The Hellcats (1968)
2/10
Z-Grade biker rubbish
5 January 2010
This incredibly shoddy 60's biker flick is a real mess. It features Ross Hagen as a man who infiltrates a bike gang called The Hellcats in order to find out who killed his brother. The plot has about as much focus as the blurry camera-work. It's all over the place. Random events sometimes happen for no discernible reason, for example, the scene where the artist and his model are attacked by bikers doesn't seem to have any relevance to anything. On the other hand, when a potentially half-interesting moment is about to happen, it's not shown at all; like when the bike race between to two gang leaders happens off-screen, wow the excitement. The scenes with The Hellcats are pretty sloppy in general and often just seem to consist of them muntering around while the psychedelic pop of the never-popular Davey Jones and the Dolphins plays endlessly in the background. The theme tune may nefariously make its way into your subconscious, so please beware. Despite the presence of authentic looking bikers, this is not exactly convincing stuff. When Ross Hagen first meets The Hellcats, he wins their respect by defeating their leader by simply pushing him over. I'm not certain that manoeuvre would've worked with The Hell's Angels to be perfectly honest but hey this is the movies eh? Our gang do incorporate some harder initiation rituals however, such as the strange limb stretching procedure so fair play but, sadly, they also have a member who goes around annoyingly playing a bugle at every given opportunity, so less respect on that score.

At the end of the day this film is all over the place. The camera-work is out-of-focus and badly framed, with peoples heads often off-screen. The acting is really terrible. The story is badly put together. And the action scenes are terribly presented (you would be forgiven for not even noticing when The Hellcat leader is shot, it's so shoddily done). Overall, it wasn't all that entertaining and can only be described as a truly Z-Grade counter-culture clunker.
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