(Mayflower Pictures, 1968)

Among those who love low-budget and exploitation films, Chicago’s Herschell Gordon Lewis will forever be known as the Godfather of Gore, having created -- with his expansive partner David F. Friedman -- the first real “gore” picture. That was  1963’s Blood Feast, a ground-breaking, stomach-churning splatterfest featuring a deranged Egyptian caterer named Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) who uses the body parts of women to create his specialty, “Egyptian Feasts.”...

Less well known, however, is Lewis’ pioneering work in another film genre. He is, in fact, also the godfather of the female biker-gang picture.  “It came as a reaction to something I saw on the streets of Miami,” he told us recently,  “where this rather heavy-set girl on a big hog was going down the street, mistress of the universe.”

By this time, Lewis had turned his hand to movies in all sorts of categories, from sexploitation to horror to kid stuff, and “I was groping around for what we hadn’t yet done.” The woman on the bike provided the answer.


Queen (Betty Connell, also in top photo) and her gang work over a bartender (Roy Collodi).

“We set up in some schlock motel, and I ran a little ad in the Miami Herald -- I think it was a two-inch ad,” he recalled with a chuckle. “I asked for girls who rode bikes to be in a movie. My feeling was -- and still is, for that matter -- that if we’re looking for somebody who has to appear to be realistic, that person should be competent in that field, rather than as an actor. So the only qualifier in advance was that they be able to get on a big Harley or a Norton or BMW or Honda 350 or whatever and ride around. That was our audition, really.

“Once they had passed the preliminary audition, we had a secondary audition, which was, `Can you read lines?’ We apportioned the roles based on that secondary ability. Now, I was lucky in one respect. The gal who plays Queen [the lead] in that movie was named Betty Connell, a rather sophisticated young lady who had an immaculate Harley-Davidson, who read lines fairly well, and who understood what we were doing and wasn’t the least bit abashed by it -- which surprised me, because of what seemed to be a background that wasn’t typical of bikers. And a girl named Pat Poston got the role of Whitey. I think she was the one I had originally seen riding on the streets. That’s now lost in history, because I’ve had no real reason to try and recollect it.”

In She-Devils on Wheels, Queen is the leader of a vicious motorcycle club called the Man-Eaters, with Whitey and Karen (Christie Wagner) her lieutenants. Each week, the girls meet at an abandoned airport runway and race their cycles to see who gets first pick from the “stud line,” an odd group of men who hang with the Man-Eaters. But Karen, the usual winner, has been consistently picking a guy named Bill (David Harris), which goes against the gang’s code and bodes unwell for Bill. He ends up getting dragged around the runway until he’s in shreds, tied to a rope behind Karen’s cycle.



Clearly, these women have some issues, and it doesn’t get any better when they come up against a band of male drag-racers who’ve appropriated their runway. More nastiness follows, leading to the kidnapping of the Man-Eaters’ mascot, Honey-Pot (Nancy Lee Noble), by the racers, and her subsequent beating and mutilation. Before it’s over, there’s been plenty more of the old ultraviolence, including assault by insecticide and a decapitation sequence that’s one of Lewis’ best-realized gore effects. It happens near the end of the picture, when Queen and the gang confront head drag-racer Joe-Boy (John Weymer) and goad him into following them down a road and into a neck-high stretch of wire, resulting in the film’s memorably gruesome money shot.

But rough and unsettling though it may be, She-Devils on Wheels is in some ways curiously tame by today’s standards, where major motion pictures are as often as not full of big-star nudity, sex scenes and f-bombs. “That was before we could actually say things that I would’ve really liked to have said in dialogue,” noted Lewis. “We had no four-letter words in that picture at all. Not one four-letter word, and no nudity, because we were right on the ragged edge as it was.”

Lewis, however, did get in one bit of dialogue in that amuses him to this day. “There’s a scene where Queen says, `Go fumigate yourself, craphead!’” he said, laughing. “I injected that and everybody broke up, so I said, `Leave it in.’”

He also injected the picture with a fine tough-chick theme song called, fittingly, “Get Off the Road,” writing the lyrics under the name of  “Sheldon Seymour.” The music is credited to Robert Lewis, who’s not only a real person, but Lewis’ son.

“My son Bob had a little group that recorded it,” Lewis explained.


Those Man_Eaters, including Honey-Pot (Nancy Lee Noble, bottom), know how to throw a party.

The only real actress in the film, he added, was Noble, who came down from Chicago to play the role of Honey-Pot. Lewis had used her in other films; the next year, she’d also show up in Haskell Wexler’s big-budget indictment of America’s television culture, Medium Cool.  “Nancy Lee Noble could not ride a motorcycle, so we taught her how to ride a little Honda 50,” Lewis recalled. “She was not a a biker. She was an actress. Screening the film, you could probably tell the difference.”

Of the non-actresses in the picture, a couple made indelible impressions on Lewis. “I had a fellow on the crew named Alex Ameripoor, who also helped cut the film. And Alex had a girl named Agi Gyenes -- strange, Hungarian, name. He was apparently smitten with her, and he said, `Oh, yeah. She ride bike. She ride bike.’ So I said, `Okay. Let’s see her.’ And she rode her motorcycle into the motel’s pool.”

He laughed. “I thought we were going to get kicked out of there, because there was oily crap all over the place. But it’s the nature of motion-picture history: You can get away with darn near anything. We began calling her Augie the Doggie. And she did get a role in the picture.



“We had another girl we called Fang, because she had one front tooth. A strange look. But she showed up on time, and that was a factor. I made it very clear that the only rules of deportment were, (1) No pot smoking or anything of that sort, and (2) show up on time.

“Fang shows up one day, and she’s late. It didn’t make any difference -- we were shooting something that wasn’t really crucial -- and she says, `I’m sorry I’m late. I was in the hospital with my boyfriend.’ She pulls up her pants leg, and she has a big scratch on her leg. She says, `We wiped out.’ So she has a little case of what we called road rash, but he’s in the hospital.

“Next day, she shows up on time, and I ask, `How’s your boyfriend?’ And she says, `Oh, he died.’

“My gosh,” concluded Lewis. “The power of motion pictures.”





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