Solomon King (1974)

Imagine if Rudy Ray Moore possessed the charisma of a DMV clerk and didn’t tell jokes—then you’ve got an idea of what to expect from Solomon King, a vanity project from cinematically incompetent Oakland, California, clothier Sal Watts. A doughy dude with a forgettably affable quality, Watts cast himself as a secret agent-turned-private detective who navigates international intrigue and romantic entanglements. Specifically, the insipid plot puts Solomon King (Watts) in danger when Princess Oneeba (Claudia Russo) flees from the Middle East to the Bay Area while avoiding operatives of a villain named Hassan (Richard Scarso). Years earlier, Solomon helped Oneeba’s father out of a jam and was rewarded with ownership of oil fields, so Hassan apparently stands to gain from not only Oneeba’s death but also Solomon’s. Most of Solomon King comprises the usual blaxploitation noise of fights, sex scenes, and vignettes showcasing Black life circa the early ’70s. (There are a lot of dance parties in this picture.) Although Solomon King—which Watts produced, cowrote, and codirected—has cinematography on par with most low-budget ’70s sludge, what sinks the picture is abysmal editing. The story often hiccups incomprehensibly, atrocious voicever gets used to cover scenes with unusuable production sound, fight scenes are comically inept, and sex scenes drag on forever. Still, there is some so-bad-it’s-good fun to be had here. For example, the movie’s absurd climax finds the hero and his Green Beret buddies (!) laying siege to Hassan’s Middle Eastern palace, which for some reason looks like a Nazi bunker somewhere in Europe. During the climax, Solomon dubiously complements his all-black commando outfit with a shiny pimp hat and an even shinier medallion. You do you, man! FYI, this picture earned a smattering of attention in mid-2022 when a crowdfunded restoration was completed. A debut airing on TCM Underground followed a few months later.

Solomon King: LAME

Hangup (1974)

          Painfully generic blaxploitation melodrama Hangup provides a minor footnote within film history because it was the last picture helmed by Golden Age stalwart Henry Hathaway, once a reliable director of action movies and Westerns. Exactly none of his former ability is on display here—Hangup has all the momentum and style of a bad TV episode. To be fair, the version screened for this blog is an abbreviated cut that was re-released as Super Dude. Still, nothing suggests a few extra moments of character development could possibly elevate Hangup into anything meritorious, especially because the leading performances by William Elliott and Marki Bey are lifeless. He plays a college student training to be a cop (who somehow snags an undercover gig on a narcotics squad) and she plays his high-school dream girl, now lost in a spiral of drug addiction and sex work. The threadbare plot involves Ken (Elliott) pumping Julie (Bey) for information he can use to nail a big-time supplier named Richards (Michael Lerner). Predictably, close proximity causes Ken and Julie to fall in love. Tragedy ensues.

          Shot in grungy pockets of Los Angeles on a minuscule budget, Hangup plods along at a dreary pace exacerbated by Bey’s and Elliott’s wooden acting. In their defense, it would take a special class of thespian to animate lines such as this one: “I’m hooked on her the same way she was hooked on smack!” Yet at least for its first hour, Hangup is moderately watchable because the hackneyed contrivance of a narc falling for a junkie has inherent drama. Alas, that strength leads to Hangup’s biggest weakness. When there are still more than 20 minutes left to go, the movie wraps up the love story, a glitch made worse because the main villain has also been sidelined. These narrative choices slow the pace nearly to the point of inertia. And then there’s the sleaze factor—or, rather, the lack thereof. Notwithstanding a few topless scenes, Hangup feels restrained in comparison to, say, Jack Hill’s gonzo blaxploitation joints. So while an easily offended viewer might find Hangup more palatable than other films from the same genre, serious Blaxploitation fans will be left jonesing for a fix of something rougher.

Hangup: FUNKY

Brother on the Run (1973)

