Motorpsycho (1865)
Directed by: Russ Meyer
Written by: Billy Sprague, Hal Hopper, James Griffith, Ross Massbaum, Russ Meyer
Starring: Alex Rocco, Haji, Holle K. Winters, Steve Oliver
USA
AVAILABLE ON DUAL FORMAT 4K UHD & BLU-RAY, AND STANDALONE BLU-RAY: 28th April,
from SEVERIN FILMS UK Webstore and SEVERIN FILMS US Webstore
RUNNING TIME: 74 mins
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera
Three motorcyclists by the names of Brahmin, Dante and Slick ride around the California desert raping women and beating up their husbands. Plans for a weekend of gambling go awry when they see Gail Maddox, though her veternarian husband Cory rescues her from their attentions. However, the next day, while Cory is at work, Brahmin and company beat up and rape Gail. Cory is astonished to be told by the local sheriff that he cant do anything at all about the biker gang problem, so he decides to rid the area of them himself and teams up with Ruby Bonner, a Cajun woman who’s husband Harry was recently murdered by the gang….
One of Russ Meyer’s best known films is Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! in which three heavily buxomed go-go dancers go on a murder and kidnapping spree in the California desert. I only caught up with it a couple of months ago, spurred on by my first-time viewings of Meyer’s Vixen!, Supervixens and Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens courtesy of Severin Films who were kind enough to send this site review copies. Yes, I’ve come rather late to the world of this very individualist of cult filmmakers, but it’s not the only thing I was a late starter at, and now Severin Films are bringing out two more restored Meyer works, Motorpsycho being the first. Meyer made it just before Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! and the two are quite similar, the main differences being that the first has a gang of three male menaces while the second changes them into women which made it become iconic whilst the first lapsed into obscurity, and that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Motorpsycho fits into the “rougbie” subgenre that was popular in American exploitation cinema of the period, a genre that involved women being treated terribly by men. Yes, it sounds rather questionable today, but I think it’s possible to appreciate such films if they’re actually good in addition to seeing them as products of their time, and Motorpsycho is really a rather neat little ‘B’ movie, a gritty no-budget actioner whose desert locales seem a perfect backdrop for its seedy, vicious tale of murder, rape and revenge, while Meyer already has his style and interests [some might say obsessions], from sharp editing to odd dialogue to ladies who love sex and have big bazongas, though there’s very little humour in this one.
Our first sight is of a girl in bra and panties lying on a sunbed, rather bored while her husband is fishing; she gets up and goes over to him but he’s not interested in her advances so she jumps into the lake. “Now you’ve screwed up the fishing” he complains. “Why, you’ve got the best there is on your line right now”, she answers. Now we cut to our three reprobates; leader Brahmin, Dante and Slick, Slick expresses unease at delaying their planned trip to Las Vegas and notes to Dante that “Brahmin is a flip and you know it”. And it’s very soon revealed that they are nasty, in what’s probably a typical day for them. They see the lady lying back on the sunbed, then walk over to her. Brahmin leans over and kisses her; she, with her eyes being shut, initially thinks it’s her other half before opening them and screaming. Hubby hears and rushes over, punching down Slick, then Dante, before being beaten viciously by Brahmin who then turns his attention to the lady – after which we cut away. This was still 1965 and sex in movies still was hardly ever shown, let alone forced sex, but this opening portion still makes an impact and makes us really fear these guys, who don’t look that menacing and actually appear rather ordinary – which of course is more frightening. We now meet Cory and Gail at nighttime, she having just woken up in bed alone and finding him at his desk, worried about the gang and trying to occupy himself doing work stuff. We’re in Meyerland, so of course she lures him back to bed and they get down to it despite a phone call from a client [who’s pregnant horse is acting up] not really interrupting them.
The next day, the gang see Gail walking along the road and hassle her until Cory shows up to push Brahmin off his motorbike. However, the trio follows them to their house, then waits for Cory to go to work. The radio carried by Slick is turned up loud while Gail is forcibly danced with; a nice touch is Slick casually speaking on the phone to his parents. Gail knees Brahmin in the crotch and is therefore carried by him onto the settee where we know what he’s going to do next. The intensity is pretty strong and this scene must have seemed really harsh stuff for cinemagoers at the time. Cory is chatting to the owner of the local petrol station when three bikes come whizzing by; Cory races off, then we cut to a beaten and raped Gail on a stretcher being put into the back of an ambulance, Meyer’s tight storytelling well in evidence here “She’ll be alright, after all nothing happened to her that a woman ain’t built for” says the arsehole of a Sheriff, who’s played by – Russ Meyer! He even suggests that Gail encouraged the gang, though the film supports that idea no more than Cory, who cries “they won’t get away with it”, totally ignored by the Sheriff, a truly shining example of authority at its most uncaring and ignorant; appropriately the law plays no part whatsoever in what follows. Now we meet another couple, Harry and the considerably younger Ruby Bonner arguing in his truck, introduced by the line “I need you like a hole in the head”. There’s a flat tire, then, while she goes off to have a pee behind some bushes, our three show up and attack him. She returns and lovely Harry says to them “now listen fellas, if you want to, you go right ahead, she won’t mind, she likes it”. In the commotion Slick accidently shoots Harry dead with a rifle that he found in his truck, and Brahmin shoots the fleeing Ruby, though doesn’t kill her. She’s found by Cory when the gang have driven off in the truck.
