Thursday, July 22, 2010

Movie review – “The Wild Ride” (1960) *1/2

A second lead role for Jack Nicholson, following Cry Baby Killer. He plays a bad boy, a leader of a gang of teens – the sort of role John Ashley would play for AIP. The plot has one of his gang involved in a goody-two-shoes girl and Nicholson doesn’t like it; he wants his mate to break it off with her but the mate is reluctant to do so.
Nicholson fans will find this interesting – he’s still Jack, just a young version, with the same voice and sardonic smile, a bit more hair. His acting is a bit awkward but he does have a charisma. There is some fun dialogue (“she doesn’t dig our way”, “you start talking like that and the next thing you know you’ll be sitting on a sofa watching TV and you’ll be dead”), but the production values are low (the film looks cheap), the story not particularly compelling, and the acting apart from Nicholson is bad. The story was by Burton Topper, who later became the director Burt Topper.

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