Bikers & Hippies

The same year that producer-director LAURENCE MERRICK made the oddball vampire film Guess What Happened to Count Dracula, he also unleashed Black Angels, a loopy yet cynical biker flick about a white motorcycle gang vs. a black motorcycle gang that’s jam packed with absurdities, semi-authenticities, and even some ass-kickin’ action. (The film also opens with a chase scene so hilariously sped up that it makes the entire world look like...Read More

Delinquents! Drugs! Interracial Violence! RITA MORENO! DYAN CANNON! And - yipes! - Topless Sex Scenes! Yes, kiddies, here's another excellent ·but­ forgotten B-movie, full of racial tension and a couple of big name stars, turned into Sixties Sexploitation via nudie-movie inserts. The mind-boggling end result is that you're hearing dialogue like "No black monkey's going to play around with my sister!" one minute, then seeing giggling g...Read More

After releasing the exploitation, sexploitation, and even kiddie films of one-man film-industry BARRY MAHON, Something Weird has finally found one of his two "lost" rock movies, Musical Mutiny starring IRON BUTTERFLY, a wacky little hippie fantasy which hasn’t been seen since its theatrical release way back in 1970. And, of course, with Mr. Mahon at the helm, it's also the most minimalist rock movie ever made complete with a plot of s...Read More

Bikers, beach parties, body painting, death by dune buggy, interracial lust, and a good old-fashioned catfight all gleefully collide in Savages from Hell, the manic followup to Shanty Tramp from producer K. GORDON MURRAY and director JOSE ("Joseph") PRIETO. And while Savages ain’t no Shanty — hell, few films are — it’s still an exuberant blast from Florida’s past which manages to make the entire Sunshine State seem like one of those s...Read More

Simply put, it's male bikers vs. female bootleggers. And if that ain’t a perfect example of drive-in-style High Concept, nothing is! With a cast that reads like a Who’s Who of Sixties exploitation. The Girls from Thunder Strip is also one of the very first films to exploit the biker craze that came in the wake of German’s The Wild Angels the same year. But in the hands of director DAVID L HEWITT (who would dazzle the world three years...Read More

Something happened alright! It was like a bolt of cultural lightning that split the decade - and America itself - in two. It was a radical change In music, fashions, sensibtlity and politics that separated and polarized generations. It was the birth of Add Culture, Free Love, and the Anti-War Movement. It was sex and drugs and sitar, flower power, free clinics, and freakouts. It was The Hippie Revolt, and It's all captured here, baby....Read More

Originally titled Electric Shades of Grey (the on-screen title of SWV's pristine print), The Psychedelic Priest is a real rarity from the tail end of the hippie movement. According to cinematographer (and unbilled co-director) WILLIAM GREFE, the producer raised the film's budget by promoting trading stamps (!), and the shooting schedule demanded a certain amount of improvisation, because the amount of script that had actually been pre...Read More

Hippies! Incest! High-School Hookers! Drug parties! lesbians! Free-love! Suicide! And. .. well, psychiatry. Put it all together - with an especially heavy hand - and you’ve got The Wild Scene, a cinematic stew of sex and sociology that gleefully exploits the most overused phrase of the late-sixties," the generation gap" ("It’s more than a gap, it’s a void") with a variety of lurid case studies ....