The short running time doesn’t allow for the premise of “two good people against three bad people” to be developed in a particularly interesting way, but, except for a scene where Ruby tells Cory about her past which I suspiciously feel may have been put in late in the day when it was realised how very short the film was, things are never allowed to slow down as our heroes and villains evade, chase and threaten each other, and the viewer gets a truck / jeep pursuit and a climax on a hill involving guns and grenades that Meyer partially rehashed in Supervixens – along with a daft moment where the villains clearly have the upper hand and we get the exchange “Let’s do them in for good”, “What do you want to do, wait for the lousy fuzz? They’re not going places with that damn tire”. The amount of sexual threat is considerable for the time and Meyer does his best to make these scenes properly uncomfortable and sometimes uses suggestion in a powerful way, particularly in what’s perhaps the most shocking of his edits. The owner of this pregnant horse makes full-on sexual overtones to Cory – we might still be in 1965 but already in Meyerland most people just want to get laid and don’t waste any time in trying to get what they want – and gets a kiss from Cory but he won’t go any further. “I already got more than I can handle” he tells her, a sentence that’s about to become bitterly ironic, before leaving her and she’s left to say “Well, some girls have it made”. And then we cut to Gail sitting down in her lounge with a bloody nose, framed between Brahmin’s legs in a striking image that you won’t forget. I’m a bit uneasy about Meyer’s view of uncoersive sex as shown elsewhere, but here we’re left in no doubt; these are atrocities and, even when Ruby takes her top off to slow down an attacking villain, it’s not presented as an erotic moment.
Of course Meyer wasn’t allowed to show boobies yet, though he does his best to give us the impression, like having Gail lie in bed with the covers down as far as was permissable, not to mention Ruby’s tight outfit. And is that bits of a human body that we see when one character is blown up? Blimey! Then there’s the only really humorous bit, a scene that Meyer would reuse in Supervixens, unless one includes a bit of the deliberately trashy dialogue that Meyer would go on to use more and more, where Cory is bitten by a snake on one of his legs and Haji has to help out with her mouth while Cory demands “suck it out, spit it out”. He he! Alex Rocco and Haji, while not especially great performers really, share enough chemistry to almost make us wish that they’d get together for at least one time despite Cory having a physically abused wife in hospital, which is quite an achievement really – though Haji is certainly an unusual presence with a sort of sweet sexuality and really pulls off a scene where she lies on top of Cory for comfort while he’s having a nightmare. The most disturbed character is of course Brahmin, a Korean war casualty who loses it when something reminds him of serving, though his imaginings of things that aren’t actually happening happens too suddenly; the screenplay doesn’t have enough time to gradually build up to this. Stephen Oliver nonetheless gives probably the best performance in the film; quite subtle but detailed and convincing when it heats up. Also fairly well sketched is Slick, who doesn’t participate in much of the nasty stuff that the other two get up to, preferring to hold their radio to his ear nearly all the time.
The way that we hear said radio’s period rock, which alternates throughout the running time with “sexy” jazzy music that’s a bit overused, isn’t always consistent and believable – for example it never gets louder of quieter depending on where Slick is – unless you want to consider this is to be experimental and clever instead, and I wouldn’t dismiss such a point of view seeing as Meyer usually has a firm grasp on what he’s doing; just look at, for example, the way that he and co-editor Charles G. Schelling don’t like to build up to events; they usually just suddenly happen. Motorpsycho has considerable verve and singularity and is a fine example of the American ‘B’ exploitationer of the time.
SPECIAL FEATURES
4K UHD
Audio Commentary With Film Historian Elizabeth Purchell And Filmmaker Zach Clark
Trailer
BLU-RAY
I don’t support UHD but, judging by the Blu-ray copy that I requested, buyers are in for a treat, the Blu-ray looking much better than a cheapie indie film of its vintage probably ought to look. The picture is sharp, grain is evenly managed, and blacks are deep except for a few day-for-night shots which rarely work too well in HD anyway because of the process used to create such shots.
Audio Commentary with Film Historian Elizabeth Purchell and Filmmaker Zach Clark
Purchell and Clark, two commentators who are new to me, provide a pretty comprehensive talk track, discussing everything from production to the differing stages of Meyer’s career to when they first encountered this film with admiration and knowledge. Purchell leads and dominates the track just a bit, and tells us about the film poster’s news headlines about bad motorbike gangs being mostly fictional, Rocco’s colourful criminal past and Meyer’s mother being proud of him when it came out because he played a policeman, while Zach is more technical, commenting for example that the editing mirrors each of the characters, while he also says that Meyer didn’t like actors blinking which was one of his reasons for never lingering on faces for long, and says that Meyer essentially lived the American Dream – “he got out of the war and he built a career for himself living in his own fantasy land”. I learned a lot here and even became more appreciative of Motorpsycho than I’d already become from first watching it.
Desert Rats On Hondas – Interviews With Stars Haji and Alex Rocco l21 mins]
Haji and Rocco speak with fondness about their time making this film, beginning with how they were found; Haji was seen in a nightclub by Meyer and his friend George Costello while Rocco was noticed and suggested by Meyer’s then-wife Eve who was working in a night club at the time. They both initially read for much smaller parts. Haji tells of how Meyer didn’t want anybody leaving the set but that Steven Oliver kept wanting to read his motorbike, and how nice Meyer was in their several collaborations, while Rocco doesn’t go much into his dodgy past before making Motorpsycho, but tells us that the girls – especially Haji whom Meyer sent to a motel with him[!] preferred him to the more macho Oliver, who even threatened him with a gun at one point before revealing that he was just winding him up; while he didn’t realise that his scene with Haji concerning the snake bite was a comedic one while filming it.
Trailer [3 mins]
“Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill!” is widely regarded as the first full-fledged Meyer film but that title actually belongs to “Motorpsycho”, which looks forward to a great deal of later Meyer madness but is a good, gritty little cheapie thriller in its own right. Lost for a great many years, Severin have given it a fine release. Highly Recommended!
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