A Biker Movie for Babes: Moody Mayhem Drives Dixie Peabody to Revenge in ‘Bury Me an Angel’
On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.
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Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.
The Pitch: Old School Cool Fuels This Increasingly Odd Portrait of a Female Hot Rodder
[Editor’s Note: “Bury Me an Angel” is half of a two-part After Dark series spotlighting Barbara Peeters. If you can, check out “Humanoids from the Deep” first.]
Barbara Peeters is no prude. That’s maybe the biggest misconception worth clearing up for any cinematic spelunkers who know the infamous Roger Corman defector as the woman director who just could not make “Humanoids from the Deep” exploitative enough. (Did you read the sarcasm that was intended there? Good job. Just checking.)
Too many movies, particularly those buried past the 50-year benchmark that seems to divide older cinema from far too old cinema, are summed up these days in search engine-friendly snippets that are presented with little or no context. Digging into a singular footnote on a trashy B-movie’s Wikipedia page (damn you, “[14]”!!) brought us to this two-part After Dark exploration, and after screening “Bury Me an Angel,” few could argue that such an exhaustive investigation was overkill. Mention Peeters to any true-blue ‘70s genre fan and you’ll quickly find, those pesky half-fish sex offenders from Corman’s “Humanoids” were never and could never be the sum of this audacious female filmmaker’s legacy as a formative appreciator, establisher, and in the end sufferer of genre.
The first biker film made for babes by a babe, Peeters’ 1971 revenge epic — discovering Dixie Peabody as the effortlessly tough Dag, a luscious road warrior heroine out to kill the man responsible for her brother’s untimely death at any cost — exists in the ephemeral archival space between legitimate movie and glorified mood. Its’ writer/director has described the film on multiple occasions as her proudest accomplishment. That’s got to be attributed, at least in part, to Peeters’ well-earned sense of achievement as a dogged self-made artist, who, in a 2019 presentation at UCLA Film, spoke about cranking out the script for “Bury Me an Angel” overnight when offered investment during a spur-of-the-moment encounter. (In the same discussion, she admits later receiving $90,000 for the picture… making it for just $60,000… and giving the remainder back. Rock star.)
“Oh yeah, I was hungry,” Peeters said, echoing the tenacious ferocity of her singular biker icon.
This exquisite blend of indie filmmaking bravado (the movie’s audacious, coked-out opening party sequence was shot at Peeters’ place above the apartment of a family…with an infant) and its nevertheless luxurious thematic meditation on trauma suggest nothing if not the intrinsic confidence essential to great midnight programming. Winding through a sometimes slapstick, sometimes tragic, and always stylish consideration of a grieving loved one rocketing toward their own demise, Peeters arrives almost instantaneously as an artistic force intent on telling Dag’s soapy and yet unstoppable story of a woman married to the road and out to get hers.
Also featuring Dan Haggerty (AKA “Grizzly Adams” himself) in his first speaking role, “Bury Me an Angel” deserves to be hoisted as high — if not higher — than Peeters’ sea creature feature from 1980, which at least by internet footprint continues to dwarf the rest of her mostly superior filmography. As a semi-spiritual figure in the journey IndieWire’s Sarah Shachat is about to endure will tell us, we often believe the truths that are most convenient to the stories we’re already telling ourselves. Maybe it’s easier that way. But, in this second half of an essential double-feature, “Humanoids from the Deep” collides with “Bury Me an Angel” to challenge everything you thought you knew about New World’s illustrious women — and the sexist history that precedes the films we’ll always associate with them. —AF
The Aftermath: A Girl Rides Home Alone At Night
Whew boy. It’s funny that I’ve just come off of writing a bit about “Star Wars” in its Mouse House era to watch this extremely indie biker flick, the first directed by a woman — and not because the episodic, verite-ish, “Easy Rider” mode that “Bury Me An Angel” seems to want to operate in for long stretches has the same kind of rhythm as the experiments Lucas and the movie brats were running. No, that commonality is neat, but there’s another, more plot-structure-related one: Going on a convoluted road trip in order to avenge a sibling is something that can actually be so personal.