          Minor blaxploitation melodrama Brother on the Run doesn’t come anywhere close to fulfilling the promise of its fantastic title, and the reasons why begin with the premise. After an attempted robbery goes awry, leaving a shopkeeper dead, small-time crooks Billy (Kyle Johnson) and Frank (Gary Rist) become the targets of a police dragnet. For story reasons, it’s important to note that Billy is black. In scenes intercut with the robbery storyline, Brother on the Run sets up that college professor Grant (Terry Carter), who is also black, lives next door to a hooker named Maud (Gwenn Mitchell), with whom he’s casually acquainted. Maud is Billy’s older sister, so the fugitives try hiding at her place until the police come knocking. Grant gets hip to what’s going on, so he meets the crooks and becomes sympathetic to their plight. Then, once the manhunt resumes, Grant promises Maud that he’ll try to find Billy before the cops. All of this raises questions. Since Billy is guilty of at least being an accomplice, why does Grant get involved? Since Billy makes it clear at Maud’s place that he’s against surrendering to the cops, what is Grant’s plan once he tracks Billy down? And why does Grant stop in the middle of his search for Billy to service a horny white lady?
           One assumes the filmmakers neither thought these questions through nor expected theatergoers to do so—more likely, the goal was to generate cheap thrills by exploiting the provocative notion that any black suspect running from white cops has a target on his back. Several passable blaxploitation flicks arose from that same notion, so the failure of Brother on the Run to generate excitement seems attributable to behind-the-camera carelessness as well as shortfalls in production resources. Cowritten and codirected by veteran TV guys Edward J. Lasko and Herbert L. Strock, the movie feels choppy, rushed, and under-budgeted; characterizations are laughably thin, the storyline is riddled with dopey coincidences, and the movie’s attempts at sociopolitical messaging are pathetic. (If only the filmmakers had leaned into bizarro moments such as the bit during which Maud provides gentle BDSM fun for a cross-dressing client.)

          Offering marginal interest is the presence of actors better known for work they later did on the small screen. Playing the lead is Terry Carter, subsequently a regular on the original Battlestar Galactica series, and playing the main cop is James B. Sikking, who eventually found minor fame on Hill Street Blues. Even with a handful of watchable elements, however, Brother on the Run adds little to the blaxploitation experience.

Brother on the Run: FUNKY

Speeding Up Time (1971)

Blaxploitation sludge made on a pathetic budget, Speeding Up Time has something to do with a young writer tracking down the crooks who killed his mother by burning down her house while she was inside. Yet it’s a struggle to parse even that simple premise, given writer/director John Evans’ inept storytelling. Either he ran out of money or simply forgot to collect important footage, but either way, this film comes across as a the rough assembly for perhaps two-thirds of a movie, with zero effort put into creating placeholders or transitions to cover the gaps. The fact that Speeding Up Time found its way not only into theaters but also onto home video speaks more to the ravenous appetites of those exhibition platforms during the ’70s and ’80s than anything else. Anyway, here’s some of the nonsense that happens. Our hero, Marcus (played by the fabulously named Winston Thrash), visits a poet who inspires Marcus to repeat the phrase “I am prepared” several times. Prepared for what? Who knows? Who cares? Later Marcus wakes from a dream (or premonition or whatever) about his mom’s house burning down, then snaps at his mother for suggesting he settle down. After that, Marcus works on his writing in the bathroom until the toilet overflows, ruining his work. Wait, all this time I haven’t stored my only copies of documents on bathroom floors? I knew I was doing something wrong! Eventually, Marcus zooms his vintage car through a drive-in lot during a tepid chase scene, gets it on with a young lady during a crudely shot sex scene, and makes aggressive remarks to gangsters. Oh, and just to create the illusion of political relevance, he also spews some vaguely revolutionary jive.

Speeding Up Time: SQUARE

Lord Shango (1975)

          Some practitioners of the horror genre argue that logic has no place in spooky stories. Fair enough. After all, one would never argue that the events of, say, The Shining (1980) could take place in reality. Still, there are limits. In the offbeat blaxploitation horror picture Lord Shango, murders happen in plain view of witnesses but authorities never seem to get involved. And that’s just one affront to common sense. Lord Shango is moderately interesting because of the way it forefronts a clash between two belief systems, but the movie is a frustrating mess. In the wild opening sequence, young man Femi (Bill Overton) rushes to rescue his girlfriend, Billie (Avis McCarther), from baptism by a group of overzealous Christians. They respond by drowning him in full view of an entire congregation. This enrages Billie’s mother, Jenny (Marlene Clark), who turns to a local voodoo cult for help exacting revenge. Enter Jabo (Lawrence Cook), a ne’er-do-well who may or may not have mystical powers. He compels Jenny to make sacrifices to “Lord Shango” in order to reincarnate Femi. And if you’re wondering how all this stuff meshes into a coherent storyline, don’t bother, because it doesn’t.

          Lord Shango unspools as a random assortment of moments, some of which are creepy and some of which are merely confounding. In the picture’s best scene, Jabo strolls onto the dancefloor of a nightclub and shimmies toward a pregnant Billie, who’s grooving to one of the movie’s hot Afro-fusion beats. Jabo moves closer and closer to Billie until her movements slow down to match his, and he stares into her eyes, triggering some sort of hypnosis/possession/trance state. Afterward, Jabo frets that he failed to achieve a supernatural task: “It’s always a struggle when a restless soul tries to enter a body not yet born.” Built solely on acting and mood and music, this scene has all the clarity and weirdness Lord Shango seeks elsewhere but usually fails to find. Incidentally, many of the same problems plague the 1973 blaxploitation vampire picture Ganja & Hess, which also stars Marlene Clark.

