She-Devils on Wheels (1968)

Primary Genre: Crime

Secondary Genres: Outlaw Biker Film, Exploitation

Plot: A few days in the life of the Man-Eaters, a tough talking all female biker sorority, er, gang.  They eventually run afoul of an all male car club.

The Good Stuff: Well, it’s better than Monster a Go-Go.

The Bad Stuff:

• Not the Wild Ride You Might Have Expected: For a film about a female biker gang by a filmmaker best known for breaking all the rules, this movie is shockingly tame  It’s mostly G ratable: 
• Sex scenes with no sex. 
• Orgies that end with the participants fully clothed.  
• Absolutely no nudity.  
• Some uninteresting, laughable gore.  
• All kidding aside, I’ve seen church films more shocking than this. (The Burning Hell (1974) comes to mind.)
• 
  Exploiting exploitation: By original definition, an exploitation film is one that is made quickly and cheaply  to exploit a current popular niche trend.  (And if you want it made quick and cheap, B movie production groups could turn on a dime for a dime; therefore, the association between exploitation movies and B movies.)  Such movies often sell themselves as racy and sexy, too.  For those that think exploitation movies are supposed to be racy and sexy, then we'll note that there’s very little exploiting going on here.  On the other hand, the original definition (made to exploit a current niche trend) suggests that is is, by it's the nature of its intention, disposable entertainment.  And brother, is this movie disposable!
• You Can’t Lose the Plot When You Don’t Have One: There’s no real plot to this thing until about two thirds of the way into it, when the Man-Eaters clash with a car club, and this escalates for the remainder of the movie, but ends suddenly when somebody is killed (and not because anybody felt remorse). The first two thirds are at best episodic and have a "home movie" vibe.
• Bad Biker Movies: Most B/independent biker movies of the late 60s/early 70s were very dull and tended to exist only to make a product that could exploit the notoriety of biker gangs like Hells Angels, which had become particularly notorious following Hunter S. Thompson’s book about the club. (They’d become even more notorious after they agreed to provide physical security for the disastrous Altamont Free Concert in 1969.) Such biker movies also exploited early counterculture popularity, as seen in Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966), which had breakout role for Peter Fonda as a biker.  See also Easy Rider (1969), which was a counterculture movie with a couple of bikers..
• Bad Biker Improv: By the late 60s, many of these movies had improvised scenes with real biker gang members, and it shows -- but not in a good way.  Perhaps filmmakers had seen one of the greatest method actors of the 50s, Marlon Brando, playing a motorcycle outlaw in The Wild One (1953) and assumed that real life bikers could do this, too, because they'd be authentic.  Needless to say, it didn't work that way.
• Menaces to Society: Some people look at old NBC cop shows like Dragnet and Adam-12 and laugh at how the hip and happening counterculture youths in these shows look so square.  The portrayal of counterculture in this movie is even more unintentionally laugh inducing.  Aw, hell, let’s just stop being nice and admit only one or two women in this thing could actually act like being a biker wasn't just a second job for her..
• Not Scary: When the Man-Eaters threaten people, you don’t feel the menace.  I don’t know what these girls were like in real life, but on screen they convey less menace than the Mice gang (the female biker auxiliaries for the Rats in the Party Beach comedies).
• No payback?: Early on, one of the Man-Eaters drags a gang guy behind her bike to torture him.  He gets messed up good.. So, the guy’s bros retaliate by declaring war on the Man-Eaters, right?  Um... No.  OK, so they make rude faces behind the backs of the Man-Eaters?  No… So they send a strongly worded opinion letter to a newspaper?  No….
• Bad Limericks: Occasionally, the Man-Eaters display their razor like wit by composing and reciting limericks.  Everybody loves these examples of bawdy verse .  (“Everybody” is limited to a few people in the movie.)  The filmmakers were so impressed with this they added two limericks in an encore post credits scene.  (Stop.  Just please stop.)
• Crime and Indemnity: The payoff at the end celebrates how one of the Man-Eaters was able to murder a man in with malice aforethought and get off scot free because the only evidence, her signature weapon which she'd intentionally left next to the body, was circumstantial.  Earlier, she'd brutally assaulted someone with the same weapon while there was a whole roomful of eye witnesses.  Can't get her for one crime, you can still get her for the other.  Just sayin'.

The Who Cares Stuff:

• Herschel Gordon Lewis (a.k.a. "HGL") became popular with some horror fans during the 70s after making three surprisingly gory, super low budget “splatter” movies during the early 60s. But by the mid 60s he also produced and directed the completion of an abandoned movie, resulting in the notoriously bad Monster a Go-Go, one of the worst movies ever released.  (Wisely, he kept his name off the credits.  Sometimes when something is good, they say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  In this case, the whole somehow managed to be less than the sum of its parts.)  Therefore, we can honestly say that She Devils on Wheels is not the worst HGL movie ever released.
• Florida Bikers: This movie was shot on the cheap in Florida and used real bikers for some of the cast.  The result is less cool than it sounds.

The Bottom Line:

No.  Just no.