"The Human Tornado"(1976)d /Cliff Roquemore

In the year of the American bicentennial with films like Taxi Driver, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Carrie, and Rocky all going knuckles up at the box-office, moviegoers had some tough choices to make. Or, they could have just checked out the movie with a one-sheet that boasts of fifties R n' B singer Rudy Ray Moore in patchwork pimp gear, twister-punching his way through a whirlwind o' white folks, and been done with it. Knowing cult audiences were instantly enamored with Moore's legendary signature rhyme-spouting, lady-pleasing, shotgun-blasting, karate-kicking, ferocious, mackadocious antidote to no business, born insecure, junkyard rat soup-eating motherfuckers, Rudy rolls him out for a righteously raucous round two, with many of the usual suspects, i.e. Lady Reed, Jimmy Lynch, Howard Jackson, and even Lord Java himself. If you're going in looking for a blaxploitative good time machine ride back to the funky seventies, you've come to the right place, I'd wager. Let's make it, fellas...


I think this one speaks for itself. High water mark in the series.
After what can be called one of the most memorable title sequences ever filmed (I've yet to ever see anything like it, many of you who've seen it will agree), we catch up with that bad motherfucker Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore) as he's putting his weight on the sheriff's wife, just as the sheriff (J.B. Baron) and his deputy are raiding the joint for an arrest. This leads to some harsh words, one "Biiiiiiitch! Are you fo' REAAAAAAAL?",  a firefight, some dead bodies, and Dolemite rolling his bare ass down a hill in slow motion to the getaway car. Twice. He then blows up the pursuing police with a twelve gauge blast (of course, he dramatically raps as he joins the rank of cinematic cop killers) , forcing him to go on the lam, hijacking a gay dude's car to California(...where they are already, as anyone can clearly see), where one of his people, Queen Bee (Lady Reed) herself, wears outfits that make Mummers look understated and runs a nightclub where he promptly lays down some dozens-style insult comedy in a kaleidoscope of crazy-looking seventies gear on stage, and several kung fu hookers that pledge allegiance to Dolemite work out of. Only problem, a mobster named Cavaletti has designs on the Queen's action, shutting down her club, and even taking two of her girls hostage. Only one isn't technically a girl. Are you surprised by that at this point? Me, neither.


"Mules didn't bruise mah hide cuz I done doubled my size on Fatburgahs an' fries, can you dig it?"
When he's not enjoying post-coital watermelon(!!!) with old flame Hurricane Annie, he's buying new shoes and searching for clues to the performers' whereabouts, as detective/ sped up kung fu bad ass as he is pimp. Adding to the madness, is Cavaletti's old mother, who's a dungeon-dwelling, woman-torturing creep, and his middle-aged wife, who's a nymphomaniac with some heavy hangers and a serious case of jungle fever, can you dig it? Dolemite interrogates the bitch, and by "interrogates" I obviously mean, puts it on her so hard that the fucking ceiling collapses and the bedroom is totally destroyed by their lovemaking session (like a human tornado, this bad cat), which, in the end,  yields the very answers he was looking for. This leads to a full-on, sped up kung fu battle royale at the private party at Cavaletti's mansion, which looks more than a little like Dolemite's pad from the initial reel, but who's paying that much attention, baby? Howard Jackson is in attendance, both as himself and as Dolemite's obvious stunt double, for those kicks higher than knee level and punch combinations faster than your average slow jam. You'll have to see how it all wraps up for yourselves, though. See it!


"Ooooo-eeeee!This Stylistics record got my Skene's glands secretin' like a mufucka!"
Moore followed this one up with The Monkey Hu$tle, opposite the venerable Yaphet Kotto,  the same year. 1977 brought us Petey Wheatstraw, while '79 saw more than Willie Stargell publicly boogie-ing to Sister Sledge, also bringing the premiere of Moore's legendary Disco Godfather. Despite a myriad of glaring technical shortcomings much like its predecessor a year earlier, this sequel chooses to play up its obvious limitations for even more laughs, and if a blaxploitation flick is to be judged on the outrageously dated seventies gear, shuckin' and jivin', cartoonish dialog, wooden performances, across-the-board racial stereotypes, high rise afros, low rent martial arts, etc., found within it,  then we might just have the Citizen Kane of pimp flicks on our hands tonight, after all. On the scale, Tornaaaaaaada earns thee Wops the easy way, on the ornately decorated mackin' cape of the late, great Rudy Ray. Can you dig it?


"Oogah-boogahdah-boogahdah!"

"Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde" (1975) d/ William Crain

Watching the vintage trailer for tonight's review, another slice of blaxploitative horror from the guy who served up the likes of Blacula to cult audiences three years earlier, might leave you in a mad jones to hunt down the 35th Anniversary release (which should only set you back a couple of bucks at the time I'm writing this), what with all the rappin' narration, afro-coiffed homeboys gettin' chucked through plate glass windows, and promise of  further goings on of a freaky, outta sight nature within. Who'd blame you? You've got former 1968 L.A. Ram Pro Bowler and head Gargoyle himself, Bernie Casey, in the lead, ably supported by Rosalind "Omega Man" Cash, Marie O'Henry, and prolific tv actor Ji-Tu Cumbuka as a police lieutenant whose dryly intelligent quips predate Jules Winnfield by two decades, but recall Samuel L. Jackson's famous performance just the same. Casey's inner homicidal honkey-by-night was created by none other than Stan Winston, who teamed up with Ellis Burman on Casey's reptilian look on the aforementioned made-for-tv cult classic, Gargoyles.


