Enter the Dragon (1973)

The British secret services convince Shaolin martial arts master Lee (Bruce Lee) to attend a martial arts tournament taking place on the fortress island of international drug lord and all around evildoer Han (Shih Kien). Since Han has disgraced the shaolin martial arts he once studied, and also murdered Lee’s sister (Angela Mao in a short but sweet flashback), there’s quite a bit of motivation provided for our hero to destroy Han’s operation.

Han for his part mostly uses the tournament as a way for recruitment, but at least two of the other martial artists, blaxploitation movie protagonist Williams (Jim Kelly) and roguish adventurer Roper (John Saxon) will turn out to be just as unhappy with their host’s lifestyle as Lee is, and thus make for natural allies.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that Bruce Lee never meant as much to my appreciation of martial arts cinema as he did to other people. Despite his obvious talent, the movie star image first approach he tended to take – and which fit Hollywood much better than it did Hong Kong – always did rub me the wrong way a little.

Which isn’t to say Enter the Dragon is not a fantastically successful attempt at mixing Hong Kong style martial arts, blaxploitation and spy adventure in the Ian Fleming style. This is one of those movies that seem to absolutely embody the sprit of 70s exploitation cinema (which has always been, and will always be, on of the loves of my life). There’s very little here that isn’t enjoyable – from the fights, to the gimmicks, the so wonderfully of its time production design, to the breathing noises so loud, Sonny Chiba heard them over in Japan and decided to make them even more absurd. The film is carried by a spirit of generosity towards its audience, really going all out to not just belong in half a dozen genres or so, but to provide a viewer with everything they could wish for from every single one of them.

And all that from a director like Robert Clouse who usually doesn’t understand pacing, or style, or how to direct action. Well, looked at objectively, for most of the film, it isn’t actually Clouse doing much of the heavy lifting, but the choreography, the production design and a gang of actors that appear to have a great amount of fun; the director for mostly tries not to get in the way of what he has. Which, given most of Clouse’s other films, I can’t help but wish he’d used as an approach more often.

Bucktown (1975)

Big city hard ass Duke (Fred Williamson) comes to the conveniently named Bucktown to bury his estranged brother who owned a nightclub there. For dubious reasons of The Law, Duke must stay in town for at least sixty days to put his brother’s affairs in order.

Given that he’s hassled early on by the corrupt and racist police force, whose main reasons to exist seem to be racketeering and extortion (and who will of course also turn out to be responsible for the death of Duke’s brother, as if that ever was in any doubt), that’s not a great proposition. Because a man needs something to do, and the buck needs to flow, Duke lets himself be convinced by a hustling kid and by Harley (Bernie Hamilton), an alcoholic buddy of his brother, to reopen the nightclub for a bit. This also gets him far into the good books and the bed of his brother’s girlfriend Aretha (Pam Grier).

When Duke very violently disagrees with paying the protection money the police expects of him, things do start to look a bit bleak for his continued survival, so he calls in an old buddy of his from the city, the gangster Roy (Thalmus Rasulala). Once Roy arrives with three generally unpleasant mooks (one of them played by the late, great Carl Weathers) in tow, he and Duke begin to gleefully murder their way through the cops.

Once that’s over, Duke expects Roy and the goons to go back to the city. Instead, Roy decides to stay in town and take over the police business, legal and illegal. Duke’s not too happy with this, because he clearly didn’t plan on replacing one group of violent shits with another one, and apparently thought better of Roy. Which, giving their whole companionable killing spree, seems somewhat peculiar. Eventually, the former friends will come to blows.

Before going into Arthur Marks’s blaxploitation movie Bucktown, it is probably best to temper one’s expectations a little. Specifically, the promise of Fred Williamson and Pam Grier starring in the same movie isn’t fulfilled in quite the way I would have hoped for: Williamson’s as Williamson as he always is, but Grier’s role in the movie is strictly being The Girl, so don’t expect razors hidden in afros, much asskicking or just coolness from her. She is unfortunately in the movie mostly for the melodramatic outbursts of awkward dialogue, which doesn’t at all play to her strengths as an actress or as an on-screen personality.

Having put the film’s great disappointment out of the way, there is rather a lot to like about the rest of the movie: its portrayal of the police force of Bucktown as just another gang goes even further than the racist and corrupt police forces in most other blaxploitation movies that at least seem to involve law enforcement work from time to time do; but then going another step further and positing that gangsters and pimps aren’t a great replacement for that role either puts the whole thing dangerously close to being a blaxploitation film that actually critiques the kind of violent but awesome (in the movies) types of black men that are the bread and butter of these films as well.

Of course, this being an exploitation movie, it also takes great delight at showing us the badassery of Duke and Roy quipping while brutally murdering some – admittedly very nasty – people, and certainly is never going to make a – for it obviously hypocritical – final stand against answering brutal violence with even more brutal violence.

It does, however, use the somewhat less awkward opportunity to portray the kind of close, male friendship that would later become one of the core interests of Hong Kong’s heroic bloodshed movie beyond the (heroic) bloodshed. These scenes of Duke and Roy first being buddies in violence and then growing increasingly disenchanted with one another – Roy’s disgust with Duke’s apparent growing of a tiny little bit of conscience is played particularly well by Rasulala – are the strongest of the film’s dramatic scenes. Rasulala and Williamson play off one another wonderfully whatever their relation, suggesting a lot of the men’s personal history without never needing to explain them.

That their final throw down is the climax of their relationship as well as the film’s best action scene – not that there’s anything wrong with the earlier action – seems rather fitting in this context.

Trouble Man (1972)

A man generally known as T (Robert Hooks) – that’s Mr. T (no relation) to you and me, or we’ll have to suffer the consequences, I suppose – is working as a bit of a problem solver in an urban black neighbourhood, keeping one leg on the line of the law and one casually crossing over, meting out justice where it is needed, going into macho postures and keeping the peace as best as one can without actually trying to change the world.

When minor crime bosses Chalky (Paul Winfield, in that stage of his career before he started to project distinction as his basic mode of operation and did instead slimy very well) and Pete (Ralph Waite, so sweaty he’s gotta smell, probably not welcome on a certain farm this way) ask T to help them capture a group that has been robbing their craps games, it looks like just another day in the life of a cool dude. However, T soon finds himself confronted with attempts at framing him for murder as well as  a convenient scape goat for your typical gangster business.

Though how convenient this particular choice of goat will really turn out to be is questionable, for our hero combines unflappable coolness, a sharp mind, a disinterest in working things out in a lawful manner that would probably get him killed or arrested for something he’s completely innocent of, with a talent for all things two-fisted.

