Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon (1972)

D. Horatio Jason
Colour

Having looked at ‘Malcolm on Wheels’ at the start of the week and made the point that British bikers are just far less scary than their American Hells Angel counterparts, I’m now going to make the point again by looking at perhaps THE scariest biker gang ever to grace American cinema. In ‘The Wild One’ Marlon Brando is asked what he’s rebelling against and famously responds with “Whadda you got?”. The Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon would see that as a weak and lily-livered answer. They aren’t just rebelling against what you’ve got, they’re rebelling against what you haven’t even thought of yet, what you haven’t even imagined. As this is not just the scariest biker gang in America (we’re told that more than once; so solid a fact is it within the film that I wonder if there was a little award ceremony where they received a plaque), but they’re actual werewolves.

Yes, werewolves.

Riding motorbikes.

Pretty cool, ay?

Interestingly this doesn’t follow the path of the normal werewolf film. In the normal werewolf film Lon Chaney is bitten and then strives against the rising animal urges within him. He is a human being, a civilised man and he doesn’t want the beast inside to take over. In the normal werewolf film the bite and the consequences thereof are terrible things to be fought against. Not here though, the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon are werewolves and fucking proud!

So we get incredible scenes of them pulling into trailer parts just at dusk, waiting for the sun to go down and then sating their appetites with huge amounts of blood and violence. This is a tremendously gory and gruesome film. It’s also an incredibly sexist film, the women are either chicks who want to be with the gang, or else they’re meat to feed the gang – no other roles but lovers or snacks, both requiring very little clothing. It fits well within the film’s viewpoint though as we see everything through the eyes of the gang; we never see anybody pursuing them, we never see any of their victims until briefly before the attacks. This is all about the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon and nothing but the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon.

What defeats them is their own appetites, their own indulgences. The more they change, the harder it is to turn back and those more advanced in their lycanthropy end up on all fours scampering away into the woods, the part of them that was man totally lost. This does lead to a few scenes in daylight of men in werewolf make-up and leathers riding big motorbikes, and the filmmakers clearly don’t realise how funny a sight that is. But the message is that giving into your wildness means that your wildness subsumes you and you can never go back again. And the fact that they’re defeated by what’s within them, as opposed to some gunfight or narrative voodoo, makes this is a lot more subtle and clever a film than it pretends to be.