This Saturday, August 8 at 8 PM — yes, 8/8/2020 at 8 PM, which feels like some kind of occult ritual is about to happen — we’ll be conjuring up two visions of the sasquatch, the yeti, the skunk ape…the Bigfoot!
Up first, 1974’s Shriek of the Mutilated!
Here’s a drink just perfect for draining while you watch people get, well, mutilated!
EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie originally ran on our site during our Biker Week event on July 24, 2018. It has perhaps one of my favorite trailers of all time. And seeing how it ended up on the Mill Creek Savage Cinema set, let’s take another look at it.
I have no idea who this movie is for. I would imagine that gay folks would either find it camp or be offended by its horrible stereotypes. Then, I think that bikers would also be upset by the fact that it sends up their culture and points out the homoeroticism at its core. And then, I think that anyone looking for a comedy will be put off by the ending. Even worse, anyone who loves good filmmaking will wonder why they’ve suffered through the endless takes and torturous plot.
But fuck, that’s a great trailer. It has everything good about this movie, including some quotable lines. That’s what a great grindhouse or drive-in trailer is all about: action, baby!
Director Larry G. Brown only created two other films: An Eye from an Eye, a 1973 movie where a children’s television show host stalks and murders abusive parents, and 1986’s Silent but Deadly, which has a poster of a dog farting.
Producer Gary Razdat even posted this on IMDB about the film: “In the genre of cinema verite, I thought that the film was a pure attempt to make a movie and see if it could get distributed…I know that for sure as I am the one that produced the movie. It started out with the best of intentions and the money came and went…the best part was that we actually got it distributed and on the film circuit…The characters were picked from the USC school of film as were a couple of the women, one of which was an actual ‘hooker’ that just wanted to be in the film. It was a real effort to complete the film since the director was insane and had forgotten to film an ending – which we had to re-shoot after everything was wrapped…quite a story, eh?”
Hey — is that Michael Pataki and Dan Haggarty as bikers? Yep. Sure is. They’re straight bikers who the Pink Angels ply with prostitutes. Yet when they wake up, they’ve been made up with hair accessories and makeup by our heroes. Oh, you guys. This scene probably only exists so we can get some female nudity and moviegoers could feel a bit more manly after seeing so much man lust. It’s also when one of the better scenes happens, as the future Grizzly Adams jumps on the black prostitute, who proclaims, “Black is not only beautiful, it’s good.”
There’s also a general who is trying to capture the Pink Angels for some reason. And he gets them in the end, as the film jump cuts to an ending with our heroes, the folks we laughed, love and fought with for over 80 minutes or so lynched in the front yard. I guess after Easy Rider every biker movie had to end on a downer note. That said, this is a real downer.
My advice? Just watch the trailer. You’ll be better off.
The Mill Creek Savage Cinema set features an image from this film’s poster on its cover. Seeing as how this was also known as Biker Babes, it’s probably the most suggestive — and therefore best possible selling — film to feature.
The Hellcats bury Big Daddy, who was killed by their mob contact Mr. Adrian (Robert F. Slatzer, who directed this as well as Bigfoot) when he learned that the crook was also a snitch for Detective Dave Chapman. All of these relationships are symbolized in the start of the film — the biker gang is putting their boss in the ground while the cops and the crooks watch from a distance.
Adrian decides to kill off Chapman when he’s on a date with his fiancee Linda (Dee Duffy, who was a Slaygirl and Miss June in the Matt Helm movies The Ambushers and Murderer’s Row). Dave’s brother Monte (Ross Hagen, who was also in The Sidehackers) comes back from the war to learn about what happened. He and Linda decide to act like a biker couple and get revenge.
He does so by getting drawn and quartered longer than the leader of the gang, Snake (Sonny West, a member of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia). This earns him the right to have sex with Sheila (one and done actress Sharyn Kinzie) and brings our protagonists into the gang’s scam to bring back drugs from Mexico.
