Drum (1976)

Drum was a kind of sequel to Mandingo, which in 1975 had (for a short time) put the slavesploitation genre on the map. Mandingo actually took itself more seriously than you might expect, trying to be more than just trash. It was trash, but trash with some pretensions. Drum appeared in the following year and it is pure trash. Pure trash, but deliriously entertaining trash.

Drum is the name of a slave. We start with a brief prologue about his birth and upbringing. He is the offspring of a white woman, Marianna (Isela Vega) and a black slave. Marianna’s slave Rachel raised the boy as her own to avoid a scandal.

Now, twenty years later, Marianna runs the most celebrated whorehouse in New Orleans. Drum enjoys a comfortable enough life as a house slave. Then fate takes a hand.

The sinister degenerate Bernard DeMarigny (John Colicos) has organised a fight between two slaves to serve as entertainment for his friends but one of the slaves has been withdrawn from the fight by his master. Rather than be embarrassed in front of his friends DeMarigny coerces Marianna into allowing Drum to fight. DeMarigny’s slave Blaise (Yaphet Kotto) is a formidable opponent. After half-killing Blaise Drum decides he wants to be his friend. It will be an uneasy friendship.

DeMarigny offers Drum anything he wants as a reward for winning the fight and Drum decides he wants a woman. He gets Calinda (Brenda Sykes). As a bonus he also gets Blaise. Things turn very awkward however when DeMarigny tries to seduce Drum and not only gets rejected but gets clobbered as well. DeMarigny vows to get his revenge.

To get Drum out of the situation Marianna sells him to Hammond Maxwell (Warren Beatty). Maxwell’s plantation, Falconhurst, is devoted entirely to the breeding of slaves.

To set up a nicely explosive situation two more elements are added. Maxwell wants Marianna to find him a nice whore to help him raise his very troublesome daughter Sophie (Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith) but Augusta (Fiona Lewis) turns out to be a lady rather than a whore and being a lady she is determined to change things at Falconhurst.

Even more explosive is Sophie herself, whose chief hobby seems to be trying to seduce the male slaves. When set sets her sights on Blaise things are clearly going to get messy. If the master finds out he’ll have Blaise killed, if Blaise is lucky.

The stage is set for the standard slavesploitation ending - a revolt with lots and lots of violence.

The plot offers obvious opportunities for copious amounts of sex and violence. The sex includes every deviation you can think of. There’s a great deal of nudity. Most of it is entirely gratuitous but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else, which at least is refreshingly honest.

This was not an exploitation B-movie. It was a genuine big-budget A-picture. It was originally a Paramount project but ended up being released by United Artists. The switch to UA entailed major reshuffles with Steve Carver replacing Burt Kennedy as director, major cast changes and a complete rewrite of the script. It also meant a cut in the budget but the budget was still insanely high by exploitation movie standards. Not many exploitation movies have a crew of 150. And when they needed a mansion they built one, at a cost of one million dollars (and that’s one million dollars in 1976 money). They then burnt it to the ground.

With lots of money spent on it and an extremely generous 63-day shooting schedule you’d expect Drum to look sensational, and it does. The sets are superb. And they’re big! Having multiple Academy Award-winning cinematographer Lucien Ballard onboard also doesn’t hurt.

The movie’s biggest asset is Warren Oates. He gives a performance that very cleverly combines campiness and subtlety. He gets plenty of laughs but he makes Hammond Maxwell surprisingly complex. Maxwell might be a slave-owner but in his own bizarre way he’s a kindly man with his own individual but rigid moral code. He is definitely no melodrama villain. He’s the most interesting and in some ways the most sympathetic character in the movie.

Ken Norton can’t act at all but he looks the part. Yaphet Kotto can act, and does so to good effect. Fiona Lewis is a delight as Augusta, combining primness with spirit and managing to be scheming but in a good way. Pam Grier gets very little to do as Maxwell’s bed wench Regine (unfortunately most of her scenes were among the many that the MPAA insisted be cut). Rainbeaux Smith is great fun as the terrifyingly slutty Sophie.

While it tries to be a bit more serious at the beginning and at the end the middle part of Drum is outrageous and often very funny.

