Movie Review - 'Hell Ride'

Hell Ride

Starring Larry Bishop, Michael Madsen, and Eric Balfour
Directed by Larry Bishop
Rated R

Bad movies come in all shapes and sizes. They can be low-budget (and with good reason), or they can be $180 million disasters. They can have big stars and they can have nobodies. Some trainwrecks are so bad you can't look away and some are simply bad enough to keep you away in the first place.

Hell Ride is a bad movie. Very bad. But it's not magnificently bad, the kind of awful that requires that you see the carnage for yourself. It's unclear to me whether writer-director-star Larry Bishop (son of Rat Packer Joey Bishop) wanted to make a glorious, exploitive piece of garbage, if he wanted to make something good and failed horribly, or if he just got lucky - kind of - and his piece of garbage was actually elevated by some of the things in the film that almost make it a serious effort.

What is clear, however, is that this is still a bad movie.

Hell Ride is about two warring motorcycle gangs, the Victors (Bishop, Michael Madsen, and Eric Balfour) and the Six-Six-Sixers (Vinnie Jones and David Carradine). In 1976, the Sixers brutally murdered Cherokee, the main squeeze of Johnny Pistolero (that's Bishop, casting himself in the main role). After all these years, it's time for payback.

This movie has the most gratuitous nudity of any film released in 2008. So there's that. It also has a lot of gunplay and the most imaginatively wretched dialogue I've ever heard. What these characters say is so bizarre and outlandish you start to wonder whether or not it's just practice dialogue, a joke between the actors as they rehearsed the scene while the crew set up the next shot. Particularly bad is a scene in the middle of nowhere between Johnny Pistolero and his sultry assistant (Leonor Varela) in which the sexual metaphor of a fire hose is used nearly two dozen times.

Hell Ride is a Quentin Tarantino production, and it's very clear in everything from the musical cues to the attempts at clever, idiosyncratic dialogue, and from the casting of Michael Madsen to the violence and mayhem that Larry Bishop wants us to think this is a Tarantino film. It's just a bad imitation.

What prevents this from being magnificently bad? The atmosphere, for starters, which is deadly accurate for a movie like this, and some of the directorial decisions Bishop makes, such as the depiction of a peyote hallucination, which is better than Oliver Stone could manage in The Doors.

Sadly, though, Bishop's flourishes of competence prevent this from being the truly awful classic it otherwise should be.