Foxy Brown
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Pam Grier plays the title role of Foxy Brown and as the picture begins, she’s waiting for her boyfriend Dalton Ford (Terry Carter) to get out of the hospital. He’s a retired federal agent undergoing facial plastic surgery after a failed two-year long undercover assignment. On his release he and Foxy plan to move away and start a new life together. Unfortunately, when Foxy’s drug dealing brother Link (Antonio Fargas) is introduced to Ford under the new name of Michael Anderson, the new face doesn’t fool him. Link is in deep trouble with the local drug lord for losing several thousand dollars of smack and he uses his information about Ford/Anderson to erase the debt.
Faster than you can say lead sandwich, the beloved boyfriend is shot dead and Foxy is beating names out of little brother so she can exact a giant sized measure of vengeance. From Link she learns that the head of the criminal organization is a woman (!) named Katherine Wall (Kathryn Loder), who uses a modeling agency as a cover for both a high priced call-girl service and drug running. Ms. Brown infiltrates the call-girl ring but after helping one of the unwilling prostitutes escape to be with her family, Foxy is captured. Raped, tortured and injected with heroin Foxy still manages to brutally fight her way clear only to learn of her brother’s sorry fate. Realizing she must take down the entire gang, she enlists a group of black vigilantes to join her crusade, setting up the violent and bloody endgame.
Originally conceived as a sequel to Coffy, this film’s success cemented Grier’s stardom and put director Jack Hill in a position to get more of his ideas on screen without interference. The film has many charms but I have to agree with Hill that it isn’t nearly as good as Coffy. In the great commentary track for this DVD Hill laments the fact that the studio was not willing to increase the budget even though they had to pay Grier and himself a higher salary than before. The budget was set at $500,000 and that meant less money was available for sets, effects and other actors. Still, Hill and his crew were able to pull together a solid crime movie that holds up very well nearly 30 years later. The director admits that he had very little time to write the script but feels the pressure brought out some good things. Calling filmmaking foremost a collaborative effort, he is very clear in assigning credit for elements of the film that came from others; he seems to take pride in heaping praise on his cast. He also explains why he’s never taken the credit ‘A Jack Hill Film’ for any of his work. I admire his modesty and generosity when speaking of his coworkers. The commentary track is packed with abundant information and almost never lags.
He’s forthright about the film’s flaws and I found myself agreeing with many of his criticisms, none more so than the ridiculous number of different outfits that Pam wears throughout the picture. It often seems that she changes clothes each time she enters a new room! One of the joys of this type of film is seeing how the creators construct their story to get you on the protagonist’s side. In Foxy Brown Hill creates some wonderfully nasty villains in the cold blooded but codependent Walls and her lover/crime partner Steve Elias (Peter Brown). Elias is cruel and vicious throughout the film but, in a touch I’ve always found realistic, his hands shake almost uncontrollably on his shotgun when he confronts Link. Hill was always good about including these kinds of little individual moments that make the stories just a bit more believable. Of course, Elias’ punishment is suitably harsh and goes a long way toward illustrating my observation that in a Jack Hill film, the bad guys always have the maximum amount of pain inflicted on them while the hero coolly looks on in satisfaction.
Coffy
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If Coffy does nothing else, it proves the principle reason chick fights are so great: There’s always a chance somebody’s shirt is coming off.
And in the hooker battle royal of the century, classic Blaxploitation heroine Coffy (a 24-year old Pam Grier) takes on half a dozen angry streetwalkers, as shirts go flying, bottles are smashed over heads and fingers are shredded by razor sharp hair clips.
Though Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 are considered the forebearers of the modern bad ass female, Grier whips just as much tail and had what neither of them could muster: sex appeal.
After appearing in small parts in a series of exploitation films (including two of writer/director Jack Hill’s “babes behind bars” flicks, The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage) Coffy was Grier’s breakout role. She plays an emergency room nurse turned vigilante (think Charles Bronson from Death Wish, but with ridiculously large breasts) who takes to the streets to exact revenge upon the pushers and pimps who put her little sister into a coma.
This quest for retribution begins in the first scene as Grier, pretending to be a junkie who’ll do anything for a fix, lures a local drug dealer and one of his small-time pushers to a secluded apartment where she proceeds to, in close-up, blow off the kingpin’s head with a shotgun before helping the underling to a lethal dose of heroine.
Just when her revenge is seemingly complete, Grier’s cop friend Carter (William Elliot) is attacked by a pair of ski-masked, baseball wielding hoodlums in retaliation for not going on the take with the rest of the police department. With Carter now in a coma (“If he’s lucky he’ll be able to go to the bathroom by himself again,” says a doctor who apparently skipped his sensitivity training classes), Grier has an excuse to go after an Italian crime lord who’s been muscling in on the Ghetto rackets.
Though director Hill manages to fit in most of the genres clichés, with massive amounts of gratuitous violence, a few Screw Whitey speeches and every possible opportunity taken to relieve a female character of her clothing, Coffy rises above the genre by looking gritty without looking cheap and by containing performances quantum leaps above the usual Blaxploitation fare.