Tom Hanson, who directed The Zodiac Killer, shows up here as Mongoose. Gus Trikonis, who made Nashville Woman, The Evil, She’s Dressed to Killand more, is Scorpio. Tony Lorea, who plays Six-Pack and also acted in Supercock, went to to be the assistant director of Sweet Sixteen, The Gloveand Ladies Night. Was this entire gang made up of exploitation movie directors? Where’s Bud Cardos?
You can either watch this as part of the Savage Cinema set or check it out on Daily Motion.
You know how it is at B&S About Movies: discussing mainstream, Tinseltown-made movies is anathema. So when we started digging into the antecedents of The Fast and the Furious franchise for this tribute week, you know we’re heading to the VHS shelves stocked with the films directed by Daniel Haller (Die Monster, Die, Devil’s Angels, and The Dunwich Horror), William Asher (Johnny Cool and “Beach Movies”), and Richard Rush (Hells Angels on Wheels, Psych-Out, The Savage Seven) that star the actors we care about, i.e., Frankie Avalon (Blood Song), Fabian (Disco Fever, Kiss Daddy Goodbye), Mimsy Farmer (swoon . . . Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Perfume of the Lady in Black, Autopsy), Annette Funicello, and Diane McBain (Maryjane, The Mini-Skirt Mob, The Delta Factor). So, yeah, we’re going to review Thunder Alley (1967), The Wild Racers (1968) and Fireball 500 (1966) in quick succession. We’d be derelict in our reviewing duties if we didn’t inhale anything with the Corman-AIP stank on it*. (Ditto for Jim Drake’s (Police Academy 4: Citizens On Patrol) 1989 car-crash homage, Speed Zone.)
So while this “mainstream” film is directed by Howard Hawks and released by Paramount Pictures, we’re breaking those mainstream-rules since this racing “epic” features an early starring role for James Caan (who did this and the space “epic” Countdown and water “epic” Submarine X-1 . . . on his way to the apoc-epic Rollerball. . . oh, and some mob-movie called The Godfather).
But don’t let Caan’s presence and the iconic name of Howard Hawks fool you: This is pure Elvis-as-a-race car driver-via-process shots tomfoolery, ala Viva Las Vegas (1964), Spinout(1966), and Speedway (1968), without the singing. Hawks should have cast Frankie Avalon and Fabian, and dumped it in Drive-Ins, and called it a day. At least it would have turned a profit, like those abysmal (yet adoring) Elvis race romps.
“We gotta win this race . . . lemonade, that cool, refreshing drink.”
It’s true: The days of Hawks wowing us with the gangster classic Scarface(1932), the war epic Sergeant York (1941), the noir must-see The Big Sleep (1946), his one-two punch oeuvre with John Wayne of Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959) (yeah, we know they also did ’62s Hatari, ’67s El Dorado, and ’70s Rio Lobo), and — the big daddy of sci-fi — The Thing From Another World (1951), were clearly behind him. Critics weren’t kind then, and retro-critics aren’t kind now, to this NASCAR romance-saga — and as someone who watched all of the Hawks-Wayne films with his dad (and loved them): I can honestly say this truly is the weakest film in the Hawks catalog.
In the backwash of Hawks-Paramount Pictures’ production, John Frankenheimer (Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, the blimp-disaster Black Sunday) put together the superior Formula One-centric Grand Prix (1966) with James Garner (chronicled in document, The Racing Scene). That Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film “blew the doors off” Paramount’s Red Line 7000, with a $20 million gross against $9 million, making it one of the Top-Ten grossing films of 1966, which earned a DGA Award for Outstanding Directing in a Feature Film — even though it featured real-life, stock-shot racing footage, just like the Hawks racing drama.
As with Tom Cruise developing his love of car racing into Days of Thunder(1990), Steve McQueen — himself an accomplished racer of Porsches — produced his affection for France’s 24 Hours of Le Mans with Le Mans (1971) for 20th Century Fox. As with Red Line 7000, and unlike Grand Prix, McQueen’s racing epic — even though it filmed all of its racing footage “on-location” during the 1970 Le Mans race — failed at the box office, making less than its $8 million budget. Ditto for Paul Newman who made Winning (1969), his Indy 500-dreamer race romp with James Goldstone (TV movie heaven with Cry Panic and the amusement-disaster Rollercoaster) for Universal.
