DEVIL'S EXPRESS (Gang Wars, 1976)

First-time director Barry Rosen bet on a Seventies genre trifecta by making a blaxploitation martial-arts horror film, and while I wouldn't call it a good movie it is an often-fascinating document of the fantasy life springing from the grungy state of urban life at that time. In its Mummy-inspired prologue, ancient Chinese monks lower a mysterious casket, with an amulet attached, into a hole in the earth. To ensure that no one knows the location of the burial, the leader of the little group kills everyone else before putting himself to the sword. While he might well have waited until they'd all done something to cover the hole, no one actually discovers the mystery inside until centuries later.

In 1970s Harlem, martial-arts instructor Luke (Warhawk Tanzania) spars with his friend Cris (Larry Fleischman). It's a tense friendship since Luke is black and Cris is a white cop, but as Luke explains to his suspicious students, he owes Cris a favor. In any event, Luke and his student-buddy Rodan (Wilfredo Roldan) are soon off to Hong Kong for some elite training. Rodan's head really isn't into the discipline -- he's more of a thug at heart -- but Luke earns a diploma after a match with the master. After that, Luke is sent to an island to meditate, while Rodan is tasked with watching over him. Bored by it all, Rodan just happens to discover the pit that generations of random explorers and possible treasure hunters managed to miss. Lowering himself in with ease, he snatches the amulet and takes it home to America with him.

The Hong Kong-New York steamer has another passenger: a Chinese man who suddenly finds himself possessed by some unseen entity. By the time he reaches the U.S. he's a staggering, bug-eyed mess terrified by every bright light and sharp sound until he finds a sort of shelter in the subway system. Now whatever's inside him can come into its own, though the filmmakers don't quite have the money to do more than suggest a chest-bursting exit with a lot of bleeding.

Meanwhile, Rodan and his gang buddies escalate their feud with a Chinese gang after he gets ripped off in a cocaine deal. In a violent variation on West Side Story the Chinese and black/Hispanic gangs perform martial-arts rumbles in the slums of New York, where the producers enjoyed extensive municipal cooperation despite their film's unflattering snapshot of Seventies squalor. As the gang war escalates, Cris and the rest of the police begin investigating a subway serial killer. While his comedy-relief partner invokes urban legends of mutant animals, Cris suspects that the killings are gang-related, despite Luke's vehement pushback against that suggestion. Luke's attitude toward his friends is strangely ambivalent. He warns them constantly against using martial arts in anger, but it's unclear whether he even realizes that Rodan is a drug dealer or if he would care. He lives in a sort of ebony tower, content to make love to his girlfriend and improve his knowledge until the killings come to close to home.

As you might guess, the subway entity is drawn to Rodan for the amulet he wears -- but by the time it finally catches up with him, the Chinese gang has snatched it away. That's how their wise old mentor is finally able to explain the actual situation to Luke, once the Chinese convince him that they weren't the ones who slammed Rodan face-first into a transformer. Only Luke has the mental discipline to defeat the monster, which adds an arsenal of psychic attacks to its arsenal for the final showdown in the tunnels. It takes a variety of forms, including Rodan and later two fighters at once, before trying to convince Luke that trains are bearing down on him. For Rosen it's a brave effort at something trippy and supernatural, but when the monster finally shows its true form and goes for a death grapple the scene is too dark to appreciate either the monster get-up or the climactic action.

While Devil's Express ends on an underwhelming note, it's an admirable B-film in which everyone seems to be trying hard to make an impression. Warhawk Tanzania (who made only one more film) is no real actor but at least errs on the side of excess, and while the fighting isn't much by Chinese standards (and the gore effects are mostly laughable) Rosen and his co-writers manage to invest each encounter with some dramatic urgency. They also find time for gratuitously entertaining stuff like a fight between a male bully and a female bartender at Luke's favorite watering hole and a cameo by misanthropic performance artist Brother Theodore -- he may be remembered from the early years of David Letterman's late-night show -- as a priest slowly driven mad by the subway killings. There's a likable cacophany to the pre-climactic scene where Luke negotiates with the cops to let him go into the tunnels alone while the priest rants to the assembled crowd about dead gods, pestiferous rats and whatnot. Rosen's enthusiasm makes it regrettable that he directed only one more film, though he's gone on to a long career as a TV producer. For Devil's Express he threw a lot of stuff at the screen to see what would stick, and that's almost certain to leave at least something for some of us to like.

THE BAD BUNCH (1973)

Greydon Clark made his directorial debut and starred in this low-budget quasi-blaxploitation picture. It's not quite the real thing because Clark, a white man, is the point-of-view character throughout. It opens in Vietnam, represented by helicopter sound effects and some scrubby tall brush, as Jim (Clark) talks race relations with his black comrade-in-arms. This well-meaning person is about to reveal an idea he had for healing racial divisions when Charlie opens fire on the men, killing Jim's buddy. Stateside, Jim takes it upon himself to deliver a letter his buddy had written to his father, Tom Washington (Fred Scott). Arriving in Watts, Jim is immediately an object of suspicion and derision. Outside the old man's home, he has a tense encounter with a gang led by his buddy's brother, Tom Washington Jr. (Tom Johnigarn), or as he prefers, Makimba. As far as Makimba's concerned, it's Jim fault that his brother is dead, because Vietnam is a white man's war. The gang tracks Jim to a carnival and chases him down afterward. Before things get ugly, the cops show up. Then things get ugly, for the two middle-aged plainclothes white detectives (Aldo Ray and Jock Mahoney) are bigots looking for any excuse to take down black kids. Jim manages to defuse the situation but only earns the cops' contempt without winning any trust from Makimba.

