S02E09 - The Hellcats

Plot

While investigate a crime boss that uses a biker gang to run drugs for him, a detective is killed by one of the crime boss's lackeys. The detective's brother, a sergeant in the army, later returns from active duty and learns of his brother death. Vowing revenge against the crime boss, the sergeant goes undercover with his brother's fiancee as a biking couple to join the Hellcats, the biker gang that the crime boss employs for his drug runs.


Movie Review

The third biker film that MST3K aired in its second season, The Hellcats proves to be the worst of the lot. Yes, even worse than The Sidehackers, the film that broke its generic story with a hideous rape sequence. How does this movie pull of such a magnificent feat? Heavy instances of padding and a thoroughly muddled story certainly contribute, as well as some thoroughly uninteresting characters.

Perhaps the biggest problem that Hellcats has is that it has no idea what kind of story it wants to tell. Does it want to tell a revenge tale about a marine trying to find who killed his detective brother? Or does it want to focus on a biker gang's illicit lifestyle? This movie has no idea what it wants to focus on, so it creates an uneven mishmash of both ideas. And even then the movie has no idea how to properly flesh out the narrative of any of the two, so it falls back on the trope that the remaining run time can be padded with unnecessary picnics and extended shots of motorcycles. While the padding isn't as bad as some previous films on this show, it's still egregious.

And the little bit of actual plot that can be found amidst the padding? Almost incomprehensible. Oh, yes, the overall story idea can be followed well enough, but the way it is executed is head-scratching. How did the marine and his brother's girlfriend infiltrate the gang so easily? Why did the biker gang's girlfriend choose the latter to ride with her on a drug run after knowing her for such a short time? Hell, why did she fall in love with the former so quickly? These are just a few of the nagging questions that remain after this mess of a film finishes with its prerequisite indie rock song no one has ever heard of.

And let's not forget about the characters, which might as well be represented by cardboard cutouts. The marine is played by Ross Hagen, who has the dubious "honor" of also being the lead in Sidehackers, and he is just as gruff and unlikable in Hellcats. His companion, his brother's girlfriend, at least isn't a blond bimbo who can't take care of herself, but she still does little beyond getting caught and acting tough with generic girl power. The bikers are the typical morons that make you question how they have eluded the police for so long, and the main villains - the crime lord and his henchmen - are stereotypes (they killed the crime lord's girlfriend for no reason, for Christ's sake!). At least there was no annoying comic relief this time around.

Overall, Hellcats is a complete waste of time in every regard, and the reason that there's so little to say about it is because it's too bland to really merit any kind of serious thought. Again, it is worse than Sidehackers, which is quite a feat.


MST3K Review

Yikes! What happened here? Usually over the course of an MST3K episode, there are at least several moments here and there that save an episode without a strong riffing script, but for this episode such moments were very few and far between. Apparently most of the Best Brains staff were out of town when this episode was being written, which explains why the jokes are not up to the usual wittiness that the second season has established. In fact, if it weren't for the smooth flow of the riffs, this episode could've fit right in with season one. It's still a moderately enjoyable episode, but definitely one of the worst in the series so far, definitely on par with the equally forgettable The Mad Monster.


Stinger Review

The stinger seems to have the same lack of effort as the episode's riffing, since it's more "huh?" than bizarre. In the stinger, we see the aftermath of a trumpeter being tossed into a river: his screams at his friends incomprehensibly before running out of the river. The lack of clarity in his words (try to make out any word other than "human," I dare you) is likely the reason for its selection as a stinger, but a man screaming something incoherent is not itself bizarre, just an example of poor sound quality. I'm not sure what other scene could've been selected as the stinger, but this one doesn't really do it for me, especially compared to the previous episodes' stingers.