Northville Cemetery Massacre (1976)

 Northville Cemetery Massacre (1976)

aka

Freedom R.I.P

Harley's Angels

Rockerschlacht in Northville

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 [and The Road Agents]), 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. (IMDB  Woodyanders)

Filmed in 1972, not released until 1976. 

Jan Sisk - David Hyry