"I'm hep to your atitis, Linda.", says Dr. Pride (Casey).
Dr. Pride (Casey) works slavishly towards a cure for the liver disease that took his mother, heating beakers full of Kool Aid and turning brown rats into homicidal white ones in his laboratory, when he isn't volunteering his services at the Watts Free Clinic/Thrift Store(!), throwing ten spots at poor old ladies and administering butt-injections to hep-riddled hookers-with-hearts-of-gold, like Linda (O' Henry). When his experimental serum turns an old black woman dying from liver problems into an aggro albino with a propensity to choke a nurse in a heartbeat, before she turns her toes up, an impatient Pride injects himself with the solution, transforming into Mr. Hyde, or a powdery Bernie Casey with whited-out contacts, latex applications across his brow line, and some white streaks in his afro, if you want to get technical about it. As Hyde, he joyrides through Watts in his Rolls Royce, and lays the smackdown upon some street corner brothers who give him jibes instead of directions. He shows up at Linda's favorite watering hole and proceeds to trash the joint. When Linda's old pimp, Silky, and his homeboys chase Hyde out the front door, they're surprised to find a groggy Dr. Pride, nursing a slash wound and dressed identically to the cat that was just kicking all their asses moments earlier. Hmmm, he musta split...


"White in Watts??!! Honey, ain't nobody got time fo' dat!"
When the good doctor takes his trick-turning patient out for dinner on the promise of no "business" talk, he later takes her back to his pad and demands that she let him jab her with a syringe full of untested chemicals on the promise that it will cure her hepatitis (and apparently entirely unconcerned by the notion that she's out infecting johns all over California with hepatitis), before giving himself a good faith jab and changing into Hyde, sending her screaming into the night. At this point, Hyde takes it upon himself to strangle all of Linda's prostitute pals to death one by one, even squashing poor Silky against a cement wall with his Rolls. Several murders later, a heartbroken Linda approaches Pride in hopes that he will turn himself in to the authorities and get the help he needs, reporting him to the cops when he ignores her pleas, instead, and shoots himself up with enough serum to provide for an action-packed King Kong-y finale atop the Watts Towers. Roll credits.


Death lies upon Silky the Pimp, like an untimely frost upon the mackin'-est flower of all the damn field, y'all.
Stan Winston would continue to keep it "street", providing the special makeups for 1978's ethnocentric answer to the Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, before famously helping to usher in the glorious eighties with credits in fare such as The Exterminator (1980), Dead and Buried (1981), Friday the 13th Pt. 3 (1982) ( uncredited ), and of course, The Thing (1982). O'Henry, who selflessly provides the film's breasseses, worked previously in 1974's Three the Hard Way, and would also appear in Deliver Us From Evil (1977) and Human Experiments (1979). As far as blaxploitation horror goes, this one's not nearly as rotten as Blackenstein (1974), nor is it as memorable as Sugar Hill (1974), and on the rating scale, I've given it a respectable deuce for it's troubles. Definitely worth a look, if this sort of thing is your bag, man.


Oh no, it wasn't the airplanes. 'Twas booty that killed this particular beast.

"Coonskin" (1974) d/ Ralph Bakshi

Nobody ever asks me who's the guy responsible for my favorite animated features of all-time, but if anyone ever did, I'd tell 'em it's obviously Ralph Bakshi, once I'd gotten over the initial shock of someone actually having asked me an interesting question. Tonight's review, Bakshi's third such feature, and second to mix his highly stylized animation with live-action sequences, is an urban update of Uncle Remus' beloved children's stories starring a pre-Miami Vice Philip Michael Thomas, Scat Man Crothers, and even Barry "Can't-get-enough-of-yo'-looove-baaaybuh" White, that drew mixed reviews upon a limited initial theatrical release due to it's satire-heavy portrayal of the frustration of life in the inner city. Bakshi lays waste to racial stereotypes of all sorts here by giving them center stage, in all their absurdity (the main characters' looks are based on the black faced make up of the travelling minstrels of yesteryear), for the audience to interpret as they will, though it should be noted that any mafiosi in attendance will surely feel the sting of the piss-take herein. Just don't take it personally, Sollozzo, and may your first child be a masculine one. Here we go...


You never see brunettes in this kinda predicament. Just sayin'...
Somewhere down south, we see Randy (Thomas) and Pappy (Crothers) in the midst of a daring midnight prison escape, and while camped out against a high wall out of the line of sight of any guards and waiting fo' the getaway whip, Pappy tells the funky story of three cats who remind him a lot of Randy and his ambitious homeboys: Brother Rabbit (Thomas), Brother Bear (White), and Preacher Fox (Gordone), who relocate north to Harlem, home to every Black man, when the bank forecloses on their southern digs, effectively turning it into a whorehouse ( you know, the kind that a racist sheriff's daughter would get caught turning comical interracial tricks at ). Upon arrival, they meet up with Black Jesus' cousin, Simple Savior, a black separatist who shoots up images of Elvis, Nixon, and John Wayne while hoisted atop a light-up cross on stage in the nude, ferchrissakes. Needless to say, Rabbit and Bear pull his card, making Rabbit the new boss of all of Harlem's underworld action, but he soon finds that with notoriety comes with a high price tag...


Don King or Al Sharpton? You be's the judge, baybuh.
Rabbit goes head to head with Madigan (Frank DeKova), a badge-wearing palooka that's on the mafia payroll, who gets his drink dosed, gets duped into a homosexual interlude, and ultimately gets taken down by his fellow officers while on a black-faced shooting spree while coming down off acid. Meanwhile, the Godfather (Al "Grandpa" Lewis) puts a hit on Rabbit from the underbelly of the sewers, but when his only straight son, Sonny (Richard Paul), shows up to ice the hare at his nightclub, decked out in blackface, he's pumped full of lead then abruptly blown to smithereens, before his ashes are sent home to his bawlin' mama. Bear visits Fox, who's been running a brothel for the mob, is hastily married to one of the tricks, and talked into boxing professionally for the crime family. Rabbit builds an explosive-laden tar facsimile of himself and plants it at one of Bear's prizefights, where the remaining mafiosi unwittingly all get stuck while trying to off the bunny. Our heroes escape in the nick of time as the venue blows up with their cartoon enemies inside, as we switch back to the daring live-action bullet-riddled, broad daylight escape of Randy and Pappy, who are equally successful in the end. Credits...