Drum is the kind of movie that no-one would dare to make today. While it ticks all the right political boxes and takes all the correct political stances (it is certainly very much an anti-slavery film) it still manages to be outrageously politically incorrect. There’s nothing pious or preachy here - despite the big budget this is unequivocally an exploitation movie and it delivers the exploitation elements with enthusiasm. Steve Carver was a graduate of the Roger Corman school of film-making and the end result is exactly like a Roger Corman movie made on an enormous budget.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that if this film seems a little disjointed at times that’s because it was cut to ribbons by the MPAA.

Kino Lorber’s Region 1 DVD includes an audio commentary by the director. The transfer is anamorphic and it’s excellent.

Drum is totally disreputable but it doesn’t care. It sets out to entertain and it succeeds. Highly recommended.

Blacksnake (1973)

Blacksnake is the one Russ Meyer film that nobody seems to like, not even hardcore Meyer fans. It’s nowhere near as bad as it’s usually made out to be but it’s easy enough to see why so many people disliked it.

After his brief and less than happy experience trying to make big-budget Hollywood movies Meyer wisely decided to return to independent productions. He also decided to try a dramatic change of genres. This was understandable enough. Once hardcore porn appeared on the scene it was clearly going to be more difficult for Meyer to find an audience for the sorts of movies he liked to make. And Meyer was adamant that he was going to have nothing whatsoever to do with hardcore porn. His solution was to concentrate on violence rather than sex.

Blacksnake was however a departure from the usual Meyer territory in lots of other ways as well. It was his first period picture, and his first foray into the world of blaxploitation. Blacksnake was to be a savage indictment of slavery.

The setting is the West Indian island of San Cristobal in 1835. The British had by this time abolished slavery but somehow Lady Susan Walker (Anouska Hempel) is still getting away with running her plantation with slave labour. To protect her position she has a private army of French-speaking blacks led by Captain Raymond Daladier (Bernard Boston).

Sir Charles Walker (David Warbeck) is intensely interested in Lady Susan’s activities. One of her many husbands was his brother Jonathan who mysteriously vanished and is presumed to be dead. Sir Charles is convinced that Lady Susan murdered him. He manages to get himself a position as Lady Susan’s book-keeper and sets off for the West Indies to discover the truth about his brother.

He soon discovers that San Cristobal is suffering a reign of terror at the hands of Lady Susan and her henchmen, especially the sadistic white overseer Joxer Tierney (Percy Herbert). A slave revolt is in the offing although no-one on San Cristobal can see it coming. Sir Charles uncovers the horrifying truth about his brother and he is also caught up in Lady Susan’s dangerous sexual games. The violence is pretty much non-stop and builds to a frightening crescendo.

One of the major problems with this film is that Meyer seemed to want to make a sincere and serious anti-slavery film but at the same time he was trying to make an exploitation film (which is after all what he was good at). There’s violence in most of Meyer’s movies but it’s always very stylised and very cartoonish and mostly played for laughs. The violence in Blacksnake is the exception to this rule - it’s over-the-top but it’s also horrifyingly realistic. This was obviously a conscious decision by Meyer but it can be a bit jarring since there’s also (as always in Meyer’s films) a fair amount of comedy.

An even bigger problem is that I’m not sure exactly what kind of audience he expected to reach. Fans of his earlier films were not going to like the combination of realistic violence and virtually no sex and nudity. Earnest white liberals who liked message movies such as Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and To Kill a Mockingbird were not going to deal with the sadistic violence. Blaxploitation fans were not going to like it because there’s no black hero to relate to. The one memorable black character is Captain Raymond Daladier, an effeminate French-speaking homosexual. Art-house audiences were not going to go to see a movie by a disreputable exploitation film-maker (Meyer would eventually gain a following among the film school crowd but that was some years in the future). Mainstream audiences were going to be shocked and mystified. So the danger was that it would end up finding no audience at all, which was in fact what happened.

The biggest problem of all is the acting. Percy Herbert gives the sort of performance that would have been perfect in a typical Meyer movie but it doesn’t quite work in this one. David Warbeck is atrocious. He’s both bland and irritating and comes across as a pompous do-gooder. Bernard Boston’s performance is an absolute delight but it’s as if the the major male characters are all characters in entirely different movies.

