Hells Angels On Wheels

                                     Hells Angels on Wheels (1967)
' The shattering true story of the Hell's Angels of Northern California!
             The violence...
                                      The hate...
                                                   The way-out parties...Exactly as it happens!'

Directed by Richard Rush
Runtime: 90 min
At first gas station attendant Bobby is happy when the rockers gang "Hell's Angels" finally accepts him. But he's shocked when he learns how brutal they are - not even murder is a taboo to them. He gets himself in trouble when the leader's girlfriend falls in love with him - and he welcomes her approaches.

Still years away from his much deserved mainstream Oscar nomination status Jack Nicholson stars as Poet, a down and out gas station attendant who is able to make his way into the San Francisco Hell's Angels. The film was made a couple of years before the shattering of the hippie dream at Altamont)The Angels are led by Buddy (Adam Roarke). Poet becomes attracted to Buddy's, promiscuous girlfriend, Shill, but this is a relationship which can only lead to trouble. Poet is tough and he fits right in, but he is a bit more morally conscious than the other Angels and seems to want to go on to better things even though his life is going absolutely nowhere.

The Angels' exploits include killing a sailor who roughed up Poet, tripping to Nevada to have a wedding (including a bit by B-movie legend Bruno VeSota as a chubby reverend), brawling with just about anyone, and running an old geezer off the highway. The film finishes abruptly and not very unusually for the times and the genre on a down note.

HELL'S ANGELS ON WHEELS is an entertaining piece of trash(so did we expect anything more ? ) It may be padded with fluffy, colorful sequences, but it still manages to make its lead characters interesting and very human. One can't help but get a sense that the three main characters, Poet, Buddy, and Shill, know that this haphazard lifestyle can't last forever, but they constantly block out that notion and immaturely parade around.
One of the film's best scenes includes an orgy that has a beatnik painter marking up some half-naked females as the drunken, stoned Angels indulge themselves.
Real life Angels' President, Sonny Barger (who appears in the film briefly with real San Francisco Angels), was credited as a technical advisor.