More people will probably know Ivan Dixon’s Trouble Man for its (unfortunately more workmanlike than great) Marvin Gaye soundtrack than will actually have seen it. That’s a bit of a shame, for the film is a great example for the less exploitative, less crazy arm of blaxploitation cinema. In fact, I’m not even completely comfortable calling it blaxploitation instead of simply treating it as crime movie with a black protagonist. But then, trying to define genres, sub-genres and marketing labels too closely will only give a guy a headache, and blaxploitation can mean very different things to many different people at the best of times.

After a stint as an actor on “Hogan’s Heroes”, Dixon – one of the actual African Americans directing movies in the genre – became a clearly well-respected and hard-working TV director. This and the excellent spy movie The Spook Who Sat by the Door are his main feature films, and they certainly suggest a man with quite a bit of talent. Sure, Dixon isn’t one for obviously sexy stylish flourishes, but he manages to provide the handful of sets and locations he’s working with here with a genuinely lived in feeling, presenting the a bit too cool and competent to be likeable T as a part of an actual community, suggesting all the ways an at best ignored part of a population goes about building their own support structures when the rest of society ignores their needs (again, at best).

It’s a low budget movie kind of community, of course, but Dixon is genuinely good with the broad stroke characterisation that comes with that, and the actors are all the sort of pros that do well with a set-up like this.

Speaking of set-ups, while not terribly plausible (it may make sense to try and frame a guy who might genuinely be able to get away with murder, but T’s obviously the man you simply want to keep out of your business completely), the plotting works well. T’s way of finding out what’s going on follows a classic private eye film structure (and methods) in a satisfying way, until things do climax in the appropriate amount of gunplay, so there’s little about Trouble Man that isn’t at the very least satisfying to watch.

In short: Mean Johnny Barrows (1975)

Dishonourably discharged from the army after he punched out a white guy who tried to murder him with a landmine (seriously), Vietnam war hero (and former nearly football star) Johnny Barrows (Fred Williams), soon finds himself homeless on the streets of his old home town. Early on, Johnny meets Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman), a football acquaintance who offers him a job. But it’s clearly doing dirty work for the mafia, and Johnny has his principles. But as it goes, principles can be washed away by poverty and the general shittiness of one’s surroundings, so after further travails, Johnny will eventually take on the role of a hit man for Mario’s clan during an attempt of the aggressive Da Vinces (with Roddy McDowall of all people playing the youngest son) to muscle in on their territory. Don’t worry, the Racconis are the good Mafiosi, though, who only ever made money with numbers games and fought against drugs. Insert humungous eyeroll here.

This is the first of Fred Williamson’s twenty or so direction credits, and for its first twenty minutes or so, it actually feels like a minor highpoint of blaxploitation filmmaking. Williamson shoots as well as plays Johnny’s downward movement in the first act with great strength and conviction, bringing the shittiness of the black experience to life through fine direction and a performance that expresses much of the unfairness of the character’s life without any need for speechifying. It’s still not subtle, mind you, but it’s not about subtle things. As a bonus, there’s also a short cameo by Elliott Gould in which he dresses like a lost version of The Doctor – and calls himself the Professor to boot – teaching Williamson the ins and outs of being homeless by acting really, really weird.

After that, the film unfortunately spirals pretty quickly out of control and turns into a series of, sometimes weird and awkward, sometimes pretty fun, mafia meetings where the actors seems mostly to be farting around, horrible martial arts fights, long and badly written speeches told with soulful facial expressions quite in contrast to their badness by Williamson, a couple of decent action sequences and pointless plot twists, where nothing hangs together thematically or as a narrative anymore, the film losing all momentum as well as showing little of the impressive filmmaking chops of the first act.

Imagine the “Theme From Shaft” Here

If you’re like me, you probably have fantasized about a movie featuring a blaxploitation protagonist doing the good work of the psychic detective. I still can’t help you with the movie, but Edward M. Erdelac’s story collection “Conquer” (here’s a link to my local version of Amazon, you know how to use yours), concerning the adventures of the titular private eye with an eye for the weird, has you covered in book form.

Pleasantly, the stories don’t just coast by on the neat idea of “Shaft meets Carnacki” and Erdelac’s expert use of the pulp toolbox but do some fun conceptual work on its basic concept, adding some interesting ideas about how magic works in Conquer’s world, as well as demonstrating a fine eye for the interplay between the weird and the book’s 70’s setting.

With all its love for the period it is set in and inspired by, this is very much a book written in our time, so it does show a rather more inclusive and empathetic spirit than you might expect. Consequently, characters like the drag queens in one of the tales are treated much more dignified than you’d see in any blaxploitation flick. The book is, obviously, all the better for it.

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.

Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975)

aka Soul Vengeance

Warning: I will repeatedly use words like “penis” in this one.

Charles (Marlo Monte) is a small-time drug pusher working the black community in Los Angeles. He is, inevitably, arrested. Less inevitable is that one of the cops arresting him, Harry (Ben Bigelow), has a particular hatred of black men like Charles because his wife cheats on him with (gasp!) a black man. Harry is in fact such a crazy bundle of racism and neuroses he’s trying to castrate Charles, which, for reasons the film never bothers to explain, doesn’t quite succeed. The crazy cop’s partner, Jim (Stan Kamber) is theoretically less racist and more fair-minded, but when push comes to shove, he enables and covers for his partner despite knowing better. One might argue this makes him even worse than our would-be castrator, for he actually make a decision to be as bad as he is, whereas his partner clearly has no control over his own actions whatsoever. So there’s no word about any attempted castration in Charles’s trial, and a ranting DA and a judge who spends his free time with black prostitutes land him in prison for three years.

Charles’s time must have been pretty nightmarish, the film turning black and white, the camera following a corridor of cells to a solitary box in which he is kept, cutting to still photographs of Charles in distress. When he comes out, our protagonist wants to go clean, but that’s not easy, ex-cons not exactly being high on the list of the employable. HIs girlfriend has left him for his former partner who now treats him like a doormat. There are good things waiting for him too, though. He and the prostitute Carmen (Reatha Grey) fall in love, Charles getting rid of her pimp easily enough.

But still, the guy who tried to castrate Charles is still around, as are the male figures of supposed authority who covered up for him, so Charles goes around, sexually hypnotizes his enemies’ women so they help him against their respective husbands, and proceeds to kill the men with his prehensile, telescopic schlong.

