The Northville Cemetery Massacre (1976)

Our film opens on a lonely backwater highway leading into Northville, Michigan, where an elderly couple are sidelined with a flat tire. Suddenly, they’re surrounded by a horde of Bikers. But while things appear ominous at first as these apparent ruffians noisily swarm all over their car, things are not as they seem. See, the Spirits aren't about that kind of thing, man, and soon have the flat off, the spare on, and send the couple peacefully on their way with a kiss.

Bluntly in the face of this act of altruism, the Spirits are then stopped at the Northville city limits by the police and summarily rousted, hassled, and jailed on several bogus charges just because of who and what they are. And here we have the entire crux of the film wrapped up in a nutshell. So while you could just stop now, stick around; things are only getting warmed up and it's about to get weird -- and icky.

As a case in point, the Spirits actually celebrate their incarceration -- mostly by sharing the pot a hitchhiker they’d picked up on the way into town managed to smuggle into the cells. 

Seems Chris (Hyry), the hitchhiker, is a local, making a less than triumphant return to see his girl, Lynn, after serving a tour in Vietnam. One should also note that Chris appears to be a long-haired Hippie type; and Hippies and Bikers are like oil and water, right? Right. But the Spirits don't hassle him either -- after all, it's his weed, and this mongoloid menagerie happily toke the night away.

Come the dawn, after being sentenced to a scrub and wax at the local car wash (-- them along with their bikes, mind you, much to the locals amusement), the Spirits are escorted out of town. At this point, Chris peels off, finds Lynn (Sisk) and invites her to a wedding -- Spirits style, which is taking place in an open meadow up the road apiece. 

And while the majority of the Bikers belly-flop into a dogpile to fight over the tossed garter belt, Chris and Lynn sneak off to a nearby barn for a little *ahem* “roll in the hay.” Alas, no matter where the Spirits go, Johnny Law never seems to be too far behind and the Bikers are soon sent packing again by the Northville authorities.

Thus, Chris and Lynn are left alone in the barn, where they have the misfortune of being discovered, buck-naked, by a sadistic little sociopath with a badge named Putnam (Collicott), who quickly bludgeons Chris unconscious with the butt of his shotgun, and then turns a lecherous eye on Lynn.

Oozily, with his pants around his ankles, everything else soon follows; and once the dirty deed is done, Putnam continues to beat on Lynn, threatening that if she doesn't say it was the Bikers who raped and brutalized her, he'll kill Chris and slice her face to ribbons…

Film-buffs always argue over where a particular genre started. Some say the Outlaw Biker movie began with Stanley Kramer’s The Wild One (1953); others say it was Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966). Most, but not all, agree the genre reached its zenith with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider (1969) -- personally, I say it was Al Adamsons’ Satan's Sadists (1969). But almost everyone agrees the genre officially died with The Northville Cemetery Massacre (1976).

And for those interested in such things, I go deeper into the history and lore of the Outlaw Biker genre in our review of Werewolves on Wheels (1971) on the old site. As to the history and background on the making of The Northville Cemetery Massacre, well, it had a rather interesting birthing process from script to screen that went way past its due date, and it all begins with William Dear.

A Canadian by birth, Dear’s family moved to the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, in 1956, where he met his new best friend, Robert Dyke. “[He] was the first friend I made when I moved here at the age of 11 from Toronto,” said Dear in an interview with Elvis Mitchell (Detroit Free Press, May 31, 1987). “His dad had an 8mm camera, and we started making movies. We’d go build monsters at home and film them after seeing Ray Harryhausen movies. We’d make a model car, put a firecracker under it, and then film it as it blew up.”

In 1962, Dear attended college at Central Michigan University in neighboring Mt. Pleasant, where he majored in Art. “Instead of doing my homework, I did animation,” Dear confessed to Mitchell. “I made clay dragons and animated them.” Also, by the time he was 18, Dear was already freelancing as a production assistant and cameraman for Detroit’s WXYZ Channel 7 News and several local production facilities -- Magic Lantern Productions, Jim Handy Studios. And with free access to all of that camera and editing equipment, with an assist from Dyke, they cobbled together a short film called Mr. Grey (1969).

