BIKER GANGS SAVING P.O.W.s IN VIETNAM DOUBLE FEATURE: THE LOSERS and NAM ANGELS

In THE LOSERS a Vietnam era biker gang is recruited by the American military for a dangerous mission to recover a CIA agent being held in Cambodia. I guess it’s a mission that has to be done off the books, plus it requires high speed transportation. Biker gang it is. So they build some modified combat bikes, figure out a plan, practice it on a miniature model, then go for it.

But not until the last 25 minutes or so. That’s what’s unique and (I admit) disappointing. Most of the running time is spent fucking around, getting into trouble at bars or visiting their Vietnamese girlfriends. Very little of the backstory is explained – it seems like most or all were soldiers before, but it’s not clear how or why they came back. They don’t show them being tracked down in the U.S. and pressured to join. They’re already on board at the beginning.

I like the melodrama though – these guys clashing with their military overseer about their lack of discipline, about race, about whether they can be trusted not to run off before the mission. One guy wears a (backwards) swastika, as dumb bikers often used to. It’s weird to see a war movie with a good guy wearing one of those. He wears it on a headband and then on his helmet. In war it turns out bikers wear full helmets, they’re not as self conscious. Safety first, bikers always say.

The lead is William Smith as Link. I always like him in movies but always forget it’s the same guy. Watching this I liked him but forgot he was the cool driver in Cronenberg’s FAST COMPANY and Clint’s opponent/ally in ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN. Here he looks like a bodybuilder but seems believable as a biker. He’s also the most interesting because he has some kind of past with this guy they’re trying to rescue, Chet Davis, and it seems like he’s just on the mission so he can beat up Chet Davis.

The director is Jack Starret, the guy who fell out of the helicopter in FIRST BLOOD and also directed CLEOPATRA JONES. Strangely he also plays Chet Davis, so these guys are on a mission to save their director.

It’s weird because this seems like a perfect B-movie concept, but aside from some pretty cool motorcycle mayhem at the end it doesn’t exploit the absurdity of the idea all that much. This was before the formula was really set in stone with UNCOMMON VALOR and movies like that, plus it was made while the war was still raging, so it would’ve been hard to have more fun with it I guess. It ends with shots of all the deaths over a sad folk song, which is a little corny now but must’ve been powerful when it came out in 1970.

THE LOSERS was also sometimes called NAM’S ANGELS, so I had some confusion as to whether or not there were two movies with this premise. Sure enough there is a rip-off called NAM ANGELS and made in 1989 by director Cirio Santiago (TNT JACKSON). In this version they’re not vets but Hell’s Angels stirring up trouble in the bars of Vietnam. They all get locked up after a drunken brawl with Special Forces guys. Another soldier named Calhoun (Brad Johnson) is impressed by their toughness and decides to recruit them for a mission. He tells them it’s about some gold they found but his real objective is to have them rescue some POWs in the same area as the gold. He figures he’ll tell them later.

This is much more of a traditional action movie with the recruiting, bonding over the death of one of the bikers, realizing they should stop fuckin around and do heroic shit with their lives, etc. Also lots of action and a cartoonish villain, Vernon Wells as a former soldier now considered a deity by a primitive tribe and living with a code of honor. But still evil. He sells POWs to the VC so his only real motivation is money and competition. He considers himself to be playing a game and when he faces off with the Calhoun he drops his gun and has an honorable spear duel.

I think Calhoun is supposed to be kind of a musclebound Indiana Jones – he wears a cool hat and black muscle shirt and uses whips and lassos all the time.

This is a low-rent movie, the kind of thing where Vernon Welles can yell, “You may be a worthy adversary, Calhoun, but you’re a DEAD MAN!” and it will not sound that out of place because most of the dialogue is like that. THE LOSERS looks better, has better acting, more developed characters, better music and it seems more heartfelt with its anti-war sentiments and concern for the bikers being with the women they love and all that. But NAM ANGELS is kind of more fun. During the opening combat scene I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get through the movie without getting too bored and turning it off, but it quickly captured me.

Also it has funny opening credits with the title on a Harley Davidson shield that just says “MOTOR CYCLES.”

So if you really do a double feature (which you probaly shouldn’t, to be honest) watch NAM ANGELS second.

[ratings]

(if you REALLY haven’t heard of Billy Jack you probaly assumed that last part was a joke, so I should make it clear that it is not.)

