EASY WHEELS (1989)

 

EASY WHEELS also has the feel of a romp, though it’s more purely a comic take on the nearly extinct genre of the biker-film.  Many of these films pit destructive, hell-bent-for-leather “bad bikers” against relatively “good” riders of the open road, and EASY WHEELS takes one cue from these.  It also takes a cue from a handful of female-biker films, though most if not all of these stick close to the naturalistic.

EASY’s one touch of the metaphenomenal hinges upon its main (and villainous) character, She-Wolf (Eileen Davidson), for she’s presented as a feral child raised by wolves.  Her background doesn't give She-Wolf any special abilities or cause her to wear unusual attire, but her experience with the wolves somehow convinces her to found her own tribe of lesbian warriors, apparently modeled on the example of the archaic Amazons.  The film spends no time with questions as to how She-Wolf became a functioning human being, or how she gathered together a gang of lesbian bikers.  In contrast to the matriarchal Amazons, who slept with men from other tribes in order to spawn girl babies—while getting rid of the boys along the way—She-Wolf’s group sells the boy babies to black-market adoption agencies and plans to raise the girls to found their new nation under Lesbos.

As noted above, all of this is pursued in very light-hearted fashion. In deference to the growth of “tough girls” in the movies of the 1980s, all of the biker-amazons are as tough as nails, and they pretty much ride roughshod over all of their opponents, including a gang of goodguy male bikers, known as the Bourne Losers, and led by "Bruce" (Paul Le Mat).  She-Wolf’s only vulnerability is that she falls in love with Bruce. In order to scratch this unexpected hetero itch, She-Wolf convinces her lesbo buddies to emulate the ancient Amazons and have a mass orgy with the guys, purely to produce some girl babies of their own.  The lesbians find out about She-Wolf’s “fbrbidden love” and force her to return to baby-stealing, thus setting up the final battle—which the guys only win by dumb luck.

EASY WHEELS is largely enjoyable for its slapstick fight-scenes and the minor wit of its setup.  Despite the mentions of lesbianism this is at best a PG film, most of which could run unedited on any mainstream TV channel.  One of its scripters was Sam Raimi, who would become bettter known as a director and as a producer for a much better-known amazon-adventure, 1995's XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS.