Posts Tagged ‘blaxploitation’
Monday, March 2nd, 2015
“Equation-wise the first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended. We work on the other side of time. We’ll bring them here through either isotope teleportation, trans-molecularization, or better still, teleport the whole planet here through music.”
There’s no way around it: SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974) is a crazy fuckin movie. And not in the common manner of movies that are obviously trying to be weird to get a rise out of you. More like you watch it and wonder who the hell made this movie. Actual crazy people? A UFO cult of some kind? Inmates at an asylum that uses free jazz and guerrilla filmmaking as therapy? The people in question, crazy or not, are Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, the one-of-a-kind cosmically themed avant-garde jazz army from Philadelphia by way of New York by way of Chicago by way of Saturn. They land their space ship in Oakland, California, hang out a while, perform, and try to find ideal new recruits for their all black space colony.
Sun Ra wasn’t always a space man. Early in the movie we see him as Sonny Ray, the piano player at a black Chicago night club circa 1943. The real life Sonny Blount indeed played clubs like this. He was a talented pianist backing up touring musicians and leading his own highly skilled bands, renowned for being able to play in many styles.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, jazz, Sun Ra
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014
“Me and Priest go back to the golden age of hustlin.”
Alot of people tend to forget that Superfly returned in 1990. And unlike, say, Batman in BATMAN RETURNS, he actually had a place to return from. He’s still living overseas, now in Paris, when he hears his old partner Eddie has been killed, so he finally comes back to New York.
Oh shit, but I fell into the trap. “Superfly” was never his name, his name was Youngblood Priest and the title referred to the alleged quality of his illegal medicinal products. And it was two words anyway. Super Fly. Maybe “The Return of Superfly” means that Eddie’s dope was not up to snuff and now has been replaced by superior product by this guy Hector (Carlos Carrasco, CROCODILE DUNDEE II, SPEED, PARKER), who’s taking over. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Nathan Purdee, Samuel L. Jackson, Sig Shore, Tico Wells
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 46 Comments »
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2014
“I am retired. Can you dig where I’m coming from?”
How is it that I never watched the sequel to SUPER FLY, especially considering
it was called SUPER FLY T.N.T.? You’d think I’d’ve gotten on that shit right away. But I’m not the only one who forgot about it. This 1973 sequel has never been released on DVD. It has no external reviews on IMDb. And its soundtrack has never been on CD, even though it’s good enough that I bought a vinyl copy on ebay right after I watched the movie.
I’m surprised it took me this long to get around to it, but admittedly I never thought it would be good. I figured why make a sequel to SUPER FLY, anyway? Didn’t he quit the game at the end of the first one? Is this gonna be like MAGNUM FORCE, where they totally ignored that Clint had thrown his badge off a bridge at the end of DIRTY HARRY?
Actually, no. Not at all.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Haley, blaxploitation, Robert Guillaume, Ron O'Neal, Roscoe Lee Browne, Sheila Frazier, Zero External Reviews on IMDb
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 17 Comments »
Monday, April 21st, 2014
I’ve seen SUPER FLY a bunch of times, but I guess not since the VHS days. It’s a good looking movie on DVD, a nice document of extravagant ’70s clothing, small but fancy apartments, a white Rolls Royce rolling around dirty New York streets, its shiny hood ornaments leading the charge like a figurehead on a boat headed to the new world. It’s not a plot-heavy movie, it’s full of long scenes showing off the Curtis Mayfield soundtrack, for my money probly the greatest song soundtrack ever made for a movie (though the blaxploitation genre’s got several classics: SHAFT, BLACK CAESAR and COFFY come to mind. And you can’t front on TRUCK TURNER.)
Speaking of SHAFT, it’s weird that SHAFT and SUPER FLY are the two most famous blaxploitation movies, and they’re directed by father and son. Gordon Parks Sr. did SHAFT in ’71, Junior did SUPER FLY in ’72. I don’t know anything about the relationship between father and son, but I noticed Junior gets an opening credit for the still photo sequence. I wonder if that was to make sure nobody thought it was by his famous photographer father? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Carl Lee, Charles McGregor, Curtis Mayfield, Gordon Parks Jr., Ron O'Neal
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Thursday, February 27th, 2014
Alot of people have recommended the PENITENTIARY trilogy to me over the years. Apparently it’s a pretty crazy movie property franchise of the VHS era, so it made sort of a minor cult legend out of writer-director Jamaa Fanaka. He came out of the UCLA film school and a group of young black filmmakers known as “the L.A. Rebellion.” Other members include Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Haile Gerima, so he might’ve been the black sheep of the group, being more interested in exploitation type subject matter than his colleagues.
Although the PENITENTIARYs are what he’s known for, Fanaka (who was born Walter Gordon, by the way – he changed it to a Swahili name in college) actually started in the blaxploitation era. His first feature was 1974’s EMMA MAE, better known now as BLACK SISTER’S REVENGE. In 1975 he did WELCOME HOME, BROTHER CHARLES, which we will discuss here under its current video title of SOUL VENGEANCE. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Charles Burnett, Jamaa Fanaka, L.A. Rebellion
Posted in Horror, I don't know, Reviews | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, February 26th, 2014
“Their first mistake was letting him in. Their worst mistake was letting him out.”
