Tom

I saw this film under the title THE BAD BUNCH. It was directed by and stars Greydon Clark, the low budget film-maker best known for making the effective alien movie THE WARNING (aka WITHOUT WARNING). This is his attempt to jump on the blaxploitation bandwagon and sees Clark playing an army veteran who loses his black buddy to a shell in Vietnam. Back home, he tries to visit the dead man's family, only to run afoul of a gang of white-hating black guys who wish him violence.

There's not much going on in this cheap and cheerful slice of exploitation. There's a lot of bad attitude and a script which delivers some effectively 'hard man' lines. The whole thing was shot in two weeks so you can't really expect much quality at that speed. I did enjoy the way the film explores race relations in Los Angeles in the early 1970s and the way in which both whites and blacks are racist in equal measure. Clark isn't much of an actor but he does get a couple of old timers (Aldo Ray and Jock Mahoney) to play some racist cops. For much of the running time THE BAD BUNCH plays out as a skin flick more than anything else, with silicon-enhanced starlet Bambi Allen particularly 'standing out'.