“We made it by borrowing a camera off a friend,” said Dear. “We got some film from Channel 7, the short ends that they’d throw away. We got it all processed there, too, at night; a friend there would help us out.” The finished short would go on to win a Special Jury Award at the inaugural Atlanta Film Festival in 1969. At the same event, Steven Spielberg’s short film Amblin (1969) won the top Silver Phoenix Award. Alas, Dear was unable to attend the event so their paths never crossed -- at least not yet. 

From there, Dear had the itch to make a feature. And to those ends, once more borrowing equipment and material from his day job, he headed out into the wilderness of Michigan's upper-peninsula with a camera, a small cast, and ah-lot of pretensions and came back with something called Nymph (1973), where a boy and his girlfriend head out into the forest to round-up his father, out on a hunting trip, due to some family emergency.

How did this all turn out? Well, according to Peter Hanson’s review for Every 70s Movie (October 27, 2015), “The lack of saucy content is hardly the biggest problem with this ineptly edited picture. Vast stretches of Nymph comprise of shots of animals, bridges, cars, forests, trailers -- really any old damned thing that captured Dear’s pictorial fancy -- juxtaposed with rotten songs and/or voiceover tracks.” And in conclusion, “Nymph is a numbingly uninteresting barrage of disassociated vignettes culminating in an ending so cryptic as to be pointless.”

Shot and edited in the late 1960s, I’m sure the salacious, bait and switch title didn’t help the cause on Dear’s navel-gazing, sexless debut film, but there was enough there to eventually get picked-up by Jack H. Harris -- The Blob (1958), Equinox (1970), A*P*E (1976), who had an eye for amateur talent -- John Landis' Schlock (1973), John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon's Dark Star (1974), and who no doubt cooked-up that title -- sell it, don’t smell it after all; and through his distribution pipeline, the film did eventually see the light of day in 1973 at darkened drive-ins and wherever bottom-bill chasers were shown until it eventually played itself out by 1975.

Undaunted, Dear was ready to try again with, hopefully, something more commercial and profitable. Once again teaming up with Dyke, who brought along his younger brother, Thomas, they started kicking around ideas.

“We sat down and thought, we want to make a film. What can we afford? And we went, Well, a biker movie or a horror movie,” Dear confided to Richard Whitaker in a later interview for The Austin Chronicle (July 30, 2014). And while the Dykes were leaning toward a horror film, Dear felt they could say more and say it better -- and cheaper -- with motorcycles and soon convinced the others to follow suit.

On the director’s audio commentary track for VCI Entertainment’s 30th Anniversary release of The Northville Cemetery Massacre, Thomas Dyke put the film’s origins into perspective. ''In order to understand where we were coming from, you have to understand the times. In the 1960s, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas; Hippies protesting, ‘Make peace not war.’ For years it seemed we were engaged in watching the war in Vietnam on the nightly TV news. Newspaper headlines reflected the violence of our society. Dr. Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. Marching in the streets. The National Guard opened fire and killed college students at Kent State University. We lived in freedom at the point of a gun ... 'Who's next?' we thought.”

In that interview with Whitaker, Dear agreed with Dyke’s sentiments, at least to a certain degree, saying, “The Vietnam War was raging, but we weren't part of any Haight-Ashbury movement. We were a couple of filmmakers in Detroit, Michigan, and we just wanted to make a movie.”

No, for Dear, the quarter finally dropped on what the movie should be when he and his wife drove to Wyandotte, Michigan, on a research trip to see what he thought was going to be yet another Biker movie. Well, that ‘Biker movie’ turned out to be Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969); a western that so enthralled Dear, he told Whitaker, "I found myself in pain, because I was biting on the edge of my finger."

And from there, Dear saw their proposed film as a bleak, modern day Western; with the Bikers as the last cowboys, a dying breed of outlaw, standing up to a corrupt lawman. And while Captain America (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) were helplessly gunned down at the end of Easy Rider, Dear asked the question, What if the Bikers shot back? And would that be enough?

Thus and so, taking the visceral violence of The Wild Bunch, the counterculture swagger of Easy Rider, and the gonzo tales of author Hunter S. Thompson’s adventures while riding with the Hell’s Angels, which he barely survived a curb-stomping from, and were chronicled in his book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, the trio soon had a rough outline of a script for something called Freedom R.I.P. 