And what’s our analog god of all things UHF and VHS have to say about all this racing tomfoolery: Quentin Tarantino has stated that he’d “rather saw off his fingers” than sit through Winning, as it was worse than Steve McQueen’s Le Mans. He’s also said that if he was to direct a racing movie (Please do! Don’t let Once Upon a Time In Hollywood be the end?), it wouldn’t be pretentious, like Grand Prix, it would be like Red Line 7000, with it’s soap-opera-everyone-trying-to-sleep-with-everyone-else storyline, but fun — and play like a really great Elvis Presley race movie.
And Quentin loves his cars (in movies) and didn’t miss that Red Line 7000 features the then “new” 1965 Shelby GT-350 speeding on the track and that one of the characters drives a 1965 Cobra Daytona Coupe. In his own Once Up a Time in Hollywood, Quentin broke production protocols and used over 2000 vintage rides in the film: the average film uses between 300 to 500 cars. To that “racing end”: Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) drove a 1962 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, Abigail Folger (Samantha Robinson) drove a 1969 Pontiac Firebird, and Tex Watson (Austin Butler) drove a 1959 Ford Galaxie.
So, am I out of line saying that I’m waiting for Humphrey Bogart to crawl out of the cockpit, unzip the flame retardants, and jump into the Holiday Inn sack with Lauren Bacall?
That’s how outdated (even back in the early UHF ’70s) this racing romp feels to me, with the horses traded out for cars and the western wastelands for circular asphalt. And that Nelson Riddle score! Talk about wanting to saw off fingers . . . and ears. Where’s that swingin’ n’ screechin’ Dick Contino (Daddy-O, Girls Town) jazz score when you need it? (The ‘Con bagged Leigh Snowden from The Creature Walks Among Us, so he’s a “cool cat” in my book.)
But that’s the plot, sans the horses and Nevada dirt: everyone is trying to bed everyone else except their own girlfriends, either punching out or trying to kill their romantic rivals. And in between: they race via process shots via stock footage (including several high-profile crashes) filmed at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, Darlington Raceway, Daytona International Speedway, and Riverside International Speedway — A.J Foyt’s violent crash at Riverside earlier in 1965 served as the “death” of Caan’s team mate at Daytona. The “romance” gets so heated that Caan’s Mike Marsh trades paint with Dan McCall (Skip Ward of Ann-Margret’s Kitten with a Whip, Elvis’s Easy Come, Easy Go, and the box-office bomb Myra Breckiridge) and tries to kill him on the track.
On the casting side: George Takei, on his way to where no man has gone before, is Kato, a member of Caan’s pit crew. And no disrespect to the mighty Jonathan E., but how cool would it have been to see Paul Mantee of Paramount’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars (and the Bond rips A Man Called Dagger and That Man Bolt) in Caan’s role (who was also a Paramount contract player)?
Again, it all comes back to the actors we want to see: Paul Mantee. Do you remember Paul on Seinfeld as the Health Inspector busting Poppy for peeing and not washing his hands? And — surely Sam will give me shite — we’re back to my “Six Degrees of Seinfeld” foolishness, again.
Sorry, kids. No freebies. Not even on TubiTV and Vudu. You’ll have to settle for an Amazon Prime VOD.
* Long threatened, we finally rolled out that Roger Corman tribute month to his New World Pictures shingle in March 2023. Clicking through will populate all of those reviews.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
William Asher’s career was mostly in TV — he was a driving force behind I Love Lucy and Bewitched — and making AIP’s beach movies work. The one aberration is the movie Butcher, Baker Nightmare Maker, which is a mindblowing piece of film that I encourage everyone to see.
AIP was always ahead of the teen curve, as they realized that the beach films had run their course and now, the kids wanted, well, rebellion.
AIP executive Deke Heyward said, “The next big thing for teenage films is protest. Teenagers empathize with protest because they are in revolt against their parents… These films represent a protest against society. These will be moral tales, there will be good guys and bad guys. But we will show the reasons for young people going against the dictates of the establishment.”
