Our Favorite Scene:  When Mitch comes into the biker bar, he's surrounded by bikers and face to face with T.J.  The surly mood is broken by the jangle of the pinball machine where pinball fanatic Gabe is playing on, oblivious to everything around him.  T.J. calls out, "Gabriel, can't you see we're menacing someone?"  Gabe responds with a quiet, surprised apology and joins the gang circled around Mitch.

WILLIAM SMITH as T.J:  It would be natural going into this movie to assume William Smith, as the leader of the Wizards, is the villain.  But he isn't.  He struts, he postures, he's buff, he's tough.  But within the context of his role of leader of a biker gang, he's really a decent guy.  T.J.'s priority is to protect the gang as though it's his family.  When the girls' car goes over the cliff, he's furious at Casey and insists they try to help.  However, when a car approaches the scene, T.J. leads the gang in flight.  He has an agreement with the Sheriff in Piru.  He keeps the gang in line and law enforcement doesn't harass them.  He kicks Casey in the butt when he's hitting his girlfriend.   T.J. eventually kicks Casey out of the gang, but lets Casey's  girlfriend Susan know she's welcome to stay despite having brought the gang trouble by giving information to Mitch.  There's a nice little scene in which Susan asks T.J. if he wants her to stay.  He's too proud to say he does, so he's silent.  She reads his silence and says, "Then I'll stay."  Of course, T.J. does try to get information from Mitch by punching him in the groin and then plans to kidnap him until he talks, but hell, we didn't like Tony Young as Mitch anyway.

T.J. looks bad; Casey is bad

The obligatory arm-wrestling scene

T.J.

T.J. with biker chick

T.J. has an arrangement with the local sheriff

One of our favorite Bill photos

NITEOWL REVIEW:  Most of the NiteOwls liked the premise of this biker flick but we didn't think Tony Young was believable as Mitch the tough army training sergeant.  [The guys were surprised that the women didn't like him in this role either.]  Michael Haynes (Casey) had more credits as a stuntman than as an actor so his fight with William Smith (who was a de facto stuntman himself) was the best fight in the movie.  Somehow the fight between Smith and Young didn't have the same panache although Young's  stunt double did a nice fight-ending kick on Smith.

CHICK NOTE:   We thought Tony Young was a pretty boy trying unsuccessfully to look rugged.  We liked Peter Brown's "Chad Cooper  joins the army" spin on his part much better.  [Cooper was his Laredo character]  It was nice to see a biker movie with no rape scenes or women being routinely mistreated except by the one bad guy.  Of course, that meant there was a scarcity of women in the movie.

Note the brief appearance of Herb Jeffries as the NCO bartender.  Jeffries played the lead in black films such as "Harlem Rides the Range" and "The Bronze Buckaroo", decades before Blaxploitation made an appearance in the 1970's.  [The on-screen credits wrongly list him as playing "Ned" the Piru bartender.]  He was at the Laughlin Westerns Show in November 2000 singing up a storm and going strong into his 90's.  [See the Snapshots page on our Peter Brown Site]