Lord Shango: FUNKY

Big Time (1977)

          Noteworthy as the lone venture into film production and screenwriting for legendary Motown singer-songwriter William “Smokey” Robinson, Big Time is an amateurish but mostly pleasant blaxploitation comedy that benefits greatly from a funky soundtrack composed by, naturally, the estimable Mr. Robinson. The picture also has three appealing actors in leading roles. Christopher Joy gives an amusing turn as a low-rent hustler who gets into trouble by messing with the Mob’s money. Roger E. Mosley is entertaining as a crook with a pimptastic wardrobe, who may or may not be as tough as he seems. And leading lady Jayne Kennedy, playing an insurance investigator who goes undercover to entrap Joy’s character, is so breathtaking that it doesn’t matter if her performance is merely adequate—after all, the description “merely adequate” could just as easily apply to Big Time itself, so why not enjoy the sights and sounds that make Big Time bearable?

          Eddie Jones (Joy) is a con artist specializing in fake accidents (think neck braces and frivolous lawsuits). A string of bad decisions have left him in debt to J.J. (Mosely), who threatens violence if Eddie doesn’t make good. In a typical scene, J.J., who has his initials inscribed on vanity plates and on custom-made gold teeth, compels Eddie to leap from a moving car even though Eddie’s wearing only a towel. Desperate to pay his debts, Eddie enlists his buddy Harold (Tobar Mayo) for help running schemes. Eddie also woos Shana (Kennedy) following a meet-cute during an accident, though he’s too dim to recognize her hidden agenda. Eventually, Eddie stumbles onto a crime scene and steals a suitcase full of cash. This upsets mobsters, who are portrayed as a bunch of fat Italians sitting around a table covered with pizzas.

          Once the FBI enters the storyline, things get confusing fast, so during a good 30 minutes of Big Time, it’s difficult to track who’s doing what to whom and why. Also distracting: The way Shana’s partner delivers most of his lines in a bad Humphrey Bogart impersonation. Presumably influenced by the anarchic vibe of Sidney Poitier/Bill Cosby comedies from the mid-’70s, Big Time is blaxploitation without degradation, which counts for something. The language is gentle, the racial portrayals aren’t especially vulgar, the violence is tame, and Kennedy maintains her dignity by never wearing less than a bikini. So even though Big Time is dopey, it’s an amiable romp set to a slick Motown groove, and every third or fourth attempt at a joke nearly connects.

Big Time: FUNKY

Miss Melody Jones (1972)

By definition, the purpose of criticism involves identifying strengths and weaknesses in creative endeavors. Often that leads to positive results, with appraisers lavishing artists with compliments. Sometimes it goes the other way. And every so often, a critic lands in the unfortunate position of having to remark on something like Philomena Nowlin’s performance in the blaxploitation-themed showbiz saga Miss Melody Jones, also known as Ebony Dreams. Before we travel down that path, let’s set the scene. Shot on a meager budget and made with an equally meager amount of imagination, Miss Melody Jones tells the story of an upbeat young woman who makes a living as a stripper in a Los Angeles nightclub while trudging through one humiliating audition after another in search of stardom. She gets comfort and support from her gay roommate and, eventually, a warmhearted paramour with his own cinematic ambitions, but life is unkind to Miss Melody Jones. At her lowest, she takes an acting role as a gang-rape victim in a nudie flick. There’s nothing here viewers haven’t seen a zillion times before, except for the inimitable Philomena Nowlin. A shockingly inept actress, Nowlin screams nearly every line, and she does so in one of the most dissonant voices you will ever encounter. Imagine the sound of a cat that just inhaled helium. Even Fran Drescher would cringe. Yet for some reason, Nowlin was given one long monologue after another, so a good 15 percent of the movie comprises nothing but a bug-eyed, hand-flailing Nowlin screeching at top volume. Overall, Miss Melody Jones is innocuous, if a bit threadbare from a narrative perspective. But with regard to the film’s singular leading performance, spare yourself if you value your eardrums and your sanity.

