Bucktown (1975)

Big city hard ass Duke (Fred Williamson) comes to the conveniently named Bucktown to bury his estranged brother who owned a nightclub there. For dubious reasons of The Law, Duke must stay in town for at least sixty days to put his brother’s affairs in order.

Given that he’s hassled early on by the corrupt and racist police force, whose main reasons to exist seem to be racketeering and extortion (and who will of course also turn out to be responsible for the death of Duke’s brother, as if that ever was in any doubt), that’s not a great proposition. Because a man needs something to do, and the buck needs to flow, Duke lets himself be convinced by a hustling kid and by Harley (Bernie Hamilton), an alcoholic buddy of his brother, to reopen the nightclub for a bit. This also gets him far into the good books and the bed of his brother’s girlfriend Aretha (Pam Grier).

When Duke very violently disagrees with paying the protection money the police expects of him, things do start to look a bit bleak for his continued survival, so he calls in an old buddy of his from the city, the gangster Roy (Thalmus Rasulala). Once Roy arrives with three generally unpleasant mooks (one of them played by the late, great Carl Weathers) in tow, he and Duke begin to gleefully murder their way through the cops.

Once that’s over, Duke expects Roy and the goons to go back to the city. Instead, Roy decides to stay in town and take over the police business, legal and illegal. Duke’s not too happy with this, because he clearly didn’t plan on replacing one group of violent shits with another one, and apparently thought better of Roy. Which, giving their whole companionable killing spree, seems somewhat peculiar. Eventually, the former friends will come to blows.

Before going into Arthur Marks’s blaxploitation movie Bucktown, it is probably best to temper one’s expectations a little. Specifically, the promise of Fred Williamson and Pam Grier starring in the same movie isn’t fulfilled in quite the way I would have hoped for: Williamson’s as Williamson as he always is, but Grier’s role in the movie is strictly being The Girl, so don’t expect razors hidden in afros, much asskicking or just coolness from her. She is unfortunately in the movie mostly for the melodramatic outbursts of awkward dialogue, which doesn’t at all play to her strengths as an actress or as an on-screen personality.

Having put the film’s great disappointment out of the way, there is rather a lot to like about the rest of the movie: its portrayal of the police force of Bucktown as just another gang goes even further than the racist and corrupt police forces in most other blaxploitation movies that at least seem to involve law enforcement work from time to time do; but then going another step further and positing that gangsters and pimps aren’t a great replacement for that role either puts the whole thing dangerously close to being a blaxploitation film that actually critiques the kind of violent but awesome (in the movies) types of black men that are the bread and butter of these films as well.

Of course, this being an exploitation movie, it also takes great delight at showing us the badassery of Duke and Roy quipping while brutally murdering some – admittedly very nasty – people, and certainly is never going to make a – for it obviously hypocritical – final stand against answering brutal violence with even more brutal violence.

It does, however, use the somewhat less awkward opportunity to portray the kind of close, male friendship that would later become one of the core interests of Hong Kong’s heroic bloodshed movie beyond the (heroic) bloodshed. These scenes of Duke and Roy first being buddies in violence and then growing increasingly disenchanted with one another – Roy’s disgust with Duke’s apparent growing of a tiny little bit of conscience is played particularly well by Rasulala – are the strongest of the film’s dramatic scenes. Rasulala and Williamson play off one another wonderfully whatever their relation, suggesting a lot of the men’s personal history without never needing to explain them.

That their final throw down is the climax of their relationship as well as the film’s best action scene – not that there’s anything wrong with the earlier action – seems rather fitting in this context.

J.D.’s Revenge (1976)

Between studying law and driving taxi to pay for it, mild-mannered Ike (Glynn Turman) barely has time for much else in his life, certainly not the night life of New Orleans. For one night, however, his girlfriend Christella (Joan Pringle) convinces him to go out on the town with her to celebrate the one year anniversary of their best friends. Why this begins with everybody visiting a strip club is anybody’s guess. Anyway, eventually, the quartet end up in a hypnotism show, with Ike one of the brave hypnosis subjects.