Said Dyke in that audio commentary, ''We were not paranoid extremists, we were independent filmmakers influenced by the writings of Thompson, Hopper's Easy Rider, Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, and Woodstock (1970) -- Bob Dylan's singing, ‘The times they are a changin.’ And with Richie Haven's musical mantra ‘Freedom’ ringing in our ears, we formed a production company and were off and filming.'' 

William Dear, Thomas and Robert Dyke.

Dear and Thomas Dyke would serve as co-directors and co-cinematographers on the film, and would co-write the ever-evolving script with an assist from Jim Pappas. They would also serve as co-producers, with Robert Dyke handling the money and expenses as executive producer. To help keep those costs down, they once more borrowed equipment and short-ends of film stock from the TV-station and hired local actors to fill in all the non-Biker roles. And speaking of, the production really lucked out when Dear knew a guy, Jim King, who knew a guy, Jeff Pritchard, who was a member of a Detroit Motorcycle Club that went by the handle of The Scorpions.

Founded and established as a riding club ‘Bound by Brotherhood’ in 1966, the Scorpions consisted mostly of returning Vietnam vets who had served with distinction. "They were a Bike Club, not a bike gang,” Dear told Whitaker. “And they have their own strict moral code. You have to be a good, moral citizen to be a Scorpion."

Somewhat hilariously, in their pitch to get the club to sign onto the picture, they showed them an anti-drug educational short they'd just finished called Jump. Nobody knows for sure if it was the quality of the filmmaking or the cajones it took to show something like this to that crowd, moral citizens or not, but the Club was sold. And when they agreed to be in the film, said Dear, "All we had to do was provide the new colors, the Spirits R.I.P."

Now, despite this strong moral fiber, that didn’t mean the Club wasn’t above any shenanigans as filming commenced. Said Dyke, ''During production, there was always something unexpected happening with the Scorpions. And it usually happened just after we said, 'Action!'. But, ''The theme of the film intentionally builds on image and stereotypes. In our film the bikers were the good guys. Patriots. We wanted the film to expose our tendencies to stereotype and prejudge others.”

And whether Freedom R.I.P. meant Ride in Peace or Rest in Pieces remains to be seen as the vile Putnam stays ahead of his lies by personally escorting Lynn to the hospital after sexually assaulting her in the barn, telling all who would listen that those degenerate Bikers were responsible.

Thus, terrified of him and what he might do to Chris, Lynn can’t tell her father, John Tyner (Sharples), what really happened. But Putnam sure can -- his version of the truth, anyway, who lays the blame on the Spirits. 

Here, the bastard pushes things even further, stoking Tyner’s rage by saying they’ll never be able to prove what ‘they’ did due to a “lack of evidence.” And Putnam keeps on pushing this notion that they’ll most likely get away with it until Tyner is good and ready to seek revenge -- and more than willing to go outside the law to help eradicate those animals who hurt his daughter off the face of the planet.

With Tyner onboard, Putnam then seeks out one more person for his devious crusade: a local businessman with a Count Zaroff complex named Armstrong (Speck), who's more than happy to help hunt down and kill what he feels is the “most dangerous game.” And be sure to enjoy Armstrong’s wonky justification speech about what gives him the right to ‘cull the herd.’ Wow.

Meanwhile, at the Spirits' Clubhouse, that wedding is finally winding down (-- how many days later?). And while Chris relates to Deke (Jackson), the Club's president, how the cops attacked him and Lynn in the barn, and how he woke up to find everyone else gone, a couple Bikers, one of them the groom, step outside to take a whiz (-- 'cuz you don't buy beer, you only rent it). But they're barely out the door and unzipped before both fall -- very messily, to a sniper's bullet.

Thinking a rival gang was behind this ambush, Deke sets up a palaver with the Road Rangers at an abandoned drive-in theater to settle things (-- the Rangers represented by another real-life Club, The Road Agents, who were also coaxed into being in the movie). When the Rangers deny any involvement with the shooting, this is quickly verified when the sniper strikes again, taking out Bikers from both sides. 

And as the bullets fly, never one to leave a man behind, the other Bikers pull the wounded and the dead onto their bikes and haul ass out of there. But before getting clear, the leader of the rival gang takes one in the leg, leading to an impromptu surgical procedure in a gas station’s restroom. 

