Best of 2023: No Sequel Has Been More Deliriously Off-Brand than the Pro-War, Pro-Soldier Sequel to Easy Rider, Easy Rider: The Ride Back
In an astonishing act of hubris/cosmic fluke/glitch in the matrix 1969’s Easy Rider, one of the most iconic and influential films ever made, was followed, after a fashion, in 2012 by Easy Rider: The Ride Back, a glorified fan film co-written by, and starring, Phil Pitzer, an Ohio lawyer in his sixties who had never even acted in a movie before and would never disgrace the big screen with his presence again.
Instead of Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, three of the coolest and sexiest actors and icons in the history of film, Easy Rider: The Ride Back is a singularly unsuccessful vehicle for a leathery sexagenarian with a Prince Valiant/mullet hairstyle, dad jeans, a horrifyingly skimpy sleeveless tee-shirt and a hypnotizingly dull monotone.
Pitzer isn’t an actor. He’s certainly not a movie star. He’s just some guy and his central presence makes Easy Rider: The Ride Back feel less like a real movie or a legitimate sequel than the product of a Movie Fantasy Camp that afforded a rank amateur with no discernible talent an opportunity to live out his dreams of starring in a sequel to his favorite movie alongside bona fide professionals like Jeff Fahey, Michael Nouri and Rance Howard, Clint and Ron’s character actor dad.
Easy Rider: The Ride Back would make more sense as something Pitzer would get at the end of Movie Fantasy Camp so that he could show his co-workers at the law firm that he totally made a “real” movie and play at the office party and only at the office party than it does to an authorized follow-up to a movie that legitimately changed cinema and pop culture forever.
Pitzer’s epic folly roars out of the gate with opening narration that immediately establishes that this will be one for the ages, and not in a good way. Against a blurry, slightly out of focus American flag, Pitzer’s anti-hero drones, “My name is Morgan Williams. I had a brother, Wyatt. He had this nickname, Captain America. Day after Mardi Gras, 1969 Wyatt and his best friend Billy were riding their bikes, heading to Florida. The sky was crystal blue, just like 9/11. Wyatt died that day, the victim of hatred and prejudice at the hands of those whose greatest fear is freedom whether in the form of a nation or a single individual. (I’m) finally making the ride back after forty years. Time to face the face the ghosts of the past. And all because little sister Shane showed up at my island off the coast of Mexico. If there’s one thing I hate in life it’s fucking surprises.”
The most charitable reading of the unforgettable, instantly iconic line, “The sky was crystal blue, just like 9/11” is that Osama Bin Laden and the rednecks who murdered Captain America and Billy the Kid are united in a feverish, homicidal hatred of freedom, and will do anything to stop it, including mass murder.
A less charitable interpretation of one of the most gloriously wrong non-sequiturs in bad film history is that Pitzer and his co-writer and director Dustin Rikert wanted to say something about everything despite having nothing to say and an insufferable manner of saying it.
Easy Rider: The Ride Back is the work of filmmakers with Orson Welles level ambition and audacity and Tommy Wiseau-level execution. It wants to be Easy Rider redux as well as a sprawling, multi-generational tale of love, hatred, patriotism, war and duty when it’s really just The Room on a motorcycle but much crazier and much worse.
sexy, sexy, sexy
It’s a testament to the filmmaker’s staggeringly wrong-headed ambition that Easy Rider: The Ride Back is a sequel to Easy Rider we never saw coming AND a prequel as well. Easy Rider: The Ride Back can’t do anything even halfway competently but that does not keep it from trying to do everything. That includes flashbacks to World War II AND Vietnam that the movie does not need and cannot afford yet inexplicably saw fit to include anyway.
That’s because Easy Rider: The Ride Back is above all else a flag-waving tribute to Old Glory, our fighting boys overseas and military tradition. Even Morgan, who burned his draft card so he could devote his time to Day-Glo pot parties with groovy, body-painted hippie chicks, insists, “You can attack the war, man. But never the warrior.”
That extends to the sick fucks who single-handedly burned down Vietnamese villages full of women and children. They too were warriors and consequently worthy of respect and admiration. Easy Rider: The Ride Back doesn’t seem too keen on attacking wars, either.
Morgan has made a living selling marijuana, but only marijuana and none of those bad drugs, for decades. Yet every time he smokes a joint it looks like it’s his first time and he will NOT be repeating the experience ever again. No one has ever looked as un-cool smoking weed as Pitzer does here. That includes Elon Musk on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
When Pitzer swears it similarly feels like he’s worried that one of his great-grandchildren will hear him and call him a hypocrite for threatening to wash their mouths out for cursing when they were children.
