Badass biker flick destined for cult status

If Hell Ride were any more authentic to motorcycle gang culture the theater tickets would come with vials of meth and a shank in the ribs. This is the real deal … well, at least according to this movie critic, who drives a faded Sentra.

Credit every dirty nanosecond of it to Larry Bishop, the writer, star and director — and I bet if you asked the other actors, they’d admit he was tuning the bikes when the cameras weren’t rolling. Hell Ride is Bishop’s movie, every convoluted, incomprehensible twist of it. Yes, I was a little lost — hell, a lot lost — but I liked the places it took me and I liked the way it didn’t really care what I thought. “A nihilist’s dream come true,” one character says. No shit. Hell Ride revs up, peels out and doesn’t stop until it’s impaled on the handlebars.

Billed as an extension to Quentin Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse, Hell Ride acknowledges in its tone and style that it’s a midnight movie, a B-flick destined to be a cult classic in the same vein as The Wild One, Vanishing Point or maybe even that hokey Brian Bosworth biker movie, Stone Cold. Tarantino produces it, and in many ways it looks a lot like his Death Proof: low production value, gritty camera work, dialogue on the fly and meaningless, exploitive images of fuel-guzzling vehicles and women. I would write that the plot unravels, but that implies at one point it was raveled, which it wasn’t. All totaled up, it’s a mess of a movie, but it’s so legit to its subject that all is forgiven.

Larry Bishop — yes, Rat Pack member Joey Bishop’s son — is Pistolero, the prez of an outlaw biker gang called the Victors. Pistolero, looking like Satan himself but more pissed off, rides around on a motorcycle piping hot, ready to blow, drawing down on everyone he crosses. His friend, St. Louie was killed the night before by a rival gang, the Six-Six-Sixers; St. Louie was beaten, his throat was slit and then he was set on fire. So yeah, Pistolero has a reason to be steamed. He and his gang gather graveside, chug beers and toss bottles on the wooden casket. “This is not over,” he seethes.

As best I can tell the movie takes off to avenge St. Louie’s miserable death, but along the way it turns into something more as Pistolero eats some peyote buttons, hallucinates a time jump to make love to dead biker chick Cherokee (Julia Jones) and then takes an arrow in the chest from his current girlfriend, a foxy lady who straddles his face to pull out the arrow. At one point everyone starts hording keys that may go to a safety deposit box buried in the desert, but, due to the twisting construction of the movie, I wouldn’t call that a distinguishable plot, subplot or even a coherent tangent. There’s also a significant development with a young Victor biker, Comanche (Eric Balfour), who may be Cherokee’s son, or maybe her neighbor, or maybe Pistolero’s son. Who knows with this shifty sensation.

I don’t identify with biker culture enough to know if this is authentic or not, but it feels genuine in every way — the look, the lingo, the drugs, the bikes, the sounds, the insane little twinkle in Bishop’s beady little eyes. He reminded me a great deal of Hells Angel troublemaker, and Cave Creek resident, Sonny Barger, who was at Altamont in ’69, chilled with Hunter S. Thompson and spent four years in a federal pen on a conspiracy charge. Barger is an author now and I got a small chuckle when Pistolero produces his memoirs bound in scraps of leather. If the Hells Angels didn’t somehow influence Bishop’s magnum opus, then I’ll eat the script.

Hell Ride is spent almost entirely outside and on the road, where Victors stalk the highways looking for Six-Six-Sixers, including its new leader, Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones), who carries a paintball gun that shoots arrows like bullets. And don’t ask what the purple tattoo on his arm means. Billy’s gang is deadly, but they can’t seem to get ahead of Pistolero’s complex plan, part of which involves kidnapping the Sixers president (David Carradine) and then meeting at a Tucson bar where a final confrontation may lay the past to rest. At one point, amid countless betrayals and an uzi-hosing, Dennis Hopper, who hasn't been filmed on a bike like this since Easy Rider, turns up to extol his biker knowledge — "You got a joint, man."

By the time they all meet in Tucson, after a number of bloody double-crosses and two orgies in the desert, only Pistolero and two others are left. One is Comanche, tall and awkward on a motorcycle, and the other is The Gent (Michael Madsen), an existentialist who says trippy things like, “This must be the best dust I’ve ever seen.” The Gent rides around in half a tuxedo on a custom chopper that requires quite a reach. In a shootout he’s the first one inside and the first one with an empty gun, and when other gang members take the dead guys’ weapons, he takes their porn, which he rolls up and sticks in his waistband. Later he leads the group in the biker mantra: “Bikes, beer and booty.”

The Three Bs are rather stupid, especially the way they’re presented to us in goofy biker harmonies, but it touches on the film’s road-hardened theme: A strict biker code must be maintained to preserve the sanctity of the gang and its members. Pistolero embodies this code to such a degree it consumes him and turns him into a relentless madman until he can once again balance the dusty universe inhabited by gangs like the Victors or the Six-Six-Sixers. Bishop, a veteran to motorcycles, seems to understand this and accepts it. He may even live the code the movie adopts.

Hell Ride can be frustrating and slow, tedious even, but the chopper opera it creates is one tough monument to the American biker culture — not the weekend Harley riders, mind you, but the hardcore guys with skin as tough as their leathers and motorcycles that could be museum pieces. This is one rugged movie, too: the language is coarse, the sex and nudity are off the charts, the drugs are hard, the gunfights are violent and gruesome, and the men are misogynists and incapable of remorse. But it always feels real, like a movie the motorcycle gangs would make if given the opportunity.

And I think Sonny Barger, who has renounced violence, will enjoy it for what it’s worth — an ode to the biker code.