I imagine that everyone reading this column is familiar with this film as well as it’s lead character, John Shaft, the man that would risk his neck for his brother man. (And when I say Shaft, I mean Richard Roundtree; with all due respect to Samuel L Jackson, Roundtree is the ONLY John Shaft.) We actually considered leaving this out of the column, due to the fact that in some ways it’s almost too mainstream of a film to be considered part of a sub-genre of non-mainstream film. (Which is what blaxploitation is generally considered.) In the end we realized that it didn’t make sense to ignore Shaft because, in spite of it’s cross-cultural marketability, it’s influence on African American cinema is undeniable. Essentially the plotline is as follows: Shaft is a private investigator who, when not being hassled by the man, is a freelancer of sorts. As you may have heard, he’s a complicated man; and no one understands him but his woman. (OK, OK. I promise that’s the last time I will use the lyrics from the theme in this review.) A more accurate statement might be “no one understands him but women” as throughout the course of the film, when he’s not fighting crime, Shaft is being understood by many, many different women. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Early in the film one of his many nemeses, Bumpy (a Harlem based criminal entrepreneur), shows up at his office—uninvited no less—and asks for Shaft’s help in finding his missing daughter. Bumpy fears a group of “militant brothers” may have kidnapped her and intend to hold her for ransom. Or at least that’s what he tells Shaft. As it turns out, Bumpy knows damn well that it’s not the alleged militants behind the daughter-napping, but the “other” Mafia (you know, the Italian one) who are trying to gain the upper hand in a turf war. However, for reasons I’m still not one hundred percent sure I understand, Bumpy wants him to think it’s this other group. So he sets up a scenario that leads to Shaft confronting them at their home base. Then a whole bunch of people get shot, including many members of the political caucus, causing Shaft to partner up with the head militant dude and enlists the help of his “army” to find and rescue the girl. Which, eventually, they do. Of course a lot of other stuff happens, albeit at a somewhat slow pace. In between all of the plot, the viewer is treated to great scenes of early ‘70s New York City (back when it was dirty, and seamy, and so much cooler than it is today), a ton of quotable slang heavy dialogue and, last but certainly not least, Isaac Hayes’ most excellent soundtrack. Even though it’s considered a touchstone of blaxploitation cinema, in retrospect it’s a fairly standard action / cop flick, with all the expected good versus evil implications and plenty of flying bullets.
—Bunny

I don’t know about you, but I love a Dracula movie. And even though I enjoy a good ol’ fashioned by-the-numbers re-telling of this oh-so-classic tale as much as the next Dracula fan, I love a kooky non-traditional take on the tale of Transylvania’s most famous resident as well. Obviously Blacula was released in the wake of a number of other well received films with African American lead stars but in many ways this just as much of a horror movie as it is a blaxploitation flick, and very much in line with the other similarly themed films of that era like Dracula 1972 A.D. or Count Yorga. Like many Dracula films past and present, it starts well in the past. We first meet Prince Mamuwalde (who is about to become Blacula before the credits roll) and his lady-friend, Luva, when they’re dining at Castle Dracula with the Count himself. All seems to be going well until Drac starts telling Mamuwalde how much he’d like to bang the Prince’s bride. To make matters worse, the Count rejects his suggestion that they work together to end slavery and then bites him and turns him into a vampire! As if that wasn’t punishment enough, he follows that up by locking Mamuwalde in a coffin and putting the locked coffin in a locked room in his basement with Luva by his side, essentially putting an end to both of their lives. Or so he thought. Oddly enough though, by the time the 1970s rolled around both Count Dracula and Luva were well dead yet, as the viewer is about to discover, Blacula is very much alive. And thanks to two effeminate interior decorators, he’s living in sunny California. (They purchased the contents of the Count’s castle and brought it all back to America.) Perhaps not the optimum climate for a man who supposedly cannot handle daylight but, as my mother likes to say, beggars can’t be choosers. So, what happens is, the two frilly shirt guys decide to pry off the coffin’s lock to get a peek inside and as soon as their backs are turned (which is in like two seconds, these effeminate interior decorators are easily distracted) a hairy and hungry Mamuwalde springs forth and kills them both. Then he heads back to the coffin for a nap. The following day, or perhaps night, Blacula spies on the funeral of the darker skinned effeminate interior designer and lays eyes on a woman who looks unbelievably similar to his beloved Luva. (Probably because they’re played by the same actress.) He follows the woman, Tina, and confronts her in a dark alley, trying to get her to go someplace with him by grabbing her aggressively and calling her by another woman’s name. (No offense to Blacula but that’s just not a good pick-up strategy.) She runs off, dropping her purse in the process, and Mamuwalde stops for a quick bite - from the neck of a jive talking female taxi driver. The following night he mysteriously appears at the same nightclub as Tina, where he introduces himself and returns her purse, thus gaining her trust. She invites him to join her birthday party and, of course, once you go black… uh, I mean invite a vampire—black, white, Hispanic or otherwise—to your birthday party… you can’t go back. Or so I’ve been told. This much I know for sure, it is this nightclub birthday party meeting that sets up the rest of the movie. And I’m not gonna spoil it for you by saying much more. As is the case with most vampire movies, there has to be a vampire slayer type to play the good side of the good versus evil face-off and in Blacula we have Thalmus Rasulala as Dr. Gordon Thomas. Tina is the sister of the Doc’s girlfriend, Michelle, so he meets Mamuwalde at the party too but it takes him a while to get on the trolley and put fang marks on corpses together with mysterious caped guy to get vampire. Eventually, though, he does and helps to save the day. The ending wouldn’t allow you to believe there could be a sequel but, thankfully, there was; the also highly recommended Scream Blacula Scream followed in 1973.