Stock car racer “Fireball” Dave Owens (Frankie Avalon) has come from the West Coast to race Spartansburg’s champion Sonny Leander Fox (Fabian). He also gets plenty of glances from Fox’s girl, Jane (Annette Funicello).
The conflict comes when Dave is conned into smuggling moonshine by Julie Parrish and Harvey Lembeck’s characters. Then the IRS gets involved, threatening to jail our hero unless he helps them defeat the moonshiners. And then Fox wants one more race on the deadly Figure 8 track.
The real star of this movie is the Fireball 500, a 1966 Plymouth Barracuda customized by George Barris. There was going to be a sequel, Malibu 500, but that eventually became Thunder Alley.
As if Dave making eyes at Fox’s girl wasn’t bad enough, he’s also hooked up with Martha the Moonshiner (the aforementioned Parrish). So how does our man beat the system and get the girl? There’s only one way to find out.
Let’s roll the dice on that Mill Creek Savage Cinema box set one more time. This time? An American mondo exploration of the Death Riders, a group of stuntmen travelling the country, picking up ladies and blowing one another up real good.
You have to love a movie with the tagline, ” A Motion Picture Dedicated to Those Who Don’t Make It.” Yes, the teenage and twenty-something boys — barely men at this stage in their lives — that make up the Death Riders are carny barnstormers, heading from town to town putting on all manner of stuntwork for audiences that, at times, swarm them with affection. It’s also the only movie that Jim Wilson would direct, although he did serve as the cinematographer for the Chuck Norris movie Good Guys Wear Black.
Oh Crown International Pictures. Oh Mill Creek. When the two of you unite, I get crazy films like this to take my mind off the world and how much it upsets me. Can we just go back to 1976 and put me inside a wooden coffin with no safety measures and explode me in a field to the delight of some kids who are bored on a hot summer night?
Vilmos Zsigmond — yes, the same man who shot McCabe and Mrs. Miller, as well as The Deer Hunter and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — was the director of photography on this. And it was edited by Phil Tucker, who in addition to also cutting The Nude Bomb directed the burst of insanity known as Robot Monster.
You’ll feel like you’re part of the gang, pranking one another, forgetting a girl by the next town and randomly winning $5 for a motocross race out of nowhere. This movie is the mid-70’s, a lived in, dog-earred, threadbare and sun-drenched mess, but so enjoyable all at the same time.
John Singleton, who directed Boyz n the Hood, stepped into the chair for the second film in the franchise, which loses Vin Diesel and keeps Paul Walker. This is how Roman Pearce (Tyrese) and Tej Parker (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) ended up becoming part of the movie family.
After letting Dominic, former LAPD officer Brian O’Conner (Walker) has left the West Coast behind, living in Miami as an illegal street racer. When the authorities grab him, he’s forced into a deal where he’ll help them stop Argentinian drug lord Carter Verone (Cole Hauser, yes, the son of Wings).
O’Conner has some help, as U.S. customs agent Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes) has been undercover in Verone’s organization for more than a year. He also reconnects with his childhood friend Roman, who blames him for getting arrested.
Taking a page out of the movies that have our true heart, James Remar appears as Agent Markham.
There are also plenty of other racers, like Suki (Devon Aoki, sister of Steve and daughter of Benihana founder Hirokai), who leads an all-girl race team, as well as people with names like Orange Julius and Slap Jack.
As for Diesel, well, he turned down $25 million to come back, instead starring in The Chronicles of Riddick. He’s since stated that he wishes that he’d thought through this decison, but I think we can all agree that he’s done just fine.
Unlike most of the movies in this series, nobody important dies. This will change.
The Mill Creek Savage Cinema box set has twelve movies, some with great looking pictures, others that have been battered beyond belief. If you’re not a snob, you’ll find something enjoyable on this. I know I did! I started with this film, one of the few drag racing movies that I’ve ever watched.