And then there’s Anouska Hempel. Nobody has a good word for her performance. Personally I don’t think she’s all that bad but again there’s the problem of the movie being unable to decide if it’s going to be serious or campy. Hempel is slightly too over-the-top for her character to be taken seriously but she’s not excessive enough or sufficiently larger-than-life to make Lady Susan work as a cartoon villainess.

Yet another problem is that there is zero sexual heat in this movie. The most successful of all movies in this slavesploitation sub-genre was Mandingo and it was successful because it had lots and lots of sexual heat which made the violence and sadism easier to endure. With all its other faults Blacksnake could have worked if it had had that kind of overheated perverse sexual tension. Anouska Hempel’s performance is however entirely sexless. Even the brief moments of nudity manage to be sexless. I don’t think it was entirely her fault - with a leading man like David Warbeck giving the impression he didn’t even want to touch a woman she had nothing whatever to work with. Many Meyer fans feel that the problem was that she did not have the kinds of physical attributes that one expects from a leading lady in a Russ Meyer film. That may have been a problem in that Meyer thought she was too flat-chested to be sexy and I guess it’s a bit difficult to motivate yourself to convey sexiness if your director thinks you have zero sex appeal. I don’t really think this was the real problem though. She may not have had the bust measurements of a typical Meyer starlet but Anouska Hempel was still a very attractive young woman.

What it comes down to is that for the story to work we have to believe that Lady Susan is the sort of woman who can drive men crazy with lust and the sort of woman who has insatiable lusts of her own and we just don’t believe it. So we have a Russ Meyer movie totally lacking in sexiness and largely lacking in fun.

It’s not a total loss. Blacksnake was shot on location in Barbados and it looks sensational. It’s also very stylish. It’s not quite Meyer’s usual style (there’s not so much emphasis on lightning-fast editing) but it works and he does come up with some very striking (and occasionally very powerful) images.

The best thing about Blacksnake is that its failure finally convinced Meyer to forget mainstream audiences and mainstream critics altogether and go back to making the kinds of movies he liked making. It also seems to have convinced him to go back to doing his own cinematography and his own editing. His next movie would be the wonderful Supervixens, which is just about the archetypal Russ Meyer movie. Blacksnake is a failure, although it’s an interesting failure and worth a look if you’re a dedicated Meyer fan.

Soul Vengeance (1975)

There are bizarre movies and there are really bizarre movies. And then there’s Soul Vengeance. Bizarre is simply a hopelessly inadequate word to describe this 1975 blaxploitation flick.

It starts off appearing to be a fairly routine blaxploitation feature. A drug deal goes wrong when the cops turn up. They pursue the two black suspects. A prostitute working the streets tries to help one of them escape. Then the cops set off for the precinct house with one of the suspects. So far pretty standard stuff.

Then one of the cops tells him partner to pull off into a laneway so he can work the suspect over. He gets more than a little carried away. And now the movie makes its first turn towards weirdness. The cop tries to castrate the black dude. OK, maybe not too weird, but keep watching.

Then we find out why the cop was so excited. On a stakeout he and his partner spot a black drug dealer having sex with a white woman. Only the white woman happens to be the crazy cop’s wife. And then we find out that the said cop just can’t cut the mustard in the bedroom any more which is why his wife is looking for satisfaction elsewhere.

The black guy we saw being arrested earlier is named Charles and three years later he’s released from prison. He wants revenge on the cops who busted him, and on the prosecutor and the judge who sent him down as well. It still doesn’t sound too strange, but like I said, keep watching. Charles had a girlfriend named Twyla, but she’s now working as a stripper and shacked up with a really nasty bad guy.

Charles has met up with the hooker who tried to help him three years earlier and they fall in love and move in together. But Charles is still determined to have his revenge. And now we come to the method by which he does this. It seems that the crazed cop didn’t manage to cut his manhood off, but for some obscure reason (which may have been explained but I missed it) his manhood has now mutated into a gigantic Penis of Death. The Penis of Death has a number of useful properties. It can (temporarily at least) turn women into zombie-like slaves. And it can be used to strangle his enemies. I told you this was going to get weird.

Now you might think that any movie as twisted and odd as this has to be entertaining at the very least. Unfortunately Soul Vengeance has some major problems. The pacing is glacial. The acting is exceptionally bad but it’s not bad in an entertaining Z-movie way, it’s just bad in a dull way.

