"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘pimps’

Truck Turner

Friday, February 18th, 2011

tn_truckturnerEverybody knows Isaac Hayes’s music for SHAFT, but he also scored TRUCK TURNER. And while he was at it he decided to also star as Truck Turner. Why not? I guess at one point it was gonna be Robert Mitchum, which would’ve made for a really weird blaxploitation movie.

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.

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Vice Squad

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011

tn_vicesquadVICE SQUAD is a gritty 1982 movie about some L.A. cops trying to catch a murderous pimp. He’s a redneck pimp named Ramrod, played by the Busey-esque Wings Hauser, who I last saw as the evil sorcerer in BEASTMASTER 2. Hauser also sings a crazy song called “Neon Slime” that’s played over the opening credits and is so interesting it does an encore during the end credits so you can re-examine it. It takes two listens to really get it, I think.

Ramrod drives a Bronco, dresses kinda like Cowboy Curtis and has a gigantic photo of Elvis in his apartment. This guy is a real psycho, he gets rough with women in general and beats his hoes especially. One of them he beats so bad she dies, but he doesn’t realize it at the time. The Vice Squad, led by Detective Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson), guilt a hooker friend of the deceased named Princess (Season Hubley) into wearing a wire and helping them bust Ramrod. She’s hesitant but she does it, and it works.

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Hustle & Flow

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

I had a good feeling about this movie from right about the time the title came on the screen. It was a shot of a pimp (Terence Howard) and a ho (Taryn Manning) driving in a car, and it freeze frames to write the title in yellow ’70s style lettering.

I always like Terence Howard but I’ve never seen him in a lead role before. He’s always the supporting role that steals the movie. Here he has a lead role that steals the movie. I haven’t seen GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN but I would be surprised if Terence Howard’s performance in this movie doesn’t run a hundred circles around his co-star in that movie, both as an actor and as a rapper. True, he does mumble alot in this movie (you almost need subtitles) but I still feel his enunciation is better than Fifty Cents. (read the rest of this shit…)

Pimps Up, Ho’s Down

Wednesday, December 27th, 2000

Ever since I first saw American Pimp I have been meaning to see this competing “pimpumentary” which came out the same year and was covered in the same articles. Someone even told me it was way better because the pimps are crazier and flashier. But now that I’ve finally seen it I gotta say, I disagree. This is the poor man’s American Pimp. The made-for-tv American Pimp. This is the Carnosaur to American Pimp‘s Jurassic Park. If American Pimp is The Beatles, Pimps Up is a Monkees cover band. When they’re older and less inspired, and thinking of breaking up.

The filmatics in this one simply is not as good. American Pimp was finely sculpted in such a way as to explain the pimp culture, how they are viewed in society, what is important to them, how their job works, etc. Pimps Up doesn’t explain shit. It’s just a bunch of interviews, some of them very entertaining, but thrown together pretty much at random. Since I saw it on dvd it is the director’s cut, which I think just means they added in about 30 minutes of extra ass shaking. Alot of it takes place at strip clubs or at pimp conventions where they just have strippers shaking their asses alot. Which, sorry fellas, but it gets old. There are other documentaries which cover that territory better, many of them from companies like Vivid or Hustler. (read the rest of this shit…)

American Pimp

Saturday, June 10th, 2000

Those of you motherfuckers who read me regularly know that my column this week is about the great pimp novelist Iceberg Slim and the attempts by “hollywood” to turn his autobiography into a major motion picture starring Ice Cube. Well shit, if I knew about this movie I might not have been worried. Even if Pimp: The Story of My Life: The Movie turns out to be a bust, we do got this excellent documentary which also looks into the seductive, charismatic and fucked up world of the pimping industry.

The film is directed by the Hughes brothers. Now I can’t remember if these are the brothers behind Fargo, or the ones behind Dumb and Dumber, or possibly the ones who did the Matrix. WHO the fuck knows. But whoever they are THESE are the individuals who ought to be doing the Iceberg Slim movie! They are a-class type filmmakers and obviously after this movie they know a thing or two about pimps. Now in my opinion there are a LOT of directors in hollywood who have intimate knowledge of the prostitution industry, however not necessarily the pimp part. Yes it is important to understand prostitutes in order to do Pimp: The Movie however please keep in mind hollywood these are street hoes we are dealing with, not callgirls or escorts. The Hughses know these pimps. Hell I’d like to see some of these individuals in small parts in the movie. Philmore Slim would DEFINITELY fit right in in the world of the book. (read the rest of this shit…)