m not sure where the movie is coming from. I don’t think it wants us to sympathize with Pete and Stick, but there are hints of an Of Mice and Men situation where Pete would be fine if it weren’t for Stick and his idiocy. But Pete is pretty active in supporting Stick in assaulting and killing people. I think we’re supposed to be on the women’s side, but we spend a lot of time away from them. If they’re the subjects and the sympathetic characters, the focus should be on them and their attempts to escape. Instead, we focus on Pete. Another element that complicates all this is the women are kind of put at fault. The woman of the house is cheating on her husband, does regularly, and willingly hooks up with Pete. She even chastises her friend for not being willing to hook up with Stick. Later, after a failed escape attempt, she tries to kill Pete but can’t because of her feelings for him. Then she and Pete hook up again and she seems to become his actual partner. Even the end has her sort-of mourning this guy who’d, only moments before, pledged to kill her, her husband, and her friend.
So, yeah. Fuck you movie.
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