Architect Paul Collier (an incredibly insipid performance by Cameron Mitchell) stops off at a small Arizona desert town to visit his headstrong pregnant girlfriend Karen (a sound and sympathetic portrayal by Diane Ladd). Paul bumps into old high school buddy J.J. Weston (the always solid Bruce Dern), who's now the amiable and laid-back leader of a gang of rowdy bikers. Naturally, J.J.'s scruffy chopper chums take an unsavory interest in Karen. Sound exciting? Well, alas it ain't. Martin B. Cohen's bland direction, working from a drab and talky script which he co-wrote with Michael Kars and Abe Polsky, relates the meandering narrative at a draggy pace, fails to bring any real tension or vitality to the proceedings, and gets further bogged down in a sappy love story between Mitchell and Ladd. The cast do their best with the sub-par material: Dern and Ladd contribute respectable work, Jack Nicholson sports an amazing pair of gloriously ghastly striped pants and makes the most out of his regrettably minor role as volatile rotten apple Harley hound Bunny, and Harry Dean Stanton is a hoot as flaky hipster Randolph Halverson. Both Laszlo Kovacs' fairly polished cinematography and William Loose's groovy jammin' score are above average. While the movie occasionally bursts to life with some decent fisticuffs and motorcycle races, it's overall not gritty or energetic enough to qualify as anything more than a strictly passable time-waster.
Review of The Rebel Rousers