"C'mon, take the noose off, I promise I won't do any more James Taylor covers..."
Despite multiple title changes (Harlem Nights, Coonskin no more..., Street Fight, Bustin' Out, etc.), an undeserved demise at the box office, and much controversy along the way, you're bound to be entertained here. If you're the rare type of individual that equates racism with names like Ted Nugent or Steven Colbert, there's a good chance you'll be too highly offended by the exaggerated ethnic stereotypes on display here to ever pick up on the social commentary within. Those of us who live in the real world, on the other hand, will find a lot to love about Coonskin, a visually dazzling time capsule of the tumultuous and turbulent seventies, as edgy as it is funny. On the scale, it earns an impressive three Wop score, and comes highly recommended.


"You mobsters feelin' some type of way up in that tar right about now."

R.I.P. Jim Kelly

                                        05/05/46 - 06/29/13

"Willie Dynamite" (1974) d/ Gilbert Moses

Pimpy day

keepin the johns well-laid

On my way to where the macks are sweet

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to

Willie Dynamite's street?

...Yeah, sorry, I couldn't resist.


Quit eyein' up the fabric, Henson...you ain't makin' muppets out the muthafucka!
Out of all the New York pimps, Willie Dynamite (Orman) is number two, though if one gauged a pimp's mackaframalama by the loud threads he wears or the chromed down purple Caddy he drives, then Willie D. is a pimp among pimples. Motherfucker's clothes are so loud, if you spend too much time looking at one of his outrageous get up's, you'll get a p.s.h.(permanent shift of hearing, can you dig it?). With the pigs comin' down hard on the city's players, a mackin' committee convenes over the heavy situation where the pimpin' King and Willie's main rival, Bell (Roger Robinson), suggests the flesh peddlers all share turf to lessen the economic blow, but Dynamite chooses to face the heat directly, pimpadocious cat that he no doubt sho' nuff do be.  As the old saying goes, pimpin' ain't easy, and Willie learns first hand the truth behind such a sentiment when his Caddy gets towed, Pashen (Joyce Walker), his afro-wigged trick, gets pinched, and to make matters worse, Cora (Diana Sands), the local social do-goodnik, lays a heavy moral trip on our trick-slappin' daddy, who tells her he'd rather rape a watermelon (!!) than her self-righteous ass.


Only five of these tricks is Oscar's, the other's up in this bitch for his pet worm.
Things go from bad to "You gotta be shittin' me, Jack!" for Willie, as his whole stable of bitches get collared and herded into a box truck. Save the paddy wagon for those two bit hamburger pimps, baby. With the D on the ropes, Bell tries putting the mackin' squeeze on him, and ends up naked in the Bronx (talk about revolting developments...) for his efforts. Despite his best attempts, karma puts it's good foot straight up Willie's polyester-clad ass sideways, anyway in the end. When Willie's top money earner, Honey (Norma Donaldson) tries to muscle some of Bell's girls off of Willie's turf, she gets a neck-mouth for her troubles, and Cora gets all of D's bank accounts frozen like an old cat's stroke-ridden grill. After the local detectives chase Willie all over the Bronx (firing their weapons indiscriminately, mind you) and his bitches get arrested again, with Pashen taking a natural prison ass whooping, some of Bell's homeboys beat the shit out of the luckless player, who gets arrested himself afterwards! Finally, after his heartbroken moms keels over dead at his arraignment (!!!) and he watches a tow truck remove his pimped out set of wheels, he briefly joins in on some neighborhood kids' football toss, and walks off towards a new, less stressful future.


"Why you escalatin' the price of cognac on a brothah, Mr. Hooper?"
Once you've exhausted all the Sesame Street and wardrobe jokes you could possibly make about tonight's effort (don't look at me, man,  I NEVER run outta cornball jokes. They say some of the things I write should end up as dialog in movies, but they're wrong, as anyone with half a mind could tell you: It all should. Haha!), you'll end up with a fairly gripping urban drama, with little if any glorification of the prostitution/pimping biz to be found within. In fact, after you're finished screening Willie, you might come to realize you didn't just watch the run of the mill 70's blaxploitation flick, and see it for the highly watchable downer it really is, well deserving of three big ones. Recommended.


When Willie (Roscoe Orman) ain't  pimpin', he doubles as a baton in a marchin' band, dig?

"Super Fly"(1972)d/Gordon Parks, Jr.

