Less words, more body. Surely, American parents in the seventies frightened children not with non-existent monsters from the closet or representatives of law enforcement, but with bikers - after all, it was in this decade that motorcycle ownership finally formed as a threat to public peace, and not an attribute of luxury and belonging to the upper class. Young and angry, strong and furious, free from everything from prejudice and social norms to the need to follow the letter of the law, these men, fearless but risk-taking, began to occupy the cinema. They chose the most successful time - in the late sixties and early seventies, American cinema began to free itself from clichés and stiffness, there were many new faces who wanted to make honest films, and it became possible for viewers to warmly accept such nonconformist films as "Heavenly Rider", in which the biker subculture was shown with much greater challenge than in "Savage" with Marlon Brando, released sixteen years earlier. A lover of cheap horror Al Adamson, who during his lifetime was not very popular, and became known for his ridiculous death, to become the films he shot, could not pass by the image of rough men and sexy women on motorcycles, who ask them to exploit. "Angel Faces" - just one of his biker experiments, in which he decided to focus on the weaker half of humanity.
The main problem with the picture is that it does not have a coherent plot. It has no connection, no denouement - if you change all the episodes in places, the general essence will not change, and the viewer will not notice that now something is missing. But the lack of an idea is clearly visible in the order of events chosen by the director - he starts with one violence, continues with another, and so the camera jumps endlessly between a large number of characters, many of whom can appear in the picture dozens of times, but the viewer will still have the feeling that this is the first time, so they are not remembered either by their names or even by their faces. However, the author was undoubtedly not betting on the plot integrity, so it would be fair to evaluate his work from the positions that he himself chose as determining. As mentioned earlier, the world of bikers of the seventies is a world of violence, when a guy in a leather jacket and on a motorcycle could hardly be a righteous priest, a good father, a faithful husband or a brave policeman, as is possible now, when not only outlaw biker clubs flourish, but also a simple love of speed and adrenaline. Therefore, the director makes the center of the picture waving his fists and sparkling naked bodies, but does not succeed even in this, despite the presence of spectacular women and evil men. The staging of fight scenes is at a very low level - no pain, no blood, one endlessly wallowing on dusty American soil. Ladies, though more bright and frank in the manifestations of their moral freedom, but quickly are forgotten, giving way to wild plot tricks that the director will perform further.
But the problems of the visual component are not only that bright women are not always allowed to show themselves, and not bright men on the contrary are allowed to do it too often, but that the operator shows a stunning even for low-budget exploitative inability to shoot. The camera looks from behind the thick foliage of trees, then wanders in pitch darkness, in which you can not even distinguish the outlines of the characters that are not memorable, then focuses on some endless steppe, and the main characters appear in the corner of the frame, clipped to the waist. Because of such a hulking attitude of the filmmakers to her work, she does not even pull on a biker home video, glorifying the dangerous but attractive lifestyle of rebels on wheels. In addition, sometimes Al Adamson tries to take heights that are clearly inaccessible to him, and as a respite between violence and naked bodies, inserts the eternal themes of death and love, as well as a clumsy attempt to laugh at the classic American way of life in the face of a respectable farmer who fell under the spell of sexy bikers. Of course, in the "Angel Faces" could be much corrected and brought to mind even with modest available resources, but even then they would not stand on a par with the "Easy Rider" or at least the classic woman-exploited "Fast, kitty!" Kill, Kill, and remain an assembly film on a once popular theme.