And while the premise would seem to be ideally suited to a rather campy over-the-top approach writer-director Jamaa Fanaka instead tries to get arty. With very mixed results.

The Region 4 DVD release seems to be uncut, so the incoherence of the plot can’t be blamed on missing footage. This DVD is also widescreen but unfortunately it’s a horrendously bad transfer which doesn’t help matters.

Originally released as Welcome Home Brother Charles this movie can’t really be considered a success on any level but it has such a massive weirdness factor that despite its serious flaws it’s worth seeing just for that reason. It’s the sort of movie that sounds too improbable to exist but it’s real. The 70s were truly a golden age for eccentric movies.

Foxy Brown (1974)

You can’t really go wrong with a blaxploitation flick directed by Jack Hill and starring Pam Grier. While Foxy Brown isn’t quite as good as their first blaxploitation collaboration, Coffy, it’s still enormous fun.

Pam Grier is Foxy Brown, a smart woman with plenty of attitude and confidence but some real problems. Her biggest problem is her loser of a brother. It’s not just that he’s an habitual criminal, he’s also the world’s most unsuccessful criminal. Foxy has to get him out of one jam after another.

Her other problem is her boyfriend. He’s a nice guy and they’re totally in love, but he’s also an undercover federal narcotics cop with a price on his head. At the moment the bad guys think he’s dead, and he’s had plastic surgery to change his appearance. It was a good plan, and it might have worked except for Foxy’s low-life brother. He has no morals, but he has a naturally suspicious mind, and he notices that Foxy’s new boyfriend Michael reminds him vaguely of the old undercover cop one. And he senses that this insight could be worth some money to him.

Pretty soon Foxy finds herself going up against the big drug boss, a beautiful but exceptionally ruthless white woman. This crime ring also runs a stable of high-class call-girls, but their job is not to take money for the organisation but to provide sexual favours to powerful judges, law-makers, politicians, cops, etc. This is the reason the police have found it so difficult to get convictions against members of this organisation. Foxy decides to apply for a job as a call-girl. Given her glamour and her spectacular figure she has no problems getting in. She and another girl are sent out on an assignment to keep a judge happy. He likes black girls, and being provided with two beautiful black girls should certainly keep him onside. The other hooker, Claudia, turns out to be less than happy with her employees and she’s also a rather feisty lady so she’s happy to help Foxy bring down the evil crime queen.

There’s the usual mix of action with a touch of camp that you expect from Jack Hill. The violence isn’t graphic, but it’s done with style. There’s some nudity, but not much. Pam Grier takes her clothes off less often than usual. There’s outrageous 1970s interior design and fashions, and lots of afros.

Pam Grier was so good in these types of movies because she was more than just a hot body combined with kickass attitude. She has a basic likeability so you always want to see her get the better of the bad guys.

The plot is fairly silly, but in an exploitation movie that’s more likely to be an advantage than otherwise. The main thing is it’s an adrenaline-charged 90 minutes of entertainment with style, and it never makes the mistake of taking itself seriously.

If you’re new to blaxploitation or if you’re not familiar with the fabulous Pam Grier then Coffy is probably a better place to start, but Foxy Brown is fun in its own right. It’s also great to see a movie in which a black woman requires no help from the men in her life in order to sort out her problems, and their problems as well. And she does this with a mix of kickass attitude, intelligence and guts.

The Region 2 DVD is what you expect from MGM. The movie looks good, but there’s a shameful lack of extras. But if you shop around you can pick this one up very cheaply indeed.

T.N.T. Jackson (1975)

The premise of T.N.T. Jackson is simple. If blaxploitation movies are fun, and king fu movies are fun, then a blaxploitation king fu movie has to be a sure-fire winner. And, in its own trashy way, this is a highly entertaining little flick.

Diana “T. N. T.” Jackson is a young black female king fu fighter who arrives in Hong Kong looking for her missing brother. She quickly finds herself embroiled with sundry gangsters involved in heroin trafficking. And it seems that a major gangland war is about to erupt, with heroin shipments being hijacked to the accompaniment of much bloodshed. T. N. T. befriends a Chinese guy named Joe who is not quite a gangster but not quite a law-abiding citizen either, and she makes the acquaintance of a white American woman named Elaine who is the girlfriend of one of the criminal kingpins. T. N. T. and Elaine dislike each other on sight, so you know they’re going to come to blows at some stage, which becomes even more certain when it turns out that Elaine is a king fu expert as well, and that she is not at all what she appears to be.