Tonight, we'll take a look at director Gordon Parks Jr.'s premier effort, a coke-encrusted cult classic of seventies' blaxploitation  known primarily by the stellar soundtrack provided by the legendary Curtis Mayfield, who also lends his visage to the film while performing live with his band, The Curtis Mayfield Experience.His lyrics to soul classics like "Freddy's Dead", "Little Child Runnin' Wild", "Pusherman", and the title track vault the otherwise pedestrian urban fare within,  to a morally uplifting socio-economic commentary for the turbulent era.Utica native and classically trained actor Ron O'Neal delivers a memorable turn as anti-hero Youngblood Priest, a heady young coke dealer looking to deliver one last big score before exiting the dangerous drug game on his own terms.Unfortunately for O'Neal, who would ironically succumb to pancreatic cancer in 2004 on the very day his signature film was released on dvd, the same performance that gained him success as an actor would provide a stifling cinematic stereotype that he would never be able to climb out from behind.Also on board here are television staple Sheila Frazier as Priest's main squeeze Georgia, Carl Lee, as his business partner Eddie(who gets to deliver all the best lines here while O'Neal provides much of the action), the venerable genre fave Julius Harris as Priest's old powder connection Scatter, and Charles McGregor as the oblivious Fat Freddie.The son of Gordon Parks, Sr., whose Shaft!(1971) helped lay the foundation for the popular subgenre, Parks, Jr. does an admirable job in providing a provocative look at the hazards of ghetto life while maintaining a controversially non-judgmental stance on the criminality of the hustler's creed, represented here by the anticipatedly gaudy fashions, luxurious apartments, caramel-colored Carmelitas, and pimped out luxury sedans one would expect to encounter in a low budgeted ethno-action flick such as this. A succinct script allows for much display of Parks' visual style through establishing shots of walking and driving through slum neighborhoods that often resemble a pre-fab post-apocalyptic set, more than places of human habitation in America in the twentieth century, for sure.Moderately powerful stuff, indeed.
 
"It ain't the same without 'Mr. Bubble', baby..."
Priest(Ron O'Neal) is a successful young powder pusher who's willing to gamble his fancy designer vines, extravagant spread, gran'daddy Caddy, half a piece of dope a day habit, and loyal young filly Georgia(Sheila Frazier) on thirty kilos of llello from his main man Scatter(Julius Harris) , which he hopes to parlay into a million in cold, hard cash in a month's time with his overbitten weasel of a business associate, Eddie(Carl Lee), in hopes of abandoning the hustle for good before he gets iced by rivals on the streets, or worse,  incarcerated by overzealous thugs with badges and a penchant for racial insensitivity, dig?At first, everything is clumsily impotent-looking judo training, photo montages of cocaine abuse, and slo-mo sudsy tub fuck sequences that go on longer than that snazzy-assed Eldorado cat be wheelin' around in, for Youngblood, with a lengthy chase-thru-the-filth that nets a junkie pickpocket a designer boot to the skull on the floor of his ghetto hovel and some tough love for lazy earner Fat Freddie, who's forced to go out and mug for Priest's missing ends or face seeing his wife get turned out as a common streetwalker, thrown in for good measure.

It's not every day you witness white-on-white crime, and if it is, why don't we hang out more often, dammit.
Freddie unwittingly gets pinched while knuckledusting an easy mark with brassies on the street in broad daylight, and after the badges rough his shit up on the white-hand side, he bloodily divulges every last bit of info he's got on Priest's set up before getting himself smooshed by a car.To further define the hustler's stress levels, a group of black militants ridicules him over his lack of participation in the coming revolution, to which he assures them, that, when it finally goes down, he'll be right down front, killin' Whitey, not constantly putting a gold cross/spoon necklace full of nose candy into his nostrils.If only that white powder wasn't so damned oppressive and symbolic of the decadent decade...A rocky rendezvous with former mentor Scatter earns the old coot an arm full of lethal drugs when the mob muscles him out in favor of the new kid with the outrageous hair, fronting him the dope supply necessary to throw his master plan into action once and for all.With the knowledge of Youngblood's hustle, naturally, the cops orchestrate a sting and arrest...nah, just kidding, they suggest he partners them in on his racket on the grounds that he never leaves the game. What the hustler decides to do in the last reel, I'll let you discover on your own when you see it for your own damned selves.
 
They're right, things do go better with Coke.
To be fair, some dialogue exchanges are handled sloppily by Parks, giving them an air of artificiality that contaminates the film's reality in places.O'Neal's silly wig and epicene mannerisms only compound that problem, and when one adds the flagrantly inept camera placement during the slo-mo fight in the finale, it's not long before they're reminded that they're watching a low budget exploitation film, after all. Flaws notwithstanding, this is still memorable viewing for any fan of the sub-genre, beyond question, and compared to later entries like Abar the Black Superman(1977) or Super Soul Brother a.k.a./Six Thousand Dollar Nigger(1979), it may as well be Citizen Kane up there on the screen.O'Neal would direct the forgettable sequel, Superfly T.N.T.(1975), himself, but it would fail to make much of a splash at the box office.The film's producer, Sig Shore, would direct the second sequel, Return of Superfly, in 1990.Parks would helm Three the Hard Way two years later, and die at 44 in a Kenyan plane crash in 1979.Harris would turn up in  Larry Cohen's two slices of blaxploitation gold, Black Caesar and Hell up in Harlem(both 1973) as Big Papa Gibbs, and even King Kong(1976), as well as Raimi's Crimewave(1985) and Darkman(1990).You'll no doubt remember Charles McGregor from Blazing Saddles(1976).Real-life pimp K.C. loaned his unforgettable mack-tastic '71 Eldo to the production in exchange for a role in the movie, dig.Still, the most noteworthy aspect of this one has to be the Mayfield soundtrack.On the scale, I'm givin' Fly the only score The Man'll let me give it, which is:
 
 Biff! Zap! Powww! And his leather stays flawless, can you dig it, baby?

