The Spook Who Sat By The Door

The Spook Who Sat By The Door, by Sam Greenlee

January, 1970  Bantam Books

(Original hardcover edition 1968)

Most likely known more for its film adaptation (below), The Spook Who Sat By The Door started life as this hardcover novel published by Sam Greenlee in 1968. According to the back cover of the 2020 edition published by Wayne State University Press, the novel has been “continuously available in print since 1968,” and what’s more it “has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture.” Of course, “anti-racist” means the exact same thing as “racist,” but we’ll leave that alone for now. 

Actually, we won’t. The back cover of the Wayne State University Press edition also goes on to state, “As a tale of reaction to the forces of suppression, this book is universal.” To which, like pretty much all other “progressive” double-speak, I say bullshit. Indeed, the “hero” of this tale is such a craven, hate-filled bastard that I almost wondered if Sam Greenlee intended him as a lampoon of the whole “black rage” movement. But that might be giving more credit than is due, as there’s nothing to indicate Greenlee had any tricks up his sleeve; the novel is tiresomely serious, and the attempts at instilling a second-hand rage in the reader fails, mostly because the main character is such an iredeemable prick. He isn’t so much “reacting to the forces of suppression” as he is instigating a race war, for reasons that are decidedly self-centered. In fact the dude basically plans to have others do the fighting for him, while he lives in his bachelor pad sipping whiskey and listening to jazz on the hi-fi. 

The novel is also written in such a way that the reader must do all the heavy lifting; Greenlee has a tendency to write much of the narrative in summary, ie such and such happened, then such and such happened – like, it’s all nearly in outline format, with no drama or suspense to bring the characters or situations to life. And a lot of important stuff happens off-page, or isn’t exploited well enough to reap the full dramatic potential – something the filmmakers astutely corrected, as the movie is a lot better than the book, and not just because the soundtrack’s by Herbie Hancock. 

On the plus side, I was happy to discover that Greenlee wrote The Spook Who Sat By The Door in the style of the popular fiction of the era; this is not a “literary” novel, or something akin to Ishmael Reed. And at times Greenlee does capture a masculine vibe in his terse prose; I also appreciated the frequent mentions of music, with characters even visiting record stores. Jazz musicians are mentioned often, and particular albums are mentioned, but Greenlee, writing in the late ‘60s, has his characters listening to the pre-electric stuff. I mean, as I’ve said before, I like my jazz funky, electric, and from the ‘70s. In fact, I’m listening to Eddie Harris’s Bad Luck Is All I Have as I write this review. 

The novel is set in the same period in which it was published, though the action takes place over a few years, leading to the “it could happen!” sluglines that adorned paperback copies in the early ‘70s. Despite what the Wayne State University edition’s back cover wants you to believe (not to mention what a particular political party wants you to believe), the era in which The Spook Who Sat By The Door occurs is very different from our modern era. But then, that same political party stays in power by cultivating and harnessing race rage – or, really, any kind of rage – so on that note you could say the book is still timely. I guess rage just never goes out of fashion with the left. 

Confirming this, politics is not really a driver for our “hero,” Dan Freeman. Rage is. This is fine; I mean rage is the driver for most men’s adventure protagonists of the era. But at least with those characters, you can empathize with them. Freeman is kept at such a distance from the reader – and other characters – that it’s not until late in the novel that you even learn what drives him. This undermines the power of The Spook Who Sat By The Door, along with the passive, summary-style narrative approach. 

If anything, Freeman – which is to say, possibly, Greenlee – shows most rage for liberal whites. A disdain for “caring” whites runs through the novel, meaning those white people who pretend to care for the plight of the blacks but have ulterior motives. In other words, virtue-signallers as they would now be called. There are a lot of humorous parts where these hypocrites are called out for their hypocrisy. 

But then, just as much anger is directed at blacks. There is a lot of antagonism between Dan Freeman and other blacks; in his intro in the novel, he’s bickering and sniping at fellow blacks who have been chosen for a new CIA program. They don’t like Freeman because he doesn’t seem to fit in, and Freeman doesn’t like them because they all have Ivy League educations and fraternity pins. In other words, in Freeman’s mind they are pretend caucasians. 

Curiously, the one group Freeman – and, possibly, Greenlee – does not have a problem with is actual racist white people! Indeed, it’s subtly conveyed that Freeman respects these people for showing their true feelings…with the hidden inference that Freeman likes it because he himself is a racist. 

Unless I missed something, Dan Freeman is not the titular “spook” who sat by the door. Rather, it’s a black man who has been hired by a congressman as a sounding board for the black voting public, but who mostly “sits by the door.” He opens the novel, implying that he will be an integral character in the novel, but he disappears after this opening – and, what’s more, the idea that forms the plot of the novel doesn’t even come from him! 

Rather, it’s the congressman’s wife who proposes, apropos of nothing, that the congressman push for an integrated CIA as a way of currying support from “the Negroes.” I mean, the “spook who sits by the door” isn’t even the one who comes up with the idea! Perhaps this is Greenlee’s point, that even the “token negro” who has literally been hired to give the black viewpoint is ignored by the liberal whites who have employed him – rather, they listen to their fellow liberal whites instead. As I say, the book is downright timely in some regards. 

Nevertheless, the plan is put in motion, and thus we are introduced without much fanfare to our ostensible hero, Dan Freeman. We don’t learn much about him, only that he’s from Chicago and has gotten through the intense trials to become one of the few black men up for CIA membership. We learn that he harbors a lot of rage, and also that he has ulterior motives of his own – the implication is clear that he plans to use this CIA training to cause some hell. But Greenlee keeps him at such a distance from us that we don’t get a clear idea of what it is he plans. 

In the meantime, he fights with his black comrades as well as the racists in charge of CIA training. As I stated at the outset, The Spook Who Sat By The Door takes place in a different world, where “integration” was detested by the racist whites who ran everything. At least, according to this novel. As mentioned, the book itself is very racist: all whites here are bigots who harbor prejudices against black people and whatnot. But then again such fiction is taken as truth today. Personally I’ve learned after fifty years of life that skin color means not a thing – an asshole is an asshole, regardless of race. 

Greenlee occasionally veers outside of his summary approach and gives us actual tense scenes, like when Freeman takes on his racist judo instructor. This is a cool part and has that masculine, men’s adventure-type vibe; the instructor is a white man, the referee is Korean, and Freeman mops the floor with the bigot. But after which he scolds himself for letting his “mask” slip; again, Greenlee has this tendency to keep Freeman’s true inclinations hidden from not only other characters but the reader himself (or “themselves,” if you go that way), and this sort of neuters the impact of the narrative. 

The CIA is run by “The General,” another bigot who intends to drum out all of the blacks through rigorous training. But as expected, Freeman manages to pass until the end – and, instead of becoming a field agent, he’s given a desk job in DC. So essentially he too becomes “a spook who sits beside the door.” Over the next few years, Freeman becomes a key player for the Agency, traveling around the world with various politicians and learning to grease the wheels in other countries. 

Along the way he has some “side pieces,” like a black hooker in DC he retains over the years, and also an old flame who apparently is Freeman’s main girlfriend, though she’s thrust on readers so casually that at first I confused her for the hooker. The idea is that even from these women Freeman hides his true self, though via the hooker we learn of his revolutionary tendencies, in that he refers to her as a “Dahomey Queen,” a reference to Africa. 

But again, the reader must do a lot of the work to make the narrative come to life. In this way Greenlee is similar to author Cecelia Holland, who also refrains from providing the motivations for her characters; I’ve tried two times over the past six years to read her doorstep of a sci-fi novel, Floating Worlds, and have given up halfway through each time due to my frustration over not being told why characters were doing what they were doing. 

Anyway, the General gives a patronizing speech to Freeman over dinner one night, telling him how “you people…will take generations” to fully integrate, and etc, and Freeman keeps his “mask” on, only losing control when he excuses himself to the restroom, where he cries in rage – curiously, a scene that was left out of the movie. Again following his own unstated goal, Freeman abruptly quits the CIA and goes back home to Chicago, returning to his former job as a social worker; he sets up a nice bachelor pad and again integrates with the upper-crust (read: liberal) white society. And meanwhile he hobknobs with the Cobras, a Black Power guerrilla outfit (read: The Black Panthers). Freeman only now demonstrates his true goal: to instill his CIA training on these black freedom fighters, to start a war on whitey. 

Now, the cynic in me wants to accuse Dan Freeman of cultural appropriation. I mean, think of it – he’s been taught by white people, and now he wants to use their own stuff against them. It’s not like Dan Freeman is an originator. This is why I think Sam Greenlee might have had some tricks up his sleeve, as he constantly refers to jazz musicians – real ones, like Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt – and the implication is that these black Americans are originators, men who have broken away from their shackles (rather real or conceived) and have gone on to create instead of to destroy. 

But as we all know – and have learned – the left only knows how to destroy, not create. And this is what Freeman teaches the Cobras to do. All the hand-fighting, shooting, bomb-making, and etc tricks he learned in the Agency. As “Turk,” Freeman again wears a mask, not allowing himself to get too close to the Cobras, as he knows they’ll need to be expendable. Again, our hero is a prick. For Freeman plans to begin racial skirmishes across the country, his Cobras using all kinds of whitey’s tricks against them…while Freeman himself maintains his pose as the high-society “integrated negro” who lives in a cushy apartment, sipping whiskey and listening to jazz. 

Again, so much is told instead of shown. The Cobras hit a bank – we’re told about it. They dose a guy with LSD, we’re told about it. Indeed, for years I’ve had this jazz-funk DJ mix, which I blogged about on here many years ago: Pulp Fusion: Cheeba Cheeba Mix. Well there’s a sample in that mix, some guy saying, “I just met the most wonderful bunch of n—” (you of course know the word I mean), and I had no idea that line of dialog came from the movie version of The Spook Who Sat By The Door. And it’s in the novel, too – but unlike the film, it’s delievered in hindsight, capping off yet another summary-style excursion of “this happened, then hat happened,” so that, like virtually everything else in the novel, the line lacks any punch. 

Things come to a head in Chicago, where the riots begin, soon erupting across the country. And meanwhile Dan Freeman sits in his bachelor pad, posing as a member of integrated society. His “mask” is still firmly in place, as he lies to everyone – to the Cobras who serve him and look up to him, to the old girflriend who comes visiting. None of them know who the true Freeman is, and as mentioned even we readers never do, as his motivation is never satisfactorily delivered. Thus the novel’s intended downbeat ending – or happy ending, depending on your point of view – also lacks much punch.

In 1973 a film adaptation was released; I’ve come across speculation online that the CIA “yanked” the movie from theaters because it gave away too many secrets, and etc. Again: bullshit. This is a low-budget film, of a piece with the other independent Blaxploitation productions of the era, and I highly doubt the CIA was bothered by it at all. Episodes of Mission: Impossible gave away more “secrets.” 

