An Ode To The Blaxploitation Galacticos. And Cannibal Mums.
If you managed to wend your merry way through the first part of this bloated, Xanadu-style review, then you will no doubt have noticed that a few phrases regularly turn up when reviewing any exploitation movie. Terms like “bad acting”, “terrible editing”, “poor special effects”, “continuity errors” and “exploding chests” (well that was just one movie, but it came up A LOT).
But a term that doesn’t get used much is “charm”. Exploitation films – the good ones at least – have charm, some element or thing that makes them watchable, enjoyable or even good.
It might be the sort of Police Academy soundtrack to the supposedly terrifying Cannibal Holocaust II, a film so devoid of horror they had to promote the fact that a guy gets a fish up his butt on the back of the box to get people to buy it*. Or it could be that there’s a sequence that shows how truly good this film could have been with the right budget, or the right backing, like say the ending of Rats: Night Of Terror.
If this writer were given the job of picking the thing that makes the “blaxploitation” movies enjoyable, it wouldn’t be their charm. It’d be their charisma.
You see, from Sweet Sweetback’s Baaaaadaaaassss Song to Coffy and on down the line, blaxploitation filmmakers made one spot-on decision; the lead character was always super-cool. Be it the rhyming and jiving of Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite, the iconic social righteousness of Richard Roundtree’s Shaft, or just Fred Williamson showing up and being himself, they always made sure the lead was witty, funny, or just beating up enough of The Man’s cronies and getting off with their wives that you couldn’t help but think “that’s cool”.
While most exploitation movies just put whoever they could get into the lead role to interact with the other actors and the effects, or so it would seem, blaxploitation movies made sure you knew who the star of the movie was. They had the charisma to make you look past the ropey sets or fight scenes, or the usually unnecessary sex and follow that character to the end of the story, and be satisfied, if not happy, with the conclusion of their adventures.
And cannibal movies have cannibals. What more could you ask for?
There are dream movie casts, and then there are dream movie casts. And then there are dream blaxploitation movie casts. Assembling possibly the most charismatic cult film cast this side of the Star Trek movies is Fred Williamson’s eminently watchable One Down, Two To Go (1982).
The story is typical blaxploitation fare – some money is owed, some people get hurt and the heroes go after the bad guys (aka The Man) to get paid – but with an above the title crew consisting of Richard Roundtree (Shaft), Jim Brown (The Dirty Dozen), Jim Kelly (Enter The Dragon) and Williamson himself, there’s more cool on show in this movie than a freezer shop. It’s not for nothing that one of the taglines was “Forget The A-Team, this is the Kick-Ass Team!”
This, as with most of Williamson’s directorial efforts, is prone to cheesiness. Wooden dialogue, shootouts cut so loosely you can almost see the actors standing on their marks waiting to fall down poorly (particularly in the climax) and the usual exploitation production niggles pop up all over the place, taking away from a lot of the nice visual touches and funkadelic soundtrack that are present here. The result, as with all these films, is that the production only serves to belie how much better things could have been with a bigger budget, and require the viewer to ignore them to gain any enjoyment.
Not that that’s hard. Not when the story pretty much runs like this: Jim Kelly and Richard Roundtree kick ass till Fred Williamson and Jim Brown show up, then Kelly is sacrificed so Williamson, Roundtree and Brown can team up and kick even more ass until the high-fiving epilogue. Be assured, no one’s posterior is safe in this film.
Put simply, it’s the leading men who make this movie, providing all the humour, menace, and effortless cool the genre is famous for. Roundtree nearly steals the show in the opening act with his scene opposite The Godfather’s Joe Spinell, while Williamson shows his dexterity with a gun, a quip, a cigar and a woman. And a dog.
But it’s Jim Brown who emerges as the best of these Blaxploitation Galacticos, essaying a bullish, alpha male performance laced with laid back funk. When he says “Let’s turn this mother OUT!” right before the final showdown, it’s only a supreme cynic who won’t crack a smile. Then get the urge to grab a gun and some flared trousers so they can join the action.
If you like fun, and think Jackie Brown was the coolest film ever, watch this movie and gain a real understanding of what the terms “fun” and “cool” are all about.
Black Samurai: Agent Of D.R.A.G.O.N. (1977) is a different, far crazier animal altogether. Jim Kelly, alone this time, is Robert Sand, the titular samurai secret agent on the trail of the nasty devil-worshipping mutha who stole his girl.