These things never go well in horror cinema, so the little session seems to open a door in Ike’s mind through which the spirit of a decidedly nasty man slips in. Said spirit belonging to one J.D. Walker (played by David McKnight in flashbacks and mirrors) quickly begins to take over Ike’s life, first changing his sartorial tastes to the worse, but soon also bequeathing a tendency to violence, general vileness, rough sex, sadism and macho posturing. All of this increases terribly, until Ike becomes a rapist sadist maniac who dresses like an early 1940s pimp, and there seems to be little left of the man he was before. And whenever he does come back for a stint, J.D.’s sure to return just at the ideal moment to make everything worse. At first, Christella takes the brunt of Walker’s brand of toxic masculinity, but while he is branching out to doing violence to other people, he stumbles into the church of ecstatic preacher Reverend Elija Bliss (Louis Gossett Jr. when he was just Lou, and not so little). Bliss is a curious man who doesn’t seem quite sure if he’s hustling people like his brother Theotis (Fred Pinkard) who runs the church like a gang operation wants him to, or if he really has heard a calling from a higher power.

The thing is, Walker and the Bliss brothers have a past, and once he has laid eyes on Elija, he realizes he has stolen Ike’s body for a reason – vengeance.

Well, I certainly didn’t expect this blaxploitation horror film directed by Arthur Marks, at this point a TV veteran with a couple of directing credits and producer roles in things like “Perry Mason” and most certainly not black, and written by one Jaison Starkes who did little else and nothing of any interest, to be quite as excellent as J.D.’s Revenge turned out to be, even though Marks has two other blaxploitation films, the very interesting Detroit 3000 and Friday Foster in his earlier filmography. But then, I’m not sure I’d even categorize the film as blaxploitation in the strictest sense – it’s really more an intelligent horror film with an African American cast that just happens to be produced by AIP. The “exploitation” content of the formula is really not all that huge, either, there’s a bit of female and a bit of male nudity, but apart from the strip club scene, these things don’t play out as attempts to titillate so much as necessary elements of the story.

There’s one scene of rough sex bordering on non-consensuality and one attempted rape, but the film plays these really not at all as coy attempts at being sexy in an unpleasant way. Particularly the latter scene is staged so the audience witnesses it from the perspective of the female victim of J.D.’s sexual sadism, turning it into something as uncomfortable to watch as a scene where a man tries to rape his own girlfriend should be; this film takes the “horror” bit in its description very seriously indeed. It’s also a scene that’s genuinely important for the film because it emphasises how far gone Ike is at this point, or really, how little of him is left, and what this does to Christella.

Which leads me to another element of the film that works particularly well: the ghostly possession. In this case, the film adds to the general horror of one’s personality being subsumed under that of another until the victim can’t even see there ever was a difference between it and what has taken over, by turning Ike into the total opposite of what he has been before. The kind, sensible and thoughtful man that’s as far away from all the badly posited clichés of how a black man is supposed to be and act as possible is taken over by a sexually sadistic, cruel and violent hustler and pimp who should by all rights come over as a bit of a caricature but is handled so well by the film he is a true figure of terror. It’s as if all the bad versions of what it’s supposed to mean to be a man take Ike over and turn him into someone so vile, he’s hardly even human anymore. Turman is pretty fantastic at portraying the possession, not just taking on the posture and tics of McKnight’s version of J.D. from the flashbacks, but playing them in a way that doesn’t quite seem to fit his face and his body. It’s not just an interesting and thoughtful way to portray a possession but another element of the film that’s just the little bit more disturbing than you’d expect of it.

Another fascinating aspect of J.D.’s Revenge is how willing it is to go into uncomfortable directions. The way Christella eventually returns to Ike/J.D. after he beat her up the first time feels a bit too close to what I know about women in real life abusive relationships, for example.

