The titular Santa who gets the also titular revenge is played by an actor I really like, Ken Foree. Of course I always knew him as Peter from DAWN OF THE DEAD. Through the ’80s he mainly did TV guest star gigs on Knight Rider and Scarecrow and Mrs. King and shit like that, with only the occasional movie appearance like JOJO DANCER YOUR LIFE IS CALLING or FROM BEYOND to fulfill any of his potential. I was real excited when I recognized him in LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III (his Good Samaritan survivalist character is an enjoyable part of a not-great movie) and like alot of horror fans I always wished he would show up more.

That seemed to sort of happen after 2005 when he played the Lando Calrissian type character in THE DEVIL’S REJECTS that welcomes Captain Spaulding to the safety of his brothel. Now he’s one of the Rob Zombie players, showing up in all the Zombie pictures, and like Sid Haig that means he also gets a bunch of side-work in movies so low-rent even I wouldn’t think about watching them. I could be wrong, so please let me know if you know of a good one, but I got no faith in most of ‘em. I made the mistake of trying to watch that NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 3D with Haig and it made the DAY OF THE DEAD remake seem pretty good by comparison.

Anyway BLACK SANTA’S REVENGE is pretty much what the title says it is. It’s a violent revenge tale about a guy who dresses as Santa for poor kids at a community center that takes toy donations that they’re actually gonna give to the kids that asked for them. Then some assholes steal all the toys at gunpoint and say they hate Christmas.

Now Santa has a headwound and he’s depressed as shit, fantasizing about a kid calling him “nothin but a punk ass beeyitch” for not following through with the presents, having a drink at a titty bar. Suddenly he notices one of the toy-thieves, follows him to a warehouse and murders everybody involved in the toy-donation-thieving ring. There is a little bit of Santa-themed dialogue, for example he yells “Ho ho ho, you naughty motherfuckers!” as he opens his attack, and a thug bangs his head against the ground while grunting “Milk drinkin… cookie eatin… mother… fucker!”

There are little references that you’d expect from Badazz Mofo – a Jim Kelly line from ENTER THE DRAGON, a Dolemite phrase (”rat soup eating motherfucker” of course), a song listed on the credits as “Sounds Like John Carpenter Theme.” But thankfully it treats it more seriously than as a joke, despite the obvious absurdity. I do think it would work alot better if it made a little more sense – like, what charity has a Santa that promises specific toys to kids planning to really give it to them from donations? And how are we supposed to believe that some guy is gonna get money from selling shitty used teddy bears? He’d have trouble moving them at a garage sale.

I guess I don’t believe it, but if it was gonna be phony anyway it could’ve had some ridiculous explanation, like somebody accidentally donated a doll full of a superdrug or something, I don’t know.

Also, why is he Black Santa? Is it because white Santas don’t volunteer at the community center, even though most of the kids there are white? It doesn’t seem to make a difference in the story at all. Does anybody ever give him shit about not fitting the common image of whitey Santa? They don’t really deal with it. I guess I like my blaxploitation to have some kind of racial conflict, like the racist white sheriff who loses his wife to Dolemite, or Mamuwalde refusing to deal with Dracula because he’s a slave trader. But I guess that wouldn’t be in the spirit of Christmas to have that kind of divisiveness in here. Instead Walker chooses to honor the spirit of the holiday by emphasizing the importance of charity, and by delivering savage vengeance upon those who fuck with charity.

I can’t really say you need to seek this out. It seems like probly exactly what it is – some film fans who decided to have fun trying to make one. They probly regret a few things and they probly learned things they would use if they tried again. I would be happy to regret a couple of bad green screen shots on their behalf (like the shot where a door opens onto what appears to be a stretched jpeg of some toys).

It’s not great. But I like that it’s not as smart-assed as I expected. It’s not really Troma-esque in tone. It even ends on a sentimental note. Best of all, Foree treats it as a dramatic role and not acting like he’s trying to be funny. And he doesn’t get that many leads so it’s nice to see even a 20 minute short that centers on him. I’d watch a feature version if they made one.

Under Hayes’s super-funky theme song the movie opens with a montage of vintage L.A. lowlife spots: liquor stores, blood banks, pawn shops, a corner where a bunch of old drunks have an awkward slap fight until a cop breaks it up. And I’m pretty sure those are real dudes. The montage also shows the signs for more than ten bail bonds places, which shows that our man Truck has alot of competition.

Hayes is Mack “Truck” Turner, former NFL player turned bounty hunter. He’s a unique blaxploitation hero because he combines the untouchable superfly type with a complete loser. He’s a bad motherfucker, and can handle any situation, but he pisses off his friends, he’s a total slob and he literally smells like pee. His partner’s middle class wife hates his guts, and with good reason, it turns out. We first see Truck asleep in his little apartment surrounded by empty beer cans and garbage from McDonalds, some pizza joint and Dinah’s Fried Chicken. He has a football trophy, a lovingly displayed copy of The Immortal Otis Redding, and one shirt which he realizes his cat pissed on. But he wears it anyway.

He has a really hot girlfriend (Annazette Chase), but his colleagues tease him about it because she’s a klepto, and currently incarcerated. When she gets out he forgets to meet her, then goes to pick her up with beer on his breath and dirt all over his shirt. She says bitterly that he just wants to buy her beer and screw her, so to sweeten the pot he buys her some fried chicken first. She nibbles on it awkwardly, then gives in when he starts kissing her. It’s straight out of one of those books with Fabio on the cover, man. What a smoothie.

Even when he brings her shopping to butter her up (and play a trick on her) it’s at the discount store. That’s one thing I really like about this movie. It’s not all limos and fur coats, it’s small time.

Another thing I like, it has lots of funny dialogue. When he goes to an Air Force base to pick up a child rapist the officer he has to talk to starts talking up the prisoner’s war record. “Look, Major,” Truck says. “I didn’t bring no violin.”

When he gets back to the bail bonds joint and a guy says, “You guys back already?” he deadpans, “Nah.”

Or when they’re going in to try to pick up this pimp named Gator (Paul Harris), he says “Let’s try to take him alive, okay?”

His partner asks, “How hard?” and Truck says, “Don’t strain yourself.”

There’s also some good laughs that just come from good edits. Like when his prisoner says “You’re a big man while I got these cuffs on,” and it smash cuts to the guy in a field with no cuffs on, Truck punching the shit out of him.

And there’s some weird shit in here too. Always gotta be some weird shit for flavor. There’s a white pimp who wears a cowboy shirt and a rhinestone-covered eyepatch. And there’s a pimp funeral where one of the mourners is a ho with a rainbow afro. And there’s a crazy scene where a topless white ho stabs a guy with scissors. I’m not sure but I think she might be the ho that Scatman Crothers refers to as “Stalingrad Crude.” I don’t know, that might be somebody else he’s talking about. This girl doesn’t really look like a Stalingrad.

And here’s a SPOILER but holy shit, they hang Truck’s cat! That’s some cold shit. I wonder if that’s where they got the idea for hanging the koala in THE ADVENTURES OF FORD FAIRLANE.

Movies of this genre can get dull if they don’t deliver enough action. This one doesn’t disappoint. There’s a good car chase, some shootings, some punchings, and a great climactic shootout in a hospital, a decade and a half before HARD BOILED. But instead of the hero carrying a baby to save it the villain carries a little boy as a human shield. Which I’m against.

Another bit I like is during a big chase Gator runs into a bar and hands everybody there fifty dollar bills to beat up the guys that come in behind him (Truck and his partner), and even though he sneaks out the back they really put some effort into it. They follow the honor system. I think that’s admirable. I think. And that might explain alot of these scenes where dudes get beat up by everybody in the bar, it might be missing the part where somebody hands out money to them.