"The Mack"(1973)d/Michael Campus

Long before the advent of blaxploitation films or Wings Hauser, pimpin' remained as difficult as it had ever been, with hookers' general inability to get a hustler's money straight, resulting in many of these fancy trick bitches coming down with an acute case of foot-up-yo'-ass disease and rightfully GODdamned so, if I may be so bold.In 1973, a player's dilemma was finally committed to celluloid in the form of tonight's review, a surprisingly effective film that transcends the sub-genre limitations in sporadic instances, making it highly watchable for both exploitation fanatics and general film buffs alike.'Intense' and 'passionate' aren't usually commonplace words when describing B-movies about small-time crooks in Oakland, but you'll hear those and others tossed around a lot when Mack comes up in cinema convo, due in part to a potent supporting cast made up of comedic great, Richard Pryor, genre vet Carol Speed, Roger E. Mosley of 'Magnum P.I.' fame, B-movie staples, Juanita Moore and Don Gordon, as well as a smattering of real-life pimps and hustlers like Frank Ward, who was gunned down shortly before the film's release.Of course, the spotlight here is on Max Julien, who gives a tour de force performance as Goldie, mixing sleaze with sympathy in creating one of the most compelling characters in cult cinema history while inspiring future directors like Oliver Stone and entire generations of hip hop artists to follow, and even helping design some of the outrageous threads worn in the movie.The final draft of the script was also written by Julien, Pryor, and Campus, though screenwriter Robert Poole allegedly wrote the first treatment on toilet paper while in prison(!).Tonight's review goes out to reader Floyd, who's seen just about every blaxploitation flick ever made, and whose own pimp cape has stayed wrinkle-free as long as I've known him.Dig it, baby...

Pimpin' Hint # 7:Avoid crooked honky cops at all times.
After finding himself suspended upside down in a car wreck looking up at two mocking cops(Don Gordon, William Watson) when a botched drug deal turns into a fire fight, Goldie(Max Julien) is given a five year bed at the state pen, where he damned near goes stir crazy.Having served his sentence, he finds himself on a charter bus back to Oakland where he reconnects in a billiard hall with street guru, Blind Man(Paul Harris), who helps him to get back on his feet by introducing him to the mackin' game, convinced that Goldie could potentially be the coldest pimp there ever was.Goldie meets childhood sweetheart, Lulu(Carol Speed), at a nightclub where she admits to having become a prostitute in the years since, beseeching him to become her pimp.After leaving the bar, he's leaned on again by the same two badged bigots from earlier, there to remind him they plan on remaining a thorn in his side.He then tells Mama(Juanita Brown) that he's gotta face the man the only way he knows how, the nefarious and illegal exploitation of women for money, vowing to move her out of the ghetto once he's amassed the ends to get it done.He meets up with his brother, Olinga(Roger E. Mosley), who's since become a black nationalist that pulls drug addicts off the street and rehabilitates them into soldiers for the cause, but spares him the news of his forthcoming new business venture.Goldie listens to pimp braggadocio at the barber shop to strengthen his own game, which he lays on Lulu, who becomes his bottom bitch, with partner-in-crime, Slim(Richard Pryor) along for the ride.Cue: funky montage of Goldie rolling in long dollars as he gathers his eclectic stable of money hos, that includes Chico(Kai Hernandez) and Diane(Sandra Brown), while moving his mother into a new place and doling out cash to kids on the street for going to school.We then see Goldie congregate his bitches into a local planetarium, where he laughingly indoctrinates their minds in the ways of gash fo' cash with projected views of space and a microphone with echo.A sweet mack, indeed.

Big Pimpin'.It's the toughest job you'll ever love.
Once Goldie's rolling in a pimped out '71 Eldo and rocking a matching brown velour derby and pimp cape to boot, he's instantly set upon by the street's bottom feeders; The Fat Man(George Murdock), a white heroin kingpin Goldie once worked for that's been losing addicts to his brother's racial rhetoric, Hank and Jed, the two corrupt cops with a hard on for Goldie, who murder a black detective that uncovers their shady side deals, rival Pretty Tony, when his apex hooker jumps ship to Goldie's stable in front of all the hustlers(Goldie memorably remarks:"We can handle this like you got some class, or we can get into some gangsta shit."), and even Olinga, who righteously denounces his brother's gaudy lifestyle.What's a hustler to do, except attend the Player's Ball where he rejects another work offer from the Fat Man before being awarded "Pimp of the Year" by his ridiculously garbed peers.It isn't long before the streets of Oakland are littered with overdosed hos, executed mothers, and whacked main men, so naturally, Goldie responds with repeated cane-sword-ass-stabbin', dynamite teethin', cop headshots(while Olinga C.T.F.O.'s the partner), and overdosed syringe retribution on all the cats what's done him wrong, culminating in a touching bus station farewell from his brother, when he's forced to split town due to the incredible amount of heat he's just brought down upon himself.Cue the funk, baby.

Pimpin' Hint # 43:Use a planetarium light show to effectively blow your bitches' minds.
Besides playing L.S.D.-soaked Elwood in Wop fave Psych-Out(1967), Julien can be seen in Ted V. Mikels' The Black Klansman(1966) and The Mod Squad tv series.He also wrote Cleopatra Jones(1975), for then-girlfriend, Vonetta McGee, though Tamara Dobson ended up winning the role.His long-time friend, Richard Pryor, was frowned upon by the film's producers for his legendary behavior on the set of 1968's Wild in the Streets, where he took a piss on Shelley Winters(!!).Director Campus, who helmed the minor sci-fi movie Z.P.G.(Zero Population Growth) in 1972, claims Pryor rarely showed up straight on the set, if at all.Mosley's Olinga character was based on Black Panthers Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, both of which were real-life friends of Julien's.Apart from his long run opposite Tom Selleck, Mosley would appear on television shows like Night Gallery, Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, and The Love Boat.Ms. Speed, would score acting credits in blaxploitation fare like Jack Hill's The Big Bird Cage(1972), Savage!(1973), Dynamite Brothers, Abby, and Disco Godfather(all 1974).On the scale, Mack rates a pimpadocious three Wops, as a top rate genre flick, probably the best of it's kind, were it not for a director named Van Peebles and a film project he'd completed in 1970, but that's another movie, another entry, baby.Highly recommended.

Real hustlers aren't afraid to rock a mink bowtie to the Player's Ball.

