If you think back to the original concept for Grindhouse, Rodriguez and
Tarantino were going to make their films based on the premise, "What if
the drive-in/grindhouse movies had been as good as the posters made them
seem?" Rodriguez lived up to the premise. He made a zombie movie with all
the CGI frills, all the gore, and all the action that were never actually
in those films back in the day. Essentially, he made a Robert Rodriguez movie from
a 1969 movie poster. Tarantino, however, did not make a modern Tarantino movie.
He basically just made a perfect clone of the period films. That's OK, I
guess, if you actually liked those films and wish they were still being
made with modern stars. Personally, I had a hard time staying awake during
Death Proof. Just about everything that was wrong with drive-in films was
also wrong with QT's clone.
Which brings us to Hell Ride, another type of drive-in film: the biker
flick. Writer/director Larry Bishop got Tarantino's imprimatur for this
one and gave QT
a producer credit ... and went about making the same mistake Tarantino made
with Death Proof: he recreated a late 60s biker flick, warts and all. Was
there anything you disliked about biker flicks? Bad acting? Hell Ride has
it. Incoherent plot line? Check. Long stretches of nothingness while
bikers ride the open road while a rock song plays? Check. Ludicrous dialogue?
Check. Gratuitous macho posturing? Check. Complete absence of character
development? Check.
However, Bishop did honor the Rodriguez Promise in that he delivered
the nudity and gore that the period flicks never did. As I recall from
nights at the triple feature drive-in, there was often a crappy biker
flick mixed in with the crappy horror films and crappy softcores, and the
biker epics were always disappointing in the nudity department. There
wasn't much flesh, and what there was seemed to have been hit with the fugly stick. So
I guess Hell Ride is actually an upgrade from the originals, at least in
the flesh department, since there is nudity about every ten minutes,
including copious nudity in some scenes, and the women are all reasonably
attractive.
And I surely don't remember the old-time gore being as explicit as that
in Hell Ride, in which victims are slaughtered in automatic weapon fire,
garroted, decapitated, set on fire, and shot with harpoons which are pulled
rudely out. Others get their throats slit on camera. Pretty much all of those
things happen to Vinnie Jones at once, and he takes a bullet to the dick
for good measure!
Apart from the intensity of the exploitation elements, you could take
this flick back in time to 1968, project it at the local drive-in, and almost
nobody would realize it came from the future. The editing style and tone
mimic the old films perfectly. It even stars the same guys. Of course
those guys are old codgers now. Auteur Larry Bishop, who appeared in
several biker flicks in the 1968-74 era, is also the star of Hell Ride. I
suppose he's about 60 now. (By the way, he's the son of Joey Bishop,
Sinatra's crony.) Dennis Hopper is 72. David Carradine is 71. The young
whippersnappers are Michael Madsen, who's about 50, and Vinnie Jones,
who's only in his 40s, but is plenty grizzled enough to match the old
geezers. These guys are so old that the film could be a Monty Python sketch
about Hell's Grannies. If they do a sequel, they'll have to replace the
bikes with those riding carts that the aged and infirm use for shopping at
Wal-Mart. It'll be like the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza led the irate oldsters
on a low-speed chase.
Astoundingly, Hell Ride managed to get a theatrical release. Sure it
was only 82 theaters, but still ... what were they thinking? It's
obviously a guilty pleasure film aimed at a tiny niche audience.
Predictably, it took in only about $1200 per screen on its opening
weekend. The numbers per screen rarely go much lower than that. Even Gigli,
the notorious Bennifer bomb, took in $1700 per theater on its opening
weekend. As you might imagine, Hell Ride disappeared from every single
theater after the owners had fulfilled their contractual two-week
obligation.
Critics disliked Hell Ride because it was just a bad 1968 biker flick with more gore and sex. Genre lovers
and B-movie fanatics liked it for the very same reason. As a result,
Hell Ride combines quite a respectable IMDb score (6.3) with a
bottom-dwelling score at Rotten Tomatoes (11%). You can use that combo to
do a "one of these things is not like the other" for an adult version of
Sesame Street with three maligned films that came out about the same time:
