The Dirt Gang (1972)

More biker-flick trash about brawling, debauchery, and rape, The Dirt Gang presents all the clichés of a low-rent genre without any of the redeeming values found in the genre’s best pictures. Set to crappy, horn-driven rock music that sounds like it was recorded in 1962, rather than a decade later, The Dirt Gang depicts the violence that occurs when a group of bikers stumbles onto a movie company shooting in a western ghost town. Initially hassling the Hollywood folks for free food, the bikers then hold the movie company hostage, raping every woman in sight and beating the tar out of the one tough guy who dares to rebel against the bikers. Notwithstanding some backstory about how the tough guy used to be a biker himself, plus a subplot about the movie’s leading lady using sex to mollify the leader of the biker gang, that’s pretty much the whole narrative. The Dirt Gang is so enervated that a major narrative thread gets abandoned for no reason—during the first act, the bikers murder several cops, but after the bikers escape the crime scene, the incident is never mentioned again. Huh? Performances in The Dirt Gang range from serviceable to substandard. Sporting an eyepatch, Paul Carr invests the role of gang leader Monk with forgettable menace. Playing a loutish biker with a taste for parading around in his tighty-whiteys, B-movie stalwart Michael Pataki offers his usual mixture of growled vulgarities and silly movie-star impressions. Nominal leading man Michael Forest, as the tough guy, provides little except an imposing physique, although Jo Anne Meredith—playing the aging actress who employs her wiles for self-preservation—conveys an enjoyable hint of cynicism before her role becomes mere eye candy during a long nude scene. Fitting its title, The Dirt Gang is grungy enough to make the viewer want a shower.

The Dirt Gang: LAME