EVOL666 I had no idea what to expect from this one when I pulled it from my stack of discs. I was expecting some sort of lame, low-budget early '80s slasher-film based on the title...what I got instead was a solid, mid-'70s bikers-versus-rednecks semi-exploit/action film instead. I'm glad my initial suspicions were wrong. A group of rowdy but otherwise relatively non-threatening bikers called the Scorpions is harassed by the local pigs when they roll through a small redneck town. A local girl is raped by one of the town's deputies-and in order to shift the blame away from himself-of course blames the bikers. The cop/rapist goes so far as to stir up some of the other yokels, including the girl's father, to take revenge on the bikers in such a way as to make it look like the work of a rival club called the Road Agents. Before going to war with the Agents-the Scorpion's President decides to call a meeting with them first. It's quickly determined that the Agents weren't the culprits in the murder of the Scorpion's fallen brothers, when an unseen sniper starts taking shots at both club's members during the meeting. After stocking up from the local arms-dealer, the Scorpions eventually find out who was really behind the rape of the girl and murder of their boys when the real bad- guys shows up at their brother's funeral...and it's all-out-f!ckin-war...NORTHVILLE CEMETERY MASSACRE is a great film. Despite the obvious low-budget, everything about this one works. The storyline is simple but effective, there's the right mix of build-up and payoff, the acting is actually pretty solid all around, and the ending is absolutely classic. To compare it to a more well-known film, this one reminded me a lot of FIRST BLOOD (though NORTHVILLE pre-dated that film by several years...) with it's similar concepts of the prejudicial treatment of people thought to be 'unsavory' by those who are supposedly 'respected'- and of pushing someone into a corner until they have no choice but to strike back. Solid and universal themes that if handled properly will always make for good film-making. As for other content-there's a decent amount of bloody violence to satisfy the action-lovers, and the rape victim is a natural, girl-next-door, absolute beauty and you get to see her tits...something that I'll never complain about in a film. Though there's nothing overtly sleazy about NORTHVILLE...(the rape is implied as opposed to being shown)-I would still classify this one in the exploit genre and would highly recommend it to that audience, as well as biker-film fans, or anyone that enjoys '70s-styled action-films. Definitely recommended. 8.5/10

Woodyanders A rowdy and scruffy, but basically decent and likable biker gang stop off in a small Southern town. They are immediately antagonized and put in jail by the browbeating local yokel cops. A brutish deputy rapes a teenage girl and blames it on the bikers. This in turn begets a chain of harsh and vicious violence with grievous consequences for the cops and bikers alike. Directed, written, edited and photographed in an effectively blunt'n'basic no-frills scrappy fashion by William Dear and Thomas Dyke, this extremely raw and compelling low-budget vintage 70's exploitation nugget packs a very strong and lingering wallop. Michael Nesmith's groovy-rockin' score, the rough, grainy, unpolished cinematography, the appealingly naturalistic acting from a game no-name cast (the real life motorcycle club the Scorpions from Detroit portray the biker gang), several nifty folkie songs on the soundtrack, the fabulously profane dialogue, a few nice 70's period touches (for example, there's a dart board with Richard Nixon's face on it on a wall in a bar), and a potent and provocative subtext about uptight middle America's gross inability to tolerate anyone who boldly defies the repressive toe-the-line straight-arrow conventional conformist norm all combine to give this picture a wonderfully ragged and cynical edge. The outbursts of violence are properly ugly and shocking, with high quality splashy squib work and strikingly stylized use of strenuous slow motion ala Sam Peckinpah. The climactic graveyard shoot-out rates as a definite exciting highlight. The astonishingly bleak and downbeat ending concludes the whole affair on a truly haunting and resonant note.

jakeloves The greatest biker movie ever made! In fact, it's the only biker movie I like. Every other biker movie promises so much and delivers so little. This film gets the job done. Thank God at least one movie made the genre proud. I feel the same about The Mack. Every other movie of the blaxploitation genre just didn't have the bite their bark promised. But The Mack pulled it off. Some great movies were made in the 70's and 80's. Escape from New York, The Thing, Road Warrior, Dawn of the Dead, Squirm, Blues Brothers.

bob wolf This is one of those low-budget biker vs the cops pictures that permeated the early seventies movie scene. Unlike those other titles though this one features some of the most violent scenes I've ever watched.The story concerns a small town sheriff who savagely rapes the daughter of one of the town's more respected residents. He places the blame on a group of fun-loving bikers just passing through. The sherrif and the father of the girl go on a rampage, slaughtering every biker in sight.The final stand-off between the sherrif and the father and the remaining bikers inside the town's Northville Cemetery is violent to the extreme. The bloodletting in this scene is on par with the finale scene in The Wild Bunch. The special effects are also amazing, especially for a film with this low a budget.What I appreciated most about this film is that in the final shoot-out you'll notice that the two men trained in firearm usage, the sherrif and the father, a big game hunter, manage to hit everything they shoot at while the bikers, an untrained bunch, miss everything. It's that kind of realism that I like.A mexican stand-off between the film's two main characters is never concluded before the film fades to black. We are left to wonder what happens next. I loved that! Imagine if Leone chose not to show what happened next when Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach had each other all lined up in that threeway stand-off.Northville Cemetery Massacre is a fun, violent movie that is definitely not for the squeamish or for children.