Darktown Strutters

Looking for the weirdest blaxploitation movie ever? Look no further! This piece of cinematic insanity is incomprehensible and chock full of lame humour, yet it is just so out there that you cannot but admire its sheer audacity. Its story, such that it is, has a female motorcycle gang (dressed in the coolest biker gear I have ever seen) ride into town and encounter a never-ending conveyor belt of weirdos. There's no point in detailing the synopsis beyond this as I am not sure it really matters. There are some outrageous colourful sets, comedy relief racist cops(!?), a drug dealer in a white cowboy suit who pedals an ice cream cart with all his wares in it, a karate fanatic who busts moves ALL the time, a colour-co-ordinated KKK biker gang, soul groups who break into song at the drop of a fedora hat, pig men in capes, a minstrel performance(!?) and a human cloning device devised by a mad scientist. Its more an experience than anything else. Points awarded for sheer nerve.

Black babe Trina Parks will always have a place in movie history - and in my heart - for her role as Thumper in one of the most memorable scenes of "Diamonds Are Forever", where she and Bambi team up against James Bond. Before seeing "Darktown Strutters", I was hoping for an action flick along the lines of "Cleopatra Jones", but this film is more of a (literally) dopey / surreal spoof, with bright colors, outrageous props and outfits, sped-up slapstick, out-of-nowhere musical numbers, and a loony sci-fi plot involving cloning. The main problems are two: 1) It's not funny enough, 2) The lunacy cannot sustain this movie even for just 81 minutes. Still, its audacity makes it worth a look, and the women that comprise the title gang are all beautiful. (**)

"Darktown strutters" uses the most elaborate, colorful, and huge props and sets like the interior of the "pot-sicle" freezer complete with an igloo. The costumes are some of the most outlandish in the blaxploitation genre. The biker women wear rhinestoned pink and bright yellow jumpsuits and feather head dresses. The comedy is very basic slapstick which relies a lot on the props and action (like kung-fu moves, pies in the face and other uninteresting activities) rather than interesting dialogue or inventive action. Its overall "weirdness" was so obviously trying to be weird that it became sort of routine.

Darktown Strutters has to rate right up there with The Forbidden Zone for goodnatured, unbridled kinetic energy, outright insanity, and its willful desire to offend. This is a surreal flick in which everything is over the top to such a degree you have to wonder if it was due to drug use or if it was a purposeful creation of satire. In any case, I was entertained and appalled at the same time. But then again, I don't think that a middle aged white guy in the 21st century was really the intended audience for this film. The audience for this flick was the inner-city black-theater crowd of the mid-seventies. I just wonder how it played back in the day? Did they laugh along with the exaggerated black stereotypes, seeing it all as a satirical take on how black culture was seen by the mainstream? Or were they up in arms, seeing it as a slap in their collective faces by white filmmakers? I wonder. Was Darktown THE definitive satire of the "Blaxploitation" genre, or was it the genre's nadir?

Directed by William Witney and written by George Armitage, Darktown Strutters is quite simply, the forerunner to I'M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA! It is slapstick comedy that was seen on a bigger budget in BLAZING SADDLES, but because of the storyline it was quite ahead of its time. The Darktown Strutters, a group of female bikers, come into Watts, where Syreena(fearless leader of the quartet) is looking for her mother. In the middle of it all, a racist, fast food magnate is plotting to manipulate the Black community for his own intentions. Highly stylized, and fast-paced, what makes Darktown Strutters so silly is its contemporary take on urban America and racism. Modern issues such as abortion, fast food chains, cloning, police brutality, and racism are interwoven quite effectively. The villain of the piece, one Colonel Louisville Cross, made his millions as owner of the Sky Hog fast food chain: where the pork ribs are bonesuckin' good! It is a very amusing spin on the benevolent image of the dearly departed Colonel Sanders(of KFC fame), who walked the earth when this film was released. It's also funny how they avoided copyright infringement by replacing fried chicken with pork: the other white meat. It's also funny to see Syreena's contempt for the Colonel the minute she sees him. It's easy to see why the movie is overlooked. During that period, I really don't think Black Americans were in the mood for such comedies, especially when the Blaxploitation era was full of hardcore action flicks. I think too many viewers on the IMDB, who have seen this, just don't get some of the jokes. If you were around during that time, and/or if you are of African American descent, you will get a lot of the comedy on display. To compare this to Car Wash makes no sense. And it is not as weird as people make it out to be. As I said earlier, it was simply ahead of its time.