"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Brotherhood of Death

BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH is one of those low budget exploitation movies that promises a seemingly can’t-lose premise and then doesn’t much deliver on it. Oh well, it’s still kinda fun. With the tagline “Watch the brothers stick it to the Klan!,” it tells the story of a group of black friends (some of them played by members of the Washington Redskins, I guess) who go off to Vietnam, and become Special Forces badasses. When they get back home they discover that not much has changed. The Klan are terrorizing and raping black people and the police aren’t much help because… well, because the police here are the Klan, it’s mostly the same group of guys, just wearing different uniforms. So – much too late in the movie – these vets do exactly what Doug Llewelyn used to tell us not to do: take the law into their own hands. They apply what they learned in ‘Nam to the situation.

When we first meet them they’re driving around in a school bus like hippies, getting drunk off their asses. They get into a conflict with a guy at the gas station who’s clearly a racist piece of shit. I gotta side with them while also admitting that they started it.

Apparently they do shit like this all the time. They’re considered troublemakers around town, and since they’re the self-proclaimed “A #1 reason for [the Klan] getting back into gear” they decide to enlist as a way to lay low for a while. The Vietnam scenes definitely look like they’re shot in Maryland like the rest of the movie. There’s some stock footage and some low rent sneaking-around-in-the-grass scenes and then they’re recruited by a dude who gives them elite training about booby traps and shit. But also they smoke weed and invest in some of that good shit to bring back home and sell. They are not great American heroes, to be honest.

The drug dealing subplot is immediately abandoned and they come back home to their favorite bar, where they get very drunk on Budweiser with their friend the bartender. The next day, a black couple is playing around in the woods, about to have sex, when three rednecks come along, beat up the guy, and one named Leroy (Ron David, FIREBACK) chases and rapes the woman. “The cops don’t give a shit” and “that’s just the way things are around here” so one of our vets jumps Leroy that night.

The sheriff (Bryan Clark, later known for Folger’s ads and for playing Ronald Reagan in GUTS AND GLORY: THE RISE AND FALL OF OLIVER NORTH, WITHOUT WARNING: THE JAMES BRADY STORY, PIZZA MAN, RICKOVER: THE BIRTH OF NUCLEAR POWER and an episode of Dark Skies) comes to talk to Leroy the next day. This Sheriff Jim is a really interesting character, a sort of redneck John Wayne who has had enough of these people’s shit so he comes and gets Leroy to tell his phony story of between five and eight men (but he uses a racial slur) “rampaging” and attacking him. Then the sheriff tells Leroy off, says that he knows very well the reason he got beat up is because he’s a rapist.

The weird thing is the sheriff comes across like the hero of a western and the only guy within the system – in fact, the only white person at all – who is standing up to the Klan. And yet… the motherfucker is willing to compromise on the rape, as if it’s some small infraction! He’s going to let it go if they’ll behave better from now on.

For their part, the town’s black community makes a good faith effort to work within the system to improve things. They rally at the church and plan a voter registration drive to try to get better representation in the local government. They use the bus to bring people in. The hick behind the desk at city hall is so aghast at the line out the door that wacky ragtime music plays.

But the Klan strikes back. They burn down the church (in stock footage) and celebrate. Their top guy, county attorney Harold Turner (Rick Ellis), wears a pink robe and makes a big speech about stopping “those who would dare to defile our Christian civilization.” To them protecting Christianity means murdering a local black man named Newt Biggars (football player Mike Thomas) and pretending Raymond did it, torturing him with a cigarette until the Sheriff walks in on it and clears him by doing a powder burn test.

Later Raymond convinces the Sheriff he should do the same test for Turner, so they go together to his house. If not for my issues with the Sheriff’s handling of the rape case this would be a great mismatched duo of heroic badasses here. But it becomes a chess (or, let’s be honest, checkers) game of the Ku Klux Kops trying to create a distraction to prevent the sheriff from knowing for sure that Turner is guilty.

