She-Devils on Wheels (1968) -*½
However low your opinion of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s canonical gore period, you really do need to look beyond those films in order to experience the true depths to which he was capable of sinking. She-Devils on Wheels was Lewis’s contribution to the biker movie fad touched off by Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels. It was also, upon my initial encounter with it in the late 1980’s, the first film that I can specifically recall provoking me to think, “This might be the worst fucking movie I’ve ever seen.” Mind you, I’ve seen a good many that were a great deal worse since then. Hell, I’ve even seen at least one Herschell Gordon Lewis movie that was significantly worse. But even so, She-Devils on Wheels is awful in ways that only an elite handful of filmmakers can achieve. Beyond merely amateurish and inept, it’s also underdeveloped to the point of pointlessness, rendered boring and draggy by sheer attenuation of plot, action, and resolution. And although it’s foully sleazy from beginning to end, She-Devils on Wheels is difficult to enjoy even on that crude level. Most notably, I defy you to find any other picture with so many fully-clothed orgy scenes!
I often see people much younger than me describe movies as having “no plot, just vibes.” My incipient geezerhood always makes me reluctant to adopt the terminology of the Extremely Online Youth (after all, there’s nobody further out of touch than an old fool who doesn’t realize how far out of touch he is), but that phrase seems tailor-made for She-Devils on Wheels— provided we stipulate that the vibes in question are all rancid and repellant. The whole film is little more than a succession of slice-of-life vignettes concerning the Man-Eaters, an all-girl gang of outlaw bikers operating in one of the uglier and less beachy regions of Florida. To the extent that there’s a through-line to the whole movie, it tracks the escalating misgivings of Karen (Christine Wagner), the newest fully-fledged recruit to the gang, regarding the lifestyle of violence, criminality, and loveless exploitation of the male sex drive mandated by the Man-Eaters’ aptly-named leader, Queen (Betty Connell). What we mainly see, though, is a bit less than an hour and a half of improbably-attired girls racing their motorbikes, partying in a spirit of strangely prudish randiness with a stunning menagerie of Florida Men, and doing battle with various enemies, sometimes including each other. Oh— and also extemporizing dirty limericks and similar crude doggerel. Indeed, the Man-Eaters are almost as devoted to clunky, half-assed rhymes as Dolemite.
Anyway, Vignette #1 focuses on Karen’s relationship with an oaf by the name of Bill (David Harris), who is unmistakably her favorite among the interesting physical specimens who hang out by night at the Man-Eaters’ clubhouse, angling for the girls’ attention. Pecking order for selecting each evening’s playmates is determined by each gang-member’s performance in a preliminary race, but whenever Karen has her unconstrained pick of the Young and the Chinless, she invariably goes straight for Bill. It’s almost as if she has feelings for the guy. That would be contrary to the Code of the Man-Eaters (wait— do you mean to tell me these chicks are Jedi Knights?!), and some of Karen’s rivals in the gang are starting to make angry noises about her conduct. Queen herself is getting tired of seeing her take the same mouth-breather to bed night after night, and she leads the most disgruntled of her followers in setting up a little trial. They kidnap Bill, summon Karen to the defunct short-hop airstrip where they stage their races, and offer the girl a choice: either she proves her lack of attachment to Bill by dragging him up and down the runway behind her hog, or else the other Man-Eaters will do the same to her. The fact that this is the first vignette, while Karen’s alienation from the rest of the gang is the closest thing She-Devils on Wheels has to an overarching theme, should be enough to tell you how well that goes for Bill.
Next up, we have the initiation of Honeypot (Nancy Lee Noble, from Chesty Anderson, U.S. Navy and Jackson County Jail), apprentice Man-Eater, into full membership in the gang. Naturally, Honeypot earns her wings by winning a race against the other bikers— although they amusingly have to give her a significant head start in order for her feeble little scooter to have a ghost of a chance among all those Harleys, Indians, and whatnot. Initiation entails the other girls stripping Honeypot to her underwear, dousing her with various foul fluids, and then improvising dirty limericks about her before handing her over to the Florida Men for a big statutory rape party.
Vignette #3 introduces the Man-Eaters’ principal antagonists. Somewhat surprisingly, these are neither girls nor bikers, but rather a gang of degenerate hot rod dudes led by Joe-Boy (John Weyner), whose moustache commands attention even in this cavalcade of misbegotten facial hair. The conflict begins when the hot-rodders discover the Man-Eaters’ favorite dragstrip, and recognize its perfection for their own purposes. When the Man-Eaters arrive later that evening to find a bunch of males using their blacktop, harsh words quickly escalate to unrestrained violence, and ultimately to obscene humiliation for the beaten hot-rodders. Joe-Boy and his fellows will be back, though, once they’ve finished licking their wounds and washing the piss out of their hair. You can make bank on that!
