Bury Me an Angel (USA, 1971) 89 min color DIR-SCR: Barbara Peeters. PROD: Paul Norbert. MUSIC: Bill Cone, Richard Hieronymus, East-West Pipeline. DOP: Sven Walnum. CAST: Dixie Peabody, Terry Mace, Clyde Ventura, Joanne Moore Jordan, Dennis Peabody, Beach Dickerson, Dan Haggerty. (New World Pictures)
Writer-director Barbara Peeters, along with Stephanie Rothman (The Student Nurses), specialized in genre films with a “feminist” slant, often released by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Bury Me an Angel is a unique biker film, and not just because the protagonist is female. Writer-director Peeters has crafted a stylish and surprisingly thoughtful antithesis of the genre. The heroine (given the interestingly asexual name “Dag”) is a human being instead of a gun-toting caricature. When her brother gets killed in the imaginatively shot opening (done with no dialogue), she is actually given an ample amount of screen time to grieve (usually in movie reality, people stop mourning before the next scene).
The film’s first third is filled with strange Bergman-esque flashbacks of Dag’s disturbingly Freudian childhood with her brother. Not only do her adolescent memories show up just after her brother’s demise, but also during any sexual moments. On the revenge trail, Dag recruits a couple of dorks to extend her vengeful duties (in an amusing switch of the gender roles, one of the men says to her, “You were just using us?!?”). While she bathes in the lake, these two goons jump into the water, in the hope of getting some free love. Suddenly, intercut with these sunny scenes, we get these strange, dark flashbacks of a little girl in a bathtub. Much later, Dag meets an artist named Ken, played by Dan Haggerty (yes, Grizzly Adams), who helps her out. Then in an elongated love scene between the two, this almost-erotic moment shot with red gels (signifying: passion? anger? fear?) is interrupted by cut-ins of her brother, also bathed in red light, in close-up, as seen by her POV, and that he is “mounting” her.
These cut-ins during the potentially erotic moments serve a dual purpose. Because Dag is a six-foot tall, good-looking blonde, and because this is an exploitation movie after all, the male viewer anticipates seeing much more of Dag than just her personality. These moments are always sabotaged. It makes sense that her would-be sexual encounters evoke these dreadful memories. Ms. Peeters forces the viewers to confront their voyeurism with these upsetting, incongruous images. It thusly becomes a curious case of biting the hand that feeds– all the drive-in crowd wanted was some sex and violence, yet got a lot more than they bargained for. Given all this heavy psychology, the moment where she exacts her revenge is understandably anticlimactic. When her brother’s assassin is staring down a gun barrel, he says -in a typical hick accent that you can almost hear the blade of grass in his teeth-: “You and yer brother, weren’t right…. incest!”. This resolution is something we’ve suspected all along, yet even this insight feels too simplistic. Something is still amiss here, something even more dreadful…
Barbara Peeters did after all make a film, and not a term paper, so it would be remiss to ignore her skill as a director, with a wealth of visual imagination given the material. (An interesting motif is to film scenes via reflections in mirrors– itself symbolic of the story.) Plus, the moments of violence are decidedly more harsh than standard B movie fodder. These are three-dimensional characters who bleed. Sadly, “Dag” was the only lead role for the impressive Dixie Peabody (formerly a model named Diane Potter). After a supporting role in Night Call Nurses (part of Corman’s hugely successful “nurse” series), she disappeared from movies, and sadly passed away in 2005 at the too-young age of 57. Corman factory regular Beach Dickerson, appearing here as “Harry”, is also an associate producer. Richard Compton (also director of the Macon County films, and Angels Die Hard, in which Dixie Peabody had a cameo) appears as a pool player. James Whitworth (Jupiter in The Hills Have Eyes) is a biker. Although New World Video released this to VHS, incredibly, Bury Me an Angel still has yet to receive a DVD or Blu-ray release as of this writing.