There’s actually a dynamite concept behind this movie. Basically, it’s an attempt to merge James Bond stylings with Enter The Dragon in the blaxploitation universe. The script follows the usual run of say, The Man With The Golden Gun, but with added kung fu and funky music, potentially making for a movie anyone with eyes would want to see. It’s just a shame that all these brilliant elements are subject to some of the most ridiculous execution ever committed to film (by Al Adamson, director of such films as Dracula v Frankenstein and I Spit On Your Corpse).
The opening shootout is pure exploitation, all ragged jump cuts and obvious blood bags, but the fun doesn’t stop there. The film gets progressively more surreal, even as the laughability factor rises at the speed of guffaw. During the course of Sand’s adventures, we get treated to an abundance of shoddy set pieces, effects, and performances, not least by Biff Yeager as the world’s most expressionless tough guy agent.
The gadget car passes muster, but everything else doesn’t: There’s an incongruous and ridiculous jetpack sequence, followed by an even more incongruous and ridiculous fight between Kelly and some Halloween costume wearing “Zulu warriors”. There’s dancing blood-smeared women and devils in tribal masks, led by a villain who appears to be a cross between John Saxon and Henry Kelly from Going For Gold. There’s the fact that every single quip from the hero’s mouth is dubbed in afterwards, and that they consist of such zingers as “Chump! You’re a CHUMP!”
Then there’s the midgets. It’s at this point the film goes from exploitation to near modern art levels. At my count, Black Samurai contains a squeaky-voice dubbed shotgun-toting midget, two jumpy kung-fu midgets and a midget with a whip. They just pop up at random intervals for Kelly or Yeager’s characters to kick and to yank a laugh from the audience, or so it would seem.
Kelly’s performance, despite his overdubbed one-liners and the often fumbly combat, is just groovy enough to carry through to the climax, but once the climax arrives, things just get loopy. David Lynch loopy. A rape scene is cut out hilariously poorly, the villain appears to just pop away from his huge devil ceremony to kill a henchman for no reason, and we are treated to the worst girl-on-girl fight this side of porn.
But the defining surrealist moment of this ridiculous adventure is the image of Jim Kelly and Jim Kelly’s obviously white stuntman taking turns karate fighting a vulture. Yes. Karate fighting a VULTURE. If it sounds great, then it is. But not for the reasons it was supposed to be. Much like the film itself.
Hideously deformed, sexually promiscuous suburban women devouring their children. No, it’s not Desperate Housewives, it’s Flesh Eating Mothers (1988) a film that’s worse than bad.
It’s boring.
A “gripping” tale about a strange virus that attacks child-bearing women and turns them into cannibals, the movie shoots for the gruesome satire of the likes of An American Werewolf in London, but ends up with the boring boredom of a…actually, it’s so boring that it doesn’t even deserve a funny description. Everything sucks. The music is too inappropriate even for exploitation, and drowns out a lot of the dialogue. The acting gradually worsens, going from hilariously bad to terrible to wanting to stab the inventor of DVD for allowing this so-called film to ever be distributed.
It’s inconsistent. It’s annoying. And worst of all for a satire, it’s not funny. There’s a plethora of knowingly OTT lines and moments, not to mention the gargantuan incest euphamism that’s played for precisely no laughs whatsoever, but everything just falls flat under the weight of the sheer blandness of the entire thing.
If there’s anything to recommend for this film, it’s for fans of continuity errors and lovers of unintentional hilarity only. Apart from the changing of the world’s smallest action hero doctor’s moustache with every shot, we are also led to believe that not only is the virus cutesily animated, but so are the uteruses of the entire female population of the world. The makers didn’t even bother to use some stock footage of viruses. They used cartoons. Cartoons of female eggs with big angry eyes apparently devouring a brown Pac-Man.
But even this is robbed of its hilarity in the end by the reveal that ****SPOILER**** the cure is penicillin. Peni-bloody-CILLIN. Water’s almost less boring of a cure than Penicillin. I actually screamed at the screen ****SPOILER**** .. There’s a nice bit at the end where a guy’s face gets ripped off, but you won’t care. You’ll be so bored that you might well have begun to try and tear your own features off, just for something to do.
Or turned on Desperate Housewives, which is the same thing but with Kyle McLachlan. Which makes everything a little bit better.
Coming up in the final part of the Rampage:
GUTS!
GORE!
AND MORE!
*Don’t buy Cannibal Holocaust II just for the fish up the arse. It’s not worth it.