The only things that elevate this film adaptation are Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack and the fact that protagonist Dan Freeman – as well as the other characters – is given a chance to breathe; we actually see things as they happen, and aren’t told everything in summary. If the Cobras – here named “The Black Cobras” in the movie – rob a bank, we see the bank robbery as it goes down, instead of reading a paragraph summary of the events. 

Also, Dan Freeman (portrayed by Lawrence Cook, who is very good in the role) is given the motivation he was denied in the novel. Indeed, the idea that he goes into Agency training precisely to start a race war is not evident in the film version; the idea is just as easily conveyed that his frustrations with lack of integration are what push him over the edge. As mentioned above, the part where the General gives his patronizing speech remains in the film version, but Freeman’s emotional breakdown after it has been removed from the adaptation, which I found curious. 

Sam Greenlee himself was a co-writer of the script, as well as a producer of the film, so one wonders if it was his attempt to rectify the passive tones of his original novel. Characters are still sort of thrust on us, like Freeman’s old girlfriend from Chicago who still throws him a casual lay every once in a while, but at least these characters are introduced more properly than in the book. Also the movie sports better characterizations for the Cobras, leading to memorable scenes – like the “yellow” Cobra (ie a light-skinned black) who chaffes that everyone thinks he’s white, leading to an emotional “I was born black, I’m gonna die black” speech – one that was sampled in yet another funk DJ mix I like a lot, Blaxploitation Mixtape by DJ EB. 

But as mentioned, the movie is clearly low-budget. The novel opens with a big cabinet meeting, but in the movie it’s three people in a small office. And hell, the titular “spook” who sits by the door has been turned into a woman in the movie, but even here it’s the politician’s wife who comes up with the “integrated CIA” idea. A lot of Freeman’s simmering schemes are left out of the movie, but the fight with the judo teacher remains. Overall, though, the feeling is that the producers were trying to make a legit movie, as The Spook Who Sat By The Door lacks much of what one thinks of when one thinks of a “Blaxploitation” movie. Indeed there isn’t even any nudity or much violence. 

One thing the film does have that is similar to other Blaxploitation flicks is a great soundtrack. Recorded right in the midst of his “Headhunters” phase, Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack features early versions of material that would come out on his Thrust LP. We’re talking jazz-funk with serious cosmic aspirations, courtesy far-out synth work with ring modulators and echoplex and a host of other sonic trickery. It’s a shame the soundtrack was never properly released, as what exists in the film sounds incredible, and for me the music was the highlight of the film. 

It’s taken me some weeks to write this review, mostly due to work and life commitments. In this time the race conflict has come even here to Frisco, Texas – on April 2nd of this year a seventeen-year-old boy was stabbed to death at a track meet by another boy of the same age. This garnered national coverage, but curiously race was never mentioned by the mainstream news outlets; the victim was white, the perpetrator was black.  Curious indeed that this racial element was not mentioned, given the corporate media’s obsession with “racial motivations” when it’s white-on-black crime.  (It was up to the “right-wing news outlets” to even mention the racial angle…which of course was yet more indication of their right-wingery, you shouldn’t be surprised to know.) 

Granted, race could very well have had nothing to do with the murder here in Frisco – it’s a horrific event regardless of motivation – but I bring it up because it illustrates, again, how different our world is from the 1968 of Sam Greenlee’s novel. How would the national media have responded if a black boy stabbed a white boy to death then? Indeed, per the incessantly-aggrieved pearl clutchers of social media, it’s racist to even consider that there was a racial motivation to the murder here in Frisco. Of course, these are the same people who took to the streets in “fiery, but mostly peaceful” protests in the summer of 2020.  Of course, race was never proven to be a motivation for the incident that sparked that particular outrage, either, but whatever.

Now that I’ve finally read The Spook Who Sat By The Door, I think it would only make sense to read Civil War II, written by Don Pendleton and published shortly after Greenlee’s novel came out; it appears to pick up where The Spook Who Sat By The Door left off.

UPDATE: I wrote this review over the weekend, and in that time the situation here in Frisco has quickly progressed.  Race has now been brought into it...but not by the side you might assume.  (Actually, if you have been paying any attention whatsoever to our collapsing modern world, you know exactly which side brought race into it).  That the murdered white kid has been demonized as a deserving victim says all that needs to be said about how far astray our society has gone.  But at least there are people out there like this young lady who see and speak the truth.  

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 19

More Jim Kelly movies: 

Mellinda (1972): I’ve long known about this movie, given that it was Jim Kelly’s first appearance in a film, and reportedly it’s this role that got him cast in the following year’s Enter The Dragon, which of course made Kelly a star. Melinda is also notable for featuring Rockne Tarkington, who was originally cast in the role Jim Kelly would ultimately play in Enter The Dragon; I seem to recall reading, when I was obsessed with all things Bruce Lee twenty-some years ago, that Bruce Lee didn’t get along with Rockne Tarkington, so Tarkington was fired and Jim Kelly got the gig. 

Well anyway, despite this pedigree Melinda has apparently been hard to see for many years. It’s curious the film isn’t more well-known, as it’s actually pretty good – even if Jim Kelly’s barely in it. He only appears in the first few minutes, then disappears until the last several minutes of the picture, where he returns for the final fight sequence. It’s clear why he would’ve gotten the Enter The Dragon role from this, given his martial arts skills on display throughout, but what’s real weird is that Rockne Tarkington got the offer first; Tarkington, who has a lot more screentime than Kelly in Melinda, does absolutely no fighting in the course of the film, and indeed is beaten up by various people! He plays a former pro footballer who is in deep with the mob, but he’s a coward and he simpers more than he snarls – curious then that he would be the first choice for Bruce Lee’s film, and not Jim Kelly. 

Loglined as “Your kind of black film,” Melinda stars Calvin Lockhart as a smooth-talking DJ on a soul music radio station who takes “I’m black and I’m proud” to a whole ‘nother level. His character, Frankie J. Parker, is one of the more arrogant “heroes” you’ll meet in a film, with his rapid-fire come-on lines and endless “I’m cool, can you dig it?” patter, but somehow Lockhart manages to be likable. The film opens with Frankie sparring with his karate teacher, played by Jim Kelly naturally, and it’s all sort of like that “urban black karate dojo” Jim Kelly briefly appeared in when his character was introduced in Enter The Dragon. But I love this stuff because it gives the impression that people just beat the shit out of each other in these inner-city karate classes, then laughed it off and hit the showers. 

Kelly doesn’t have much in the way of dialog, but one can clearly see a star in the making. But as mentioned he’s gone soon and Lockhart carries the picture, doing a fine job of it. The story goes that Frankie meets the titular Melinda (a very attractive Vonetta McGee), a hotstuff babe new in town who initially seems immune to Frankie’s come-on patter, but soon enough they’re getting into some R-rated hankie pankie. Ah, the days of nudity in action films. Meanwhile some hulking black stooge watches them through the friggin’ peephole of the door to Frankie’s apartment, apparently able to see the naughty action clearly enough that he begins to, uh, pleasure himself. It’s true love between Frankie and Melinda, but it’s doomed, and within a day or two Frankie’s world comes crashing down and Melinda is gone. 

It turns out Melinda was involved with high-level Syndicate type (Paul Stevens, whose high-level Syndicate type character is given the very un-villainous name “Mitch!”), and he wants her back – particularly something she hid from him. This brings a mystery angle to Melinda, or perhaps a hardboiled vibe would be a more apt description, as soon Frankie’s being accosted by various enemies (most memorably by a busty white chick in a see-through knit top who tries to take him somewhere at gunpoint), and he learns that some of his supposed friends were involved with Melinda’s fate. In particular Tank, (Tarkington), who turns out to be a “business associate” of Mitch, though Tank’s really into it for the easy women. 

The film seems to have had a nice budget and the acting throughout is good; an hour in none other than Ross “Wonder Women” Hagen shows up, delivering a stand-up performance as Mitch’s top henchman. The way Hagen effortlessly handles the role is fun to see and another reminder that the dude should’ve become a much bigger star. Rosalind Cash also features as Frankie’s ex-girlfriend, Terry, and while her role starts off as thankless (spatting with Frankie when she sees him with Melinda), she ends up having a much larger part in the proceedings, with an especially memorable bit where Terry poses as Melinda and goes into a bank to get into Melinda’s lockbox. Initially I felt this part was dragging on too long – the suspense being whether Terry’s guise would be uncovered – but it turned out to be one of the highlights of the film, with Terry abruptly going ballistic on the bank manager. 

But then that might be why Melinda apparently didn’t resonate with audience of the day…it’s a bit too long and drawn out, coming in at nearly 2 hours. Also I think the title couldn’t have helped matters; maybe if it had been titled “Black Rage” or something similar, it might have resonated more. I mean, “Melinda” certainly doesn’t scream “blaxploitation” to me, so I’d wager this mis-titling factored into the film’s fade into obscurity. Then again, they named the main villain “Mitch,” so clearly titles and names weren’t a strong suit of the producers. This is a shame, as overall I really enjoyed it – oh, and as mentioned Jim Kelly does return, towards the very end, bringing in his karate school to help Frankie kick some mobster ass. But given that Jim Kelly isn’t the star, he’s mostly in the background, knocking down various thugs while Frankie takes on the bigger villains. 

Death Dimension (1978): A year after Black Samurai was released, Jim Kelly reunited with director Al Adamson for another low-budget offering that was destined for drive-ins everywhere, though this one apparently didn’t even cause a ripple, as it’s relatively unknown. Even if it does co-star former 007 George Lazenby. It’s fitting that Lazenby and Kelly would appear in a movie together, as their careers were so similar: starting off strong, reduced to appearing in low-budget crap in just a few years. Kelly even did a Hong Kong chop-socky (below), same as Lazenby. Speaking of Bond, Harold “Oddjob” Sakata also features as the villain here in Death Dimension…the title of which, by the way, doesn’t seem to have any relevance to the plot per se. 

Why exactly Adamson didn’t do another Black Samurai film will have to be a mystery. Maybe he just didn’t want to pay Marc Olden for the rights. Whatever the reason, it’s unfortunate he didn’t, as Black Samurai, despite its faults, is worlds better than Death Dimension. This is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, with “boom mic” audio, lousy direction, and a “soundtrack” culled from library music LPs – same as Black Samurai was, but here the music is laughably at odds with the onscreen action. Like, “smooth dinner jazz” playing in the friggin’ climactic fight scene. 

Also like Black Samurai, Death Dimension was released a few years ago in uncut high definition, though the print is as expected grainy and faded (and also strangely enough it’s sourced from a German print, though we get the original English audio). There are none of the pseudo-Bond trappings of Black Samurai, which is real odd, given that this one co-stars a former Bond, but then who among us could understand the mind of Al Adamson. Instead, star Jim Kelly is here just a cop, one with a penchant for the martial arts, and he gets caught up in a case revolving around “The Pig,” aka main villain Sakata. Lazenby has a thankless role as Kelly’s boss, standing around in a low-budget “captain’s office” with a .38 holstered in the waistband of his pants and playing the straight man to Kelly. 