Here, I'm gonna assume Chris was a medic in Vietnam -- or at least the guy with a bullet being pried out of his leg better hope he was a medic in Vietnam. Regardless, the operation is a success.

Now, since whoever is attacking them is packing some pretty high-caliber heat, making them totally out-gunned, Deke leads the Spirits into Detroit to see Captain Freedom (Gardener), a whack-o radical who sells guns out of his garage, to help even things out. Alas, all of his automatic weapons are “spoken for,” so the Spirits have to settle on an assortment of shotguns and pistols. However, the good Captain graciously tops off their order with several hand grenades, free of charge, to make up for this.

Then, on the road back to Northville, any doubts about Putnam's manhood are put to rest when he ambushes a lone Spirit, broken down on the side of the road. Here, he spills and spells out his psychosis -- and it's depressingly familiar, before blowing a hole in the other man's chest.

Suspicious of psycho Putnam all along, Chris’ hunch is confirmed when Lynn finally reveals what really happened in the barn. And keenly aware of what else has been happening, she also fears her father might've had something to do with these false-flag vigilante ambushes. Chris agrees, but feels Putnam is the root cause of everyone's grief and is ready to kill him for what he's done. But Lynn doesn't think Chris should -- or could -- kill anybody, and promises to tell her father the truth, convinced this will stop the killing.

Alas, she never gets the chance as this unfolding tragedy reaches its bloody climax at the Northville Cemetery, where a procession of bikes and hearses wind their way to the secluded spot. Now, one of these hearse’s drivers has the ballgame tuned in on the radio; and as the National Anthem plays, it gives a viewer the sense that something very gladiatorial is about to happen.

Sure enough, as the Spirits try to bury their fallen comrades, the cemetery is buzzed by a helicopter. On board, Armstrong, Tyner and Putnam open fire, but this time the Spirits were ready for them.

Breaking open those coffins, all filled with the weapons they got from Captain Freedom, the Bikers quickly return fire. And so, chaos reigns and the blood and viscera flies at the Northville Cemetery. 

Unfortunately, the Spirits prove better targets than marksmen; and after several sweeps by the helicopter, it appears the vigilantes have killed everyone.

Landing the chopper, the men get out to make sure and mop things up. But this time, they're the ones who are ambushed as the Spirits still kicking were playing possum. And so, yet another firefight erupts as the helicopter and its pilot are taken out with several hand grenades. Chris, meanwhile, moves around to try and help all the wounded until he takes one in the shoulder.

Alas, and again, though the Spirits have them outnumbered, Armstrong, Tyner and Putnam take cover and pick the Bikers and their Old Ladies off, one by one, and note how its always Putnam who shoots the women, until none are left standing. Well, not quite all as Deke manages to get on his bike and takes out Armstrong -- how exactly I'm not sure, but trust me, Armstrong's dead -- before he, too, falls in a hail of bullets and receives an ersatz Viking funeral as his bike detonates, taking him with it. 

Then all is quiet. Here, Lynn finally arrives on scene, too late, and tearfully confesses to her father that all this carnage was for nothing. The Spirits didn't hurt her, she says, and then angrily points at Putnam and identifies him as the one who raped her.

Putnam replies to this accusation by blowing Tyner away. Hearing a shotgun being racked behind him, Putnam turns to see that Chris -- bloodied but still kicking, has the drop on him. And after a brief Mexican stand-off, we have a close-up of a trigger-housing, a finger twitch, and the sound of a gun clicking empty. But whose? 

Well, as this stand-off silently continues, we switch to an aerial shot to view the accumulated carnage and then fade to black before we get an answer.

Originally conceived in late 1969, production on Freedom R.I.P. didn’t begin in earnest until late 1971. (The Scorpions were first approached in September of that year.) The plan was to shoot locally and in 16mm for about three weeks in the towns of Plymouth, Inkster, Salem, and Taylor -- home of the Jolly Roger Drive-In Theater seen in the film. There would also be a brief detour into Detroit proper, but the majority of the film would be shot in and around the actual town of Northville, Michigan.

However, the budget quickly ran out of gas and filming was suspended until more funds could be scrounged up. And so, shooting continued piecemeal through 1971. And 1972. And then 1973. And also 1974. And then, finally, principal photography wrapped in early 1975. 