There are two great performances by two great villains. Villain number one is Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols playing a foul-mouthed madam who puts a bounty on Truck’s head after he kills her man Gator. It’s so weird to see Uhura talking so much shit. She just drips with hatred everytime she spits out that n-word. It’s crazy.

But the main villain is Harvard Blue, a rival of Gator who tries to take Truck out in a bid for control of all Los Angeles prostitution. He’s played as a cold-blooded snake by the great Yaphet Kotto. I know people like to laugh at a pimp and his crazy clothes and all that, but Blue is not that kind of pimp. He’s just a scary one. You don’t laugh at his clothes, you get creeped out by the dead look in his eyes. Just watching you at home you feel like he’s gonna beat you with a coathanger and you’re gonna give him all your money.

Kotto is the second name on the credits so I kept waiting for him. He actually doesn’t show up until 45 minutes in, and he has a classic entrance. He pulls up in a car during Gator’s funeral, gets out, walks up to the coffin, spits on the corpse’s face, then turns around and leaves. Not only that but it’s shot from inside the coffin. This is one of the first movies with a dead pimp POV shot. And still one of the best.

Like alot of blaxploitation heroes Truck does some questionable shit. Despite his success with romancing his girl, Truck is not the same smooth lover that recorded the album Hot Buttered Soul. He just doesn’t know how to be a good boyfriend. I definitely side with him in the sneaky way he protects his girl, but I feel that he could have improved communication in his relationships or something.

More importantly that was fucked up when he called his buddy in the middle of the night and told him to go check on the office and got him killed. Shit, Truck. And you wonder why his wife hates you?

Great movie though. It’s written by Oscar Williams (BLACKBELT JONES) and Michael Allin (ENTER THE DRAGON, FLASH GORDON) and directed by Jonathan Kaplan (NIGHT CALL NURSES, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes).

Two undercover brothers (Albert Popwell from the DIRTY HARRY series and some other guy, both returning from part 1) have gone missing during a drug buy in China. They got caught in the middle of a turf war, so they’re in captivity now under the watchful eye of the Dragon Lady (Stella Stevens). She’s kind of a more serious and pouty version of the Mommy character Shelley Winters played in part 1 – an arrogant, dangerous and powerful foe. She owns an island casino staffed with whores first seen with her in a giant all-girl sensual massage party, but later revealed to be her adopted daughters. She’s also a hell of a brawler and swordswoman and often wears a black hat that makes her look like an evil Mary Poppins. Personally I liked Mommy better – she was funnier. But it was probaly wise not to just duplicate her in the sequel.

Cleo teams up with a local P.I. named Mi Ling who’s handy with poison darts and has vast resources including a shooting gallery, a team of motorcylists and a network of street-kid informants. Then they follow the trail right to the casino and take on the Dragon Lady.

Cleo’s fashion is even more crazy this time, more Grace Jones. She wears weird silver paint around her eyes, and Tamara Dobson herself gets the makeup credit (not sure if that means nobody else wanted to put their name on it). She looks hilarious walking around these neighborhoods because she’s black, American, a foot taller than everybody else, and rocking giant hats and colorful plaid. And I thought Seagal stood out in a crowd in BELLY OF THE BEAST. When Cleo goes to the casino she wears a cape and a rhinestone-covered swim cap type hat. An offscreen voice says, “I want to dress just like her!”

Her personality is funny too. Her boss is Normal Fell and whenever he asks her to do something she basically tells him to eat shit. Then she smiles like she’s just being cute with him, but still doesn’t do what he says. But she’s very friendly with Mi Ling, always calling her “girl” or “baby” or at the end “honey child.” When she’s getting beat up and Mi Ling (at that point a mere acquaintance) shows up to save her Cleo says, “Girl, when I looked up and saw you it was like money from home!” She also doesn’t mind playing second fiddle, like when she rides in a motorcycle sidecar with a machine gun filling every motherfucker she sees with a hundred bullets. Alot of lead characters gotta always be the one driving, Cleo doesn’t mind the sidecar.

That first fight was one of my favorites. Dobson (and stunt double)’s lanky frame makes for good visuals, and she moves fast and blunt. It’s a Run Run Shaw production and the only thing blaxploitation about it is the funky soundtrack by Dominic Frontiere. Otherwise it’s pretty much an Americanized martial arts movie like ENTER THE DRAGON. Actually it’s kind of like a less jokey RUSH HOUR.

One action scene is kind of frustrating – a guy on a motorcycle chasing a bad guy on foot. This bad guy’s not Jesse Owens or The Flash but somehow he gets away. Every time the motorcycle’s right on his ass the camera changes angles and he’s got a healthy lead again. It’s like reverse Jason Voorhees.

The Dragon Lady is kind of like a James Bond villain. She has a circle of swords that pop out of the ground so the guy she wants to dual can’t run away – it’s really more of an honor system though because he could just step between the swords. I’m not sure how she got to be in charge of these people – I guess we’ll just have to hold out for a prequel that explains everything. Whatever the deal is her people are fanatically dedicated. When her adopted daughter/whore helps they kill her with a chopstick through the tongue.

It all comes to a head at the end and there’s a huge shootout and martial arts fight all through the casino, destroying everything. Cleo and Dragon lady fight each other smashing vases and doors, rolling and jumping and flipping and swordfighting. Mi Ling blows up a side of the casino with a bomb she calls her “Dragon Reducer.” Their friends drive their motorcycles all through the casino. One of them jumps his bike off a balcony, jumps off of it and holds onto a hanging light as the bike lands on a roulette table and blows up, then he swings around and drops and fights some guys. None of this stuff would’ve happened if they made the movie in the U.S., so three cheers for Run Run Shaw.

It’s really a shame that this was the end of the series. If it was one of a whole bunch of Cleopatra Jones adventures in different parts of the world it would be much cooler. “Oh yeah, is that the one where she’s in China?” She’s like James Bond, but taller and with more makeup. But I guess these types of movies were losing their popularity around that time and this one didn’t do so hot.

Shit, I never thought about this before, but what if it was Cleopatra Jones and the Temple of Doom? I think she could’ve handled those monkey brain eaters and would’ve figured out a way to ditch the whiny blond lady. I’d hate to see Cleopatra recast, but if the Indiana Jones series ever makes it into the ’70s I think it should be INDIANA JONES AND CLEOPATRA JONES AND THE BLOOD CULT OF FIRE ISLAND or some shit like that.

Anyway, I like the first one better, it’s a more unique take on the blaxploitation and spy genres than this is on the martial arts and spy genres, and it’s got more funny little jokes thanks to the script by the Mack himself, Max Julien. Still, CASINO OF GOLD is an enjoyable movie especially when the action goes ape shit at the end.

(note: there’s no region 1 DVD yet but they got  bare bones one in Europe or you can find an old VHS tape)

[ratings]

Obviously it’s a silly movie and at times it’s sloppy, but it has many of the funny and absurd types of moments I look for in a movie like this. A couple of my favorites:

1. Robert Clouse’s directing credit is over a freeze frame of Black Belt aiming his gun at a dude who’s running away. When it unfreezes the bullet hits the guy in the ass.

2. Pops owes Pinky $1,000, but when Pinky shows him an I.O.U. it says 11,000. Then after Pops dies he shows the I.O.U. to Sydney and now it says 41,000. He keeps adding more lines to it!

3. Black Belt is not very enlightened about women. When Sydney wants to come along on some dangerous mission he tells her to stay and do the dishes. She shoots the dishes and says, “They’re done.”