Very curiously, Jim Kelly doesn’t get much chance to shine in Death Dimension. All told, there is a muddled air to the film, as if everything were intentionally half-assed. Don’t get me wrong, Kelly still gives a fine performance – his natural charisma was enough to save pretty much any film – but the jive-talking hustler of earlier films has been replaced by a dude who is more prone to sit around and brood. His karate scenes are infrequent and poorly staged, though this isn’t Kelly’s fault; hell, the movie even ends with Kelly doing an abrupt jump kick toward the camera – a surreal moment in which the fourth wall is broken for absolutely no reason – and Adamson freezes the goddamn picture before Kelly’s leg is even fully extended. So it looks like Kelly’s practicing a new disco jump for the dancefloor. 

And yes, “disco;” we’re in the late ‘70s now, friends, though truth be told there’s nothing about Death Dimension that seems too “late ‘70s.” But that early-mid ‘70s spark is clearly lost; hell, Kelly’s afro is even smaller, as if he were getting ahead of the game for the more straight and reserved ‘80s. That said, he does sport the occasional track suit in this one, likely Adamson catering to the recently-released Game Of Death travesty that had been ushered into theaters that same year. 

As for the plot…well, I had a tough time figuring it out. The movie has a memorable opening, at least: a close-up of a doctor making an incision in the scalp of an attractive brunette, then implanting a chip of some sort in the incision and sewing her head back up. Apparently this is info pertaining to the evil Pig and his plans for nefariousness or whatnot. Meanwhile, Jim Kelly is a cop teaching other cops how to karate fight, but folks the movie’s so damn lame that Kelly’s character, Lt. Ash, doesn’t even take his own advice. His opening features him teaching students how to kick the gun out of someone’s hand…and this happens to Ash himself late in the movie – someone knocks his gun out of his hand. 

But this itself is an indication of how lame Death Dimension is. Okay, the guy who knocks aside Ash’s gun is a scar-faced black sadist named Tatoupa (Bob Minor), who – no spoilers – has killed someone Ash cares about. This happens midway through the flick, and Ash knows Tatoupa was the killer, given the signature killing move of a slashed throat, courtesy the special blade Tatoupa wears on his pinkie. Well anyway, the finale features Ash getting the drop on Tatoupa, the man who killed someone Ash cares about we’ll remember…and Ash puts a gun on him and tells him to freeze! And he’s standing so close to Tatoupa that Tatoupa just knocks the gun aside! I mean…wouldn’t Ash remember his own martial arts lesson and stand back a little? Or, more importantly, wouldn’t Ash just want to ice the fucker and not mess around with any “official cop business?” 

Such questions occurred to me, and many more besides. I’ve never been able to find anything positive written about Death Dimension, and now that I’ve finally seen the movie I understand why. To quote dialog from the movie itself: “It stinks!” Actually, “stinks” is a recurring word in the film, usually used in lame puns like, “Something stinks – and it’s coming from the Pig,” or something to that effect, but my hunches tell me the “stinks” line is an audio cue to Jim Kelly’s famous line in Enter The Dragon, of how ghettoes are the same all over the world: they stink. But then I could be wrong and it could just be a coincidence. 

Instead of having George friggin’ Lazenby team up with Kelly’s character and have the two handle the action together like a decade-early version of Lethal Weapon, Adamson instead gives “action co-lead” billing to some dude named Myron Bruce Lee (I kid you not), who portrays Ash’s old kung-fu pal who is a fellow cop ready to help take on the Pig. Lazenby is left on the sidelines for the most part, until an out-of-nowhere reveal in the final quarter that leaves the viewer scratching his or her (or its) head. Even this is handled ineptly; SPOILER ALERT, but Lazenby is abruptly outed as a villain…but instead of having Jim Kelly face off against him, it’s Myron Bruce Lee who takes him on. That said, we do get a humorous “fatality” when Lee’s character kicks Lazenby into a pool, and Lazenby’s character just happens to be holding an electrical cord, and Lazenby gamely contorts and twists his body in the pool as if he were being electrocuted. 

Otherwise folks, there’s not much to recommend Death Dimension. There is a bit of nudity, though, Adamson playing up to his drive-in audience expectations. Ash has a sultry girlfriend of indeterminate race who is attractive in a late ‘70s way and shows off her upper-body goods in a shower scene. But man, given that her part mostly entails lying in bed with Ash and telling him how much she loves him, the viewer can pretty much guess her fate. There’s also a random trip to some cathouse in Reno, and I’m assuming the gals who line up for Ash – likely yet another callback to Enter The Dragon, namely Kelly’s most memorable scene – are the real deal…but boy, they ain’t that attractive. At least Ash picks the prettiest one. Not that he does anything with her; the entire sequence seems to exist to pad the minutes, or for the posters at the drive-in to promise a visit to a brothel or something. Ash just goes into a room with the gal, leaves when her back is turned, scopes out the place…and politely leaves when he’s caught trespassing! Just a lame scene in a movie filled with lame scenes. 

The Tattoo Connection (1978): Released the same year as Death Dimension, and released as “Black Belt Jones II” in England, The Tattoo Connection is further proof of how far and how fast Jim Kelly’s star had wanted, just a few years after his debut. But as mentioned above, this is the same fate that befell George Lazenby. Truth be told, it’s a bit surprising that Kelly even made a movie in Hong Kong; I can’t believe Chinese audiences of the 1970s would have been very receptive to a film starring a black American. Indeed, that Kelly is black is made very apparent throughout The Tattoo Connection, with a girl at one point refusing to have sex with him precisely because he is black. 

This could explain why Jim Kelly is barely in the movie. Hell, it takes him fifteen minutes to even show up, and it’s like as soon as he’s onscreen they can’t get him off of it fast enough. I almost wonder if another version of the flick was shot without Jim Kelly in it at all. Supposedly he’s the star of the picture, but a little editing and a few new scenes and you could make an actor named Tan Tao-ling, who plays a sort-of villain named Tung Hao, the movie’s star. His character even has more of an arc; Tan Tao-ling opens the movie defending himself in kung-fu combat, harbors reservations about being a villain despite being a crime boss’s main thug, and has a change of heart in the movie’s climax. Jim Kelly meanwhile shows up fifteen minutes into the picture, has a couple random scenes, and doesn’t seem nearly as important to the plot. 

As for the plot, like Death Dimension I had no clue what it was about. The titular “tattoo connection” has hardly anything to do with the picture per se; there’s a part midway through where Jim Kelly, who plays a cop or troubleshooter or something, tracks down a gang member in Hong Kong due to the tattoos the man sports. But that’s it. Really the movie seems to be about a diamond smuggling operation, and Jim Kelly, who plays “Lucas” (though more often than not he’s just referred to as “the black guy”), is called in by an old pal to help sort things out. Or something. About the most positive thing I can say is that Jim Kelly dubs himself in the English version, but given that this is a Chinese picture his “sassy dialog” has been toned way down. But even dubbed Kelly’s onscreen charisma is apparent, and he gets more opportunity to play a typical role of his here than he did in the same year’s Death Dimension. 

For one, he smiles a lot more, and also he is clearly having fun. Given that this is a Hong Kong flick, the fight choreography is a lot better than probably any other Jim Kelly movie, with unbroken long shots of him kicking ass; none of the random close-ups and whatnot that ruined the choreography of so many American-made martial arts movies of the time. You can see where the film has been sped up occasionally, but otherwise Kelly holds his own with the Chinese fighters – one of whom happens to be Bolo Yeung, Kelly’s co-star in Enter The Dragon. Curiously, the producers make nothing of this, with Bolo playing a random thug; that said, he and Kelly do get in a fairly brutal fight in the film’s climax, giving us the matchup we were denied in Enter The Dragon. 

I also wonder if The Tattoo Connection was only produced for the international market. Meaning, if it even played in Hong Kong at all. This could explain how Jim Kelly got top billing – and also might explain the copious nudity, as if the filmmakers were catering to the US drive-in market. Now clearly there was nudity in Hong Kong films at the time, but not as much as you’d think in kung-fu movies of the era; not that I’m an expert on the subject, but at a conservative estimate I’d say I’ve seen hundreds of ‘70s kung-fu movies in my lifetime. I remember the days of scouring the racks in stores for kung-fu VHS tapes, and one of the first things I ever did “online” in the early ‘90s was to find people to trade kung-fu videos with. There were indeed chop-sockies that had lots of nudity, like for example the Bruce Li joint Image Of Bruce Lee (that’s me as “Joe909” in the linked review, btw), which is another one that could have been produced for the international market. There’s just as much nudity in The Tattoo Connection, mostly courtesy Japanese actress Nami Misaki, who plays a nightclub stripper named Nana and is one of the main villain’s kept girls, but who is secretly in love with Tung Hao. 

As with most Hong Kong chop-sockies, the soundtrack is lifted from countless uncredited sources. It’s very heavy on the jazz-funk trip, as with most soundtracks of this era; one track in particular I spotted was off Mandigo’s The Primeval Rhythm Of Life. (Once upon a time I had a kung-fu movie with music stolen from The Empire Strikes Back!) The soundtrack is humorously done at times, too, with mega-fuzz guitar blaring when we get sudden extreme close-ups of a person’s face. Overall this gives the movie that “bell-bottom fury” vibe I have always liked, yet at the same time the movie is plodding because it’s more focused on that friggin’ Tung Hao guy. Seriously, he’s the star of the film, and Jim Kelly essentially has a glorified walk-on role. I would love to know more about how he even got involved with the production, and I’m wondering if it’s a case where he was only on location for a few days, hence his relatively small screen-time. 

That said, there is still some fun stuff; like when Nana is tasked with getting Lucas “excited” and giving him a “new drug from America” that will cause him to have a fatal heart attack. Nana is the girl who earlier turned Lucas’s advances down because he was black, but she dutifully takes the job. Yet, no matter what movie he’s in, Jim Kelly is always ten steps ahead of his opponents, so he turns the tables on Nana, switching their drinks. The film seems to forget that the drug is fatal, though, as instead Nana just giggles a bunch and does another strip tease, showing off her very nice upper body for us. The actress even goes all the way with it, kissing Kelly – I bet this one got a lot of gasps in theaters if the movie played in Hong Kong. 

But it’s humorous because they expressly call out the very thing that would go unmentioned in an American film: when Lucas initially puts the moves on Nana, earlier in the film, she bluntly tells him she won’t do it “because you’re black.” What’s also funny is that once she’s said this, it’s like the cat has been let out of the bag; from there on out, Lucas is constantly referred to as “the black guy.” Even the white guy who initially starts off the picture as Lucas’s best buddy starts referring to him as “that black guy!” But Jim Kelly takes it all in stride; he even refers to himself as “a sexy young black man” later in the flick, when Nana’s been dosed by her own drug. However he doesn’t score; the film wants to have a fairy tale happy ending for Nana and her beloved, Tung friggin’ Hao, so Lucas expressly notes that he and Nana haven’t gone all the way together. 

