Chrome and Hot Leather (1971)

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

For the most part, I agree with most of the previous user comments - "Chrome and Hot Leather" is a terrible movie. It's hard to believe that American-International Pictures, who were usually experts at drive in movies, would pick this up for distribution. It's a slow-moving exercise that has very little exploitation material - no nudity or sex, no foul language, and the violence is almost totally confined to the opening and closing. No one in the cast gives a good performance, and the musical score is one of the worst I've heard from a movie for a long time.Still, the movie is not completely without merit. Praise should be given to the movie by going against the norm of the time and depicting the military protagonists as real heroes. They are loyal and professional, and of sound minds. And they manage to defeat the bikers without killing any of them! It's too bad these likable heroes couldn't have been in a better movie.

William Smith who during the Seventies and Eighties played a lovely garden variety of villains bordering on the psychotic is top billed here in Chrome And Hot Leather. Smith heads a biker gang which harasses and later kills young bride Cheryl Ladd. They soon have reason to regret that bit of fun because Ladd's intended was Tony Young of the Green Berets who is stateside training other would be Green Berets.Young enlists his three Green Beret sergeant buddies, Michael Haynes, Peter Brown and Marvin Gaye to track and fine the bikers responsible and bring them to justice.Bikers are tough, but Green Berets are combat trained and Young borrows a few of their toys to help round them up. It's really no contest once his pals arrive.Most interesting performance in the film is that of Joey Bishop's son Larry who plays a gay biker who spends his time playing pinball and giving Smith wistful glances. Toss him out of the gang if he gets too explicit.After giving Young a really serious motive, the film devolves in the end to some dopey type comedy. I'm sure the drive-in crowd loved it back in 1971 as they wouldn't miss much as they concentrated on other things.

Lee Frost was a capable and half-way decent director and cinematographer, I guess. He has a catalog of work from the 60s and 70s, such titles (and such titles I've yet to see the movies of) that includes Zero in and Scream, Mondo Bizarro, Nazi Love Camp and The Black Gestapo. I don't know if having such a catalog of work and a halfway decent eye as a DoP meant he made good movies. Probably not entirely the case. But Chrome and Hot Leather, aside from its hard-knock-awesome title, has a few things going for it. For one thing its star, the Lieutenant who returns from Vietnam to discover that his girlfriend was run off the road by a hothead member of a biker gang called the Beards (?), has a hard-jaw face and voice that's like a knock-off of Sterling Hayden. It's also got a likable-cum-sleazy cast of biker folk who get drunk, arm wrestle and sometimes have some group sex. Not that you see too much of it, of course, since it's PG-13 (at least today, maybe it was G-rated back then, who knows).But the few things going for it, which also, I should add, includes an absolutely hilarious climactic battle where the Lieutenant and his army buddies take a whole lot of ammo and bombs and bullets to the bikers just to, you know, scare them and get them loaded with gas that the ex-Vientam guys need gasmasks for (!), are not enough to make it something you should rush out to see. Even if you're into trashy biker movies from the 60s and 70s, such as I am in that true-blue guilty pleasure kind of way, it's something to see further down the pike, preferably on the double-bill I viewed it with, the Mini-Skirt Mob. It's got a plot that's got enough meat on it to keep things a little interesting, even as the acting is sewer-tastic and the final showdown between the Lieutenant and the (accidental?) killer of his girlfriend is underwhelming to say the least. But, yet, Lee Frost puts in little moments, like one particular line by a biker in a bar about harassing someone, and seeing how the soldiers hilariously train on their newly purchased Kawasakis. You'd think they were getting ready for a reenactment of the video-game Excitebike as opposed to seeking vengeance on a bunch of dopes.

I saw this movie today on cable. I enjoyed the beginning of the movie and up to the part where the three Green Berets rescue their friend from the bikers. After that, it became pretty obvious that the movie was quickly going down hill. All the army equipment scenes were pretty cheesy. I never saw LAAW rockets used in the manner the Berets used them here. Why, if someone is shooting off rockets and mortar rounds, would the biker gang not leave the valley the minute the rocket blasts started. My favorite biker movie is MAD MAX. Now that was a mean biker gang.