Cody Hamman hits the road with Werewolves on Wheels for Film Appreciation.
Outlaw biker films became popular in grindhouses and at drive-ins in the 1960s, and reached their pinnacle with the success of Easy Rider in 1969 - which led to more biker movies. How could any another biker movie possibly hope to top Easy Rider, though? Director Michel Levesque had a genius idea for his feature directorial debut: he'd make a low budget movie that would take a gang of outlaw bikers and turn them into werewolves. He even had the perfect title for it. Werewolves on Wheels.
Werewolves on Wheels is a film I appreciate more for the concept than for the execution. I have long been fascinated by the idea of werewolf bikers. This fascination started back in late 1996, at a time when I had a VHS copy of From Dusk Till Dawn basically running on a loop in my home. I was 12 or 13 years old, I was obsessed with From Dusk Till Dawn, and I was inspired to write a werewolf twist on that story; instead of having vampire strippers attack a club full of bikers and truckers, I had a gang of werewolf bikers attacking people. That was one of the fastest and most fun scripts I ever wrote, and over the next year I would write three sequels. A few years later, I put the first werewolf script online, and when that was well-received I wrote a different sequel... and a crossover script where the werewolf bikers ran into Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th franchise. I had a good time writing all of that werewolf action, and I'm not saying I'm done writing about werewolf bikers. I feel like there may be more of that in my future.
Around the time I was writing that first werewolf biker script - I honestly can't remember if this was before or after I started daydreaming about werewolf bikers - I read in an issue of Fangoria that Wes Craven was going to be directing a werewolf biker movie called Bad Moon Rising for Dimension Films, with Scream cast member Drew Barrymore in talks to star in it. Dimension ended up having Craven do Scream 2 instead and never made the Bad Moon Rising screenplay, which was written by Scott Rosenberg, into a film. They did have Craven direct a different werewolf movie for them some years down the line, and their meddling turned that into a disaster.
Due to my own writing and the Craven Bad Moon Rising announcement that went nowhere, I had werewolf bikers on my mind for years before I even knew that Werewolves on Wheels existed. I didn't find out about this movie until 2001, when I attended a 24-hour theatrical horror marathon in Columbus, Ohio for the first time, and the trailer for Werewolves on Wheels was shown before one of the films.
This is a case where I actually enjoy the trailer for a film much more than I enjoy the movie itself. Running just under 100 seconds, the trailer for Werewolves on Wheels is a beautiful work of art, the sort of thing made just for those of us who love the grindhouse / drive-in era. It mixes images of Satanic monks performing a ceremony with shots of a biker gang and their women getting up to the usual shenanigans: ripping down the road, beating the hell out of people, getting wasted, and telling each other things like, "We all know how we're gonna die, baby. We're gonna crash and burn." Meanwhile, a narrator is very seriously hyping up the film with promises that this movie is "the most unusual and exciting horror motorcycle film yet made" and "the most eerie, the most chilling, the most terrifying motorcycle horror film ever made". Wait, did those lines imply there had been other motorcycle horror films? The narrator corrects himself in the end, this is "the first horror motorcycle film ever made!"
We're told the title 33 seconds into the trailer, but it waits until 68 seconds have passed before it shows us how the werewolves look. Which is, for the budget, good enough. And yes, the trailer does include a shot of a werewolf riding a motorcycle.
The trailer blew me away when I saw it in '01. Werewolf bikers existed somewhere other than just in my imagination! The first thing I did when I got back home was go online to buy a VHS copy of Werewolves on Wheels off eBay. When that copy arrived, I found out that the movie doesn't live up to the greatness of its trailer. Still, I always enjoyed seeing the trailer again when it would play at other marathons. I attended Columbus horror marathons for thirteen years straight, and the Werewolves on Wheels trailer was shown at most of them. It got a strong reaction from the crowd every single time.
The feature itself only has a running time of 84 minutes, but it moves along at a crawl. Those 84 minutes are padded out with extended scenes of the biker gang, called the Devil's Advocates and led by Adam (Steve Oliver), driving along California roads, hanging out, having a good old time. The script is credited to Levesque and David M. Kaufman, but I don't think they had to write very many pages to put this together. The Devil's Advocates make the mistake of stopping by a Satanic church one afternoon, and the Satanic monks that inhabit the place serve them bread and wine - wine that has a sedative in it, so the bikers are sleeping outside the church while the monks perform a ceremony that involves sacrificing a cat. An "act of wanton cruelty". Adam's "old lady" Helen (Donna Anders, under the name D.J. Anderson) wakes up and wanders into the middle of the ceremony, and with a bite of bread dipped in cat's blood she becomes the Bride of Satan and starts dancing with a snake.
The bikers get Helen away from the monks, but this encounter has left its mark: Helen now carries the curse of the werewolf. As the Devil's Advocates make their way through the desert, they have to stop and set up camp every night - and each night members of the gang are murdered and mutilated in werewolf attacks. Tarot (Gene Shane, under the misspelled name Duece Berry) can see that trouble's coming down the line before the situation gets out of hand, but nobody listens to him and his "magic trip", in fact they completely turn against him... and then it's too late for them.
Apparently one of the bikers is played by Barry McGuire, who had the hit song "Eve of Destruction" in the mid-'60s, but there isn't any special attention paid to his character Scarf, and the trailer didn't even point out his involvement.
Despite the awesome concept and title, Werewolves on Wheels is a meandering and dull movie, with only a couple brief spikes of action. It's charming in its own way, though. It's very much a movie of its time, a time capsule glimpse back at 1971. A movie called Werewolves on Wheels should be a lot better and more entertaining than this one is, but this film keeps pulling me back for more viewings. The tone, the ridiculous "outlaw biker" behavior, the music composed by Don Gere, and of course the werewolves, it all works together to make this a watchable movie, even though it falls far short of its potential.
After years of teasing the audience with the trailer, a Columbus marathon did finally include Werewolves on Wheels in its lineup back in 2012, and the audience got to see that the movie isn't quite what the trailer makes it out to be. But still, we watched Werewolves on Wheels on the big screen, and that's something to celebrate anyway.
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