Sky Riders | |
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Directed by | Douglas Hickox |
Produced by | Terry Morse Jr. Sandy Howard executive producer |
Written by | Bill McGaw Hall T. Sprague Garry Michael White |
Screenplay by | Jack DeWitt Greg MacGillivray |
Starring |
James Coburn Susannah York Robert Culp |
Music by | Lalo Schifrin |
Cinematography | Jim Freeman Greg MacGillivray Ousama Rawi |
Edited by | Malcolm Cooke |
Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release date
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Running time
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91 min |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $1,730,000 (US/ Canada) |
Sky Riders (also known as Assault on the Forbidden Fortress) is a 1976 American action film directed by Douglas Hickox and starring James Coburn, Susannah York and Robert Culp. A woman and her children are kidnapped in Athens and held in a mountain-top monastery as hostages by a revolutionary terrorist movement. A rescue operation is mounted using hang gliders. The rescue sequences were filmed in Meteora in Greece where the finale of the later James Bond film For Your Eyes Only was set.
On January 17, 2012 the film was released on DVD through Shout! Factory as part of a double feature with The Last Hard Men.
The wife, Ellen (Susannah York), of an international industrialist (Robert Culp) and her two children are kidnapped from their Athens home by a terrorist group and taken to an abandoned monastery on an imposing, needle-shaped island. Jim McCabe (James Coburn), Ellen's ex-husband hires a crew of professional hang gliders to help him rescue her and the kids from the terrorist's mountain top lair.
Film's producer Sandy Howard and Terry Morse Jr. were imprisoned in Greece for an explosion on the set of Sky Riders, when a Greek electrician died. They had to bribe Greek officials so the crew member responsible would not be imprisoned by the military regime.
It was also the first English language film ever seen by Bollywood superstar, Shahrukh Khan in his youth.