The Wild Angels

First shot: a kid on a trike pedals furiously away from his mother, to be stopped abruptly by a chopper's front wheel. Final shot: Peter Fonda shovels dirt over fellow-Angel Bruce Dern's grave, as police sirens wail closer. Moral: none. Roger Corman's notorious classic remains perhaps the most explicitly nihilistic movie ever made; revealed in retrospect to be less a rebellious youth picture than the extremist culmination of his horror movie cycle. Organised around Dern's death and protracted funeral rites, the film focuses a dispassionate scrutiny on the limits of inarticulate anarchy, with the Hell's Angels characterised with suitably satanic literalness as they 'fall' in the no-choice gulf between the cross and the swastika. Paradise Lost, indeed, as non serviam leads inexorably, and very sourly, to 'nothing to say'...'nowhere to go'. Discomfiting, but timely.