Miss Melody Jones: LAME

The Black Connection (1974)

Formless blaxploitation junk featuring three members of music group the Checkmates Ltd. in acting roles—naturally, they provide the soundtrack—The Black Connection is also known by a more provocative title, Run, Nigger, Run. The alternative moniker gives a better sense of the storyline, or at least the confusing blur of narrative events that passes for a storyline. After a whole bunch of aimless scenes featuring secondary characters, the piece resolves into a melodrama concerning African-American crook Miles Carter (Bobby Stevens), who’s having some sort of trouble with white gangsters. Best guess is he’s a pusher and they’re his suppliers, but now he wants a bigger piece of the action, or else he’s running a scheme on the gangsters and they get wise. Whatever. The Black Connection is so thoroughly terrible that parsing the details isn’t worth the effort. The acting is atrocious, the filmmaking is inept, and the storytelling is rotten. Only the funk tunes on the soundtrack are passable, though your guess is as good as mine why the film contains a ballad with the lyric, “Would you like to buy my pretty balloon?” In any event, devoted blaxploitation junkies might be able to find a few amusing moments amid the meandering nonsense. There’s some fighting, some sex, and some tough talk. The best zinger is spoken by young woman when characterizing an adversary’s shortcomings: “The trouble with her is she don’t know a lady when she sees one—and I’m a motherfuckin’ lady!” Clearly.

The Black Connection: LAME

Black Lolita (1975)

Excepting the novelty of sketchy 3D photography, Black Lolita—sometimes known as Wildcat Women—is vile junk bordering on porn. An uninteresting woman billed as “Yolanda Love” stars as Lolita, a lounge singer who launches a war on crime after thugs involved with a protection racket murder her uncle, a kindly shopkeeper. Calling upon her martial-arts skills and sexual wiles, Lolita builds a squad of shapely ladies, including a yoga enthusiast and a prostitute, while also forging alliances with police officers. What ensues is a dull cavalcade of fight scenes and sex scenes, with the smutty elements getting most of the attention. At regular intervals, cowriter-director Stephen Gibson stops the movie dead to linger on some carnal encounter that unfolds in real time, very nearly in full view of the camera. (Although nothing crosses the line into hardcore, some bits suggest that actors, ahem, committed to their roles during filming.) The acting is atrocious, the characterizations are threadbare, the dialogue is dumb, the filming style is ugly, and the story presents clichés lifelessly. The picture also relishes in the exploitation and/or abuse of women, as during a long torture scene featuring a villain extinguishing his cigarette on a young lady’s skin. Thankfully, Gibson doesn’t overuse stereoscopic photography during sex scenes. Instead, 3D effects are mostly employed in the corny old way of characters poking random objects toward the camera, such as a two-by-four that a thug brandishes while attacking Lolita.

Black Lolita: SQUARE

Bad, Black & Beautiful (1975)

If nothing else, this inept blaxploitation flick has an accurate title: Leading lady Gwynn Barbee is black and beautiful, while the movie around her is bad. The basic premise is fine, because Barbee plays a hotshot attorney who uses her seemingly endless set of skills to help clear a man’s name when he’s accused of murder. Myriad Pam Grier films were made from narrative fabric of this sort. Yet Gwynn Barbee, for all her loveliness, is no Grier, and Bad, Black & Beautiful writer-director Bobby Davis is no Jack Hill, the dude behind Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Davis’ shortcomings manifest in a discombobulated script and sloppy direction, problems exacerbated by a meager budget. For instance, when Eva (Barbee) hears a description of the accused man’s experiences in Vietnam, Davis cuts to grainy stock footage of generic soldiers in Southeast Asia, rather than a properly filmed narrative flashback. Sometimes the film’s flaws result in accidental humor. At one point, a thug working for the movie’s main villain approaches a drunk whom the villain wants dead, shakes the drunk’s shoulders, and walks away, after which the drunk has a seizure of some sort and dies. Say what? Although Bad, Black & Beautiful has the production values of a first-year student film, Davis unwisely tried to emulate the big-canvas style of better-financed blaxploitation flicks. Eva displays her skill as a pilot, a racecar driver, a singer, and, of course, a trial attorney, but each of these sequences looks cheaper than the preceding. Additionally, Davis’ seeming aversion to creating transitions means that the movie regularly cuts to random characters and events, with viewers left scratching their heads as to what X scene has to do with Y scene. Good luck figuring out why Davis spends so much time following a white reporter whose bedazzled denim ensemble makes him look like he should be Stevie Nicks’ Rumours-era coke dealer instead of an ink-stained wretch.

Bad, Black & Beautiful: SQUARE

Supersoul Brother (1978)