4. Also he doesn’t wait for her to put on her panties when they have to make a run for it. Then he doesn’t understand why she’s still holding onto the panties and throws them out the car window. In my opinion he owes her a pair of panties.

5. In one scene we see B.B. on a beach with some hot chicks bouncing on a trampoline. It seems like it’s just there to show the kind of lifestyle a guy like this lives, hanging out on a beach with bouncing women. But later he ends up hiring them for a mission where they have to jump off of portable trampolines. Also, they call him “Mr. Jones.” I think he may actually be their trampoline teacher, but I’m not sure.

6. There’s a big jokey chase scene on a beach where Black Belt and Sydney flirtatiously fight until they end up stealing somebody’s sex tent. One of the goofiest jokes is when they break some fat hippie’s acoustic guitar, especially since it’s edited to match up to a guitar solo in the theme song.

There’s also weird ideas like a climactic fight in car wash suds (reminded me of samurai movies in snow) and a funky as hell theme song by the white-but-funky guitarist Dennis Coffey.

Kelly’s a good fighter on screen and an icon of both ’70s black cool and that decade’s explosion of popularity for the martial arts. They have an all black karate school that promotes discipline without being explicitly political like Black Panthers. Pinky still calls them “commies” though because they ask him to take his shoes off in the dojo.

I don’t know that much about karate, but some of the shit they do seems made up. For example I don’t believe it’s tradition to do a bunch of moves next to the coffin at a funeral. Also, I believe these kids should be allowed to wear shoes when driving a car.

Another thing that’s weird is that Kelly keeps doing those cat noises that his former co-star Bruce Lee did. It seems so goofy now because the only people who really make sounds like that are Bruce Lee and people imitating Bruce Lee in comedies. But I know Jim Kelly was really good friends with Bruce Lee, so it was probaly his tribute, since this came out the year after Bruce died.

Sydney is a funny character. She doesn’t put up with any shit. When a bunch of “Bogarts” as Pinky calls them threaten her she tells them “I’ll make you look like a sick faggot” and then beats them all up. She also tells Black Belt if he wants to have sex with her he has to “take it,” and when he says he doesn’t need any woman that badly she slaps him across the face and says “What’s the matter, you a faggot?” So she is not too good on gay rights or women’s issues but she’s hilariously self-assured. She doesn’t mean any harm, she’s just trying to show off that she can hold her own even with a dude like Black Belt Jones.

This is not a great piece of filmatism like, say, SHAFT, and not a home-made affair like DOLEMITE, it’s somewhere in between. I guess I would put it in a category with CLEOPATRA JONES as one of the more enjoyably absurd blaxploitation pictures. Too bad they don’t have a good DVD of it yet (the one I watched was clearly transferred from VHS.)

[ratings]

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Vern is down with BLACK DYNAMITE

I’ve missed some potential good ones at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, but I was not about to miss the midnight show of BLACK DYNAMITE. If you don’t know what this is, it’s a retro blaxploitation movie where Michael Jai White (also co-writer) plays the title character, an ex-CIA, Vietnam vet, kung fu practicing, five-women-at-a-time-fucking badass motherfucker trying to find out who killed his brother.

Doing a blaxploitation homage in 2009 sounds good on paper, because there are a finite amount of authentic movies of this genre. At a certain point you run out of blaxploitation to watch, and you need more. It never hurts to have backups. But when you think about it there are a million ways for a movie like this to be disappointing or worse. BLACK DYNAMITE has great posters and trailers, but that doesn’t prove anything. For my tastes it’s a fine line to walk. I didn’t want to see something too jokey or spoofy, something that was mocking these movies more than paying tribute to them. And there’s no reason to assume an independent film out of nowhere from filmatists without that much of a track record will capture a vintage blaxploitation feel.

I could’ve worried about that shit but it would’ve been a waste of time, because BLACK DYNAMITE is pretty god damn spectacular. Yes, it could be accurately described as a parody of the genre, but clearly a loving, even worshipful parody done not by some smarmy assholes who want to laugh at funny old clothes and hairstyles, but by dudes who clearly have passion for and knowledge of the genre and a fetishistic attention to the details that matter.

Somewhere I saw somebody compare this to AUSTIN POWERS. I don’t consider that accurate. Those movies are all about riffing on different comedy concepts within some of the trappings of an old genre. You could say the same for I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA. That was an affectionate blaxploitation homage, but it’s coming up with joke concepts, like “this guy has theme music, so what if we show a band following him around playing his theme music?”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that approach, but I was happy to see BLACK DYNAMITE play it much more straight. The laughs (and there are many) mostly aren’t jokes exactly. They fit within the context of a straight-up blaxploitation movie. Sure, BLACK DYNAMITE knows that its story is getting more and more ridiculous, and purposely has messed up shots and clunky dialogue like “I was the best CIA agent that the CIA ever had in the CIA.” But it never winks at you, never nudges you. It could be the blaxploitation movie they would’ve had on another GRINDHOUSE double feature if the first one hadn’t tanked.

Let me give you one example of why I respect this movie. There’s a scene where Black Dynamite goes to a bar called The Hip Pocket to get some information out of a bunch of hostile dudes in Rudy Ray Moore style velvet hats. They’re not helping much so he turns around to head for the door, and they taunt him to his back about never coming back to the Hip Pocket again. But they shut up real quick when he flips the sign on the window to “closed” and shuts the gate. He’s not leaving, he just wants some privacy while he beats them silly.

See, that’s not a joke – that’s a genuine Badass Cinema moment. You don’t do that in AUSTIN POWERS or I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA. White and director/co-writer Scott Sanders can get laughs by exaggerating the plot of THREE THE HARD WAY and imitating the sloppy filmatism of the Rudy Ray Moore pictures, but it’s clear that they also sincerely appreciate and want to re-create the badass screen presence of Fred Williamson, Jim Brown and Jim Kelly. In UNDERCOVER BROTHER, even in DOLEMITE, you laugh at the idea of the hero kicking ass. You don’t laugh at Black Dynamite. When he kicks people through walls you laugh not because it’s a joke but because it’s awesome. He is not a parody of awesome, he actually is awesome.

I gotta admit that it crosses the line into straight comedy about 2/3 in when Black Dynamite spells out on a chalkboard the nefarious plot that they’re up against. From that point on it gets way more silly, especially if I didn’t dream the part where he’s helped in a fight by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. But it’s funny shit, and I appreciate that at least for a while they were able to treat it not as much like a comedy as like the craziest and most awesome blaxploitation movie you never found out about before.

None of this would matter if it even halfway felt like a modern movie, but they have the blaxplo look and feel dead on. Apparently it’s shot on real film and processed in some forgotten way that makes it grainy. And it uses some stock footage. But I’m unclear how they got all the buildings and streets to look so perfect.

The most crucial and impressive aspect is the music. I’m picky about this shit so if I’d given it much thought I would’ve assumed the music would be the weak link in the movie. It so easily could’ve gotten laughs from some cheap wah wah guitars and cheesy studio musicians. But it’s much harder to make it sound real. How do you compete with Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Johnny Pate? Even the musicians who actually played funk back in the day have a hard time recapturing it now.

But somehow this guy Adrian Younge made a completely convincing 1970s soundtrack. It’s not just the wah wahs but the percussion, the organs, the flute. Even the vocals and Lalo Schifrin-type dramatic stings sound completely vintage. And I didn’t notice him imitating specific songs either, just all the best of the styles that were used at the time. I mean, I have seen plenty of actual blaxploitation movies where the soundtracks weren’t as good as BLACK DYNAMITE’s.