There’s also the from my perspective horrific scene after that first beating where Ike’s best friend interprets a guy beating up his girlfriend as the dude finally coming out of his shell and stopping to repress his emotions. Women, he explains, do need that sort of thing from time to time. A nice interpretation of this one might read it as some kind of critique of not quite as crazy but still pretty horrible ideas about maleness; it’s certainly a way quite a few men in the 70s – and apparently still today – think, so it’s not pleasant to listen too, but it’s certainly true to the reality of some men being proper shits.

J.D.’s Revenge generally also recommends itself by allowing everyone in it a degree of complexity. After all, even horrible J.D. does indeed have an understandable reason for wanting to take revenge, he’s just going about it the way a guy just one step removed from a serial killer would do, making your usual vengeance seeking movie character look downright nice in the process. Or take the ambivalence the film has about the Bliss brothers: how much of Elija’s showy faith is indeed show, how much him starting to believe the things he performs, how much is simply genuine? And how about the way he just accepts Theotis acting the gangster even when he’s organizing his church? It’s messy and complicated, and the film isn’t providing clear answers because these things are messy and complicated in real life too.


On the visual side, there’s little too remarkable about the film. Marks with his TV background clearly doesn’t bring much of a sense of visual experimentalism with him; he does, however, know how to tell the film’s story economically and effectively, doing an excellent script and the wonderful cast justice.

Detroit 9000 (1973)

When black congress man Aubrey Clayton (Rudy Challenger) holds a not at all pre-planned, totally spontaneous fundraiser for his not at all pre-planned, totally spontaneous decision to run for governor, he and the other rich black people of Detroit (one supposes those are the only rich black people in the city too) suddenly find themselves victims of a short, sharp and very professional robbery.

The robbers are so effective, in fact, nobody is even able to discern their race(s), a particularly big problem in this already politically loaded case. As it goes, the whites talk about black on black crime and inside jobs, while the blacks suggest a conspiracy to hold their candidate down.

The poor bastard of a cop chosen to solve this mess is Lieutenant Danny Bassett (Alex Rocco), whose career has been shafted by his unwillingness to play politics. He’s more into crime solving, apparently. Danny is not very racist for a white cop in what is at least in part a blaxploitation flick, and tries to get by being honest and still somehow paying for the treatments of his wife who is incurable sick with something – being terribly racist and even more melodramatic seem to be part of her symptoms. Danny is going things alone at first, but another cop, black murder beat Sergeant Jesse Williams (Hari Rhodes) pushes himself into the investigation when he finds a corpse who very well might have been one of the robbers when still alive.

Danny doesn’t like Jesse much, in part – though one Danny probably wouldn’t admit to it – certainly because of his race, but also because Jesse is the police department’s black poster boy: he’s stylish, he was a famous athlete, and he knows how to play politics, all things the working stiff Danny doesn’t particularly like. Not surprisingly, Jesse reciprocates most of these feelings. But Jesse’s also a good cop, so working the case, they do develop a degree of mutual understanding (one wouldn’t go so far to call it friendship), though, as the ending will show, only a degree of it.

All this does make Arthur Marks’s Detroit 9000 sound like a rather worthy police procedural about mutual understanding; in practice, the film turns out to be rather more cynical and/or complex than that and certainly still a true exploitation movie, for the film does enjoy its shoot-outs a lot. As a matter of fact, there’s one about every ten minutes, usually ending in one or more people exploding a shower of very Shaw Brothers red blood capsules after lots of running and jumping has taken place. The final set piece of this sort is a long, long running gun battle between a bunch of cops and the gangsters that practically bursts with crazed energy.

Marks isn’t a terribly elegant director – rough and tumble is probably the best description to his approach – but it is exactly this rawness that makes the action work, providing it with a gripping and direct feel that fits a film so very much of its time and place as this one is particularly well. I’d be tempted to call his approach semi-documentarian, but I’m not terribly convinced Marks is doing any of this on purpose. One way or the other, the heated effect of the action stays the same.

