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.

The Bermuda Depths (1978)

After an abbreviated education, mental health problems and some time of wandering around the globe on a budget, Magnus Dens (Leigh McCloskey) returns to Bermuda where he spent parts of his childhood, as well as the place where his father died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. He connects with his old buddy Eric (Carl Weathers), who is now on his way to a Masters degree in marine biology, at the moment working as the assistant of an old friend of Magnus’s father, Professor Paulis (Burl Ives).

Early on, Magnus also meets the mysterious and beautiful Jennie Haniver (Connie Sellecca), a woman with the habit of appearing and disappearing out of and into nothing, a rather great love for swimming, and a soft spot for our protagonist. She also may be the very same girl Magnus played with when he was a child nobody but him believed existed, or a hallucination, or a ghost right from a folk tale taking place in the 1800s. But then, the romance between Magnus and Jennie is also very much out of a folk tale.

While Magnus is growing increasingly confused, Eric and Paulis discover hints suggesting the existence of some form of gigantic (as in kaiju-sized) marine animal. It will later turn out to be a giant turtle, alas not one called Gamera. There’s a strange connection between the turtle, Jennie and Magnus, as well.

Because Rankin/Bass already had great contacts to Japanese studio circles through their habit of farming out of large parts of the animation work for their regular and at the time highly popular TV specials to Japan, most of their attempts at making live action fare happened in collaboration with Japanese studios as well. For production values, this must have been quite the bargain – most other US TV movies of the time certainly couldn’t afford extensive location shoots in Bermuda like these Rankin/Bass films tended to. On paper, cooperating with Tsuburaya Productions as happened in this case must have looked like something of a coup, as well, for there was hardly any company better at making giant monsters on a TV budget than the makers of the various Ultraman series (not to speak of Eiji Tsuburaya’s past as the great special effects artist who brought us Godzilla).

However, in this case as in the other Rankin/Bass-Japanese co-productions, something seems to have been lost in translation, for the effects are never even a tenth as effective as they should be coming from Tsuburaya’s company, with little of the focus on the important detail that usually makes the model and suitmation work so great in their own productions.

Someone involved in the productions also had a tendency to hold to people behind the camera who had already proven not to be great: so most of these movies – including the one at hand - were directed by the plodding and ineffective Tsugunobu Kotani, and were based on bland scripts by William Overgard that take a kernel of good ideas but never manage – I’m not even sure they try – to turn them into an engaging narrative.

This is particularly annoying in The Bermuda Depths’s case, for here’s a wonderful opportunity for turning this into a modern romantic folktale that just happens to also include a giant monster wasted because neither Kotani nor the script show any of the imagination and ability to create the proper mood that would have been needed to pull it off. Instead, this is the sort of inoffensive TV pap US TV movies of this era surprisingly often weren’t.

Death Hunt (1981)

The early 1930s, Canada, the Yukon territory. A trapper named Albert Johnson (Charles Bronson) has just returned to the area to reclaim a way of life he followed before he became a spy in World War I (and did whatever guys like he do after that). When he sees local influential asshole Hazel (Ed Lauter) attempt to kill his own dog because it was losing a dog fight, he intervenes, making Hazel and his gang of violent cronies his bitter enemies. Hazel does his best to escalate things when it turns out that Johnson isn’t one to be easily killed by the likes of him, eventually managing to set the – very unwilling and generally tired – local Mountie Millen (Lee Marvin), his partner Sundog (Carl Weathers) and newly arrived rookie Mountie Alvin (Andrew Stevens, quite some time before he became one of the kings of Skinemax) against the trapper.

Because Johnson is a very dangerous man when riled, and a master at survival in dangerous circumstances, things escalate into a huge manhunt that makes the national news, making any idea of a peaceful solution nearly ridiculous.

Peter R. Hunt’s Northern Death Hunt is a wonderful film, basically doing nothing whatsoever that could destroy its balance, and doing very many things very right indeed.

The character work is strong throughout: Hunt makes excellent use of those elements of Bronson’s external stoicism that can suggest a combination of compassion and stubbornness when used properly (and Bronson clearly liked to do that when a film gave him the chance, and so applied himself fully in these situations instead of going through the motions of being Bronson), showing all the complexities of the character despite him only having a handful of dialogue scenes.

This ability to work via the body language of veteran actors also produces quite a resonant relationship between Marvin and Bronson despite them never meeting between glances through binoculars. Of course, these two are constructed as very parallel characters, decent men of violence who see their ways of life coming to an end, and not liking the replacement at all. It’s not that the film is getting all melancholy about the great times of frontier barbarism, mind you: it’s clear that nearly everyone populating these last spaces ruled by the old ways is a violent thug of some kind, cruel and callous; the film’s just as clear about the fact that the new ways of living coming up North now are not really any less terrible – they just like to pretend they are.

The film works wonderfully as a grim adventure movie with quite a few great set pieces, atmospherically filmed. The environmental dangers of snow and ice are ever-present, and, the film seems to suggest, are outward symbols of everyone’s mental states, which generally aren’t terribly healthy. The film takes some rather clever detours when it puts its mind to it, using tropes of the Western and revisionist Western but giving them interesting little twists to turn characters more human. Somewhat surprisingly, but certainly fitting in this context, for a film whose view on human nature seems to be rather cynical as a whole, Death Hunt shows a decided tendency to give every single side character (all played by wonderful character actors) something to be beyond their premeditated genre role, even fleshing out some of Hazel’s shithead henchmen as if they were proper human beings. The most impressive thing is not just that Hunt had the immense ambition to add all this humanity to his icy chase movie, it’s that he managed to do this while keeping the film ticking away like clockwork, ending up with a film that’s sprawling when thought about, but which feels tight and focussed while you watch it.

