Definitely my favorite theater here in Portland, OR is the Clinton. It’s the kind of place that’s not supposed to exist anymore. One screen, unglamorous, dirty floors, a built in cafe with cheap beer an snacks, absolutely terrible snacks, and probably all of their revenue comes from the frequent showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s a place that has simultaneously lots of charm and absolutely none. The perfect place to hide away an afternoon watching weird films that would otherwise fall through the cracks.

They also specialize in a certain type of flick at the Clinton. What we used to call exploitation cinema but we now call grindhouse cinema. This weekend they had a double feature of biker movies, one of which I was lucky enough to catch. The Losers which IMDB lists under the much more appropriate title Nam’s Angels. Let me explain something important about the viewing conditions of this film; this was the single worst print of celuid I have ever endured in a theater setting. The whole print had turned the sickly yellow color of old people’s skin (my apologies to our senior citizens). Furthermore, the already poor quality sound system did nothing to save the horrendously preserved soundtrack that was practically inaudible. So when I describe what the movie was about it’s really just my best guess based on the available clues. But as near as I can tell the it’s the thick of shit in Nam and Uncle Sam needs to repel the impending Red Army so they’re forced to rely on a a weapon of last resort: bad-ass Hell’s Angels, at least one of which is a Nazi. And all of which have a problem with black people since they seem to hate Capt. Jackson, the reluctant officer / dead beat dad chosen to lead their top secret suicide mission into the red heart of enemy territory.
This movie starts out really well, with a bad-ass but also horriffic bit of warefare followed by some scene where the bikers come off the back of a truck and are introduced to us accompanied by some over the top military music that recalls the A-Team more than anything else, The A-Team if BA Barraca wore a swastika head band.
Unfortunately, after this strong beginning the film kind of derails. In the great tradition of exploitation films the middle hour or so is so much filler where the gang rides their motor cycles around, defiling the natives and getting in the occasional random fight. That alone isn’t the greatest of sins but unfortunately director Jack Starrett(?) never strongly invests any of the characters with personality moments to imprint upon us the audience. We have to kind of make due with identifing the characters with what few personality traits are given to us. There’s the nazi one, the one trying to save the prostitute and the kid, the one who looks like one of the kids from that 70’s show. Later on they mod their bikes with machine guns (Yup, just like in Machette) and each one is given a cool, memorable gimmick. Also one of them rides around with an American flag helmet just like Peter Fonda in Rebel Without A Cause. There’s a lot of film history here. Also a lot of political symbolism. Here the great vangaurd of the American Right, the Vietnam War, is forced to rely on help from the great vangaurd of the American Left, hippie counter culture (okay, one of them’s wearing a swastika but the rest are all wearing tie dies and long hair and they all smoke pot).
Another major failing of this film; it could’ve been the poor sound quality but it didn’t seem like there were any memorable lines of bad-assary. That’s a major misstep in this type of movie. Every so often you’ve got to have one of your heroes say something over the top that has the audience howl in laughter while they say to themselves “that is one cool dude, I wish I were a tough guy like him. Too bad I’m just a pussy”. There were no moments like that from what I could tell, in fact for this type of flick the audience was entirely too quite.

Still there’s a lot of good points to recommend this film by. First of all the premise is gold. It’s got Hell’s Angels riding around vietnam in souped up bikes with machine guns blowing up china men. And one of them’s a Nazi (spoiler: he gets his comeupance). There’s at least one memorable heartfelt death scene that deserves at least a footnote in the long history of cinematic deaths. Furthermore, I’m no expert on these things but considering this was a low budget film, probably shot in some one’s mom’s backyard, I thought it scored a reasonable depiction of Vietnam. In my opinion at least it was more than convincing enough.

So that’s my wrap up of Nam’s Angels AKA The Losers. An enjoyable but unremarkable entry into the 1970’s motorcycle exploitation (ie grindhouse) genre. If this were school I’d give it a gentleman’s C.

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