Well this is the VERY FIRST Billy Jack movie, even before the movie Billy Jack. Apparently they wrote Billy Jack and it sat around for ten years, because they couldn’t get anybody interested in making a movie about “a half-blood indian,” even if the dude playing him is a white dude who’s only down because he’s married to “a half-blood indian.” So they put the character into this biker movie, called up Samuel Z. Arkoff, and the shit was on.

I never seen this one before and early on I was thinking damn, I saved myself a real treat here. The tone feels a lot like the other ones but to make it more obviously commercial they got all these cute girls in bikinis. The main girl they got has her hair cut real short, and she rides around on a motorcycle wearing white sunglasses, bikini and go-go boots, talking tough when she gets surrounded by the biker gang of the title. These assholes have been terrorizing this little beach town.

The biker gang seems pretty silly at first glance, a weird mix of hippie, mod and beatnik. Some of them look new wave years before there even was a wave at all. But apparently these dudes are the real deal, only a couple of them are actors. So I assume they know what they’re doing. I wish I could bust out with a load of biker knowledge right about now but the truth is I was kind of what you call a “poser.” I went through a phase when I first got out, I thought that would be a real cool way to experience the freedom of the outside – the fresh air, the open road and the funny looking half helmet. But I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. You know those friends you have, they go through about ten hobbies in a year, you got no idea what they’re trying to do. Some lazy fatass, all sudden shows up at your apartment on a mountain bike he just bought that day, but he has to go all out. He’s got the full yellow outfit with the biker shorts, helmet, gloves, sunglasses… you’re going what, did you just kill a real bicyclist and steal his clothes? Where the fuck did this come from? Two months later you get him a subscription to Bike Fancier magazine for his birthday, come to find out he sold his bike and now he’s obsessed with luge or rug weaving or teaching basketball to russian orphans or some shit like that. Bikes was just a phase. Well, that was me. I’m no expert on bikes is what I’m saying. Sorry.

Anyway, the way Billy Jack gets involved is he’s sitting in a little cafe drinking a milkshake when the Born Losers surround a guy and start beating him to death. He stumbles into the cafe covered in blood, wanting to call the police, but the owner makes him leave.

Billy Jack does his trademark silent, smoldering outrage, then gets up, gets his shotgun and takes on the bikers. I was hoping he’d do his famous take-off-the-boots-to-foreshadow-a-serious-asskicking routine, but I guess that hadn’t been invented yet. And Tom Laughlin had very little karate training at this point so there’s not alot of that. Still, so far so good. And since there has to be some kind of serious injustice in a Billy Jack movie, they all get arrested and Billy Jack gets a harsher sentence than any of the bikers.

So I’m into this movie at this point. And no offense to Delores Taylor, who is the producer of the movies, and Tom Laughlin’s real life wife, and who plays Billy Jack’s wife in the other three movies. But it was fun to see young Billy Jack with this cute little looker in the go-go boots instead of the usual overly serious hippie mama. Unfortunately, this movie in general is not alot of fun. Because it turns out to be about a series of gang rapes. The Losers rape young girls, then threaten their friends, family and witnesses, preventing anybody from doing anything about it. Laughlin and Taylor say they were inspired by reading about similar incidents with the Hell’s Angels. (So then they got real bikers to be in the movie?)

Maybe it’s a double standard, I don’t know. I can enjoy watching many forms of violence and murder as long as it’s done right. But rape in a movie to me is a deal breaker. It’s just gonna make any movie a bummer. I know the Billy Jack movies are serious and they’re about things that outrage Tom Laughlin, and this is obviously something to be outraged about. But you gotta have some kind of fun watching the badass cinema, right? I mean Stander is definitely a bummer on many levels, and it’s about apartheid for crying out loud. But it still manages to have a fun time with all the bank robberies and disguises and making fools of the apartheid-supporting cops. It’s serious and political but mostly it’s fun. You can do both. But not if your movie is about multiple gang rapes.

So this is not my favorite in the series. But I still enjoy seeing the character, especially seeing his origins. And there’s a pretty interesting appearance by an older Jane Russell, going pretty over the top as the mother of one of the victims.

Give me a racist bad guy any day, I’ll watch you beat him up Billy Jack, it will be a good time at the movies. I promise.

[ratings]

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