Eight-inch Collars and a Smorgasbord of Overacting Blaxploitation's Baddest Brothers

By Chris Davidson

Elvis once sang what could be the motto of every blaxploitation movie hero: "If you're lookin' for trouble, you came to the right place."

And while Kissin' Cousins was the closest the King ever came to a blaxploitation flick (lots of gone black-versus-white symbolism with El in a dual role fighting himself sporting a blond wig), the guy knew that a knuckle sandwich beats a conference call as the ultimate tool of negotiation.

From Richard Roundtree to Rudy Ray Moore, every black swinger has done his talking with his fists. That's blaxploitation's greatness: it's long on action, short on smarts and real fruity on clothes (remember, in the early Seventies, when most of this stuff came out, eight-inch shirt collars hanging parallel to the ground were like "In,"
baby). Yep, these movies are as tough and mean as a pail of Aunt Esther's stick-to-your-ribs hot sauce.

 

Unfortunately, though, blaxploitation films have pretty much dried up. Not counting Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, dean of the cuff-you-first-ask-questions-later school of film making, who still releases lots of direct-to-video bloodbaths, the bulk of blaxploitation movies came and went around 20 years ago.

The 1970s' blax-batch was the best, no contest. But black action films have been around ever since movies have been moving. You could look back to 1915, I suppose, and say Birth of a Nation started it all for black Hollywood, but D.W. Griffith's clunky Klan story uses white actors in blackface, so that's pushing it a bit. Better are the mess of "race films" that came out in the Thirties and Forties, like The Bronze Buckaroo, which let black actors tear it up in westerns and crime dramas.

In the Fifties and Sixties, the cat who scratched most in Tinsel Town was Sidney Poitier. He's kinda the grandfather of the whole modern scene, but like granddad, he can be a little too cute sometimes. Not to take away from goodies like In the Heat of the Night, Blackboard Jungle and The Defiant Ones, but Sid's deal was racial tolerance. And that's not what it was all about in the early Seventies. So for the primo product, let's stick to the mushroom-cloud- sized-afro and down-with-whitey years.

One man best captured the feel of this era: Antonio Fargas. You're familiar with him as Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, but he rocked big-time in blax classics like Shaft and Cleopatra Jones. Sure, his credentials speak for
themselves (he was also in Foxy Brown and Across 110th Street). But as proof of his absolute rightness as the
greatest blaxploitation actor, Keenen Ivory Wayans used him in the spoof I'm Gonna Git You Sucka as the prototypical, platform-shoe-wearing pimp, Fly Guy.

That particular romp is pretty lame, but it gets a few things right: 1) Fargas, the black Olivier, made blax-
ploitation movies real because he was real. You can't walk around in shoes with aquariums in their heels and fake
talent. He lived this stuff; 2) Every blaxploitation movie needs a nightclub scene. Put your characters in a hopping
joint like the Blueberry Hill disco in Avenging Godfather and watch sparks fly as they sing and swing like it's Arbor Day in a Canuck logging camp; and 3) There is no better weapon against "The Man" (white establishment, chitlin-head) than a loaded pistol and a bad attitude. As Fargas said to white-as-a-white-whale Shelley Winters, "See you around, Super Honky."

Now before you get scared away, and rent Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm tonight, march yourself to the nearest
neighborhood video store/pawn shop/check-cashing center and pick up a copy of Coffy or Hell Up in Harlem. Steer clear of the major video chains for most of this stuff, lest you be coerced into renting a Bill Cosby movie and thinking the job done. You've been warned.

Below, we've gathered together the best in blaxploitation. Sort of a blacklist of where to find the most far-out flicks. Dig the way cats like Jim Brown would rather rap you upside the head than look at you. Dig, too, how a lot of the racial tension message is still lingering around today. But dig most importantly, that these movies are for everyone, no matter what color you were dipped in upstairs.

Avenging Disco Godfather (1979, Active Home Video): Kinda late in the game for this stuff, but Rudy Ray Moore doesn't even notice. From his disco headquarters, Rudy's fighting an angel dust epidemic, but he's a little too nice to kids and dogs, and comes off like Roy Rogers in doubleknits. Still, this monument to bad acting, bad dialogue and bad music has a final 15 minutes where Rudy gets a taste of drugs and goes loco in his green sweatsuit. He defies all comparison as he screams bloody murder at a hallucination of his Aunt Betty.

Blacula (1972, HBO/Cannon): Count Dracula bit a black prince in 1780, and cursed him to eternal sleep inside a coffin. Who cares? No one, really, until the prince wakes up as an ultra-smooth vampire who talks like King Lear, terrorizes cabbies and orders Bloody Marys in a bar. Starring William Marshall (who popped up as the King of Cartoons on Pee Wee's Playhouse), this spawned a sequel, Scream, Blacula, Scream, which firmed up Marshall as the black vampire of choice. Just once, how much would you have given to see Blacula take a piece out of Pee Wee's hide?