The best joke related to this rotten blaxploitation comedy is its alternate title, The Six Thousand Dollar Nigger, an edgy riff on The Six Million Dollar Man satirizing how black lives are valued in American society as compared to white lives. Had the filmmakers actually created a spoof about a bargain-basement bionic man, as some advertising materials suggest, Supersoul Brother could have been funny and provocative. Unfortunately, it’s just crude and stupid. Two criminals approach a scientist named “Dr. Dippy,” played incompetently by little person Peter Conrad, and pay him $6,000 to create a serum that grants invulnerability and super-strength. The catch is that the recipient of these powers will die a week after the serum is administered. The criminals grab a wino off the street, then provide him with a swank new pad and a maid who performs sexual services, promising financial rewards in exchange for receiving an injection of the doctor’s serum. (They don’t tell him about the whole impending-death thing.) The wino becomes super-powered and helps the crooks pull off a heist, but when the mad doctor’s pretty assistant tells him the truth, the wino rebels. All of this unfolds in some of the least attractive frames ever committed to celluloid. Director Rene Martinez Jr.’s camerawork is roughly equivalent to that found in amateur porn, all artless compositions and choppy edits and garish lighting. This presentation problem is exacerbated by dopey scatological dialogue and mindless sex jokes. (The insertion of a rectal thermometer is presented as a comic highlight.) Naturally, all of the performances are atrocious, though leading man “Wildman” Steve Gallon, a regional nightclub performer who appeared in a handful of terrible movies, has something that vaguely resembles swagger.

Supersoul Brother: LAME

Black Starlet (1974)

          Telling the familiar story of a young woman degraded by the humiliating compromises she makes while pursuing Hollywood stardom, Black Starlet should be a disposable exploitation flick. The budget is low, the cast is unimpressive, and the exploitation quotient is high enough to become bothersome, with gratuitous nudity periodically distracting from the story. Yet Black Starlet meets and nearly exceeds the very low expectations set by its subject matter and title. Star Juanita Brown, who acted in a handful of ’70s drive-in flicks, grows into her role, becoming stronger as her character falls from hopefulness to cynicism. While certainly not a skillful performance, her work is committed enough to put the movie across. Similarly, director Chris Munger and his collaborators put sincere effort into making clichéd characters and scenes feel fresh. Everything in Black Starlet is rote on the conceptual level, from the sleazy agents and producers to the horrific scenes of men demanding sexual favors in exchange for career opportunities, but the way Munger lingers inside scenes—rather than speeding through them—allows a sense of unease to take root.

          Waking up one day next to a man she clearly regrets sleeping with, Clara (Brown) steps to a window and looks out at Los Angeles, then flashes back to events that led to her current situation. In her old life, despite having taken years of acting classes, she was a millworker going through a dull routine with a loser boyfriend prone to bar brawls. After one too many humiliating Saturday nights, she left him and made her way to Hollywood, where she got a job in a dry-cleaning shop while hustling for acting work. Enter Brisco (Eric Mason), a scumbag agent willing to trade his services for sex. He got Clara’s career started, but he also spread the word she was willing to oblige, leading her into the beds of one bottom-feeding producer after another. Ignoring good advice from the few kind souls she encountered in Los Angeles, including business manager Ben (Rockne Tarkington), Clara became “Carla,” a drugged-out, self-loathing, tempestuous diva.

          What makes Black Starlet more or less palatable are the moments wedged between exploitation-flick extremes. An early scene features Clara waiting on a street corner for a bus. After several men stop their cars to solicit her, presuming a black woman alone on the street must be a hooker, a motorcycle cop threatens to arrest her, so Clara jumps into the next man’s car just to get away from the cop. That man steals all of Clara’s money. Lesson learned. Later, in the dry-cleaning shop, Clara endures hectoring from her boss, Sam (Al Lewis), a cigar-chomping putz who refers to all his customers as “slobs” and obsessively yells: “Don’t press above the crotch!” Individually, each of these scenes is serviceable, but cumulatively, they give the vapid storyline a foundation in human reality.

Black Starlet: FUNKY

Mean Mother (1971)

As if his original productions weren’t bad enough, schlockmeister Al Adamson periodically repurposed old footage—from his own past films and from productions for which he acquired the rights—to swindle unsuspecting grindhouse audiences. Bogusly marketed as a brand-new blaxploitation picture, Mean Mother began its existence as Run for Your Life (1971), a Spanish-made adventure flick about a Vietnam deserter who becomes mired in various criminal enterprises. Adamson bought the movie, then shot about 30 minutes of new scenes featuring Dobie Gray, a singer who scored a pop hit the previous year with “Drift Away,” as a second deserter. (Squandering any tie-in opportunities, the singer is billed here as “Clifton Brown.”) Adamson spliced material from the two productions together and created a disjointed hybrid film. Mean Mother starts and ends with the new material, which has a quasi-blaxploitation feel if only because Gray and Marilyn Joi, the leading lady in his sequences, are both African-American. Every so often, Adamson cuts to the Spanish material, which has a totally different vibe. The new scenes are fast-paced and sleazy, whereas the European scenes are leisurely and slick. Tracking the storyline is pointless, though the overall gist has something to do with the deserters trying to raise enough money to leave Rome, where they landed after fleeing Southeast Asia, and relocate to Canada. There’s also some nonsense about drug deals and kidnappings, but, really, everything in the plot is an excuse to trigger fight scenes and sex scenes. Adamson satisfies low appetites with nudity and violence, but the deeply uninteresting Mean Mother disappoints in every other regard. As for Gray, the fact that he only notched one more screen credit—14 years after Mean Mother—correctly indicates that acting was not among his gifts.