—Bunny

I’ve gotta fess up right from the get-go—this is probably my all-time favorite blaxploitation flick. Black Caesar, starring Fred Williamson, is almost like a missing link between the definitive gangster film of the ‘30s, Little Caesar, and the definitive modern gangster film, Scarface (the Pacino version). You can see echoes of the former and also see some influences on the latter. The action starts in 1953 (although it looks more like 1970), where a young Harlem shoeshine boy named Tommy Gibbs helps the mob out on a hit. He’s then asked to take a payoff to a crooked cop, which he does. The cop claims Tommy’s stolen money from the payoff and beats the crap out of him, breaking his leg. For one reason or another (it’s not really explained), Tommy goes to prison. The next time we see him it’s 1965 (although it still looks more like 1970), and he’s now an adult. After asserting himself by carrying out a mob ordered hit—although he wasn’t a “professional” hired to do it—he meets the local Don and asks for his own territory. He gets laughed at, because the mob “don’t hire niggers,” so he begins to carve out his own territorial niche. Tommy remembers a set of ledgers he saw as a kid (that are basically a multi-decade history of crime, payoffs and corruption involving elected officials, people in power and - especially - the police.) Whoever owns the ledgers essentially can call the shots, free from legal interference. Needless to say, Tommy doesn’t mind mowing down a few people in the back room of a nightclub to get the books—and that’s exactly what he does. Once he’s made sure that the police commissioner (who happens to be the still-on-the-take crooked cop who broke Tommy’s leg years ago) knows he’s in possession of the books and thus calling the shots, Tommy begins to see the pendulum of underworld prominence being to swing his way. In no time flat he’s ultra-successful and begins to muscle in on the traditional territories held by the New York families, even going so far as to have his men mow down a yard full of LA based Mafiosi and throw their bullet-riddled bodies in the pool. (They were the brothers of the New York families.) But, just as sure as his rise to power was meteoric, his fall comes even more swiftly. Eventually Tommy feels the heat, as he begins to lose his soldiers; at the same time, his long-time lawyer switches allegiances to side with the commish. Using a former girl of Tommy’s, who’s actually now married to his best friend (Tommy’s ex-accountant/right hand man) as bait, the cops gain access to the safe deposit box where the books are kept and a whirlwind of events follow. What it comes down to is an attempted hit on Tommy in broad daylight in the middle of a busy midtown Manhattan intersection. Tommy takes a bullet in the side but manages to stagger around for two full days, during which he somehow walks all over the city (at one point stumbling beneath a Times Square movie theater that happens to be showing “The Godfather”), gets refused medical treatment from one his friends, beats the commish to death and gets the books back. Still wounded, Tommy wanders back uptown to the now demolished block in Harlem where he grew up, only to be jumped and beaten by a group of teens who have no idea who he is and they leave him for dead with the all-important ledgers scattered around him. As good as Black Caesar is, it’s even better when watched back-to-back with it’s revenge-laden sequel, Hell Up In Harlem.