At least he gets to show off his karate skills, particularly in the end. Well, first of all the climax gets off to a bad start, with Lucas lured to a freighter where he’s beaten up and captured. One of the few times you see someone get the better of Jim Kelly in one of his movies. Then he’s let loose and, suddenly shirtless and wearing black pants, he picks up where Bruce Lee left off at the end of Enter The Dragon, even taking up a pole staff at one point and wielding it the same way Lee did. One thing missing though is Jim Kelly’s trademark “OOOO-EEEE!” karate yells; the fights are dubbed standard chop-sockey style, with a lot of grunts and screams, and it doesn’t sound like Kelly dubbed himself in the fights. 

Overall, The Tattoo Connection was interesting to see, because I’ve wondered about it for years (and it’s always been hard to track down), but it was let down by the fact that Jim Kelly wasn’t in it nearly as much as he should have been. Again I would love to know more about the production of the film and whether it was actually released in Hong Kong. Whatever its origin, it clearly didn’t make much of an impact (so to speak), and from here on Kelly would only appear in supporting roles, before retiring from the movie business. A shame, really, and an indication of how short-sighted Hollywood was at the time. The guy should’ve been huge. 

Even if Chinese audiences of the ‘70s might not have been receptive to a black American star, it would appear that Jim Kelly is more embraced by modern-day Chinese. The other month I was at a place called Andretti’s, owned apparently by Mario Andretti, and it was one of those video game/restaurant places. There was a kung-fu video game there called like “Kung-fu vs Karate” or something, and it appeared to be a Chinese production. Sort of a Mortal Kombat deal, only without the gore. One of the characters you could pick was a clear Jim Kelly tribute, even sporting the same Afro, and of course it was this character I played as while I let my seven-year-old son kick my butt as a ninja. It goes without saying that in a real-world matchup Jim Kelly would’ve kicked that ninja’s ass. But I figured he’d also be kind enough to let a kid beat him.

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 18

Grindhouse/Drive-in movies: 

Invasion Of The Bee Girls (1973): Bringing the vibe of ‘50s paranoia sci-fi like Invasion of The Body Snatchers to the drive-in ‘70s, Invasion Of The Bee Girls follows the same path as those earlier drive-in flicks but adds in ‘70s-mandatory boobs. Burly William Smith is cast against type as an amiable, even-tempered State Department agent who spends the entire movie wearing a three-piece suit and smiling; you get the impression he’s dying to tear off the suit and start swinging his fists. Despite being somewhat miscast, he’s still good in the role, and like the same year’s Wonder Women this one almost comes off like the film adaptation of a men’s adventure series that never was. 

Written by Nicholas Meyer, there’s a bit more to the movie than the standard drive-in fare of the day, with various “readings” of the film possible. To me it seems a clear reaction to the women’s lib of the day, though spoofing it to a certain extent. The gist of the story is that men in smalltown Peckham, in California, are dying of massive heart attacks, apparently caused by lots of sex. Though the film never outright states it, the implication is clear: they’ve been fucked to death. But then, the movie is interesting in how it’s never too R-rated; while there is copious boobage, there’s little cursing and hardly any violence. It’s essentially a mainstream take on drive-in pulp, and perhaps it’s for this reason that Invasion Of The Bee Girls is relatively unknown: it’s too timid for the hardcore grindhouse fans and it’s too saucy for mainstream movie fans. 

Truth be told, it is a little slow-paced, operating more on a long-simmer mystery angle than the slam-bang sci-fi action one might expect. Smith’s character is called in because the men dying happen to be employed at a secret governmental research base in town, and the State Department is concerned of threats and whatnot. Safe to say, there’s never been a State Department officer who looked like William Smith (especially not in today’s “intersectional” era), but for a guy who spent the previous decade busting heads in various biker movies, Smith acquits himself well as a nattily-attired agent who’s just trying to do his job. There isn’t even the expected antagonism with the local cops; indeed, there’s a part midway through where the local police chief loses his cool over the “Fed” pushing in on his territory, and Smith just grins and apologizes for stepping on his toes. It’s way against type for Smith, but one imagines he enjoyed the opportunity to play less of a hot-head. 

While the movie spends most of its time focused on Smith trying to figure out what’s going on, the viewer already knows that sultry Anitra Ford, who plays a researcher at the secret base, is basically turning the town’s women into the titular Bee Girls. Now one thing to note is that the awesome poster for the film is misleading: the Bee Girls never wear costumes. 

But then, they don’t wear anything. One of the humorous bits about the movie is that all of these Peckham women are total babes: there’s a laugh out loud part where we meet the widow of one of the men – a heavyset bald guy who looks like Colonel Klink – and she’s a mega-stacked babe who goes topless throughout a practically endless sequence in which we see how the Bee Girls are created. But then, Smith’s character spends the entire movie working with a research assistant at the base who wears glasses and dresses conservatively, and late in the novel she too is captured and almost given the Bee Girl treatment, topless and showing off a body that’s straight out of Playboy…not surprising, given that the actress is Victoria Vettri, who was a famous Playmate in the late ‘60s. Indeed her centerfold picture even made it to the Moon, courtesy the rowdy Apollo 12 crew. Even here Smith’s character shows special consideration; he doesn’t even make his interest in her known until the end, when he throws her on a bed and climbs on top of her. Given that the camera pans over to a bee and we hear “Thus Spake Zarathustra” on the soundtrack as the two get with it, the implication is clear that Vettri’s character might have indeed become a Bee Girl. 

Overall Invasion Of The Bee Girls is fun, but one must think of it more as a hybrid of sci-fi and mystery, as it never goes to the action levels one might hope for. Production values are certainly high for the genre, with Anitra Ford’s high-tech secret chambers being especially cool. But the pace kind of plods at times and one wishes William Smith had been given more to do than just ask questions. That said, the movie scores points for featuring the guy who played the Mafioso in Black Belt Jones as a “sex researcher” at the base. Also, Charles Bernstein’s jazz-funk score is very nice, with an effective main theme featuring a wordless “la la la” melody that almost sounds like it could’ve come off an Italian picture of the day. 

Speaking of men’s adventure, there’s a part toward the very end where the Bee Girls lab is blowing up and William Smith watches the action through a window in a door, and he looks just like the profile portrait of Adrano on the Adrano For Hire covers: 

Seizure (1974): Back in 2016 I bought the Trailer Trauma grindhouse/drive-in trailer compilation Blu Ray, because it was the only new release of its kind after the awesome 42nd Street Forever series came to an end with its fifth volume in 2009 (save for a special Blu Ray release in 2012, which I of course got as soon as it came out, but while cool it was just a compilation of the first two volumes of the original standard disc releases). Trailer Trauma is now also up to its fifth volume – 2020’s 70’s Action Attack, which might be my favorite trailer comp of all time given that it focuses, as you might guess from the title, on ‘70s action – but I never got into the Trailer Trauma series much due to its focus on horror. I’m not a fan of ‘70s and ‘80s horror movies, really. Well anyway I was recently watching my Trailer Trauma Blu Ray…only to realize midway through that I never even watched all of it back when I got it. I think I just watched the first half. Well, hell, there was still a predominance of horror stuff on it, but toward the end of the disc there was this crazy trailer in French with people in a cabin in the woods and a long-limbed girl in panties and halter top fighting some guy with a knife, and the title was “Tango Macabre,” so I figured it was just some goofy ‘70s French horror flick. 

But then I happened to read the review of Trailer Trauma at DVD Drive-In, and was surprised to learn that the trailer was the French promo for a Canada-US film from 1974…a film directed, of all people, by Oliver frigggin’ Stone!! So needless to say I had to see it. It’s now out on Blu Ray and that’s how I saw it, but to tell the truth it would’ve been just as well if I hadn’t. Curiously listless, Seizure has a lot of potential, concerning a horror author/artist (Jonathan Frid, from Dark Shadows) hosting a weekend getaway (or something) at his cottage in the verdant French Canadian countryside. But man, for a movie that features the credit, “Herve Villacheze as The Spider,” Seizure never makes much use of its crazy setup. Basically our hero – such as he is – fears that his dreams are becoming reality, and three freaks crawl out of the woodwork and start making hell for him and his guests. Or maybe they’re escaped lunatics from an asylum…or maybe it’s all just a dream! Stone tries to have his cake and eat it, too, but the only problem is he doesn’t spend enough time preparing either (hopefully that lame analogy made sense). 

The movie is lethargically paced, and not helped by the fact that it takes itself too seriously…but then, it is an Oliver Stone picture! He does aim above his minimal trappings with staging that’s unusual for the genre, particularly using a handheld camera at times. So I guess one could see the makings of a future cinema heavyweight here, this being Stone’s first directing credit. And yes, Herve Villechaize is in the film, a few years before Fantasy Island and two years before The Man With The Golden Gun (according to IMDB the movie was filmed in late 1972). His part here seems to be a trial for that latter role, as he essentially plays the henchman of the lunatic chick in charge of the trio (there’s also a hulking black man with a horrifically-scarred face). But man, Stone saddles Villechaize with most of the movie’s dialog, and I had a helluva time understanding what the hell he was saying! It didn’t help that it seemed Stone (who by the way co-wrote the script as well) seemed to have penned this dialog after ingesting the poetry of Jim Morrison. It’s just way over the top, but at least Villechaize acquits himself well. 

The humor comes unintentionally, like the disperate group of “friends” who congregrate here…they spend most of the time fighting and bickering, to the point that you wonder what the hell they’re even doing together. Genre regular Mary Woronov (who appears elsewhere on this review round-up) shines as the young wife of a loudmouth; the two nearly steal the picture. Woronov though gets the honor; she is the aforementioned long-limbed babe in panties and halter top from the trailer, and she appears this way in the final quarter of the film, forced into a knife fight with the Dark Shadows guy. This scene here again shows Oliver Stone’s attempts at getting outside his contraints, with the camera going handheld again and close to the actors; Woronov looks like she’s trying out for the Conan picture (which by the way Oliver Stone also wrote! At least the first draft!), like a sort of ‘70s barbarian babe. She should’ve been the star of the movie. 

Seizure is curiously tame in the sex and violence departments; other than Wornov’s skimpy clothing, there is zero in the way of sex appeal, and no nudity whatsoever. Violence is also minimal, with only occasional bits of blood, and a gruesome bit toward the end where the hulking black villain crushes a guy’s skull (off-camera) with his bare hands, and we get a closeup of his hands afterward and there’s all this chunky goup on it (ie, the brains he just crushed out!). Oh, we also get some animal violence, with a quick cut of a poor dog hanging in the woods. “Quick” is the key word, though; Stone goes for a lot of “shock shots,” with super-quick hits of violence, but they’re so quick that the shock is ruined – like the aforementioned horrifically-scarred face. The first time it’s shown, it’s on-camera so fast you barely even register it. 

