She Devils On Wheels (Special Edition)

Just awful from start to finish. Not a cult movie or amusing, due to it’s rotten acting or lack of plot. JUST AWFUL!

`We don’t owe nobody nuthin’,

and we don’t make no deals,

we’re swingin’ chicks on motors,

and we’re man-eaters on wheels!’

Ah yes, it’s She Devils on Wheels (1968), crapmeister extraordinaire Herschell Gordon Lewis’ ode to the biker flick, the twist here being, in case you haven’t figured it out from the title of the feature, that instead of a movie about a group of male motorcycle enthusiasts, this one’s all about the ladies, whose `guts as hard as the steel of their hogs’ and `ride their men as viciously as they ride their motorcycles’. Produced and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, The Wizard of Gore), the film features Christie Wagner (Cataclysm) and Betty Connell in her only silver screen appearance. Also appearing is Nancy Lee Noble (Jackson County Jail), Rodney Bedell (The Gruesome Twosome), and Pat Poston (Just for the Hell of It) among others…

As the movie begins we see an unassuming young woman leaving her house, telling her mother she’ll be spending the night at a girlfriend’s. She gets into a car, drives off, and pulls into a garage, closing the door behind her…shortly afterwards the same garage door opens and the unassuming young woman is now on a motorcycle, dressed in hot pants, go-go boots, and is sporting a rather cheap looking vest made of what appears to be felt material, with the words `Man-Eaters’ printed across the back…and now we cut into four and a half minutes of production credits. You know, I’ve never felt that was a good sign, when a film spits out all the credits up front because it makes me think the makers of the movie think the feature is so lousy that few will sit until the end, so they’d better get the credits out of the way in the beginning while they still have an audience…anyway, the woman we saw in the beginning, named Karen (Wagner), is a member of an all female motorcycle gang called the Man-Eaters, led by a tough talking, cigar smokin’, heavy metal mama named Queen (Connell). As Karen makes it to the clubhouse we meet another member of the gang, a rather heavy set blonde bruiser named Whitey…picture this, a two hundred and fifty pound butch woman with pigtails down to the middle of her back, chomping on a cigar, clad in two sizes too small Capri pants and gold Beatle boots who’s in a state of constant arousal, given how much she talks about doing the `bedtime boogaloo’…excuse me while I go and cut my head off with a rusty hacksaw…and there’s Honey Pot (Noble), a ditzy little number pledging to get into the gang…geezum crow these chicks are homely! The one woman’s face looks like a well worn catcher’s mitt…soon after Karen’s arriving, the women participate in a race on an abandoned airstrip, the winner getting first dibs on the assortment of motley males in the gang’s boy toy pool (given the women in the gang, I’d prefer a severe case of road rash). After a completely unexciting race we see the women engage in various activities including a faux gang fight with some hot rodders, ho hum motorcycle riding montages, Honey Pot’s initiation, Queen calling out Karen for breaking the rules (none of the women are allowed to have boyfriends), greasy love fests, the inevitable terrorizing of a main street in a local town, hassles from the fuzz, a turf dispute, and so on…eventually the hot rodders, led by some greaseball named Joe Boy try to even the score for the beating they took earlier by kidnapping a member of the gang, and Queen and her motorcycle skaggs take their revenge.

Whenever you go into a Herschell Gordon Lewis film you’re guaranteed a number of things like bargain basement production values, ridiculously rotten acting, moronic dialog, uninspiring characters, questionable direction, and sleaze, buckets of sleaze, but know this, his features usually made money…gobs of money. Why? Because on some level his films entertained, as a good number of people, whether they’ll admit it or not, are enamored with that which they find trashy, tawdry, and vulgar. We can’t help it as it’s part of our collective nature…despite the obvious deficiencies within this film, I still found it entertaining. I thought it kind of odd that Lewis couldn’t find one attractive female to appear in this film (when your realm is low budget shabby chic apparently you take what you can get). I think my favorite bit from the film involved the women battling it out with the hot rodders once the latter invaded their turf. I found myself wondering whom I should root for, as neither gang had much in terms of appeal. The fight wasn’t really a fight, but just a whole lot of pushing, shoving, and phony baloney beat downs. Given the participants the men should have easily trounced the ladies, but then that would have hardly fit into the theme of the film, that of cycle riding hellions out for whatever they can get…the most unsettling aspects of the movie for me were the parts that featured the women expressing their more carnal desires, always in some crude manner. There’s just something about excessively unattractive women talking about needing `their fires put out’ that made my skin crawl. Imagine someone like Rosie O’Donnell going into graphic detail about her copulatory needs and you’ll get my drift. That large, blonde woman was probably the worst of the bunch as her bawdy talk was enough to kill even the strongest libido. Seriously, had I been one of the guys on the `meat line’, having wild, ravenous dogs bite me in my gonards would have been preferable to being chosen by her for a romp in the proverbial hay (generally she’d take two men from the group, as one wasn’t enough to scratch her itch…shudder). An unintentionally humorous aspect to the film involved the motorcycle riding montages. Generally one would expect these to involve two things, lots of speed and the riders acting silly, doing things you wouldn’t expect to see people do on motorcycles like riding while standing on the seat or something…that’s not the case here. The montages here featured the women riding at reasonably moderate speeds, with a seeming eye towards general safety. I did learn one thing from this feature and that was Herschell Gordon Lewis had a real issue transitioning between sequences. His repertoire consisted of two methods, the fade out/fade in routine, and another bit involving showing a painting of a wild looking woman on a motorcycle, and then spinning the picture. The latter lost whatever tolerable appeal it may have possessed after being used about twenty or thirty times.

The picture quality, presented in fullscreen (1.33:1), looks very clean on this Something Weird Video DVD release, and the audio, presented in Dolby Digital mono comes through fairly well (there’s some really groovy, 60s female garage rock), except the dialog is often difficult to hear (this was due to how it was originally recorded, and not from any issues in transferring the feature to DVD format). As far as extras, there’s an original theatrical trailer, an audio commentary track by Herschell Gordon Lewis, an archival short subject titled `Biker Beach Party’ (12:56), and a Herschell Gordon Lewis gallery of exploitation art, materials used in the promotion of his various features (it’s a nice showing, but it needed some background music or something as it came off a little dry).

Cookieman108

Filmed in Florida in 1968 with a cast of non-actors by gore-meister Herschell Gordon Lewis, this low-budget biker chick flick certainly expresses the anarchic nihilism of the time it was made. The girl bikers are as crude, violent, and contemptuous of intimacy, compassion, and authority as any of their male counterparts, which oddly gives this movie a strong feminist vibe. I wouldn’t call it good, but it is an interesting time capsule.

What this movie lacks a bit in the intellectual stimulation department, it makes up for by being a magnificent cultural relic. The cast is comprised of a real female motorcycle gang: the members of which know how to kick start a bike. Not easy — I’ve done it.

Check it out for changes in our culture. Note no tattoos on anyone or piercings. And a laudatory treatment of men — if you don’t like men, that is.

Played fine.

This film is supposed to be 1:85 but Arrow has chosen to present it cropped, in 1:33:1. Buyer beware.

You can tell a really bad movie when they put all of the credits at the beginning, figuring you would leave the drive-in before this “movie” finished. I really only watched it for the sex scenes, which consisted of people aggressively rolling on each other while leaving their pants and bras on. I guess the theme song was pretty catchy too, apparently sung by the actresses, proving that they had no talent for anything.