If you know anything about drag racing — and I sure don’t — this movie is filled with the stars of the 70’s. That’d be Don Garlits, Marvin Graham, Gary Beck, Don Prudhomme, Raymond Beadle, Tony Nancy and Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowny, the only name I know beacuse the movie Heart Like a Wheel is all about her. Shirley is great because she’s super outspoken, claiming that Jamie Lee Curtis should have played her instead of Bonnie Bedelia, who she called a “snot.”
I actually looked up other drag racing films — just to see if there were any other than these two examples. There are! They would be Funny Car Summer, Seven-Second Love Affair, Drag Racer, Wheels of Fire, Fast Company (directed by David Cronenberg!), Right On Track, More American Graffiti and Snake and Mongoose. If you’re now thinking, “I bet B&S About Movies is going to do a theme drag racing week,” you know us oh so well.
Scott (Mark Schneider, Supervan) wants to be a drag racer. His dad doesn’t want him to be one. Soon, they learn that they can bond by being part of the sport. Scott is also incredibly hard to like. And there’s the movie.
Director Graham Meech-Burkestone only made this one movie. But man, he was all over the place in Hollywood, doing Oliver Reed’s hair for Burnt Offeringsand makeup for Day of the Animals, The Manitou and The Exterminator.
“This picture is dedicated to the men and women in drag racing — they are all winners,” says the credits. Nope. This movie is dedicated to my Letterboxd Crown International list. Someday, somehow, I’m going to get 100% that thing.
James Garner was a huge star in 1969, coming off the TV series Maverick and roles in films like The Great Escape, Support Your Local Sheriff! and Marlowe, a movie in which he fought Bruce Lee. He also made the movie Grand Prix for John Frankenheimer, which was the sixth movie of his that didn’t do well at the box office. It hurt his career but gave him a passion for racing which he turned into starting his own crew and entering multiple races. This movie documents that time.
I’m so happy to have watched this, because it finally allows me to have seen every single movie that was directed by Andy Sidaris. You can tell Andy directed this because of how much attention is paid to Miss Continental Racing Queen Majken Kruse.
This movie was written by Willam Edgar, who would one day write Stacey, the movie that would begin Sidaris’ world of gorgeous women and men who can’t shoot a gun to save their lives.
We’ve mentioned this VHS potboiler in passing during our reviews of Rocktober Blood and Larry Buchanan’sDown on Us (you know how it works: we’ll get to that tidbit, later). Thanks to Sam dreaming up a “Fast and Furious Tribute Week” — and his excavating the Jim Drake 1989 VHS uber-obscurity, Speed Zone — we finally have an excuse to give this grandfather to the The Fast and the Furious franchise a review proper: a fictional film based on the real life problem of “Banzai Runners” speeding along the desert asphalt strip of the I-15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
As you can tell from the box, ubiquitous TV actor Dean Stockwell stars in this direct-to-video romp. But don’t be copywriter-duped. In no way is this comparable to his work in the superior films noted under his name. And while modern audience will recognized Stockwell for his later TV work in the series Quantum Leap, JAG, and SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica reboot, we, the B&S crew, will always remember Stockwell for his work in the Jack Nicholson-starring counterculture flick, Psych-Out (1968), and his starring with Sandra Dee in The Dunwich Horror (1970).
Stockwell’s greatest strength is not only how easily he transitions from TV to film and back again, but how he can take the lead in (and inspire us to rent) a low-budget actioner, then show up in smaller roles in A-List films for Francis Ford Coppola (Gardens of Stone and The Rainmaker), William Freidkin (To Live and Die in L.A.), David Lynch (Dune, Blue Velvet), and Wolfgang Peterson (Air Force One). He is, simply put: Eric Roberts before Eric Roberts. Hell, he’s Bruce Campbell before Bruce Campbell. He’s the good actor you put in a bad movie — and he still gives us his all and “sells the role” to the home video masses.