I wondered where they found this guy, because I never heard of him. According to this internet here he’s an old friend of Scott Sanders, he also edited the movie and he played every instrument on the soundtrack. I want to give this guy a medal, and I want to give myself the soundtrack on CD (if not vinyl).

So everything is in place, but as with almost all the classic blaxploitation movies the main thing you’re looking at is the star, and how cool he or she is. The whole movie could’ve been ruined if it had been the wrong actor who came up with the idea and starred in it. But Michael Jai White is absolutely perfect in this movie, nothing short of brilliant. He plays it 100% deadpan and has every aspect down to a science – the scowl, the heavy-lidded stare, the strut, the voice, the “kong fu.” There are a few scenes with jokey fake martial arts (one of his allies, Bullhorn, is modelled after Dolemite) but White has seven blackbelts, so there’s tons of real action here. And he uses nunchakas alot.

White is hilarious, but not by trying to be funny, just by being dedicated to putting on screen the meanest, coolest, cockiest motherfucker ever. He could do this exact performance in a movie that wasn’t supposed to be funny and I would still love it. The one outstandingly comedic touch is a scene that makes me laugh just thinking about it, a date-in-the-park montage where he’s so tough he doesn’t know how to do romantic scenes. His hug is more awkward than Vin Diesel kissing Asia Argento in xXx.

I consider myself a Michael Jai White fan. I didn’t catch on as fast as some of you talkbackers, who I remember insisting he had to play Blade on the TV series, and I wasn’t sure where that came from. But UNDISPUTED II made me understand. Since then I’ve gone back and watched some of his other roles, like the TV movie of TYSON and the previous Scott Sanders film THICK AS THIEVES (and of course I knew his work in EXIT WOUNDS, where he and Seagal have a sword fight with paper cutter blades).

White is a rare commodity in Hollywood, a legitimate action star/actor. In the old days you had action stars trying to act, and these days you have actors trying to be action stars. White has been able to straddle that line and this is clearly his greatest role so far, giving a perfect performance most other martial arts guys couldn’t do and martial arts that most actors couldn’t do. I’m so happy to see him in a movie that showcases his range of talents.

Sanders was there to give a brief introduction before the movie. Because it was a midnight show I figured he wouldn’t stick around for a Q&A. But right after the wildly applauded end credits he ran up to the stage and to my surprise introduced Michael Jai White himself. Judging by the questions I don’t think most of the crowd knew who he was (what was that movie he was in? DARK KNIGHT? never saw it), but it seemed like they were genuinely excited to see Black Dynamite in person. I was well-behaved and didn’t yell out any questions like “Why is UNDISPUTED II so awesome?”

I’m not sure it was meant as an entirely serious question, but somebody asked if he was worried he would get typecast as “a black action hero.” White semi-defensively talked about being in an upcoming Tyler Perry movie. But I say fuck that, man. If you would rather do dramas that’s cool, but you’ve worked hard to be a great action hero. You’re only getting started here. I want to see more.

In the movie there’s a joke about Black Dynamite never smiling, but when White came up to that stage he was beaming like he was a kid and we were singing happy birthday to him. After all these years taking small parts in Troma movies, in Hong Kong movies, getting a major starring role only to have it become one of the worst comic book movies ever, having a great scene in KILL BILL only to have it cut out… this guy has earned a shot at the next level, but instead of being given it he went out there and made it himself.

BLACK DYNAMITE comes to theaters September 4th. I’m sure some people will see it and say I’m overhyping it. I wouldn’t try to talk somebody who’s not into this type of thing into seeing it. But if you are a fan of blaxploitation and can enjoy an absurd take on it, BLACK DYNAMITE is required viewing, preferably with audience. Please consider seeing it so that maybe we’ll get BLACK DYNAMITE IN AFRICA or BLACK DYNAMITE T.N.T. or something.

Johnny Pate is a Chicago-born bassist and arranger. He says his first and biggest love is jazz, but to me he’s a legend because of his comparatively brief detour into R&B in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He worked with many Chicago labels of that era but most notably alongside the one and only Curtis Mayfield – Pate was an arranger for the Impressions and for Mayfield’s label, Curtom.

I’m not as detail-oriented about music as I am about movies, so I probaly wouldn’t know about Johnny Pate except that I happened to pick up his 1970 funk instrumentals album “Outrageous” when it was reissued last year by Dusty Groove. Then I found out he scored SHAFT IN AFRICA so I finally got around to watching those sequels and loved them. At least half of my love for blaxploitation movies comes from the music, and of course SUPERFLY and SHAFT are the two most legendary blaxploitation soundtracks. Here’s a guy who kind of connects them together – he arranged Superfly for Mayfield, he scored the third SHAFT movie, and even played with the original Isaac Hayes SHAFT themes when he scored the short-lived (and not on DVD) SHAFT tv series.

But SHAFT IN AFRICA is a masterwork. Okay, it’s not as deep as SUPERFLY and maybe the original SHAFT score has a wider breadth of styles on it, and also it’s hard to really compare anything to SHAFT because it’s so inescapable in pop culture it’s hard to be objective about it. But all I know is SHAFT IN AFRICA has two of the most preposterously funky themes of all time. They are the type of theme songs every badass character wishes they had, but never will. That is the sound I always wanted to hear and I figure nobody, including Pate, ever topped them. But just to be sure I decided to watch and review some of the other movies Johnny Pate scored.

BROTHER ON THE RUN (1973)

The VHS tape I found was called MAN ON THE RUN, but the original and better title is BROTHER ON THE RUN. They got MAN on the title screen but Pate’s theme song (which plays in several different variations throughout the movie) repeatedly calls him “brother on the run.” And brother is simply more accurate because the guy who’s on the run is more like a kid than a man on the run, and he has a sister in the movie so maybe the title is from her point of view. He’s her little brother on the run.

(It could be worse though. IMDB claims it was also released on video as BLACK FORCE 2, which would make it the sequel to an unrelated movie that came out two years later.)

The reason the brother is on the run is he and a white dude were shoplifting radios from a store when the store owner pulled a gun on them, there was a scuffle and the owner got shot and killed. These kids are actually part of a crime ring run by a white hippie preacher named Brother John, and they kind of got set up by a corrupt individual trying to cover his involvement in the whole deal.

Anyway, he runs to his sister’s house, then the cops show up there so he runs some more, and that is why he is on the run.

But the actual hero of the movie is not on the run, he’s Professor Boots Turner played by Terry Carter of FOXY BROWN and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (original recipe). We see in the opening scene that he’s a popular and somewhat lenient professor of English literature, and later he makes a reference to Fagin from Oliver Twist, and also he wears a very professorial suit and tie for the whole movie, but otherwise he’s basically Shaft. He knows how to break locks, use a gun, lose a tail, beat up a dude in a junkyard and trick the cops. He spends the movie trying to find the brother on the run because he’s worried if the racist cops find him first they’ll kill him.

He’s not a private eye like Shaft, so obviously he can’t be hired onto the case. He just found out he’s neighbors with an old hooker friend who is the brother’s sister. So he happens to be catching up on old times when the kid shows up with his white friend dying of a bullet wound. I really have no idea why they made him a teacher, that’s kind of weird. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the story. But I like it. He must be one of the all time toughest movie educators, up there with Indiana Jones, Tom Berenger’s THE SUBSTITUTE and Seagal’s professor of Chinese archaeology character from OUT FOR A KILL.