Makimba might be the hero of a true blaxploitation picture, but here he's only a self-righteous asshole, kept from being an absolute villain only by the irredeemable racism of the cops and the audience's inferred understanding of the reality of places like Watts. He remains obsessed with getting some sort of revenge on the unoffending Jim. Meanwhile, Clark pads the film with an uninteresting love triangle involving Jim, his fiancee and a head-shop cashier he cheats on her with. You can't escape the impression that while he's supposed to be our hero, Jim's a bit of a sleaze who socializes at strip clubs, gets drunk and fears commitment. At the same time, Makimba is impotently resentful of the fact that his girlfriend has to turn tricks to pay the rent. Perhaps there's a faint echo here of the classic race-noir Odds Against Tomorrow, in which a white and black criminal who hate and ultimately destroy each other are shown to be pathetically miserable in their personal lives.

Somehow the plot contrives to get Makimba and his friends invited to a pool party thrown by Jim's friends in a Jewish neighborhood (Jim himself is Eastern Orthodox). It's an interesting scene that shows several of the gang loosening up and having fun with many of the whites while Jim remains gloweringly aloof. It's also an excuse for ample full-frontal female nudity, though as far as I noticed none of the men strips so completely before diving into the pool. An angry neighbor, offended at the site of "negroids" frolicking with whites, calls the cops on the party, forcing Makimba and friends to flee, almost missing the tardy Jim.

Makimba has only grown more paranoid about Jim because he's misinterpreted the white man's encounter with the cops at Tom Washington's funeral. Makimba's father had a fatal heart attack while scuffling with his son over the ammo for a rifle Makimba wants to shoot with. Jim wants to pay his respects and gets into an argument with the same racist cops from earlier in the picture. Seeing this from a distance, Makimba gets the idea that Jim has "fingered" him in some way. Thwarted at the pool party, Makimba desperately seeks another way to get at Jim, finally snatching the head-shop cashier and torturing her, despite the objections of his increasingly divided gang, to learn where Jim is. One of the gang is so repulsed by Makimba's mania that he actually rats his friend out to the racist cops, who race to the rescue only to get killed by the gang with knives, shovels, etc.

Now there's nothing left for Makimba to do but kill Jim, who has finally decided to go through with his marriage. Clark, who co-wrote the film, may have thought it a clever touch that Jim's overcoming his fear of commitment would prove his undoing, but since he does little, as actor or auteur, to make Jim an interesting personality, I doubt many in the audience cared much whether Jim got married or not. Unfortunately, I doubt many cared whether Jim got killed or not. For what it's worth, The Bad Bunch (also known as Tom or N----r Lover, after its title song) is a creation of its time, and so with characteristic pessimism it ends with Makimba killing Jim and a final split screen equating this murder with the death of Makimba's brother in war. While the film as a whole has a certain grungy authenticity that I appreciate in Seventies movies, its utterly one-dimensional treatment of Makimba undermines any point it meant to make about race relations. As an exploitation picture and a document of its time, however, it still has its moments of interest.

FRED WILLIAMSON in the Western that Dare Not Speak Its Name!

The newspaper ad above comes from the Baltimore Afro-American. What that shows us is that in 1975 not only did Fred Williamson have no problem producing, writing and starring in a picture called Boss Nigger, but a black-owned newspaper had no problem advertising the title. Similar ads for the movie appeared in white or mainstream newspapers as well -- with controversy or not, I can't say. In 2008, for the DVD release of the picture, Williamson prepared a text preface endorsing its reappearance under its original title, and with the original title song playing on the soundtrack. Conservatively, the DVD company released it under the title Boss. It's pretty certain that few if any movie theaters would show a film called Boss Nigger today, no matter how much a product of African-American auteurship -- albeit directed by a white man, Jack Arnold -- it was. Were race relations easier forty years ago? Depends on where you were, I suppose, but it seems at least that the "N-word" was not the red flag for so many people that it is now. I can't help thinking, too, that cable TV pundits and radio talkers would furiously (if not fearfully) denounce many of the top blaxploitation films were they to first appear today. Many would seem to a certain sensitivity today like incitements to race war, or simply expressions of race hatred. I'm sure some saw them that way in the Seventies, but my nostalgic impression is that white people back then were better sports about it all, more willing to indulge others in their particular fantasies -- and quite likely enjoying them themselves.

This is some setup for a pretty bad movie. Boss Nigger betrays its low budget and quickie schedule in almost every frame. Jack Arnold's triumphs as a director were two decades in the past, and the former sci-fi specialist at Universal brings little pictorial imagination to Williamson's story, or else he and Williamson, as co-producers, lacked the resources to bring either man's imagination to life. Much of the action plays out in poorly staged long takes, leaving the picture with little of the epic (or mock-epic) sweep the producers presumably aspired to. There's a particularly bad comic bit in which D'Urville Martin, as Williamson's sidekick, is trying to reach through a window and club a guard in a rocking chair with his pistol. Martin's reach is too short and he keeps missing. There's the beginning of a sight gag here, but they payoff would be to somehow get the guard rocking further and further back until Martin can whack him -- the gag is the rocking of the chair. Instead, Arnold has a captive woman in the room pretend to seduce the guard and simply shove the chair toward the window so Martin can strike home. That's typical of the inept comedy of the picture. Arnold had presumably proven himself as a comedy director by handling Peter Sellers in The Mouse That Roared, but here his touch is leaden. Fred Williamson is no Peter Sellers, of course, but bear in mind that Fred was after even bigger comic game.

