Born To Ride News

Al Adamson. That name pretty much says it all. He is the creator of a handful of “Biker exploitation” pieces that run from bad to worse, and this one is probably at the very bottom of the worst. The plot is simple enough but the incoherency presented in this film was explained after doing some extensive research. Does this plot look too familiar to you? How about the score for the opening of the movie? The theme song Fakers ran in this, and a few other versions of the movie. That’s an old Nelson Riddle tune that sounds like it was sung by Ertha Kitt! (Actually it was Debbie Stuart.) This movie, if you want to call it that, really has nothing to do with bikers, bike gangs, or any other two wheeled devices— except perhaps a rolling trash receptacle. It may be the hardest to follow of any of the gazillion films that I have watched and reviewed in my career. I assume that what happened was: One day Joe editor (whom works as a janitor at night) walks into the cutting room at the studio. Joe sweeps the floor, and all the little pieces of film are handed over to Adamson with a roll of Scotch tape on the side. Adamson gets drunk, and assembles all the little pieces into what you are reading about now. Since it’s my duty, I will try my best to sum this mess up. …

Originally, Hell’s Bloody Devils was produced under the titles The Fakers and Operation M as a straightforward espionage action piece (circa 1967). When film distributors balked at the finished product, Al Adamson and co-producer Samuel Sherman added the biker subplot, and gave the product a more exploitive title. Shorn of the motorcycle gang footage, the film was also released as Smashing the Crime Syndicate. …

In this masterpiece of miss-fitting frames, actor Mark Adams plays an FBI agent who has been assigned to infiltrate an organized crime ring that has obtained a set of printing plates that will allow them to produce nearly perfect counterfeit $20 bills. The plates were made in Germany during World War II, and were discovered by a radical right-wing group hoping to restore the Nazi Party to power. This version of the movie was released in 1970, so the group was referred to as the “New Nazis” which later became, (as you probably know) the Neo-Nazi movement. The American gangsters are in cahoots with a group of wealthy American Neo-Nazis led by fugitive war criminal Count Von Delberg. This is where it gets weird. The Count allegedly recruited a vicious motorcycle gang, the Bloody Devils, to do his dirty work. The movie ends when the count, his daughter, and one of his cronies blow up in a tiny helicopter sans the bike gang. You never actually see the ‘bikers’ in this film do anything but beat up some travelers, do some drugs, and make-out with some hippie looking girls that were hitch-hiking. Like I said, it ain’t really a biker piece! The one cross-over character Carol Bechtol, the girl in the really cool ’69 mustang fastback, is the only slim continuity stretched between the Bad Spy Film and the Biker Exploitation Film. … Outstanding parts of the movie? Only one comes to mind. The real Col. Harland Sanders appears when Mark dines with his girlfriend at a local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Col. Sanders says something along the line of “ain’t that the best chicken you ever ate?”

I still like KFC, and the few brief scenes when the actors were actually riding were played by members of the Hessians MC, and there were a few boobies displayed (YAAAAY!) so I will give this flick one star, and half a chicken leg. If for some reason you wake up really sober one day and want to become confused and irrational without using drugs or alcohol, go get this movie. It’s available on DVD and runs for 92 never ending minutes.