Yeah, well, I didn’t see that one coming either. It’s no wonder one wouldn’t, either, for Jamaa Fanaka’s Welcome Home does little to prepare its audience for what it gets up to in its final twenty-five minutes or so. Sure, Charles’s jail time is pictured as a literal nightmare, but nightmare doesn’t exactly spell “hero grows super penis”. The little exposition scene “explaining” this comes totally after the fact, and doesn’t actually explain anything. Fanaka’s staging of the film’s sudden turn into weirdo exploitation, his disinterest in structuring it in any conventional narrative manner, does fit the rest of the film, however, for while the synopsis above might make the whole affair seem pretty straightforward, this is not a film structured following any of the rules of a typical narrative. There’s a lot of narrative connective tissue left out, Fanaka clearly preferring to follow his own associative logic in getting from scene to scene.

That’s not a bad thing, mind you, for while there are moments when the film feels sloppy and shaggy, there are many more when Fanaka’s approach feels personal and original; at the very least, the strange directorial decisions taken are usually purposeful choices by the director. Often, the film feels as if it were attempting to dissolve the lines between a kind of verité filmmaking very much en vogue with a group of young African American filmmakers in Los Angeles at the time, and a style of the surreal that pictures the same horrors and tragedies more metaphorically and weirdly. I suspect the kind of US black experience the film talks about must sometimes feel surreal to its victims, anyway, so talking about it this way might be only too fitting.


This is, obviously, not a film everyone will enjoy: it is after all, rough and strange, prone to distractions, and not following the narrative shapes it at first seems to suggest. It’s also technically raw, clearly made with talent and (skewed) vision, yet also just as clearly stretching what was possible for the filmmaker at the time. I think this formal and visual rawness adds a lot to the film, providing its slippage into the whacked out in the end with an additional frisson of reality slipping away into what can certainly be read as a revenge fantasy.

In short: Black Eye (1974)

Ex-cop of course turned private eye - as well as beater of drug dealers and protector of prostitutes - Shep Stone (Fred Williamson) stumbles into quite the case. When looking in on prostitute Vera (Nancy FIsher), he only finds her corpse, as well as her murderer. The guy is armed with a knife but also swinging a cane with a special silver handle. We the audience already know that cane belonged to a silent movie star, and Vera stole it from the top of his coffin. After a pretty intense fight, the killer escapes with his cane and most of his bones intact. Shep’s not the kind of guy to let this sort of thing slip, so he convinces his ex-partner in the police to hire him to work the case, instead of the people actually responsible for investigating murders.

Because our hero’s a bit of a multitasker, he also agrees to a second case a couple of hours later. He is to find runaway daughter Amy (Susan Arnold) for a guy named Dole (Richard Anderson). Working the cases – if indeed these are separate cases – will lead Shep through all sorts of very 1974 situations, as seen through the eyes of nearly 60 years old director Jack Arnold.

The late 60s and the 70s didn’t exactly treat low budget movie pro Arnold too well, or perhaps he just never really managed to adapt his sensibilities to the new era of filmmaking. In any case, the non-TV work of late period Arnold always feels to me a bit like the work of a man who is trying his best to follow the contemporary exploitation angles but doesn’t quite have the vocabulary needed to do it convincingly. In Black Eye’s case, all attempts to depict the early 70s life and mores of younger people seem to come from a position of raised eyebrows, the director nearly audibly tutting at homosexuals, lesbians, late hippies, religious zealots, and letting his lead tut right with him. It’s often rather awkward, and could indeed be pretty unpleasant at times if not for the joy it is to watch Fred Williamson at work. Williamson spends much of his time using his nearly proverbial (at least if you’re moving in my circles) laidback swagger to stroll from slightly off kilter scene to slightly off scene as a character you might imagine to be played by James Garner in case of Wiliamson’s unavailability, flirting, pretending to be shocked by stuff my grandmother wouldn’t have been shocked by at the time – and how I love him for so clearly only pretending – and from time to time hitting deserving people in the face.


Every couple of scenes – when the film isn’t suddenly turning into a Sunday afterschool special or spends its time on a slow motion romance montage you gotta see to believe and which incorporates a nearly naked Williamson and later a tandem  – Arnold gets up to more timeless things. The handful of action scenes are mostly spirited and fun, and demonstrate that Arnold still had his old directing chops and just didn’t really warm to his material. Still, if you’re interested in the bodies of work of Arnold and/or Williamson, or want to see a 70s private eye film with a black lead that isn’t really a blaxploitation film, this one has enough good moments to be worth your while.

Detroit 9000 (1973)

When black congress man Aubrey Clayton (Rudy Challenger) holds a not at all pre-planned, totally spontaneous fundraiser for his not at all pre-planned, totally spontaneous decision to run for governor, he and the other rich black people of Detroit (one supposes those are the only rich black people in the city too) suddenly find themselves victims of a short, sharp and very professional robbery.

The robbers are so effective, in fact, nobody is even able to discern their race(s), a particularly big problem in this already politically loaded case. As it goes, the whites talk about black on black crime and inside jobs, while the blacks suggest a conspiracy to hold their candidate down.

The poor bastard of a cop chosen to solve this mess is Lieutenant Danny Bassett (Alex Rocco), whose career has been shafted by his unwillingness to play politics. He’s more into crime solving, apparently. Danny is not very racist for a white cop in what is at least in part a blaxploitation flick, and tries to get by being honest and still somehow paying for the treatments of his wife who is incurable sick with something – being terribly racist and even more melodramatic seem to be part of her symptoms. Danny is going things alone at first, but another cop, black murder beat Sergeant Jesse Williams (Hari Rhodes) pushes himself into the investigation when he finds a corpse who very well might have been one of the robbers when still alive.

Danny doesn’t like Jesse much, in part – though one Danny probably wouldn’t admit to it – certainly because of his race, but also because Jesse is the police department’s black poster boy: he’s stylish, he was a famous athlete, and he knows how to play politics, all things the working stiff Danny doesn’t particularly like. Not surprisingly, Jesse reciprocates most of these feelings. But Jesse’s also a good cop, so working the case, they do develop a degree of mutual understanding (one wouldn’t go so far to call it friendship), though, as the ending will show, only a degree of it.

All this does make Arthur Marks’s Detroit 9000 sound like a rather worthy police procedural about mutual understanding; in practice, the film turns out to be rather more cynical and/or complex than that and certainly still a true exploitation movie, for the film does enjoy its shoot-outs a lot. As a matter of fact, there’s one about every ten minutes, usually ending in one or more people exploding a shower of very Shaw Brothers red blood capsules after lots of running and jumping has taken place. The final set piece of this sort is a long, long running gun battle between a bunch of cops and the gangsters that practically bursts with crazed energy.

