Rent Satan's Sadists (1969)

Hell's Halfwits - Satan's Sadists review by Count Otto Black

I like a good B-movie as much as anybody. Or even a bad one, so long as it's fun. But what I don't like are B-movies with absolutely nothing going for them other than sheer badness. Some people might describe this wretched little film as "so bad it's good" and claim to enjoy sniggering ironically at its utter lack of quality in any department at all, but in truth it's just plain bad, as well as being almost entirely boring, apart from the few moments when it briefly achieves genuine unpleasantness of a singularly sleazy kind.

It's not quite as formulaic as it might have been, but only because the subhuman bikers who pursue the one-dimensional hero and his even more cardboard girl across the desert behave so randomly that they forget all about their prey for large stretches of the film, or rather, the director does, as if even he realized how dull those characters were. There are plenty of other second-rate "bikesploitation" movies, notably "The Wild Angels", which portrayed its anti-heroes as such morons that the Hell's Angels sued Roger Corman for character defamation (yes, really!), but this dismal effort makes "The Wild Angels" look like "Mad Max: Fury Road". Slow and plodding, with abysmal fight choreography, the cheapest ever attempt to portray the effects of psychedelic drugs, and acting and scriptwriting so execrable that you realize Ed Wood was at least trying, the occasional accidentally funny lines are far outweighed by the ugly mean-spiritedness of the whole sorry mess.

Special mentions must go to the sound recording, which for large stretches of the movie is so inept that at one point we're shown a close-up of an air-conditioning unit in a desperate attempt to explain the constant background noise (which remains loudly audible for quite some time after the characters have left the air-conditioned building), and Regina Carrol's performance as a biker chick with hair resembling the love-child of the thing that lives on top of Donald Trump's head and Bigfoot. She may have been a chunky, bovine non-actress who couldn't dance either, but she had very large breasts, and just happened to be married to the director. This was Al Adamson's first attempt to make a star out of his painfully talentless spouse, and I guess he must have truly loved her, because it wasn't the last.

This truly is a bike-wreck of a film! If you want to see something along very similar lines but genuinely worthy of being described as a cult movie, watch "Faster, Pussycat - Kill! Kill!" instead. Or if you've seen that already, pretty much anything that wasn't directed by Al Adamson will probably pass the time more enjoyably than this waste of celluloid. By the way, I don't know what the person who assigns tags to films on this site thinks the word "classic" means, but judging by some of the movies he labels "classics", I presume he believes it applies to anything made with a camera that isn't a photograph.