Mayhem Film Festival’s contribution to this year’s Scalarama was a suitably insane and hugely entertaining Biker Movie Double Bill of Stone and Psychomania to help raise funds for the National Association for Bikers with a Disability.
Chris Cooke introduced the opening film Stone, citing it as one of the key Ozploitation films responsible for launching the Australian new wave. Written and directed by Sandy Harbutt, Stone was a low-budget, relentlessly paced story of police officer Stone and his time working undercover with the Gravediggers, an Outlaw motorcycle gang in the suburbs of Sydney. Learning that he has more in common with the hard drinking, ultra-violent bikers than he might care to admit, he earns their begrudging respect on the quest to find out who has been killing members of the gang. There’s a few familiar faces that later went on to star in Mad Max, including Hugh Keays-Byrne and Roger Ward, as well as a brilliant visual and musical uniqueness. Packed with action, violence and humour, Stone is an absorbing look at some of the more idiosyncratic vignettes of biker life in seventies Australia.
The second feature of the evening was screened in Broadway’s Café Bar. Introduced by Mayhem co-curator Steven Sheil, Psychomania was the even-more-mental story of a young group of British bikers who, in a deal with some evil power, kill themselves in order to be reborn immortal. Don Sharp’s film showed a different side to biker life than Stone. Whereas the Australian bikers lived outside the law, they retained a sense of charm. The Living Dead gang presented in Psychomania come across as little more than mildly irritating – despite the significantly higher body count left in their wake - which only lends to the beautifully quaint Britishness of the whole film. Their crimes include kicking over shopping trolleys and carefully stacked baked bean tin displays, while being pursued by Chief Inspector Hesseltine (a wonderfully stoic Robert Hardy). It’s a weird, but constantly entertaining film that injects a big dose of gallows humour, the supernatural and teen angst into the biker movie genre.
Mayhem’s Biker Movie Double Bill was held in aid of the National Association for Bikers with a Disability, a charity established to help get disabled people to enjoy independent motorcycling, however they came by their disability, whether by accident, through illness, or from birth. To find more information about the NABD, or to make a donation, you can visit www.nabd.org.uk.
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