So many genres have been brought back from the dead, yet it’s amazing no one’s really tried to revive the biker film.
Yes, biker movies are a relic of the ‘60’s, but one could be done in modern day style. There’s still a lot of craziness going on with bikers today, like the war in Las Vegas where rival gangs were taking each other out, or you can go retro and make a movie about the Hells Angels back in the day.
The biker movies started in 1966 with Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels, which was a big money maker, and more low budget imitations followed until Easy Rider in 1969, which was not only the be all, end all biker film, but it also opened the door for young Hollywood directors to make their own movies.
Today we have bikers on the small screen with Sons of Anarchy, but what about a theatrical biker movie? Haven’t seen anything like that at the multiplex, that’s for sure.
Well as it turns out, Tom Hardy, who’s playing Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, may actually be the savior of the biker film genre. As Variety and The Hollywood Reporter tell us, Hardy has a deal set up at Warner Brothers, home of Batman, to do a biker film with producers Art and John Linson. Art Linson is a Hollywood vet who produced Car Wash, Heat, and Fight Club, and his son John recently produced the movie The Runaways, about the infamous teenage all-female group of the ’70s.
The screenplay has apparently already been penned by Mark L. Smith, who also wrote the horror film Vacancy, from a story by John Linson, who is also a motorcyclist himself. The plot sounds a bit Ramboish, it’s about a ‘Nam vet returning home to San Francisco at the height of the flower power movement. Instead of preaching peace and love, he becomes the leader of a bike gang.
Having a number of old biker flicks in my collection, including Born Losers and Satan’s Sadists, I welcome the chance that a modern day biker movie can be made, and who doesn’t love the irony that it’s being done with the help of Batman’s current arch nemesis?