More significant in plot term is Charlie, an ambitious black guy (and the numero uno king fu expert in the Hong Kong crime scene) functioning as right-hand man to a major crime lord. You just know he and T. N. T. will end up in bed together, and that they will also have to have a major fight scene together.

There’s lots of mayhem, some moderately graphic violence, and some sex and nudity. It’s a pretty standard 70s exploitation formula, but it’s executed with energy and a certain amount of style, and at only 72 action-packed minutes there’s little chance of boredom setting in. This is another of the Roger Corman-produced movies of the 70s (along with films like The Big Doll House) made partly in the Philippines, although there seems to have been some location shooting in Hong Kong as well.

Former Playboy playmate of the month Jeannie Bell stars as T. N. T. She’s at least moderately convincing in the action sequences, and she has a certain presence. She’s no Pam Grier, but she’s adequate. This movie belongs very much at the cheap and trashy end of the blaxploitation spectrum but it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than that, and it delivers solid entertainment. If you’re a fan of blaxploitation, king fu movies or 70 exploitation fare in general then you’re unlikely to have any real complaints.

Coffy (1973)

Jack Hill’s Coffy is a tale of vegeance. Coffy is a black woman whose sister is languishing in a drug rehab centre. Coffy sets out to destroy those she sees as being responsible for destroying her sister’s life. Within the first few minutes of the film two men have ready met violent deaths at Coffy’s hands. And she’s only just started.

In the course of her revenge spree she uncovers a web of corruption and deceit, of crooked cops and sleazy politicians. As director Jack Hill points out in his excellent commentary track, he didn’t want to make his central character a martial arts expert, a professional killer or a superhero. She’s just an ordinary woman pushed over the edge, and she spends the movie in what is essentially a dream state, a kind of warrior trance which allows her to do things she would never consider doing at any other time.

That the movie works so well is due in no small measure to Pam Grier’s performance as Coffy. She’d already established her credentials as an entertaining and charismatic performer in exploitation movies, but Coffy gave her the chance to do some real acting as well. And, despite the outrageous and rather unlikely plot, she makes Coffy a believable and compelling character. In fact the acting in general in this movie is remarkably good by exploitation movie standards. Hill deliberately cast several key actors against type, and they repaid him with wonderful performances.

The movie itself is a fairly violent action thriller, but it never becomes a dumb action movie. Even minor characters have real depth. I particularly like the way Hill sets up characters so that initially they appear to be mere stereotypes (like the pimp King George and his call-girl girlfriend) and then shows us that they’re real people.

This was Hill’s first movie for American International Pictures and the experience as apparently anything but a pleasant one for him. They threatened to fire him several times for spending too much time on developing characters and not enough on action, but he stuck to his guns and had the last laugh when Coffy turned out to be a major box office hit.

It’s a stylish and highly entertaining movie, combining sizeable quantities of mayhem and enormous quantities of gratuitous nudity. The nudity is so gratuitous, and so obviously gratuitous, that it becomes rather amusing. The commentary track is the only significant extra on the Region 1 DVD, but it’s a very worthwhile one. If you’re already a Pam Grier fan I don’t need to tell you to see Coffy. If you’re already a fan of hers, this movie should be mote than sufficient to convert you. Highly recommended.

Mandingo (1975)

Mandingo, released in 1975, is one of the most notorious of all bad movies, an outrageously lurid blaxploitation epic about slavery, a bit like a camp version of Gone with the Wind with lots of interracial sex. At least that’s how it was viewed at the time, and that’s the view of this film that largely prevails to this day. Quentin Tarantino famously described it as "a big-budget exploitation movie on a par with Showgirls."

But is this an accurate view of the movie? Is it possible that both audiences and critics
have watched this movie without actually seeing it? That the comforting assumption that it’s a so-bad-it’s-good trashy movie has allowed people to avoid confronting the awful truth, that the film-makers mean exactly what they’re saying, and that it’s intended to depict the reality of the slave-owning society in Louisiana in the 1840s. And it’s allowed them to avoid an even more unpalatable thought - that the movie may have succeeded in doing just that.

