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Run, Angel, Run
Don't shave your facial hair for me, not if you care for me
1969
Review: June 20, 2006
Director: Jack Starrett
Starring: William Smith, Valerie Starrett, Dam Kemp, Margaret Markov
A nice addition.
THE SETUP:
Biker sells out other bikers for magazine article. They come after him.
DISCUSSION:
I bought this whole biker boxed set of three DVDs for $15, and for some reason just left it in my closet. Maybe because the pointlessness of Satan’s Sadists put me off the genre. But then last night there I was, wondering what I felt like watching, and it occurred to me that there was that one disc in my set with that one hot guy…
You can watch this disc with a brief introduction by Joe Bob Briggs, which is informative about the people involved and why this is an atypical biker movie. It’s atypical because in it the bikers are the bad guys, and because it’s primarily a love story. We also find out a lot about star William Smith, AKA “The Biller” [he bills people?], including that he once held the world record for sit-ups, doing like 5,100 at one point. Apparently he was also legendary for appearing in a bunch of movies like this, as well.
We begin with Angel [The Biller] getting out of prison. He calls up this stripper he knew, Laurie, and she bails him out. There’s a question of whether he’s going to just take off with barely thank you, but he finally says “Come on, get on!” and they go off riding together to the tune of Tammy Wynette’s title song. You see, Angel is on the current cover of Like magazine [looks like Life] where he allowed himself to be interviewed for a story exposing the inner workings of his apparently degenerate biker gang, and now the gang members are out to et their revenge.
He and Laurie stop for lunch across from the rather sizeable Form Rubber store when the other bikers show up. This leads to more riding footage, which is a little hypnotic for all the slowly rotating and moving landscapes in the background as the camera zooms in and out on the bikes. They then see the bikers again [get used to this pattern], whereupon Angel, not a man to pay much attention to women, responds to “What are we gonna do?” with “Shut up and let me think!”
The bikers chase them for a while, until Laurie jumps from the moving bike onto a passing train, and a second later Angel jumps his bike onto the train and they get away. There is then some drama with some hoboes that threaten to rape Laurie, but The Biller makes all but one jump off the train. In the morning they get off and try to find somewhere to stay.
We now have the first of many arguments between Angel and the passive-aggressive Laurie, ending with her saying “I thought you were taking me to Frisco?” and him replying “Things have changed now, baby,” and leaving her on the side of the road. And, as will become usual, he changes his mind and comes back a second later, rescuing her from the marauding bikers, attacking her in extensive split-screen footage.
They find a shack to hole up in, smoke dope and have fully-clothed offscreen sex. He dreams about what he’s going to do with his $10,000, the money he got from the article, which he has not yet received. His plan is to move to Spain and get a villa, or move to Turkey and have a harem. “That’s what I need,” he says, “a harem.”
They decide that they have to find a more permanent place to hole up, and the convenient and apparently abundant abandoned farmhouse presents itself, as it usually does. By now we have noticed that in several scenes Angel’s mustache is of the paste-on variety. In others it appears to be real.
But what of the bikers? They go hang out in this bar where there is this tragic rural drag queen. The bikers talk about how even she’s looking pretty good, “as good as anything else here," and eventually one of the bikers ends up talking to her, whereupon she starts unloading all of her sob stories. Meanwhile the other bikers have called the dates of some men “sluts,” leading to a huge biker brawl.
But it’s time for another fight between Angel and Laurie. She didn’t have dinner ready when he got home, and “burned the meat,” and they fight and he takes off. He thinks of how much better things would be if he were on his own and didn’t have to worry about anybody, and she feels like he at least owes her a ride to Frisco for bailing him out. Anyway, he runs out of gas and is forced to return, whereupon he realizes that he has begun to develop some feelings for her.
SPOILERS > > > Immediately after his mustache is gone [I wouldn’t make you change, Angel] he gets a job with Dan, the hunky former biker and current sheep farmer. He fixes up Dan’s old chopper and dines at his house [without so much as mentioning Laurie, who I’m sure they’d like to meet as well], and checks out Dan’s teenage daughter, which Dan notices. His daughter is played by Margaret Markov, of Black Mama, White Mama. He begins to really like Dan, and they have discussions of how Dan could leave the biker lifestyle and freedom. Dan says that he liked being a biker but he changed, and now he likes his farm, his wife and family. Angel says he could never be tied down like that.
There is then another fight between he and Laurie, because she went shopping and bought him clothes and herself a radio, but forgot to buy anything for dinner. “I didn’t get to it,” she says smugly, and he gets furious. It’s hard to get a read on her character and why she does things like this, acting as though it should be no big deal, in fact amusing, that there won’t be a single thing for them to eat. I think she’s trying to manipulate him into feeling that he cares for HER, and doesn’t care about such worldly things as food. He finally relents and tells her that he loves her, which one can tell is a big thing for him to admit. I have to say that The Biller also impressed me with his sensitive emotional acting.
Anyway, the bikers come upon Dan’s teenage daughter and gang-rape her, leading Dan to think that Angel did it. Angel comes home and finds that Laurie has also been gang-raped, and this leads immediately into a showdown between Angel and the bikers. There are a bunch of bikers, but somehow at the end they only shoot one and the whole thing is considered over. Then Dan has his shotgun trained on Angel, but he sees how he’s grieving for what happened to Laurie, and he knows that he couldn’t have done it. The end. < < < SPOILERS END
It was fairly decent. I was surprised at the depth of the love story and the relationships. The whole background is that Angel is at a time in his life when he, like Dan, needs to settle down and admit that he cares about something and someone, and the story is about how that happens. I definitely was impressed by Smith’s performance, because it’s not easy to portray the delicate emotional states of someone so cut off from really getting attached to something suddenly finding that he’s attached to it—this is bringing to mind Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. Anyway, way to go, Bill. And I’d be happy to offer you a year's worth of blow jobs as a prize.
Other than that we have some good biker move fun with topless dancers, cheesy bars, barroom brawls, and lots of riding footage. It was fun, but a lot of the deep emotion of the story keeps it from being a total lighthearted hoot.
Oh by the way, we never find out what Angel said to the cops about his former biker buds and why they’re so pissed. We also never find out the circumstances that led up to it or how he feels about it. At one point Louise calls him on it, saying he sold out his brothers, and he doesn’t deny it.
Overall, some good biker movie fun and a dcent and emotional story to boot. And some hot, hot Bill. At least 'til he shaves his 'stache.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
That’s it, a pretty decent movie, if not as laughable as other biker movies.