Mean Mother: LAME

No Way Back (1976)

          Graded on one very specific curve, this blaxploitation joint earns a passing grade, but just barely. The curve in question reflects the sad fact that most films directed by Fred Williamson are awful. Judged by any other standard, the picture would fare poorly. In any event, No Way Back is the second flick to star Williamson as private dick Jesse Crowder, following the character’s debut in Death Journey, which was released the same year. (Sources differ as to which flick came first, but since there’s no series continuity, pinpoint accuracy doesn’t really matter.) Hired from his home base in Los Angeles to track down a missing person in San Francisco, Jesse does his usual thing, seducing babes, smacking down bad guys, and smooth-talking informants. As per the norm for Williamson’s Po’ Boy Productions, the main order of the day isn’t telling a story so much as making Williamson look cool and virile, though whether clothing the star in a series of leisure suits with matching neck scarves actually accomplishes that goal is open to question. No Way Back is standard-issue schlock, a brainless action thriller with R&B jams on the soundtrack, but it’s redeemed by fun elements.

          The story, not that it matters much, involves a bank executive named Pickens (Charles Woolf), who swindles cash from his employers, then takes off with a sexy accomplice named Candy (Tracy Reed). Complicating matters, she actually works for a gangster named Bernie (Stack Pierce). Meanwhile, Pickens’ wife, Mildred (Virginia Gregg), searches for her husband with less than noble intentions. It’s the usual drill of double crosses and twists, with the resourceful Jesse caught in the middle. Where the picture makes up ground is in the realm of vibe. Soul singers the Dells provide smooth tunes for the soundtrack, Reed complements her beauty with respectable acting, and the high-octane scenes have a measure of novelty, as when Jesse literally rides to the rescue, on horseback, during the climax. There’s also a mildly amusing subplot involving a hustler played by the iconic TV host Don Cornelius. Is anything in No Way Back original or special? Not even close. Does the film lag so badly at times that it becomes almost narcotizing? You bet. But is No Way Back infinitely better than Death Journey? Affirmative. And given the incredibly low standards one must embrace when appraising the Po’ Boy Productions filmography, that faint praise earns No Way Back a halfhearted checkmark in the “win” column.

No Way Back: FUNKY

Gang Wars (1976)

The best thing about this wretched hybrid of crime, horror, and martial arts is the name of the leading actor, because it’s hard to top “Warhawk Tanzania.” Incompetently cowritten (with four other people!) and directed by Barry Rosen, the flick opens in China circa 200 B.C., with fanatics performing a deadly ritual near a deep pit. Cut to the present, where Luke (Tanzania) is a martial-arts master in New York City. His student, Rodan (Wilfredo Roldan), gets into a hassle with Chinese gangsters in Manhattan before traveling, with Luke, to Hong Kong for advanced kung-fu training. Rodan stumbles onto the pit from the ritual and accidentally releases a demon, which follows him and Luke back to New York and sets up housekeeping in the city’s subway system. If you’re already confused, join the club. The demon starts murdering folks in the subway, which causes police to suspect gangsters are responsible and eventually leads detectives to Luke and Rodan. None of this makes any more sense onscreen than it does on paper, and Gang Wars—also known as Devil’s Express, hence the above poster—has production values commensurate to its storytelling. Scenes smash together without transitions, repetitive funk grooves make fight sequences feel tedious, and the filmmakers periodically replace production sound with voiceover, which merely adds to the overall awkwardness. The demon bits are ridiculous, culminating with Tanzania kung-fu fighting some dude in a rubber suit, and the highlight—as far as horror goes—is a vignette of a fellow ripping off his own skin while the demon possessing him breaks free. Too infrequently, glimmers of droll weirdness poke through the sludge. NYC freakazoid Brother Theodore plays a priest in one scene, and, in the most enjoyable moment, a crazed bag lady (Sarah Nyrick) harangues strangers on the subway before she’s attacked by the demon. You may find yourself wishing the movie was about the bag lady.