Mandingo is certainly melodramatic, but it’s melodramatic in the style of the best southern gothic. James Mason is Warren Maxwell, owner of Falconhurst. Maxwell’s plantation is essentially a breeding farm for slaves. He dreams of obtaining a pure-bred mandingo male, the very best breeding stock there is. He also dreams of having a grandson to carry on the family’s proud traditions. His son Hammond is less than keen, but is persuaded to marry his cousin Blanche. She is also breeding stock of the best kind. To console himself, Hammond buys a new bed wench for himself, an attractive female slave named Ellen.

He is not comfortable with the idea of having sex with a white lady, and he’s fairly sure white ladies don’t like having sex anyway. He’s always confined himself to sex with slaves and whores. His enthusiasm for his slave bed partners, and his odd tenderness towards them, is something that has been worrying his daddy quite a bit. Hammond is however willing to do his husbandly duty with his new wife, until his wedding night when he discovers that his new bride is no virgin! He’s had enough sex with virgins to know such things, since he always likes to be the first to break in a new breeding female. It’s a sort of family tradition. He is of course appalled that Blanche has already been “pleasured” by a man. It’s just as well she hasn’t told him that the man in question was her brother (which is possibly one of her family’s proud traditions).

Naturally he no longer wishes to have any physical contact with a woman who is no better than a whore, and he is further repulsed by Blanche’s obvious desire for sex. Blanche is left without any outlet for her appetites, until she decides that perhaps she should sample some “black meat” as well. Obviously there are troubled times ahead for Falconhurst.

While the plot does sound exceptionally lurid, the treatment of the material is absolutely straight. The movie is horrifyingly direct and honest in confronting the evils of slavery, and not just the obvious evils but the corrosive moral effect on everyone involved, victim and oppressor. In that sense it reminds me a little of Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (another movie that continues to make people uncomfortable). It is unflinching in depicting the brutality of slavery, but even more so in exploring the almost unimaginable everyday degradations that are part and parcel of a society that treats humans like livestock.

It also has a good deal to say about the position of women in such a society. Blanche is eventually treated in exactly the same way a slave would be treated, although I won’t spoil the plot by telling you the details. Susan George’s frenzied performance’s as Blanche is a highlight of the movie. She’s over-the-top, but I think she’s perfectly correct to play the part that way. She knows exactly what she’s doing. James Mason takes a similar approach, and again it works. Perry King as Hammond is much more low-key. Despite the exaggerated performances none of the characters come across as mere stereotypes. There’s a humanness to them that makes them even more horrifying than a stereotype would be.

It turns out that Tarantino’s comparison of this movie to Showgirls was strangely apt, although whether Tarantino himself understood just how apt the comparison was is an open question. Both are movies that have been monumentally and willfully misunderstood. And while both appear on the surface to be exploitation movies, that’s exactly what they are not. It’s not surprising that the recent DVD release contains no extras whatsoever. An audio commentary for example might reveal the unpleasant truth that this movie is in fact in deadly earnest. Mandingo is still too confronting to be taken seriously.

The Arena (1974)

With women-in-prison movies like The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage proving to be nice little earners for New World Pictures the temptation was to just keep churning them out. But for The Arena in 1974 they decided to vary the formula a little. Instead of a women-in-prison movie, we have a women-slaves movie set in the Roman Empire. And with Pam Grier heading the cast, how could it lose?

The dynamics are very similar to the WiP genre (and somehow the producers even managed to work in the obligatory shower scene!) with the women initially fighting among themselves, then eventually having to learn to stand together in order to survive. The female slaves are intended as sex slaves for the male gladiators, but then their owner gets the bright idea of using them as women gladiators. So we not only get the standard female fight scenes, we get to see them fighting each other with swords and tridents as well. There’s also plenty of nudity and sex - in fact all the standard exploitation elements.

When one of the women has to kill one of her friends in the arena they decide enough is enough, and start making plans to escape. This leads to much mayhem an considerable action, and it’s done pretty well despite an obviously very limited budget. Pam Grier has a much more rewarding role in this one compared to The Big Doll House, and she makes the most of it. Margaret Markov is her chief rival who becomes her chief ally, and she’s pretty impressive as well. It’s all great fun, the gladiatorial scenes in the arena are splendid, and it’s really a must-see for exploitation fans, and of course for fans of Pam Grier.