Marks isn’t a terribly elegant director – rough and tumble is probably the best description to his approach – but it is exactly this rawness that makes the action work, providing it with a gripping and direct feel that fits a film so very much of its time and place as this one is particularly well. I’d be tempted to call his approach semi-documentarian, but I’m not terribly convinced Marks is doing any of this on purpose. One way or the other, the heated effect of the action stays the same.

Apart from that, the script (by Orville H. Hampton whose stuff is all over the place in genre and quality) is often just very interesting, adding clever, sometimes humane, sometimes cynical, little flourishes to character types that turn them into characters. My favourite bit of this sort of writing in the film is a flashback concerning Vonetta McGee’s Roby Harris that turns the “misused prostitute” trope into something more individual and personal that actually lets you look at a character in a crime and exploitation flick and have pity for her without turning her into a caricature. And this is by far not the only moment of this kind in the film.

I also found Detroit 9000’s treatment of its main characters very interesting. At first, the film keeps very close to Danny, showing us his pretty sad life and the start of his investigation, yet later increasingly shifts perspective over to Jesse, not just to demonstrate how Danny looks from the outside but to put the audience as much in Jesse’s shoes as in his. Despite certainly being made for the shoot-outs, the film does prefer to show more than one side of every argument, which actually makes its observations about race and the ways it interplays with class less like an internet rant and more like actual life.

As to the film’s actual racial politics, it goes for the obvious solution that a lot of people – white and black – are pretty damn horrible, poverty certainly doesn’t help in that regard, and that people in power or people who want to acquire power are hypocritical bastards. Which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Past Misdeeds: Black Samson (1974)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Samson (Rockne Tarkington) has made quite a life for himself - he owns a well-loved, permanently overcrowded strip bar, has a big stick to hit people with, a (probably doped up to the gills) lion lying around on the bar's counter and is very much in love with his girlfriend Leslie (Carol Speed) who just happens to have the biggest afro I've ever seen.

Samson deserves all that, too, because he is a deeply righteous man who lets the local elderly alcoholic spend the night in his bar, and helps drug addicts clean up their act. Well, after he has threatened them with his stick. He's also the man responsible for keeping his part of town clean from two larger criminal organizations.

The more harmless one of these organizations is lead by his old friend Arthur (Michael Payne) - who also moonlights as a perfectly legal and supremely terrifying undertaker - and is not much of a problem, but the mafia family of the Nappas is quite a different thing.

Old man Nappa (Titos Vandis, the first mafioso with a Greek accent) might be the Gandhi of organized crime abhorring violence and spurting ridiculous wisdom whenever the camera meets him, but his nephew Johnny (William Smith) is quite a bit less tolerant.

Johnny has a few problems with things like impulse control and a tendency to react violently to, well, everything, and he really really hates Samson, so he's planning on killing our hero and taking over the bar owner's area, if his uncle likes it or not.

That's easier said than done, though. As Johnny's uncle would say: "Piece of cake? I know a man who choked on a piece of cake".

Samson doesn't have much of a problem with surviving the first murder attempts of Johnny's goons, what with his would-be killers bringing no weapons when they are trying to kill someone and him always armed with the Stick of Hitting +5, so Johnny has to get creative. And he has some brilliant ideas. The first one is letting his own girlfriend (Connie Strickland) work as an undercover stripper at Samson's place to get info on his enemy's activities. Not surprisingly, that doesn't work out too well for anyone, and only when Johnny's plans get more baroque with blowing up Samson's bar, kidnapping Leslie (this time with armed men!) and pushing his girlfriend out of a driving car so that she will tell Samson of Leslie's whereabouts, does our hero have to work a bit harder for his money.

As one might surmise from the more bonkers details of Black Samson's plot, it isn't a film bound to win the Across 110th Street memorial prize for intelligent and politically sound blaxploitation movies, but it is such an enthusiastic piece of low-brow fun that I don't think that matters too much in its particular case. It's not a completely stupid film either. Most of Black Samson's characters (ignoring the psychopathic Johnny Nappa) aren't deep, yet are at least two-note instead of one-note characters. Take Arthur (played by Payne with insane enthusiasm, bug-eyed stares, a love for cocaine and a tone of voice that make him look like Flavor Flav born too early), who is definitely a bastard, a drug dealer and a coward but still stops short of taking sexual favours from Leslie to help Samson. While that's not necessarily character depth, it's more than I'd have expected to find in a blaxploitation film directed by a future TV workhorse like Charles Bail.

It is also of interest to note that Samson is supposed to be a Black Nationalist of some kind, and still allowed to be the film's hero and source of inspiration to the people of his quarter. Compare that to the way politicized African Americans are shown in most other blaxploitation movies and be amazed.

Bail's direction is mostly just workmanlike, without any of the more psychedelic flourishes you sometimes find in the genre (which would have fit the film's weirder ideas nicely), but the film doesn't drag and the action scenes - while they aren't exactly Hong Kong quality - are quite solid.

The actors seem to be having a lot of fun doing their respective things, too. I already mentioned Michael Payne's scenery-chewing, and that would be enough for a normal film. Surprisingly, Payne's performance is overshadowed by William Smith, who tries to be the most insanely insane bad guy in blaxploitation and mostly achieves his goal by smirking, shouting and punching like a loon. I was especially enamoured of the scenes with his uncle, which consist of him cursing and getting angrier by the second while still needing to keep smiling and his uncle spouting ridiculous words of wisdom.

Tarkington doesn't share in the overacting of his fellows and does instead the cool (yet funky, don't worry) hero bit very well indeed, while the actresses just don't have all that much to do except for looking pretty, crying and being kidnapped and roughed up - unfortunately a destiny all too typical of women not named Pam Grier in this genre.

I also need to point in the direction of the film's dialogue again that contains some great pearls of silliness (and probably wisdom). Did you for example know that the smell of death is not a nice smell, Johnny?

And then there's the film's grand finale that starts with a punch-up between the Stick of Hitting and a few mafiosi, turns into a peculiar car chase whose participants just steal a new car when they crash their old one, and ends with the bad guys being bombarded with household appliances, doors and mattresses. I think one of them is even killed by a flying fridge, which is hard to beat when it comes to inappropriate ways of dying.
It's all as pleasantly silly as one could wish for and exactly the sort of thing I hope for in my classic exploitation.