Some of the ads for Boss Nigger wishfully label it "Another Blazing Saddles." It's tempting to dismiss the Williamson/Arnold picture as a ripoff of Blazing Saddles and to note that, in challenging Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor on the field of comedy, Fred and Jack were bringing a knife to a nuclear war. The facts suggest something more like coincidence. Boss Nigger was being mentioned as Williamson's next project as early as the spring of 1973, after the actor had made two successful "Nigger Charley" movies. Blazing Saddles wasn't released until February 1974, but Boss Nigger didn't make it into theaters until a year after that. The point of similarity, of course, is that in both films a black man becomes the sheriff of an Old West town. It wouldn't surprise me if Williamson had seen some version of a Blazing Saddles script, or if he had been offered the role that went to Cleavon Little after Warner Bros. wouldn't let Brooks cast Pryor. Whether he did or not, the one thing Williamson's own script for Boss Nigger has going for it is its discovery of a conceptual space not covered by Brooks, Pryor et al yet ideally suited for blaxploitation. In Blazing Saddles the black sheriff is a dupe, a pawn in Hedley Lamarr's plot to destroy the town of Rock Ridge, imposed on the town by Lamarr and his pal the governor. In Boss Nigger, Boss the bounty hunter (Williamson) takes over the town of San Miguel on his own initiative and for his own purpose. Boss wants the town and its jail as a base of operations from which to wage war on the gang of Jed Clayton (William Smith), with no nobler ultimate purpose, at first, than to collect the big bounty on Clayton's head. Much more so than in Blazing Saddles, the black sheriff in Boss Nigger becomes a lord of misrule. A lot of the labored comedy in the middle section comes from Boss and his sidekick Amos enforcing their "Black Laws," empowering themselves to fine or jail anyone who disrespects them by using the N-word or by any other means. Williamson and Arnold never really manage to make this funny, but the idea isn't bad.

Comedy may not come naturally to Fred Willamson, and at times Boss Nigger becomes quite uncomic. Williamson gives Boss a social conscience by having him befriend the Mexican peons who live in impoverished segregation at the edge of town. He plays Moses by confiscating goods from the general store and distributing them to the peons. He and Arnold play mawkishly for pathos by having one boy befriended by Boss trampled to death by the horses of Clayton's gang after tumbling to the ground in slow motion. Later, Boss's girlfriend, the town's only other black person, is shot dead by Clayton, and there's nothing comic about Boss's vengeance. Clayton had given Boss his own beatdown earlier, and there's nothing comic about William Smith's villainy. Williamson and Arnold cast well for a big, mean bully, and Smith is one of the few performers to fully deliver the goods here. At the very end, Boss Nigger achieves something like an epic poignancy after Boss kills Clayton, only to be gravely wounded by the town's conniving mayor (R. G. Armstrong). Convinced (against Amos's assurances) that his wounds are mortal, Boss becomes desperate to leave San Miguel. He doesn't want to die in a white man's town, and he spurns the appeal of the white schoolmarm who befriended him (Barbara Leigh) to go with him. His few white friends, including the doctor and the blacksmith, load him into a wagon for Amos to drive away. On their way, they pass through the Mexican quarter, and the body of Boss's girl is loaded into the wagon. There's something of Shane in this ending, with the hero departing not dead but most likely dying -- despite Fred Willamson's admonition that he should never die (and should get the girl) in his own pictures.  Of course the blaxploitation music that's played throughout the picture kind of kills the mood, but Williamson may not have thought the final pathos inconsistent with the overall burlesque. The ending hints at a deeper ambition than Williamson, who had not yet begun directing himself, wasn't ready to realize, and Arnold could no longer fulfill. Williamson would write a darker-toned western, Joshua, a few years after, and around the same time directed his own ill-fated collaboration with Richard Pryor, Adios Amigo. In sheer quantitative terms, Williamson was one of the major western stars of the Seventies, but Boss Nigger falls short for many reasons of any ambition he had to make a major western. In some ways, the even more impoverished Joshua is a better movie. But Boss Nigger will always be a point of interest for western and blaxploitation fans, and anyone attracted by the allure of the forbidden.

On the Big Screen: DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)

The new film by Quentin Tarantino is a poor excuse for a spaghetti western in many ways, whatever its other virtues may be. Consider: the great fan of the genre forgot to include a climactic mano-a-mano gunfight between the hero and a villain. Yes, not every spaghetti western has such a scene, but just about all of them have villains who are good with guns -- but Django Unchained does not. It actually has a couple of great villains in Leonardo DiCaprio's decadent plantation master and Samuel L. Jackson's loathsome sycophant of a major-domo, but neither of them shows any prowess with firearms. Tarantino saw no need to endow either character with gun prowess, nor any need to stage a classic showdown. As far as the big action scenes are concerned, Django often resembles Asian films in which the hero, whether armed with a sword or just with kung fu, slays multitudes. Even most of those films, however, have some sort of one-on-one showdown involving an evil master, a worthy antagonist who allows the hero to show off his ultimate skills. The absence of such a figure in Unchained is glaring. It's not as if Tarantino's hero Sergio Corbucci eschewed such showdowns; the face-off in his Il Mercenario between Jack Palance and Tony Musante is one of the best of the genre. Such scenes don't figure so much, however, in the revolutionary westerns, usually set in Mexico, which certainly influenced Tarantino.

