Savage Dawn

Title: Savage Dawn
Director:  Simon Nuchtern
Released: 1985
Starring: Lance Henriksen, George Kennedy, Karen Black, William Forsythe, Richard Lynch, Claudia Udy

Plot: Vietnam veteran turned drifter Stryker (Henriksen) finds himself defending a town from bikers gang The Savages when they decide to take over.

Review: Because there is nothing like a leaving soon message to help you clear out the watchlist as was the case here with director Simon Nuchtern whose work I’d previously encounter with the 3D slasher Silent Madness while here he delivers a by the numbers action flick. 

Lance Henriksen here heads up the cast largely made up of genre cinema favourites as he plays the war veteran and drifter Stryker a man of few words and a reluctance to involve himself in fighting even when a band of bikers take over the town while he’s visiting is war buddy Tick (Kennedy). This is one of the big issues for the film as it means that while we want to see Stryker tooling up to wage war on the biker gang “The Savages” especially when they break into the national guard armoury and get their hands on a tank amongst some choice military firepower. Instead the gang are largely left to cause havok in the town outside of the occasional punch up. Add to the fact that Stryker hardly talks and the problems only continue to be added to the film. 

William Forsythe plays the big bad of the film as the leader of the Savages and cares little for anything other than causing chaos in the town and terrorising the locals of the this small California desert town. His fellow bikers meanwhile are a rag tag band of biker thugs, hair metal band rejects and seemingly a bunch of dancers the production found to be in the film. None of them it seems are overly confident on the bikes especially when you look at the speed they ride around at it would be quicker to walk than get a ride off any of these guys. This gets especially comedic when it comes to the action scenes with bikers being knocked of their barely rolling rides. 

The town residents are nonetheless an eclectic group with the town having hit hard times when the gold dried up the main draw of the town seems to come from the deputy sheriff holding bare knuckle fighting competitions while being followed by his own dwarf sidekick, while Richard Lynch plays the town priest who easily forgets his commitment to the church whenever there’s a pretty young girl nearby and at one point even hooks up one of the biker girls known as Mouth Service. Karen Black meanwhile is quick to turn her back on the town to run off with the bikers believing it has to be a better life than the one she has in the town.

Suffering from a plodding script were nothing really happens until the final 40 mins and even then the action is so pedestrian and mishandled it’s hard to really get excited about anything that is happening even with the bikers having access to a tank you would think that the film could find an exciting set piece to craft but it never happens and even when the town take the fight in their own hands it never really manages to grab you no doubt because you wondering if this is the moment that Styker actually does something!

While I can accept a film being bad, especially with the cast assembled here there is the hope that it might scrape by as passible entertainment but when you film becomes a bore to sit the problems really begin. Yes there are certainly elements which should have been played better here but the script is so plodding it makes it hard to care about any of it.