J.D.’s Revenge (1976)

Between studying law and driving taxi to pay for it, mild-mannered Ike (Glynn Turman) barely has time for much else in his life, certainly not the night life of New Orleans. For one night, however, his girlfriend Christella (Joan Pringle) convinces him to go out on the town with her to celebrate the one year anniversary of their best friends. Why this begins with everybody visiting a strip club is anybody’s guess. Anyway, eventually, the quartet end up in a hypnotism show, with Ike one of the brave hypnosis subjects.

These things never go well in horror cinema, so the little session seems to open a door in Ike’s mind through which the spirit of a decidedly nasty man slips in. Said spirit belonging to one J.D. Walker (played by David McKnight in flashbacks and mirrors) quickly begins to take over Ike’s life, first changing his sartorial tastes to the worse, but soon also bequeathing a tendency to violence, general vileness, rough sex, sadism and macho posturing. All of this increases terribly, until Ike becomes a rapist sadist maniac who dresses like an early 1940s pimp, and there seems to be little left of the man he was before. And whenever he does come back for a stint, J.D.’s sure to return just at the ideal moment to make everything worse. At first, Christella takes the brunt of Walker’s brand of toxic masculinity, but while he is branching out to doing violence to other people, he stumbles into the church of ecstatic preacher Reverend Elija Bliss (Louis Gossett Jr. when he was just Lou, and not so little). Bliss is a curious man who doesn’t seem quite sure if he’s hustling people like his brother Theotis (Fred Pinkard) who runs the church like a gang operation wants him to, or if he really has heard a calling from a higher power.

The thing is, Walker and the Bliss brothers have a past, and once he has laid eyes on Elija, he realizes he has stolen Ike’s body for a reason – vengeance.

Well, I certainly didn’t expect this blaxploitation horror film directed by Arthur Marks, at this point a TV veteran with a couple of directing credits and producer roles in things like “Perry Mason” and most certainly not black, and written by one Jaison Starkes who did little else and nothing of any interest, to be quite as excellent as J.D.’s Revenge turned out to be, even though Marks has two other blaxploitation films, the very interesting Detroit 3000 and Friday Foster in his earlier filmography. But then, I’m not sure I’d even categorize the film as blaxploitation in the strictest sense – it’s really more an intelligent horror film with an African American cast that just happens to be produced by AIP. The “exploitation” content of the formula is really not all that huge, either, there’s a bit of female and a bit of male nudity, but apart from the strip club scene, these things don’t play out as attempts to titillate so much as necessary elements of the story.

There’s one scene of rough sex bordering on non-consensuality and one attempted rape, but the film plays these really not at all as coy attempts at being sexy in an unpleasant way. Particularly the latter scene is staged so the audience witnesses it from the perspective of the female victim of J.D.’s sexual sadism, turning it into something as uncomfortable to watch as a scene where a man tries to rape his own girlfriend should be; this film takes the “horror” bit in its description very seriously indeed. It’s also a scene that’s genuinely important for the film because it emphasises how far gone Ike is at this point, or really, how little of him is left, and what this does to Christella.

Which leads me to another element of the film that works particularly well: the ghostly possession. In this case, the film adds to the general horror of one’s personality being subsumed under that of another until the victim can’t even see there ever was a difference between it and what has taken over, by turning Ike into the total opposite of what he has been before. The kind, sensible and thoughtful man that’s as far away from all the badly posited clichés of how a black man is supposed to be and act as possible is taken over by a sexually sadistic, cruel and violent hustler and pimp who should by all rights come over as a bit of a caricature but is handled so well by the film he is a true figure of terror. It’s as if all the bad versions of what it’s supposed to mean to be a man take Ike over and turn him into someone so vile, he’s hardly even human anymore. Turman is pretty fantastic at portraying the possession, not just taking on the posture and tics of McKnight’s version of J.D. from the flashbacks, but playing them in a way that doesn’t quite seem to fit his face and his body. It’s not just an interesting and thoughtful way to portray a possession but another element of the film that’s just the little bit more disturbing than you’d expect of it.

Another fascinating aspect of J.D.’s Revenge is how willing it is to go into uncomfortable directions. The way Christella eventually returns to Ike/J.D. after he beat her up the first time feels a bit too close to what I know about women in real life abusive relationships, for example.

There’s also the from my perspective horrific scene after that first beating where Ike’s best friend interprets a guy beating up his girlfriend as the dude finally coming out of his shell and stopping to repress his emotions. Women, he explains, do need that sort of thing from time to time. A nice interpretation of this one might read it as some kind of critique of not quite as crazy but still pretty horrible ideas about maleness; it’s certainly a way quite a few men in the 70s – and apparently still today – think, so it’s not pleasant to listen too, but it’s certainly true to the reality of some men being proper shits.

J.D.’s Revenge generally also recommends itself by allowing everyone in it a degree of complexity. After all, even horrible J.D. does indeed have an understandable reason for wanting to take revenge, he’s just going about it the way a guy just one step removed from a serial killer would do, making your usual vengeance seeking movie character look downright nice in the process. Or take the ambivalence the film has about the Bliss brothers: how much of Elija’s showy faith is indeed show, how much him starting to believe the things he performs, how much is simply genuine? And how about the way he just accepts Theotis acting the gangster even when he’s organizing his church? It’s messy and complicated, and the film isn’t providing clear answers because these things are messy and complicated in real life too.


On the visual side, there’s little too remarkable about the film. Marks with his TV background clearly doesn’t bring much of a sense of visual experimentalism with him; he does, however, know how to tell the film’s story economically and effectively, doing an excellent script and the wonderful cast justice.