In the teaming of Jamie Foxx's title character and Christoph Waltz's Germanic bounty hunter Django echoes the archetypal pairing of "primitive" bandit and foreign "expert" in films like Damiano Damiani's Bullet for the General and Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dynamite. Those movies usually involve some sort of consciousness raising, but that element is strangely abortive in Unchained. That's unfortunate given the potential for rich backstory for Dr. King Schultz, an immigrant who despises slavery and proves less capable than Django the ex-slave of restraining his disdain for the slavemasters. The bounty hunter may be German only because Waltz is playing him, but the casting raises the possibility that Schultz might have been a refugee from the suppressed 1848 revolutions in Germany and the rest of Europe and thus a liberal if not an outright leftist. Schultz's past goes unexplored, however, and in general Django has fewer of the digressions that define Tarantino's work. It's the most rhetorically subdued film the director has made to date. The only truly characteristic Tarantino moment comes with DiCaprio's impromptu lecture on the phrenological proofs of Negro inferiority, illustrated with his hacksaw dissection of a former servant's Yorick-like skull. Otherwise, Waltz's occasional grandiloquence hardly holds a candle to the arias Tony Kushner gave to some of Dr. Schultz's contemporaries in Spielberg's Lincoln.  As my original complaint might indicate, Django Unchained lacks much of Tarantino's usual genre magic. That may be because the spaghetti western as a genre is a form of pastiche, and one that embraces a certain superficiality -- or sacrifices depth to achieve other, often impressive effects -- so that a pastiche of spaghetti westerns starts at one further remove, at least, from any kind of spontaneity. Unchained is lovely to look at, but that's the least you could expect from a cinematographer like Robert Richardson on some epic locations. But there's less feeling of seeing something with new eyes here than you'll get from any other Tarantino film except for Death Proof. If anything, the new film feels redundant, its ultimate resort to slaughter differing little from Inglourious Basterds, as if that's how Tarantino movies are going to end from now on -- not with showdowns, not even with revolutions, but with executions. Even his sampler soundtrack -- including an original song contributed by Ennio Morricone -- sounds relatively uninspired. As a fan of Jacopetti & Prosperi's Goodbye Uncle Tom, I found the absence of cues from Riz Ortolani's tremendous score for that film conspicuous. Maybe the use of the theme song in Drive last year made it poison for him.

Worse, Tarantino may have joined the ranks of directors who've forgotten how to end movies. You'll think you're seeing the wrap-up of Django Unchained in one very violent sequence, but you'll see that the film has about a half-hour to go. Django is one of Tarantino's most linear movies -- it plays out in chronological order, apart from brief flashbacks, and there's only one of the director's compulsive chapter breaks -- and it may show why he prefers to go non-linear. At nearly three hours, it lacks pace along with much urgency in the first half. It picks up considerably once the heroes begin their journey to Candieland, DiCaprio's plantation where Django's beloved remains enslaved. Tarantino has suggested that Apocalypse Now is a structural model for his film and you do get a sense of descending into an abyss as DiCaprio and Jackson reveal their evil. But perhaps out of some misplaced sense of historical or social realism, Tarantino's villains aren't made for single combat, and beyond that he fails to make the most of their menace. As a case in point, I was expecting Jackson's Stephen, made up as Uncle Tom's evil twin, to be a sexual threat to Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), Django's wife, but that threat never materializes, and as an elderly, lame man Stephen is no one to get into physical fights with Django. He falls somewhere between Grima Wormtongue and Edward G. Robinson's Dathan from The Ten Commandments, with a volume of Tarantino-Jacksonisms thrown in. Jackson and DiCaprio give the film's best performances but the film still seems to underutilize them, while Tarantino may have plotted a climax and filmed it before realizing that, while he might do without a climactic gun duel, he couldn't dispense with another key spaghetti trope, the capture and torture of the hero. It couldn't come at a more awkward time. Overall, Django Unchained feels surprisingly haphazard, especially since we know that some scenes are pointless whimsies (the dreadful business of Don Johnson's proto-klansmen kvetching about their ill-made masks) while others (retained in the graphic-novel adaptation) were cut out or never filmed.

Tarantino may have been too full of a sense of historical mission. He's told Henry Louis Gates that Django Unchained is to some extent an exorcism of John Ford, a director he affects to despise for his alleged offense of wearing a Klan hood as an extra on Birth of a Nation and his supposedly-unreconstructed racism, as if Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn had never existed. He seems really to want to blow bloody holes in a cinematic heritage he deems tainted by bigotry. His intellectually-admirable anti-racist agenda is even more sweeping, if you think about his appropriation of the Siegfried-Brunhilde myth most often associated with the anti-Semite Richard Wagner. Django is as much a self-conscious countermyth as Oliver Stone's JFK, and as such it has already been criticized. Inevitably, he's drawn fire from Spike Lee and fired back, dismissing Lee's insulted sensibilities as ridiculous. The exchange is telling. Lee protested against the idea of addressing slavery in a spaghetti western context, while Tarantino assumed that Lee insisted on some politically correct standard of dignity in any cinematic portrayal of slaves. This point came up in a different way during the actual shoot, as Tarantino had to persuade Foxx that Django could not be a Jim Brown-like badass superhero from his first appearance. The director had to know he was playing with fire by emphasizing the abjection of slaves, since someone might take it as a reflection on the character of slaves' descendants. But it's one thing to accuse detractors of demanding a false ideal of dignified resistance and another to caricature slavery for sensationalism, and by stating bluntly that slavery was not a spaghetti western Lee (who has admitted not seeing or intending to see the film) was probably criticizing some inevitable caricature, not flinching from some uncomfortable truth. Tarantino's slavedom is a realm of extensive collaboration by the likes of Stephen or Candie's apparent concubine, an arena for "mandingo fighting" and a venue for depravity by masters and slaves alike. If "slavesploitation" as a genre, from the epochal Goodbye Uncle Tom to Hollywood's lurid fantasies like Mandingo, has a defining fault, it's the generic focus on depravity rather than drudgery. You hardly see slaves working in the fields in slave movies. They are seen to exist as objects of their masters' fantasies and whims and become fantasy objects for audiences as well -- so goes the general critique. That extends to films that envision slave insurrections or the more personal revenge played out in Django Unchained.  I can imagine Tarantino offering his film as an empowering myth, but I wonder what he thinks the moral is.

