There's something about seeing the American International logo and the name "Samuel Z. Arkoff" in the first minute of a movie that always gives me the warm fuzzies. To me, it's an assurance of quality, sort of like sitting down at a German restaurant and noticing that the accordion player is wearing lederhosen. Arkoff was a capitalist in the best sense of the word, who knew that he could produce mass quantities of crap, feed it to the American public, and make a sizeable profit. But for me there's something about Arkoff's crap that is enduring and almost always entertaining.
Sam was always looking for the right genre to market at a given moment, and during the late 50s, bikers and juvenile delinquents were part of the equation. Motorcycle Gang is a splendid example in both regards, in that it euphemizes the thuggery with goofy beatnik lingo, and to some extent glosses over the brutality spelled out more explicitly in the next decade in films like Satan's Sadist's and The Born Losers.
To fill the void caused by the more stringent moral code of the 1950s, movies like Motorcycle Gang substituted mammaries tightly encased in bullet bras, and the sort of comic relief you might find in a junior high school theatre production.
In this case, the pointy tits are provided by Anne Neyland, Jean Moorhead and Susanne Sidney. Jean Moorhead you may recognize from Ed Wood, Jr.'s The Violent Years. She has a more secondary role here, but her performance is just as Wooden, plus she has the archetypal American International blonde actress accoutrements: the bullet bra, and tight shorts, stretched to the breaking point around chunky thighs, hiked up such that they are latched to the ass crack like a rock climber on PCP.
Susanne Sidney serves the dual purpose of providing a life support system for tits and ass, plus working with Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer to churn out the levity when required. Since people shoving hot dogs into their mouths is endlessly amusing, there's a running joke with how they both like food, plus the usual implication that homely people should only mate with their own.
All of this is the backdrop to a rift between Steve Terrell and John Ashley, the latter resembling Ricky Nelson with an extremely grating Oklahoma drawl. They fight over Anne Neyland, have grudge races on their bikes, agonize over whether they should be "good" or "bad," and all the other usual crap that's been beaten to death by movies like this. As usual, the real entertainment comes from the forced hipness of the script, and wacky character actors like Raymond Hatton as "Uncle Ed." Hatton walks around in a nightie and says things like "Ooh wot a pooty night! Smell dat alfalfa?," possibly a tribute to his co-star Switzer. And in one of the more surreal moments, Uncle Ed breaks out his fiddle, and performs a duet with Aki Aleong, whose only other purpose is to provide a springboard for stupid jokes about how Chinese guys can talk like beatniks too.
There's another one of these by the same director, also featuring Ashley and Terrell, called Dragstrip Girl. It's basically the same movie with Frank Gorshin substituted for Alfalfa. In both cases, the gags provided make Sammy Petrillo seem subtle. But you know something? I love shit like this. With a couple of beers melting my brain, I can lean back in the recliner and giggle my ass off. I endorse this unrepentently.
No comments