Another interesting thing from a modern perspective is that Seizure, like Hollywood Boulevard below, could almost be the work of a modern-day director trying to cater to an old genre form. And not just due to the lack of nudity – see, for example, Rodriguez and Tarantino’s 2007 Grindhouse movies, which slavishly catered to the form but somehow missed the key ingredient of female nudity and were set in the present day for some inexplicable reason – but also due to the film artifacts that occasionally pop up. By this I again refer to Grindhouse, with Rodriguez’s Planet Terror in particular having all kinds of “bad film damage” digitally overlaid. We get almost this same thing in the “horror scenes” in Seizure; there will suddenly be film damage, like bad splices, when characters scream or react to something shocking or whatever. 

Otherwise Seizure was only interesting in that it showed the beginnings of a legendary career. But even “Herve Villechaize as The Spider” couldn’t save it, nor could Mary Woronov in her panties and halter top. 

Death Race 2000 (1975): I remember hearing about this movie all the time as a kid (I was born the year before it came out), so clearly it made some impact on the cultural radar. But, other than seeing bits and pieces on TV over the years, I never actually watched the movie until fairly recently. I’m not sure how well Death Race 2000 is considered now; the trailer does not appear on any of the grindhouse trailer comps I’m familiar with (which is a lot), and this implies to me that genre fans consider it too mainstream. Or maybe no one wants to talk about it due to the lame remake of several years back. (I assume it’s lame; of course, there’s no way in hell I ever intended to watch it.) But man, Death Race 2000 might just be one of the greatest grindhouse/drive-in movies of all time, featuring plentiful action, lots of nudity, and even horror effects courtesy the proto-Darth Vader garb “hero” David Carradine sports as “Frankenstein.” Plus it co-stars Sylvester Stallone!! (And it also features Mary Woronov – who will appear yet again in this review round-up!) 

The movie performs way above expectations and just gets better with age, though I bet it was a helluva lot of fun to watch in a drive-in back in ’75. It’s also a great reminder of how Hollywood once churned out fast-moving pieces of entertainment that didn’t wear out their welcome (the flick’s not even 90 minutes long), and featured plenty of nudity and violence. While the boobs and butts (and bush, in Woronov’s case) are real, the violence is spectacularly fake – the blood is this garish reddish-orange, and the outrageous gore effects are more comical than gut-churning. Limbs getting ripped off, heads getting crushed, etc; it’s all here, and it all looks more slapstick than violent, lending the film even more of a wonderfully dark comic vibe. 

This appears to be mostly due to director Paul Bartel, who cameos (uncredited) in the film as the doctor who attends David Carradine’s character Frankenstein in the beginning of the film. Bartel was known more for acting than directing, and indeed appeared in the following year’s Hollywood Boulevard (below), where he played a pretentious director – a film that included clips from Death Race 2000, adding even more self-referential comedy to a movie already filled with it. His direction here is great, with a rapid pace, steady shots on the big racing scenes (none of the shaky cam or cgi bullshit of today’s movies here), and the droll, blackly comic vibe seems like just the thing his character in Hollywood Boulevard would have done, again giving these two movies a cool sort of in-joke vibe. 

Carradine is very good in his role, underplaying it; he spends most of the movie in a leather costume and cape complete with full face mask. There’s a proto-Darth Vader element to the Frankenstein look, but unlike Vader this guy actually has a libido, so we have the required T&A when Frankenstein gets busy with his navigator, a blonde babe with a brick shithouse bod (Annie, as played by actress Simone Griffeth). Good grief these ‘70s women had it going on. The producers knew their audience; in addition to Griffeth’s frequent nudity, we also have a bit where she, Woronov, and Roberta Collins (as racer Matilda the Hun) get full-body massages in the nude…Woronov’s Calamity Jane and Collins’s Matilda get in a catfight, and we get a half-second confirmation that Woronov is indeed fully naked when she gets up off the massage table to confront Collins’s character. Stallone is also present, seeming quite the calm professional surrounded by all this bare female flesh. 

The dark comedy is perfectly handled and I love that the movie doesn’t play it safe, though I am glad the producers didn’t go all the way and show kids getting run over by the racers – kids and the elderly affording the most “points” when run over during the trans-continental race. That said, there’s none of the pandering a modern-day flick like this would stoop to; Frankenstein, even though he’s our hero, still runs over men and women without even looking upset about it. I’m sure if this movie were made today the hero would be fighting back tears everytime he had to run over someone, or he’d go out of his way to not run over anyone. (Oh, and of course “he” would be “she” if the film were made today!) I also enjoyed the political satire afoot with the guru-like president who openly lies to the populace (loved the running gag that “the French” are behind the attacks on the race, a government cover-up of the resistance movement) and the easy-going government officials who casually tell the racers they can have them killed. 

A year before he became famous for life, Stallone shines as Machine Gun Joe, and I got the impression he was ad-libbing his lines. Being a writer himself, I think it’s very likely Stallone was coming up with his own lines. There is a natural delivery to his performance and he’s clearly having a lot of fun, and from a modern vantage point it’s also fun to see him playing a bad guy for once. Also, where else can you see slender David Carradine beating up burly Sylvester Stallone? Plus there’s a hilarious part where Machine Gun Joe blasts a tommy gun at the audience before the race starts, and Stallone pulls a proto-Rambo grimace while blasting on full auto. There are also hidden storylines in the film for the viewer to ponder, like what exactly is going on between Machine Gun Joe and Frankenstein’s navigator Annie…who, by the way, also seems to have something going on with one of the resistance leaders. 

There’s also a cool postmodern vibe in play with the proto-reality TV element of the race, complete with gabby newscasters giving frequent updates or voiceovers, a la Survivor or The Amazing Race or other such bullshit. One of the newscasters is a pitch-perfect spoof of Walter Kronkite, and the other appears to be a spoof of a Rona Barrett type, a gossip-focused woman whose recurring joke has it that she is a “dear friend” of practically every important character. The entire movie is funny, with really no missteps, but manages to also pack a punch in the frequent action scenes. I mean I know many years ago Vanishing Point was proclaimed as the best of those ‘70s “car movies,” but really Death Race 2000 is better than any of them, and is probably the epitome of a drive-in movie. 

Hollywood Boulevard (1976): I only recently saw this movie for the first time, and couldn’t believe how much I loved it. Previously I was only familiar with the poster for it, and knew that it starred the blonde and lovely, should-have-been-a-huge-star, Candice Rialson. What I did not know was that Hollywood Boulevard was the first film of future heavyweight director Joe Dante (who co-directs with Allan Arkush), who had been cutting trailers for New World (in fact he cut the trailer for Death Race 2000) and who managed to convince Roger Corman to allow him to direct an entire picture. As mentioned above, there is a strange post-modern feeling to this movie…as if it had been made by someone who watched all of the 42nd Street Forever grindhouse trailer DVD compilations and tried to both spoof and pay tribute to the entire drive-in aesthetic. In other words, Hollywood Boulevard is everything Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse wanted to be, with the additional coolness factor that it was actually produced in the ‘70s. 

This one’s an actual comedy, but still manages to pack in action and the required nudity. Surprisingly Rialson isn’t the one showing off the most flesh; surprising because the lady had perhaps the nicest rack in film history. Good grief! Her topless scenes are for the most part tame, usually while quickly disrobing before some off-screen lovin’ (a fun element about the movie is that Rialson’s character “Candy” is more wholesome than promiscuous, and spends the movie with just one guy). Then of course there’s the rape scene. Actually, the rape scenes. Hollywood Boulevard is so “1970s” that a gang-rape is played for laughs twice: first when Candy must act out being raped by a bunch of enemy soldiers in a movie she’s shooting in the Philipines, and later in the movie when the “real” Candy is almost raped by a film projectionist and an audience member who get overly excited watching the aforementioned “fake” rape scene on the big screen. 

Dante and Arkush recycle footage from other New World movies, like the aforementioned Death Race 2000, complete with Candice Rialson wearing David Carradine’s leather Frankenstein costume. Meaning there’s even a cosplay element to the damn movie…that’s how ahead of its time it was! True, the humor is a little slapstick at times…the plot hinges on mysterious deaths plaguing the shooting locations of Miracle Pictures productions (“If it’s a good movie, it’s a Miracle!”), and the flick opens with a parachutist falling to her death – complete with a big Loony Tunes type bodyshaped hole in the ground where she hit…and moments later the producer, lothario P.G., is talking how most actresses would “die” to get in Hollywood. That said, Paul Bartel shines as a pretentious director, with a running gag of him giving “motivation” to the actors for the scene they’re about to play. But Mary Woronov steals the film, playing a bitchy diva and clearly enjoying every minute of it. 

Rialson as ever shines, but her role is limited to basically just being adorable; she is the naïve beauty who just wants to break into pictures, so she doesn’t get much opportunity to steal scenes like the others do. That said, there’s a great meta-fictional bit where her character goes to see her “big debut,” only to have to drive way outside of L.A., where the movie is playing on a triple-bill at a drive-in, and Candy gets progressively drunk and dispirited as she watches herself on the big screen…leading to that aforementioned rape scene. Oh, and Dick Miller also steals the show as Candy’s agent Walter Paisely (a character name Dick Miller often played), complete with running gags about former clients – the movie rewards multiple viewings, as in Dick Miller’s first scene he’s complaining that he’s just lost one of his big clients, a friggin’ elephant, and in a later scene, while Candy’s waiting in the car for a bank robbery that she thinks is a movie scene but isn’t, you can hear the commercial for a movie starring an elephant on her car radio. 

There’s actually a lot of meta humor throughout Hollywood Boulevard; when Candy gets her first gig with Miracle Pictures, Walter gives her directions and tells her to “take the Slauson Cutoff.” Anyone who watched Johnny Carson will get that one. Former Monster Kid Dante also inserts a lot of references to the old horror flicks, with Rialson even posing over the Hollywood star of Bela Lugosi in the opening credits. The direction is miles beyond typical drive-in fodder, with a lot of visual gags; the plot gradually concerns a killer stalking the Miracle Pictures crew, and in one memorable sequence the masked killer slashes a victim with a blade, and we cut immediately to barbecuse sauce dripping off Walter’s chicken onto a newspaper headline about the murder. Another part has P.G. about to get it on with two lovely actresses at the same time, and we get a quick cut to the foam erupting from a beer can someone’s popped the tab on. This is in addition to the visual cues to genre films, like for example the clear tribute to Mario Bava in a late scene where the killer stalks prey on a darkened, fogswept movie lot. I’m not as familiar with the work of Allan Arkush, but one can clearly see the seeds of Joe Dante’s future work here; the movie is just as much a tribute to the genre as his later unsung piece Matinee was to its genre. 

