I have always loved free coffee. As kids, my friends and I would ride our skateboards around to each church in the area on Sunday morning, helping ourselves to the breakfast table before riding off to cause more minor trouble. Nobody said shit (for church reasons I assumed), and a few awkward moments was well worth some shitty coffee to me at the time. It was fun, mostly because of the free coffee, but I also derived some kind of pleasure from the holy dine and dash itself. Nowadays though, when I think back on those moments, I'm sure I must have dodged a bullet . What the fuck was I thinking? Knowing what I know now, Im lucky I made it. What if they were just letting us get away with it? They could have been making us think we were making off with some free donuts , when in reality we were opening ourselves up to their freaky drugs or potions (as opposed to just passive aggression). That could have been the plan the whole time-- entice a bunch heathens with snacks and refreshments with plans for torture, a curse of some kind, brainwashing experiments, or who knows what else . I have learned a lot from cult films (about cults in particular) and one of those lessons is, that you should never take food from religious groups. I definitely know better now. I certainly do not go seeking out pastries from zealots, and when offered, I politely decline or duck away to dispose of the likely tainted specimen. It’s a wonder I made it this far, drinking the liquids that cult members handed me like a naïf in my youth. The older wiser me knows that drinking from the wrong cup, from the right church (or maybe vice-versa) can end terribly . One swig and it's lights out, then you might wake up as a live sacrifice, possessed, or fucking knocked up by a god-monster. No coffee is worth that. I'm not going to say free refreshments don't exist, but if a bunch of similarly dressed dudes offer you some snacks, on their way to do some chanting, you should probably just pass. It could end up biting you in the ass like in Werewolves on Wheels (1971).

The Devil’s Advocates are your average late 60s nihilistic biker gang, spending days enjoying the freedom of the open road, doing nondescript drugs, and accosting various residents along an unnamed California highway. The gang is led by Adam ( Steve Oliver ), who sometimes says deep things and takes advice from Tarot ( Gene Shane ), the gang's resident psychic. One day the gang, after roughing up a local for running a member off the road, comes upon a religious construct of some kind, nestled in a suspiciously green area (in the desert). Since being in league with the devil is kind of the group's thing, they ignore the warning of the spooky stick in the mud (Tarot) and decide to take a well-earned rest. After they have been hanging out for a while, some synchronized men in hoods show up to offer them food and drink that the extremely trusting gang members consume without question (because no one would try to poison a bunch of assholes, who just got done beating and harassing randoms). Most likely drugged from the grub, the bikers unsurprisingly pass out in front of what ends up being a church of some kind, and the cultists go about their creepy business, which includes killing a cat for some reason. Aroused by the sermon, Adams Girlfriend, Helen ( Donna Anders ), wakes up in a daze before anyone else, and the members of the cult quickly teach her new dance moves involving a human skull, a snake and her birthday suit. Sooner or later the bikers wake up, start kicking in church group faces and finally make a break for it. Weirded out, but mostly just chalking it all up to bad drugs, Adam and the gang go back to getting fucked up in the desert like usual. Unfortunately, members begin getting ripped to shreds or disappearing, and it starts looking like, just maybe, shit is more complicated than they thought. People start sprouting hair, there is some more chanting, and for some reason, a pile of cars is set on fire. Then, everyone meets back up at the church to finish off the bread and wine leftovers.

The varied methods on the technical side of things fit well attached to the engaging but unfocused story. The “road” scenes are oddly organic and for all the silliness that they actually tie together, they still come off feeling a lot like a documentary at times. As if from another film completely, the motorcycle-centric chunks have an aspired clunky editing that strings together biker lifestyle shots with aesthetic nature footage. Sooner or later, it leads to things like a naked skull hula, but the intro sets up a mood that would give a few of its bikesploitation peers a run for their money. For its satanic rituals and such, the film switches bases completely into artful madness without notice. Just as motivated as the more grounded moments in the film, the occult depiction bundles borrowed techniques into a unique outlandish style. The camera, more or less, takes flight during these flashy rituals, pausing its frantic twirling only for shit like eyeball close-ups. As quickly as it shifts from the two extremes, it drops all stylization for most of the last quarter. The movie’s wolfman effects are a low point, somehow being less intimidating than the shorter haired bikers. It's more than a little lackluster in the monster department, however, that does lead to some of the film’s best carnage. Eventually, there are some practical gore effects that can be pretty brutal, even a little ahead of their time, but they take forever to show up and include a ridiculous fake cat sacrifice. Each theme in the film gets its own extremely fitting soundtrack. Avant-garde, instrumental 70s guitar laces the trashy black magic psychedelics, leaving the biker scenes to a playlist of folksy 60s rock.

Werewolves on Wheels is a standoff between commonly used grindhouse tropes on a dusty American road. It's wonderfully goofy garbage that makes me wish Paul Naschy and Dennis Hopper would have gotten together in the late 60s to ride motorcycles, take acid and fight random doom-cults. The plot cramps every genre trope it can fit in its runtime, while still moving along quickly enough to keep it simple and consistently entertaining (all it's really missing is hippies). It makes me feel better that even some badass bikers fell for the old free food at church routine. By dumb-luck alone, I made it through my more trusting youthful indiscretions. I don't know if fourteen year old me had it in him to punch enough old people in Sunday clothes to make it out of a scenario with the same gusto that The Devil's Advocates had. Although, now that I have typed that out it, it seems like something little RevTerry might have been into trying, at least.

1h 25min | 1971

Director: Michel Levesque

Writers: David M. Kaufman, Michel Levesque





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