According to Dyke’s commentary, it was several "encouraging" calls from the Scorpions to "Keep on keepin' on" that got the film finished so they could all get paid. (I’ll assume the Club was promised a deferred piece of the box office pie.) But even though they were done filming, Freedom R.I.P. still had a long way to go before it was finished. 

Post-production and editing on the film began in New York in 1975 until they once again ran out of money. Vacating those facilities, and skipping out on the bill, apparently, the production moved to Los Angeles. But upon arrival, they discovered most of their negatives were missing, which were still back in New York, where they would remain “confiscated” at the old studio until they paid up.

And as the legend goes, since they still had a key to the building, having failed to turn that in, too, after a red-eye back to New York and a midnight raid on the editing facilities didn’t turn up their footage, Dear and the Dykes did find a copy of a newly finished print of The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974), which they promptly pilfered and used as leverage to eventually negotiate a return and trade for their materials.

But while the recovered stock was being spliced together, it became readily apparent that the audio tracks were a shambles and work commenced to try and salvage it with ADR. For the soundtrack, on a whim, Dear told Whitaker he approached former Monkee Mike Nesmith after a gig and asked if he would like to write the score for his film. And after showing Nesmith a rough cut, “He turned to me and said, 'This is a terrible movie.' And I said, 'Yes, I know. Would you like to score it?' And he said, 'Yes. Yes I do,” even though Dear had no money to pay him for this.

 Mike Nesmith.

But Nesmith provided the music as a favor and also served as the occasional balladeer. Similarly, Nick Nolte was approached the same way and agreed to dub over David Hyry as Chris for a free beer and a promise of $150. Nolte had just appeared in Return to Macon County (1975), and was destined to break out big a year later in the Made for TV Mini-Series, Rich Man, Poor Man (1976). At the time, Nolte’s efforts went uncredited. Now, his name is very prevalent on all the promotional materials. And then, after nearly five years in the making, Freedom R.I.P. was finally finished. Now all they had to do was find a distributor and, hopefully, cash-in.

This they found with Cannon Films. At the time, Cannon was still under the stewardship of Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey, who founded the company while in their early 20s and found some initial success importing and redubbing the softcore films of Joseph Sarno -- Inga (1968), To Ingrid, My Love, Lisa (1968). They also distributed a couple of British horror films from Tigon -- The Beast in the Cellar (1970), and the vastly under-appreciated, The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). But their biggest hit to date was probably John Avildsen's Joe (1970), another tale of the counterculture running head on into the establishment with lethal results.

But by 1976, the company was hemorrhaging money and were in desperate need of product to try and overcompensate for some high dollar flops. A trend that would continue until they cratered in 1978, resulting in the company being sold off to Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus for a mere $500,000 in 1979. Thus and so, and before all of that, Cannon picked up Dear and Dyke’s regional Biker film, blew the negative up from 16mm to 35mm, and Freedom R.I.P. was finally ready to hit theaters -- as The Northville Cemetery Massacre. But even that wasn’t easy.

It was Cannon who insisted on the name change to a more lurid and exploitable title -- the film would later be released on home video under its original title and as Harley’s Angels. The distributor also asked for a lot of cuts, leaving what Dear described as all the satire and comedy on the editing room floor (-- about eight minutes worth according to Dear’s own audio commentary). And then the MPAA got involved, who initially slapped the film with an X-Rating. “Not for any sexual content,” said Dear. “But purely for the bloodletting.

Now, it is the concluding, almost operatic bloodbath that cemented The Northville Cemetery Massacre's status as a bona fide Cult Movie. From the editing, to the slow-motion shoot-outs, to those volcanic blood squibs, the filmmakers once again drew inspiration from Peckinpah. But Peckinpah, mind you, had access to professional stuntmen and FX technicians. Dear and Dyke? Not so much.

No, their nasty, makeshift squibs were done on the cheap and on the fly, consisting of baggies of fake blood and illegal firecrackers, which were then strapped onto their actors’ chests and backs with gaffer’s tape, who risked life and limb and their ear-drums to get the needed shots. To add even more grue, apparently, one of the film’s backers owned a chain of Burger Chef restaurants, who also provided lunches for the shoots. Both cast and crew soon grew tired of the hamburger monotony; and so, all the leftovers were soon mangled and mashed-up and added to the baggie-squibs to make them even more messy when they detonated. The results were startlingly effective.