If you have extremely poor vision you might mistake Pitzer for Peter Fonda’s stunt double. Alternately, if you were to aggressively clone Peter Fonda and each new clone was progressively fuzzier, uglier and less distinct then the 50th or so would probably bear a passing resemblance to Pitzer. Pitzer favors skimpy sleeveless tee shirts designed to show off his non-existent musculature. That means that Easy Rider: The Ride Back’s conception of grown-up sexiness entails forcing the audience to spend the film staring at an old man’s armpits.
Morgan’s little sister Shane (b-movie staple Sheree J. Wilson, who also produced) admonishes her extremely cool rebel senior citizen brother to take the titular ride back to visit his estranged, cranky World War II veteran father Old Hickcock 'Wild Bill' Williams (Newell Alexander) so that they can reconcile before the old man dies.
Easy Rider: The Ride Back is a crazy clown car of a movie. Egregiously unnecessary new characters and subplots keep popping out in a frenzy, each more impossible to care about than the last. It’s as if the filmmakers are laying the groundwork for eight or nine sequels, a Netflix miniseries, a series of novels and an Off Broadway play.
They’re poignantly incapable of making an actual movie, let alone a proper sequel, to an all-time classic yet they seem intent on creating a sprawling franchise in violent defiance of God’s will and the wishes of the American public.
Morgan wears his dead brother’s helmet on the ride back and never tires of shoe-horning him into conversations. As Morgan tells his riding buddy Wes Coast (Jeff Fahey), “I’m also kind of making this ride in memory of Wyatt. Wearing his shit. Riding his bike.”
Compared to Pitzer, Fahey is a combustible combination of Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, Marlon Brando in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
To his very minor credit, Pitzer understands that Fahey is more charismatic than he is and is appropriately deferential. Then again, that’s also true of various inanimate objects in the movie. Pitzer isn’t just upstaged by a hammy old pro like Fahey; he’s less compelling and magnetic than various leather couches, barstools, park benches and buses featured in the film as well.
At a sleazy roadhouse bar, Wes Coast leeringly asks a barmaid young enough to be his granddaughter, “Maybe you can tell me where some tired old men can score some reefer?”
Morgan makes his living selling pot and it is canonical that Wes Coast has some seriously heavy reefer sticks yet the fellas inexplicably find themselves out of marijuana and twenty to thirty years behind the time when it comes to drug slang.
“Reefer? Around here we call it pot?” giggles a waitress way too impressed by Wes shortly before leading him to a spot where freaks get higher than kites on that sweet, sweet reefer.
Morgan and Wes Coast make a pit stop to visit the Salton Sea, which we’re told was the sight of the greatest ecological disaster in American history. In his trademark lifeless monotone Morgan drones via narration, “We blew it, man.”
He’s badly paraphrasing the iconic moment in Easy Rider when Captain America and Billy the Kid have made their big score and ostensibly finagled their slice of the American dream when Peter Fonda’s sexy spiritual seeker is suddenly overcome with an overwhelming sense of despair and realizes just how empty and meaningless their victory truly is. In that awful, revelatory moment he comes to understand that his win is actually a loss and that what he imagined was freedom is actually doom.
It’s a moment of powerful ambivalence that speaks not just to Captain America’s existential angst but to the self-doubt of a counterculture that righteously rejected the rules and conformity of mainstream culture but didn’t necessarily have a superior alternative, or an alternative at all, to replace it with.
Within the context of Easy Rider: The Ride Back, however, it could not be less ambivalent or more forehead-slappingly obvious.
Pitzer as Morgan stiffly offers up, “We blew it man” and then, in case there is ANY doubt as to what he means, follows it up with a passionless, “We’ve got to take better care of our planet.”
Easy Rider: The Ride Back isn’t afraid to take the safest of stances. We take a pit stop at a repurposed bus where Wes Coast’s old professional rival has devoted his life to feeding the homeless so that Morgan can inform us, via narration, that feeding the needy is a good thing.
Also good? Integration in 1940s baseball. We know that Wild Bill is a good, good man despite his anger at Morgan because he fought with distinction in World War II (“USA! USA! USA!” this follow-up to the definitive countercultural manifesto silently but insistently chants throughout) but also because he tells his boys about a good, good man named Jackie Robinson who played professional baseball despite encountering intense racism as the first African American in the major leagues.