"Foxy Brown"(1974)d/Jack Hill

Pillow-chested stick o' chocolate dynamite Pam Grier hit the blaxploitation/Women in Prison scene like a pimpslapped cheek back in 1971 with a role in director Jack Hill's The Big Doll House and established herself thereafter as a familiar and formidable box office draw whose performances dripped with raw sensuality and gritty violence in some of the genre's finest offerings of the decade.Tonight, we'll be viddying what's got to be her crowning grindhouse work, the second of two blaxploitation movies she collaborated on with Hill(Coffy came a year earlier); a
delirious mash up of racial stereotypes, dated boogie-wear, domepiece squib hits, sloppily executed fights, afro wigs, and a pair of girthy mams that'd give Truck Turner heart palpitations, can you dig it?Also on board as Foxy's perpetual fuck up brother is none other than Antonio "Huggy Bear" Fargas, who's never been shiftier, in my opinion.Add to the mix blaxploitation vet Juanita Brown, long-time Hill-faves Kathryn Loder and Sid Haig, and a funkified r n' b soundtrack from Willie Hutch, and you've got yourself 94 minutes of B movie gold guaranteed to satisfy the most jaded genre nut.If only every dame could rock a polyester straitjacket-tittin' action pants suit with complimentary bra gat and be just as quick to judo chop jive turkeys as she was to NY Hustle in silhouette, the world'd be a much better place for cats to get down in, believe me, baby.Let's make it...

Foxy(Pam Grier)and Michael(Terry Carter) enjoy some quality ethno-motorboatin'.Blblblblblblblb, y'all.
Link(Antonio Fargas) likes beddin' hos, slangin' dope, and comin' up short for twenty large to loan sharks.When he's cornered like a 'hood rat at a hot dog stand by two mob-tied bonebreakers, he naturally uses the miraculous appearance of two esuriant honkey pig cops to rotary dial his bad-ass sister, Foxy Brown(Pam Grier), for some math-fast assistance with his burgeoning problems.Though Foxy doesn't dig her bro's unrighteous lifestyle, she doesn't think twice about rolling out of bed, stuffing a pearl-handled gat into her Brobdingnagian bra cup and saving his miserable hide in the nick of time.She lets homeboy crash at her pad until the coast is clear, so long as he doesn't interfere with the return of her fed boyfriend, Michael(Terry Carter), whose undercover work to pinch the mob(coincidentally the same cats Link owes bread to) failed epically enough for him to require a faked death, new identity, and plastic surgified grillpiece.Faster than Usain Bolt in a quicksilver jumpsuit, Link recognizes Foxy's 'new' man and feeds his criminal creditors the valuable skinny to eliminate his debt and effectively number Michael's days at the same time.When Michael eats hot lead-punctured death just outside his girlfriend's pad, Foxy stumbles across the pencil-modified photo clipping of her late lover, as doodled by that no good motherfucker, Link, and puts two and two together.Awww shit.She bursts into his crib as he's horizontal boogieing with his finest white bitch and fucks the place up in a whirlwind of womanhood, squeezing the names of involved mobsters out of his sorry ass before breaking the fuck out like poison sumac.Ain't nothing like some well-calculated revenge on the horizon, y'all.

Even Foxy's tongue is baaaad.
Oblivious to any moral high ground that may have existed prior to said vengeance, Foxy decides that the ultimate infiltrative guise she could don is: hooker.Eh, at least it makes for some near-nude fashion combos with extra emphasis on busty to squeeze into, as she shows up on the doorstep of the crime syndicate's modeling agency front, as overseen by the tyrannical Miss Katherine(Kathryn Loder) and her partner-in-crime, Steve(Peter Brown), who's instantly mesmerized by Pammy's massive mammies.The ever-jealous Katherine sends her out with another abused drug addict ho(Juanita Brown) to hotel room-hustle with a judge who's about to bang the gavel on one of their associates.The hos doublecross the jurisconsult and leave him in the hallway with his pants around his ankles as a small crowd of bewildered boarders approaches.Foxy vainly tries to lie low, but her new partner-in-revenge's wanderlust puts both chicks in a lesbo bar surrounded by aroused dykes who wanna fuck n' fight 'til the broad daylight.The syndicate reaches out to Link for his sister's whereabouts, disposing of him with bullets once the cat's outta the bag.Katherine ties up the meddling negress, fixes her up with a shot of junk, and leaves her to the devices of a pair of rapist thugs, but with the help of one helluva talented tongue, she manages to free herself, claw up some face with a bent-up wire hanger, and set the boys and their love shack on fire, before splitting.After some local would-be Panthers help her to perform a makeshift penectomy with a Bowie knife on a screaming Steve, and she snakes the controls of an amorous pilot(Sid Haig)'s biplane, using it to dice more of Katherine's men into minced mafiosi, she decends on the female crime lord with a jar full o' pickled junk, and just when it looks bad-meaning-bad for our hardcore heroine, she pulls a pistol from her afro and all Hell breaks loose.See for yourselves...

There's one mannekin that'll never see Macy's front window again...
Though you might think Grier's career got a nick o' time jumpstart due to Tarantino's 1997 fanboy tribute Jackie Brown(Great title.Yeah.), the fact is, despite the eventual decline of blaxploitation pictures, Pam never went anywhere, finding a steady flow of television roles on shows like The Love Boat, Night Court, and even MadTV, as well as movies like Ghosts of Mars, Escape From LA, Mars Attacks!, and Fort Apache the Bronx.She's an icon of the decade and a positive role model for women everywhere.You go, girl.Antonio Fargas has remained busy in the industry the whole time, himself, acting in television shows like Kojak and MacGyver(!) and even genre films like The Borrower(1991) and direct-to-video Howling VI:The Freaks(1991), while his son Justin lines up in the Oakland Raiders backfield.Go 'head, son.The legendary Hill has helmed cult classics like The Terror(1963) and Spider Baby(1968), as well as writing the screenplays behind The Bees(1978) and 1980's Death Ship.He's awfully nice on Facebook, too.On the scale, Foxy scores three big ones, packed with exploitative thrills n' chills, a definite treat for fans of such fare.Hell, it might even make a new fan out of you if you give it half the chance.Check it out.

