The Losers (1970)

Well, at the rate I'm going, I'll watch a new biker movie every year or so. It's not that I don't like them, far from it. It's that at times, it can be difficult to find good ones, even viewable ones. So following up 1968's The Savage Seven (a very pleasant surprise) and 1969's Hell's Angels '69 (liked it a lot, heist movie meets biker movie), here's 1970's The Losers.

At a a remote Army outpost deep in Vietnam, a heavily armed patrol cuts through several Viet Cong ambushes to deliver a special team being used for an almost suicidal mission. Who steps out of the Army truck? Five Hells Angels bikers led by Link Thomas (William Smith), a tough as nails biker recruited by his brother, an Army major (Dan Kemp), who's limited by international law as to what he can do. Just across the border a few miles into Cambodia, an American diplomat/CIA agent is a prisoner of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, but American forces aren't allowed to cross the border to rescue him. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping five rogue Hells Angels from hopping on their bikes and riding into Cambodia. With Army backing as long as they're in Vietnam, Link and his men armor their motorcycles with armor-plating, heavy machine guns and grenades, all the while preparing to go in and rescue the captured American.

There are certain low budget genres you just know aren't going to be truly quality moments, many of them from the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Think of the lousier spaghetti westerns, gory, schlocky horror flicks, and in this case, biker flicks. Put a bunch of tough-looking, grizzled bikers on some motorcycles and let the craziness ensue, low budget be damned! If you can embrace that cheap quality, you're in for a treat. Sometimes, it's just too much. I wanted to like this biker action movie from director Jack Starrett (also starring as the paranoid, ranting CIA agent). At its heart, it is a men-on-a-mission movie, a bunch of oddballs working together to pull off a suicide mission. Even the bad ones can be good with that formula, but this one just isn't good enough to recommend. It has a moment here and there, but in between can be rough-going.

For openers, the casting felt like a good jumping off point. A physical bear of a man, Smith is Link, a Vietnam vet turned biker who assembles a team of bikers to pull off a rescue at his brother's behest. He's the leader, but an anti-hero through and through, troubled at what the war has become. He has a soft spot for some of the people he runs into, all the while trying to hold his crew together. That group includes biker regular Adam Roarke as Duke, a fellow vet looking to find a past love in the Vietnamese boonies,  Paul Koslo as Limpy, similarly finding love in a rundown old house, Houston Savage as Dirty Denny, the pot-smoking, booze-swilling, three-way having biker, and Eugene Cornelius as Speed, the goofy, long-haired hippie with an odd sense of humor. There's also Bernie Hamilton as Capt. Jackson, the regular army officer tasked with keeping the Losers in line, and John Garwood playing his right-hand man, Sgt. Winston.

Some cool potential there, right? That's what I figured, but that's what it remains with little else, potential. I expected a hard-edged men on a mission movie with said men fighting impossible odds. Instead, it's a half-boiled love story. We get Roarke's Duke reuniting with his lost love, walking through the fields dreamily, wondering about the future. Koslo's Limpy falls for a Vietnamese girl with a baby and steps in as a surrogate father. What the hell happened?!? Sure, there's some biker shenanigans, Dirty Denny (of course) having a three-way and then getting in a fight with some locals. There's no story, no sense of urgency, and no rhythm in the least. The bikers party and bitch and fight and screw around, outfit their cycles, and then oh yeah, they head into Cambodia. By that point, I'd been fast-forwarding through huge stretches of so-called 'story.'

If there's a remotely positive saving grace, it is the biker attack on the Red Chinese camp in Cambodia. All sorts of crazy bike stunts, gunfire and explosions throughout make it an exciting, adrenaline-pumping shootout. That isn't the end though, some preachiness saved for the last 15 minutes as a movie about bikers on a suicide mission decides it needs to deliver a message to its viewers. Seems logical, right? The ending is not surprisingly pretty downbeat, but it was yet another case of too little, too late. A pretty bad movie, aided by two folk songs in the soundtrack that try to again, add depth to a story that simply doesn't require it.

Make a movie about Hells Angels rampaging through Vietnam and Cambodia and be content with it. Don't try and make it something more. A disappointment.