Also, the reason no automatic weapons were used (-- save for one scene that used live ammo --) was because the blanks used on the rifles, pistols and shotguns were also homemade, using a “dash of black powder and some paraffin wax to seal the shell,” which resulted in not much of a bang but a lot of smoke. Still, it’s amazing (and damned lucky) no one was seriously injured during the lengthy shoot. And worse yet, it would appear all of their efforts went for naught as most of the gore was also excised to get an R-rating.

Fortunately, Dear managed to hang onto one single unaltered print of The Northville Cemetery Massacre, which he later identified as "the first test print that went before the ratings board." And this Director’s Cut is what appears on that VCI DVD, which restores all of the satire and gore and is jam-packed with all kinds of extras, including three separate commentaries: one from Dyke, one from Dear, and one by the surviving Scorpions. They're all a hoot and I cannot recommend that disc enough.

Robert "Bob" Skotak.

Scrolling through the crew credits, the only name that rang familiar was Robert Skotak, who served as a production assistant and may or may not have been responsible for those homemade pyrotechnics. Skotak was another Monster Kid, who wrote dozens of articles for Famous Monsters of Filmland and later Filmfax magazine, and he dabbled in damned near everything -- special effects, visual effects, make-up effects and production design.

And after working on The Demon Lover (1976), another regional film for fellow Michiganites Donald Jackson and Jerry Younkins -- later of Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988) and Rollergator (1996) infamy, Skotak, along with his brother, Dennis, made the move to Hollywood and started working for Roger Corman on things like Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), Galaxy of Terror (1981) and Forbidden World (1982). Skotak would also work as the Special-Effects Supervisor on John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

Meanwhile, Cannon's watered-down The Northville Cemetery Massacre made its official debut on Christmas Eve, 1975, at the 20th Century Drive-In in Tampa, Florida, with Daniel Vance's The No Mercy Man (1973) as its co-feature. It then continued with a regional roll-out in the south and midwest in 1976, barely registering on the box-office Richter scale. But the film did seem to find a second wind in 1978, showing up as bottom bills for the Drive-In releases of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1978).

Upon its final completion and release, the Dykes packed-up and returned to Michigan, never to be heard from again, cinematically speaking. As for Dear, he stuck around Hollywood, shooting second unit on the features Blue Collar (1978) and Hardcore (1979) for fellow Michigan native, Paul Schraeder. 

Around this time Dear also went into business with Nesmith, who cashed in that favor around 1977. And together, taking inspiration from The Monkees TV-Series (1966-1968) and those old Scopitones shorts (-- sort of a proto-music video format that played on certain jukeboxes), they shot a short film for Nesmith’s song “Rio” and called it a PopClip. Nesmith then sold this notion of a PopClips TV-show to Warners for ah-lot of money, which premiered in 1980 on Nickelodeon, which featured a host introducing the new music videos. This format, of course, served as an inspiration for MTV, which debuted a year later in 1981. 

Continuing to work with Nesmith, Dear then directed the spoof Elephant Parts (1981), its spin-off, Television Parts (1985), and the Sci-Fi feature film, Timerider: The Adventures of Lyle Swann (1983). And then, after a series of visually impressive commercials for Budweiser that spoofed the old American International Beach Party (1963) movies, Dear earned a shot to direct an episode for Steven Spielberg's anthology TV-series, Amazing Stories (1985-1987).

The episode in question was the absolutely hilarious Mummy Daddy (Season 1, Episode 4), where a stuntman on location playing a mummy in some low-rent B-movie desperately tries to get to the hospital for the birth of his first child -- if the locals don't kill him first, that is, thinking he's a real monster, since, in his excitement, the man neglected to remove the costume. Mayhem ensues.

“I like working with smart people,” Dear said in an interview with Mike Duffy (Detroit Free Press, October 26, 1985). And he “praised the rare atmosphere of creativity and support Spielberg has fostered on Amazing Stories,” saying, “It was like a film family. And the directors are like visiting cousins and are instantly taken into the family. Television is typically a producer’s medium. But in this one instance, unique to television, the director is the head creative force.”

