A motorcycle gang, “MC California”, drifts into a ramshackle Native American Indian shanty town with the idea of fighting, drinking beer and carousing with some of the Native American females. It’s not until commanding and charismatic Kisum (Adam Roarke), the leader of the pack, tries to get a bit too friendly with local Indian waitress Marcia Little Hawk (Joanna Frank), that the Indians, who at first avoided violence, start to get restless. Marcia’s hot-headed, blue-eyed brother, Johnnie Little Hawk (Robert Walker, Jr.), is the leader of this tribe, and is upset about the budding romance.
There are a number of confrontations between Johnnie and his Indian friends living in poverty, with Kisum’s crew of drunk and rowdy bikers that the rich and greedy, controlling local owner of the bar and convenience store, Fillmore (Mel Berger), attempts to use to his advantage.
Fillmore has been trying for some time to drive the pesky Indians off their land and turn it into a resort and shopping mall that would make him millions. Now with Kisum and his gang running amok and terrifying the Indians in town, Fillmore has a secret plan to pay Kisum to burn the Indians out of their homes, and at the same time, by calling the state police troopers, then have Kisum and his gang arrested for arson and murder. That’s the proverbial knocking off two birds with one stone on Fillmore’s part!
The bikers and Indians, seeing a common cause, become allied against Fillmore. He goes into overdrive, and has a local Indian woman raped and murdered by his #1 henchman karate black belt Taggert (Charles Bail) and makes it look like one of the bikers did it!
But, things still aren’t going the way he wanted. The bikers and Indians are not going for each other throats. So, Fillmore has Taggert & Co. murder Kisum’s good friend Bull (Richard Anders) to start a war between the bikers & Indians. After Bull is murdered, he is crucified by Fillmore’s men, making it look like the Indians did it in revenge for the raped and murdered Indian woman.
With both the bikers and Indians now at war with each other, Fillmore and his crew just sit back, acting like “innocent bystanders” in all the carnage, and wait for the inevitable results: The two sides wiping each other out with Fillmore and his boys, being non-combatants, picking up all the pieces, and the valuable Indian land! Since both the Bikers and Indians, in killing off each other, won’t have any use for it anyway!
That’s until a battered and beaten Taggert, who had the truth beat out of him by Kisum, confessed that his boss, Fillmore, is working both ends against the middle. With alliances shifting back and forth, it’s now up to Kisum to get the truth out to both his bikers and Johnnie’s Indians to unite against their real enemy, Fillmore, before they both end up slaughtering each other!
A 1968 action, crime, drama, thriller, outlaw biker film directed by Richard Rush (“The Stuntman”), produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff, Dick Clark, and James H. Nicholson, screenplay by Michael Fisher from a story by Rosalind Ross, and richly photographed by László Kovács. Starring Robert Walker Jr., Joanna Frank, John Garwood, Larry Bishop, Max Julien and Duane Eddy. Penny Marshall and Billy Green Bush appears in one of their earliest screen roles. It’s worth seeing for Walker and Rourke’s performances, they elevate this film to a much higher level than it would be, with lesser actors.
Rush had directed the previous year’s “Hells Angels on Wheels”, and agreed to direct this biker flick in exchange for the opportunity to make his psychedelic film “Psych-Out” (1968). Here, he doesn’t seem inhibited by the common-ness of the material. Rush builds the characters and has Kovács move the camera (it glides and whirls like a gymnast) in typically startling fashion.
This biker film adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic “Seven Samurai” (1954) was one of the many biker films coming out of the AIP studios during the 1960’s and 70’s, but it’s also one of the most entertaining. With style to burn, it delivers on all the action and stunts you’d expect from this genre while also injecting some obvious but effective social commentary on the scrambled values of the era. The powers-that-be pit the bikers and Indians against each other to dissolve their strength and perpetuate their fringe status.
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Richard F. Shepard wrote: “The movie is one continuous uproar of unmuffled motors and head-cracking and emphasized cruelty from one and to another. It is colorful and technically competent but completely cheap in its primitive, uninquiring, kick’-em-in-the-groin sensationalism, too serious to be lusty and too one-note to be interesting.”
Selected by Quentin Tarantino for the First Quentin Tarantino Film Festival, which was held in Austin, Texas in 1997. If you like classic drive-in movies, then this will be a whole lot of fun. Whip out some popcorn, and set back to be entertained.
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