The Losers (1970): * 1/2 /****

The Savage Seven

Writing this blog, I take some pride in doing reviews of countless guy's guys type of movies; westerns and war movies, film noir and heist flicks. Any and all, I'll give them a shot. How about a new addition? In 1,000 plus reviews, I've never really wrote a review of a true outlaw biker film, but there's a first for everything. Here's 1968's The Savage Seven.

At a tiny, isolated desert shanty town, a young Indian man, Johnnie Little Hawk (Robert Walker Jr.) is one of many poor Indians under the thumb of a very greedy, very sinister American businessman, Fillmore (Mel Berger). There is a constant back and forth as Fillmore consistently keeps the people down, but there could be a solution for all involved. One day, a biker gang led by Kisum (Adam Roarke) rides into the town and immediately starts to wreak havoc. The bikers don't seem too interested in getting involved with anyone else's problems; instead they want to booze, drink and party before moving on to the next town. Kisum is drawn though to Johnnie's younger sister, Marcia (Joanna Frank), and the gang sticks around. All bets are off though when Fillmore tries to cut a deal with Kisum and the gang to rid himself of the Indian villagers. Let the chaos and violence ensue.

The outlaw biker genre was a perfect time capsule of its era, the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rebel groups of motorcycle riders terrorizing towns and populations......well, because they can. Who wants to stick it to The Man? We do!!!! Who wants to take what we want and forget about the consequences? We do! We're bikers so who cares?!? These are low-brow, cheap flicks that were meant as part of a double-bill at a drive-in on the weekend. We're not talking Shakespearean scripts here. We're talking about a biker gang with characters called Joint (Larry Bishop), Stud (John Garwood), Bull (Richard Anders), and Wolf (Walter Robles) among others. Cliches, stereotypes, cheesy one-liners, 'Savage' has it all, and let me tell you.....it's an entertaining mess of a movie that kept me entertained from beginning to end.

So like any sub-genre, know what you're getting into, and that will go a long way in determining what you take away from it. Director Richard Rush knows exactly what he's working with here and in its own oddness, delivers an almost perfect genre flick.

The formula here is as simple as they come. A movie that runs just 94 minutes is full of fistfights, brawls, drinking, riding and bizarre male bonding. Seriously....no more than five minutes go by at any point where someone doesn't get punched in the face. This isn't the type of flick that stimulates your brain, making you think for hours and days later about what you've just watched. You sit back and let it wash over you. Then, because the movie is pretty dirty -- literally dirty in terms of actual dirt, not sex -- you want to go take a shower. The story of bikers fighting Indians, Indians fighting bikers, Indians and bikers teaming up to fight the Man, it's always on the move and never slows down. It's incredibly stupid, but boy, is it fun.

Though he's buried a bit in the cast listing, Roarke is the star here as biker leader Kisum. He's the perfect roguish anti-hero. His mindset is simple; take what you want, and if you can't take it, take it anyways. In this case, he wants Joanna Frank's Marcia. At this isolated little Indian village, he sees some chances for fun and entertainment, becoming almost a biker Robin Hood (almost, he's still a dirty biker). A familiar face of the biker genre, Roarke is a scene-stealer. Walker Jr. is all right in a smaller part as an Indian (and he doesn't look the part at all), but he plays second fiddle to Roarke's Kisum. Playing the evil Man, Berger is a perfect evil, dangerously overweight, corpulent bad guy while Charles Bail is his karate-kicking enforcer, Taggart. The enforce announces one his attack intentions, yelling 'KARATE!' to which Bull answers 'CHAIR!' and hits him with a chair. You couldn't make up that type of quality script-writing if you try.

Without a lull along the way, 'Savage' still manages to ratchet things up in the final act in a battle royale at the village. After a brutal incident pits the bikers versus the Indians, Kisum's gang descends on the barricaded village, throwing themselves and the bikes at the heavily-guarded barricades. It's an extended action sequence that features some truly impressive biker stunts and jumps, not to mention some pretty rough hand-to-hand violence. It goes on for at least 15 minutes, not too bad for a cheap drive-in flick. 'Savage' is pretty low-brow and requires no heavy lifting in the brain department, but I enjoyed it from the start. Even Eric Clapton and Cream sing the theme! Listen HERE.