Past Misdeeds: The Devil's Express (1976)

a.k.a. Gang Wars

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Luke (awesomely named Warhawk Tanzania) leads a successful martial arts dojo in New York. Among his pupils are as diverse people as the white cop Sam as well as Rodan (probably not related to the kaiju, played by Wilfredo Roldan), the drug-dealing thug leader of a street gang called the Black Spades.

Luke seems to have become quite successful in the growth of his own martial arts as well, at least he has earned the honour to travel to China to attain a new rank by getting his ass kicked by an elderly master. Luke seems to have some hope for instilling a bit of spiritual growth in Rodan, so he takes him on his Chinese adventure.

After a bit of fighting and losing, the New Yorker only needs to do some meditation in the woods to level up to level nine. He chooses Rodan to protect his body while he's doing the silent soul-searching stuff. Unfortunately, Rodan is easily bored, and instead of protecting his friend, he's all too soon roaming through the woods until he finds a cave full of century old corpses. Unknown to the freshly awakened Luke, he also steals an amulet one of the dead wears around his neck.

Both men don't realize that their indiscretion has awakened the amulet's owner, who is annoyed enough to possess some poor random Chinese guy and stow away on the same ship to New York the martial artists take, obviously with bad intentions in mind.

Back in New York, Rodan steers his gang into a war with a Chinese gang called the Red Dragons, while the demon, although seemingly pining for the return of his amulet, moves into the subway system and starts to kill people.

At first, the police think the gang war and the subway murders are somehow connected, but Sam - who is quite bright for a cop in a blaxploitation movie - soon realizes that there must be more to the latter than meets the eye. He also tries to get Luke's help in containing the gang situation, but the martial artist is of course too much in love with his own machismo and the evils of The Man to be of any help.

Luke is only getting active when the demon finally kills Rodan. At first, he tries to avenge his friend on the Red Dragons, but when a random wise old man explains to him who really killed his friend, he decides to catch himself a demon.

There's not much that could be sounding more grindhouse than a combination of blaxploitation, American martial arts and horror flick, promising a very special sort of dubious movie nirvana. Of course, "sounding good" was often as far as films made for the grindhouse circuit came to the word "good" at all, so I went into watching The Devil's Express with some reservations regarding its quality. I was positively surprised.

Sure, Barry Rosen's film isn't exactly what one would call a good film, but it takes the elements of the three (four, if you add the surprise visits in cop movie territory) genres it plunders with enough enthusiasm and earnestness to win my heart.

It's certainly a film with its share of problems. The acting - with the exception of the guy (possibly Larry Fleishman) who plays the Italo-American cop with excellent clichéd gusto and a schizophrenic bag lady - is rather wooden, but carries with it the sort of authenticity you get by casting semi-professional actors and amateurs. And I can hardly blame Warhawk Tanzania for not being as awesome as his name.

Compared to even the most mediocre martial arts movies from Hong Kong or Taiwan, the fighting (I wouldn't really speak of fight choreography in this case) isn't much good either, but are there any US martial arts films with good, or even just competent, fights? At least the fights aren't lackluster, because everybody on screen is really trying to get into it like Bruce Lee, just without the required training.

The movie's plotting isn't much to gush about either. The script doesn't even seem to be able to decide who its protagonist is - Luke? Sam? both? - and therefore jumps merrily back and forth without developing much momentum.

Additionally, the film's running time is padded out by random inserts of not exactly important scenes. However, in this film the padding is where the fun lies, since here "padding" doesn't mean the usual travelogue footage or scenes and scenes of people explaining the plot to each other, but wondrous moments of exploitative art. Sudden bouts of grindhouse social realism (the things that just happen to land on camera when you film outside in a big city without a permit), an utterly random love montage between Luke and a nameless woman, a kung fu fighting waitress, or the rambly monologuing of a bag lady unite to become something quite special.

In these moments, The Devil's Express isn't so much a cheap shot at making money by haphazardly throwing a movie together, but a near-magical evocation of a particular place at a particular time. This is something you couldn't get in a more carefully constructed picture that (understandably enough) would need to keep out all the randomness Rosen's film (probably unconsciously) embraces. Of course, not too many low budget films of this type manage to incorporate as many of these moments of magic/unconscious art as this one does.

I also have to stress that some scenes belonging to the film's main plot line are pretty great, too. The scenes in "China" are very creatively realized, and while you'd never believe them to take place in China, Rosen gives them a very different feel from the city scenes. I think it is the quality of the light that's mainly accountable for that effect.

First and foremost, The Devil's Express is an extremely fun movie. I can take a lot of delight in a film that goes out of its way to keep the promises of fun it makes, even if it is a little sloppy, a bit cheap and very silly, so I felt right at home with it.

In short: Slaughter (1972)

Someone murders the father of Vietnam war hero (since when was there such a thing?) Slaughter (Jim Brown) in what looks a lot like a mafia hit. Slaughter knew his father was involved in shady dealings but he still takes the assassination personally, and starts a hunt for the killer that suggests his name to be his program too.

Slaughter’s violent ways awaken the interest of racist US treasury department man A.W. Price (Cameron Mitchell) who recruits our very angry hero for his own war against mafia capo Mario Felice (Norman Alfe) and his main underling Dominic Hoffo (Rip Torn), informing Slaughter that Felice is the man responsible for Slaughter senior’s death, and putting him on his trail in Mexico. Supposedly, Slaughter is to follow orders and act somewhat less extreme than is his usual style but of course, soon people die left and right, things explode, and Hoffo’s girlfriend Ann (Stella Stevens), as well as treasury department agent Harry (Don Gordon) are charmed by Slaughter’s manly man ways. The whole affair has something to do with the mafia’s new super computer, the replacement of the old mafia guard with the new, and a casino.

However, the plot really is beside the point for Slaughter’s director Jack Starrett, and is only there to enable Jim Brown to be awesome, cool and violent, sometimes awesomely violent, and to give the film an excuse to take short breaks from its own overwhelming Jim Brown-ness to provide its audience with short but sweet moments of ridiculous mafia clichés. Which, close study of Slaughter suggests, might be all I ever dreamed of.

The fact that Slaughter is as entertaining an entry in the blaxploitation cycle as it is has a lot to do with Starrett’s sure hand for action scenes whose controlled wildness often reminded me of classic serial action, filmed with all the stylistic tics of a film made in the early 70s, yet also with a sense of excitement and an exhilarating air you don’t always get from your low budget cinema (of any era), because excitement isn’t cheap. There are even car chases I enjoyed watching, something that happens about every six months to someone who is not at all a car person like me.