Almost all drive-in genres are spoofed: women in prison, women with guns, car races, giallo-type thrillers, etc.  Godzilla is even here, courtesy a guy who randomly enough is wearing the costume during one of the shoots – leading to another of those goofy gags, where Godzilla gets up off a toilet (which for some reason is sitting in a field in the middle of a shooting location) and throws the script he’s reading into the bowl. Again, the movie is very much both tribute and spoof of the stuff one thinks of when one thinks “drive-in movie,” spoofing the exact sort of thing you see in the various grindhouse trailer compilations out there; indeed, I recall reading that Joe Dante was involved with the Alamo Drafthouse’s 2012 compilation Trailer War, which is one of the best drive-in compilations out there. 

But whereas Matinee was a love letter to a long-gone time, Hollywood Boulevard is a time capsule of a long-gone time; when Candy, her boyfriend, and Walter go to the drive-in theater to see Candy’s movie, we have a long sequence of the experience. It’s obviously done for comedy, with most of the audience drunk, rowdy, and horny, but at the same time it allows us in the modern day to experience what it might have been like in the era. This for me is the highlight of the film; you almost feel like you are there with the three characters. It’s a fun scene, complete with Candice Rialson apparently getting drunk for real. One part that really cracked me up was the sound effects on the film playing in the background; when they watch Candy’s Philipines-shot flick “Machete Maidens,” there’s a quick shot of the movie screen, showing a girl being whipped by another woman; a scene taken from The Big Doll House. The camera cuts back to the trio in the car, but you can still hear the movie in the background, and the girl getting whipped sounds like she’s enjoying it. It’s been years since I saw The Big Doll House (I plan to watch it again soon), but I suspect this audio was newly added by Dante and Arkush. 

There’s also a lot of great dialog in it, most of it again genre-referential. Like when one of the characters is killed in the Philipines and someone says to call the cops, and Mary Woronov (who plays “Mary,” just like Candice Rialson plays “Candy,” adding more of a meta nature to the flick) deadpans: “This is the Philipines. There are no police.” One could clearly come to that conclusion after watching the Philipines-shot action movies of the ‘70s. My only complaint is that sometimes the comedy gets too broad, at least in the callous played-for-laughs reactions to various deaths. There’s also a curious bit a little over halfway through where the crew is about to shoot a 1950s film, but it’s just as abruptly dropped; one gets the impression it was inserted for time. I read that Hollywood Boulevard was shot in a mere ten days, for under sixty thousand dollars, but you’d never guess it, as it’s genuinely a quality film, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The Texas 27 Film Vault

I only recently discovered this show, which ran on Saturday nights from 1985 to 1987 on Channel 27 in Dallas. Unfortunately not much of the show survives, but there are some clips on Youtube (like this one above), and I’ll link to them in the post. 

So basically The Texas 27 Film Vault was a locally-produced “horror host” program, more notable than most because it was a precursor to MST3K with its sarcastic vibe and its elaborate host segments. Obviously The Texas 27 Film Vault never achieved the fame of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it did at least precede it; the show was already off the air before Joel Hodgson and crew began MST3K on Minneapolis public access in 1988. 

While the vibe might be the same, what elevated MST3K from the other horror host shows was that Joel and the Bots inserted themselves into the films, riffing on them; other horror hosts had done similar things in the past, but usually for just a random joke. None of them had done anything on the level of MST3K. The Film Vault is only similar in its high-concept setup; whereas Joel, per his show’s story, is a janitor who is sent to a satellite to watch “cheesy movies” with a pair of robots and riff on them (all for science, of course), in The Film Vault we have a pair of hosts who live in a massive vault beneath Dallas and whose job it is to protect cheesy movies.

But here’s the thing. I discovered MST3K around the summer of 1991; I was flipping channels one Saturday afternoon and came upon what I thought was a rerun of Dynaman, a show that had played on the TBS (or was it TNT?) show Night Flight some years before. Dynaman was a redubbed Power Rangers-type show from Japan, the dubbers – some of whom were from The Kids In The Hall, I seem to remember – giving the shows surreal/goofy plotlines. But in reality what I’d stumbled upon that Saturday afternoon was the MST3K episode Time Of The Apes…yet another Japanese production, but this one a Planet Of The Apes ripoff. And the comedians weren’t dubbing it – they were appearing in silhouette in the lower right corner of the screen and making fun of it. 

Needles to say, I became a fan…and even though I have tons of MST3K DVDs and episodes recorded on tape from back in the day, I still haven’t seen every episode. And most importantly…to this day I have never watched one of the host segments. I always skip right through them (and when the show was “live” on TV I’d surf other channels). The Joel years, the Mike years, it makes no difference. I find the host segments on MST3K irritating and unfunny, and I just want to watch the movie riffing. 

It’s the complete opposite scenario with the The Texas 27 Film Vault. In this case, I want to see the host segments and I’m not that interested in the featured films. This is because, instead of going for the goofy vibe of the MST3K host segments, the Film Vault crew went for more of a surreal, action and horror-themed setup, with the hosts blasting machine guns at giant rats and stop-motion dinosaur things. The special effects were very impressive for a locally-produced show in the mid-‘80s…indeed, the host segments in The Film Vault look even better than the professional productions MST3K featured in its latter Sci Fi channel years. 

This comes down to the show’s special effects guy, Joe Riley. When I saw his name upon discovering The Texas 27 Film Vault it really took me back – when I moved to Dallas in 1996, public access was still a thing. I soon discovered a show called The Hypnotic Eye, in which a one-eyed puppet hosted a gonzo program of Japanese monster movies, old commercials, random features on local areas of interest, and etc. The show was created, produced, hosted, and everything else, by someone named Joe Riley. Now at the time I briefly got involved with Dallas Public Access courtesy a friend named Taylor Hayden, who did his own show on there: Voodoo Plastic Arm. This show was nothing like The Hypnotic Eye, just Taylor and a random selection of local wanna-be actors doing skits (or “sketches,” as Taylor insisted on calling them). There was no theme to the show, but sometimes the skits got surreal. 

However, Joe Riley himself was a fan of Taylor’s show, and indeed snippets of Voodoo Plastic Arm can occasionally be seen on The Hypnotic Eye (for example the sixth episode; that’s Taylor at the 2:36 mark). I recall Taylor told me that he never actually met Joe Riley; Riley contacted Taylor via the Dallas Public Access community board and asked for Taylor’s permission to include some Voodoo Plastic Arm bits in his show…and of course Taylor said sure. 

Actually now that I think of it, both Taylor and I did briefly meet Joe Riley. It was at the Crystal Awards in the summer of 2000…the Crystal Awards being for Dallas Public Access. I think both Taylor’s and Joe Riley’s shows were up for “Best,” and of course The Hypnotic Eye won. I was only there because I’d written a few “sketches” for Taylor’s show…none of the ones featured in The Hypnotic Eye, though (my one chance at fame, blown!). As I recall there was a big group there with Joe Riley…in fact he might have been wearing a costume, I can’t really remember. I know I have the event on VHS somewhere. 

Well anyway I went into this digression because Joe Riley’s work is key to the high-dollar look of The Texas 27 Film Vault; there’s some cool stuff in the video above, from miniature work (including a Ray Harryhausen-type monster and a guy flying across the massive vault in a jetpack helicopter) to submachine guns that blast real fire. What makes this all the more impressive is that Riley was only 22 or 23 years old at the time, but he was capable of all these effects. Also key to the look is the set design of Ken Miller, who apparently killed himself in 1988. And speaking of which, Joe Riley himself came to a too-soon end; he died in 2007, still living here in Dallas, and he was only in his early 40s. 

Pretty much all I know about The Texas 27 Film Vault I learned from Balladeer’s Blog. Proprietor Balladeer has done a huge amount of research on the show, and even interviewed co-host Randy Clower, who per the credits wrote and directed most episodes, if not all of them.  Also the credits of the show are a lot of fun, poking fun at the people involved.

Speaking of Randy Clower, he appears to be the “RooMan296” who has created a Youtube Playlist with selected clips from The Texas 27 Film Vault, including a full episode of the show. I haven’t watched all of the uploads on the playlist yet, but one that deserves mention is the 1st Rat Attack clip, which is a compilation of host segments from two episodes in which hosts Randy and Richard, as well as the other “technicians” in the vault, go up against invading rats in a storyline that predates Aliens. But talk about super-random: a little halfway through the clip, sci-fi author John Steakley shows up, sporting a copy of his novel Armor. That paperback was ubiquitous in the ‘80s; as a sci-fi geek kid I recall seeing it everywhere, though I never read the book. 

That’s another thing that separates The Texas 27 Film Vault from Mystery Science Theater 3000: it has a bigger cast. Not only that, but there’s some definite “eye candy” in the Film Vault; with pretty women often posing as egregiously as possible in the background (not that I’m complaining). Some of the humor is also more risque than MST3K; as I say, it was certainly a more “adult” or at least “mature” show, and it easily could have become huge if it had been picked up for syndication or gotten onto cable. But if it had, it’s interesting to wonder if MST3K would’ve ever happened. 

Well anyway, this is a somewhat random post, but given the Halloween season I thought it might be a bit topical. Here’s hoping more footage is found and put up on Youtube – I think the show’s pretty great, and plus it’s a nice reminder of the lost art of original programming on local television. (Me personally, I grew up with Count Gore Vidal/Captain 20 out of Washington, DC.)

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 17

Jim Kelly movies: 

Black Belt Jones (1974): This was to be Jim Kelly’s big role after his starmaking turn as Williams in the previous year’s Enter The Dragon. Robert Clouse again directs, but this time the film is a Blaxploitation joint with a comedy overlay. It’s still the ‘70s, though, so there’s a bit of blood at times and some random nudity. Oscar Williams handled the script (as he would for the execrable sequel, more on which below), and it seems like a clear attempt to launch Kelly as a new urban action hero. I believe Black Belt Jones did fairly well, but as it turned out this would be the only time Jim Kelly would carry a major studio film. 

As a kid I was of course familiar with Kelly, having first watched Enter The Dragon as a teen, but I didn’t discover Black Belt Jones until the summer of 1994, when I was 19 and came across the video in a Suncoast Video store (remember those?). To say this movie had an impact on me would be an understatement. Actually – it would be the theme song by Dennis Coffey (miscredited as “Dennis Coffy” in the closing credits) that had the biggest impact on me. I would watch the video just to hear the “Theme From Black Belt Jones,” and even recorded it directly onto audio tape so I could play it. I even did dumb faux-movie commercials in the campus studio and would use Coffey’s theme song on the soundtrack. As far as I’m concerned, this unjustly-overlooked track is the best song in the entire Blaxploitation soundtrack canon. Many years later I finally found a good-quality copy of it on Harmless Records’s Pulp Fusion: Revenge Of The Ghetto Grooves; “Theme From Black Belt Jones,” by the way, was never released on a Coffey LP (a 7” single – now grossly overpriced – was released on Warner Records in 1974, whereas Coffey’s albums at the time were released on Sussex), and there was never an official soundtrack release, though a bootleg came out on vinyl in 2000…recorded directly off the VHS. Luichi DeJesus, who the following year would handle the kick-ass vocoder-heavy soundtrack for Pam Grier’s Friday Foster, did the actual score for Black Belt Jones; Dennis Coffey only did the theme song and the “love theme” which plays during the ultra-bizarre “mating” sequence that occurs late in the film. 