When Spielberg screened the finished episode, he instantly fell in love with it and invited Dear to a sit-down to discuss what he should do next. According to Dear, Spielberg said, “This is really good. You should be doing a feature. Do you have anything you’d like to do?” To which Dear answered, “I was literally five days from finishing a script I’d co-written with a friend (Bill Martin).” The script was for the equally hilarious family Bigfoot misadventure, Harry and the Hendersons (1987), which I really should review one of these days. And Steven said, “Great, I’d like to do it with you.” It was one of those storybook Hollywood situations, said Dear. “It’s a real dream come true.”

Dear would then continue working nearly exclusively in family friendly fare in the 1990s, directing a remake of Angels in the Outfield (1994), and helped Danny Bilson and Paul de Meo adapt Dave Stevens’ rip-snorting comics into a screenplay for The Rocketeer (1991).

As for his not quite inaugural feature, fair or not, I think The Northville Cemetery Massacre never really had a chance. From the budget woes, to the rudimentary acting skills of the cast, who ranged from good -- J. Craig Collicut, David Hyry (with an assist from Nolte), to passable -- Jan Sisk, the Scorpions en masse, to downright awful -- Len Speck, Ray Gardener, to the atrocious audio track, all topped-off with an absolute hatchet-job of a theatrical edit, add it all up and, yeah, the film was basically Dead on Arrival. 

But I think its failures go a little deeper than that and lay mostly on all those production delays. Remember, in the interim from when it was originally conceived (1969) until it actually came out (1976), America was now out of Vietnam, and wasn’t even remotely close to being ready to deal with all the baggage and the hangover from that yet; Nixon’s Silent Majority and get tough on crime stance had come and gone, along with Nixon, down in flames after Watergate; the Counterculture movement they were championing had fizzled and the Hippies were now in the process of gentrifying into Reaganite Yuppies; and the Biker genre itself was no longer a going concern, relegated to the scrap-heap since about, oh, 1972.

And yet … There’s something there. A nugget of talent fighting like hell against all those odds to overachieve and land this thing properly and make it something truly special -- and something truly special way beyond those memorable meaty squib-hits. 

The Spirits were indeed cowboys out of time -- in a mortality sense and in a chronal sense, with nowhere left to roam in this world without civilization crowding in and stamping them out in the name of progress. It was a bad time to be a disillusioned freak just wanting to wear your colors, ride your scooter, smoke, drink, and screw without being hassled by ‘the man’ -- and I think this point on society’s ills would’ve been made better if the Club had remained The Scorpions and not changed to the more milder Spirits.

Thus, its central theme of “reality is reality” is kind of lost in that maelstrom of budget compromises, but the bending of the truth and making it what you want it to be -- or need it to be -- to line up with your way of thinking in a misguided attempt at self-preservation tucked inside of ‘might makes right’ delusion comes through loud and clear. 

I mean, the only reason the Bikers are even acting up is because Putnam is manipulating things behind the scenes, giving him the “us against them” excuse he needs to act on his psychotic urges. And all of the chaos and bloodshed that follows is a direct result of this same twisted lie. And once the other locals buy into this authoritative lie and join his genocidal crusade (-- some happily, others reluctantly), where the lie is now blindly accepted as truth, then, well, everybody's screwed. A strong metaphor for the times, that still holds a lot of resonance today. Maybe even more so.

And while very blunt with its message on the dangers of misperceptions and damned near everything else, Dear and Dyke kept the ending and resolution rather ambiguous -- it took me three viewings to decide on whose gun clicked empty during the final stand-off and whether we had a happy ending or an ending that would ruin your day. But that opinion is just that: an opinion, and not definitive. Nor is my overall opinion on The Northville Cemetery Massacre. It's not quite there. Close. But not quite. And if it had come out in a more timely fashion? Would it go from Cult Film to Cult Classic? Well, that’s me shrugging right now.

Originally posted on June 15, 2007, at 3B Theater.

The Northville Cemetery Massacre (1976) Cannon Films / EP: Robert H. Dyke / P: William Dear, Thomas L. Dyke / AP: Marvin Lee Camp / D: William Dear, Thomas L. Dyke / W: William Dear, Thomas L. Dyke, Jim Pappas / C: William Dear, Thomas L. Dyke / E: Christa Kindt, Jerry Wellen / M: Michael Nesmith / S: David Hyry, Jan Sisk, J. Craig Collicut, Carson Jackson, Herb Sharples, Len Speck