gavin6942
Angel (surfer Don Stroud, "The Amityville Horror") is a biker who joins a commune of hippies near a small town. When the town rednecks attack them, Angel calls up some of his bad biker buddies to exact revenge.This is more or less exactly what you would expect from a movie that combines hippies with bikers. They simply do not get along well, despite both of them being anti-establishment and pro-drug. (We saw a similar yet different encounter in "Easy Rider".) Was this a good film? Maybe. I mean, I am not going to go out and tell people to watch it. But as far as some good old-fashioned American International Pictures fun goes, this is another AIP film that you can just relax to. No thinking involved.
sonya90028
Don Stroud stars as Angel, an outlaw biker who decides to leave his gang behind, and live in a hippie commune. The premise of this film isn't really credible, since bikers had a completely different value system than hippies. The typical outlaw biker was a macho, bad-ass type, who relished using violence as a way of life. By contrast, hippies were peaceful, and hated violence. For a while in the late 60s, many hippies did try to mix with bikers though, and even romanticized the biker lifestyle. But hippies backed-away from glorifying bikers, by the time this film was made. By that time, hippies realized that they couldn't condone the violent biker culture. Especially after a biker gang was involved in the beating death, of a young man who attended the infamous Altamont concert in '69.Don Stroud's character, Angel, is full of contradictions and conflicts. He wants to leave his old gang, but calls on them to help defend the hippies from constant harassment, by the local rednecks. Angel falls for one of the hippie women, but then rejects her attempts to get close to him. When his gang arrives at the commune, Angel isn't quite sure if he'd like to rejoin them, or stay at the commune and morph into a hippie. Angel is a guy that's just very hard to fathom.Like most biker films, this one has it's share of violence, drug abuse, wild sexual escapades, and lots of fast, daring motorcycle rides. There are many biker movies made during this era, that are much more entertaining by comparison. Angel Unchained lacks the electric energy, that made other biker movies so compelling, in the late 60s/early 70s. If you like biker movies, there's many of them with much more pizazz, than Angel Unchained.
Thompson Owen
obviously "biker gang" and "hippie commune" are terms of pure fantasy ... the fantasy of enjoyment that the workaday world had about '60s subculture. so this film is mildly interesting in that it manages to represent both with (what I imagine to be) some degree of accuracy. bikers, with the promise of extra enjoyment, act as enforcers for peace-loving back-to-the-landers against hostile hick "townies" who harass them at every opportunity. it is a bucketful of cliché and ends in a big dune-buggy hack-em-wack-em fireball, but there's some meaningful representation of (what I imagine to be) the cultural conflicts of the era.
Vornoff-3
What really struck me about this film was its accuracy in depicting two of the most frequently exploited subcultures of the American 1960's. The Hippies are young middle-class idealists, with no evident skills or systematic approach to philosophy. The bikers are violent degenerates, but not over-the-top barbarians who kill at a moment's notice. Their behavior was so similar to stories and books I've read that I wonder if some of the scenes were actually reminiscences of some former Hell's Angel the writer knew. Unfortunately, I never could make out the name of the motorcycle club on the backs of their jackets. It looked like "Exiles Nomads", but what kind of a name is that? Overall, the movie is satisfying, if nothing particularly new. Fits well into the "Born Losers" category of film, but definitely in a class apart from "Satan's Sadists" or "Wild Angel."