Grier manages to be believable as the shotgun-toting hero. Booker Bradshaw adds a charming, sleazy demeanor to Grier’s Congressman wannabe boyfriend, with Sid Haig perfect as a sadistic mob henchman and Robert DoQui (complete with jumpsuits, cape and his own pimp theme song) doing his best Antonio Fargas imitation as King George.
Black Mama, White Mama
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Two female prisoners, one black and one white attempt to escape a women’s reformatory in this violent exploitation film that is a cheap knock- off of The Defiant Ones. The black woman is in for prostitution while her blonde counterpart was involved with a radical group. They escape after lesbian guards make passes at them. Though chained together, the two manage to make their way through the Filipino jungle to a camp filled with revolutionaries and drug smugglers. There more action ensues as the crooks engage in a climactic battle with a crooked cop.
Disco Godfather
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Disco Godfather could very well qualify Rudy Ray Moore as the Ed Wood of the 1970s. It is a movie so bad - badly filmed, badly acted, and badly edited - that it reaches a Platonic ideal of badness, which of course turns the film into some kind of twisted masterpiece of cheese cinema.
The man you all know as Dolemite plays the “godfather of the disco” - the local (and popular) owner of the Blueberry Hill nightclub. The first five minutes of the movie are devoted to a typical night where the godfather, known as Tucker, decked out in amazingly ostentatious garb, proceeds to the wheels of steel telling everyone to “put your weight on it!” After his nephew has an unfortunate encounter with angel dust (which causes him to hallucinate some kind of cheesy voodoo zombie lady), Tucker pays a visit to his old police unit and proceeds to “activate his reserve status”, whatever that means.
We are soon treated to a low-budget war between Tucker and the angel dust dealers, punctuated with fake kung-fu, laughable psychedelic PCP trip-outs that inexplicably last months, a white police captain who picks up a phone receiver to deliver a monologue to the audience and then subsequently hangs up without making a call, an anti-PCP rally run by a woman telling us to either “wack the attack” or “attack the wack” (depending on how she is feeling at the moment), and an attempt at an exorcism on a whacked-out girl by the girl’s mother and her entourage of priests and gospel singers.
Don’t forget the scene where a random jogger arrives at a warehouse where Tucker is fighting, and, upon learning that the bad guys are angel dust dealers, declares “Let’s kick ass, then!” (Random jogger is never heard from again). Or the strange dig at Saturday Night Fever (at a party, the soundtrack LP is used as a coke bowl). Or a fight with a whip-cracking punk in a cowboy hat bearing a familiar resemblance to Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver. Perhaps you might enjoy the scene where Tucker is force-fed the dust and then hallucinates his evil Aunt Betty (why she is evil isn’t revealed).
Rudy Ray Moore Interview
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Petey Wheatstraw - The Devil’s Son-in-Law
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Opening with a bit of his characteristic spoken word poetry rap, Rudy sets the stage for his (Petey’s) birth in Miami. In the midst of a powerful hurricane, a doctor (the same irritating jerk who played Sheriff Bently in Human Tornado) is summoned to the bedside of his mother, who’s suffering from a most unusual pregnancy — her belly is swollen to gargantuan size. The doc is shocked when the first thing to emerge from her womb is a watermelon. (At least he doesn’t stop to thump it.) Then Petey himself is born… only instead of an infant he’s the size of an 8-year old, already wearing a diaper, and able to talk! “I’ll call you Petey Wheatstraw,” Mom declares, as if this is supposed to have some significance. We then segue into the opening credits, which detail young Petey’s instruction in the martial arts by a strange Kwai Chang Cain-like figure named Bantu. When Bantu tells Petey he’s learned all there is to teach — including how to dice a watermelon with a samurai sword — the boy declares that what he really wants to be is a comedian.
By the time he’s an adult Petey has conquered the world of standup comedy with equal aplomb. He’s so successful in fact that rival comedians Leroy and Skillet (the stage name of comedy duo Leroy Daniels and Ernest Mayhand) totally panic when his engagement at another club threatens to undercut their business. They’re heavily in debt to Mafia boss Mr. White (who is, of course, Caucasian) and can’t let Petey threaten the success of their new musical-comedy review. Petey tersely tells ‘em to stick it when asked to postpone his show. Leroy and Skillet order their henchmen to apply pressure by roughing up one of Petey’s entourage. Instead a young boy, the cousin of Petey’s friend, is unintentionally killed. (Providing a wildly out of place moment of supposedly “serious” drama.) Realizing that Petey won’t back down, Leroy and Skillet’s men show up at the boy’s funeral armed with machine guns and massacre everyone attending the service —including Petey himself! Yes, Petey Wheatstraw is dead. But a nattily dressed man (G. Tito Shaw) appears from nowhere to stand by his corpse. When the mysterious figure calls him by name, Petey opens his eyes. It is Lucifer himself, come to offer Petey a deal he can’t refuse. Ol’ Scratch will restore him to life if Petey will agree to marry the Devil’s daughter. Shown a picture of his prospective bride, Petey doesn’t think too highly of the proposal. She is the Bride from Hell — literally. “Oh hell no, man,” he says. “No, no, no. I won’t marry her, deal or no deal. Kill me, man!” To butter him up, the Devil offers Petey the use of a magic cane with which he can exact revenge on Leroy and Skillet. Petey — a brother with supreme confidence in his own abilities — reasons he can take the deal and then figure a way to get out of it. But for all his bravado, can this jive talkin’ kung fu warrior/comedian really beat the Devil at his own game?