Well, enough about the soundtrack. The movie itself also made a big impact on me. That summer of 1994 was somewhat special to me. I seem to recall spending most of it drinking and watching kung-fu movies with my college friends. Now that’s the life! We watched Black Belt Jones several times; this was also at the time that I was becoming obsessed with the early to mid 1970s. I was born in 1974, the year this film came out, and Thomas Pynchon writes in his novel V something to the effect that many people are destined to become obessed with the era in which they were born. Well, that summer was when it started for me…but then, at the time the entire ‘70s obsession was in full swing. The Beastie Boys of course were at the center of that, with their “Sabotage” video being a faux-‘70s cop show and ‘70s references throughout their albums (including a Dennis Coffey reference in their 1992 B-side “Skills To Pay The Bills”). To this day I’m still fascinated by this era, and what’s funny is that 1994 is now longer ago than the ‘70s were when I first watched the movie – at the time, Black Belt Jones had only been released 20 years before. But man, as hard as it is to believe, 1994 was 28 years ago! WTF!? Now that I think of it, there might be some kid out there now who was born in ’94 and is thus obsessed with the early ‘90s, the poor bastard... 

I watched that video untold times, but at some point lost my copy – I seem to recall someone “borrowed” it. It wasn’t until 2010 that I watched the movie again; this was when Black Belt Jones was finally released on DVD, along with two other Jim Kelly films (plus one with Rockne Tarkington, the actor who was originally set to play Williams in Enter The Dragon). Seeing the movie in remastered widescreen was almost like seeing it for the first time, but man I still remembered all the lines, all the story beats. Hey listen, I should talk about the movie and cut out the navel gazing. So look, no one’s going to say Black Belt Jones is a classic. But I love it. And watching it again the other day (still no Blu Ray release, though), it only seems to have gotten better with age. Clouse and company were very right to get rid of the grim and gritty vibe typical of Blaxploitation and go for more of a good-spirited vibe. This is a fun movie, and Kelly carries it well. He sort of plays a less cocky version of his Williams, from Enter The Dragon, but he still has a bunch of smart-ass lines. Who exactly “Black Belt Jones” is, though, is pretty much a mystery; and yes, that’s his damn name. I mean he’s referred to as “Black Belt” for cryin’ out loud. Well anyway, when Black Belt Jones isn’t having white girls jump on a trampoline by the beach or kicking it in his ultramod bachelor pad (which is also on the beach), he seems to do odd jobs for the government. Or at least some agency. When we meet him, he’s busy protecting some dignitary from would-be assassins. Later in the film, though, he acts more in his personal interests than in any government or law enforcement capacity. 

An interesting thing about Black Belt Jones is how its template is so similar to just about any Chinese kung-fu movie you could name. I mean it’s literally about the bad guys trying to take over a martial arts school; that’s pretty much the plot for around a billion kung-fu movies. And man what a school this one is – it’s “sensei” is none other than Scatman friggin’ Crothers, playing the least believable karate master in film history. The movie never does make it clear whether Scatman’s “Pop” actually taught Black Belt Jones, but we do learn that the two men have some sort of a student-pupil connection. However, playing the emotional stuff is not Jim Kelly’s forte, so this isn’t much played up on. The convoluted story has it that the Mafia is leaning on black criminal Pinky; they want a particular building in Pinky’s domain, the building with Pop’s karate school, so Pinky and crew start leaning on Pop. Robert Clouse must have taken to actor Malik Carter, who plays Pinky; Carter even gets an “introducing” credit at the start of the movie. Several scenes are given over to Carter so he can chew scenery as the outlandish Pinky, sometimes strutting and rapping about his awesomeness. While Clouse might have seen a future star in Malik Carter, it was not to be; he only acted sporadically after this, his last role being the “night guard” in Stallone’s Cobra (1986). (I discovered this myself before the Internet Movie Database existed; I saw Cobra on cable TV not long after I got the Black Belt Jones video, and just about freaked out when I recognized none other than Pinky himself as a security guard – even though he was only on screen for a few seconds and didn’t have any dialog.) 

When Pinky leans a bit too hard on Pop, things quickly escalate. But even here Black Belt Jones does not become a violent revenge thriller a la Coffy. As I say, Jim Kelly’s Black Belt Jones never really seems to give a shit; Pinky’s plot just gives him another opportunity to “be busy lookin’ good.” Actually that’s a Williams line, but it also describes Black Belt Jones. Kelly is very much on form in this picture; he so outmatches his opponents, never tiring even after hordes of them come at him, that it almost approaches the level of a Bruceploitation movie – like Bruce Le, the fake Bruce who starred in the most loathsome Bruceploitation movies of all, where he’d fight like a thousand people and never even break a sweat. At no point does Black Belt Jones seem in trouble, even in a part where Pinky’s men capture him and attempt to beat him to death, with the warning that if Black Belt fights back one of Pop’s students will be killed. I’ve always thought that the action highlight in the film is the one toward the end on the abandoned train; this is an excellently staged sequence, which still retains the goofy comedy overlay of the film (ie the twitching knocked-out thugs, as if Black Belt has given them nerve damage in addition to a sound beating). 

The film also has some of the best foley work ever. It’s totally exaggerated; every punch and kick is magnified on the soundtrack. The producers also add a weird “bone crunching” noise at times, which is so overdone it actually can raise your hackles. It gives the impression that Black Belt’s just ruptured someone’s innards. But my favorite sound effect of all in the entire film is when Sydney, Pop’s estranged daughter (played by a fierce Gloria Hendry), bitch-slaps Black Belt before their weird mating ritual on the beach. Gloria Hendry delivers lines with aplomb throughout the film, bad-ass lines that she serves up more convincingly than even Kelly does. And they’re wonderfully un-PC, too, like when she calmly tells one of Pinky’s men, “I’ll make you look like a sick faggot.” She’s got a great one before she bitch-slaps Black Belt, too; when Black Belt tells her he “takes” what he wants, Sydney responds, “My cookie would kill you.” You can check this scene out here – listen to that bitch slap! And this mating sequence deal, scored by Coffey’s “Love Theme From Black Belt Jones,” is a bizarre bit that features Black Belt and Syndey chasing each other around the beach and beating each other up as foreplay. There’s a random bit, in an altogether random scene, where they come across a fat hippie strumming his acoustic guitar along the beach, and the two sadists smash the guitar up; you can see this at the end of the clip I linked to above. Folks, the fat hippie looks so much like Wayne’s World 2-era Chris Farley that you almost wonder if the dude traveled back in time – he even has the same overdone reactions as Farley when they grab his guitar. 

The climax is underwhelming after the fight in the empty train; it’s pretty goofy, too, with a seemingly-endless tide of thugs coming out of the soap bubbles to be knocked out by Black Belt and then escorted into a sanitation truck by Sydney. And yes, soap bubbles; the final fight occurs in a car wash that’s gone haywire. Also here one will spot a cameo by Bob Wall, who played a sadistic henchman in Enter The Dragon; here he plays a geeky Mafia chauffeur. I’m cool with the underwhelming climax, though, as it retains the spirit of the overall film. It’s the dialog that’s key for me; I could quote this movie all day, from the kid’s “She was bad! She was good!” when referring to Sydney’s karate skills to Black Belt’s triumphant, “Let’s go to McDonald’s!” after foiling Pinky. And of course, Black Belt’s “Batman, motherfucker!”  Clouse and crew keep the action moving, with a lot of fun sequences, like when Black Belt employs those white trampoline girls on a heist. It’s a little bumpy at the start, though; I mean I don’t watch a movie titled Black Belt Jones and expect to see Scatman Crothers arguing with his heavyset girlfriend. (A scene which regardless features more wonderfully un-PC dialog, ie “I’ll slap the black off you!”) Once Gloria Hendry shows up it’s as if the movie takes on a new drive, and she acquits herself well in the action scenes, really selling her punches and kicks. 

I’ve gone on and on about Black Belt Jones but I feel like I really haven’t said much about it. I’ll just leave it that it’s a fun movie, and I bet it was fun as hell to see it on the bigscreen in 1974 – I can just imagine a pack of inner-city kids enthusing over it in some theater on 42nd Street. And the movie did well enough that it warranted a sequel, something I wasn’t aware of until the DVD release in 2010. And speaking of which… 

Hot Potato (1975): This movie was so goddamn stupid I scanned through it and didn’t even watch the whole thing; a half-assed movie deserves a half-assed review. Like Black Samurai, this is another one that has a copyright that differs from the release date; Hot Potato is copyright 1975, so far as the opening credits are concerned, but was apparently released in 1976. It’s also a sequel to Black Belt Jones, though you’d never know it. Jim Kelly plays “Jones,” apparently as in “Black Belt Jones,” but he’s never referred to by that name, and no other actors from the previous film are in this one. Indeed, absolutely no mention is made of that previous film. Hot Potato was written by Oscar Williams, who also wrote Black Belt Jones, but he directs this time as well. What a bad decision for the studio; Hot Potato makes Black Belt Jones look like Citizen Kane. It’s messy and chaotic, and I actually felt embarrassed for Jim Kelly. Whereas the previous film had an accent on comedy, it still featured some violent action and everything didn’t seem to be a joke to the characters. Not so here; the entire stupid movie is nothing but comedy, and unfunny comedy, to boot – like Jim Kelly and his colleagues watching a fat man and woman challenge each other to an eating contest, and the gross spectacle just keeps going on and on, complete with gut-churning overdubbed “eating” sounds. 