It would be nice to be able to say something positive about the Region 4 DVD release, but I can’t. It’s just awful. It’s a grainy pan and scanned print and it looks fairly terrible. It sounds like it’s the same transfer as the Region 2 release. If you can pick it up cheaply though it’s a highly entertaining little movie.

Super Fly (1972)

Priest, the hero of the 1972 blaxploitation classic Super Fly, is a coke dealer who who wants to make one last big score and then get out. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, but he knows this is not it. He appears to have it all. He has the fancy car, the flash apartment in New York city, the cool threads, and two beautiful girlfriends - one white and one black. But as he says, he’d like to get out of this life before he finds himself having to kill someone, or someone kills him.

There’s a serious political edge to Super Fly. The life Priest leads is not one he would have chosen willingly, but as a black man he has few options. Blaxploitation movies were also among the first American movies to show the corruption and casual brutality, and the racism, of the police.

Made on a shoestring budget, this movie oozes style and energy and features a great soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield. Ron O’Neal plays Priest absolutely straight, and it works. This is not a cartoonish or campy movie. It’s also nowhere near as violent as you might expect. The impact of the film comes from the sense of people being trapped in lives that are slowly destroying their humanity, rather than from overt violence. The threat of violence is always there however.

First-time director Gordon Parks Jr does a fine job. His tragically early death in an air crash robbed American cinema of a very promising talent. The acting is terrific, with Carl Lee providing both menace and amusement in his over-the-top portrayal of Priest’s business partner. Shiela Frazier is impressive as Georgia, who loves Priest and struggles to understand his sense of alienation and frustration. There’s a very well-done love scene between Priest and Georgia that serves as a telling illustration of the way that sex was done so much better in the movies of the 70s compared to today.

And then there are the clothes! They’re truly amazing. Yes, they’re outrageously 70s, but they’re fun and they’re a great example of fashion being used as an expression of growing sense of confidence among urban blacks. And Nate Adams, who was responsible for the costumes, still has most of them (much to the horror of his wife) and proudly shows them off in one of the extras! We also get a brief interview with the guy who did the customising on the Caddy that Priest drives. In fact the extras are superb. Although it’s a budget-priced DVD Warner Brothers have given us premium selection of extras. It’s great to see a cult or exploitation movie getting such a respectful DVD release! Super Fly is both an important film and an outrageously entertaining movie.

The Big Doll House (1971)

The success of Jess Franco’s 99 Women triggered a wave of women-in-prison movies. None were as good as 99 Women, but The Big Doll House does have its own appeal. Directed by Jack Hill and released in 1971, if features all the elements of a classic WiP movie – there’s the sadistic female prison guard, the insane prison governor, the tough lesbian, the junkie, the sympathetic but ineffectual prison doctor and the naïve newbie. There’s the obligatory shower scene, there are beatings, lots of implied lesbianism, and there’s the rebellion of the prisoners. All combined with some classic (but highly entertaining) bad acting. These ingredients are blended with a certain amount of flair and the result is a must for fans of this sub-genre.

Judith Brown is Collier, the new girl in a brutal women’s prison in an unnamed South-East Asian country (it was filmed in the Philippines), sent down for 99 years for the murder of her rich husband. Her cell-mates include the three toughest women in the prison. There’s Bodine, the hard-bitten but idealistic revolutionary. There’s Alcott (Roberta Collins in a memorably outrageous performance), blonde and pretty but as hard as nails and the facto queen of the prison. And lastly there’s Grear, the tough black lesbian (played by the queen of 70s blaxploitation movies, Pam Grier). Collier finds herself torn between Alcott and Grear, Grear already has a girlfriend, a junkie, but she appears to be interested in grooming Collier as a replacement. Collier meanwhile has allied herself with Alcott in the hope that she’ll save her from a Fate Worse Than Death at the hands of Grear. When Lucian (the sadistic female prison guard played with relish by Kathryn Loder) goes too far an escape plot is hatched. There are also a couple of sleazy guys who deliver food to the gaol and bring treats to the prisoners in exchange for being allowed to feel them up. The sleaze factor in this movie is quite remarkably high really. These two bozos get caught up in the escape attempt.

