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.

Evilspeak (1981)

Warning: the final paragraph is full of spoilers for the film’s ending, which is just too transcendental not to talk about

Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard) has lost badly at the roulette of chances in life. He’s a student at a military academy where he’s at best treated as the poor relation by the teachers, if he’s not outright bullied by them, and is brutally bullied and abused by the other students. Stanley does, after all, look kinda funny, is socially awkward, poor, is an orphan and therefor  has now grown-ups to back him up at least emotionally, and is really bad at keeping his head down far enough not to be noticed (which would basically be underground anyway). So there are many reasons he’s the perfect victim especially for main school bully Bubba (Don Stark) – whom I can’t help but imagine having become the complete bully he is to distract from his eminently hilarious name. Stanley’s only friend is the apparently only black student of the place, and you can imagine how much that’s helping either of them on the crappy social ladder of the hellhole that’s supposed to make expert killersheroic patriots out of them.

Things certainly start to change for our protagonist when he accidentally stumbles upon a hidden room in the school’s cellar, where he finds the grimoire of Father Esteban (Richard Moll), a devil-worshipper from the place’s past. Stanley is fascinated by the tome, managing to translate its Latin text through the super translation powers of the school computer. Nest step is starting to work on a ritual for acquiring the power of Satan. The thing is, while he’s the local punching bag, Stanley is also a genuinely decent kid without a cruel bone in his body, so a lot of additional horrible stuff will have to happen to him before he snaps. A lot of additional horrible stuff does indeed happen, and it’s not as if the damn grimoire wouldn’t have plans of its own.

Eric Weston’s Evilspeak is a prime argument for the closeness of the outright goofy to the perfectly clever in horror, as well as for the fact that a film might start as a bit of a rip-off of Carrie but can end up a thing all its own. Quite a few of the film’s elements, when seen from the wrong angle, are highly mockable. Take, for example, the whole bit where Stanley uses a very 1981 idea of a computer for his ritual and its preparations. On the one hand, this is not how computers – even demonically possessed computers one presumes – actually worked at the time (though Google would probably kill for the translation algorithm that puts out perfectly idiomatic translations). On the other, it’s also a perfect and clever way to mix the old-fashioned gothic element of the evil magic book with something utterly contemporary as of 1981; that this contemporary elements looks possibly even more quaint than the grimoire to our eyes in 2018 isn’t really anyone’s fault.

One could also argue the characters surrounding Stanley – particularly the grown-ups – are drawn with somewhat too broad strokes. However, when you’re a kid, particularly a bullied and crapped on by destiny one like Stanley, the people inflicting all manners of cruelty and indignity on you do indeed look like caricatures of actual human beings, and since we see most of what happens – apart from a couple of deaths to fill the murder quota and scenes setting them up, really – through the eyes of Stanley, it makes total sense we get to see them as caricatures too.

Weston is particularly good at escalating Stanley’s troubles, not really hiding under the film’s eccentric veneer he’s quite conscious of the mechanics of bullying as well as the things the victim of bullies fears the most. So the things that should help get Stanley through – a puppy, a companionable working-class cook, a girl that doesn’t outright mock him for his existence – will in the end just set him up for even worse troubles, and while that may not be a realistic portrayal of life, it sure as hell is one of the fears a kid like Stanley has.

The film has other strengths too: Weston is highly inventive when it comes to setting up the film’s scares and murders, using religious symbols – often also connected to things Stanley fears interestingly enough – in ways subtle and unsubtle (the death of the priest has to be seen to be believed, for example). Why, one might think someone involved in the film has a somewhat displeased connection to religion in his background. While the editing seems sometimes rough, the film is well-paced, looks good, and is generally atmospheric, with even its most lurid moments breathing a sense of place that helps sell them. There’s a bunch of character actors (other than the already mentioned ones for example R.G. Armstrong and Charles Tyner) working their magic on the exalted characters they are playing, and young Howard is pretty much the perfect guy to play Stanley.


And that’s all before we even come to the film’s finale which takes some elements of Carrie and blows them up into dimensions of inspired grotesquerie, big “what the fuck!?”s swirling in the speech bubbles about viewers’ heads when they witness a series of scenes where a priest’s death by a nail from a bleeding and moving Jesus statue is really only the beginning. For the following sequence will also contain a levitating Clint Howard with electrified hair decapitating people with a broadsword, demon killer pigs (making a return from an earlier scene) and a random zombie ripping a heart out. It’s gotta be seen to believed, and once you’ve seen it, you can’t but love it.