Kelly himself looks bored this time…he looks older than he did just a year before, and also for some reason he’s shaved off his sideburns. There are some parts I kid you not where he looks like ol’ Barry Obama – check out the final fight scene. It’s like Obama with a natural! I’m guessing at this point Jim Kelly must’ve realized his moment in the limelight had already passed him by; surely he had to realize this movie was a turkey. Maybe he did it because he figured the guy who wrote Black Belt Jones couldn’t do him wrong. Obviously he was proven wrong. Or hell, maybe Kelly just wanted a vacation in Thailand (the entire film takes place there – again, a far cry from the urban setting of the previous film). I also feel bad for the Warners marketing department, as they had to try to get people to pay to see this piece of shit. Well, I’ve spent enough time on this one…it’s lame, Jim Kelly’s barely in it (and when he is, he’s usually just standing around), and the focus is on lame comedy throughout. What’s crazy is, despite the suckitude, the film actually looks like a big-budget venture when compared to the cheap productions Kelly would find himself starring in next. Speaking of which… 

Black Samurai (1976): As with Hot Potato, this one has differing copyright and release dates – it’s copyright 1976, but seems to have been released in 1977. It certainly seems more “mid-‘70s” than “disco ‘70s.” Even though it isn’t a big studio production like his previous films, Jim Kelly is back to his old self in this one…you’d think it was actually shot before Hot Potato. Maybe he thought it would lead to a franchise – which the film should have. Well anyway, this is of course a filmed adaptation of Marc Olden’s Black Samurai – specifcally, an adaptation of Black Samurai #6: The Warlock. While lots has been changed to accommodate the small budget (the entire second half of the film takes place in one location, for example, despite the globe-hopping of the source novel), the film is still faithful to the bare bones of the novel’s plot. And almost all of the characters from The Warlock are here, though in a lessened state: Synne, the hot-as-hell black beauty of the novel, has lost her silver hair; Bone, the hulking gay albino henchman, is a black guy (though it’s intimated in overdubbed dialog during the climactic fight that he’s still gay in the film); and most humorously of all, Rheinhardt, the werewolf in the novel, has been changed to…a midget. But then there were midgets throughout The Warlock, and sure, they were transvestite midgets who wielded whips and wore s&m getups, but at least director Al Adamson was still somewhat faithful to the novel with this change. 

But he made some strange changes which were not faithful to the novel. For one, Robert “Black Samurai” Sand (ie Jim Kelly) does not report to former President William Baron Clarke in the movie; instead, Sand works for D.R.A.G.O.N. (as in, “Enter The;” no doubt Adamson was trying to refer back to Kelly’s most famous movie). And whereas Robert Sand in the novels was a somewhat-terse badass who favored a samurai sword and a .45, the Sand of the movie is a James Bond wannabe, complete with a Thunderball-esque jetpack. He also drives a purple 1972 Dino Ferrari. But man, if Adamson had dispensed with this stuff, he might’ve had sufficient budget to do a more faithful adaptation of the novel. I mean for one thing, Sand uses his samurai sword in the novels, but here he mostly relies on his hands and feet; he shoots one guy with a revolver, and later in the film affixes a silencer to a .45 (for absolutely no reason, as he’s in the friggin’ jungle at the time), but he never fires it. And he only uses a samurai sword briefly in the climax – to cut the ropes off someone. My assumption is Adamson whittled down on the sword action because it would’ve cost more so far as choreography went; it’s much cheaper to have actors just pretend to be kicked in the face than to be chopped by a sword. 

But now let me tell you how I personally learned about Black Samurai, because I’m sure you all are dying to know. I grew up with an obsession for kung-fu movies, and the early ‘90s was a cool time for this because it seemed like a ton of them suddenly came out on VHS. I built up quite a collection, despite not having much money, and on one of the videos I got there was the trailer for Black Samurai. I no longer recall what kung-fu video in particular it was that featured this trailer, but it would’ve been something I bought in 1994. This trailer, which you can see here (it was also included in Alamo Drafthouse’s 2012 Blu Ray release Trailer War), made a big impression on me. At the time I was in college, and we’d often film impromptu kung-fu parodies or whatnot…I recall often mocking this goofy commercial, in particular the line “half the world’s out to kill him.” At the time I had no idea how Black Samurai itself could even be seen – all I had was the trailer on the video. Then in 2000 or so Black Samurai was released on VHS and DVD…but I quickly learned that it was edited, with the nudity and violence removed. Fuck that! It was also at this time that I learned of Marc Olden’s source material, and while I eventually got the actual books, I still never sought out Al Adamson’s film. Actually that’s a lie, as I’d read somewhere that in the ‘80s the film had been released uncut on VHS, but this video was impossible to find – at least impossibe for me to find. And now that I think of it, I’m assuming it was this ‘80s video release that was being advertised on that video I purchased in the early ‘90s. 

Well anyway, in one of those random flukes, Black Samurai was released on Blu Ray the other year as part of “The Al Adamson Collection,” and friends it’s the uncut version that was originally released in grindhouses and drive-ins in 1977. It was a strange experience to actually watch this movie so many years after discovering it via that trailer; I almost found myself getting misty-eyed, but that was probably the cheap blended whiskey I was drinking at the time. And booze (or drugs) would certainly be recommended for anyone who chooses to watch Black Samurai. But then, the movie isn’t that bad, even though people often rake it over the coals (just check out Marty McKee’s review at Crane Shot).  I mean yeah, it is lame, but it isn’t nearly as bad as Hot Potato. And hell, I’d still rather watch Black Samurai than The Eternals. Also, the movie is deserving of at least some respect, as it was the only film adaptation of a men’s adventure series in the ‘70s – the decade that saw a glut of men’s adventure paperbacks, and Black Samurai was the only one that made it to the big screen. 

I’d love to know what Marc Olden thought of the film. Many years ago his widow Diane told me via email that Olden never met Jim Kelly, “though he admired him.” I was bummed to learn that Olden never got a chance to meet the man who brought his Robert Sand to life. One thing everyone can agree on is that Jim Kelly was the perfect Robert Sand. Unfortunately Al Adamson and his screenwriters didn’t understand the source material, because Kelly, who didn’t have the greatest of range, could’ve easily handled the character as presented in Olden’s novels. Indeed, the Robert Sand of Olden’s novels doesn’t say much – but when he does says something, it’s pretty bad-ass, and then he gets to the ass-kicking. Kelly could’ve handled this. But given how he had all the best lines in Enter The Dragon, the directors of his ensuing films tried to replicate that, so the film version of Robert Sand is a blabbermouth when compared to the novel version. He also lacks the samurai training and mindset; indeed, “Black Samurai” seems to just be this Robert Sand’s codename. He’s basically just a regular movie spy, with all the customary gadgets, only one with a little more focus in karate. No mention is made of him being an actual samurai. 

It's been twelve years(!) since I read The Warlock, but so far as I recall the bones of the novel’s plot are here in the film. And speaking of which, I really enjoyed The Warlock, but am only now starting to read the series from the beginning…not sure why I took so long, but I think it’s because I was also reading Olden’s Narc series and just wanted to focus on it first. Well anyway, same as in the source novel, the plot hinges around black magician Janicot, the warlock of the original novel’s title, taking captive Toki, daughter of Sand’s samurai trainer Mr. Konuma. Adamson and team have changed the relationships a bit, but Toki is still Robert Sand’s beloved in this one – however as mentioned Jim Kelly didn’t have the greatest range, thus he never seems all that fired up about rescuing Toki. In fact, Toki’s practically an afterthought. Oh yeah, I recall Janicot ran a sideline operation in the novel where he filmed various noteables in his black magic sex orgies, using that for blackmail…none of this is in the film. Janicot has practically been neutered in the film version; Bill Roy’s portrayal of the character is more Paul Lynde than Anton LaVey. (Seriously, it would be easy to imagine this Janicot as one of Uncle Arthur’s “special male friends.”) He makes for a lame duck villain, and his “warlock” nature isn’t nearly as exploited as in the novel. 

But let’s talk about the boobs! Seriously though, this uncut version of Black Samurai has been lost for many, many years, but the topless gals are here in all their glory. Adamson strings nudity throughout the film, befitting a movie intended for grindhouse theaters; in particular we have a dazed-looking blonde who does a practically endless striptease halfway through the film, topless throughout (the camera cuts away for the big finale when she pulls off her panties, however). Marilyn Joi as Synne also gets her top torn off by Chavez, Latino thug who in the novel ran his own drug empire, but here in the novel is another of Janicot’s men. Actually he comes off as more threatening than Janicot himself. Oh but randomly enough…Adamson kept the “lion-men” in the movie! One of the more outrageous elements of an outrageous novel made it to the film; randomly enough, Sand at one point is attacked by a pair of black guys dressed up like the savages in a 1930s jungle movie. One of them he seems to relish in killing; I’m not sure if the bloody violence was cut from the previously-available versions, but here in this Blu Ray Sand makes a few bloody kills. For example he tosses a boulder on one of the lion men, and we get a closeup of the spouting blood as the lion man floats in water. 

The karate scenes are actually pretty good. Once again Kelly comes off as vastly outmatching his opponents, but there seems to have been an attempt at actually making him work for it at times. For example the fight with Bone (Charles Grant) is pretty good – livened up by some postproduction dubbing where the two trash-talk each other. Here Sand calls Bone all kinds of inappropriate-for-today gay slurs, adding to the over-the-top vibe of the film; making it even more crazy, the actors clearly aren’t saying anything to each other and all their dialog has been dubbed in after the fact…and since you hear their voices but their lips aren’t moving it gives it all a surreal, dreamlike quality. Unintentionally avant-garde, I guess. Also, Jim Kelly fights a friggin’ vulture, but it’s staged so ineptly that again you wonder why Adamson didn’t use the money for something else. And the fight with Janicot is so lame you wonder why they even included it. But Kelly really seems invested in the role, even if the production is meager compared to his previous movies – I mean we’re talking “boom mic audio.” 

Speaking of cost-cutting, Adamson saved on the soundtrack, too. Black Samurai does not feature an original score. Adamson instead uses what’s now known as “sound library” music, ie production music created by various labels for use in film, TV, radio, and etc. The “theme song,” for example, is actually “Flashback” by Alan Hawkshaw and Keith Mansfield. The song that plays throughout the endless stripdance sequence is “Soul Slap” by Madeline Bell and Alan Parker. Some years ago a blogger by the handle Fraykers Revenge created the soundtrack for Black Samurai, tracking down each song from his vast collection of sound library releases; unfortunately his blog is long gone, but perhaps the soundtrack is still available somewhere on the internet. 

I’ve been going on and on, but I’ve gotta say Black Samurai isn’t terrible. I mean Hot Potato is terrible. Black Samurai is actually watchable, and it’s at least good enough that you wish it was better – that it had more money for the setups and locations. Jim Kelly acquits himself well, proving he could carry a film…even when wearing a very un-Robert Sand tracksuit. There’s definitely a camp quality to it, which always helps. But then perhaps my positive sentiments are due to the uncut Blu Ray; I might be complaining just like every other reviewer if I was talking about the cut version that was previously available on the market. At any rate, it makes one sorry that there wasn’t a followup; the following year Kelly starred in another Adamson production, Death Dimension, and you kind of wish they’d just done Black Samurai II instead. 

Well friends, I was going to review more of Jim Kelly’s movies (he’s always been one of my favorite actors…I mean he’s the only guy in film history who could be in a movie with Bruce Lee and actually come off as cooler than Bruce Lee), but as usual I ran on so long that I’ll have to get to the others anon; Three The Hard Way, Death Dimension, Golden Needles, etc.