—The Kommandant

Tammy Dobson might have done it first but Pam Grier did it best. By the time this movie came out, she’d been in 11 major films—all of the Women In Prison, horror or Blaxploitation genre; or, in some cases, a combo of those genres—and was pretty much THE leading lady of soul cinema. In this film Grier plays Foxy Brown who, as her hapless drug dealing brother, Link (played by Antonio Fargas) points out, is “A whole lotta woman!” (Indeed.) Foxy is always helping Link out of one jam or another, in the first ten minutes of the film she saves his ass by driving her car down the sidewalk and running over a couple hired goons trying to put a whuppin’ on him. Apparently he owes $20,000 to the wrong people, so he decides to hide out at Foxy’s for a while. Meanwhile, Foxy’s boyfriend is about to get out of the hospital—with a new face. Turns out he’s a DEA agent named Dalton who, after being shot in the line of duty, needed a new identity for his own safety. And the people who he was busting when he got shot just so happen to be the same people Link owes money to. Foxy brings new-faced boyfriend (who has a new name too, Mike) home for a little lovin’ and they run into Link, who’s on his way out. Somehow Link realizes that Mike is Dalton and heads straight to the syndicate to use that information to clear his debt, which results in Mike promptly being shot. Again. Hell hath no fury like a Foxy Brown scorned so she sets out for some serious revenge-ing, beginning with the kicking of Link’s ass and destruction of his apartment. As a way of saving his own ass (he does a lot of that in this movie) her brother, after Foxy nicks him in the side of the ear with a well-placed warning shot, reveals that the man behind all this trouble is… a woman; Ms. Katherine Hall. Hall runs a “modeling agency”, AKA a nationwide prostitution ring. It’s actually an operation that sends call girls to service judges and other elected officials so that their drug dealing business can flourish free of legal hassles from the man. Foxy gets herself hired and immediately starts causing trouble from the inside. After she and one of the girls cause a huge ruckus resulting in a judge throwing the book at two dealers, they go on the lam. But the other girl starts to flake out, and after an awesome brawl at a lesbian bar, she gets away and Foxy ends up being held prisoner and shot full of dope at some creepy shack in the middle of nowhere. After killing her two captors and escaping, she enlists the “Neighborhood Committee” (clearly intended to be a Black Panther type of group) and lays out her plan for further revenge. What follows is 20 minutes of action that’s as loaded as the weapons being toted, including surprise twists like a plane driving into a cabin and an implied castration. After that, Foxy has her final showdown with Hall. First she gives the woman the recently detached package of her number one goon, who also happens to be her lover. (Encased in a pickle jar no less.) Hall freaks out and Foxy shoots her in the arm, leaving her alive to suffer with her dickless boy toy. Foxy Brown is a true classic from top to bottom and offers almost everything you’d expect or want from one of the best films in the genre.
—the Kommandant

From the opening scene, where we see a HUGE purple and gold Caddy (all-over leopard interior; giant side pipes; front license plate: WILLIE; back plate: DYNAMITE) tooling around mid-’70s Manhattan intercut with a gaggle of hookers working a Shriner convention crowd, this movie drips with all the exaggerated hallmarks of pimps and hos we’ve come to know and love—especially the beyond over-the-top fashions. Willie Dynamite is the number two pimp in New York but he aims to be number one (he also happens to be played by Roscoe Orman, who went on to fame as Gordon on Sesame Street). He’s got a stable of seven bitches who he has working the hotel/convention circuit in Manhattan and, from his perspective, things couldn’t be finer. But all is not well in Ho-ville. It seems the heat is on big-time and, in a move that echoes the meeting of the heads of the families in The Godfather, Willie attends a meeting of the seven leading NYC pimps. The number one pimp, Bell, has called the meeting and proposes a strategy that would unite all the pimps and divide up territories equally. (As a side note, I’ve gotta point out that having the token white pimp named “Milky Way” is fucking brilliant.) If one pimp goes down, the others run the territory until he’s back and cut him in on the cash. Everyone thinks it’s a good thing, except Willie. This fateful decision soon begins to play out to Willie’s rather uncomfortable disadvantage. No sooner does he turn around and his car’s being towed. When he gets it back, after getting roughed up a bit by the cops and held on false charges, two cops—who’ve been following Willie since the beginning—are there to greet him and lean on him a little more. They’re building a case against him, and can ‘t seem to find anything that’ll stick, so they figure a little more pressure can’t hurt. Willie finally gets back to his ultra-’70s apartment the hos tell him Passion, a ho who’s also Willie’s girl, has been busted. Just before she gets transferred into the custody of some do-gooding woman, Cora (whose boyfriend happens to be the assistant D.A.), Willie shows up with his attorney and posts bail. I’m not going to go any further in the finite details because there’s too damn much to encapsulate. Suffice it to say bitches get slashed and smashed, cars are shot, pimps are stranded naked in the Bronx, and Willie gets beaten, busted and freed again, all while wearing a mind-blowingly endless array of outfits that sometimes have so much fur, it’s as if he’s wearing an entire species on his head and back. (Other times his outfits look as if they were leftovers from P-Funk’s Mothership Connection tour.) Even Willie’s bedside phone has strips of mink on it! I know that the Great Gatsby won the Oscar for best costumes in 1974, but looking back on Willie Dynamite as a period piece now, I’ve gotta say it’s deserving of some sort of costuming honor. In the end, after an unbelievably bad downward spiral of events, Willie’s car is towed away for the last time and, in a most un-Blaxploitation like of moves, he walks way from the life. I’ve often seen Willie Dynamite touted as the ultimate pimp ‘n’ ho movie of the era and, although it comes close, it’s moralistic ending keeps it from number one status in my book; still indispensible and required watching though.
—The Kommandant