Tonight at Cinema J: HELL UP IN HARLEM

 Tonight, I watched HELL UP IN HARLEM. It's the sequel to Larry Cohen's excellent blaxploitation classic BLACK CAESAR from 1973. For some reason I've never watched the sequel before and that's clearly a mistake as it turned out to be pretty entertaining but then again... how could it not be, it stars FRED WILLIAMSON for crying out loud! Of the male blaxploitation main leads Fred was always the one a tad (a lot!) more unpleasant then the rest of the bunch; He always played the hero but there was always something that made him a mean bastard despite being the hero. Richard Roundtree (Shaft) is tough and cool but he's also a flødebolle. HELL UP IN HARLEM isn't as good as BLACK CAESAR but even so it's more entertaining that most stuff today. Anyhoo, up next is dinner and then GET CHRISTIE LOVE!


TRAILER:

Crashing...

...in front of the telly. Yesterday, I watched KARA MURAT VS THE BLACK KNIGHT on German VHS. Cuneyt Arkin plays Kara Murat (or "Karamurat" in the international versions) and in this one we get twice as much of him as he also plays his own evil twin brother. Lots of action and violence. I found a Turkish TV print online but discovered that the TV print is actually cut (an arm chopping scene is missing in full).


This gory scene is actually from KARAMURAT: THE SULTAN'S WARRIOR but who cares, LOL.


Next up was THE DEVIL BAT, starring Bela Lugosi. Lugosi plays a disgruntled employee who plans to kill off his boss and the boss' family. In order to do so Lugosi creates a gigantic killer bat that he lets out of the window at night to follow his dastardly commands. I watched THE DEVIL BAT on a UK DVD. There was a bit of pixelation as it's a 3-films-on-1 DVD but it wasn't too bad.


Bela Lugosi being sinister in THE DEVIL BAT.

The last film I watched was KILLING BIRDS which is out on reg. 1 DVD as Zombie 5: Killing Birds. It's a daft re-title though as it's not really a zombie film (altho we do see a couple of zombies). KILLING BIRDS is directed by Joe D'amato and some other guy, I forget his name. It clocks in after approx 90 minutes which of course is normal running time but they could easily have cut out 15 minutes and it would've made it a much better film. As it is there are long boring scenes that just keep going forever, or so it feels. The actors were forgettable but there were some cool gore scenes so that was good. Overall, KILLING BIRDS was the least entertaining of the three films while KARA MURAT VS THE BLACK KNIGHT the most entertaining. DEVIL BAT is a enjoyable psychotronic flick that won't scare anybody nowadays (I'm not sure it ever did) but it was cool to watch and Bela Lugoso, altho playing the bad guy, totally steals the show.


Trailer for KILLING BIRDS


Scenes from the Italian language version. Unfortunately, the US reg. 1 DVD only carries the English audio track.