Banzai Runner, while a commendable attempt to chronicle a factual event wrapped in a fictional tale (as with illegal street racing in The Fast and the Furious), failed in the home video market as result of its ambition-over budget. It became the only feature film writing credit for animation-scripter Phil Harnage, who is a “shooting fish in a barrel” type of writer when it comes to cartoons. You haven’t not seen his art work, which dates all the way back to Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert, along with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Adventures of Super Mario, G.I Joe, The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, and Double Dragon. In the producer and director’s chair is John G. Thomas, whose slight resume gave us not only Banzai Runner, but Dean Stockwell’s brother-in-arms, Michael Parks (Kill Bill: Vol. 1), in Arizona Heat (1988), starring alongside his cop-buddy Denise “Tasha Yar” Crosby (American Satan).
That’s how it goes in the B&S About Movies universe. Not everyone is destined for a television-to-theatrical career.
So Stockwell is Highway Patrolman Billy Baxter. And he’s worn out dealing with the rebel-rousing drunk gamblers on his Nevada stretch of highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. But what really pisses him off is that the brass turned down his request to modify his police cruiser so he can keep up with the so called “Banzai Runners”: the unapprehendable, rich elitists who zip by him in their supercharged, high-powered Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Ah, but those speed demons aren’t speeding for kicks: they’re running drugs for Syszek — played by requisite screen villain Billy Drago (Hunter’s Blood, Invasion U.S.A).
Baxter eventually goes “Mad Max” when Syszek kills his brother and orphans his nephew, now in his care. So his mechanic buddy upgrades his cruiser (courtesy of the only other notable actor in the cast, Charles Dierkop, aka Det. Pete Royster from TV’s Police Woman; but remembered best for his work in Angels Hard as They Come, The Hot Box, Messiah of Evil, and Silent Night, Deadly Night). When the brass has enough and strips Baxter of his badge, he’s ripe for DEA recruitment to go undercover in the dark world of the “Banzai Runners” and take his revenge os Syszek. (Have you ever notice villains have cool, Euro-ethnic names with lots of consonants of the w, x, y, z variety? I guess Billy Drago as “Sam Miller” or “Joe Smith” doesn’t “ring true,” does it?)
Oh, by the way: This is the type of film where the cars don’t speed on the roads in real time: they acquire their “speed” in post-production via speeding up the film.
Yes. They’re fast and furious, indeed.
“Hey, wait! What about the trivia about Rocktober Blood and Down on Us?”
Oh, yeah, thanks for reminding me. So, Riba Meryl (passed away in 2007) stars here Donna, one of the film’s minor characters. Part of the Sunset Strip’s ’80s hair-metal scene, she came to co-write the faux-rock epic “Rainbow Eyes” with Sorcery’s Richard Taylor for Rocktober Blood — and was cast aside for fellow Las Vegas transplant Susie Rose Major to vocalize the tune as Lynn Staring. Prior to her second and final acting gig in Bonzai Runner — as result of her session work with Randy Nicklaus and Jerry Riopelle on the film’s never released soundtrack — she portrayed Janis Joplin in the speculative 1984 rock flick, Down on Us.
The soundtrack for Bonzai Runner features songs written and performed by Randy Nicklaus, who’s engineered records for Alias, Blondie, Contraband (aka Michael Schenker), INXS, Motley Crue, Vixen, and Yes; he also placed songs on the soundtracks to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and The Wraith. Detroit-born Jerry Riopelle and his band members, Joel Goldsmith and Kevin Dukes, have placed songs in projects as diverse as Crystal Heart, Hollywood Hot Tubs, and Paramedics. Sadly, we lost Jerry Riopelle in 2018. Goldsmith scores can be heard in Moon 44, Laserblast, and The Rift, and, most recently in the Stargate TV-universe.
You can watch — the one lone copy — of Banzai Runner for free on You Tube . . . and keep your eyes open for those 50 mph cars film-sped to 200 mph in the Arizona heat. Why yes, you can watch Arizona Heat on You Tube, and here’s the trailer to get you started, if you dare!
Ugh. A great soundtrack, but here’s only one tune isolated from the film on You Tube: “It’s Everything” by Jerry Riopelle. You can listen to more of his work on his You Tube page. There’s also a wealth of Randy Nicklaus’s work on You Tube.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
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