Despite all I've said, Jamie Foxx's Django makes an intriguing spaghetti hero. His consciousness-raising arc is the closest the film gives us to something new in the genre. It's not the usual arc taking a "primitive" hero from selfishness to revolutionary consciousness. Django seems mostly indifferent, or else sometimes contemptuous, towards other slaves -- more so, in either case, as he adopts the role Schultz assigns for him as a "black slaver," an appraiser of mandingo fighters. Schultz talks anachronistaclly like an acting coach encouraging his charge in Method technique, while Django threatens to prove too good a student, his assumed arrogance toward whites and blacks alike threatening Schultz's delicate scheme to secure Broomhilda's manumission from Candie. To spoil a few things, however, it's Schultz himself who sabotages the plan at the last moment. They've been found out and forced to pay a high price for Hildy, but it looks like Candie will let them have her as long as he's got the money. As a last condition, however, Candie insists that state law requires the deal to be finalized with a handshake, but Schultz can't bring himself to shake hands with the vile slaveowner and can't stop himself from precipitating a disaster. You can't help thinking that had it been up to Django alone, he'd have shaken Candie's hand and left with Hildy.Whatever his political heritage, Schultz succumbs to moral indignation while Django seems able to restrain his -- despite several shots of him reaching toward his holster when he sees evidence of Hildy's suffering. This is a significant distinction, though for all I know the full significance of it may be lost to Tarantino himself. In simplest terms, the distinction may be between an idealist and a pragmatist, but Schultz remains too vaguely defined for me to guess where his fault lies exactly. Suffice it to say that his acte gratuite is where the film goes off the rails, but there may still be a point to his impulse making the rest of the movie's violence necessary. More than the monotonous flow of blood in the last reels, this mystery keeps me from dismissing Django Unchained as a genre botch, but it remains a disappointment. Tarantino has talked about quitting while he's ahead, but despite many positive reviews for this one, it may already be too late.

Wendigo Meets GANJA AND HESS (1973)

My friend Wendigo is a vampire-movie fan but not necessarily a cult-movie fan. When I mentioned that Bill Gunn's notorious (and in some quarters admired) black vampire film was being shown on TCM last weekend, he confessed that he had never heard of it. Obviously a DVR appointment was in order, since for all that I'd heard of it, I hadn't seen it either. Except for seeing it on TV instead of in a theater, this would be an optimum presentation: letterboxed and uncut -- including full frontal male nudity for the finale. We could obviously have done worse. After its failed New York premiere (which followed a triumphant world premiere at Cannes), Ganja and Hess was cut down drastically, retitled several times over and marketed for exploitation. Now, however, there would be no excuses if the film failed to impress us.

From the beginning, apparently, audiences have had a hard time following Gunn's story. He had to write an angry letter to the New York Times correcting the reviewer on a fairly important plot point, and to this day the synopsis on Wikipedia doesn't quite jibe with what we saw. This is odd, since the movie spells things out pretty bluntly, and twice over at that. A set of title cards relate that Dr. Hess Green (Duane "Night of the Living Dead" Jones) has become an immortal blood drinker after being stabbed with a ritual knife from the legendary African kingdom of Myrthia. The fact of Hess's blood addiction is restated in the narration of a gospel preacher who doubles as Dr. Green's chauffeur. But some people clearly believe that what follows, the first act of the film, flashes back to how Green became a blood addict, though nothing that we can recall actually identifies the sequence as a flashback. What we saw showed Green's awkward interaction with his new assistant, George Meda (Gunn). Meda is suicidal; Green has to talk him out of a tree in one scene as a noose hangs prominently from a branch. Suicidal thoughts become homicidal as Meda does stab Green with the famous knife, but the doctor pops back up promptly. Finally, Meda shoots himself. As a puddle of blood forms beneath him, Hess hits the floor to lap up the stuff in a matter-of-fact manner. If this is his first vampiric act, he give no indication that he finds it unusual or disturbing.

Enter Mrs. Ganja Meda (Marlene Clark), who makes a dismal first impression on viewers by insulting Green's long-suffering butler and not seeming overly impatient about her husband's return from wherever he went. Where he went, she finally learns, was to Green's wine cellar freezer. By this point, Hess has already started putting the moves on the unwitting widow -- though he restricts his blood drinking to strangers whenever he hears the ancient Myrthian chanting on the soundtrack. Her shocking discovery only accelerates things. Soon enough Ganja becomes Mrs. Hess Green, and a blood drinker, thanks to Hess's work with the Myrthian knife.  It's your standard romantic-vampire eternal-love fantasy, except it doesn't last. Hess gives Ganja a boy toy to play with, but seems to lose interest in the lifestyle -- if you can call it that. He ponders over Myrthian and Christian lore in search of the secret of self-destruction and seeks the reverend chauffeur's blessing, more or less, in church. Having offered Ganja eternal life, Hess now invites her to join him in death -- whether as an ultimate proof of love or as a moral imperative, but Ganja isn't so sure....

