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Slaughter
[MGM]
1972; color
Directed by Jack Starrett
Starring: Jim Brown, Stella Stevens, Rip Torn, Cameron Mitchell & Don Gordon
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That cat Shaft might be a baaad..... but Slaughter is the baddest cat to ever walk the Earth, baby. Or so Jim Brown tells Stella Stevens just moments before throwing two guys off a roof and another down a flight of stairs. But, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Slaughter starts off with a bang, literally, when an older black couple get in their car and it promptly blows up. Not surprisingly, it turns out the couple were the parents of Slaughter, an ex-Green Beret Captain who apparently has no first name, not many emotions, and a seemingly endless supply of small and medium-sized weaponry at his personal disposal. Slaughter's dad was mob connected somehow and was killed because he knew too much. About what and whom nobody knows, but Slaughter commits himself to finding out and wreaking some serious revenge on whoever was responsible. He starts by trying to get info from a scantily clad young lady (read: mob party girl) who was an acquaintance of his father but she tells him she can't give him any info... until she's shot multiple times on the spot by an unknown gunman firing through her window, at which point she gives up all she knows just before dying in Slaughter's arms. Armed with a name, time, location, and of course guns, he disrupts a late night airport rendezvous, killing the man he thinks is responsible in the process. Unfortunately for Slaughter, what he actually did was disrupt a US Treasury Dept. surveillance operation. (And, on top of that, let his parent's killer slip away.) Faced with prison time by the Feds for f'ing up their operation, Slaughter agrees to go to Mexico to track down those responsible and help out the Feds in exchange for all charges against him being dropped; and of course the opportunity to exact his pre-planned vengeance. On arrival he's paired up with a Fed partner, Harry, who soon becomes his sidekick. Slaughter learns what's really happening is the mob are running a huge operation through computers located somewhere in a mobster's villa where a private casino is located. He crashes the casino and has a relatively friendly chat with Fellici, the head Mafiosi, but not before locking eyes across the room with Ann (Stella Stevens) who's the unhappy girlfriend of the operation's second-in-command, Hoppo (played to the hilt with sneering anger by Rip Torn), who is actually the one responsible for killing Slaughter's parents. He's also got ambitions to take over the whole operation but is continually thwarted and held back by Fellici. Once Fellici sees Slaughter's interested in Ann, he instructs her to get close to him and learn what she can. What it all comes down to, eventually, is Slaughter and Harry storming the casino, mowing down just about every mobster and henchman in sight, except for Hoppo, who Slaughter kills after a spectacularly low budget car chase. Despite it's myriad of flaws, the film is a classic and Slaughter has become one of my favorites characters in all blaxploitation, just behind Tommy Grimes (Black Caesar and Hell Up In Harlem) and, of course, Shaft.
—the Kommandant
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