Crew
Director – Leigh Scott, Producer – Ken Badish, Photography – Steve Parker, Visual Effects – Sweetpost (Supervisor – Ross Edgar), Makeup Effects – Krystal Phillips, Production Design – Aaron Raymond. Production Company – Active Entertainment.
Cast
Stacey Dash (Lady), Paul Le Mat (Elliot Davros), Frida Farrell (Gretchen), Eliza Swenson (Layla), Kristen Quintrall (K.J.), Jackey Hall (Tinkerbell), Brent Lydic (Blane), Monti Domingue (Dusty), Jessika Brodosi (Molly), Laura Futch (Milwaukee), Colin Gaylean (Bobby Dupree), Dean A. Arvelo (Gator), Marcus L. Brown (Jackie), [uncredited] Griff Furst (McNasty), Richard Lynch (Uncle Ted)
Plot
A group of girl bikers are passing through Lafayette, Louisiana when they get into a bar fight. However, the barman and other patrons of the bar, along with the police that arrive, all prove to be androids. The girls flee after a heavy shootout with the androids. One of the girls Gretchen is captured and taken before rogue scientific genius Elliot Davros who has built an army of android disguised as ordinary people with which he is intent on taking over the world. As the girls outfit themselves with heavier weaponry to take him on, Davros has android duplicates built of Gretchen and the others.
Chrome Angels was one of the films from low-budget director Leigh Scott (see below). Elsewhere, Scott has directed a number of other films for The Asylum. Most of Scott’s films are fairly terrible but there is the odd gem that is halfway reasonable – in particular Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers (2005) and Transmorphers (2007).
With Chrome Angels, Leigh Scott sets out to make a biker girl film a la She Devils on Wheels (1968) – the genre equivalent would probably be Troma’s Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town (1991). That mixed up with a 90s era killer android/cyborg action film that emerged in the aftermath of The Terminator (1984) and RoboCop (1987). You are reminded in particular one of the films of Richard Pepin a la CyberTracker (1994).
The opening scene of the film places the biker chicks in a dive bar where they end up getting harassed by an uncredited Griff Furst as a macho jerk. That is about the point that the entire film goes WTF and it is revealed that the patrons and bartender are all androids with glowing green eyes, followed by police that turn up with blank white faces and wearing motorcycle helmets looking exactly like the law enforcement robots out of THX 113 (1971).
Chrome Angels is a film that lives in a world that does not approach basic realism. (This is not necessarily intended as a criticism). The girl bikers all wear low-cut tops and wield quite a high degree of firepower. Despite the deployment of military grade weapons in an urban area, the only police that ever turn up are android cops. Paul Le Mat’s android maker can create lifelike duplicates (by something that resembles a 3D scanner) in minutes. He has also infiltrated quite a proportion of American society with android duplicates of everyone from seniors to suburban moms to children who have heavy artillery hidden somewhere on their body that nobody seems to notice.
In one of the more entertainingly bizarre scenes, the biker chicks shoot up a supermarket after everyone present, including the cashiers, the bespectacled suburban mom and an overweight middle-aged lady doing her shopping all turn out to be androids with green glowing eyes who produce semi-automatic weaponry out of nowhere. The climax features three versions of wheelchair-ridden villain Paul Le Mat, which the girls defeat by quoting their own version of the Vogt-Kampf test from Blade Runner (1982).
Leigh Scott was involved in the early days of The Asylum and made several of their films with the likes of The Beast of Bray Road (2005), Frankenstein Reborn (2005), King of the Lost World (2005), Dragon (2006), Exorcism: The Possession of Gal Bowers (2006), Hillside Cannibals (2006), Pirates of Treasure Island (2006), The 9/11 Commission Report (2006), The Hitchhiker (2007) and Transmorphers (2007), as well as several for other companies with Dracula’s Curse (2005), Flu Bird Horror (2008), The Dunwich Horror (2009), The Witches of Oz (2011), Dorothy and the Witches of Oz (2012), The Lost Girls (2014), Piranha Sharks (2016), The Little Mermaid (2024) and episodes of the anthology The Penny Dreadful Picture Show (2013). He has also written the screenplays for Wolvesbayne (2009), Quantum Apocalypse (2010) and Black Noise (2023). Scott’s output has been more uneven during the 2010s where he has been perpetually announced as the director of several cheap Wizard of Oz modernisations.
Trailer here