The Wild Angels movie storyline. In between sprees featuring drugs, fights, sexual assault, loud revving Harley chopper engines and bongo drums, the Angels ride out to Mecca, California in the desert to look for the Loser’s stolen motorcycle. One of the Angels find what they say is a piece of the Loser’s motorcycle in a garage that is the hang-out of a Mexican group.
The two groups brawl with the Angels apparently winning. The police arrive and the Angels escape but the Loser gets separated from the others and is left behind. He steals a police motorcycle but is not able to lose the policeman who is pursuing him or evade the road block that the police have in place. Eventually one of the officers shoots the Loser in the back, putting him in the hospital.
Blues leads a small group of Angels that sneaks him out of the hospital. One of the other Angels attempts to rape a nurse (Kim Hamilton) who happens to hear a noise and comes into the room. Blues pulls the other Angel away, forcing him to stop the attempted rape, but the nurse sees Blues and identifies Blues to police (It is never resolved whether the nurse identifies Blues in error as the man who attacked her, or if she identified him only as one of the people who got the Loser out of the hospital).
Without proper medical care, the Loser goes into shock and dies. His cohorts forge a death certificate and arrange a church funeral in the Loser’s rural hometown. Blues loses his temper and interrupts the minister’s sermon. The other Angels follow his lead and have another “party”. The Angels remove the Loser from his Nazi flag-draped casket, sit him up and place a joint in his mouth, knock out the minister, place him in the casket, and two Angels drug and rape the Loser’s grieving widow, Gaysh, while Blues is apparently raping another woman.
Later, the Angels proceed to the Sequoia Grove cemetery to bury the Loser. There, the locals throw stones at the Angels and provoke a fight. As police sirens approach and everyone scatters, Mike begs Blues to leave immediately, but he refuses and tells her to leave with another member of the gang. Blues stays behind, and before starting to bury his friend on his own, says with resignation, “There’s nowhere to go.”
The Wild Angels is a 1966 American outlaw biker film produced and directed by Roger Corman. Made on location in Southern California, The Wild Angels was the first film to associate actor Peter Fonda with Harley-Davidson motorcycles and 1960s counterculture. It inspired the biker film genre that continued into the early 1970s.
The Wild Angels, released by American International Pictures (AIP), stars Fonda as the fictitious Hells Angels San Pedro, California chapter president “Heavenly Blues” (or “Blues”), Nancy Sinatra as his girlfriend “Mike”, Bruce Dern as doomed fellow outlaw “the Loser”, and Dern’s real-life wife Diane Ladd as the Loser’s on-screen wife, “Gaysh”.
The Wild Angels (1966)
Directed by: Roger Corman
Starring: Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, Norman Alden, Buck Taylor, Michael J. Pollard, Joan Shawlee, Gayle Hunnicutt, Frank Maxwell, Gina Grant, Coby Denton
Screenplay by: Charles B. Griffith, Peter Bogdanovich
Production Design by: Richard Beck-Meyer
Cinematography by: Richard Moore, Peter Bogdanovich
Film Editing by: Monte Hellman, Peter Bogdanovich
Costume Design by: Polly Platt
Art Direction by: Leon Ericksen
Music by: Mike Curb
MPAA Rating: R for drug-related material.
Distributed by: American International Pictures
Release Date: July 20, 1966
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