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Filthy warriors for a filthy war, the old grindhouse forthrightness. (Aldrich the same year has Too Late the Hero, though Vietnam demands Jack Starrett's candid grunge.) Hells Angels in the jungle comprise the joke for a CIA out of badasses, an Army truck unloads the strange cargo of leather and earrings and bandanas: "You hired scooter trash for this job, that's what you get." William Smith as the gang leader is Paul Bunyan astride a chopper, with just the resemblance to John Wayne to clinch the rebuke to The Green Berets. His sidekicks (Adam Roarke, Paul Koslo) are sensitive dropouts wooing local maidens, the bellicose slobs (Houston Savage, Eugene Cornelius) stick around for whores and beer. Held prisoner in a Red Chinese camp is a haughty presidential adviser, armored hogs ("weapons on wheels") propel the rescue mission. Rowdy macho bluff plus forceful political despair, "sittin' on the john and singin' the Stars and Stripes," a disenchanted Western set in wrecked Cambodia. A pair of tunes bracket it, burly raunchiness in a Steppenwolf knock-off ("Sweet little lady, painted up in rouge / Got to get some love tonight, got some money to lose") and drippy fatalism in a Joni Mitchell knock-off ("Love is a flower that needs peace to grow / But if shades of fear are all we know / Then we're losers, losers..."). The slow-mo apocalypse of squibs and mud, the abandoned biracial toddler, the integrity of the expendable bastard. Bodies strewn across fields pockmark the final image, the Washington suit has no use for it, "a real bummer, man." With Bernie Hamilton, Ana Corita, John Garwood, Lillian Margarejo, and Vic Diaz.
--- Fernando F. Croce |