NEVER BLINKS: A Review of Werewolves on Wheels (1971)

by Buzz Drainpipe, Patron Saint of Grease-Smeared Celluloid
This review was stapled to the inside of a gas station bathroom door and later recovered during a séance at an abandoned drive-in.

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Let me tell you something, and I’m going to say it once before I burn this typewriter down:
Werewolves on Wheels is art.
I’m not talking drive-in double-feature, popcorn-pissing, grindhouse filler art.
I’m talking Brakhage-level, Tarkovsky-drenched, Buñuel-on-a-bender transcendental cinema filtered through motor oil, monk curses, and the slow tick of existential damnation.

Yeah, yeah—it’s “about” a biker gang that gets cursed by satanic monks and turns into werewolves. But if that’s all you see, go back to your Criterion Channel and stay there. This is pure cinema. This is cinema that rides.

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Aesthetics of the Apocalypse

Every frame is a postcard from the American Wasteland. Long pans of the desert like it’s God’s ashtray. The wind howls. The gang rolls, always rolling. No destination. Only entropy. Only the slow mutation of man into myth. Or fur.

The biker gang here isn’t just a subculture. They’re tragic nomads on a spirit quest gone wrong. The monks? Agents of fate. The werewolf transformation? That’s metaphor, baby. That’s the Id busting out of the denim.

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Soundtrack Like a Ripped Prayer Book

Don Gere’s soundtrack is ritual music for a burnt-out America. Part fuzz rock, part Satanic jazz tape loop, part funeral procession for the Age of Aquarius. You don’t listen to it. It possesses you.

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In the League of the Greats

I will say it. I will shout it from the roofs of long-closed drive-ins and underneath the fluorescent hum of convenience store lighting:
Werewolves on Wheels deserves to be screened in the same breathless, reverent hush as:

• Stalker

• El Topo

• The Holy Mountain

• Meshes of the Afternoon

• and yes, even Easy Rider.

This is Midnight Mysticism wrapped in leather and blood. It’s Jodorowsky with a switchblade. It’s Cocteau with a Hell’s Angels patch. It’s Kenneth Anger if he’d been raised on Black Sabbath and cough syrup.

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Final Thoughts from the Tank

They told me it was trash.
They told me it was biker schlock.
They told me I was drunk again.

But when that final frame fades out, and the desert takes back what’s hers, I feel something holy. Something feral. Something true.

Never blinks.
Never flinches.
Never forgets.

WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS IS ART.

— Buzz Drainpipe,
found dead with biker boots on and 16mm film tangled around his neck,
still howling.

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