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Black Angels
[Something Weird]
1970; color
Directed by Laurence Merrick
Starring: Des Roberts, Linda Jackson & John King III
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The late '60s and early '70s were a special time in B-Movie history; practically every vice or inclination one could imagine no matter how violent, perverse or just plain non-sensical, found it's way to the silver screen through films that flew way under the radar of mainstream cinema. It was a great time and, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, one we can go back and revisit whenever we like. And so it was that one evening not too long ago, the Kommandant and I settled in to travel back in time to the turbulent year of my birth, 1970, via a package that arrived in the mail from Something Weird. Of course since I was born in September of that year I don't really have any cognizant memory of just how turbulent it was, but if this movie is any inclination it was pretty motherfuckin' turbulent. Then again, the life of an outlaw biker is always fairly turbulent - it comes with the territory. Anyway, Black Angels has the unique distinction of fulfilling a number of 'sploitation desires—blacksploitation, sexploitation and, uh, biker-sploitation—all in one completely insane acid trip of a movie. Despite what your logical movie watching deductive skills might lead you to believe, the title is not a reference to the name of either gang. (The "white" gang is the Satan's Serpents and the "black" gang goes by the Choppers.) I can't help but wonder what the real-life black biker gang the Choppers thought when they were hired to play the roles of the black biker gang in this movie, or what they thought after they saw the finished film (and whether or not someone subsequently caught a beat down because of it) but some questions, much like the reasoning used when writing this script, must be put aside in order to accomplish the task at hand. At any rate, the term "black angels" is actually a euphemism for the two mostly silent cops that just kind of show up here and there throughout the course of the movie. You know, just to let us all know that the man is most definitely at work 'round these parts and, as usual, he's out to put the ol' kaibosh on any good old fashioned biker type revelry that might go down on their beat. Aside from the heat between the fuzz and the gangs, there are plenty of sparks a flyin' between the Serpents and the Choppers themselves - but again, that's to be expected. It's only when one particular young Chopper, one with a militant anti-whitey stance, gets the idea to take down the head of the Serpents—and as a result of a high speed bike chase jumps a ravine and dies—that things get ugly and all racially charged. It certainly doesn't help when the Serpents decide to allow a racist Southern biker to join their ranks; up until that point, their official stance on racial harmony had always been of the "to each their own as long as you stay off my front lawn" variety. In the end, however, it's the pigs that cause this once peaceful black and white one percenter co-existence to go all topsy turvy, resulting in one huge cross cultural gang fight and massive amounts of outlaw biker death. And cops wonder why the public doesn't trust them.
—Bunny
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