Then there is, of course, Jim Brown, swaggering, running, looking constipated, romancing, shooting and making things explode in a manner that can’t help but convince one of Slaughter’s main thesis, namely, that Jim Brown is a total bad-ass, admired by men like his white sidekick Harry, loved by women, and only hated by racist arseholes and mafiosi.

What Slaughter isn’t is a movie with a subtext that tells us anything about the black experience, or even white writers’ interpretation of what a black audience might want to see on screen as a dramatization of the black experience, going for a pure power (and perhaps empowerment) fantasy even mostly lacking the semi-documentary scenes of urban squalor so typical of the genre. It would be easy to criticize Slaughter for this if the film wouldn’t permanently distract one with wild action and Jim Brown.

But then, sometimes wild action and Jim Brown are exactly what you need in your life.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,blaxploitation,action,jack starrett,jim brown,stella stevens,rip torn,cameron mitchell

In short: Three the Hard Way (1974)

When he becomes wind of the plans of particularly crazy white supremacist to wipe all black people from the face of the earth (or is it just the USA?) via EVIL SCIENCE!, and the bad guys kidnap his girlfriend Wendy (Sheila Frazier) to add insult to injury, record producer Jimmy Lait (Jim Brown), calls in two old friends of his. Together with martial artist Mister – that’s his first name – Keyes (Jim Kelly) and whatever the hell Jagger Daniels (Fred Williamson) is beyond awesome, Jimmy starts kicking Nazi ass. Cars explode at the slightest provocation, people shoot, Jim Kelly martial artists while directed by a guy who really has no clue how to film a martial arts fight. So much for genocide.

Need I say that Gordon Parks Jr.’s Three the Hard Way is not a very good film in the traditional sense, with the way it leaves narrative logic (or really, a plot) and characterization behind and replaces everything with blaxploitation versions of Men’s Adventure clichés? And need I also say that the film still is a whole lot of fun thanks to Parks’s pacy direction that from time to time shows excellent little explosions of 70s style, thanks to its core trio of ass-kicking heroes, as well as thanks to a sense of random abandon that replaces the filler that often mars the underwritten half of blaxploitation cinema?

If I need to or not, I’m still saying it. I’m also saying it’s pretty difficult to mess up a film this sillily eager to please and to follow its imagination wherever it leads. How could anyone resist a movie that sees Fred Williamson calling in a trio of multi-racial dominatrixes arriving on colour-coded motorcycles (and in fitting leather) when they need to torture information out of someone (poor guy dies of fright)? A film that has a scene where a truck explodes from driving through a billboard? And, you know, a film that contains the mystical trio of Brown, Williamson and Kelly - even though I have to admit that Kelly’s painfully sincere acting attempts are only saved by his afro when he’s in the same scene with Williamson’s swagger, and Brown’s laid-back charm and – here absolutely underused – actual acting abilities.

It all adds up to a thing of slightly unhinged awesomeness I enjoyed mightily.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,gordon parks jr.,blaxploitation,action,wtf,jim brown,fred williamson,jim kelly,sheila frazier

Cool Breeze (1972)

Freshly released from prison, criminal mastermind and sharp dresser Sidney Lord Jones (Thalmus Rasulala) already has a new big plan to steal jewellery worth three million dollars. With the help of people like whiny, religious bookie Finian (Sam Laws) and former Texan football player turned small-time tough Travis Battle (James Watkins), whatever could go wrong?

Everything, of course, for the heist always goes wrong. However, the trouble isn’t just with Jones’s plan, and the following interest of the police, but also with the little fact that the project’s money man, Mercer (Raymond St. Jacques) has plans of acquiring all the pretty loot for himself. Things probably won’t end too well for anyone involved.

This Gene Corman blaxploitation film directed by Barry Pollack (who didn’t exactly have much of a movie career before or afterwards, it seems) is based on the same novel as John Huston’s flawed classic The Asphalt Jungle but never really plays in the same league. The jury’s out if it’s even trying to, if it just goes for the exploitative thrill of being a blaxploitation version of a revered Old Hollywood classic (which I’d approve of quite a bit, actually), or if somebody involved just thought the novel’s plot the archetypal heist movie story and structure, so why not use it.
In fact, to my eyes, the film’s main problem is that it doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind which of these three things it wants to be, and instead meanders back and forth between these approaches, while adding some comedy cops. Even though I think adding comically stupid white people to an exploitation movie is a time-honoured way to pay back some of the indignities people of colour had to suffer through in the movies, it doesn’t exactly help an already imbalanced film. Lincoln Kilpatrick’s (black) Lt. Knowles is a lot more convincing but the film muddles up his role and character too by only mentioning his corrupt ways in an off-side manner late in the movie when he’s putting pressure on Finian, which to my mind is just sloppy writing.

It’s this sloppiness that is the script’s main problem more often than not, leading to a film that just blithely wanders around the best bits of the movie it remakes (or of the novel it adapts), only from time to time stepping into the right spots, making changes seemingly at random and in spaces where there just isn’t any other way to go about things a few decades later. It would, for example, be too awkward even for Cool Breeze to cast James Watkins as a cowboy, so they go with the in itself rather clever “poor farming country boy with football talent he never truly managed to live up to” variant; too bad the film doesn’t know where to take this, nor how to fit it in with its various other elements.

Despite these major problems, Cool Breeze does have some recommendable aspects, too. The 70s atmosphere is as strong as in any blaxploitation flick, with some choice, naturalistically real feeling locations and the kind of period detail these films generally achieved by just going out and shooting, and don’t mind if you’re allowed to or not. Taken singly, and if you just pretend a movie’s single scenes don’t have to make a whole together, there are also some fine moments in the film. The scene between Knowles and Finian I already mentioned is, for example, tough and unpleasant, suggesting a lot of history between these two men, and telling no friendly lies about what kind of people the men involved are.
It would of course be much better if that scene and others of similar quality would ever add up to a movie with a coherent personality (or you know, a coherent mood, tone, theme, or plot), but then, those movies don’t give us a theme song where Solomon Burke declares someone is looking “like a cool dude”, so there’s something to be said for Cool Breeze’s approach.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,crime,blaxploitation,barry pollack,thalmus rasulala,james watkins,sam laws

In short: Friday Foster (1975)

Photographer Friday Foster (Pam Grier) stumbles into the job of shooting the secret return of The Richest Black Man In The World™, Blake Tarr (Thalmus Rasulala), to his native USA, but instead witnesses and photographs a murder attempt on him. She manages to take a picture of the only of the would-be assassins (Carl Weathers) who escapes the combined firepower of Tarr's bodyguards and the police. Friday'd love to follow up on the story, but her boss Monk Riley (Julius Harris) does disapprove of his people involving themselves in things. Which does awaken a few doubts in me regarding the noteworthiness of his magazine.

