Very well executed

Some things I liked some I did not.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

A few months after the Civil War, a megalomaniac Rebel captain pushes his remaining troops to keep up the fight...without telling them the war is over. He plans to hijack a Union wagon with 300K in gold. With the war over and the payroll decreased, however, the haul comes out to 3k. The captain steadfastly believes there must be more gold and pursues a campaign of rape and torture to find out where the rest of it is. Belief and frustration dominate this movie. In many ways, it makes some truly profound statements about the tension between them. There is no more gold and will never be any more gold. And even though the Union captain explains it all logically and concisely to the Confederate captain, the Confederate captain simply refuses to believe it. It's an existential stalemate brought vividly to life at the end of movie with the Confederate captain trapped under his horse and left to die.John Bliss' performance creeps you out. He carries the entire movie with grace and malice. So much so that it brings out how amateurish the other actors are. Even so, the low budget tends to work in favor of the film, bringing a grittiness that more money would have taken away from it.Where the low budget didn't work, though, is in the editing. At several points in the film, most noticeably in the rape of the maid, they copy/paste comments made just seconds earlier. It might be an interesting technique but it's too clumsy to have not been sloppy.My other main complaint is the "slave as cannibals" speech given by the captain. My eyes literally rolled into the back of my head. A simple, brutal massacre of his family would have been much more effective.I really enjoyed this film, despite it's glaring flaws. I'm not a big proponent of remakes, but I'd love to see this remade.

Despite a very low budget, and some marginal acting, "The Scavengers" intriguing script pushes the film into above average territory. There is a gritty feel throughout, brief nudity, at least a bunch of Negro degradation, several Civil War tunes, and a story you haven't seen before. Keeping his renegade gang of Southern soldiers as uninformed as possible, Jonathan Bliss leads them on a mission to rob a Union payroll wagon. When the robbery takes place, only a fraction of the expected booty is found. Prisoners are tortured and women raped in a misguided attempt to gain information on the missing money. A slow motion shootout decides the outcome, and a very satisfying ending features real scavengers with beaks and wings. Interesting for sure. - MERK

The video box called this crapsterpiece "a stark naked picture that leaves its guts hanging out!" and went on to say "The Scavengers were rotten to the core - thoroughly disgusting and had a serious sexual problem...you'll probably love them." Well, the nudity is so incompetently filmed that most of the time it's nigh impossible to fully gather what's going on. Unfortunate, since most of the women are absolutely gorgeous with heaving (natural) breasts worthy of Russ Meyer (well one of them is the incomparable Uschi Digard). The action scenes are OK, but there's not enough of them. The editor on the film was Paul Hunt which makes the shootouts that much more of a disappointment. And no, the slow motion in this film isn't fit to lick the cow plop off of Sam Peckinpah's boots. The plot is somewhat involving, with some interesting touches and character motivations, but the film doesn't have enough talent behind it to be good art, and doesn't have enough sleaze to be good exploitation.

This is not just another movie about the American Civil War, it's a special one. True, it's very low budget and that can sometimes irritate you. But if you cast away that minor irritations, there's plenty to enjoy. The movie is about the period only months after the Civil War ended. A Southern captain never told his men that the war was over, so they go on with their killing and raping. They go to a place where the Yankees will pass with a gold transport and they wait for a chance to get the gold. They expect 300.000 dollars, but the actual amount is much less, somewhere around 2400 dollars. The captain tortures a soldier and rapes his future wife and her (black) servant till he will tell where the rest of the gold is. (Of course, it isn't there. They only transported lots of gold during the War and the war is over now.)The movie came out in the same year as The Wild Bunch and there are a few similarities. Like Peckinpah's movie there are no real good guys and bad guys. The Southern soldiers don't know the war is over. When you hear what happened to the captain, you'll understand his hate for the Yankees and black people. You can't really say the black servant is protected by her mistress and her soldier. The black people in a nearby town have some part in the story, but their intentions aren't noble either. Which is true about most wars: it's difficult to say who are the good guys.Another similarity between The Scavengers and The Wild Bunch is that the slow motion technique is used in both movies. Though Sam Peckinpah gets most of the credit for this technique, it's only fair to say that the slow motion scenes are better used in this movie. Especially in one of the rape scenes it's very effective and quite nauseating.Which is a nice link to my remark that there's lot of nudity in the movie, maybe even a bit too much. With a little less naked breasts and a bit more money The Scavengers could have become a classic. Now it's a very interesting cult movie.