The TV Addict 

By Allan Tong of Holy Grails

Bikes and babes.  That sums up this Tarantino-produced action flick written and directed by seventies B-movie icon, Larry Bishop (THE SAVAGE SEVEN).  Too bad HELL RIDE takes viewers to a dead end.

Bishop updates the biker-gang genre by pouring on cool musical interludes, slick cinematography and flashy editing.  Suave and stylish, HELL RIDE is easy on the eyes, but ultimately empty.  The biker babes look like they strolled off the pages of Maxim, while the dudes are rough and tough motherf***ers.  In fact the bikers spend most of the film’s 83 minutes time uttering some variance of the F-word to prove how badass they are.  When they aren’t cursing up a storm they’re shooting, beating, pounding and even firing arrows to kill the hell out of each other.

Michael Madsen (KILL BILL 1 &2), Eric Balfour (24, LIE WITH ME) and Bishop himself star, while Dennis Hopper (EASY RIDER) makes an appearance as a tough old-time biker.  They all take turns-what else?-speaking the F-word and killing the hell out of each other.  The convoluted plot involves some sort of fighting between two rival gangs.  The bodies fall so furiously that I fell asleep 30 minutes in and lost track of the story, which was barely there to begin with. 

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After recently listing some of the films I found offensive, I realized afterwards that I can’t really say any of them offended me on a personal level. By that I mean I was offended for others. After all, most of my complaints were about misogyny and racism in films, and I am white and not a woman. It left me wondering, what would happen if somebody made an “offensive” film that hit closer to home for me? Would I react like the disabilities groups responding to TROPIC THUNDER, or would I be able to maintain a degree of objectivity?

Thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s INGLORIOUS BASTARDS I now have the perfect scenario to help me answer that very question. You see, though I’m a born Canadian, both my parents were born and raised Germans, and I myself have lived there for three years. I speak the language, I have close family there, and consider myself a very proud German who is sometimes sensitive to how we are perceived in regards to WWII.

That puts me in an interesting situation now that some Germans are up in arms about how in Tarantino’s script for INGLORIOUS BASTARDS there is no end of violence inflicted upon my fellow countrymen.

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