Hell Ride – The DVD Review
Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride coasts to DVD players across America on the coattails of a new-wave, modern fascination with the grindhouse exploitation flicks that were popularized in the 1960s and 70s. This concept hit the mainstream early last year with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez’s expensive double-bill flop made up of Planet Terror and Death Proof. And, through the settling dust of that costly experiment comes Hell Ride, produced, of course, by Tarantino himself.
To be fair, Hell Ride makes no attempt to hide what it’s trying to be—a sleazy, gratuitous, and violent biker film made in the vein of all the cinematic pulp mishmash that came before it. They’re boobs! They’re babes! They’re tattooed tough guys sporting leather jackets as they coast through desert landscapes! But, the movie fails because it never realizes that paying homage is simply not enough to carry a film through its complete runtime. Poorly written, poorly paced, and even more poorly acted, Hell Ride may just be the most boring “action-packed” exploitation joint ever created. And, that’s saying something when the sole purpose of a movie is strictly to tap into our most base and primitive forms of stimulation.
The story (penned by Bishop) is a meandering, uninteresting mess involving two rival biker gangs struggling to recover some MacGuffin, and of course, enact some sort of revenge. I suppose the nuts and bolts are there for something cool to happen, but it never does. Gunfights are quick and not engaging. The storytelling is unnecessarily confusing and unnecessarily stylized. Even the final encounter between the two gangs comes off as anticlimactic and cheap. The cast—made up of Michael Madsen, Eric Balfour, Dennis Hoper, David Carradine, and even Larry Bishop himself—feels like the rejected ensemble for some canned Tarantino feature. Similarly, the dialogue and style is derivative to the point of plagiarism. Hip, Tarantino-esque wordplay is constantly dished out in nauseating, painful diatribes—it has all the cadence, just none of the wit.
To make matters more laughable, gorgeous women continuously throw themselves at Larry Bishop. Larry Bishop! Even in the over-saturated, unrealistic world of Hell Ride this comes off as a stretch—the guy has about as much charisma as the dude mixing paint at the local Home Depot. As “Pistelero,” the leader of a hardened group of bike-riding renegades, he looks like he’s doing a bad impression of Mickey Rourke—something that even Mickey Rourke has been trying (and failing) to do throughout his career.
The other performances are equally unimpressive. In fact, it’s come to the point where I can’t tell if Michael Madsen is a bad actor or if he’s just really good at playing a bad actor. And, if that sentence doesn’t make sense, it exemplifies the meta-level problem of Hell Ride. When does trash becomes art? When is a movie so campy and so tongue-in-cheek that it is raised to an ironic, “I’m-so-smart-I’m playing-it-dumb” level. I’m not sure I’m intelligent enough to answer that question definitively, but I do know one thing for sure—Hell Ride certainly doesn’t fit the bill. I never thought I’d say this, but if you’re in the mood for a biker flick, Wild Hogs is only a short Netflix order away.