The filmatism is pretty crude and the story is pretty ridiculous. Boots not only beds the sister but also some white lady in Brentwood who he just meets because the kid was hiding in her backyard. But I sort of enjoyed the story which somehow was more involving than many better-made blaxploitation pictures. There are some pretty tense foot chase scenes with the kid climbing fences, hiding around corners, trying to stay quiet when cops are nearby. We can all relate to that. And he knows he’s in trouble walking through a rich white neighborhhood with his afro. Lucky for him nobody seems to lock the doors on their cars, or even their trunks. He hides in the trunk of a Mercedes at one point, a good way to catch a ride.

Musically it’s no SHAFT IN AFRICA but it’s a good one. The vocal theme song is very catchy and then there’s a bunch of funky chase music with intense drums and percussion and lots of organ solos. Also some more laidback jazzy sexy kind of tunes for the sex scenes. Not a great movie but a worthwhile one, especially for the Johnny Pate completist like you or I.

BUCKTOWN (1975)

This one’s alot like a western. Legendary badass (Fred Williamson) comes into small town by train, discovers the people are being oppressed by corrupt law officials, calls in a team of gunmen, they take justice into their own hands and execute all the cops, but then they decide to pin on the badges and take over the town themselves, so the original badass has to take them out. It’s a little different from other westerns though though because there are no cowboy hats or horses, and toward the end he drives a tank over a car and it blows up. That doesn’t happen in most of the Howard Hawks or John Ford movies.

Bucktown is kind of like South Africa during apartheid – it looks like it’s a primarily black population, but the white redneck cops control everything and abuse everybody. When Williamson steps off the train (in town for his brother’s funeral) the first thing he sees is a white cop beating up a black dude. I’m sure that’s on their postcards and souvenir t-shirts too. It might even be on the official town seal that they put on the letterhead and the checks and everything.

When Williamson calls his old friend for help he tells him to bring muscle, so he brings three dudes with him. One of them happens to be played by pre-ROCKY Carl Weathers. His character is named Hambone. Williamson and his buddies are all very cool and cocky. I like the scene where they notice a guy tailing them so they walk over and ask him to join them. These are exactly the right dudes to make some white bigots feel inadequate.

I was a little surprised that their plan just involved going around and executing all the cops, seemed too easy and straightforward. But of course when his out of town friends take over is when the story really begins. At first their friendship allows for a truce, but one of the other guys (not Hambone) gets jealous and has to fuck everything up. The message is that power corrupts, racism not necessary.

This is an above average blaxploitation movie, but I do have to deduct points for Pam Grier’s role. She had already been Coffy and Foxy Brown so it’s not very cool to give her this character where she just whines and gets upset about shit. She’s the standard woman-who-is-hostile-to-the-hero-but-then-falls-in-love-with-him-and-keeps-hysterically-shouting-about-the-dangers-afoot. When she gets attacked she just screams. It’s kind of like in SUNSHINE, when Michelle Yeoh gets attacked and doesn’t know how to fight it’s hard to accept. But this is worse because it’s a movie where a tough Pam Grier character would not necessarily be out of place.

The theme song reminded me a little bit of the DOLEMITE soundtrack but slicker with a little bit of a Fred Wesley and the Horny Horns flavor. There’s also a real funky song with vocals at the end, that one has a little bit of a P-Funkesque sound too.

DR. BLACK AND MR. HYDE (1976)

I was really surprised to find out that this fairly crappy attempt to cash-in on BLACULA was actually made by the same director. I don’t know how many of you hold BLACULA in the same high regard that I do, but I think it does a great job of combining the elements of its two genres (classic Hammer style horror and blaxploitation) and somehow coming off less ridiculous than that sounds on paper. I mean you still get to laugh at (and with) it a little, but I think it actually works as a horror movie with Afrocentric themes, and of course William Marshall is great in it.

To be fair, Bernie Casey is pretty good too as Dr. Henry Pride (hmm, his name is not Dr. Black, that’s weird). The standard horror movie part is that he’s a highly respected doctor working on cutting edge experiments that obsess him because of his mother’s death of liver disease. The new twist is that he’s also a progressive humanitarian type of doctor who works out of a free clinic in Watts that shares a building with a thrift shop. The two female leads are his partner at the clinic played by Rosalind Cash (Charlton Heston’s soul sister girlfriend in OMEGA MAN) and his prostitute patient played by Marie O’Henry (THREE THE HARD WAY). If you enjoy a good looking woman with an afro this is a pretty good movie to check out.

Dr. Pride’s serum causes a lab rat to turn white and kill all the other rats in his cage, and for some reason the doctor decides this would be a good time to secretly inject it into himself. As far as I could tell this makes no sense on any level since not only is the serum clearly not ready for human testing, but he doesn’t even have the liver disease it’s supposed to cure. The tagline of the movie is “A Monster He Can’t Control Has Taken Over His Very Soul!” and that is a double meaning there because the gimmick is that the Mr. Hyde he turns into supposed to be white. The makeup by Stan Winston (who had already made up Casey in GARGOYLES) is a pretty good monster/zombie type face with pale skin and white on the edge of his afro. Kind of a cool monster but for some reason everybody mistakes it for a white man.

This does make the movie sort of enjoyable, because of course you get some good laughs out of people referring to a monstrous Bernie Casey as a white dude. And I guess since the vast majority of serial killers are white it has some kind of logic to it that he would have to turn white in order to go on a hooker-murdering spree. But I’m not sure what the meaning of it is supposed to be. I like Mamuwalde in BLACULA because he was a dignified African leader given this curse by European slavedriver Dracula. He’s a monster and a villain but you also like him because he is bringing this Afrocentric world view to the American ghettos of the ’70s, transcending the stereotypes of the genre and trying to scare some sense into the other characters who fit into the stereotype more. Dr. Pride though, honestly I don’t know what the hell he’s trying to do, and that’s the bigger problem. In the middle section of the movie the storytelling really gets sloppy. To me anyway it is not clear what the rules or motives are. Is he continuing to take the serum for some reason, or does he just keep switching? Is there a reason why he’s killing people, or why he is singling out prostitutes? He doesn’t seem to be doing his experiments on them or anything. And for a while it’s unclear if he knows that he’s turning into a monster or that he’s killing people. And it seems to be inconsistent. In at least one monster scene he’s clearly conscious and in control of his faculties, other times he seems to not be.

Also, I gotta say, the title is really stretching it. Just because BLACULA worked out doesn’t mean you can just replace one word or syllable in any famous horror title with “BLACK” and be proud of yourself. A NIGHTMARE ON BLACK STREET, POLTERBLACK, THE BLAXORCIST, BLACKFERATU, FRIDAY THE BLACKTEENTH? Oh well, I guess if the best alternative I can come up with is JACKSON AND HYDE I got no right to criticize.

Musically it’s fine but not one of the more impressive Johnny Pate scores. Mostly he does standard ’70s cues, not songs but little tension-building low notes and percussion and shit. But there are several parts where it turns into your classic ’70s wah wah chase music. My favorite parts are the ballad at the end and the nice soul jazz tune that’s actually really inappropriate for a montage leading up to people finding a dead hooker.

This is kind of a funny one, but not a great one. Which nobody could’ve ever predicted from a movie called DR. BLACK AND MR. HYDE. Life is just crazy that way I guess.

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Early in the movie Shaft comes home to his building and somebody tells him some Africans are looking for him. He sees a guy in an African robe and ducks out of the elevator and seems proud of himself as he goes unmolested into his apartment. He hits his punching bag once and struts in but before he can relax the door is kicked down and there’s that huge African dude ready to beat his ass.

Next thing you know Shaft has been imprisoned, tormented, tested, and forced to go on a mission to Africa to uncover a modern day slavery ring. I would kind of expect Shaft to be a righteous, Afrocentric type of dude, but their plan to guilt him with America’s heritage of slavery doesn’t work. He doesn’t give a shit. (But he’ll learn.) Shaft learns some language, an accent, customs and fighting style and goes undercover so he can get inside the slavery ring and bust that fucker open.

