«2-8-1969 - Spring Lake (E of Grand Haven), MI - the M-104 Drive In had a great show with She Devils On Wheels, Born Losers, The Hellcats, and Wild Rebels.
The Starlite in Ludington had The Conqueror Worm, She Beast, and She Freak.»
With both the writer and the star of Sidehackers on board, we know we’re in for a delightful fun-filled romp.
Detective Dave Chapman is murdered by some sort of extremely small mob (kind of a mob-let) before he can close in on their drug smuggling operation. His brother Monty gets back from Vietnam or somewhere just in time to hear the news, and being played by Ross Hagen, he decides he’s going to have to get revenge himself. He and his fiancée-in-law Linda decide to dress up as bikers, get themselves invited into the gang that does the drug-running, and bring down the whole operation from within.
For a long time, I felt like there had to be a lot missing from The Hellcats, because when I would watch it as an MST3K episode I was never totally sure what was going on. Surely the Brains had removed something very important when they edited this film for the show. Then I started doing this blog, and I got cynical. If you’ll recall, I thought the same thing about movies like Laserblast and Swamp Diamonds, and it turned out I was wrong – the stuff they took out was even more irrelevant than the stuff they left in. Yet upon re-watching episode 209 again, I got that same old feeling. Where were everybody’s motivations? Were they in the missing scenes?
Of course they fucking weren’t.
I’ll give you a specific example: I thought there had to be more to the scene at the airport, where Monty and Linda meet up after Dave’s death. Remember in movies like T-Bird Gang and Wild Rebels where the police want somebody to go undercover and get evidence? I figured there would have to be something like that, but there isn’t. Instead, as I said in the summary, the only reason Monty decides to do this himself seems to be because he’s Ross Hagen, and when Linda tries to protest, he won’t let her out. Why can’t they let the police handle it? You’d think the movie would want to offer at least a token reason.
What about the relationship between Linda and Monty? She’s introduced as his brother’s fiancée. She’s posing as his girlfriend when they meet the bikers at the Moonfire Inn (a place where the real-life Manson ‘family’ hung out), but she quickly becomes actually jealous when first Cyclops Woman and then Sheila take an interest in him. Is she supposed to have fallen in love with him in the week or so since Dave died? This is never dealt with explicitly but their tender parting, with Linda urging him to come back soon, seems to imply it.
Like Megara in The Loves of Hercules, Dave is the movie’s fridge meat: he’s only here to die, and only dies to motivate Monty and Linda. We know him about as well as we knew Megara, and we don’t really care about him or about the bond these other characters supposedly had with him. Once Monty and Linda have ingratiated themselves with the gang, events move off in other directions and Dave is pretty much forgotten about. It’s at least kind of refreshing that the movie places a man in this role, but then it goes and kills one of the girl bikers in order to anger her boyfriend. Two fridges in one movie!
There’s more stuff missing. Like, who are the other biker gang, who assaulted the artist and model and then showed up to challenge Snake to a race? They seem to pop out of the void and then fade back into it. How did Monty know where Sheila and Linda had gone when they went to see the moblet boss? He was too far behind to have followed them.
Meanwhile, the things that are in the movie look and sound terrible. The photography is awful: it’s out-of-focus, poorly-framed, jumpy, washed-out, and badly-lit… often all five in the same shot! I watched the scene of the Hellcats’ Company Team-Building Picnic two or three times trying to figure out if it were supposed to be day-for-night or if it were just really crummy filming in general. I favour the latter but I’m still not sure. There’s at least enough light to tell what’s going on, which is a step up from some of these movies, but it’s bland and flat and everything looks like somebody’s home movies.
The actors are terrible. The moblet boss in particular sounds like he’s reciting the times table in every scene he’s in. Everybody else is better than him, but that leaves them a lot of room to suck. Most of the ‘bikers’ look like they’re accountants or something dressed up for a theme party.
The music is bad, with not a single memorable song. I can hum the Hellcats theme that plays over the opening and ending, but I remember it mostly because it reminds me of the Zombie Stomp from Horror of Party Beach. A song about the brutality of a motorcycle gang should not sound like Playful Teen Beach Movie music! Later, when things get actiony, we get what sounds like cheesy spy movie music. It’s weird.
The crappy music plays over a lot of padding. There are long-ass scenes of bikers on the road, and of the gang drinking, dancing, and fighting in the bar and at the picnic, while nothing much happens. These make the movie longer, but they also provide something to show while the music plays, and the music really is the point because believe it or not, there was a soundtrack album for this movie. I wonder how that went.
Insofar as the movie means something, it has an anti-drug message presented through the character Hiney’s bad trips (his version of Roses are Red does at least make me snicker) and the Mexican guy’s addict girlfriend begging for a fix. This is as unsubtle as anything in Reefer Madness, if slightly less melodramatic, and it doesn’t merit deeper analysis.
Then there’s the ending, when the gang is undone by sheer bad luck. Instead of our heroes gathering evidence, finding out who was responsible for Dave’s death, and getting revenge, the whole drug operation falls apart as a result of a traffic accident. One of the girl bikers crashes her bike after running over a board on the road, and the police lay a trap, knowing the gang will come back for the drugs she was carrying. The man who does so decides to just turn everybody in to save his own skin. Monty and Linda show up at the moblet’s HQ, where Sheila has gone for… some reason… and the final fight has far more to do with escape and survival than with revenge.
Monty and Linda participate in this climax but they are not in any way responsible for it. An act of revenge does occur, but it’s on the part of the biker gang, who want vengeance for the dead girl on behalf of her grieving boyfriend. If Monty and Linda had simply left things to the police, as Linda herself recommended, all this would probably have happened exactly the same. Like Cabot in Outlaw, or Cal and Ruth in This Island Earth, they’re entirely useless in their own movie!
Of course, in Outlaw and This Island Earth, we had some idea of the personalities of the people we were watching. In The Hellcats we’ve barely met Monty and Linda and what we’ve seen of them doesn’t particularly encourage us to like them. Monty gets off his plane and immediately vows revenge, and the next time we see him is roaring up to the Moonfire Inn on a bike with Linda clinging to him. We first meet Linda carping at her fiancé about him ignoring her in favour of work. If he’d lived and been the hero of this movie, she would have been the nagging girlfriend whom he eventually reconciles with after realizing how important family is. We don’t know or like Monty or Linda well enough to root for them, and we definitely haven’t seen enough to care about their emotional bonds with Dave.
I find myself comparing The Hellcats to The Sidehackers and trying to figure out which movie is worse. The Sidehackers did at least try to be about something (religion), but it was a nasty misanthropic movie that killed off both the protagonists and the antagonists, and left a bad taste in my mouth for days. The Hellcats doesn’t have any themes besides Drugs Are Bad and the characters don’t appear to grow or learn anything from their experiences, but it doesn’t hate the audience the way The Sidehackers did. If I had to pick one of the two to watch again, I don’t know which it would be. I mean, The Sidehackers is less boring, but I hate it so much more.
Have I just lost patience with these movies after over a hundred of them? Or was this one actually that bad? I don’t remember being so annoyed by it when I watched it as an MST3K episode but then, I only watched it once – the flashback host sketches disappointed me so I never bothered with it again. Too, I’ve learned a lot about what to pay attention to when I’m watching a film, and I probably have a very different perspective on shitty movies now than I did when I started this blog. I wonder… when I’m finished the full run, maybe I should re-visit some of the early entries, and see if I have any new thoughts on them. Maybe they’ll suck more than ever.
