Akira Kurosawa engaged SEVEN mighty samurai for his cinematic landmark and Yul Brunner led a bunch of SEVEN notorious gunslingers, but when you're dealing with tough black guys on motorcycles, I guess you can afford yourself to go with one less. "The Black Six" suffers under the incredibly low rating of barely 2.2 out of ten around this website; which I personally find exaggeratedly harsh. Such a low rating would be justified if and only if a film exclusively relied on impeccable storytelling and stylishness, but it doesn't. Matt Cimber's film is definitely entitled to a couple of extra points for ingenuity, clever marketing ideas and a whole lot of spirited input from cast and crew. As briefly indicated above already, the plot is more than a little similar to "Seven Samurai" and "The Magnificent Seven", and a rudimentary concept like that is guaranteed to score. And there's more, too. Matt Cimber alertly cashes in on not one, not two, but no less than three of the most popular exploitation topics of that period: blacks, revenge and bikers! Okay, admittedly, the production itself is a bit shabby and amateurishly inept. Particularly the pacing is wildly uneven and the script randomly leaps from one main subject onto another! There are numerous other obvious defaults, but they are merely forgivable or even delightfully cheesy ones, like stereotypical character drawings, hammy acting, obligatory love & peace speeches and abruptly edited sequences. "The Black Six" opens with the romantic tableau of a black boy and a white girl falling in love on a football field. But the girl's mean brother and his gang of bikers show up and beat the kid to death with chains. Then for the next half hour, the film extendedly introduces and follows the titular 6-headed gang of black bikers. They're Vietnam buddies who're done fighting and spend their remaining days cruising through the countryside, making regular stops to either help people who don't pay attention to skin color or teach the ones that do a valuable lesson. The plot patiently takes its time to reveal that the black kid murdering during the opening scene is actually one the six' younger brother. They all return to Bubba's hometown together and face a very important decision. Overlook the white biker gang's vile act of murder and continue to live by their principals of love and peace, or
get some revenge! Well
would you have guessed the answer if you hadn't already seen the tagline? The first half hour of "The Black Six" is terrific, with the six philosophizing in an old lady's yard and wrecking an all-white truckers' bar, but the story gets incomprehensibly dull when they return to Bubba's hometown. He alone goes out looking for his former girlfriend and asking around about the murder (of course, nobody knows anything), but it's incredibly tedious and clichéd. The climax is great amusement again, though mainly for the wrong reasons. The big and relentless showdown between the six and a nearly countless number of white Viking-bikers is a highlight of pure camp. For some reason, Matt Cimber thought it would be a great (and much cheaper) idea to hire football players for the main roles. This is another very ingenious detail and I definitely appreciate it, especially since one of them Carl Eller, the toughest of them all - looks a lot like Samuel L. Jackson and act like him, too. The opening theme is terrific and the continuously reoccurring tunes, albeit too gratuitously borrowed from "Shaft" is quite catchy. Pretty bad, maybe
but most certainly a whole lot of cheesy fun, with the exception of the dire middle-section.
Review of The Black 6