We finally get what we’ve been waiting for briefly at the very end. The vets (in uniform even) blow away robed Klansmen, popping up out of trap doors, catching them in booby traps, etc. Then they drive away in their bus as the funk plays. It ends on a freeze frame of what definitely appears to be a real billboard saying “HELP FIGHT COMMUNISM & INTERGRATION [sic], JOIN & SUPPORT UNITED KLANS OF AMERICA INC., KKKK WELCOMES YOU TO SMITHFIELD.” Sure enough, I read that the filmmakers traveled to Smithfield, North Carolina to film this scene because the billboard was still hanging. Can you believe that? This was in 1976! Not the Jim Crow era or the Trump era. Crazy.

This would be a really good movie to remake. Start either after or in Vietnam, have them returning home and make it a full-on action movie. Period might make the most sense, but maybe not. I guess it really doesn’t have to be a remake, it’s a generic enough premise if they leave out the school bus. Just make more movies with badasses protecting towns from white supremacists. That’s what I want to see. (Maybe in the comments we should make a list of movies about that sort of thing. BEST OF THE BEST 3 comes to mind.)

A modern version would not be likely to match the funky soundtrack by John Lewis – not the legendary civil rights hero and congressman, but the one who also did music for ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW and EMMANUELLE 4: CONCEALED FANTASY. Here he contributes typically enjoyable blaxploitation grooves and the opening and closing credits song “High Horse” sung by Barbara Lann. Otherwise pretty much every aspect of this movie would be easy to improve on.

BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH was the brainchild of producer Ronald K. Goldman, who had started as a producer of the Robert Blake movie CORKY, but otherwise only did blaxploitation: SWEET JESUS PREACHERMAN, THE BLACK GESTAPO, and one more after this, THE HITTER.

Writer/director Bill Berry only helmed one other movie, a 1987 comedy called OFF THE MARK, but he continued to work behind the scenes as various types of producers on NIGHT OF THE DEMONS 2, LEPRECHAUN 3, CHILDREN OF THE CORN 666, HOUSE OF THE DEAD 2, etc.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2017 at 11:02 am and is filed under Action, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

11 Responses to “Brotherhood of Death”

  1. The movie this review made me think of was THE BLACK GESTAPO, and sure enough, it’s from the same producer. You should check that out, Vern. It’s got a similar plot but it gets more into the Malcolm X vs. MLK philosophical divide concerning the proper method of stick it to The Man. It’s also just pretty fuckin’ hardcore all around. I recommend it.

  2. WHITE SUPREMACIST ROAD TRIP aka DEAD BANG should go on the list.

  3. I love when exploitation movies would shoot their Vietnam flashback scenes in any available field, regardless of how un-Vietnam like the terrain was. Just throw up a title card, spread around some M-16s (or one M16 that everybody shared) and try to keep the McDonald’s sign out of the shot.

  4. flyingguillotine

    March 30th, 2017 at 9:06 am

    Vern, I recall a while ago you reviewed an indie action film that was basically about a ninja who pulls a COOL AS ICE and ends up in a small town fighting the Klan.

  5. I watched this a couple of years ago after Haskell Vaugh Anderson III (Taylor in KICKBOXER) mentioned in an interview with a podcast that this was his first starring role. I agree with your assessment, brilliant premise but disappointing execution. Still pretty entertaining though.

  6. Lovecraft In Brooklyn

    April 4th, 2017 at 1:50 am

    One of the original Sherlock Holmes stories has him fighting a Klan agent in London; you think it’d be more ambiguously racist but nope he’s like ‘Watson, the KKK are a bunch of assholes, their goals suck, we’re gonna help their victims’, but he says it in British.

  7. Link for any lazy screenwriters who want to make this happen, with the knowledge that Holmes enjoys tremendous name recognition in the lucrative 18-36 demographic AND is safely in the public domain: I believe the Holmes story Lovecraft is referring to is “Five Orange Pipes.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Orange_Pips

    And yes, I’m aware of the irony of someone named Lovecraft advocating on behalf of an anti-KKK story.

  8. I just had interesting idea for a movie – to reverse the roles!
    Like there’s a small group of white friends in all-black neigbourhood, blacks terrorize them but being humble guys they never fight back until one night two white girls are raped and killed. Now it’s time for those white guys to stand up against black nazis.

  9. Sigh. I don’t know why I bother.

  10. ahv – that would be a great idea for a movie in the alternate reality of that movie WHITE MAN’S BURDEN. In the actual world it would bring up different issues but I do recommend you make it if that’s what you have in your heart, just so the people in your life know what they’re dealing with.

    thanks ahv

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