The acting in general is perfect for the type of movie it is, with Roberta Collins and Kathryn Loder being especially over-the-top, while Christiane Schmidtmer as the very strange prison governor is also fun. It’s all very camp, fast-paced and very violent and If you like WiP movies you’ll certainly enjoy this one.

Blacula (1972)

After hearing so many good things about Blacula I just had to see it. And it’s splendid fun! William Marshall isn’t just good; he’s one of the classic screen vampires. Having a classically trained actor play the role of the black vampire, and having him play it straight, was a slightly surprising choice but it worked superbly. Actually the acting in general was pretty good for an exploitation flick. In common with the other blaxploitation movies I’ve seen recently it really didn’t strike me as being racist.

The movie starts with an African prince in Europe in the 18th century, trying to drum up support for a campaign against slavery. He encounters Count Dracula, and is transformed into a vampire and cursed by the count. Two hundred years later a couple of gay interior decorators (with the kind of gay stereotyping you’d never get away with these days) buy up the estate of a deceased European nobleman. The estate includes a coffin, and once they get it back to Los Angeles they decide to open it (these guys have never seen a horror movie so they don’t realise what a bad idea this is likely to be) and Blacula is unleashed on the streets of LA. Having Blacula as a cultured aristocrat himself, rather than an urban street hipster, works extremely well. The whole movie is played pretty straight, and it works as a highly entertaining vampire movie. Plus you get some groovy 70 threads, and some outrageous early 70s music and dancing - what more could you want?

Shaft (1971)

Despite the 1971 fashions and the 1971 urban hip slang Shaft is a movie that has aged surprisingly well. Partly it’s because the acting is not only generally competent, it’s also somewhat understated. The temptation to go totally over-the-top is resisted, and the dialogue is delivered with such conviction that even though it should sound embarrassing, it somehow sounds right. Richard Roundtree is even able to get away with lines like “Can you dig it, man?” Roundtree actually is extremely good – he has plenty of attitude, he doesn’t take any crap from anybody, and he’s not averse to forceful expressions of indignation (to say the least) when he encounters racism, but he doesn’t overdo it. He plays Shaft as a man who gets angry when there’s a reason to be angry, but he doesn’t play him as an angry man. In fact Shaft is basically a guy who is doing OK in life and he’s enjoying himself. It’s possible that the movie struck such a chord among black audiences at the time for precisely that reason – it has a black protagonist who is in control of his life and although he has problems like everyone else he’s having a pretty good time. Shaft of course is a movie with not only a mainly African-American cast but also an African-American director, Gordon Parks. Parks is careful not only to avoid black stereotypes but also white stereotypes as well. Most of the bad guys are white, but they’re bad guys because they’re gangsters, not because they’re white, and the black gangsters are portrayed as being just as vicious as the white ones. And the white detective who is involved in the case is a decent guy (a very good performance by Charles Cioffi in a role that could easily have become a clichéd crusty cop with a heart of gold but doesn’t).

The plot of the movie is, well really it’s so threadbare it’s hardly there at all (black gangster hires black private eye John Shaft to retrieve his daughter kidnapped by rival gangsters), but you don’t watch a private eye movie for the plot, you watch it for the atmosphere and the attitude, and in those areas Shaft delivers the goods. And it’s a great deal of fun. With wonderfully quotable 70s hipster dialogue. The print shown by TCM was very grungy. They may have cleaned it up for the DVD release. I hope not, since I’m sure Parks intended the movie to look nicely grungy. This wasn’t the first blaxploitation movie, but it was the movie that established the genre at the box office. Plus you get to hear the classic Isaac Hayes theme song for which he picked up an Oscar!

Cleopatra Jones (1973)

The blaxploitation genre is something I somehow managed to miss, so 1973’s Cleopatra Jones is really the first movie of this type that I‘ve seen. Cleopatra Jones is a government agent who becomes embroiled in a gang war involving a sinister criminal mastermind, Mommy (an amazingly camp but highly entertaining performance by Shelley Winters). Cleopatra Jones is clearly aimed at a multi-racial audience, so we have some sympathetic white cops and the kind of institutionalised racism that must have been commonplace in police forces at the time is severely down-played. If you’re looking for a movie that genuinely challenges racial stereotypes this isn’t it. Tamara Dobson is fun in the title role, and the whole thing is harmless and amusing fun.