She Devils on Wheels (1968)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Louise Downe

Cast: Betty Connell as Queen; Nancy Lee Noble as Honey Pot; Christie Wagner as Karen; Rodney Bedell as Ted; Pat Poston as Whitey; Jody Pennock as Terry; John Weymer as Joe-Boy

Canon Fodder

 

Sex, blood, guts, and all men are muthas.

In response to all his films where usually women were victims, Herschell Gordon Lewis made a female biker film, where the women are tough and can beat up men. He also specifically hired people who could actually ride motorbikes, which for me is the more progressive aspect to one of his non-splatter tangents, as he cared for more verisimilitude than faking shots with the female cast. This was likely as much to avoid time and budget wasting with people who could not ride the motorbikes in the film, but it is something to admire. Also with mind to Louise Downe, a neglected figure of importance in his career, having written the script you have a sense of this further.

Like many of these tangents in his career, Herschell's films are less about the plots, where this is a very low budget genre film where that plot is vague, than his personality. In this case a female biker gang who ride bikes, defy the law, and have competitive races where the winner and the people in order of who got to the finish line first gets to choose from the male Johns to sleep with. Their one taboo is "steady meat", where you cannot have a boyfriend, something which the female stand-in for the audience, a young woman who joins the group, has to learn a lesson from when she has to drag a potential boyfriend behind her bike on concrete to show her loyalty.

This film is a difficult one to elaborate on in terms of a review as, with the pleasure of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film, plot is not the biggest aspect to even his splatter films. This film's main trajectory, baring the female lead's divided schism between the gang and an old male flame, is that a rival male gang becomes hostile the women, known as the Man-Eaters, being on their turf and take a very nasty decision on threatening them. Instead, it is the tone of his work which intrigues many of his fans, as beyond his trademarks of flood light lit static scenes and garish coloured costumes, Lewis' films are populated with likably eccentric figures. Even if they are meant to be a vicious girl gang, the Man-Eaters even act like fifties cartoonish bullies, terrorising the locals and even stealing a soda from a young girl. Even the police are mocked, despite the irony of thanking the real local police force in the end credits, when a larger powerhouse member of the group tells one he has a tiny penis in verse.

Is She Devils on Wheels actually feminist? To debate, but undeniably these are likably rogue, free figures and even how the final drama for the female lead takes a decision which is more progressive than it could have been. ([Spoiler] I.e. that female sisterhood in the gang is more important to her than a boyfriend [Spoilers End]). And even if the ending has seemingly a conservative ending, the film plays a trick by having the end credits finish only to include a coda that says they are not that easy to get rid off, through the police or otherwise. When they do have to fight, with chains and even razor wire strung across a road, they fight hard. They will even piss on their male enemies when they beat them up, which is merely implied but clearly shown when Lewis has the scene.

Plus in one of Lewis' best virtues, he always cast actors you never heard of, from this independent era of non-union actors in genre filmmaking, who make up for any crudeness of their performances with charisma, and alongside casting women who could actually ride motorcycles, he also cast women who were all charismatic. It is to his credit that, even in mind that the habit of casting female victims in his splatter films could have merely been the unfortunate habit over storytelling of usually having women in peril in horror and suspense films, he embraced the idea of a strong female biker film by having women who do not act like damsels in distress at all.

His films from this time, including his attempt at creating the destruction-sploitation genre with Just for the Hell of It (1968), where a group of young adults decided to destroy and smash everything up in a nihilistic frenzy, even put a baby in a bin at one point, do come in mind of deliberately moving away from his splatter films. They are fascinating films even in mind that, if he had never even gotten the title of the creator of the splatter film genre, or his preferred moniker of creating the "gore film", he would have likely still gained a cult reputation for how quirky his regional genre movies were, even if it took longer to be appreciated. They are as much films of their era too, so if he had stayed in filmmaking throughout the seventies he would have had to have adapted or perished.

In fact, in many ways his cinema, whilst we might have loved him to continue into that decade, may have lost something. It is odd to say this, but the charm even to The Gore-Gore Girls (1972) for all its nasty gore may have been compromised if he tried to catch up with the more lurid and nihilistic films of that decade. Even a film like She Devils on Wheels, with its violence and a dark turn when a Man-Eater member is brutalised, never becomes anything else by a playful romp with its female leads. Watching this film again, alongside the pleasures it brought, made me appreciate the virtue of Lewis even bowing out of film industry for a long period of time too.