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Sorting through that pile of stuff isn't nearly as fun as it should be. The convoluted, pointlessly achronological plot features The Victors, a motorcycle gang led by the legendary Pistolero (Bishop), and the decades-old bad blood between them and The Six Six Sixers. This involves drugs, money, a young boy who disappeared in 1976, gasoline and a dead Indian woman named Cherokee Kisum (Julia Jones) who appears to Pistolero whenever he's asleep or tripping on peyote.
But for all the fragments of story that get horked up, Bishop never actually seems to care about any of it - it's merely an excuse for him to film a number of listless scenes where badass guys ride hogs through desert landscapes, occasionally pausing for interludes where they'll stop to have sex, drink a beer or kill someone. A lot of transgressive things happen in Hell Ride, yet the film is too beholden to some calcified sense of 'cool' to have any punch.
Hell Ride seems to have been filmed in some dead zone where everything is in quotation marks, but we're still supposed to take it seriously as a gutbucket downmarket muckfest. Quentin Tarantino, who executive produced this, can walk this high wire because he's intelligent and genuinely cares about both his craft and the genres he's aping; Bishop, like so many before him, tries to follow suit but gets stuck in the crevices between recreation and homage.
Sometimes there's dialogue, at which point the film gets damn near unbearable. Bishop's strange conviction that low-level wordplay and numbing repetition are the epitome of cleverness was previously evinced in his stultifying Mad Dog Time, a film that inspired one of Roger Ebert's funniest and most venomous reviews, and the last twelve years have not disabused him of his pretensions. The film's nadir comes during a long passage of dialogue between Bishop and Leonor Varela, playing some manner of Mexican mystic/whore, where every line involves the word 'fire' in a nudge-nudge smutty context. Pistolero screams "Shut the fuck up!" a number of times during the film; it would have been nice if he followed his own advice.
It may have helped matters if Larry Bishop the director and Larry Bishop the writer had someone other than Larry Bishop the actor in mind when putting this farrago together. Pistolero is meant to be the kind of guy who inspires devotion from rough-and-tumble types, a magnetic, mean-souled Man's Man who is inspiring to guys and irresistible to gals. Another actor (maybe co-star Michael Madsen, who looks ill at ease on his chopper but delivers the film's only funny line) might have portrayed this character with squinty aplomb, but Bishop brings nothing to the table. With the vocal intonations of Fat Tony from "The Simpsons" after a handful of red devils, huge black sunglasses covering his dead eyes and a cockeyed smirk permanently plastered on his frozen face, Bishop is a black hole of charisma. Late in the film, he shares a scene with David Carradine, and the contrast between Carradine's serene, effortless poise and Bishop's forced badassness is simply embarrassing.
Hell Ride is made in the spirit of the grungy biker flicks that dotted the grindhouse circuit in the late '60s and early '70s. Like those films, it's got just enough in it to cut together into a great trailer; also like those films, everything that isn't in the trailer is worthless. It would be hard to make a film more empty than this. The energy that exudes from the higher forms of trash cinema has gone missing here. For all its frenzied devotion to exploitative material, Hell Ride is a slog.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)