Directed by one-and-done director Jimmy Murphy, who co-wrote it with The Killers screenwriter Ray Chavez Vegas, The iInk Garter Gang is, as the poster tells us, all about Billy Boy and his five girl gang and they’re wired for action! They rob for kicks, fortune and thrills!

Some of the ads also say, “These hot pants chicks mean trouble!” and “SEE the 140 M.P.H. getaway… wildest chase ever filmed!”

It’s got ten watches on Letterboxd and I had to pay $12 for a copy from DVD Lady, so allow me to take you through it.

You’ve got Mick Mehas (The Girls from Thunder Strip, Hell’s Chosen Few, The Cycle Savages), Saxon Chase, Bruce Kimball (Drive-In Massacre, Fangs), Deborah Darnell (one of Count Yorga‘s vampire women), Tanye Morgan (Targets) and Ann Martell heading up the cast, but the real “wait, is that…?” moment comes when you see Paul Gleason on the screen. Yeah, the same guy who played Vernon, the nightmare principal in The Breakfast Club, is in here. So is Keith Carradine as a surfer.

We do at least start with a girl in a mini-dress with a pink garter. Don’t get used to her. She isn’t around long. But there is a guy with a gang of five women, just as the sales copy promised us. And we do get a biker gang, which includes Roach, Bongos (who doesn’t play them), their leader Splinter (who isn’t a mutant rat) and Kimball, who brags of never taking a bath.

This is less biker movie and more people hanging out in wood-paneled dives and going to the beach. And the pink garter does show up, around twenty minutes in, while a song that sounds like a ripoff of “The Candy Man Can” plays over and over.

This gang wears black track suits, kind of like they’re a thrash band in the 1980s more than bikers. This also has one of the best narrative shifts I’ve ever seen, where a dying cop says, “I have a daughter. I mean, I had a daughter,” as we cut to a bunch of hippies smoking thai sticks while bikers gather around a concert for the band Rain Forest that probably is going to be more Altamont than Woodstock. The cop’s daughter is getting double teamed by Splinter and his gang, as they laugh about it by way of ADR. “They were the ones that picked her up and turned her on,” says the stoic lawman. “I couldn’t prove it, but I know it was them.”

Once we see the cops start chasing that silver Corvette of our heroes and police start crashing and dying, it’s only a matter of time before this all ends like so many early 70s films. Biker films, especially. Easy Rider set the bar. As Adam in Werewolves On Wheels said, “We all know how we’re gonna die, baby… we’re gonna crash and burn!”

But no! At the end, after some gunfights and chases, Billy Boy just leaves and an angry matronly lady just walks off as his boat sails off to the sound of that “Candy Man” bootleg. One of the girls waves goodbye just in time to fake me out again.

Spoiler: Billy Boy’s boat — well, it’s an insert stock shot probably from another movie — blows up real good.

In Warped and Faded, Lars Nilsen said, “Without a doubt, the rarest biker movie we ever played. There were dozens of these things making a constant circuit through the U.S. Late in the cycle, the occasional token new film like The Pink Garter Gang was popped into a “Cycle Carnival” triple or quadriple feature alongside classics like Devil’s Angels and Hell’s Angels On Wheels. People never seemed to get tired of watching scuzzy scooter trash behaving inappropriately, and from all indications, this is a chip off the oold engine block. Expect blasting fuzz guitars, endless scenes of bikers riding through square towns, hair-pulling cat fights, a lot of beer drinking, smooching and — in all likelihood — a biker named Mouse, Speed or Acid.”