This Movie Rules
Werewolves on Wheels

Werewolves on Wheels

If you're hairy, you belong on a motorbike!
Action
Horror

Release: 1971

Runtime: 85 minutes

Director: Michel Levesque

Production: South Street Films

A biker gang visits a monastery where they encounter black-robed monks engaged in worshipping Satan. When the monks try to persuade one of the female bikers, Helen, to become a satanic sacrifice the bikers smash up the monastery and leave. The monks have the last laugh, though, as Helen, as a result of the satanic rituals, is now possessed and at night changes into a werewolf, with dire results for the biker gang.

Review

Strap on your leather jacket and rev your engines because Werewolves on Wheels is a full-throttle trip down the dark side of the American outlaw dream, fueled by biker bravado, acid trips, and Satanic howls. The Devil’s Advocates are a desert-riding motorcycle gang with nothing but the open road ahead of them and maybe one too many cigarettes in their lungs. But when they crash a desert cult’s midnight bacchanal, the party takes a supernatural detour; a blood oath that turns biker chicks into snarling werewolves and the whole gang into howling harbingers of hellfire. This isn’t your classic “monster lurks in shadows” flick. No, the werewolves here ride Harleys and wear denim vests. They shoot guns, spit venom, and howl at the moon in some of the most gloriously gritty lycanthropic sequences ever captured on grainy 35mm. Their transformations are delayed but brutal. Levesque doles out the gore in fits and starts, making the payoff all the more savage and satisfying. The film barrels forward like a motorcycle with no brakes: uneven, hallucinatory, and utterly committed to its weird-ass blend of biker exploitation and occult madness. Dialogue stumbles, pacing bounces, and the acting ranges from “oh god no” to “hell yeah, bring it on.” But beneath the clunky veneer is a film charged with the combustible energy of the early ‘70s counterculture, a snapshot of a world where rebellion, drugs, and mythology crash spectacularly into one another. The real wild card? The soundtrack, a muddy fusion of psychedelic rock and twangy biker riffs that pushes every scene into deeper, stranger territory. You can practically smell the desert dust and cheap beer. Werewolves on Wheels is not a film to be “watched” so much as ridden. A midnight movie joyride for fans of cult oddities, where the thrills come as much from the ride as the destination. For those who love their horror with a throttle jammed wide open, this film howls loud and proud in the wilds of exploitation cinema.