THE SAVAGE SEVEN

A motorcycle gang, The Savage Seven, invade an Indian shanty town and at different points in the film the Indians and the Cycle Gang are either friends with each other or they're fighting each other. When one of the company store employees rapes and kills an Indian girl the blame is put on the Savage Seven. This starts an all out fight with the Savage Seven, where they take the place of the Indians attacking from above (as seen in so many Western films) and the Indians are those holed up in a "fort", or in this case the shanty town. This is when The Savage Seven finally gets in the groove with a fifteen minute fight, where the stunt director must have been told to pull out all he's got, since there are people falling off buildings, crashing bikes, running cycles through cardboard boxes, a person catches on fire, knife fights, guns shooting, dynamite exploding and probably some other things I've forgotten about.

The Savage Seven was a co-production between American International Pictures and Dick Clark Productions. It's an entry in the outlaw biker films, which were primarily made from the mid 1960s through the early 1970's.  Although, Quentin Tarantino lists the movie as #19 on his top 20 Grindhouse Films, I found it to be only mildly entertaining with most of the fun coming at the very last of the movie when the big fight occurs. Robert Walker Jr. is painfully miscast in The Savage Seven as the leader of the Indians. It's never explained why this white boy looks so different from his brethren, except once when he's called Johnny Blue-Eyes. Also, of slight interest, this movie marked the debut of Penny Marshall as one of the waitresses who's really into the motorcycle gang members.

Most likely due to Dick Clark being involved, Duane Eddy (a close friend of Clark's) was given a part in the film as Eddie, one of the motorcycle gang members. I'm assuming that Eddy decided to "talk tough" when delivering his lines, but unfortunately this caused some of his words to be almost intelligible. Eddy is sometimes hard to pick out when watching the film, but if you want to spot him, he's the one wearing the Rebel cap (sort of like the ones you buy at tourist shops in the Great Smoky Mountains). Strangely, there are no Duane Eddy instrumentals on the soundtrack; however, the soundtrack does contain one song by Cream and two songs by Iron Butterfly. I personally found this movie mediocre in the field of biker films, but others may be much more enthralled than I was.