Bury Me an Angel: The Biker Film Directed by a Woman

“A howling hellcat humping a hot steel hog on a roaring rampage of revenge.” That was the tagline New World Pictures hung on Bury Me an Angel in 1971, and it is one of the great pieces of exploitation copywriting — every word doing violence to the next, the whole thing engineered to get a teenager out of a car and up to the box office. It also has almost nothing to do with the film behind it.

What Barbara Peeters actually wrote and directed is a slow, mournful, frequently becalmed road picture about a woman riding across the Pacific Northwest for three years in pursuit of the man who killed her brother, discovering along the way that the pursuit has replaced everything she was. It is a biker film in which the bikes are mostly transport and the revenge, when it arrives, is an anticlimax. New World sold it as a rampage. Peeters made an elegy, and the gap between the two is the most interesting thing about a genuinely strange picture.

The first, and what that means

The historical claim comes attached to every mention of the film: Bury Me an Angel is the first American biker movie written and directed by a woman. Peeters had come up through the low-budget trade and Roger Corman gave her the picture; she wrote it, directed it, and delivered it to the New World specification with the required brawls and breasts in place.

The claim is worth taking seriously, because the biker cycle was the most relentlessly male genre the drive-in produced. It ran on club hierarchy, on the pack, on women as property to be traded between men — a set of conventions The Wild Angels had established in 1966 with a bluntness that shocked people at the time and set the terms for five years of imitators. Peeters keeps the iconography and empties it out. Her protagonist has no club, no pack, no property. She has a bike, a shotgun and a dead brother.

Dixie Peabody plays Dag Bandy, and the casting is most of what works. Peabody was strikingly tall and carried herself with a heavy, unhurried physicality that the camera cannot quite process — she is bigger than the frame expects a woman to be, and Peeters uses that constantly. Dag walks into rooms of men and the composition simply reorganises around her. Peabody made only a handful of films and there is no career here to trace, which makes her presence in this one feel like an artefact from an alternative history of American movies.

The revenge that will not arrive

The plot is elemental. Dag’s brother is murdered at a party. She takes a sawn-off shotgun and goes after the killer, accompanied by two friends — Jonsie (Terry Mace) and Bernie (Clyde Ventura), who ride with her out of loyalty and increasing unease. The hunt lasts years. The film follows it.

That structure is where Peeters does something genuinely unusual for the form. Revenge pictures are engines: each stop tightens the screw, each encounter moves the hunter closer, and the audience is carried by momentum toward a release. Bury Me an Angel keeps stalling. Dag arrives somewhere, learns almost nothing, gets into a fight or a bed, and rides on. Long stretches are simply riding. The film’s interest is in the erosion — what three years of this does to a person, what it does to the two men who came along, what happens to a life that has been reorganised entirely around a single act it cannot complete.

The set-pieces that punctuate it are peculiar in a way that suggests a director following her own nose. There is a detour into the mystical, an encounter with a woman who reads as a witch, an extended hallucinatory passage that belongs to a different picture entirely. Peeters shoots the Pacific Northwest as a real, damp, indifferent landscape rather than an outlaw playground, and the effect is closer to a folk ballad than to the drive-in circuit’s usual asphalt fantasia. The film keeps reaching for something it does not have the resources to grasp, and the reaching is more affecting than a competently delivered rampage would have been.

Why the flatness is the technique

The most common complaint about Bury Me an Angel is that it is boring, and the charge is half-fair. It is also, in the places that matter, deliberate.

Peeters’s method is to deny the audience the two things the genre exists to supply: the pack and the payoff. There is no club to belong to, so there is no camaraderie to enjoy. There is no escalating trail, so there is no anticipation to ride. What she puts in the space is duration — the actual, unedited experience of grief as a thing you carry around for a very long time while nothing resolves. The riding sequences run past the point of pleasure into monotony, and the monotony is the report from inside Dag’s head.

