SKINHEADS is a fun little independent action thriller in which some innocent youths are pursued by a crazed gang of Neo-Nazis with murder in mind. It has a rural setting and is very similar in look and feel to the equally low rent and cheesy '80s slasher, MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE. The heroes are a nondescript bunch here and don't have much presence, but the Nazi types are hilarious goons, slow-witted in the extreme.SKINHEADS offers plenty of cheap action in the form of fist fights, shoot-outs, and endless chase sequences. It's one of those films where the good guys manage to escape by the skin of their teeth time and again. The violence is too cheesy to take seriously, but I enjoyed this regardless; it's goofy and fun. An ageing Barbara Bain plays one of the victims, while the great Chuck Connors has a great late-stage role as a hermit type who brings his shotgun out to play against the Nazi scum.

While it may be a stretch to call Skinheads: The Second Coming of Hate the greatest American film of all time, it's much of one. This film tackles the troubling questions that Neonazism posed to our culture in the late 1980s in an unblinking fashion that throws fear completely aside. Unlike later films that dealt had skinhead-related subject matters such as American History X, Skinheads: The Second Coming of Hate does not try to preach to its audience. It simply portrays Skinheads as the ruthless Hitler-loving killers they are. Skinheads: The Second Coming of Hate also features what is probably Chuck Connors' finest performance. Connors was an American treasure and without a doubt the greatest film actor this nation has ever produced. To say that this film contains his finest performance is to say that this film contains what may very well be the greatest acting tour de force ever caught upon film. It is a modern tragedy that Skinheads: The Second Coming of Hate is rarely, if ever, mentioned as one of the great films of the 1980s let alone one of the great American films of all times.

**SPOILERS**Pretty terrible movie that must have been a carear low point for barbara bain (I'm sure Conners has been in just as bad). They are the two mature leads who help the kids battle the skinheads. The acting is universally bad and the plot as dumb as it gets. It's quite tame really and the deaths are all a bit "naff". Spoiller alert!The heroine, the in her fifties but still lovely Barbara Bain, I thought might save the film but her tough cafe owner soon becomes a "please don't hurt me" wreck when confronted by a 16 year old skinhead girl and when she is killed off by the girl, who slitts her throat, it is possibly the least realistic death scene in the movies, it looks like she's just drawn a red crayon across bain's neck!And hey this isn't Physco, what are you doing killing off your female lead after half an hour. All round awful and you'll look back and think what a waste of an hour and a half of my life!

Greydon Clark will never learn. The man has written and directed a slew of thoroughly awful films, gaining some slight notoriety in the late seventies for Satan's Cheerleaders and The Return. Rest assured this particular piece of horse hockey is no better than the films he made at the "pinnacle" of his career.Skinheads (I'm sure you can guess the plot, theme, and overbearing moralization from the title alone) is notable solely as a turning point-- well, okay, maybe an S-curve-- in two careers. It's one of the last films of Rifleman star Chuck Connors, as the grizzled hermit who takes a stand against the Evil Skinheads(TM), and it was the first big-screen role for Brian Brophy, who's since gone on to be a solid character actor in "serious" films (The Shawshank Redemption, White Man's Burden, et al.). Comparisons with American History X are inevitable, and will be uniformly unfavorable; where Tony Kaye gave us a band of halfway intelligent skinheads with a truly dangerous and thoughtful leader, Clark's bunch of halfwits are incapable of anything but the kind of moral posturing one might expect from a band of chimps exposed to nothing but reruns of That Girl for years on end.The one bright spot in this film, ironically, is the late Dennis Ott as Brains, the slow-on-the-uptake skinhead who provides the group's muscle and the overwhelming majority of the film's levity. Sadly, Ott, who passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1994, never got another role this big. It's worth a free rental to watch him here. **