HELLO BASTARDS! HERE’S A LITTLE MOVIE FOR YA!

Cue…another piece of stock footage found in a garbage can somewhere and randomly thrown in to pad out the amazingly short (77 minutes in the uncut version) running time for a coupla minutes. This time it’s more contemporary non-widescreen footage, of three couples dancing. They are meant to be dancing on the nightclub dance floor, but it’s painfully obvious that they’re professional dancers (the only professional thing in the film!) working out in a studio somewhere to an awful song – the famed ‘Muggi-Boogie’ perhaps? Hahahahaha…I am sitting here laughing, writing this and pausing the video recorder every now and then whilst doing so, and it’s paused in the middle of this scene right now. You truly would not believe this scene, and would have to see (and hear) it to believe it. Total pish, likes.
The couples stop dancing (well, two of them do – one of the couples still keeps on twirling away after the decrepit up-tempo piano-smasha song ends) and we go back to the birthday girl and her beau, who is now helping himself to booze from the club’s locked cabinet. It’s here we learn that Babs is a virgin (hafta say, this is an incredibly tasteless plot point, in light of what happens later) and she’s a bit nervous about proceedings to (literally) come. Hal just tells her to keep chucking booze down her neck, and she’ll feel “daring.” Man, he has to get young girls drunk to get them to have sex him – what a gent!
Cut to…more 60s stock footage! I’m not making this up, wish I was. A blissful hippy dancing in this footage looks uncannily like Neil The Hippy’s student friend Warlock from old BBC2 comedy series “The Young Ones,” and another guy in a horrible shirt with sideburns looks like he is having some sort of grande mal epileptic fit on the dance floor. Truly disturbing stuff. Maybe this is what the old UK video box for the film was referring to when it proudly proclaimed “This is a very violent film which could seriously disturb you,” ie fashions which are violent on the eye and disturbifying trashola dance routines.
Intercut with this footage is a shot of our couple kissing and cuddling…but wee Jose obviously finds something funny and starts laughing midway through, and it looks like they should have cut the shot out but just left it in. And when we come back from Planet 60s Shoddy Stock Footage, Babs laughs and stares straight at the camera! I mean, where did they find these people, the local bus depot or homeless shelter or something? Cos they sure as shit ain’t actors of any stripe.
But the night is wearing on, and Hal and Babs are the last customers in the place, completely drunk out of their minds. They stagger out into the street sipping at a bottle of whiskey, with Hal reassuring his date that he can “drink a barrel and still be able to drive and keep up my wits.” Which I certainly wouldn’t find too reassuring, given the fact he hasn’t demonstrated too much in the old cerebral neurons department so far, but Babs seems to think it’s alright. They kiss in the street, making strange porno-sounding noises that no other human being makes when kissing, and get into Hal’s car. But then…Disco Rommel and the rest of the Mad Foxes(?) put in a sudden appearance from the shadows…and everything goes to shit. The ‘bikers’ savagely beat Hal, and rape his date.
Now. At this point, I’d like to say something. The rape scene in this film is completely disgusting and depressing, and you can hardly believe they’d film the thing like they do. I’m not gonna go into any detail, but it just beggars belief that they thought that what they do to the girl was a fit subject for a scene in a film. I abhor rape (as do you, obviously), and am absolutely not going to make any excuses for this scene. But let me tell you something. The version of the film I have is the old UK video release on VCL, which is heavily cut. I looked for the uncut one for ages and finally found somebody on the underground splatter tape-trader circuit with it around 1989. I watched it once and, disgusted, gave it away. Cos this scene, more than nearly any other I have ever seen in a film, left such a bad taste in my mouth I couldn’t imagine myself watching it any more than once. So my talking about this film is a wee bit of a double-edged sword, but it is a genuinely funny, inept film, and I don’t have the rape scene in my copy anyway. For the record, I actually think that the rape scene is the only scene I’ve ever seen that actually deserves to be cut from a film. Totally detracts from the rest of the film’s grossly inept cartoon-like ambience.
Anyway. From that grim change of tone in the text here, we cut away from a rape scene to…a towering, phallic shot of a hospital tower straining against the sky! Absolutely incredible! Can you spell ‘zero subtlety’, kiddies? Hal has been in the hospital overnight getting fixed up from his horrific beating by…having a band aid stuck on his face! He goes home and puts on a terrible porno soundtrack-sounding record, then phones a buddy of his from a local karate school. What happened to him and Babsy isn’t going to go unpunished, and he wants the karate school’s help. And they’re happy to provide it.
Ever seen a crap biker burial? Did you know that they go to a coliseum, drape their fallen gang member in a Nazi flag…then burn the corpse? No? Well then you haven’t seen this film, ya lucky wee bastirt. The Foxes are burning their pal Jimmy, whose name seems to be out of place when the other bikers whose names we hear are Stiletto, Softy and Junk. At this point the film cranks out the Mad Foxes Funky Fucking Theme, an awful, aurally garish piece of slap-bass ear-grinding music that I still hum occasionally when I regard some film or event to be stupid or annoying. Sonic shorthand, ya see? Disco Rommel shouts “Silence!” and the muzak stops abruptly. He then declares that they will all “get drunk to his memory and give up his body to the flames” but this poignant plan is put paid to by….
The filth continues in part four of HELLO BASTARDS! HERE’S A LITTLE MOVIE FOR YA!>>>

Posted on March 26, 2004 in Features by Graham Rae

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