The Guy from Harlem

WARNING: The following review contains abuse of exclamation points.

Groooooch!

THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE.

Let me repeat this to make sure you get it.

THE. WORST. MOVIE. EVER. MADE.

Wait. I don't think I got it quite right yet.

THE!! WORST!! MOVIE!! EVER!! MADE!!

Worse than anything made by Ed Wood (including his "adult" movies)! Worse than anything by Bill Rebane, or Coleman Francis, or Richard Cunha, or Jerry Warren! Worse than MANOS! Worse than THE CREEPING TERROR! Worse than MONSTER-A-GO-GO (okay, maybe not)! Worse than BATTLEFIELD EARTH! Worse than FREDDY GOT FINGERED! Worse than PACIFIC HEIGHTS! Worse than Eddie Murphy's BOOMERANG! Worse than BABY GENIUSES 2! Wow! Stunning! Bad film-making at its worst! An all time low! Almost impossible for it to fail more than it did! Hilarious!

Teeth-grindingly awful! Everything about this movie is substandard! The lowest possible budget! Must have been written by a 12-year-old! Worse than amateurish acting! Everyone in this movie is a terrible actor! Leaden pacing! Abysmal shot composition! Poor staging! Terrible sound! (You can hear the camera rolling throughout the movie...)

The worst stunts I've ever seen! Most fake fight scene ever filmed! Awful dialog! The least amount of romantic chemistry ever seen between a male and female lead! Lousy music! (Actually the music is the least horrible thing about this movie, but it's still pretty bad.)

Ridiculously unlikely plot! Stilted exposition! A woman supposedly from Africa with an American accent! I still have not used enough exclamation points to convince you just HOW BAD this movie truly is!!!!

All budding MST3K trainees, attention: this is boot camp for the cynical movie critic. You will be LITERALLY BLOWN AWAY (hyperbole there: you will only be METAPHORICALLY blown away, not literally) by how truly awful, laughably bad and bargain basement this movie really is. Your jaw will hit the floor, your hair will curl, and your eyes will not believe what they are seeing.

If you read this comment and all the others regarding this movie, and still take a chance, don't come running back to any of us. You will either be rolling on the floor laughing the uncontrollable laughter of the truly insane or clawing your eyes out if you stick with this bloated cinematic pustule till the end.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Either this is one of the worst films ever made, even giving 70s blaxploitation an even badder name, or it is a wonderfully constructed parody of the whole genre. It could be the first satirical post-modernist film; pre-post-modernism in fact. On watching it you could think to yourself, are they being serious or is it a pastiche? Have they reduced the genre to its basic elements then re-constructed them into a profound meditation on the plight of the outsider engaged in a "left handed form of human endeavor." Are the pauses in dialogue due to the incompetence of the actors or is an attempt to cross-pollinate the gangster film with a Harold Pinter-ish sensibility? Is the crude photography a pioneering Dogme film long before its time? Is this indeed a lost masterpiece, worthy of Bergman, Dreyer or Welles? No. This is one of the worst films ever made.

"The Guy From Harlem" is strictly filled with amateurs--and NOTHING about the film is polished or appears very good. It truly looks as if no one from the film had any experience in the industry and they were all just winging it! It is a terrible film--though I have seen worse.

The CIA wants the hero to protect the wife of an African head of state. So, inexplicably, instead of protecting her themselves, they seek out the private dick, Al Connors. Connors completes this assignment--along with beating up a few baddies and having his way with the sexy lady. Then, a mobster approaches Connors--his daughter has been kidnapped. So, Connors beats up some baddies and, not surprisingly, has his way with this lady as well. Both plots are amazingly similar and I have no idea why they didn't just have one plot instead of two which were nearly identical.

Al Connors (Loy Hawkins) is one of the lowest energy and least exciting blaxploitation heroes I've ever seen in a film. He lacks style but makes up for it in crappy fighting skills and no charisma. He isn't helped any by the fact that most of the supporting actors cannot deliver their lines--at least Hawkins does not stumble over his lines--he more just strolls through them in slow-motion. Overall, you've got cheap sets, poor acting, horrendous dialog, a repetitive plot and nothing positive to distinguish this film from the pack. Dull beyond belief.

The blaxploitation fad was already in decline in the late 70's, and films like "The Guy From Harlem" were made. "Shaft" or "Black Belt Jones" this is not. It does have a funky score ("that cat is a baaaaad dude"), some beautiful black women and occasionally amusing dialogue. But the production is completely amateurish - there are quite a few cases of fumbled lines that remained in the final cut, probably because the producers couldn't afford second takes. It's billed as an action film, but it's mostly talk: virtually all of the action is fight scenes, and virtually all of the fight scenes are comically bad, playground-level. The fighting in this movie is even worse than the fighting in "T.N.T Jackson" - and that really should tell you something. (*1/2)

I got this movie in the Drive-in 50-pack collection. It's a filler film that is complete garbage. It's a blaxploitation film about a kidnapping but more like soft-core porn-garbage. I agree with another reviewer that the film should have been left for the porn-racket instead of trying to pass this off as an action crime-drama.

Z-rating all the way. Bad acting, pitiful story, and nudity. A crappy excuse to put boobs and soft-core porn in to a blaxploitation film.

This is worse than the bottom of the barrel, the film is buried deep under where the barrel is sitting.

THIS is the world's worst film, if it isn't then it's in the top 10 ten list. Why Mill Creek decided to put this rubbish in the Drive-in 50-pack is beyond me. This is not the kind of film that should be circulated but should be burned the garbage pile.

1/10