Search - Biker Triple Mania! on DVD

Juvenile delinquents, bikers, war protestors and a muddy roc

hyperbolium | Earth, USA | 08/25/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Biker Triple Mania is indeed a triple feature, but only half the material is biker related. The first picture is the 1960 title The Wild Ride, a black-and-white juvenile delinquent story starring Jack Nicholson. Nicholson's early performance is the film's drawing card, and at just over an hour, the formulaic gang story is tolerable, if not particularly exciting. The second picture is the 1970 release Rebel Rousers, starring Cameron Mitchell, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, and photographed by László Kovács. Nicholson appears in a supporting role, along with a fanciful turn by Harry Dean Stanton. This is the set's real biker film, with a Dern-led gang invading a small town and threatening Mitchell and Ladd. Dern is the reason to watch, though the padding in just about every scene provides a good tutorial on how to stretch a 45-minute film to feature length.

Closing the disc is the mondo documentary "Biker Babylon." This putative biker documentary does have some raw, first-hand footage of the Aliens motorcycle club, but ventures away for long pieces on hippies, yippies, radicals, war protests and a rock festival that tried to bring Woodstock to the South. The well-crafted narration varies between scornful, Dragnet-styled deadpan and surprisingly sympathetic, lingo-filled exposition. It's a shame the filmmakers didn't stay with the bikers throughout the film -- perhaps 25% of the film focuses on the bikers -- as the footage of the Aliens' clubhouse and party activities is a rarer treat than protestors marching in the streets of Washington, D.C. and hippies in the mud of a Southern bog.

The extras include Johnny Legend introducing several biker film trailers, including The Wild Ride, Rebel Rousers (which notes Jack Nicholson's Academy Award nomination for Easy Rider - the nomination that apparently got Rebel Rousers off the shelf and released), a violent, gorey oddity called The Undertaker and His Pals, The Glory Stompers ("crowding a lifetime of living into... now!"), Hell's Belles ("hip chicks with an itch for the kind of action it takes a lot of man to scratch"), Road of Death, and New Gladiators. Unsurprisingly, given the art of trailer making, the trailers are more exciting than the three films, none of which are best-of-genre. For more biker film trailers, see Raunchy Tonk's previous release, Biker Mania."