This movie is quite simply insane. It dips even further into surrealist territory than Human Tornado did, particularly during scenes in which Petey uses the enchanted cane to wreak havoc at his rivals’ club or to do good works around the ‘hood, such as turning a fat woman skinny and replacing a ghetto family’s broken down junker of a car with a shiny new sedan. (Thus earning Lucifer’s wrath.) The Devil also throws Petey one hell of a bachelor party. As with the two Dolemite films there’s plenty of kneeslapping action courtesy of the ludicrous kung fu fights; one has Moore (or rather his obvious stunt double) taking out a gang of thugs while clad in his BVDs. The final battles, setting Petey and friends against a horde of demons summoned from the Infernal Pit — guys with burned faces wearing K-Mart Halloween costumes and plastic horns glued to their foreheads — had me convulsing in hysterics. I simply could not believe what I was seeing! Petey Wheatstraw is trash, all right… pure, unadulterated crap. (For an example of how much care went into making it, consider this: In the end credits, stunt men are listed as “marshall arts fighters”.) It’s also a primo “guilty pleasure”, the kind of movie you can enjoy but probably won’t want to let most people know that you do. Copping a stout buzz — of either the liquid or herbal kind — is highly recommended before viewing.
The Human Tornado
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The film is a blaxploitation film that lives in infamy, toiling in a sea of cult classic cheese. The Human Tornado stands as an icon of true blaxploitation.
The Human Tornado follows the superhuman exploits of our protagonist Dolemite. After fucking a racist sheriff’s wife, Dolemite finds himself and his friends on the run from the law. They wind up in L.A., where Dolemite’s friend Queen Bee is having some problems with a guy that is a poor excuse for a gangster. The gangster kidnaps some girls and closes down Queen Bee’s club. Dolemite must uncover their hiding place, kick people’s as in hilarious Benny Hill style, and perform the Rudy Ray Mount on countless bitches in order to save the day.
The acting in the film is abouyt what you would expect for a blaxploitation film. Rudy Ray Moore’s mugs it up throughout the movie, from the film’s hilarious opening credits where Dolemite dances around in several outfits while wiggling his hands around in a strange semblance of a kung fu master to his hilarious “interrogation” of a white man’s nymphomanic wife, Moore never lets up. Suprisingly, Ernie Hudson shows up in this film to play one of Dolemite’s buddies and even in this bad cast he doesn’t really do anything that is that great.
Dolemite - A Blaxploitation Classic
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Black comedian Rudy Ray Moore packed his first film vehicle with nudity, comedy, dancing girls, fighting girls, songs, castration (offscreen), and evil Caucasians. (As in most blaxploitation, white skin is synonymous with evil unless of course it s female and naked.)
Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore) is released from prison to covertly help the FBI stem the burgeoning tide of crime in the streets. He discovers that his loyal sidekick Queen Bee (Lady Reed) has lost his beloved nightclub to his rival, Willie Green (D’Urville Martin), a flunky of the wicked mayor and corrupt cops. While his enemies try to kill him or return him to prison, Dolemite takes back the club and puts on a big show with a live band and costumed dance routines, himself as star attraction. Naturally a fight breaks out, and while Dolemite’s scantily-clad, kung fu-fighting female acolytes take care of Willie Green’s men, Dolemite takes on and kills Willie himself, suffering a gunshot wound in the process.
After one of Dolemite’s women attacks the mayor and is killed, a sympathetic black FBI agent pursues and kills the mayor. Gunmen then show up at Dolemite’s hospital room, but are ambushed and arrested.
Rudy Ray Moore had been an all-purpose nightclub entertainer in the late 1950s through the ’60s, trying his hand at singing, dancing, comedy–anything that paid the bills. He found his niche in the 1970s with a string of obscenity-laced “blue” comedy albums that were popular with inner-city audiences, reaching into the top 100 in the Billboard charts. His breakthrough LP, Eat Out More Often, included a popular “toast” (rambling, boastful tall-tales recited in rhyme) about a mythical urban superstud named Dolemite. When blaxploitation films suddenly began raking in the bucks in the early 1970s, Moore invested his profits from LP sales into bringing Dolemite to the screen.
In DOLEMITE (and to a lesser extent his later films, which move into the territory of intentional self-parodies), Moore has created an alternate universe as bizarre as any in science fiction; a world where the fat, untalented comedian is god–which is the film’s great charm. Twice, Moore delivers toasts, variations on classic urban legends of the Titanic and the Signifying Monkey.