Putting it mildly, Wendigo calls Ganja and Hess "a strange movie." He appreciates what Gunn wanted to do and admires his ambition, but he suspects that the director got caught up in an art-for-art's sake approach that didn't do justice to his story. His various cinematic tricks only made the story difficult to warm to, and his lack of real visual style makes many scenes just plain dull. Gunn is a better writer than he is a director, and his actors are clearly talented -- anyone who's ever seen Night of the Living Dead would regret how few opportunities Duane Jones got, and Wendigo remembers Marlene Clark fondly from The Beast Must Die -- but Gunn the director leaves his cast and his own script at sea. He's really not very good at composing images, however fond he is of symbolism and decorating his sets with masterworks of art. A few scenes are nicely staged, like the suicide tree dialogue, and the closing shot of a naked running man has some real power, but too often the frame seems lifeless despite the actors' best efforts. Some aspects of the film are almost inscrutable. For instance, Wendigo has no idea where the film was supposed to be taking place. Everything seems American -- especially the church scenes -- but then you hear an obviously European siren all of a sudden. Was that just some avant-garde trick or joke? That would fit Gunn's sense of his own place in world cinema. Sadly, he had a higher opinion of his craft than the film justifies; he complained to the Times that he would have been hailed as a master had he been white and European -- but had that been the case he might only have been Jess Franco. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it probably wouldn't guarantee you a good review in the New York Times.

As a script, Ganja and Hess offered Wendigo more to praise. As always, he likes alternative visions of the vampire, and he likes that Gunn got through the film without ever calling Hess or Ganja a vampire. Since folklore gives us countless ways in which people can become vampires, Wendigo has no problem at all with the Myrthian knife backstory -- if anything, he would have liked more of that background. Speaking for myself, I'll throw in my admiration for Gunn's deromanticized approach to the vampire-seduction archetype and his denial of solace through love for his accursed protagonist. Overall, however, this vaunted artifact of Seventies cinema reminded us both to a distressing extent of Vampire's Call, the Nigerian vampire tale we reviewed a few weeks back. That was another case, albeit more extreme, of talent falling short of ambitious vision. Bill Gunn was clearly more ambitious, or at least more pretentious, than his Nigerian counterpart, but ambition, however impressive, doesn't translate automatically to realization. Ganja and Hess has to be judged by execution, not intention, and Wendigo has to judge it a failure as a film. At its worst, it struck him less as a feast for the eye than an icepick aimed at it. That may be too harsh, but on the other hand, the film has probably been given too much credit for intentions over time. If the idea of a good movie is enough for you, Wendigo might recommend Ganja and Hess to you.

DEATH FORCE (aka Fighting Mad, 1978)

Cirio H. Santiago's trash epiphany from 1978 is not to be confused, by using its re-release title, with Jonathan Demme's film from two years earlier. The Philippine film made little impression Stateside under its original label, but was put back in theaters in 1982 to exploit co-producer Leon Isaac Kennedy's success in Penitentiary and his wife and co-producer Jayne Kennedy's recent Playboy magazine layout. The print advertising for "Fighting Mad" inevitably fudged the details a little, giving the unwary reader the impression that Mr. Kennedy (originally billed only as "Leon Isaac") is the hero of the picture when he's actually one of the villains.

(Check out that double-bill to the left. Cirio H. Santiago and Sonny Chiba on the same program for one price! Too bad I was too young back then.)

The real hero is played by James Iglehart, who may be best known to American cult film fans for his appearances in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and The Seven Minutes. He plays Doug Russell, a Vietnam vet wrapping up his tour of duty with a side project that involves smuggling contraband in coffins. It's not drugs, but gold, and it means a big score for Doug and his accomplices, Morelli and Magee (Leon Isaac). But Morelli, a veteran criminal for whom 'Nam was a vacation, figures that the payoff splits easier two ways than three. As he pitches it to Magee:

Morelli: That man's going back to a wife and kid. He ain't ready for what we're getting into. You could be going home to that lady. He could be just another war casualty.

Magee: You asking me to kill one of my own kind?

Morelli: Oh, don't give me that brother shit. The only brother's the man on the dollar bill -- and he ain't black.

It's a pretty convincing argument. One moment Doug's sunning himself on the deck of their boat, and the next he gets stabbed, gets his throat cut, and gets dumped into the ocean. For Morelli and Magee it's on to LA, where they wage a two-man mad-dog war on the organized crime establishment, quickly muscling their way to the top while Magee tries to make his move on the allegedly widowed Mrs. Russell (J. Kennedy), a struggling nightclub singer. Hear her sing and you'll see what I mean by "struggling."

Meanwhile, Doug washes ashore barely alive on an island somewhere in the South Pacific. Now, what might you find in such a place at this time in history? That's right: Japanese soldiers who don't know that World War II is over. Their unit is down to one officer and one kvetching enlisted man. Rather than kill the enemy on sight they endeavor to nurse him back to health in the hope that he'll make a Man Friday for them. Both men happen to know English, though of course they can't have kept track on changes in the idiom.

Doug [reviving from delirium]: Those mother-humpers...

Officer: You said that in your sleep. What does that mean?

Doug: Nothing...some 'friends' of mine....

Enlisted Man: Hmmm, they do that to you? They ain't no friends. We your friends. We mother-humpers!

Discipline's broken down on Occupied Island, as the poor grunt Ichikawa back-talks to his superior all the time. He tells his commander that, had they stayed in Japan, he'd be a general by now, but the commander comes back by noting that by now he'd be Emperor. All the officer really has left is the personal discipline of the samurai, which he improbably imparts to the recovering Doug. As our hero regains his strength, the Japanese teaches him some martial arts and shows him how to chop coconuts with a sword. With this comes a moral lesson: "It's not for you to learn how to fight," the officer says, "but learn how to live."

"Where I came from, learning how to fight was learning how to live," Doug replies. So while the Japs have fatalistically reconciled themselves to spending the rest of their lives on the island, Doug lets himself get captured by the Philippine Navy. Before you know it he's back in LA, still carrying the samurai sword his mentor gave him, i.e. armed for payback. Now it's his turn to wage a one-man guerrilla war on Morelli and Magee, who prove much less effective now that they command scores of goons than they were on the offensive. While Morelli instigated the whole affair, Magee ends up the final antagonist, holed up in a heavily guarded Mexican compound with Doug's wife and son held hostage as our hero blazes a trail of severed heads toward the final showdown.