While SHAFT honestly wasn’t an exploitation movie, this one almost dips into the world of the old softcore pornos. Not that it’s particularly graphic, but it keeps setting up goofy reasons for Shaft to get laid. He has two beautiful Shaft girls. First is Vonetta McGee (the ’70s Beyonce), daughter of the African leader who hires him. He convinces her she has to have sex with him before her scheduled female circumcision, to know what she’ll be missing. Sure enough she immediately decides to keep the clitoris after all. Then there’s the white girl, Neda Arneric as the villain’s nymphomaniac girlfriend. The bad guy doesn’t seem to appreciate her, he makes her give him a blowjob in the car and acts about as excited as if a doctor was making him cough. But she has a thing for the black men her man enslaves, we know this because she has an orgasm watching shirtless black men do road work. She gets sent to seduce Shaft (and get it on tape – there is a Shaft sex tape out there, people) and says “Oh my GOD!” when she sees his, uh, namesake. She seems to join his team, then in the very next scene gets a knife in the chest.

Arneric, who was 20 at the time, was real good looking, and is shown naked. In 2000 she was elected to Serbian parliament.

Director John Guillermin was less of an artist than Parks, more of a workman. He’d been around since ‘49 making comedies and Tarzan movies and shit, and later did THE TOWERING INFERNO and the ‘76 remake of KING KONG. The real strong addition to the team though is composer Johnny Pate. This is a guy who did arrangements for Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, and he has a pretty great instrumental album called Outrageous that was re-released last year by Dusty Groove. This is a unique trilogy musically speaking because they never re-use the theme song. Each movie has a different composer and style and yet each score is equally awesome. And as of today SHAFT IN AFRICA is my favorite. It has the percussion, bass groove and wah wahs you hope for in a blaxploitation score but also the most overwhelming, knock you on your ass funky horn section of any major theme song. There’s really no way to put it into words so you’re just gonna have to hear it:

“You Can’t Even Walk In the Park”

And that’s just the theme for Shaft to go jogging and then catch some kids stealing his hubcaps – just wait until you hear the theme for him flying into Africa. There’s also a macho vocal song by none other than the Four Tops, who ask Shaft rhetorical questions like “Are you man enough? Big and bad enough? Are you gonna let ‘em shoot you down? When the evil flies, and your brother cries, are you gonna be around?” They ask him “is it in your heart to care?” Basically the Tops are challenging John Shaft to step up his game, to take it to the next level, by proving he is more than just the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks and all that. Yeah he’s man, but is he man enough? And the only way he can be man enough is if he is willing to be there to help his African brothers who are being exploited by the fucking Europeans again.

I love this movie, but I have to admit I was a little disappointed by the African fighting stick they gave Shaft. See, it has a hidden compartment in the top with a camera, but I could’ve sworn the guy also told him it had explosives in it. I waited the whole movie and when he never used it to blow anything up. I had to go back and check the scene again and sadly all he said was that the camera had 36 exposures. And I mean that’s cool too, but you know, when you’re expecting the stick to be used as a grenade launcher or something it’s a bit of a let down. So I offer this as a warning, please be aware that the stick does not have explosives in it, and you will enjoy this movie.

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Of course, Shaft is still a bad mother et al and, proving that he really is the black James Bond, he really starts to show his skills as a womanizer in this one. When he gets that call for example it just so happens that he’s in bed with that guy’s sister! At first that seems like a hell of a coincidence, but then when you consider Shaft’s lifestyle you realize that the chances of it happening are actually pretty high. In fact, here’s an even better example of how much Shaft gets around: In the theme song for this one there’s kind of a “shut yo mouth” moment where you hear a woman say, “He’s trouble, he’s been to my house!” Can you believe that? Even within his own theme song you can find at least one backup singer whose heart he’s broken. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a gal on percussion who just didn’t want to say anything.

The music this time isn’t by Isaac Hayes. Well, he did one song, but most of it is composed by returning director Gordon Parks himself. And this sequel has pretty much all the same strengths and weaknesses as the original. It’s a little dryer than you expect, but Roundtree’s performance, the shots of New York and the funky music all combine chemically to create badass.

This one also has a montage to rival that classic “Soulsville” sequence from the first one. This time it’s of a funeral, and set to jazz music. There are some Bruce Lee style zooms on Shaft and the police detective Bolin (Julius “Sho Nuff” Harris) as they spot each other. It’s one of those potent combinations of photography, music and especially editing craftsmanship that reminds you why you love movies. It’s weird how much art there is just in ending and arranging different shots. The editing can really add energy to a movie or it can knock the whole rhythm off if you do it wrong. This movie does it right.

Shaft meets Bumpy Jonas again, he talks trash to him (including pre-emptively telling him he’s not invited to his funeral) but they kind of work together. The real bad guy is a white mobster who prides himself on playing clarinet. I really respect Mr. Parks for including a really long scene of the dude just sitting there playing clarinet. Not alot of movies like this have the balls to try the audience’s patience with weird touches like that. I’m not being sarcastic, I thought that was cool.

Without the shock of the new SHAFT’S BIG SCORE is in some ways a little weaker than the first one, but for some people it might be more exciting because it turns into a great action movie at the end, and that’s where it really gets James Bond on that ass. I am in favor of chases that involve three different modes of transportation. This one includes land (car), sea (boat) and air (helicopter). Also, John Shaft shoots down a helicopter on purpose long before John Rambo did it on accident in FIRST BLOOD.

Now let me call out a SPOILER ALERT. SHAFT’S BIG SCORE is such a badass title, but I believe in the end it turns out to be kind of ironic. When you hear SHAFT’S BIG SCORE you figure maybe Shaft is falling on the wrong side of the law this time, getting involved in a caper of some kind, but whatever he’s up to he’s gonna go home with a satchel full of cash, right? Wrong. The money was to build a children’s center, he tried to steal it back, and unless I misunderstood he ended up leaving it sitting on the ground somewhere. So as cool as Shaft is this is kind of a sad commentary on his life if this is Shaft’s big score. Breaking hearts and losing money. But looking real good in three different colors of turtleneck.

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Have you seen AMERICAN GANGSTER? At the beginning of that movie the kingpin of the black mafia, Bumpy Johnson, dies. Denzel’s character Frank Lucas takes over the empire. Well, that’s who hires Shaft in this movie. He’s called Bumpy Jonas instead of Johnson, but he’s based on the same real life underworld figure. And that’s one of the many ways the movie backs up the claims made in the theme song. He makes an appointment with Bumpy, then shows up late, deliberately keeps him waiting. Then he’s rude to him. Then he makes prima dona demands for his hiring. And before Bumpy leaves he threatens him. You might think he’s just trying to act tough, but when Bumpy leaves the room he just laughs. Clearly not scared at all. That Shaft is one bad mutha shut yo etc.

The greatest scene for establishing how badass Shaft is is when some mobsters are staking out his apartment from a bar across the street. They don’t know what he looks like so he goes in and takes over for the bartender, and does a whole scam where he gets them into a conversation by giving them free drinks and having some for himself. This is a great scene because it shows

1. he is charismatic enough to talk a bartender into letting him do this
2. he knows how to tend bar
3. he outsmarts the mobsters and
4. he ends up picking up a woman at the bar while in the process of outsmarting and capturing these mobsters. That’s some serious multitasking.

