10. The Ride Back, Because Easy Rider Needed A Sequel
Easy Rider is one of the most iconic films of the sixties, made right at the beginning of the whole auteur thing. It reflects the time period it was made in, thematically and soundtrack-wise. And if you didn't live through that era, it's really boring. Ponderous hippie nonsense. But it does have a pretty great ending where the young radical bikers travelling across the States meet some conservative redneck truckers who mow them down. It was a definitive, radical political statement from writers/directors/stars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, which didn't exactly leave any loose plot threads to be explored further down the line. Which is why it took a good forty years for anyone to produce a follow-up - and, of course, without the involvement of anyone from the original. Easy Rider 2: The Ride Back was made by director Dustin Rikert in 2012, without the help (or blessing) of anybody that worked on the original film, and actually subverted a lot of the counter-cultural ideas of Easy Rider with its boring conservative nonsense as it told a revisionist Western story about the family of Peter Fonda's character from the forties to the present day. Bonkers.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