A senator’s polls say he needs more of “the Negro vote” to win re-election, so his strategist suggests accusing the CIA of discriminatory hiring policies. Cut to the CIA considering hundreds of black men as candidates and narrowing them down to 10 men in their training course.
They teach them to shoot, car bomb, collapse bridges, sky dive, scuba dive, judo, etc. But you only need one token to play Ms. Pac-Man so only one of these guys gets through: the guy who doesn’t make any friends, who “has a habit of fading into the background.” So much so that you barely even notice him in these early scenes. Some other guy seems like he’s the main character. But this is the guy. His name is Freeman and he’s played by Lawrence Cook, who also had parts in TROUBLE MAN, COLORS and POSSE. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Herbie Hancock, Ivan Dixon, J.A. Preston, Lawrence Cook, Michael Kahn
Posted in Action, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Thursday, December 27th, 2012
A couple weeks ago the studio “lifted the embargo” as they say, and all the online critics unchained their DJANGO reviews even though non-critics wouldn’t see the thing until Christmas. I think that’s a silly ritual because I wasn’t gonna read that shit! This is the new Quentin Tarantino movie, you go in fresh. I already know I want to see any movie he makes, I don’t gotta read everything about it first. In case you’re different I’ve tried to mark the biggest spoilers in this review, but as usual I recommend seeing the movie first.
DJANGO UNCHAINED is the most straight forward movie Tarantino has ever made. It follows one main character from first scene to last, doesn’t cut away to another story or even jump around in time other than some very traditional flashbacks. There are alot of long conversation scenes, but it’s generally pretty clear what they have to do with the main plot of the freed slave Django (Jamie Foxx, STEALTH) becoming a bounty hunter and trying to rescue his wife (Kerry Washington) from a plantation. And that’s not a misleading description, that’s really the movie, a racially charged western (or “Southern,” Tarantino likes to say) in the tradition of those CHARLEY movies I just reviewed.
So in a way it feels uneventful for a Tarantino movie, the first time he made one that was pretty much what I expected from the commercials. On first viewing it seems low in my rankings of the QT filmography, but that doesn’t say much. Tarantino sure knows how to entertain, and I happen to love this genre of badass black cowboys out for frontier justice against practitioners of the slave trade. For his first straight up genre picture that’s a good genre to pick. I love this movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, Christoph Waltz, Don Johnson, Franco Nero, James Remar, Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Parks, neo spaghetti western, Quentin Tarantino, Samuel L. Jackson, slavery, Tom Wopat
Posted in Reviews, Western | 227 Comments »
Friday, December 21st, 2012
Don’t worry, this is the last of the pre-DJANGO slavery-themed reviews. I don’t want to ruin Christmas or anything, but I gotta finish the trilogy.
BOSS was originally called BOSS [word white people shouldn’t say], but it was easy to change to just BOSS and therefore it’s the only one of the Charley trilogy available on a legitimate DVD. In this one it’s still Fred Williamson as Charley, but he’s just called “Boss.” (Or maybe “Bas” like Bas Rutten?) And D’Urville Martin is still his sidekick but he’s called “Amos” instead of Toby. Maybe it’s an alias. At this point they’ve left behind their town in Mexico and are traveling bounty hunters. But it definitely is meant as a sequel because Williamson says so on a title card added to the DVD where he explains why he approves of the use of the n-word in the title, dialogue and theme song. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, D'Urville Martin, Fred Williamson, Jack Arnold, R.G. Armstrong, William Smith
Posted in Reviews, Western | 11 Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2012
The first sequel to THE LEGEND OF (cough cough) CHARLEY is the best of the series in my opinion. It takes place after the Civil War, so Charley is no longer a runaway slave, but he still has to deal with racists, including a former Confederate colonel who still leads his troop of assholes on violent rampages in black settlements.
Charley (still Fred Williamson) and Toby (still D’urville Martin) come across one of these towns right after everyone’s been massacred except for a little boy. By this time Charley is such a legend that the kid can’t believe he’s meeting him, it’s like he gets to hang out with Mohammad Ali. Or Fred Williamson.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, D'Urville Martin, Fred Williamson
Posted in Reviews, Western | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, December 19th, 2012
I’ve been curious about this series of Fred Williamson slavery-era westerns, and with DJANGO UNCHAINED coming at the end of the month it seemed like a good time to finally get to them.
As the old white patriarch of a plantation is on his death bed he wants to free his favorite slave, who took good care of him. She says she’s too old to start a new life and asks him instead to free her son, Charley (Fred Williamson). Charley works as a blacksmith, which makes me think this was probly one of the inspirations for THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS. But unfortunately he never uses his ironworking skills as a free man, not even in the sequels.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: blaxploitation, D'Urville Martin, Don Pedro Colley, Fred Williamson, slavery
Posted in Reviews, Western | 33 Comments »