Gang Wars: LAME

Three Tough Guys (1974)

          Partly a blaxploitation thriller but mostly a failed attempt to give European star Lino Ventura some international crossover appeal, Three Tough Guys—sometimes known as Tough Guys—contains about two-thirds of a moderately entertaining movie. The first stretch of the picture, setting up a convoluted plot involving various parties connected to stolen loot, is murky and tedious, too many disconnected events and not enough character development. Things pick up during the second stretch, when an ex-cop allies with a rough-and-tumble priest to search for clues. And then, in a case of too little too late, things finally resolve into proper thriller mode during the last stretch, when the ex-cop and the priest square off against a swaggering criminal. Typical of the movie’s shortcomings is the number of scenes without musical scoring, because the producers hired Isaac Hayes as both composer and costar, then failed to fully utilize his talents for manufacturing industrial-strength funk. It says a lot about Three Tough Guys that the most enjoyable sequence is a nothing vignette of a car driving across town, simply because that’s when Hayes gets to unleash a thumping R&B theme without any interruptions. Costar Fred Williamson is squandered, too, since he’s barely the first hour.

          Set in Chicago, the picture revolves around the theft of $1 million, the murder of an insurance investigator, and various other narrative threads that fail to generate much interest. For reasons that are never particularly clear, Father Charlie (Ventura), an ex-con and ex-prizefighter, defies his monsignor’s directives by investigating the theft/murder/whatever. Over the course of several days, he sees a mysterious black dude watching him, and the dude, Lee (Hayes), asserts himself just in time to rescue Father Charlie from certain death. They bond, again for reasons that are never particularly clear, though it’s amusing to watch Lee iron the priest’s pants and cook him eggs by using the still-hot iron as a griddle. Caught in the middle of the intrigue is Fay (Paula Kelly), a gangland moll connected to slick crook Joe Snake (Williamson). Blah, blah, blah. Three Tough Guys has some colorful fights, the filmmakers use Chicago locations well, and Hayes and Ventura both exude the same sort of casual cool. There’s some vibe here. But will you remember a single thing about Three Tough Guys after it’s over? Not likely.

Three Tough Guys: FUNKY

The Candy Tangerine Man (1975)

          The kitschy appeal of this low-budget flick about pimps and gangsters in mid-’70s Los Angeles can be summarized by a line of dialogue from a supporting character: “I can’t sell you no chick, man—that just ain’t croquet! Shee-it!” That torrent of jive encapsulates the film’s questionable portrayal of African-American culture, its casual objectification of women, and its queasy way of finding humor in the gutter of human exploitation. Essentially a low-rent rehash of the cult-favorite pimp movie The Mack (1973), producer-director Matt Cimber’s The Candy Tangerine Man is unrelentingly derivative, silly, and tacky, but it has a certain so-bad-it’s-good magnetism. After all, it’s hard to truly hate a thriller in which the hero’s classic 1930s car is tricked out with hidden machine-gun turrets.

          The picture opens with scenes showing how “Baron” (John Daniels) runs his empire on Hollywood’s famed Sunset Strip. He intimidates his girls into meeting their quota of tricks per night, he easily defeats thugs who try to rip him off, and he repels gangsters seeking to muscle in on his territory. All the while, he wears natty suits, leather gloves, and a wide-brimmed hat, kicking ass (and peddling ass) in high style. Yet every so often, “Baron” retreats to the suburbs and becomes Ron Lewis, whose wife and kids think a job as a traveling salesman is what keeps him away from home so much. This revelation doesn’t exactly meet the minimum standard for imbuing a character with dimensionality, but at least it’s something. Most of the picture comprises the protagonist’s battles with other pimps and gangsters, as well as the cops who want to bust him, and eventually his long list of enemies expands to include a traitorous hooker. In throwing so many adversaries at the protagonist, however, the filmmakers dilute narrative focus, so The Candy Tangerine Man becomes a blur of “Baron” fighting this enemy and that enemy even as he tries, often in vain, to keep his girls safe. (In the picture’s most gruesome scene, a crook uses a knife to cut the breasts off a hooker.)

          The acting is generally rotten, the cinematography is unattractive, the editing is jumpy, and the production values betray the project’s meager resources. Nonetheless, sleazy energy infuses The Candy Tangerine Man, as when some poor slob gets his hand shoved into a kitchen-sink garbage disposal. (The same gag was employed, much more memorably, in the 1977 William Devane thriller Rolling Thunder.) It’s also worth noting that the picture has persuasive atmosphere thanks to extensive location photography, and, according to the opening credits, supporting performances by “the actual ‘hookers’ and ‘blades’ of the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.”

The Candy Tangerine Man: FUNKY

The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) & The Soul of Nigger Charley (1973)

          If you watch enough Fred Williamson movies, you begin to forget how potent he was in his prime, simply because so many of the pictures that he produced and/or directed himself are unspeakably bad. That’s the context for my experience of The Legend of Nigger Charley, a decent B-picture likely consigned to obscurity because of its title. As directed by Martin Goldman, the film has a familiar storyline and a serviceable vibe, so it neither breaks new ground nor soars with artistry. That said, it has a bit of an edge, because the protagonist is a slave who becomes a folk hero by killing the white man who callously destroyed the slave’s emancipation papers. Circumstances transform the slave into a gunslinger, and he inspires awe from frontier types who’ve never seen a black man control of his own destiny.