The escaped killer also just happens to be involved with Friday's close friend Cloris (Rosalind Miles), whom he kills at a fashion show of eccentric designer Madame Rena (professional eccentric Eartha Kitt). If her boss wants it or not, Friday is going to investigate this killing for sure, even if her private eye friend Colt Hawkins (Yaphet Kotto) is the only help she can get.

Little does our heroine expect that she'll uncover (without doing much actual investigating) a particularly absurd conspiracy by The Man to keep African-Americans down.

It is true, Arthur Marks's Friday Foster, an adaptation of the first US newspaper strip featuring a black woman as its main and titular protagonist, is one of the minor efforts among AIP's blaxploitation films starring house (and every sane person's, too) favourite Pam Grier. The film's plot is paper thin even for an exploitation film, the conspiracy our heroine uncovers without actually having to do much work for it (champagne soaked evenings with middle-aged black men don't count as work, I think), nor having to do much thinking for that matter, is just plain stupid, and if you've come either for complex political subtext or classic blaxploitation outrageousness, you've come to the wrong film.

However, there's something political in, and something to be said for, the film's willingness to be lightweight, its lack of the cynicism that runs through a lot of blaxploitation films. I'm not saying this cynicism was wrong or untruthful when it comes to talking about the actual political situation of black America in the 1970s, I'm just saying that from time to time, it's good to see a movie in the genre where political cooperation between different groups and unity instead of breaking into micro-factions are treated as a good thing that might even help produce change in the larger world. Of course, being the deeply silly film it is, Friday Foster makes this argument (I'm using the term loosely) by way of a preposterous gun battle but then I didn't exactly expect a debate.

Apart from that, Friday Foster is a diverting action comedy, with pretty much every character actor you'd look for in a blaxploitation movie expect Ossie Davis in one silly role or the other, and a main cast that hits the lightness appropriate for a film that sees its heroine steal a hearse and later the truck of a milk salesman. Everybody on screen is clearly in on the fact that they're in something rather fluffy, yet everyone seems to have fun with the film's inherent silliness, as did I.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,blaxploitation,comedy,arthur marks,pam grier,yaphet kotto

Gordon's War (1973)

When Gordon Hudson (Paul Winfield) returns from the Vietnam War, he finds his wife dead of a drug overdose and his Harlem home overrun by its drug problem. After pushing around his wife's dealer, the delightfully named Big Pink (Nathan C. Heard), only leads to a group of Big Pink's business partners roughing up Gordon in turn, Gordon decides to solve Harlem's drug problem once and for all. He rounds up four of his old army buddies (played by Carl Lee, David Downing and Tony King) and declares war on the operations of Harlem's big player, Spanish Harry (Gilbert Lewis).

The group slowly work their way up through Harry's operation, harassing dealers and pimps and driving them out of town, disturbing the distribution of heroin. They're surprisingly successful too, so successful that not only Harry but also the examples of The Man he is working for, begin to get nervous and react.

Ossie Davis's Gordon's War is one of the more singular blaxploitation movies I've seen. One of the major differences between this and many other films of the genres is that Davis doesn't come to exploit black emancipation politics to make an action movie but attempts to exploit the action movie form to take a political stand dressed up as a revenge fantasy. It's no surprise coming from a man with Davis's background, and, if nothing else, makes for a nice change for the genre.

Of course, Gordon's War's message is a very simple one - drugs, brought in by white people with an interest in destroying any future hopes of African Americans, are destroying the black community and need to be mad to disappear, if need be with violence - and so easily enough fits into action movie structures. Consequently, the film doesn't play out very differently from other films of the vigilante genre, which is blessing and curse in one. On one hand, Davis doesn't walk into the trap of becoming preachy but on the other one, everything about Gordon's War seems just a bit thin. That impression isn't improved by the film's complete lack of characterisation: Gordon has a dead wife and is very dignified (he is played by the wonderful Paul Winfield, after all), Bee reads books, Roy has sex, and Otis has eyebrows. The film doesn't even bother to explain why his three friends are willingly helping Gordon in his dangerous crusade. Sure, we can theorize, but the film doesn't seem to care. In fact, the film doesn't seem at all to care about human emotions (even a major character death leaves only results in thirty seconds of emoting), character development, or motivations, so if one is looking for that sort of thing to - say - develop an emotional connection to a film, one is shit out of luck here.

In this regard, I also found it rather peculiar that we never actually see the film's drug dealers and pimps doing much drug dealing and pimping; it's rather difficult to share or even just understand the feelings of our vigilante heroes towards them when we only ever hear about their enemies' wicked ways but don't actually witness that much of them, except for their awe-inspiring taste in clothes. The damage they do is only shown in their absence - in a flophouse sequence and the sense of seeing a decaying community. I'm nearly tempted to suggest the film is actually about four Vietnam veterans randomly roughing up or killing people who they take for gangsters because they dress like gangsters, but that's not really what the film is about.

The film's strength - and this aspect of it can turn Gordon's War into a very gripping film if you can get yourself to care about a film that doesn't put any effort into making you care - lies in Davis's somewhat dry, detail-oriented direction that reaches for the documentarian. It's when the film shows us the flophouse, or just the daily life on the streets of Harlem when it actually comes to life, showing a care and emotional connection to Harlem as a place it never seems interested in building to its characters. His documentarian eye also stands Davis in good stead when it comes to staging action scenes, resulting in action that seems authentic and believable yet also tight and exciting enough.

As a whole, I'm just not sure what to make of Gordon's War, or rather, I have trouble understanding what Davis was thinking. Without a doubt, he knew enough about filmmaking to realize how little emotional heft his film packed, so I have to assume he left it out on purpose: as a Brechtian attempt at alienation? Out of loathing for emotionally manipulating his audience? To contrast his film against the melodramatic emotionality of other blaxploitation films? Damned if I know.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,blaxploitation,ossie davis,paul winfield,carl lee,david downing,tony king

Three Films Make A Post: That's not the victim screaming - it's you!

The Fountain (2006): Take one part pretty good melodrama, one part utter, brain-curdling weirdness and one part horrible 70s airbrush poster art, and you pretty much have The Fountain. It's a film where earnest artistic ambition dances with kitsch so closely that nobody involved - surely not director/writer Darren Aronofsky and certainly not this writer - seems to be able to tell where one begins and the other ends anymore. It's certainly a film worth experiencing, but it's also a film to which the often misused description of "pretentious" fits perfectly, in that it just isn't as clever and profound as it pretends to be.

