Hell Ride

This movie grabs you by the collar, slices your throat from ear to ear, pours gasoline all over your sputtering, confused face, and throws a lit match on you. You're done. You just been slapped upside the head with Larry Bishop's return to the exploitation biker flick, courtesy of Quentin Tarantino Presents. Did you bother looking up the 11% rating on Rottentomatoes? Well, so what. Consensus reviews from this day and age for this type of movie don't mean squat. But I'll tell you what does: This monster of hellbound biker mayhem stars Michael Madsen, Vinnie Jones, David Carradine, and Dennis Hopper riding straight to hell on their choppers. The people dumb enough to argue this is a bad movie are really wasting their time. Go rent Pineapple Express or Baghead or something, eviscerate those to your little heart's content. There's plenty of punching bags in Hollywood that deserve it way more than this small labor of love. Not that it can't handle it. Hell, it'll spit out a broken tooth and still be standing there, grinning at you. This movie is true to a lost aesthetic. To coin a phrase that can't be overused, this here movie is Not For You, if you're not already into sleazy exploitation flicks from the 70s. Just steer clear of this lean and mean nasty biking b-movie machine, ya hear. Every chick in this thing looks like she stepped out of the pages of a glossy men's magazine, I'm not saying this is a great standard or anything, just that this is a real, down and dirty, exploitation grindhouse biker movie, from 2008. This movie will deliver the goods as long as you sit through it to the end. Yes it has its flaws, some of the acting is plain bad, and some reviewers have complained about the dialog, that its unrealistic. Well whupteedoo, how about that. I myself thought the surrealistic, often rhyming dialog was funny, it had me cracking up all over the place. Of course people don't talk like that, not unless they're having an unusually good time under the influence of certain spirits. So you can see, this movie is not going to fit into the mainstream. This is a good thing to me. This movie reinstates my faith that badassery still might have a place in Hollywood. We can thank Quentin Tarantino for that. How in the everloving hell this movie squeaks by with an R rating while other movies with less sex and violence have to keep cutting down scenes to stay away from the dread NC-17 is beyond me, but if I were to guess, I'd figure that maybe the ratings board is OK with *spoiler* slicing wide open pretty women's throats and pouring gasoline over them burning them alive and bleeding, so long as its in the context of an exploitation film. Any regular movie would never get away with this, but somehow Larry Bishop and/or Quentin Tarantino can push it through the censors without getting so much as a peep outta them. Maybe Quentin greased their palms, I don't know. All I know is this is one revved up mother of a revenge movie, and according to it, revenge ain't best served cold. Uh-uh. Revenge comes screaming in the form of tattooed bikers from hell out to kill you. Vinnie Jones as "Billy Wings" cuts a massive and ruthless figure with his pneumatic arrow rifle at hand. Larry Bishop himself is somewhat of a revelation as Pistolero, the prez of a biker gang called the Victors. Madsen is at his coolest portraying their Numero Uno Killer, The Gent. Wait'll you get a load of The Gent in action. Try not to blink, or you'll miss him gun down 5 guys. He is sick in this. And newcomer Eric Balfour (of the TV show 24) plays the keystone role in this revenge story. He holds his own amidst an all star cast, providing a youthful, feral vengeance that was quite satisfying for me to watch. And the bike he rides is badass: its a classic Indian with a suicide clutch, specially made old school for the movie. There's another reason to watch this flick, the bikes alone are worth admiring. Alright I've said enough about the movie itself. Go and rent this thing. Hell, buy it, support grindhouse cinema. I know I will.

Larry Bishop kinda owes Tarantino big time. But the cool thing is this. Larry takes Quentin's goodwill (and hard money) and just lets it all out with this thing. He shows Tarantino How Its Done. (Exploitation Biker flicks, that is.) Yes the acting is sometimes atrocious (but not always), and in many scenes, the heavyweight actors kind of flounder. This is because Bishop gave them "carte blanche" on account of being legends. Hopper and Carradine both got carte blanche. That is, Bishop didn't dare presume to write them a script. (This is all covered in the special features section.) He just explained the situation to them, how their characters should be feeling, and let them improvise. So yeah, some of the lines are cheesy, some are bad, some are cheesy bad, but every once in a while, a sardonic gem slips through. What saves this movie is the story. Its a straight up revenge tale, and don't you know them is the most satisfactory. Sure you got Madsen and Carradine and half the time it feels as if this were filmed on the back lot of the Kill Bill set - but that's just one more of its sick little charms, as far as I'm concerned. It was Madsen's idea to bring back the biker movie - - he's been trying to get someone to fund this, apparently. Larry Bishop and his big googly eyes is just cool. He knows his grindhouse, that much is obvious. Of course a movie like this will flop in our air conditioned, insulated, jet set environment; most of the criticisms leveled against it are precisely the reasons the movie was made in the first place. Its almost as if every scene includes something hyper-real in it, that is, something over the top not normally allowed in movies, but which reflect our reality a bit more honestly. All wrapped up in a slick package of fetishistic defiance. Let me just say that if this is a "flash in the pan", a one-off so to speak, it will have been worth it for this single movie alone, so we can all thank Quentin for taking the trouble to track Larry down and get him up off his ass and back into the grindhouse, where he belongs. And if it helps mark (along with Death Proof/Planet Terror) the veritable return of the exploitation flick to our cineplexes - - then that is reason to rejoice. So I guess its all good no matter how you slice and dice it.