Black Belt Jones (1974, Warner Home Video): For sheer buffoonery, Jim Kelly should get his own series. Straight
from his role in Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon, Kelly proves again that his acting skills deserve a karate kick out the door. On the other hand, as an action hero Kelly romps, dicing and slicing some bloated Italian hoods who're about as ethnic as frozen lasagne. This flick is another jewel in the crown of Scatman Crothers, who's Kelly's karate teacher (as well as the voice of cartoon dog Hong Kong Fooey).

Black Caesar (1973, Filmways Home Video): Blaxploitation's busiest actor, Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, sees a lot of his films dive straight into the bargain-bin. But this violent feature is his best. His character, Tommy Gibbs, grows from street punk to a combination Public Enemy/Soul Brother No. 1, and then confronts a white cop who had harassed him as a child. It's no ordinary beating, though. Tommy pulverizes the cop with a shoeshine box, paints his face with black shoe polish, and tells him to sing "Mammy." Tommy came back for Hell Up in Harlem. The cop didn't.

Cleopatra Jones (1973, Warner Home Video): Super-beautiful Cleo (Tamara Dobson) is a Bond-like special agent, kind of like a taller Roger Moore without the bra. She's after Mommy (Shelley Winters, in a smorgasbord of over-acting), a drug queenpin who presides over underboss Doodlebug Simpkins (Fargas). Cool cars (Cleo's black Corvette has hidden gun compartments in the door) and funny minor characters (Doodlebug has a henchman who only says "That's right") can't steal the gusto from Fargas. With his ruffled shirt and walking stick, he even gets to say, "Hair is like a woman. Treat it good and it'll treat you good." Give this guy a theme park.

Coffy (1973, Filmways Home Video): Pam Grier pulls the ultimate grooming gaff, and puts razor blades in her hair before a catfight with some hookers. Later, she jams a needle in the great Sid Haig's neck. Coffy wraps up her
policy of nonviolence by killing almost every man in the script. Luckily, she never loses her cool, although her
shirt isn't quite so lucky. With Allan Arbus (the hypnotist who uses Shakespeare to make Oscar neat in The Odd Couple!) as single-serving-sized mob boss Vitroni. Fargas stars in the follow-up, Foxy Brown.

The Mack (1973): Talk about ambition: John "Goldie" Mickens, the world's greatest mack (that's a pimp, son), thinks he's the ebony Wizard of Oz. He performs wiggy brain-washing speeches on his ladies in a planetarium while blasting space music and telling them to obey his commands through a loudspeaker. Played by Max Julien (who wrote Cleopatra Jones), Goldie locks his enemies in the trunks of cars with a bagful of rats to keep things amusing. The Mack, also with Richard Pryor, is so realistic, you'd swear you mistakingly rented a documentary called How to Sell Women and Inject Battery Acid Into Your Enemies.

Penitentiary III (1987, Warner Home Video): The Penitentiary series swings. But No. 3 has midget wrestler/thespian giant The Haiti Kid, and a prison kingpin who's like Brando's Godfather crossed with an even wispier Warhol. Haiti goes from being a slobbering missing link to a boxing coach who's overdosed on Zen, and helps Leon Isaac Kennedy fight his way out of the can. At one point, the warden asks, "You know what your trouble is? You've seen too many bad prison pictures." Exactly.

Shaft (1971, MGM/UA): One of the first (and maybe the classiest) 1970s blaxploitation movies, this dumps Richard Roundtree in the middle of a Mafia-vs.-Harlem gang war. Almost better than the action, though, are the little touches: John Shaft's crazy leather-trenchcoat-and-turtleneck ensemble, his reel-to-reel tape player, the espresso he drinks, and the way he cracks a bottle of booze over a mobster's head with the finesse of a jackhammer. Two poor sequels followed.

Super Fly (1972, Warner Home Video): Not exactly a guy you want to bring to see The Sound of Music, Priest (Ron O'Neal as the title cat) makes up for his lack of good humor with a mean right cross and a wailin' Fu Manchu. He's quitting the drug game (Priest looks like who The Velvet Undergound is singing about in "I'm Waitin' For The Man"), but he's got one final deal to pull off. Don't call him "white looking," by the way. The last guy who did got his clock cleaned.

Soundsploitation: Pimps, Players & Private Eyes, themes from Seventies black movies, incl. Shaft, Foxy Brown, and Across 110th Street (Sire CD).