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Fresh and Exciting

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I must say, here was a bikie flick that really disappointed me. It's the most disappointing bikie flick I've seen in my life, when I first saw it at the tender age of fifteen. The title is fantastic and the cover was so appealing, but appearances can be deceiving. How can such a great titled movie represent such a dull film? Just watch Chrome And Hot Leather. Now some people may think I'm quite hard on this. Let me give you the rundown here. It has a good story/revenge premise of an ex green beret and his mob avenging a vicious gang of bikers, who've killed his fiancée. No surprise the lead bikie here is played by William Smith from The Losers, another bikie film, who came close to this on disappointed me, in it's first view, some shades of familiarity between the two as well. The Losers had a couple of men in berets too. Why you may ask this film doesn't work. In the violence and action department, it's remarkably restrained, and there's a lot of nothing happening moments, where the end is really when the movie perks. It's just flat, with nothing happening-ness. If judging the cover too, the movie looked more recent like eighties. We did have that rush of revenge running through our veins to see this beret to kick arse, only there wasn't enough kicking arse. Too much waiting around. We needed many more emotionally charged, and anger driven moments, that required more plot points, or even turning points. Trivia note. The lead beret, and other actor Peter Brown both starred in Rape Squad as very bad guys/rapists. And again, my true thoughts here: someone should rape this movie, before it's hired out again.

One thing I hardly thought I'd think about a biker film is that it was dull, but oddly enough, that's how I felt about "Chrome and Hot Leather". This is because although the plot sure sounds exciting, the film is very tepid--far more so that you'd ever expect.The film begins with a biker gang, the Wizards, out having fun. One of the gang members goes too far and ends up killing a couple innocent girls. One of the dead girls was the fiancée of a Sergeant and when this military man finds out, he and his friends vow to find those responsible and punish them. So far, all this sounds pretty exciting. However, the next half hour or so of the film is very slow and nothing happens apart from a stupid montage (complete with BAD music) showing the soldiers learning to ride motorcycles as well as them asking folks a lot of questions about the killing. Eventually, something does happen--but by then my attention began to wane because I kept waiting for action and it was so slow in coming and the biker gang sure turned out to be a bunch of wimps! What EVENTUALLY comes is not very satisfying and not enough to merit spending all this time watching the movie. About the only interesting thing is seeing Marvin Gaye (yes, THAT Marvin Gaye) playing one of the soldiers. That, and the line where William Smith (the leader of the baddies) tells Gabriel "...can't you see I am trying to menace someone?!" That was pretty funny. Otherwise, you could do better--even with another biker film.By the way....some of the soldiers needed haircuts and NEVER would have been allowed to sport such hairdos! And, you'd think with Marvin Gaye in the film that there'd be good music, but instead the producer got some talentless folks to provide crappy music.

Lee Frost was a capable and half-way decent director and cinematographer, I guess. He has a catalog of work from the 60s and 70s, such titles (and such titles I've yet to see the movies of) that includes Zero in and Scream, Mondo Bizarro, Nazi Love Camp and The Black Gestapo. I don't know if having such a catalog of work and a halfway decent eye as a DoP meant he made good movies. Probably not entirely the case. But Chrome and Hot Leather, aside from its hard-knock-awesome title, has a few things going for it. For one thing its star, the Lieutenant who returns from Vietnam to discover that his girlfriend was run off the road by a hothead member of a biker gang called the Beards (?), has a hard-jaw face and voice that's like a knock-off of Sterling Hayden. It's also got a likable-cum-sleazy cast of biker folk who get drunk, arm wrestle and sometimes have some group sex. Not that you see too much of it, of course, since it's PG-13 (at least today, maybe it was G-rated back then, who knows).But the few things going for it, which also, I should add, includes an absolutely hilarious climactic battle where the Lieutenant and his army buddies take a whole lot of ammo and bombs and bullets to the bikers just to, you know, scare them and get them loaded with gas that the ex-Vientam guys need gasmasks for (!), are not enough to make it something you should rush out to see. Even if you're into trashy biker movies from the 60s and 70s, such as I am in that true-blue guilty pleasure kind of way, it's something to see further down the pike, preferably on the double-bill I viewed it with, the Mini-Skirt Mob. It's got a plot that's got enough meat on it to keep things a little interesting, even as the acting is sewer-tastic and the final showdown between the Lieutenant and the (accidental?) killer of his girlfriend is underwhelming to say the least. But, yet, Lee Frost puts in little moments, like one particular line by a biker in a bar about harassing someone, and seeing how the soldiers hilariously train on their newly purchased Kawasakis. You'd think they were getting ready for a reenactment of the video-game Excitebike as opposed to seeking vengeance on a bunch of dopes.

Come on now...a biker flick is supposed to be violent and sleazy. This one is so antiseptic it would have made it by TV censors in the 70's--even if the original American-International ads tried hard to suggest otherwise. It does contain one great line: As the biker gang leader prepares to rough up one of our heroes, he is distracted by a fellow gang member playing a noisy pinball machine, leading to remark, "Gabriel, can't you see that we're menacing someone?" Ludicrous music, seemingly from another film, accompanies one of the climactic fight scenes. Sadly, this film could give the Hell's Angels a good name.