The Wild Angels, with Roger Corman
Copresented by the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Film & Television Archive
Live introduction by director Roger Corman
Roger Corman’s exploitation vehicle about an outlaw motorcycle club helped inaugurate the biker film as a genre, and these cheaply produced orgies of violence soon proliferated in drive-ins and grindhouses across the country. The idiom fascinated Joan Didion, who saw it as “a kind of underground folk literature for adolescents,” a form that “located an audience and fabricated a myth to exactly express that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death.”
Print courtesy of the Jon Davison, Roger Corman, and Academy Film Archive Collection.
(1966, dir. Roger Corman, 35mm, color, 93 min.)