ANGELS' WILD WOMEN (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Many of the films helmed by Al Adamson have a jigsaw quality to them, because Adamson and his crew frequently tinkered with them to add new exploitation-elements. ANGELS' WILD WOMEN is no exception to that tendency. According to Sam Sherman, Adamson's co-producer on the film, WILD had been completed as a biker-gang movie, SCREAMING EAGLES, but that iteration failed to find a distributor because biker-movies had fallen out of favor by 1972. Adamson and his colleagues added a new plotline which seems to have shoved out whatever the original idea was-- which may be the reason WILD doesn't seem like an assemblage of puzzle-pieces.

Some reviewers have found WILD incoherent, which makes me wonder if any of them had ever seen a biker picture. The genre was either started or at least boosted by Roger Corman's 1966 WILD ANGELS, and in my experience most if not all entries in the category are loosely plotted, full of random sex and violence. And biker-films are technically a subset of the counterculture cinema that evolved in the same period, and most of those follow the same patterns. 

Possibly the original plot just focused on Speed (headliner Ross Hagen) going around having fights with other bikers, since there are at least two such guy-on-guy battles that aren't strictly germane to the new plot. Said plot plays up the half-dozen "motorcycle mamas" who accompany Speed's gang, and they're first seen kicking the crap out of a couple of attempted rapists, led by Margo (Regina Carroll, wife of Adamson). Later, the male members of Speed's gang (never called "Angels" as far as I recall) decide they want to go off boozing with other male bikers, and they don't want their "mamas" going along because the guys always get into major fights over the women. 

So Margo and the other ladies-- including Speed's girl Donna (Jill Woefel)-- decide to hang out at a local commune for the weekend. Three of them, Margo and two others, even waylay a hunky hick. While they don't precisely "rape" the guy, they are the dominant ones in the "orgy" while the hick is the one uttering various weak non-consensual protests. (As a minor bit of trivia, the only female in the trio who actively humps the hick is played by Vicki Volante, who had been Adamson's go-to female lead until Carroll entered the picture.)

Unfortunately, the commune's run by a cult-leader named King (William Bonner), and although the ranch is owned by an old guy named Parker (1940s actor Kent "GANGBUSTERS" Taylor), King and his goons have been dealing drugs on the premises, as well as doping up some airhead females. Not a lot happens in the middle of the movie, and indeed Margo gets her own little romantic arc with a drifter named Turk, seen earlier getting his ass kicked by Speed for coming on to Donna. 

Then for some vague reason King, who never shows any real belief in whatever faith he professes as cult-leader, decides that he needs to sacrifice a woman to his god, and so he kills Donna. The "wild women" don't take much action, aside from one woman hitting a guy with a plank. However, somehow Speed's gang shows up in the nick of time and beats up the cultists. King tries to escape in a car, but Speed follows and manages to run the villain off the road to a fiery doom.

Hagen is just okay in his role as the quasi-heroic biker, though there's a nice moment when, after decking Turk, Speed lights a cigarette after striking a match on the fallen man's boot. Margo gets the most to do-- wielding a whip to throttle a rapist, gang-seducing the hunky hick, and having a heart-to-heart with Turk about her childhood-- and for that reason I'd say she and Speed are the focal icons of the story. (Margo, unlike Speed, even gets to complete her romantic arc.) I was a little surprised that Donna was so summarily killed off. But it's no great loss, because Jill Woefel was terrible here. I could see her staring toward the camera, trying for something like a Peggy Lipton soulfulness, and failing utterly. Oh, and the Spahn movie ranch plays the commune. A few years earlier, Adamson's crew worked on another project at the ranch, when a fellow named Manson was one of the occupants. A little later, Manson's followers committed the famous Tate-LaBianca murders, and it's likely that Adamson conceived King in reaction to the real-life cult-leader.

Some viewers didn't like all the fish-eye lensing and soft-focus in the cinematography, but to me that's the way a period counterculture movie should look. There's not much skin bared and only the opening scene, the trouncing of the rapists, is memorable in terms of action. But even if WILD isn't all that wild, I found it an OK time-killer.