The craft evidence that this is intentional sits in the performances. Peeters directs Peabody toward blankness, and Peabody holds it — Dag registers almost nothing across three years of screen time, which is exactly what a person who has converted herself into an instrument would register. Meanwhile Ventura and Mace are allowed to be human, to get tired, to want to go home, to fall in love, to be frightened of what their friend has become. The men’s ordinary emotional traffic is the measuring stick against which Dag’s hollowness is read. That is a real directorial idea, and it is executed with more consistency than the film’s reputation for shapelessness suggests.

The real ancestor

Everyone files this under Corman’s biker cycle, which is where New World filed it. The lineage that actually explains the film runs through the revenge western.

The shape is unmistakable once you look: a rider with no home, a killer with a name and no location, a pursuit measured in years rather than days, a companion or two who follow out of loyalty and slowly recognise that the person they are following has gone. That is the ride that hollows out the rider, the American cinema’s oldest moral engine, and Peeters has swapped the horse for a hog and changed nothing else. Dag’s shotgun is a Winchester. The bar fights are saloon fights. The final confrontation carries the western’s characteristic deflation, the one where the quarry turns out to be a man rather than a reason.

The other ancestor is the murder ballad — the folk form where a killing is announced in the first verse and the remaining verses are about carrying it. Peeters’s odd mystical detours, her landscape, her circularity all belong to that tradition, and the film’s title is a ballad title. Set it beside Electra Glide in Blue, which two years later did something comparable from the other side of the law, and the early seventies look briefly like a moment when the motorcycle picture was trying to become an American myth rather than a fight scene.

The case against, honestly

It is frequently inert. The dialogue is functional at best and the sound recording defeats it more than once. The New World requirements — the brawl, the nudity, the bar — arrive on schedule and sit awkwardly inside a film with no appetite for them, and Peeters’s compliance with the checklist is visibly grudging in a way that helps nobody. The hallucinatory material is ambitious past the budget’s ability to deliver it. And the film’s treatment of Dag’s sexuality is muddled in a way that a more confident script would have resolved: Peeters wants the character to be beyond ordinary appetite and also keeps handing her scenes that exist to satisfy the drive-in contract, so the two readings cancel each other out. A viewer looking for the coherent feminist statement the film’s historical status implies will find something considerably more compromised and more confused.

Peeters’s own subsequent history is the sourest footnote. She directed Humanoids from the Deep for New World in 1980 and Corman had additional exploitation footage shot behind her back and cut in; she disowned the result and her feature career effectively ended there. The studio that gave a woman the first shot at a biker film was the same one that later overruled her, and both facts belong in the same paragraph.

Watch it for Dixie Peabody, for the argument it makes by omission, and as the strange cousin to the more famous women-led exploitation of the years that followed — the Dag Bandy of 1971 is a direct forerunner of the avengers that Coffy and Switchblade Sisters would send out, and she is a great deal lonelier than either. It turns up in the boutique restorations of Corman’s catalogue, and it is worth an evening from anyone interested in what the drive-in was capable of when nobody was watching closely.

Spoilers below

The pursuit ends the way the western tradition demands. Dag finds her man, and the encounter delivers none of the release three years and eighty minutes have been withholding. He is small. He is frightened. The killing that has organised her entire life turns out to have been ordinary, and the film gives the confrontation no music, no build and no satisfaction — Peeters strips the scene of every device that would let an audience enjoy it.

What she puts in its place is the recognition Dag has been avoiding since the first reel. The revenge was the last thing holding her together, and completing it removes the structure. The closing passage is about a person standing in the wreckage of a purpose, with the two men who followed her looking on, unable to offer anything. Bernie’s devotion, which the film has treated with a gentle sadness throughout, has nowhere to land.

The last image is a woman with nothing left to hunt, and Peabody plays it with the same blankness she has held for three years of story time. The blankness now means something different. That reversal, achieved with no dialogue and no budget, is the reason a 1971 biker picture sold on a tagline about a howling hellcat is still worth arguing about.