“You gotta be the dumbest cat I ever met in my life, man.”

Drake’s rating: Another William Smith movie reviewed, about three-hundred more to go

Drake’s review: In 1965, Hells Angel president Sonny Barger, having probably read too many comic books and watched far too many bad movies,* sent a letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration asking that his motorcycle club be used as special guerrilla** fighters in the Vietnam War. The officials working for Johnson read the letter, gave it the two seconds of consideration it deserved, and basically sent back a “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” response.

Needless to say, President Johnson never did come calling.

But writer Alan Caillou, who had already scripted the bad movie classic Village of the Giants and would go on to cement his cult movie credentials by writing Kingdom of the Spiders, decided to pull the trigger when LBJ wouldn’t. Thus are the Devils Advocates sent into the jungles of Vietnam to rescue a diplomat who’s been captured by Chinese operatives.

Eventually. I mean, first they have to go drinking and chasing women and getting into fights, because that’s just rule number two of a biker flick.

Rule number one is hiring B-movie legend William Smith to star in your biker flick, which this movie also does. So far, so good.

And then you pack up everyone and fly them off to the Philippines to pretend that country is Vietnam, and proceed to blow things up like you’re Francis Ford Coppola. Which is a weird decision for a biker flick, but The Losers doesn’t play by your rules, man.

The whole concept of this movie is ludicrous of course, but the cast and crew play it straight the whole time. The Devils Advocates, a motorcycle club consisting of the five scruffy ruffians who take on this job, are brought in because the back trails they’ll be traveling down are too small for standard military vehicles so in this cinematic world motorcycles just make sense. But the bikes need upgrades first, including armor and mounted weapons and maybe a missile launcher or two.

And since the movie also needs romance and drama, Duke (Adam Roarke, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry) runs off to find the girl he left behind when he was serving in Vietnam, while Speed and Dirty Denny do their best to embrace their inner misanthropes and engage in the aforementioned drinking and brawling.

And that’s a good two-thirds of the movie. It’s not all bad, but it does feel like there’s a certain amount of filler here before we get to the action.

What’s interesting, however, is the subtext that director Jack Starrett injects into nearly every scene. While The Losers looks like a simple biker flick with a twist in the premise, in truth it’s very much an anti-war movie that’s very critical of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Everyone that comes into contact with the Americans, whether it’s with the bikers or the military, ends up the worse for it, and it doesn’t even matter which side of the conflict they’re on. This wouldn’t be a surprising narrative coming from a movie ten years or so down the road, but in 1970, while the war was still raging, it’s pretty radical.

The Losers is a strange one. The concept is cinematic enough to fill up drive-ins across the country, but the movie takes a surprisingly twisted path in getting to its explosive conclusion. It’s kind of a weird mix of adventure movie and biker flick, but it can’t quite commit to either genre and deftly sidesteps being a war movie altogether thanks to its latent messaging. So from one scene to the next it often feels like you’re watching different films, and it’s sometimes hard to connect to any of them since their themes are so contrary.

The biggest legacy left by The Losers might be in the films that it influenced. The “rescue the prisoners of war” movies that followed over a decade later, which were kicked off by Uncommon Valor, owe their existence to The Losers. In fact, John Milius, who produced Uncommon Valor, also co-wrote Apocalypse Now, and of that movie he said that The Losers was a “big inspiration for Apocalypse Now” and “…bikers in Vietnam, surfers in Vietnam, same idea.”

Overall, I like this flick, mainly for the casting of William Smith and the direction of Jack Starrett, but also for its sheer audacity. It’s a strange one, to be sure, and there’s some disconnect from occasionally feeling like you’re watching scenes from different movies, but it all kind of coalesces by the end as things blow up, secrets are revealed and the best laid plans of mice*** and men go awry.

Which, honestly, is a pretty apt description of what went on in the ‘70s in general.

*OK, OK, I get it. Pot, kettle.

**Misspelled by Barger as “gorilla.” Taken at face value, that would have resulted in an even weirder flick.

***Not Mutant Mice. Those little green SOB’s are frighteningly efficient.

Intermission!

• Writer Alan Caillou (real name: Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe) was an intelligence agent and military officer during World War II. In addition to screenwriting, he took up acting as well and was not only in The Losers (as the Albanian), but cult favorites such as The Ice Pirates and The Sword and the Sorcerer. In his spare time he wrote some 52 novels and scads of men’s magazine stories.
• Meanwhile, director Jack Starrett was also an actor, and played the part of the captured diplomat in The Losers. Low-budget filmmaking makes for interesting casts!
• In the same vein, William Smith did almost all of his own stunts here as well, the sole exception being a motorcycle jump over a building that was done by stuntman Gary McLarty.
• William Smith was of course a John Milius favorite, and appeared as both the Russian colonel in Red Dawn, and as Conan’s father in Conan the Barbarian. He did his own stunts there, too, with unfortunate results. Although he took a (real, not fake) axe to the back with no problem due to balsa wood padding and an expert stuntman wielding the axe, the dog attack went wrong when one of the Rottweilers, a pregnant female, went for his neck. Smith protected himself with his arm, got dragged about sixty feet, and ended up with a hard-won souvenir in the form of a scar on his forearm. The life of a movie star!