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Released by: Shout! Factory
Released on: August 21, 2012.
Director: Bruce M. Clark
Cast: Michael Greene, Jennifer Gan, Richard Rust
Year: 1969
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The Movie:
Arriving on DVD for the first time is this 1969 biker film directed by Bruce M. Clark on which Roger Corman acted as the film's production supervisor. The story revolves around a biker named Mother (Michael Greene) who leads a gang called the Los Angeles Angels. He gets his ass kicked by a rival gang called The Las Vegas Hotdoggers and winds up in the hospital but is soon released, and his not so trusty lady friend, Marlene (Jennifer Gan), is waiting for him. His first act? To confront Fingers (Richard Rust), the man who took the reins of the club out from under him while he was recuperating.
From there, he figures it's time to track down the Hotdoggers and dish out some payback. Mother and the rest of the Angels storm into a go-go bar in the city of sin, looking for the Hotdoggers' leader, only to learn that he's not there - he's holed up in an old abandoned mine out in the middle of the desert. A brawl with the Hotdoggers winds up running the Angels out of town and things are starting to turn sour within the gang. Mother has been slapping Marlene around and treating her horribly as payback for what she did while he was laid up. As the gang heads towards the old mine to take out the man in charge of the Hotdoggers, tensions mount but Mother is determined to get his revenge, no matter who stands in his way…
Naked Angels doesn't really offer up anything we haven't seen in countless other biker films made around the same time, but it's entertaining enough thanks to an interesting performance from Michael Greene. His Mother is tough and trashy, a sleazy guy who treats his woman like his own personal property but who isn't without his own strange moral code. He's able to offer up random philosophical insight into biker life in a few scenes, and at the same time he looks the part of the stereotypical biker guy. He's good in the action scenes and very much looks the part, his back and forth with both the very pretty Gan and the surly, salty Rust make a few scenes more interesting than they would be had they been handled by a different leading man.
The storyline isn't really much to write home about - we get a lot of scenes of The Angels riding their choppers through the desert looking tough with their hair blowing in the wind, and we get a few of the requisite sex scenes and brawls you'd expect from a biker film made in the sixties. It isn't a particularly deep film, though the script tries hard in a few scenes, but it moves at a decent pace despite the padding of the countless 'driving around on motorbikes' scenes that fill out the film to feature length. Some impressive cinematography ensures that the remote desert locations are captured effectively and the whole movie has an appropriately skuzzy, dirty feel to it that winds up working in its favor. There's also some great late sixties location footage of Las Vegas in all its gawdy glory here for those who appreciate such cinematic time capsules, and a solid guitar heavy fuzz score compliments the action rather appropriately.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Shout! Factory's transfer for Naked Angels is only slightly better than their recent transfer for Sweet Kill and suffers from many of the same disappointing problems. No idea what sort of elements were available but the interlaced fullframe image is murky and soft and sometimes suffers from color bleeding and poor black levels. Some of the darker scenes are especially bad - this is watchable enough but keep your expectations in check, this is obviously not a lovingly restored picture.
The audio fares a little better but the English language Dolby Digital Mono track on the DVD is a bit muffled and flat sounding. There are no alternate language options or subtitles provided.
There are no extras on this disc at all, not even a menu let alone a trailer. At least the cover art is awesome.
The Final Word:
Naked Angels isn't the greatest biker movie you'll ever see, in fact, at times it feels pretty derivative of a few other, better known titles in the genre. It does offer up some nice camerawork and a few memorable scenes of some great vintage Las Vegas location footage and it moves at a decent pace. Worth seeing for fans of the genre, just go into this one knowing that the transfer isn't so hot…