Can you really watch naked, bald, lotus-seated Hugh Jackman float through golden-ish space in a bubble and not giggle?

 

Death Journey (1976): I'd be glad if there were much of anything to giggle about in this Fred Williamson-directed part of the Jesse Crowder series of films (it might be the first one or the second - the Internet is divided, and I'm not going to watch the additional material about the production, because this thing has already stolen enough of my life), starring Williamson, and nobody else of consequence. A private eye carting a mafia bookkeeper willing to sing from LA to Chicago while the man's former bosses are doing their best to kill them may sound like the perfect set-up for a low budget action movie, especially with a guy like Williamson who always seems to have fun when doing anything physical in the lead role. Williamson the director, however, has no idea how to stage an action sequence interestingly or even just effectively, leading to a film so bland it would probably still be boring if half of it didn't consist of filler and scenes that go on much longer than they should. Even the soundtrack gives the impression of being a collection of outtakes from a a handful of other blaxploitation soundtracks.

On the positive side, there's only a sex scene realized so hilariously wrong-headed that Williamson and his partner seem to possess two or three heads each.

 

Ricco The Mean Machine (1973): Christopher Mitchum takes his dear time to take vengeance on the mafia boss who murdered his mafia boss father while Barbara Bouchet undresses or under-dresses to distract the parts of the audience receptive to her charms from the utter vacuum that is Chris. The sleaze for a good Italian crime movie is certainly there, sometimes in hilarious and embarrassing ways (turns out the best way to steal mafia money in a film that isn't supposed to be a comedy is to let Barbara Bouchet dance naked in front and on top of a car). From time to time, Tulio Demicheli's film breaks into fits of pretty nasty violence, but even then, Mitchum's complete lack of personality in his role as Hamlet's more boring brother undermines much of the emotional punch of those scenes. Not to speak of the scenes where the script wants him to act.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,sf,melodrama,action,blaxploitation,eurocrime,darren aronofsky,hugh jackman,rachel weisz,fred williamson,christopher mitchum,barbara bouchet,in short

TNT Jackson (1974)

Diana "TNT" Jackson (Jeannie Bell) comes to "Hong Kong" to look for her brother Stag/Stack (Stack-o-lee?). She doesn't know yet that he has been killed in a drug deal gone very bad. With the help of friendly, two-fisted bar owner Joe (played by beloved - or so the Internet tells me - Filipino comedian Chiquito; not doing any comedy), TNT finds out the truth about her brother soon enough.

The young woman swears vengeance on the killers of Stag, planning to do some punishing with her superior martial arts. Her plans are made easier to accomplish by a few helpful factors: firstly, the drug cartel TNT is after is not as united amongst themselves as it should be. Someone has begun to attack their deliveries and make off with the product. Secondly, Charlie (Stan Shaw), a high-ranking member of the cartel who also just happens to be the killer of TNT's brother shows a lot of interest in her. And thirdly, a female government agent (Pat Anderson), has managed to penetrate the inner circle of the gang.

Looks as if the vengeance business isn't as lonely and difficult as people say.

I've got my reasons for usually being quite hard on the films Filipino exploitation mega-producer Cirio H. Santiago directed himself, namely that the man's directorial style is terribly bland, and that his ability to make the most boring movies out of perfect exploitation ideas is maddening to the extreme. Because of these dubious tendencies, I go into Santiago's films with a large amount of trepidation, quite certain the director will be able to ruin even the best of set-ups through a special brand of wilful apathy only paralleled in certain late period Santo movies.

So it comes as something of a surprise that Santiago's TNT Jackson left me enjoying myself quite a bit. As was often the case with Santiago's movies, TNT was co-produced with Roger Corman for the American's New World Pictures, and therefore made with a large eye on the US market, with Santiago's native Philippines a secondary concern that could be satisfied with a local star like Chiquito in a secondary role.

Obviously, TNT's attempts at crossing the blaxploitation film with a very US American version of the martial arts film (that is to say, a version that mostly lacks people in front of or behind the camera even vaguely acquainted with the basic concepts of fighting on screen) do not add up to a "good" film of any kind, even before you have witnessed this film's particular idiosyncrasies, but they do end up being pretty enjoyable through sheer persistence.

This time around, Santiago actually manages to completely avoid his most debilitating weakness, the love for long and painful - often painfully long - scenes of filler. Being Santiago, he goes even one step further and seems to just have decided to throw any pretence of a coherent plot out of the window. The whole film is just a massive conglomeration of stuff that just happens to vaguely centre around TNT's vengeance, but never comes together as anything I'd call a story.

It's all bizarre dialogue, ridiculously choreographed fights during which clearly no bodily contact is ever made (cleverly emphasised by the lack of any exaggerated sound effects - we don't want people to think anyone's trying to hide his or her lack of martial arts skills here, right?), a heroine played by a woman who looks even more ridiculous in a fight than anyone else here (which is quite an achievement, once you have seen Stan Shaw waggle his legs, or, as the film calls it, "fight") with a stunt double who looks nothing like her (but can do acrobatics, hooray!), random naked fu, random moments of Chiquito being likeable and being the only competent person on screen (even his few fights look sort of believable!), and so on, and so forth. All this random stuff is presented without even the slightest attempt at making it gel dramatically. In place of all that high-falutin' logic and emotional depth, Santiago sets random, silly crap. But this once, the director/producer also seems to have realized this amount of silly crap needs to be presented with complete earnestness to be charming instead of annoying, and proceeds accordingly.

It's a laugh a minute, but I found myself laughing with the film, and not at it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,american movies,blaxploitation,martial arts,jeannie bell,chiquito,stan shaw,cirio h. santiago,reviews

On WTF: Black Samson (1974)

It's been way too long since I have talked about a blaxploitation movie, so what better way to correct this could there be than to spend some time with a film about a Black Nationalist with a very big stick and a drugged lion fighting the mafia?

I report about my experiences with Black Samson in my review on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,action,blaxploitation,reviews,rockne tarkington,william smith,carol speed,other places

On WTF: The Devil's Express (1976)

Blaxploitation! US Martial Arts! Horror! Random New York! Warhawk Tanzania! All this and more can be found in my write-up of The Devil's Express aka Gang Wars on WTF-Film.com.

It's like a dream come true.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,warhawk tanzania,martial arts,horror,blaxploitation,reviews,other places