The final two sub-stories intertwine themselves in such a way that She-Devils on Wheels starts looking almost like a normal movie for a bit. On the one side, there’s the revenge of the hot-rodders, the re-revenge of the Man-Eaters, and the looming threat of legal repercussions for all concerned, as the local police belatedly bestir themselves over the miniature gang war. And on the other, an old boyfriend of Karen’s resurfaces— a guy named Ted (The Gruesome Twosome’s Rodney Bedell), whom she dated before becoming a She-Devil on Wheels, and who continues to care deeply about her, even if he claims to have no romantic interest in her any longer. Ted wants to guide Karen back out of outlawry, and since we already know she’s the most reluctant of the Man-Eaters, there are plausible prospects for his eventual success.
There were never, however, any plausible prospects for the sequel threatened by the closing title card to She-Devils on Wheels: “Whoever calls this THE END doesn’t know the Man-Eaters!” Nor, for that matter, is the case for a sequel made any more convincing by the one final rhyme clumsily recited by Queen and Whitey (Just for the Hell of It’s Pat Poston) in what might be the earliest post-credits coda I’ve ever seen. This movie is just far too dull and shoddy for anyone to want more of the same, nor are any of these characters sufficiently engaging for anybody to desire another 80-odd minutes in their company. Herschell Gordon Lewis’s sense of pacing and story momentum has not improved one iota since Blood Feast, but She-Devils on Wheels is fully 25 minutes longer than that mercifully brief turkey. His and principal screenwriter Louise Downe’s skills at character development have increased only slightly, and are utterly overwhelmed by the sheer size of the cast. And cameraman Roy Collodi will make you wish Lewis was still doing his own cinematography; however artless the framing and lighting were in Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!, Lewis at least managed to keep the image in focus! The cast is another weak link in a chain that contains few if any strong ones. The girls portraying the Man-Eaters— the great majority of them real-life members of the Cut-Throats Division, evidently the women’s auxiliary of the Iron Cross Motorcycle Club— were chosen for their bike-riding ability first and foremost, and act accordingly. Astonishingly, though, Lewis never really exploits whatever skills the Cut-Throats Division had in the saddle. The Man-Eaters do little else with their hogs but to cruise listlessly up and down the same stretch of middle-of-nowhere blacktop. Heaven knows there’s nothing here even approaching the white-knuckle street race between the ace biker and the undercover detective in Sandy Harbutt’s Stone!
Detailed comparison with Stone (or indeed with many other products of the biker movie’s late-60’s-to-early-70’s heyday) reveals another critical defect in She-Devils on Wheels. Unlike Harbutt, Lewis visibly lacks any affinity for, or indeed curiosity about, the biker counterculture that this movie nominally explores. He seems to perceive no difference worth remarking on between the outlaw cyclists of his era and any other bunch of criminally-inclined youngsters in any other time or place. He can’t even work up a good head of “these kids today!” moral panic, which might at least have given She-Devils on Wheels a bit of alarmist zing in the manner of Reefer Madness or The Violent Years.
All of those weaknesses are more or less to be expected, however, given Lewis’s track record. The same cannot be said of this movie’s failure to push any new boundaries. Remember that Herschell Gordon Lewis was a pornographer (by 1961’s standards of pornography) who reinvented himself as the original goremeister. Finding exciting new ways to misbehave on film was his fucking métier! And 1968, the year he made She-Devils on Wheels, was also the year when the putrefying corpse of the Production Code was finally sealed up in its crypt. So how is it possible that this movie came out less graphically violent than Color Me Blood Red, and less explicitly erotic than The Adventures of Lucky Pierre? It’s especially galling considering that the closest She-Devils on Wheels ever comes to working is during two of its three gore set-pieces, including an absolutely unforgettable beheading.
The thing that broke me, though, when I first watched She-Devils on Wheels all those years ago was the device that Lewis used to mark the transitions between episodes. I know that sounds ridiculous, but you need to see the accursed thing to understand. After each vignette sputters to a halt, the screen fills with the image of one of the Man-Eaters, sitting astride her cycle and aiming a kick at no one in particular with her right leg. Although it originated as a frame of the film proper, it’s been drawn and painted over in the manner of a rotoscoped animation cel, and given thereby a pseudo-Warholian pop-art quality. A second or two later, the sound of a revving motorcycle builds up on the soundtrack, and the image cranks slowly into clockwise rotation. It’s very much the same idea as that thing they used to do on the Adam West “Batman” TV show, with the Bat emblem zooming in and out, superimposed atop a swirling blur. But when “Batman” did that, it was quick— barely a single second in total duration, and spinning like the blades of a goddamned lawnmower. The version in She-Devils on Wheels, on the other hand, has every bit as dire a case of Herschell Gordon Lewis pacing as the movie itself. I’m pretty sure we see it more often, too, although it’s been so many years since I forced myself to sit through an episode of “Batman” that I won’t swear to that. In any case, we get to know that lugubriously circling biker gal very well indeed, and each time she appears is more irritating than the last.
Home Alphabetical Index Chronological Index Contact
