Hippies! Bikers! Bikers! Hippies! They’re not really the same thing but 1971’s Angels Hard as They Come (aka Angel Warriors) doesn’t care. Get the women to take their clothes off now and again, add in some yowling rock boogie. Long hair! Marijuana! Yay – we got ourselves an exploitationer.
Of course it’s a Roger Corman movie, since he specialised in vibe-adjacent movies designed to squeeze a dollar from the latest fad. Here he’s working off the back of Easy Rider and, as was Corman’s trick, he’s got some good people in to assist. This was the first movie Jonathan Demme wrote, along with his mate from advertising Joe Viola, who took on directing duties. Viola isn’t very good at it though and on the evidence here – bad framing, a camera that’s late to the action – it’s understandable why he gave up directing in favour of just writing.
Wikipedia tells us that the idea is Rashomon done with Hells Angels. Well it might have been somewhere along the line. But Rashomon’s who’s-really-telling-the-truth-and-while-we’re-about-it-what-is-truth-anyway? angle is picked up as if it were a used tissue, then carefully deposited back where it was found. Whodunit fits the bill better. Western too, since it’s all set in a ghost town. Plus hippies, bikers, weed, breasts etc.
Rival biker gangs with hippies caught up between them is the plot. In a desert ghost town inhabited only by hippies until the bikers showed up, on one side the Angels, led by Scott Glenn’s Long John. On the other the Dragons, with Charles Dierkop’s General at their head. Long John largely the freedom-loving peaceable biker with a philosophy – “I ride where I want, I wear what I want, I smoke what I want” – General more the gimlet-eyed sociopath too unruly for polite (or possibly any) society.
The guys love to party, to race their bikes, to fight and fuck, to smoke weed, admire other guys’ engines and strike rebellious poses. Caught between them is the hippie Henry and his small gang of peaceniks, among them a couple of hot chicks, one of whom, Astrid (Gilda Texter), will catch Long John’s eye and pay the price when General and his honchos decides it’s rape o’clock.
More than this you need not know. Glenn is a laidback Long John, as if he’d overdone the weed. Gary Busey – too clean by half – plays the hippie Henry as a nice boy out of his depth. Dierkop steals the film as the insane General, clearly an appropriation of the look and manner of Charles Manson.
Manson had recently been jailed for the murders of Sharon Tate and five others (with more convictions to come) and it’s the sin-eating, vibe-tasting aspect of the movie that stands up best after all this time. In a flirtatious conversation between Long John and Astrid, he references Manson as a way of denigrating hippies. She hits back with a reference to Altamont (bikers guilty of a capital offence, in short), Demme and Viola making it clear they are from this parish. In this movie things are “cool” and “outta sight”. “Digging it” is what it’s all about.
Also interesting is the way that James Iglehart, as Monk, one of Long John’s lieutenants, is used. Iglehart is a good actor (you might have seen him in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or starring in Corman exploitationer Savage!). Standing out in a white crowd, his black skin colour is unremarked upon by hippies and bikers alike. But it suddenly becomes his most salient feature once he’s out of the camp and lost in the desert, where he’s treated shamefully by a couple of white squares out for a ride in a dune buggie. We can dig it – the counterculture sees no colour.
How this counterculture constitutes itself, its uneasy alliances and lines of fracture, is what this movie is at bottom all about. Or what it wants to be about. But Demme and Viola struggle to incorporate the hippie element into their gang-versus-gang structure, though the grimly jerky visual style smooths out a bit as Viola gets his head around how the camera works. By this point, though, the storyline is fractalling into smithereens. Viola’s technical shortcomings, by the way, are not to be confused with the cinematography, which is by Stephen M Katz (The Blues Brothers, Gods and Monsters), which is crisp and bright and catches the desert light well. The now-famous DP Caleb Deschanel is listed as “additional photography” and he may have had a hand in things. It looks good, when Viola lets us see it.
Good looks, good mood, some fine acting, a few interesting things to say, but overall a bit of a mess. Though if it does nothing else it does remind us just how terrible a chopper is as a bike, unless going in a straight line is all you want to do. Those extended forks – no manoeuvrability at all.
Angels Hard as They Come – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