Of course, we also learn that Shaft’s one weakness is his treatment of women. He’s said to be real good in bed but a bummer afterwards – for example, when he coldly tells the girl he picked up at the bar that she has to leave now. Actually, I don’t think this was necessarily supposed to be seen as a weakness. But I’m against it. Be nice, Shaft.

By the way, I know Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and a thousand less talented comedians have done alot of exploration of the topic of what black people are like and what white people are like, but I’m not sure if they have covered the turtleneck issue. I think this movie demonstrates that a black man can look tough wearing a turtleneck. Roundtree successfully sports black turtlenecks, red turtlenecks, white turtlenecks. Throw a leather jacket over any color of turtleneck and the guy looks great. A white man wearing that sweater looks like a sissy or a square, a black man wearing it looks like Shaft.

Let me give you an example here:

Case closed, right? Game, set and match.

Nah, actually I have to admit, that is kind of a loaded comparison. That second picture really did come up on the first page of results typing “turtleneck” into Google images, and I think it is a pretty good example. But to be fair if I was looking strictly at ’70s pictures I could find alot of white dudes pulling it off better than this guy. I wouldn’t have to go any further than Steve McQueen.

Maybe complexion has something to do with it. It’s basic color theory, you need contrast. There are some things that just don’t look as good next to a pale face (for example, nobody lighter than Ricardo Montalban should be wearing a white suit). But maybe I shouldn’t have brought race into this. Regardless of race, Richard Roundtree just looks good in the damn things. I gotta give credit where credit is due. And it has to do with the specific outfit, too. Put anybody in that jacket and sweater, it’s gonna look better than the dorky green one with the baseball hat. I mean if the white dude was wearing Shaft’s outfit and Shaft was wearing those stupid pants it might be a tougher call which one was cooler there.

On the other hand:

Same outfit, different vibe. Food for thought.

Although this is one of the movies that started the blaxploitation genre, people who see that term as derogatory say it’s not blaxploitation. It’s actually a pretty classy detective movie. Gordon Parks wasn’t a Roger Corman guy or anything, he was an acclaimed photographer, writer and poet. His one previous movie THE LEARNING TREE was adapted from his own autobiographical novel.

What I like best about SHAFT is the way it gives you a feel of early ’70s New York as Shaft walks through it. One of my favorite scenes is the montage of Shaft going around talking to different people on the streets trying to find a lead to where the kidnapped girl is. It’s set to an Isaac Hayes tune called “Soulsville” that’s a laidback lament about living through tough times, a little more like Curtis Mayfield than like that theme song we all associate the movie with. Parks took a standard piece of every detective story and made it into a poem about the poor people of New York.

My fellow action scholar and geocities neighbor Ryan Kenner says that characters like Shaft are part of what changed attitudes toward blacks in white America, setting the stage for President Obama. I’m not sure what I think about that, especially looking specifically at Shaft. Because this is a character who empowers black people by fulfilling a white racist’s nightmare. This is a guy who can and will steal your woman. He’ll charm her pants off, rock her world and actually be kind of bored doing it. And then if you try to confront him about it I bet he wouldn’t even remember which one you were talking about.

Obama is not that guy, he is seen as the nerdy, stable family man with a loving wife and kids. If white people thought Obama was Shaft… well, I guess some of us would’ve been even more excited to vote for him, but he would’ve scared the shit out of alot of people. He would not only be a secret Muslim and a socialist, he would be this slick motherfucker who looks great in a turtleneck who comes over to your house and smiles at your wife and he leaves with her. I guess what I’m realizing as I write this is that this character was empowering but also promoted certain stereotypes. There are worse stereotypes than that but still. I should acknowledge the stereotype while also admitting that if there is reincarnation and time travel and some sort of reality/fiction blending magic I would like to be reborn as Shaft in my next life. Just putting that out there.

But I do see a little Obama in Shaft, because he’s the guy who bridges the gap between the different groups: the black mob, the black militants, the cops. He’s not really any of them, but he works with all of them. He also has white friends including a hippie dude and a gay bartender. The only people he doesn’t really seem to get along with are the Italians, who he calls wops, but maybe when he’s not on the job he would be nicer.

In conclusion, Shaft is a sex machine to all the chicks who would risk his neck for his brother man, would not cop out if and when danger is all about, is a bad mother[unintelligible] and yet at the same time is a complicated man. Not sure if I agree with Isaac Hayes about Shaft’s woman understanding him, though if he specified which woman we might be able to clear this one up. Anyway, this movie grew on me. I’m glad I’m to the point where I can dig it.

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While DOLEMITE is arguably not as accomplished a picture as THE SCARLET EMPRESS, it does follow in von Sternberg’s spirit of independence, and that’s part of what appeals to me so much about the works of my man, the legendary Rudy Ray Moore, who passed away last month.

I don’t know about other places but in these past 10 or 15 years young white people in Seattle have picked up the adjective “ghetto” to mean low rent or shoddy. It kind of bugs me because I don’t know how the “ghetto Safeway” that doesn’t have the best selection of organic foods is comparable to the actual experience of living in poverty and segregation. But I think “ghetto” is a pretty good adjective for the life works of Rudy Ray Moore, because he seemed to maintain the same ethic from beginning to end, the ethic of a club singer who learned a poem from a homeless man, reworked it into a standup act, started pressing his own comedy records and selling them out of the trunk of his car, made a cottage industry of underground XXX comedy records like “Eat Out More Often” and used those profits to make a series of scrappy low budget movies shot in his house, at a night club where he performed and in the parking lot of Ralph’s.

I think he would’ve been great as somebody’s hilarious uncle or grandpa in a mainstream comedy, but he never went that studio route. He was independent to the end. To the age of 81 he was touring tiny clubs (I saw him perform with a broken hip on his 80th birthday) and making crazy no budget kung fu movies like SHAOLIN DOLEMITE and the please-God-release-this-on-DVD-soon DOLEMITE EXPLOSION!

His merchandising empire was definitely “ghetto” in the white people meaning of the word. The absolutely awesome DOLEMITE soundtrack CD reissue sounds like it was transfered straight from the record, and some of the songs don’t fade out, they just stop like somebody hit eject on a tape deck. The DOLEMITE dvd I own, if you go into the chapter selections, the titles for the chapters are all referring to what happens in a totally different movie, PETEY WHEATSTRAW (”Petey’s back,” “magic cane,” etc.) At his shows Moore sold chintzy wooden backscratchers tied into a song he was singing for a while. So yes, I do own an autographed Dolemite backscratcher.

When I heard about Rudy Ray Moore’s passing I thought about that DIYFS (do it your fuckin self) ethic of his and how it inspired me in the stupid shit I do. And I realized that although I wrote about that 80th birthday show and reviewed a couple of his movies I never officially reviewed DOLEMITE. So I got out my Dolemite box set (”Officially Disapproved By the Man” it says on the box) and here is my belated tribute.

Usually when I think of Rudy Ray Moore my image of him comes mostly from those comedy shows and from what I consider his two best movies, PETEY WHEATSTRAW and THE HUMAN TORNADO. Those two are exaggerated, comedic takes on the blaxploitation genre. But I forgot that this first one is pretty serious. Moore portrays Dolemite as a version of himself, a comedian famous on the streets for his toasting and his comedy records, but he puts himself in a typical blaxploitation plot. I guess that’s what you do when you’re trying your first home made movie, you take your character and put him in a plot you’ve seen before. In that great “Let’s put on a show!” tradition Moore got together friends and connections to pool their talents to make this thing. Some of his comedian and singer friends perform in the movie, director D’Urville Martin also plays the villain Willie Green, screenwriter Jerry Jones also plays Detective Blakely. Moore himself is credited as set decorator, and he found a local karate champion and a swordfighting expert to do the fight scenes. It was alot of hard work decorating those sets and shit so forgive him for not getting the Dolemite tone perfect the first time around. (Or you could argue this is the best one because it seems the least aware of how ridiculous it is.)