          The picture opens in Africa, with punchy black-and-white scenes showing a baby and his family being ripped from their ancestral home amid a flurry of bloodshed. Cut to twentysomething years later, and the baby has grown into Charley (Williamson), a muscular blacksmith working on a Southern plantation. The plantation’s dying master offers to grant his favorite slave, Theo (Gertrude Jeannette), her freedom, but she asks for the favor to be given to her son, Charley, instead. Before Charley can leave, he gets into a quarrel with the master’s heir, leading to the man’s death. That’s how Charley becomes a fugitive, and he takes his friend, house slave Toby (D’Urville Martin), with him. Eventually, their gang grows in size and stature until they’re hired by farmers to protect them from an evil preacher who runs a protection racket.

          Not only does the movie’s narrative get fuzzy soon after Charley leaves the plantation—every act has a new villain, and the story never pays off threads from the vibrant opening scenes—but the wandering-avenger theme is trite. By the end of the picture, the Charley character has become so generic he could be played by, say, Lee Van Cleef. Yet every so often, the folks behind The Legend of Nigger Charley remember what makes this material unique, so, for instance, there’s a terrific scene with an old eccentric named Shadow (Thomas Anderson), who storms into a bar where Charley’s gang is under siege just so he can say he’s seen everything.

          The Soul of Nigger Charley has a less episodic script than the first picture, and it benefits from polished elements including Don Costa’s robust orchestral score. Alas, the sequel gets bogged down in routine Western-movie tropes. Charley and Toby (again played by Williamson and Martin) stumble across a town where a slaughter was committed by vicious ex-solider Colonel Blanchard (Kevin Hagen) and his criminal gang. Later, when Charley and Toby meet survivors of Blanchard’s racially driven crime spree, Charley and Toby form an all-black militia and conspire to hit Blanchard where it hurts—by beating him to the train Blanchard plans to rob of $100,000 in gold.

          The first part of the picture, during which Charley builds a surrogate family of ex-slaves trying to get by in a white world, anticipates plot devices later used by Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Yet once The Soul of Nigger Charley shifts into heist mode, the lead character morphs from a righteous crusader to a run-of-the-mill outlaw. (Larry G. Spangler, who produced and co-wrote both Nigger Charley pictures but only directed the sequel, was truly gifted at squandering the franchise’s potential.) Notwithstanding its flaws, The Soul of Nigger Charley is enjoyable enough to watch because it hits all the expected notes. Williamson flexes and kills and smirks, leading lady Denise Nicholas complements her sex appeal with gravitas, and the action scenes have scope.

          Two last items worth mentioning: Williamson’s similarly titled 1975 flick Boss Nigger is unrelated to this films, and all three Williamson pictures with n-word monikers were likely among the inspirations for Quentin Tarantino’s slave-turned-gunslinger hit Django Unchained (2012).

The Legend of Nigger Charley: FUNKY

The Soul of Nigger Charley: FUNKY

Black Heat (1976)

Even given the low expectations I have whenever encountering an Al Adamson film, Black Heat was a serious letdown, inasmuch as I feel asleep the first three times I tried to watch the thing. And while that remark could probably suffice as a review, I’ll soldier through a few lines in the same way I eventually soldiered through the movie. As the title suggests, Black Heat is a cop movie in the blaxploitation mode. Las Vegas detective “Kicks” Carter (Timothy Brown) works two cases at once, helping women escape indentured servitude as hookers while also tracking gunrunners who are trying to smuggle weapons to revolutionaries in Central America. Neither of these cases results in much onscreen excitement, and they don’t mesh together well, so Black Heat has a herky-jerky narrative rhythm that’s as annoying as the picture’s leaden pacing. One boring thing happens after another, with little in the way of transitions in between, so only the presence of Brown in most scenes gives the impression that all the pieces belong to the same puzzle. Making matters worse are Adamson’s characteristic descents into sleaze, such as a long gang-rape scene and a leering girl-on-girl vignette. As for the leading man, Brown is spectacularly uninteresting to watch, seeing as how he was something of a renaissance man offscreen; the former NFL player dabbled in singing and dancing as well as acting. About the only kind thing I can say about Black Heat—sometimes known as The Murder Gang—is that it’s photographed better than the usual Adamson fare, with many nighttime scenes benefitting from proper backlighting. But when the most compelling thing about a shot is the use of secondary illumination to separate figures from dark backgrounds—well, that pretty much says it all.

Black Heat: LAME