Posted: 05/25/2005

Hell’s Bloody Devils

(1970)

by Ben Beard

A bloody biker gang movie with no bikers and no gangs.

From the first shot stolen directly from The Wild One, leaping from a long take of a biker gang zipping down a dusty highway to an extended biker sporting that essential of drive-in iconography, a swastika, on his belt, Hell’s Bloody Devils tells the oddball funky tale of a government agent working undercover for the mob syndicate. Mark Adams is his name, a tall drink of water with perfectly styled hair who plays it fly with the ladies. Sent by his superiors to infiltrate a “new nazi” counterfeiting ring, he runs afoul of a nubile underage vixen and portly, mustached men.

The leader of this new Nazi party: Count Von Delberg, who speaks with an accent suspiciously reminiscent of Cleveland, when he’s not listening to Wagner or praising the master race. His aide de camp, a switch-blade wielding jive sister, a brunette femme fatale with a cold icy stare. Von Delberg hires the Bloody Devils (called a biker gang but consisting mostly of three middle-aged dudes sporting ripped jean shirts and goofy facial hair and incredibly kitschy sunglasses) to do his dirty work, although it isn’t clear what that is beyond asking for more “bread” and laughing at stupid jokes. They’re all tied together in some vast underground conspiracy called “The Cicero Plan,” which sounds scary but amounts to mostly just fund-raising. Oh, the Commies are involved, too. And Colonel Sanders, maybe (it isn’t clear, even though he does have a cameo).

Two cops are assigned to crack the case, some old guy and an impossibly skinny blonde who spends only part of the movie in a bikini. Adams (played by John Gabriel) navigates the many abductions, attacks, and double crosses, taking a break in the middle to woo a bathing suit salesgirl.

It’s wondrous B-movie stuff.

At the time, Drive-in cinema was a take no prisoners, no holds barred game. Loading the movie with as much lurid, sensational content as possible, the B-directors added topical material to their films to trick audiences into watching them. Hell’s Bloody Angels is no different—the biker gang plays a pitifully small, mostly undefined role, the kind of bait and switch marketing Drive-in operators loved. This isn’t a biker movie. If anything, it’s a crime story, although what it all means is impossible to tell. Some of the sequences were clearly shot for another film, tacked on to fill in the “plot.” Wanting to capitalize on the strong of biker films, starting with Easy Rider, they threw in the subplot, probably at the last minute.

Ah, the good old days.

Of course, by today’s standards, the sexual entendres and clumsy escapades are positively tame by comparison. A few flashed breasts and tame fist fights cannot compare to the cosmic sodomy taking place in most of the big budget films raking in the cash these days.

With a thumping, funky score and a convoluted plot that mostly involves chase scenes, Hell’s Bloody Angels is directed by Al Adamson, the exploitation great who made films with titles like Lash of Lust, Blood of Ghastly Horror, Dracula versus Frankestein, and I Spit on Your Corpse. With such an illustrious resume as this, you know his films have got to be good.

Israeli double agents, exploding grenade pens, plenty of the one chop to the back of the neck and your out action, and some footage of Hitler thrown in for good measure, Hell’s Bloody Angels is a camp classic, nonsensical but fun.

Ben Beard is a film and music critic living in Chicago.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com