Action Jackson (1988)

Detroit cop Jericho “Action” Jackson (Carl Weathers) has been having a rather quiet two years. After a bit of police brutality towards the – rapist – son of a very rich man, he was demoted from Lieutenant to Sergeant, lost the right to wear a gun, and consequently landed himself a desk job. Jackson’s life is going to become rather more interesting again in the next few days, because a series of men working in the same worker’s union all happen to die rather explosive deaths. Jackson’s colleagues don’t seem to bother much about this sort of thing. The script doesn’t make clear if they actually believe a guy who had a grenade shot into his chest and exploded died in an accident, though they will later pretend a different guy getting shot into his chest from a few feet distance with a gun that didn’t belong to him committed suicide. At least, nobody does much investigating or other nonsense. The audience does of course already know there’s a group of supposedly sneaky and competent, but actually loud and silly, assassins making the union rounds.

Fortunately, an old college buddy of Jackson, one Tony (Robert Davi in a short but sweaty appearance), asks our hero for help because he’s convinced he’s the next on the list of the killers; and he’s absolutely right. Tony can even point Jackson to the man he is pretty sure to be responsible – rich asshole Peter Dellaplane (Craig T. Nelson). Dellaplane just happens to be exactly the same rich asshole whose son Jackson beat up (or mutilated, the dialogue’s a bit vague here) and got into prison, and who then did his best to ruin Jackson’s career. One might believe that’s a bit of an additional motivating factor, so it won’t come as too much of a surprise that Jackson soon finds himself sniffing around Dellaplane’s (evil) business, perhaps finding allies in Dellaplane’s wife Patrice (Sharon Stone before she was famous) and his junkie singer mistress Sydney Ash (Vanity when she was sort of famous). Explosions are soon too follow, as are absurd attempts at framing Jackson for murder that of course cut it with his brain dead colleagues.

Action Jackson is a rather likeable attempt to turn Carl Weathers into a black American action hero, kinda like a Schwarzenegger who can act and doesn’t look horrifying. In an interesting turn of events, the film doesn’t nod in the direction of classic blaxploitation flicks at all, and focuses on late 80s style US action movie tropes, treating its hero’s blackness with casualness. Given the comparative lack of other action vehicles starring Weathers, it can’t have been terribly successful at the box office, though it’s a rather entertaining film if you’re willing and able to at least ignore the typical flaws of US action cinema of this point in time. So please don’t think about the cartoonish incompetence of a movie police force that makes even the worst real world one (and boy, they do get pretty terrible, don’t they?) look like a band of geniuses and heroes; ignore the fact that the bad guy’s plan – he apparently murders lots of people to control the union so he can then use its influence to some time in the vague future become the power behind the throne of an as of now imaginary president – makes not a lick of sense; and please, don’t even try to find connections between anything in the film’s world and the real one.

Ideally, in an action movie of this style, these flaws shouldn’t just be things to be tolerated. As a matter of fact, they are supposed to be enjoyed, and boy, is Action Jackson enjoyable. Craig T. Nelson is awesome as the ultra-violent rich slime ball, his plan is pretty damn funny, his goons are clearly supposed to be cool but are very desperately not, so they are ideally positioned to be shouted at, be-one-linered and murdered by a hero who really needs to get creative with his own violence because he has to survive much of the film without a gun (he’s obviously taking the bit where he’s not allowed to be armed seriously even once people start and try to murder him). Weathers is very fun to watch as Jackson, giving the typical US macho hero some human traits, even making him pretty likeable. It helps that the man’s dignity seems undisturbed by even the cheesiest and most nonsensical one-liner (my personal favourite is “Chill out!”, before he burns a guy to death), nor by the film’s sudden bursts of what I surmise is humour. And if you’re interested in the baser things, Stone and Vanity both have a bit of nudity in here; though we actually see much more of shirtless Weathers, so there’s hopefully something for everyone here.

The whole bag of lovable nonsense was directed by Craig R. Baxley. Baxley has an extensive list of credits in stunt teams for film and TV, is credited just as extensively with various second unit directing jobs, directed a few episodes of The A-Team, and then – starting with the film at hand – made three well liked – well, by people like me who enjoy this sort of thing – action movies before he trotted off to become a dependable and solid TV director. His stunt background certainly shows in the quality of the stunt work here, with every bit of carnage and violence shot to full effect, Baxley clearly operating on the directorial basis that the audience wants to get as good a look at possible at what he has to offer here. In other words, there’s not boring action scene here. Even better, Baxley does know how to stage an entertaining dialogue sequence too, providing his actors with many an opportunity to chew the scenery or to have fun with the general absurdity of things.


As a matter of fact, I think Action Jackson is much better – and definitely more entertainingly – directed than most of the more mainstream US action movies of its era that for my tastes tend to be not terribly well paced – the works of Harlin and McTiernan obviously excluded. I certainly prefer Weathers to Schwarzenegger, too, so clearly, I judge this film “better than Commando”.