Apart from that, the script (by Orville H. Hampton whose stuff is all over the place in genre and quality) is often just very interesting, adding clever, sometimes humane, sometimes cynical, little flourishes to character types that turn them into characters. My favourite bit of this sort of writing in the film is a flashback concerning Vonetta McGee’s Roby Harris that turns the “misused prostitute” trope into something more individual and personal that actually lets you look at a character in a crime and exploitation flick and have pity for her without turning her into a caricature. And this is by far not the only moment of this kind in the film.

I also found Detroit 9000’s treatment of its main characters very interesting. At first, the film keeps very close to Danny, showing us his pretty sad life and the start of his investigation, yet later increasingly shifts perspective over to Jesse, not just to demonstrate how Danny looks from the outside but to put the audience as much in Jesse’s shoes as in his. Despite certainly being made for the shoot-outs, the film does prefer to show more than one side of every argument, which actually makes its observations about race and the ways it interplays with class less like an internet rant and more like actual life.

As to the film’s actual racial politics, it goes for the obvious solution that a lot of people – white and black – are pretty damn horrible, poverty certainly doesn’t help in that regard, and that people in power or people who want to acquire power are hypocritical bastards. Which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

In short: Friday Foster (1975)

Photographer Friday Foster (Pam Grier) stumbles into the job of shooting the secret return of The Richest Black Man In The World™, Blake Tarr (Thalmus Rasulala), to his native USA, but instead witnesses and photographs a murder attempt on him. She manages to take a picture of the only of the would-be assassins (Carl Weathers) who escapes the combined firepower of Tarr's bodyguards and the police. Friday'd love to follow up on the story, but her boss Monk Riley (Julius Harris) does disapprove of his people involving themselves in things. Which does awaken a few doubts in me regarding the noteworthiness of his magazine.

The escaped killer also just happens to be involved with Friday's close friend Cloris (Rosalind Miles), whom he kills at a fashion show of eccentric designer Madame Rena (professional eccentric Eartha Kitt). If her boss wants it or not, Friday is going to investigate this killing for sure, even if her private eye friend Colt Hawkins (Yaphet Kotto) is the only help she can get.

Little does our heroine expect that she'll uncover (without doing much actual investigating) a particularly absurd conspiracy by The Man to keep African-Americans down.

It is true, Arthur Marks's Friday Foster, an adaptation of the first US newspaper strip featuring a black woman as its main and titular protagonist, is one of the minor efforts among AIP's blaxploitation films starring house (and every sane person's, too) favourite Pam Grier. The film's plot is paper thin even for an exploitation film, the conspiracy our heroine uncovers without actually having to do much work for it (champagne soaked evenings with middle-aged black men don't count as work, I think), nor having to do much thinking for that matter, is just plain stupid, and if you've come either for complex political subtext or classic blaxploitation outrageousness, you've come to the wrong film.

However, there's something political in, and something to be said for, the film's willingness to be lightweight, its lack of the cynicism that runs through a lot of blaxploitation films. I'm not saying this cynicism was wrong or untruthful when it comes to talking about the actual political situation of black America in the 1970s, I'm just saying that from time to time, it's good to see a movie in the genre where political cooperation between different groups and unity instead of breaking into micro-factions are treated as a good thing that might even help produce change in the larger world. Of course, being the deeply silly film it is, Friday Foster makes this argument (I'm using the term loosely) by way of a preposterous gun battle but then I didn't exactly expect a debate.

Apart from that, Friday Foster is a diverting action comedy, with pretty much every character actor you'd look for in a blaxploitation movie expect Ossie Davis in one silly role or the other, and a main cast that hits the lightness appropriate for a film that sees its heroine steal a hearse and later the truck of a milk salesman. Everybody on screen is clearly in on the fact that they're in something rather fluffy, yet everyone seems to have fun with the film's inherent silliness, as did I.

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