The success of Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966) spawned a new exploitation subgenre devoted to bikers, their bitches, their rivals, the forces of law and order, and the rest of the workaday world, while at the same time providing paychecks (and additional hands-on filmmaking experience) for the future architects of the New Hollywood. Before collaborating on Easy Rider (1969), Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson all acted in low budget biker flicks aimed at the drive-in market and even John Cassavetes, needing postproduction funds for his 1968 film Faces, donned the colors of a road hardened one-percenter in Devil's Angels (1967). Reworking the fact-based particulars of Laszlo Benedict's The Wild One (1953) - which had concretized Marlon Brando's standing as an antiestablishment icon - while also drawing on a controversial 1965 court case in which members of the Hells Angels stood trial for statutory rape, Devil's Angels has the Skulls motorcycle club rolling into a desert burg "to flake off" and engendering with their rowdyism the enmity of the locals. The screenplay by AIP regular Charles Griffith localizes audience sympathy in the shared plight of Cassavetes' disillusioned rebel and tough-but-fair town sheriff Leo Gordon, neither of whom is able to prevent his people from surrendering to their baser instincts. Notable among the supporting cast are Beverly Adams (wife of celebrity stylist Vidal Sassoon) and Mimsy Farmer, who squeezed this one in between an ingénue role in Hot Rods to Hell (1967) and her debut as a leading lady in The Wild Racers (1968).

By Richard Harland Smith