Worth Mentioning - All My Cards, Plunk, on the Table

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Motorcycles, vacation friends, and sleepwalking.

HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS (1967)

Biker movies were big business for a while back in the 1950s, through the ‘60s, and into the ‘70s – and while Jack Nicholson had a role in one of the most popular films to come out of that trend (Easy Rider, released in 1969), that was not the first biker movie he appeared in. A couple years earlier, he had the lead role in director Richard Rush’s Hells Angels on Wheels, which was even made with the participation of Ralph 'Sonny' Barger, the president of the Oakland, California chapter of the Hells Angels, who makes a cameo in the movie and worked on it as a consultant.

Nicholson stars as a young man who earns the nickname Poet when he gets caught up with a branch of the Hells Angels when they come riding into his town with Buddy, played by Adam Roarke, riding at the head of the pack. Although Poet’s first couple of interactions with the Angels aren’t exactly positive, he soon comes to enjoy riding around with them as they get in fights, party, have sex in front of each other, have gangbangs, etc. He has fun with the guys, but one gets the impression that a big part of the reason he’s hanging around is because he has a sudden, intense yet almost inexplicable interest in Buddy’s “righteous old lady” Shill (Sabrina Scharf, who also appeared in Easy Rider). 

Unfortunately, the Angels’ actions cause a couple accidental deaths during Poet’s time hanging out with them, drawing the attention of a cop played by Jack Starrett, so we know it’s only a matter of time before this whole situation falls apart. Poet and Buddy turn against each other... and it all builds up to one of the most nonsensical, unintentionally funny character deaths I have ever seen. 

Also unintentionally funny is any moment where another character refers to Poet as “kid,” because Nicholson definitely did not look like a kid in this movie. He was around 30 at the time and looks like he was well into his 40s, and yet people will refer to him as “kid” before the camera cuts back to his well-wrinkled face.

The movie had a script by R. Wright Campbell, and I can't imagine there were many pages to that script. There’s not a whole lot to Hells Angels on Wheels, most of its running time is taken up by shots of motorcycle riding and party scenes, but there is some entertainment to be found in there as well.

VACATION FRIENDS 2 (2023)

Back in 2021, the Hulu streaming service released a comedy called Vacation Friends, which was directed by Clay Tarver from a screenplay he crafted with Tom Mullen, Tim Mullen, Jonathan Goldstein, and John Francis Daley. It showed us the story of an uptight guy named Marcus (Lil Rel Howery) and his bride-to-be Emily (Yvonne Orji) befriending a wild, inappropriate couple, Ron (John Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner). I enjoyed the movie well enough and was especially impressed by the comedic performance delivered by Hagner, so I was glad to hear a sequel was on the way. Two years later, Vacation Friends 2 was released (also through Hulu)... but this one was written solely by returning director Clay Tarver, and proves to be an odd case where a movie didn’t benefit from being the product of a single creative vision rather than having a bunch of different cooks in the kitchen.

The sequel catches up with Marcus, Emily, Ron, and Kyla as they head out on a Caribbean vacation together, now accompanied by Ron and Kyla’s infant son and Carlos Santos as Maurillio, a minor character from the previous film who has been brought back to work as Ron and Kyla’s babysitter. Marcus is also planning to do some serious business on this trip, setting up a job for his Chicago-based construction company... but only after the partying is out of the way and Ron and Kyla have gone home. So, of course, Marcus’s business meetings start earlier than expected and his wild friends end up being drawn into the situation.

The vacation is also crashed by the arrival of Kyla’s father Reese – played by the always welcome Steve Buscemi – who has just been released from San Quentin prison. He may be a free man now, but it doesn’t look like he has left his criminal days in the past, because he soon has everyone mixed up in some shady, crazy stuff that involves diving for treasure, a plane crash, a hostage situation, attempted murder, and a gun-toting drug lord.

Comedy sequels are tough to make, and despite the addition of Steve Buscemi, Vacation Friends 2 turns out to be your typical comedy sequel in that it just doesn’t work as well as its predecessor did. That’s why I started to suspect that Tarver benefited from having collaborators the first time around, because this movie wasn’t as entertaining as the first one. It wasn’t as funny... so the script probably could have used more jokes, courtesy of the Mullens, Goldstein, and Daley. As it turns out, Vacation Friends actually started out with a script by the Mullens, Tarver only came along as director later (after he replaced another director on the project). So the Mullens, at least, should have been consulted when it came time to write Vacation Friends 2.

But Tarver took this on solo and it didn’t turn out as well the second time around. But the leads and Buscemi did good work bringing their characters to life (or back to life), and it was fun to see Hagner play Kyla again.

SLEEPWALKING IN SUBURBIA (2017)

Emilie Ullerup stars in this thriller as Michelle Miller, a woman who has started sleepwalking after going through the trauma of having a miscarriage the year earlier... but she isn’t just a sleepwalker. She also has a rare sleep disorder called sexsomnia, which compels a person to engage in sexual activity during their sleep. This is a real disorder, but I don’t think it causes behavior exactly like what we see in Sleepwalking in Suburbia.

Director Alex Wright, who also wrote the script with Bryce Doersam, shows us an example of Michelle’s problem right up front. While she’s sleeping in bed with her husband Dan (Giles Panton),  Michelle’s eyes open. She sits up and walks out of the room like a zombie, going to the kitchen, where she fills a pan with milk – also spilling milk across the stove top in the process – and starts heating it up. Not waiting around to drink her warm milk, she walks out of the house and crosses the street, going to the home of neighbor Luke (Carlo Marks), who is having trouble in his marriage to Nancy (Lucie Guest) and also happens to be Dan’s business partner. Michelle starts kissing Luke, and he doesn’t take much convincing to have sex with her. Once they’re done having sex, Michelle walks back out of his house – and doesn’t wake up until she’s about to re-enter her own home and crosses paths with her husband, who has been woken up by the smoke alarm that was reacting to the smoke from the burning milk on the stove. Michelle was asleep the whole time she was walking around and easily seducing Luke.

Things get complicated from there. Luke becomes obsessed with Michelle, his marriage to Nancy continues to crumble, Nancy disappears, there’s someone lurking around with a gun, Michelle finds out that she’s pregnant – and after she’s informed that she had sex sleep with Luke, she starts to wonder if the father of her unborn child is Dan or Luke. She also keeps having sleepwalking and sexsomnia spells, roaming around her neighborhood, opening people’s unlocked doors. And if the door to her own house is securely locked, she’ll just sleep climb out a window. Oddly, the sexsomnia never compels her to just roll over and seduce her husband. She always has to take a lengthy walk first. There’s a scene where she climbs into bed with her friend Kate (Miranda Frigon) and her husband, but Kate realizes what’s happening and manages to wake her up, so that turns out better than her visit to Luke's place.

The set-up may be ridiculous, but Wright and Doersam crafted an interesting thriller story, Ullerup does a good job playing Michelle, and the movie is a fun watch if you enjoy Lifetime or Lifetime-esque thrillers.