March 4, 2009: Hell Ride
I like to swing as far as possible to the opposite side of the “movie quality” spectrum immediately following the Oscars, and see a bunch of junk to cleanse my palate and get ready for the year. Hell Ride seemed like the perfect choice to kick off this period (Mary Poppins snuck in there because of the timing for a family movie night – I don’t mean to imply that it was post-Oscar junk). Here we have a stupid pointless biker movie, with Michael Madsen playing essentially an over-the-top caricature of his usual caricatures.
Easy Rider defines the classic biker movie, although even back in its day or at least shortly after it, the genre swayed more towards biker *gang* movies, which Easy Rider really wasn’t. Biker flicks were a popular form of exploitation film in the early 1970s, and such films have dotted the landscape ever since. The Brian Bosworth star vehicle Stone Cold (1991) was one which hit me around the right age for me to be receptive to such silliness, and that particular film was helped immensely by the rough and ready presence of Lance Henriksen. Even the recent Wild Hogs, a Disneyfied, John Travolta-anchored star show-case from a couple of years ago, invoked Peter Fonda as a biker patriarch at the end, launching it to a level of credibility which was emphatically absent through the rest of the silly plot. Unfortunately, Hell Ride tries hard to be cool and killer, but fails more or less completely.
What is Hell Ride about? Apparently it’s a story about the revenge of some biker gang as they emerge from prison after several years. The dialogue was stylized to a ridiculous degree, in a failed attempt to be cool. There was a bunch of pointless T&A, and when I count that as a negative point in a movie, you know we’re dealing with a serious disaster. I couldn’t even remember the exact date I watched this, so the official viewing date above is only approximate. This 80-minute mess should never have existed, and I would urge the youth of today to take a look at pointless trashy biker movies of my youth (Stone Cold) instead of this. Or watch Easy Rider, if you seek a real classic.
Unbelievable. Seriously, who writes this crap?
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