A rowdy, chaotic, good old, beer drinking biker flick, Black Angels stars John King III of Psycho from Texas fame. Should all you John King III fans out there want to stage your own John King III film festival ...well it wouldn't take up too much of your time, although he had small roles in other movies and TV shows, Black Angels and Psycho from Texas were to be his only substantial acting roles before his death in the early 2000s. The other face you might recognize here is James Whitworth, whose gnarly, bearded, wild man persona would later be used to even greater effect in The Hills Have Eyes. Yep, Papa Jup plays a biker in this one, which pits black biker gang The Choppers (played by real life bikers) against white biker gang Satan's Serpents, who go against expectations by being fervently anti-racist. When John King III's character tries to play racist agitator he is immediately shot down by one of the bikers who tells him "if you were an artist you'd know that black and white go together".
Now, if you thought the 1960s TV series Honey West asked too much of Anne Francis by having her act alongside a bad tempered, violence prone ocelot, have pity on the poor actors here who have to share the screen with one very pissed off cougar. The cast of Black Angels certainly had balls, and they were fortunate the cougar didn't get at them. Comic relief comes in the form of a biker who is trying to train a raccoon to smoke a joint, and the biker mama who resents being called a slut and prefers the term nymphomaniac.
In true exploitation film fashion it all ends in a mindless orgy of shootings, stabbings and pitchfork impalings, followed by a song lamenting the senseless violence in society. Black Angels director Laurence Merrick was a fascinating character, to put it mildly. A Zionist with alleged links to the Israeli defense forces and the US government. Merrick was also a footnote to the Manson family murders, having been around the family during the making of Black Angels in 1969, and having also been Sharon Tate's acting teacher for a while. Unusually for a director of low budget exploitation movies Merrick would go on to win an Oscar for co-directing the 1973 documentary Manson in 1973. There would be no happy ending for Laurence Merrick however, in 1977 Merrick himself was murdered by a mentally unbalanced aspiring actor who believed Merrick was using black magic to thwart his acting career. Truth is often stranger than fiction, and equally as tragic.
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