(also known as MOTORPSYCHO! and MOTOR-PSYCHO!)  Eve Productions, 1965
“If [Russ] Meyer is attempting a portrait of some of the more depraved elements of today’s society, he succeeds triumphantly in making his point. As noted, however, he weakens his social comment when all of his women are costumed in plunging, bulging or bursting necklines ....” -- James Powers, The Hollywood Reporter, in a review of Motor Psycho, 1965

Biker Group: unnamed
Leader: Brahmin (Stephen Oliver)

We know now, of course, that those plunging, bulging, or bursting necklines had a lot more to do with Russ Meyer’s filmic points than any sort of social commentary he might have thrown into his pictures. But give Motor Psycho credit where credit’s due: A couple of years before motorcycle gangs and whacked-out Vietnam vets both became popular cinema subjects, famed skin-flick auteur Meyer wove both of those elements together here, with pretty good results.


Bike Riding Hoodlums "Flat-out" on Their Murdercycles...

Not a “nudie” picture, as its Variety review points out, Motor Psycho is what exploitation-filmmakers called a “roughie” -- that is, a film with lots of violence and lots of sex, usually together.  Produced, directed, co-written (with W.E. Sprague) and lensed by Meyer, it was released the same year as his better-known Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and shares some similarities with that picture, including lead actress Haji and the notion of three thrill-crazed joyriders who cross the line (guys on motorcycles in Motor Psycho,  women in sports cars in Faster Pussycat!).


Reckless Women Gambling with More Than They Could Handle...


Incredible Volumptious Young Starlets!

The three bikers in Motor Psycho -- Brahmin (Stephen Oliver), Dante (Joseph Cellini) and Slick (Thomas Scott) -- get busy early, beating up a fisherman (Steve Masters) and attacking his wife (Arsahlouis Aivazian) before five minutes of screen time have elapsed. Their depraved fun continues as they attack the wife (Holle K. Winters) of a local veterinarian (Alex Rocco), who’s out dealing with the equine concerns of a hot-to-trot member of the horsey set (Sharon Lee). When he gets back to find his wife victimized by the gang, he sets out on the old vengeance trail, with a stopoff at the home of a Cajun woman (Haji), whose husband (Coleman Francis) has been killed -- albeit accidentally -- by the gang.
The rest of the picture finds Rocco and Haji’s characters tracking the gang into a dead-end canyon called the Cauldron, running along the way into poisonous snakes, more murder, and Brahmin’s increasingly severe rice-paddy flashbacks. As it develops, Brahmin’s home because of a medical discharge from ‘Nam, something that explains, at least partially, his various psychoses.


Taking whatever Their Rapacious Appetites Demanded...

Shot in the desert in and around Blythe, California, for a reported $38,000, Motor Psycho got surprisingly good trade reviews. Even The Hollywood Reporter’s Powers, while wondering publicly about the film’s meaning (“Meyer seems at times to be saying that the assault perpetrated on these women is no more than they deserve. But it is hard to tell just what his point is.”), noted that it was “made skillfully so it has a good deal of power.”



Variety’s “Murf”  was even more positive, calling it “a violent and highly exploitable” production.
“Slick, well-made and initially absorbing, it features sex angles which kill the credibility of a script which itself is long on loose ends and short on moral compensation,” he added, less glowingly. “No marquee names, but some thesps show promise.”


Crazed Cyclemaniacs Assulting and Killing for Thrills

Among the thesps singled out  by Murph was Oliver -- who, the reviewer wrote, “shows promise of being developed into a screen name.” It didn’t quite work out that way, but Oliver’s Motor Psycho appearance did foreshadow his roles in the biker pics Angels from Hell (1968) and Werewolves on Wheels (1971).  Haji (sometimes billed in Motor Psycho advertising as “The Incredible Haji,” for a couple of obvious reasons) became one of the more famous of Meyer’s girls; remarkably, she was still at it in 2001, starring in the direct-to-video production The Double-D Avenger with former Meyer-movie comrades Kitten Natividad and Raven De La Croix as well as erstwhile Famous Monsters of Filmland editor Forrest J. Ackerman, who was by then well into his eighties and looking out from the video cover with an expression of deep bemusement. Coleman Francis, playing the husband of Haji’s hot-blooded character, is best known as a filmmaker whose low-budget work took him into the orbit of Ed Wood’s weird world; Francis’ Beast of Yucca Flats, starring frequent Wood player Tor Johnson, is one of the horror cinema’s true anti-masterpieces.

By far the most famous person to come out of Motor Psycho -- besides auteur Meyer himself, of course --  is Alex Rocco, the closest thing to a hero the picture has. He went on to a long career of acting in movies big (The Godfather) and small (Return to Horror High), with plenty of guest-starring work on TV as well, in addition to appearing regularly in three series: Three for the Road (1975), The Facts of Life (1981-88) and The Famous Teddy Z (1989-90).


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