Santiago is a master chef of cinematic junk food. He keeps things going at a good clip throughout, constantly intercutting between the villains' conquest of LA, Magee's menacing courtship of the now-jobless Mrs. Russell, and Doug's samurai training. He makes sure that not too much time passes without some action or bloodshed, and he knows to save the best (or worst) for last. He knows that the one thing that can top an hour's worth of machine-gun mayhem is some serious head-cutting. The effects are awful, of course, but Santiago builds enough momentum to get you caught up in the spirit of the exercise. When you're ready to see heads roll, heads will roll. What more can you ask from exploitation cinema? In this case, I have to give the Filipino filmmakers credit for a perhaps-unusually sympathetic portrayal of Japanese soldiers, and for an idiosyncratically sentimental soundtrack featuring a love theme sung by J. Kennedy and a cute motif for our Japanese friends.

Mill Creek Entertainment presents the film as Fighting Mad (with an obviously spliced-in title card a la Death Proof) in its 50-film Martial Arts box set. As you can see, the presentation leaves a bit to be desired, and it's a bit of a stretch to call this a martial arts film (or at least to put it alongside kung fu and ninja movies), but somehow this seems like the way that Death Force was meant to be seen. I wouldn't mind seeing a properly-restored DVD, but I can safely recommend this item to fans of Seventies trash as is.

AFRO NINJA: DESTINY (2009)

Blaxploitation lives. I don't mean in the throwback, intentional cult movie form of Black Dynamite, but as an ongoing grass-roots phenomenon of low-budget cinema. Not that Mark Hicks's movie has no ties to the past; its ties are actually fairly strong. But this is blaxploitation for the 21st century, albeit in a relatively family-friendly form. It's also a martial-arts comedy that's as dumb as a bag of hammers, and the first movie I know of that claims to be inspired by a YouTube video.

The Afro Ninja legend begins in 2004, when Hicks, a stuntman, was auditioning for a Nike commercial. He threw a back flip but flubbed the dismount, shall we say.

When the clip was uploaded to YouTube some time later, it became one of those viral videos that I sometimes hear about. It even got shown on The Tonight Show, and Hicks's movie borrows footage of Jay Leno ragging on him. Hoping to get something more than fifteen minutes of fame from his flop, Hicks turned to screenwriter Carlton Holder to shape a story around the footage that would allow him to poke fun at himself but also transcend his infamy.

Hicks plays Reggie Carson, a dorky postal worker who joins fellow workers in coming to work in costume on Halloween. His idea of a costume is a ratty wig that's supposed to make him look like Jim Kelly. Neither his colleagues nor his elderly Aunt Sally (Marla Gibbs of Jeffersons fame) buy it. But the outfit inspires him to play the hero when a crazy veteran menaces the post office with a machine gun.

There must have been some magic in those nunchakus he found, for when he grasped them in his hands...

Attempting to intimidate him with martial arts, Reggie executes (in the sense of nearly killing himself) the backflip, which is caught on a surveillance camera to become the original Afro Ninja video. The vet gets the drop on him, then reveals that the machine gun is a water pistol. Then he produces a grenade. "You should see the look on your face," he tells Reggie, "This will wipe the face off of your smile!" Is that Carlton Holder's idea of crazy dialogue or did the actor flub his line? I don't know. I do know that Reggie sees the grenade, cries "bomb!" and escapes with the other workers from the unconvincing post-office set before it blows up.

Before this went down, Reggie found a long-forgotten package that has somehow been laying around the office since 1975. It was sent from Japan and intended for one Cleavon Washington. Inside are a pair of nunchakus that glow when Reggie touches them. Meanwhile, a dying Japanese woman breathes some glowy essence into his mouth. The long-term effect is something like a radioactive spider bite. He awakens with ripped abs and an afro. He has unconscious martial arts skills and can read Japanese fluently. He has become Afro Ninja for real and under that name starts to fight crime, most of which is organized in secret by shoe magnate and martial-arts champion Jerome "Black Lightning" Gordon, who we learn was a renegade student of the long lost Cleavon Washington, who we learn, in turn, was Reggie's father.

"I know this sounds cliched, but your ass is grass." Actual dialogue from Afro Ninja: Destiny.

As Afro Ninja, Reggie learns to stand up for himself and his dreams, finds love with a co-worker, becomes "anal with clean" after years of slovenly bachelor living, and learns from an occasionally materializing Japanese master that "Sometimes you must tumble to stumble onto the right path."

Hicks is no Jim Kelly (as proven when the man himself materializes to give our hero his blessing) but he's no Rudy Ray Moore, either. The martial arts aren't sophisticated or stylish, nor are they marred by wirework or CGI. The fighting consists of stuntmen punching and kicking one another, and they do it with enthusiasm, especially in the final showdown when Afro Ninja invades Black Lightning's dojo. The only special effects in this sequence are the lights glowing in the villain's eyes and the sparkles when Reggie repels machine-gun fire with his nunchakus.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jim Kelly.

You know you're dealing with a low budget project when Hicks lets Marla Gibbs take top billing over him on the box cover, but like Kelly Gibbs is a link with a legendary era in black entertainment and despite her obvious enfeeblement she's a welcome presence in a project like this one. It was also a treat to see Kelly, however briefly and inactively, in what IMDB tells me is his first screen credit since 1994. Afro Ninja is quite conscious of its cultural heritage, and while it isn't set in the Seventies it doesn't quite seem to be of the present day, either. It's definitely not a hip-hop movie by any stretch of the imagination, nor a good movie for that matter. But it has a certain naive charm and its heart is in the right place in its affection for oldschool martial arts. It might make a good second feature to go with Black Dynamite (which my local library doesn't have yet, to my knowledge), and this one you can play while the kids are still up.