A precociously woke Williams boy asks his father, “What’s the color of his skin got to do with how he hits a baseball?” in a very brave, very timely stand against institutional racism in professional baseball in the late 1940s.
Easy Rider: The Ride Back doesn’t have the substance or maturity to handle any serious subject. That characteristically does not keep it from trying to tackle every social issue. Wild Bill, for example, has a fierce case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. His wife has an even more intense case of undiagnosed, untreated Postpartum depression that leads to an even heavier issue the movie has no idea how to handle: suicide.
We learn WAY too much about Virgil, a Williams brother who chose the straight and narrow path and served in Vietnam. Virgil follows in his father’s footsteps and gets Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after serving in Vietnam AND, in a scene that is horrifying for all the wrong reasons, the woman that he is in love with is brutally gang-raped by bikers and then he is ALSO violently sodomized by a cartoonish biker gang.
Like everything in the film, these scenes scream out angrily to be left on the cutting room floor but if the filmmakers cut everything that was nonsensical and regrettable the movie would consist of its opening credits and end credits with nothing in between.
Easy Rider: The Ride Back is so hawkish and Conservative that when the father of Morgan’s nephew (played by a slumming Michael Nouri) objects to his son serving in Iraq he’s portrayed as an American-hating pinko too selfish and cowardly to honor the proud military tradition of service to country and debilitating, life-ruining Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Pitzer and Rikert have made a masturbatory Libertarian fantasy that the hillbillies who murdered the anti-heroes of Easy Rider would like as much, if not more, than its hippy protagonists.
When Wild Bill talks longingly of a long-ago era “when family time was spent outdoors” and “not in front of a damn TV” and “a person’s wealth was measured in happiness, not by the size of their wallet” and finally, “the words “God”, “love” and “country” meant something” the film obviously agrees strongly with him even as he’s engaging in sentimental, self-satisfied Greatest Generation horseshit.
It’s a mark of how corny and outdated the film is that its conception of the young people of today disrespecting their elders with their newfangled ways involves a World War II vet complaining about those darned color televisions with the remote controls and not the internet or social media.
Wes Coast can’t wait to get his sticky little paws on some sweet, sweet reefer!
Then again, considering Pitzer’s advanced age and general obliviousness, I’m not sure he knew what the internet was when he made the ultimate vanity project though he did make what is essentially a feature-length boomer meme of a movie all the same.
Wild Bill has not seen Morgan in forty years, and is filled with rage that he did not proudly serve in Vietnam and endure the psychological devastation that is the family’s birthright.
The film acknowledges the deep, perhaps intractable issues at the core of Morgan and his father’s relationship by having it take over ninety seconds for them to resolve ALL of their conflicts.
When the old man of the old man grouses about him being a coward, the sixty-three year old rebel replies with adolescent defiance, “I thought you told us Old Glory gave us freedom of choice!”
They then connect on their shared love of the abstract concept of freedom and the United States, the greatest country that has ever existed, and agree to take a ride together that will ostensibly represent the core of the third and final entry in the Easy Rider trilogy.
After teasing the climactic appearance of the contemporary Virgil all film long, Morgan ends the proceedings by assuring us that Virgil will be in the next movie and that he’ll be “bringing a surprise that’s gonna blow everyone’s mind.”
Alas, there would be no third Easy Rider movie. You could argue that there wasn’t a second one either, just a sad old man’s attempt to recreate Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Terry Southern’s beautiful, rebellious, pure brainchild in his own image.
Easy Rider: The Ride Back proved a one-off in other ways as well. It did not lead, for example, to a string of low-budget, off-brand yet inexplicably licensed follow-ups to classic movies like Citizen Kane 2: Raising Kane! with Kevin Sorbo, one of the Farley brothers and, as the star and co-writer, a dentist from Idaho who decided to get into the motion picture business after retiring from his practice.
In its own way, Easy Rider: The Ride Back is miraculous. So many things had to go egregiously, exquisitely wrong for this abomination to happen. It’s rare to find a movie of such staggering miscalculation and ineptitude. It would similarly be hard to find a bigger dip in quality between a movie and its ostensible sequel in that Easy Rider is one of the greatest movies ever made and this is easily one of the worst.
Easy Rider: The Ride Back is a work of endless fascination because it is is deeply, humiliatingly personal. Pitzer follows in the footsteps of perversely non-charismatic lunatics like Tommy Wiseau, Neil Breen and Ed Wood who made movies that expressed everything about who they are and how they see the world and their place in it because they fail so spectacularly and completely as entertainment.
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