From the fractured narrative to the torture fetish, writer-director Larry Bishop’s jambalaya of soft-core porn and bloody revenge Hell Ride has its producer Quentin Tarantino’s gory sneer smeared all over it. Set in the dust-choked glare of the American Southwest, this spare (in terms of length and plot) exploitation flick tracks across the open highway a pair of brutal motorcycle gangs warring over the honor of a slashed-and-burned biker squaw, a key and its accompanying lockbox, and some hog-riding homeboy who was also cut and set ablaze like a Buddhist monk in ’68 Saigon.
Lots of people, in fact, spontaneously combust or catch a hot one to their balls or gurgle and spit as their fingers and heads get sawed off with all the precision of a student in shop class making a birdhouse. In between these gruesome good times, strippers slide up and down poles in lamentable desert roadhouses, dry hump drunken leather-clad creeps, and snort kilos of Peruvian pink flake, presumably so they can live with themselves.
Fortunately for the girls, the boys of the Victors, lead by the gravel-throated psychopath Pistolero (Bishop), enjoy streetside smackdowns with the rabid members of the 666s, lead by the crossbow-carrying Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones), more than they do the “Three BBBs” (Bikes, Beer, and Booty). Every skirmish between the 666s and the Victors — who also include The Gent (Michael Madsen), Comanche (Eric Balfour), and Eddie Zero (Dennis Hopper) — leave a D-Day pile of corpses amid the creosote and rock. For those who appreciate language, there’s usually an F-bomb-spiked pun or two by way of preamble, before the bodies drop like crimson bird poop. If you added some pop culture references and a little knowing irony, you’d have a Tarantino movie — which, come to think of it, is exactly what you have.
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