By: Mordicai

 

I loves me a revenge tale—the more heapin’ the vengeance, the better, especially if it’s the brand of rough-hewn silliness that involves bikers, witchcraft, and exploding-head effects. The 70’s was awash with gallons of such sensationalistic fare—flicks that held you on the edge of your seat and splattered your innocent sensibilities with over-saturated blood. Bury Me An Angel desperately wants to be that kind of movie. The best way to view this standard piece of exploitation is to imagine yourself at a drive-in, sound choking over buzzing speakers in glorious mono or at a skid-row budget picture house with shoes firmly secured firmly to the floor by what you hope is bubble gum.

 

 

Bury Me an Angel is the mega-low budget but heartfelt story of a tough chick who is sometimes hellbent on vengeance. The film begins with your requisite shots of biker-types doing coke off of knife blades, taking eyeball hits and drinking Coors (why’s it always Coors?) in Mom’s unattached garage. Some dude comes to the door and blows the head off (sort of) of Dennis, (Dennis Peabody) the (real life?) brother of our heroine, masculinely named “Dag” (Dixie Peabody.) She finds two fellas who want to get into her pants and strike off to avenge said brother’s untimely demise… even though he kind of had it coming.

 

Dag rides a bike, mouths off to “the pigs,” hustles pool, and generally spends most of the movie trying to prove what a bad ass she is… oh, and sometimes remembers she’s out to find her brother’s killer. She’s got an extra helping of testosterone, that’s for sure—and let’s just say that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that she later had a civil-union ceremony in Massachusetts. At some point they run into a hippie witch that serves them some “groovy stew” and later we get to see Dan Haggerty (TV’s Grizzly Adams) put the smooth moves on Dag. Amazingly, the film manages both an anticlimactic finale and a great twist ending, but is well worth waiting for if you’ve gotten that far.

 

 

Dixie Peabody doesn’t need to act, since she’s mastered the art of scowling and is a true auteur of the grit-your-teeth school of drama. The best performance comes briefly from Angel Colbert as the condescending enchantress, Op. For you skin fans, there’s some meat and potatoes—a lengthy bathing sequence where you’ll enjoy boo-coos of Peabody’s lanky frame. And we also get to see Grizzly Adams out of his buckskins in a truly unnecessary sex scene—to my recollection the only preserved film of Dan Haggerty’s “O” face.

 

The camera work was heinously clichéd, every shot taken right out of the Easy Rider storyboard. Let’s just say that someone got a lot of use out of a pickup with a camera mounted in the bed. It’s a struggle to figure out which is worse, the cinematography or the acting (that’s not fair, actually there are a few artsy slow-mo shotgun blasts.) But the one thing I kept repeating to myself was, “Damn, I wish this chick could act.” Mind you, I don’t expect very much from this type of outing, but our heroine’s initially humorous monotone delivery soon became agonizing. The sound track is good—groove to the “with it” sounds of the “East-West Pipeline” and tap your foot to the Richard Hieronymus score, a man who would later lend his musical talents to many a porno. And let’s not forget that director Barbara Peters would go on to helm the mutant-fish epic Humanoids from the Deep.

 

 

Bottom line: there are far-better biker films and much more engaging revenge flicks out there that you really don’t have to invest your precious time in watching Bury Me an Angel. The acting is its Achilles heel, and this might have been a much better film had the casting department not settled for the first chick they found that would take her clothes off. Though a feminist cult classic, I found it to be a plodding, shockingly-bloodless vengeance film that is original only for its heroine. Of course, as you know, I’ll watch anything, and enjoyed the movie for its unintentional humor and a few moments of legitimate period grittiness. It’s just the kind of backyard filmmaking we can expect from New World Pictures, Roger Corman’s gypsy-wagon of exploitation. Not terrible, but watch only for the street cred of bringing up an obscure film at your next cocktail party.

 

 

Rating: 2.5/5 Huge Aviator Vengeance Shades

 

 

 

 

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