Deliver Us from Evil (1975)

          The last of three well-intentioned but hopelessly amateurish melodramas that writer/producer/director Horace Jackson made about the African-American experience, Deliver Us from Evil (later reissued as Joey) crams a hell of a lot of story into 96 minutes. Very broadly, the picture concerns the fateful intersection of a tormented man, a disabled child, a socially conscious grade-school recreation director, and a gang of drug-dealing thugs. There’s also a subplot about a young woman who appears in stage shows that dramatize troubles bedeviling her community, plus another subplot about a white cop struggling to understand systemic racism. Even a filmmaker of sublime storytelling ability would have difficulty balancing this many disparate elements. Jackson, despite his obvious desire to edify audiences, is not a filmmaker of sublime storytelling ability. Quite the opposite. Deliver Us from Evil sloppily connects badly constructed scenes, so not only is it difficult to track the narrative, it’s hard to take any single moment seriously because the writing, directing, and acting are substandard.

          After Chris (Renny Roker) is released from a mental institution, he encounters awful racists everywhere, so he’s understandably edgy. One day while driving, he spots a woman named Mindy (Marie O’Henry), who is stranded with car trouble, so he offers her a ride. Yet because Chris drives like a maniac, Mindy demands to leave his car. Upon doing so, she slaps Chris, so he chases her to a house where she visits wheelchair-bound Little Joe (Danny Martin), one of the students at the school where she works. Subsequently, Chris befriends Little Joe and starts dating a friend of Mindy’s. Meanwhile, a local street gang begins selling drugs at Mindy’s school, so she stands up to them, causing gang members beat Mindy and Little Joe. You get the idea. In trying to address a laundry list of social issues, Jackson creates an experience that’s confusing, grim, and preachy. (In one scene, Little Joe demonstrates his newfound ability to recite the Lord’s Prayer.)

          By the time Deliver Us from Evil climaxes with a nonsensical act of violence and a direct-to-camera speech about the futility of black-on-black violence, Jackson has fully succumbed to his worst inclinations, sacrificing narrative cohesion for ungainly rhetoric. It’s a pity, because while Jackson had many worthwhile things to say, he never found effective ways of saying them.

Deliver Us from Evil: FUNKY

The Bus Is Coming (1971)

If good intentions were reason enough to praise a film, The Bus Is Coming would be considered a noteworthy artifact of the blaxploitation era. A feel-good riff on the Black Panther Party, this picture envisions an alternate reality in which a violent uprising by oppressed African-Americans leads to positive social change once the white power structure learns the error of its ways. As if. Clumsily written, weakly acted, and laden with a silly central metaphor, The Bus Is Coming simply doesn’t work as a film experience, which is a shame. While similar films from the same era tended toward apocalyptic vibes, notably Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), there was room in the conversation for a Black Power film blending optimism with radicalism. Anyway, the story begins with soldier Billy Mitchell (Mike Simms) returning from Vietnam to Los Angeles so he can attend the funeral of his brother, Joe, a community organizer who was killed during an altercation with police officers. Black Panther-type activists who worked with Joe believe he was deliberately murdered, so they begin arming themselves for a revolution. Hesitant to accept a conspiracy theory without corroboration, Mike investigates the situation and discovers that the racist cops who killed Joe are outliers within an otherwise socially responsible law-enforcement organization. In a weak attempt at irony, the filmmakers also demonstrate that one of the racist cops has a black female lover—because, see, he’s fucking the African-American community in more ways than one. Set to an oppressive, horn-driven jazz score, The Bus Is Coming lumbers from one terribly acted scene to the next, never building a head of narrative steam. As for the aforementioned central metaphor, two characters literally wait for a bus, which represents social change. Heavy, man. All in all, The Bus Is Coming is the most frustrating sort of bad movie, a well-meaning effort hobbled by wall-to-wall amateurism.

The Bus Is Coming: LAME

Tough (1974)

          Also known as Johnny Tough, this amateurish but well-meaning melodrama offers an adolescent riff of blaxploitation. Told from a kids’-eye view, the picture depicts obstacles that a young African-American boy named Johnny faces while trying to find himself. Johnny fights constantly with his mother, who is more interested in pursuing a career as an actress than she is in raising her son. Johnny vacillates between affection and antagonism with regard to his stepfather, who likes being a role model when things are smooth but resents the inconvenience when things are not. Johnny clashes frequently with his stern schoolteacher, an uptight white dude who seems to regard his mostly black students as animals who need to be herded from one place to the next. Johnny even gets into hassles with other kids, particularly during a harrowing early scene in which bullies stop just short of lynching Johnny’s best friend. In some ways, cowriter/director Horace Jackson makes interesting points by depicting Johnny as the product of a comfortable home rather than an impoverished ghetto; the gist is that Johnny experiences generic teen troubles in addition to difficulties stemming specifically from race.

          Yet Jackson’s approach is clumsy, heavy-handed, and unfocused. The teacher is a one-note villain. The mother is absurdly self-absorbed except for fleeting (and unconvincing) moments of compassion. The stepfather makes even less sense, because he’s stalwart in one scene, vile in the next. Worst of all is the presentation of the main character. Johnny has reason to be angry, what with his parents quarreling all the time and his teacher singling Johnny out for discipline, but Jackson fails to imbue Johnny with distinctive gifts or even noteworthy resilience. Attempting to tell a story about an average kid whose journey is a microcosm for bigger issues is all well and good, but Johnny comes across as too much of a cipher to command attention—a problem exacerbated by actor Dion Gossett’s forgettable screen persona. Still, Jackson has good intentions, even though his storytelling instincts are weak. In particular, Jackson nearly obliterates the credibility of the whole enterprise with a ridiculous ending that reeks of creative desperation.

Tough: FUNKY