The Savage Seven (1969): ***/****

Hell's Angels '69

By the late 1960s, movie studios seemed to start catching on that the same-old movies weren't appealing to audiences so there were releases like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider, among many more.  They reflected the changing times that were seeing a hippie/drug culture grow bigger and bigger, basically groups that were fed up with the status-quo and society's "norms."  Easy Rider specifically opened up a whole new genre of movies that had only been touched upon in the previous decade or so.

I don't know if it has an official name, but let's call it the biker genre where motorcycle gangs roamed the country causing havoc wherever they went.  I've only seen a couple, but from what I've read they were typically low-budget, drive-in type movies that cost as much to make as people spent to get into the drive-in or theater.  But I'll say it again, low budget doesn't mean bad.  It can be appealing in a lot of ways.  Last week's TCM Underground movie was called Hell's Angels '69, released in 1969 at the height of these biker movies.  Even though the IMDB rating is pretty low at 5.0/10 -- give or take a few decimal points -- the movie is pretty good, probably due to the talent involved.

Heading west on their motorcylces, brothers Chuck (Tom Stern) and Wes (Jeremy Slate) meet a gang of Hell's Angels and do their best to start off on good terms with these tough, very anti-social bikers.  The Angel's are a little skeptical of them but allow the brothers to ride along with them a little while as they all continue west.  Chuck and Wes though have a plan that unbeknownst to the Angel's involves them.  The brothers plan to break off from the group and head into Las Vegas where they'll be staying at Caesar's Palace.  Years of preparation has gone into putting this plan into action...they're going to knock off the casino for all the money they can carry using the Hell's Angels as a diversion.

Think of this as the original Ocean's 11 except instead of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack we get a gang of dirty, long-haired bikers.  It's one of the more unlikely heist movies I've come across, but at the same time, it's one of the better ones because of the story's simplicity.  The robbery itself is so simple -- even with the diversion -- that it surprised me that it didn't have a twist.  The last 30 minutes are the aftermath of the casino robbery as a Las Vegas detective (G.D. Spradlin, Senator Geary from Godfather II) tries to piece everything together while the brothers put their escape plan into effect.  Don't be disappointed though, the bikers figure out they've been duped and head out on the vengeance trail.  The movie is named after them so it's not like they'd disappear at the best part.

With B-movies, you have to expect a certain amount of cheese from the proceedings, but for the most part, 'Angel's' is free of it.  Sure, there is a lot of footage of the gang riding around, doing tricks, riding through Vegas, that does nothing to advance the story at all, but that's to be expected to a certain point.  It looks like Stern and Slate did a fair share of their own riding so that's always a positive too.  With one exception of an actor I recognized from another movie, the Angel's are played by actual members of the gang out of Oakland.  I won't post links because for most this was their only role, but it adds a sense of reality and for lack of a better word, coolness, that these bikers are authentic.

As the brothers leading the charge, Stern and Slate do double duty here, writing the script together while Stern also produced and put up a lot of his own money to get the movie made.  They had worked together the year before in The Devil's Brigade so I'd assume they met there and formed a fast friendship.  Because they both had something invested in the movie, it comes across better.  Stern was only in a handful of movies, and Slate was typically a supporting player so it's definitely cool to see them step into starring roles.  For one, they look alike, and they have a definite chemistry together so the brothers come across as very believable.  There are two twists -- one more important than the other -- in the last half hour that involve their backgrounds and their motivation for the robbery.

The story never really lags, but two key scenes stand out to me as out of the ordinary for a drive-in B-movie.  The build-up to the heist, the robbery and the aftermath are handled nicely in an exciting way that keeps you guessing as to what's going to happen.  Then, in the finale, there's a tension-filled chase on dirtbikes (SPOILERS watch it HERE) as the brothers run from the Hell's Angels.  The ending is a bit of a shocker, but it also leaves it open for your own interpretation as to their situation.  Surprisingly good low budget movie, and certainly a strong introduction to the all-powerful biker genre of the late 1960s.

Hell's Angel's '69 <----trailer (1969): ***/****