One chick's afro is another's gun holster, diiig?

"The Thing with Two Heads"(1972)d/Lee Frost

Contrary to all that jive-ass motherfuckin' bool-shit you mighta heard for yourselves in history books, the road to healthy race relations in America was paved by the late exploitation king, Lee Frost when he finally answered society's eternal question, as evidenced by the dyn-o-mite one sheet above:Couldn't we just sew the dome of an elderly honkey racist onto a young soul brother's shoulders and be done with it already?Admit it, you've always wanted to see something like this, I know I have.Funny enough, as much as dual-domed cats wreaking havok upon the unsuspecting populace appealed to me, this was not my favorite double header growing up, thank Bruce Dern and AIP's The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant(1971) for that.I blame the lack of homicide in tonight's entry(and the lack of tension, the lack of scares, the lack of...you can dig where I'm takin' this, baby.).Decades later, my sentiments towards the delightfully absurd drive-in cult classic have indeed softened, though I honestly feel Frost and co. merely scratched the surface concerning the concept, and should have taken it as far as they could.They might have had an all-time classic on their hands, for serious.As it stands, it's a pretty good time.The goril-licious special makeup effects were provided by none other than the apetastic Rick Baker, who also appears on camera in his two headed silverback suit.The cast is headed(ouch, sorry)by B-vet Ray Milland, who turns in a worthy performance as Rosey Grier's pesky caucasian shoulder growth.The aforementioned Giants/Rams defensive tackle doesn't show as much of a knack for acting as he once did for writing needlepoint books for men in the mid-70's, but he does manage to keep a straight face throughout all of this, and that had to have been near to goddamned impossible.

"Mbutu, you said the 'nanners was free, why are dese here peepul lookin' at us dat way?!!"
Enter one cancer-riddled, wheelchair-bound brain surgeon named Max Kirshner(Ray Milland) who's also being eaten alive from the inside out by an even more degenerative cancer, sometimes referred to as 'intolerance'.Entirely unsolicitous over his own looming mortality, Kirshner has been conducting some idiosyncratic experiments in his basement lab(the 'basement laboratory' is almost never a good sign for humanity in these movies)involving some innovative transplant theories concerning the dome.Thus far, he's successfully grafted an uncommitted goriller skullpiece onto the host body of another simian(are live gorillas that plentiful on the American black market?How the hell is a dying paraplegic getting a sizeable metal monkey cage past the neighbors anyway?It just doesn't matter, as Bill Murray used to say after a thorough nose-powdering) and the dual-domed chest pounder hasn't even broken loo...yeah, nevermind.The fruits of the stockboy's thirty-five cents an hour labor at the local grocery store are soon dashed from the shelves by the brute force of the doubled up jungle demon on a quest for...bananas, of course.One tranq dart later, Kirshner amputates the original host head from his test subject, which incredibly survives, leading him to up the ante on the head-switchin' sweepstakes to human stakes.Dr. Desmond(Roger Perry) is called in to remove the mortally ill surgeon's lid before his cancer spreads any further, and graft it onto a healthy body.Death row inmate Jack Moss(Rosey Grier) volunteers himself for the procedure, thinking that donating his body might just buy him the necessary time to prove his innocence against the criminal charges hanging over his head.Damn, Rosey.That's a tight spot.

"Ya got the wrong William Smith, I'm tellin' ya!"
After a successful operation, Kirshner groggily awakens to find he's currently affixed to the shoulder of a hulking negro, to which he ponders aloud:"Is this some kind of joke?"Once he's certain that it isn't, even, he accepts his multiracial dilemma for the moment, realizing that his head can again be removed and placed on a honky body at a later date, if only the revived Moss, who flips his wig at the idea and promptly escapes, was as receptive.Moss enlists another brother, Dr. Williams(Don Marshall), who Kirshner had previously turned down for a position on his staff due to his skin color(oops!), to help him flee from the cops.Cue: police cruisers v. two-headed-negro-on-dirtbike chase sequence that seemingly goes on for, like, ever or something.Once the unlikely duo(trio?) arrive at Moss' girlfriend Lila's(Chelsea Brown) place to hide out, Kirshner's wisecracking head singleheadedly sets the civil rights movement back fifty years with Bunkeristic barbs like "Is that all you people think about?" when Jack and Lila contemplate getting bedroom funky despite the presence of Kirshner's grill mere inches away, and "What are we having for dessert, watermelon?" in protest of the soul food Lila has cooked the household.As you might imagine, soon, all black parties involved are plugging for the A.S.A.P. evacuation of Jack's mouthy euro-dome from his shoulder.How this cautionarily dark racial horror-comedy finally plays out in the end, I'll leave for you to discover for yourselves...

Not juss' one, but two mufuggin' heads y'all...
Chances are, if it was labelled 'exploitation' in the sixties and seventies, there's a good chance Lee Frost was in the director's chair for it.Whether it was nudies like 1962's House on Bare Mountain, mondo documentaries like Mondo Freudo and Mondo Bizarro(both 1966), nazisploitation like Love Camp 7(1969), or blaxploitation gold like tonight's review and The Black Gestapo(1975), this cat filled many a sleazy grindhouse with grimy goodies in his day, methinks.Grier enjoyed a lengthy career in television, appearing on everything from I Dream of Jeannie and Love Boat to Kojak and CHiPs.Milland would later venture into genre territory with roles in Terror in the Wax Museum(1973), 1975 telepic The Dead Don't Die, The Attic(1980), and even Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby(1976).It turns out that Rick Baker, who would follow up his work here with John Landis' Shlock(1973), would contribute more than once to the blaxploitation sub-genre, supplying make up for Black Caesar(1973), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman(1974), Coming to America(1988), and also Eddie Murphy's Nutty Professor movies.We'll give you a pass for Norbit(2007), maestro.It's only fitting that this titular Thing with Two Heads earns itself two solid wops on the rating scale.Give it a look and you just might have yourself a grand ole time with it, if you're not careful.