Dolemite just got released from jail and now that he’s back on the scene he pays Willie Green’s stooges the 50 grand he owed him and considers himself once again the owner of Dolemite’s Total Experience night club. Willie Green disagrees, because he thinks he should get 100 grand in interest, or if not should be co-owner with Dolemite. So it’s a story about business disagreements that end mostly in karate.

From the opening scenes, despite Mr. von Sternberg’s efforts, you can see that the filmatism is crude. But then the theme song fires like an arrow right between your eyes and injects you with six tons of funk so you know this movie means business:

You like that? It’s like the riff from “Inner City Blues” has been hanging around with a bunch of wah wah pedals and drinking too much caffeine, very fast and hard blaxploitation funk that would make the Pope strut like a pimp. The theme song is important because the lyrics impart ten crucial facts about Dolemite:

1. He’s bad
2. The man is outta sight
3. He’s a tough son of a gun, y’all
4. His name is Dolemite (maybe this one is self-evident)
5. Ben Taylor (the singer of the song) heard of Dolemite’s coming even before his time
6. He ain’t lyin’ about number 5
7. On the day that he was born his pappy wore a sign saying “Dolemite is here and this bad little brother is mine.”
8. In addition to being outta sight Dolemite also is all right
9. He’s gonna let the whole world know how bad a man is he
10. It is recommended that you stop, look and listen due to the fact that Dolemite is here for y’all to see.

(By the way, I highly recommend that soundtrack CD. Not only is this song a must-own, the thing is loaded with ridiculously funky instrumentals that I never even knew were in the movie because they play quietly in the background, you can’t really make some of them out. Also it has some radio spots at the end where Rudy Ray says under 18 won’t be admitted without a parent or a note from their jailer.)

The Dolemite we see onscreen is not quite the mythic figure of the Dolemite toast, who went 8 years without eating food, has an uncle who killed a dozen men with the smell of his breath, he caused the Rocky Mountains to part and, uh, fucked an elephant until she broke out in tears. Also he can look up a bull’s ass and tell you the price of butter, that’s one of his abilities. It’s like Rambo being able to eat things that would make a billygoat puke, though – you’re just never gonna see Dolemite using the butter pricing thing on film, unfortunately. So the movie Dolemite isn’t as super-powered, but he has the same kind of foul mouthed insults and boasts. His character is established pretty quickly when he comes out of the joint, gets picked up by a limo full of hot chicks, strips off his clothes, throws them back to the prison and tells the guard to wipe his ass with them. That’s a good one – many movies could benefit from these types of dramatic gestures. And to be honest I would rather see that than him fucking the elephant.

Everything about the plot is generic: released from prison, framed for a crime he didn’t commit, racist white cops trying to bust him, sympathetic black cop sees what’s going on, etc. If you just read a plot description it wouldn’t sound like it stood out from other blaxploitation movies in any way. But it does, because Dolemite is unlike any other movie character. He’s not suave like Shaft or Superfly, he’s not physically impressive like the Hammer or Jim Kelly. But he’s more sure of himself than any of them, and has a bigger mouth. He brags that “When I see a ghost, I cut the mutha fucka,” that “Dolemite is my name, and fuckin up mothafuckas is my game.” He calls somebody a “rat-soup eatin, insecure, honky motha FUCKA!”

One thing people like about the blaxploitation pictures is the ridiculous outfits. The ’70s was the best time for an audacious motherfucker to really go overboard on a white bellbottom suit or a fur coat. Dolemite took advantage of that window, and wears alot of silly shit in this movie. After performing part of his “Signifying Monkey” toast at the Total Experience we see Dolemite in a dressing room, wearing a silver sequined cape and powdering up. When he goes back into the club to confront Willie Green he’s wearing a white tux with a huge plaid bow tie.

But the thing that really makes Dolemite stand out from other movie heroes is his rhyming. He gets to perform his toasts, and not just in the club. One of my favorite parts is a long scene in a parking lot where he performs the “Shine on the Great Titanic” toast for some dudes who recognize him. He kind of gets self conscious that they don’t want to hear the whole thing, asks “Is that enough?” but they’re into it and he has to keep going. It’s a good story (the black guy working his ass off in steerage who shows those silly rich people up by surviving), Dolemite tells it well, and this is the one scene in the movie that feels like reality. I imagine this is exactly what would happen to him every once in a while when people approached him on the street.

DOLEMITE is not a good movie in any of the traditional ways, but the over-the-topness of the character combines with the crappiness of the filmatism and the funkiness of the music and clothes, causing a chemical reaction that can burn through metal. It’s a crappy movie that’s awesome enough that we hold it on a pedestal more than 30 years later. We’re protective of it.

When they were talking about remaking this with LL Cool J, the prestigious cracked.com complained that “some clever devil at Dimension Films… decided that Dolemite would be a much better character if he wasn’t a pimp, and if he was framed for a crime he didn’t commit.” But I gotta point out that neither of these would be changes from the original movie. Dolemite was in prison because the corrupt cops Mitchell and White planted coke and stolen fur coats in the trunk of his car. Although he seems like a pimp when he gets out and is met by what appears to be his stable of hoes, Queen Bee explains that while he was gone things got so desperate that his girls had to sell themselves on the street. In fact they are the employees of his club, and he never pimps them. He does call one of them a bitch for bringing him cotton drawers, which he says she should know he never wears. That’s disrespectful but it doesn’t really count as pimping in my opinion.

So I can’t really be outraged by that. Like with many things I think a pretty good remake could happen, but wouldn’t. The passing of Rudy Ray may or may not push along the development on that thing. Last I heard it was some nobody production company trying to do it with Snoop Dogg. I still think Bust Rhymes would be better, with his gravelly voice. Snoop is too tall and lanky, too smooth and soft-spoken. He’s more of a Superfly than a Dolemite. Him and Busta both had Dolemite on their album intros though. Maybe he passed one of them the torch. Good luck holding onto that thing, fellas. Not gonna be easy. I’d rather they not try, but if they do they better not fuck up.

What will a post-Dolemite world be like? It’s too bad, Rudy pretended to run for president so many times, but he didn’t quite live to see President Obama. Probaly would’ve been disappointed that legalizing prostitution wasn’t on the agenda. As far as an artistic output, the guy was 81, he had enough time there. I’m dying to see DOLEMITE EXPLOSION!, but I didn’t expect him to do another one. He was actually moved into a retirement home and had to be carried around. Even if he could walk the main thing he was doing in those later years was cameos in crappy low budget movies most of us weren’t gonna track down. I don’t care how big your posse is, I will not watch a movie made by Insane Clowns. It’s not my thing.

Will that remake still happen? With Dolemite gone will some studio take it over? Would that maybe be better?

What happens to the cottage industry anyway, when the boss isn’t here? Does his son take over? Or Queen Bee and the girls? Does it just disappear, since there are no shows to sell t-shirts at? Or does Dolemite become the registered intellectual property of some corporation? A license, a franchise, a property, a brand. House of Blues Presents The Dolemite Total Experience™ Resort with your host Dolemite™.

Whatever happens, the legacy will live on. DOLEMITE isn’t even his best movie, but it alone is enough to make him legendary in my mind. The power of DOLEMITE in your DVD player will overcome whatever some stupid motherfucker tries to do to make money off the name. But they better be careful fuckin with the legacy, and I’ll tell you why:

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