These three ladies parade provocatively through scenes often enough to make you expect them to go all Charlie's Angels on somebody. Disappointingly, that never happens.

Here's the official trailer posted by none other than afroninjadestiny to YouTube:

JIVE TURKEY (Baby Needs A New Pair of Shoes, 1974)

1956 was an election year. In an unidentified Ohio town, a long-haired mayor needed an issue to exploit in order to win re-election. A crackdown on crime always works in such places, especially when you turn a blind eye to criminals or take bribes from them normally. When you finally crack down you look like a crusader. In 1956 Ohio there was no better target than the numbers racket, which was run by black people. In our unnamed town the numbers were the domain of Edwin Austin, aka Hakeem Jabbar, aka Pasha (or "the Pasha") who ran the racket out of his ghetto real estate office. In the fall of '56 Pasha found himself between two fires, for just as the city began to crack down (giving him fair warning first), the Chicago Mafia, represented by his childhood playmate Big Tony, made it's move to take over the numbers, offering Pasha an interest in drugs and prostitution in compensation. Pasha refused the offer. He wasn't interested in other vices. Half the people might use drugs, he once said, but everyone plays the numbers sometime.

Our only source for what happened in this anonymous municipality is a screenplay by Fredericka DeCosta and producers Elizabeth and Howard Ransom. Baby Needs A New Pair of Shoes was clearly a deeply personal project for them, for none of them have any other screenplays to their credit. The film now available in the Mill Creek Entertainment Drive-In Classics box set as Jive Turkey was their one shot at movie history, and it shows considerable ambition in some respects, as well as complete conceptual breakdown in others.

Viewers might be excused, for instance, for wondering whether the events portrayed actually took place in 1956, despite the insistence of several characters that "this is 1956!" For example, here is a pre-credits sequence showing a random massacre of innocent ghetto dwellers by visiting gangsters.

Note the victim falling backward in Peckinpah-style slo-mo. Does he look like a citizen of 1956?

This is a harmless child, allegedly living in the year 1956. Does anyone see what's wrong with this picture?

The fact of the matter seems to be that the Ransoms and director Bill Brame decided to make their movie a period piece because they had access to vintage cars. For a low-budget film like this one, old cars count as special effects, and they are nice to look at. They do lend the film a certain visual character. The problem is, once you look beyond the main characters' cars and their quasi-timeless criminal fashions, the illusion fails. That's why exploitation movies strive to put exaggerated details in your face so often. Their excess is designed to compensate for the lack of elements that might be taken for granted in ordinary Hollywood films, and that excess often redeems a film in the eyes of trash cinema connoisseurs. It can be a zany performance by a barely professional actor, or it can be inspired if not spectacular stuntwork or gore effects. For a film like Jive Turkey it can be something as simple as showing off a car collection, or something as wild as the performance billed as "Introducing Serene."

We're introduced to Serene (pronounced just like the adjective), who for all we know is playing herself, in the opening scene of the film proper, when Big Tony (Frank DeKova of F-Troop fame, earning a Special Guest Star credit here) tries to impose terms on Pasha (a calmly authoritative Paul Harris). Serene at first seems to be Pasha's consort or escort or companion, but when Pasha invites Big Tony outside for more private consultations, Serene stays inside, attracting the aroused attention of Big Tony's bodyguard.

Stroking his cheek one moment, Serene slits his throat with a razor-edged ring in the next.

This is actually the big gore moment of the picture, but Serene is far from finished. The producers are canny enough to keep her mostly under wraps for a while, building up anticipation for her next appearance, which comes after some turncoats have killed a popular local youth. Pasha quickly figures out who did it, and gives Serene instructions to incapacitate them with spiked booze and then "have fun." She lures the traitors to a dive and takes a saving swig of mineral oil before joining them for a game of drain the bottle.

After they pass out, she pukes out the bad stuff and has her fun. She takes off her high heeled shoes and starts pounding them heel-first into her victim's face. She does it again and again, cackling in triumph as she seems to speed up her attack and "blood" nearly covers the camera lens. In many respects, Jive Turkey is a semi-comedic observation of ghetto life that rings true with sincere, almost convincing performances. But in this respect, the film is exultant all out garbage.

Now the filmmakers have to give Pasha something to do to top Serene's exploits. The best they can manage is a final showdown with Big Tony in which a feud dating back to childhood resolves itself in a game of Russian Roulette. "You've always been a man of honor," Tony says, "something I never could stand in a n*gger. Now I want to see that honor put you right in your grave." Since Pasha assumes that Tony's men will come gunning for him anyway if he wins, he decides to play along. You'll have to see for yourself how it ends, but I will tell you that the ending also involves the flashback-laden death of a Mafia informant within Pasha's organization and a shocking revelation about Serene that most of you have probably guessed already, and which the Mill Creek disc envelope totally spoiled for me before the movie started.

By 1974 Frank DeKova was trying to trade in his 1960s typecasting as Indians for Seventies typecasting as Mafia men. He actually fits the role of a small-time gangster pretty well.

This is one of those little movies I can't help liking despite its many faults simply because the people involved seem to be trying their best. Jive Turkey has its dull stretches and its awkward moments, but there's a determination you can see throughout the show to give people something at least close to their money's worth. Objectively speaking, it's closer to mediocre than to the epic badness some of us look for, but "Serene's" once-in-a-lifetime performance definitely earns the film its place in the wild world of cinema.

You can watch the first eight minutes of Jive Turkey, including Serene's first attack, here.