You just lie there on life support tubing until yer tolerant, Milland!

"Welcome Home, Brother Charles"(1975)d/Jamaa Fanaka

Ever have one of those optimistic weekends that you planned ahead of time for greatness, but every moment seems doomed to progressively worse failure and by the time the smoke clears you're looking back on three dismal days of sto cazzo, and you managed to piss off everyone around you in the process?Mark the first weekend in June as one of those.Between a nostalgia-free cruise through the shambles of what was once my old neighborhood(Beirut comes to mind), revisiting an old dvd of my ex-family that opened some forgotten wounds, and crossed wires/botched plans with the first girl I've truly grooved on in ages(for serious), I'm almost ready to cheer on the first rays of Monday morning sunlight over here.Almost.As terminally rotten as things were for ol' Wop, I'd still never leave you without your regular review to kick off the new week; hopefully a much better one.
With a liberal dose of East Coast Hatecore segueing into some sixties calypso that's blaring in my headphones tonight, what better film to draw focus upon than Jamaa Fanaka's controversial pioneer 1975 effort, "Welcome Home, Brother Charles"(also known as "Soul Vengeance")?What Fanaka captured on film stands as a gritty, surreal extension of the eternal pissing contest between black and white males; an urban yarn o'vengeance handled with much artistic flair, a seldom-seen-yet-primo slice of seventies blacksploitation fare that has to be seen to be believed and a must for any genre collector's shelves.I first crossed paths with tonight's review back in the VHS trading days of the early nineties, a title I had heard mention of but never made much of an effort to screen for myself to that point.That all changed when I threw the tape in, instantly dumbfounded by the bleak, racist world painted in bold master strokes by Fanaka's urban brush.It ain't every day you see white bigots getting vengefully choked the fuck out by a killer black penis.Onward.

"Quit ticklin' me, muthafucka! I will NOT give you my Rufus tickets!"
We're introduced to Charles(Marlo Monte) as he sits on a high building wall, surrounded by cops, and threatening to swandive if they don't back off.His girlfriend Carmen(Reatha Grey) is brought in to talk him down, but instead, he reminisces about the weird events that led up to this stand off.Three years earlier as a street-level pusher, a botched hotel room drug deal left him in the cuffs of two cops named Jim and Harry, the latter being the crooked, racially frustrated bigot-type who decides to beat the stuffing out of Charles in the back of the squad car, nearly castrating him in the process(intentionally, mind you).On top of that, he receives a three year prison bed on which to stew upon directly after his day in court goes stereotypically(Seriously, a cop tries to cut your dick off, you might wanna bring that up in front of a judge.Just sayin'.).In the hoosegow, Chaz's wounds eventually heal as he develops a deeper spirituality, vowing to go straight amidst what sounds like a foghorn-based avant garde theme from Fanaka himself, and a montage of black and white shots of an anguished Charles brooding in his cell.Once he's on the outside again, he notices that all his old homeboys are immersed deeper in criminality than before he went in, and his former friend N.D.(Jake Carter) used Chas' incarceration to turn his girlfriend Twyla into a stripper.A prostitute named Carmen, who tried to help him as he was arrested, makes a soul connection with Charles that soon blossoms into love.But this ain't the same Charlie as before, baby.

Rule of the streets #17: Never mess with a black man's junk.
Charles's current adherence to the straight and narrow is frequently broken by the sad truth that his home has degenerated into a criminal underworld, an inability to return to productive society, and lapses of vengeance-fueled race hate against those who sought to oppress him in the beginning.And his dick grows to about twelve feet in length, strangling whitey constrictor-style whenever the feeling grips him, in a tongue-in-cheek nod to the old white racist myths about black slaves comandeering the slavemasters' wives with their enormous sex organs.So, yeah.He pleases the wives of his enemies after bedding them with Svengali-esque hypno-powers(jail was awfully productive for this guy,huh) then strangles the shit out of the honkeys-in-question with his ridiculously enormous johnson.I'll let you wrap your minds around that concept for a while, and suggest that you seek out the Xenon dvd for the exciting conclusion and potential answers to the film's eternal questions: Did Harry take Charles directly to jail, and if not, how did he skirt around the attempted castration at the hospital? Where was Chas' girlfriend Twyla prior to his prison sentence? Do undercover cops often double dip as bomb diffusal specialists? Does the sight of a giant, unfurling, black dick cause white folks to freeze up like a deer-in-headlights prior to strangulation? Once you draw your conclusions, send them off to me, ferchrissakes.I'm just as curious as you are.

Boy, Scatman Crothers could sure throw a party...
Brother Charles was one of Fanaka's three feature films he completed as student projects while studying at UCLA, the third, Penitentiary(1981), a prison boxing picture starring Leon Isaac Kennedy, was a top grossing independent film that year.Xenon's print is allegedly missing somewhere in the neighborhood of seven minutes of more shocking footage compared to other copies of the film.I actually can't remember whether the VHS I snared years ago was any more graphic than this disc.Eh, it matters little at this point.I recommend Brother Charles to any and all blaxploitation fans, and bestow three wops upon it.Hunt it down for yourselves!

I exclusively choke chicks out with mine, but whatever fries your calamari, homepiss.