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Arts and Culture
Music

Killing for Satan

A couple of biker movie soundtrack gems, from both sides of the line.

Adrian Mack 11 Aug 2011TheTyee.ca

Adrian Mack contributes a regular music column to The Tyee and frequently sits behind Rich Hope.
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Werewolves on Wheels: where's the American Film Institute tribute?

Some folks are partial to Citizen Kane or The Godfather Part II, but the greatest American film of all time is probably Werewolves on Wheels. Michael Levesque's 1971 drive-in feature didn't advance the art of cinema or anything, but it did have one overpowering virtue -- namely, werewolves on wheels. What other movie has that?

It even has airborne flaming werewolves on wheels in one knockout scene, which you can see briefly at the end of the trailer, but there's more. Before transforming into denim-clad lycanthropes, the film's otherwise run-of-the-mill '70s biker assholes ("The Devil's Advocates") have to enter a sort of interzone in the California desert where time stops, rivers run backwards, and what should be a routine beat down on a bunch of Satanists takes a turn for the weird.

In this sense, the movie is a bit like Tarkovsky's Stalker, except with werewolves on wheels. It also coincides roughly with my experience of the California desert. There's truth in Levesque's strange little masterpiece.

The soundtrack by Don Gere is as offbeat as the film, an incantatory backdrop of trancey psyche that falls somewhere -- as reissue label Finders Keepers puts it -- between early krautrock and Skip Spence. But while it's nice that we can actually purchase the Werewolves on Wheels OST, the real prize is Harley Hatcher's nutty score for the 1969 bikesploitation classic Satan's Sadists. I had to enter something of an ethical interzone recently to download a copy of that.

It's a crummy 320K rip from the original vinyl and just decent enough to make me lust after a real copy if it ever pops up anywhere, so no need to get your knickers in a twist, anti-sharing crusaders. But you might forgive me for being such a dirty lowdown thief once you get a load of the theme song, "Satan," a delirious, horn-driven ballad that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Tom Jones record if it wasn't for lines like, "By the time I was 12, I was killing for Satan."

I'd kill for an actual copy of the record. Hell, I'd even lay down 20 or 30 bucks. Whatever it takes! [Tyee]

Read more: Music

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