The personality of Dag, surviving sister of a man murdered in a (botched?) confrontation over a stolen bike, is as cool as the chopper she rides. She’s calm, confident, and competent, the motorcycling riding, wish-fulfillment avatar of every tomboy who wants to reach adulthood and still be a fully-fledged tomsman. She witnesses the murder after she and her brother had stepped away from a party with a snort-coke-on-a-Bowie-knife kind of vibe, and he’d gone to open the wrong door. Whoops.
We get that classic exploitation cinema canned tomato blood all over this dude’s ruined face in the moment, which feels as gleefully gross as any low budget revenge flick of the era. But the way that Peeters then goes on to use every part of the proverbial (murdered) buffalo is even better, activating big blocks of red lighting and superimposing the murder on other surfaces/images over the course of the film. The violence of the murder isn’t just tossed away; it becomes the engine with which Peeters is powering the movie forward.
Because of course Dag witnesses the murder; and of course it will haunt her in ways both cinematic and sexy; and of course it will prompt her to light out towards the exotic wilds of Canada to hunt down the man who killed her brother. It is unfortunate that she agrees to take her two idiot boy friends Bernie (Clyde Ventura) and Jonsie (Terry Mace) along for the ride as the film’s extremely trying (and in one instance wildly racist?!?) comic relief, but so it goes.
Our three heroes travel and camp out and explore dodgy road houses in search of The Killer (Stephen Whittaker), meeting witches (Angel Colbert) and school principals (Alan DeWitt) and hot artists (Dan Haggerty) along the way. However the most interesting bits of the movie’s journey, for my money — which, for the record, totaled zero dollars; thank you for letting me continue to log in as a guest, Tubi — were Peeters’ eye for detail, her patience, and her willingness to fuck up a frame in order to throw a psychological haymaker.
I don’t want to oversell the camerawork; “Bury Me An Angel” isn’t extraordinarily visually ambitious or anything. But Peeters is very good throughout the film about letting scenes breathe and settle into place, and then culminating them with ruthless efficiency. The pool room brawl comes to mind as, essentially, a series of cartoon comedy bits meant to establish Dag as the one who hustles and breaks pool sticks over the heads of assholes, no backup necessary. But the run-up and pool montage to get us there perfectly set up the simmering environment, and we leave the bar exactly when we need to.
There’s a visual patience with Dag that I simply cannot imagine a male director of the era having. Yeah, she goes skinny dipping at one point and right before the final confrontation she ditches her bozos (finally!) to fuck a townie with a beard. It’s 1971. But Peeter charges both those moments and several others besides with flashes (pun intended) of Dag’s trauma.
I’m going to be thinking about the dream sequence that Dag has of getting revenge for a while. The setup is incredibly simple — just a red light and yellow light in an otherwise black void, truly garage home-movie level stuff. But it’s an effective mental hellscape, one that Peeters then heightens with more blood, running white like milk down a red shirt. It’s visually cheap, but emotionally going for something. Man, Barbara Peeters should’ve made more movies.
I suspect that Ali might want to revoke my After Dark membership card already because I haven’t talked about the final twist in “Bury Me An Angel.” It’s another reason why having just thought about “Star Wars” a bunch is funny, if you know what I mean and I think you might. But I’ll say this. With most biker movies, and road movies generally, the journey is far more interesting than the final destination. I’m not sure the last movement of “Bury Me An Angel” sticks the landing better. But it does stick the landing in the most low budget exploitation way possible, and that’s a beautiful thing to behold. —SS
Those brave enough to join in on the fun can stream “Bury Me an Angel” on Prime Video (Freevee), Tubi, and more. IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations at 11:59 p.m. ET every Friday. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
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