Velvet Smooth

For a low-budget 70's martial arts film, I thought it was pretty entertaining. The soundtrack is really a hoot, as are the sets and costumes. I especially enjoyed the scene where King and Velvet are on the sofa and you can actually see the audio boom shifting back and forth at the bottom of the screen! When Velvet speaks her line the boom points at her and when King says something, the boom races back toward him--hilarious! I noticed that the casino bouncer is one of the "family" from "Super Fly". There are some amusing parallels: Velvet takes off her bracelet at home, cut to bracelets being stolen at the casino robbery. Also, during the fight scene on the top of the MTA building, the costumes match the colors and shapes of the hele-pad. I thought the Kojak lookalike was a really strange touch and whatever they were using for stage blood looked like marinara! Fantastic!

The fun, shorter, rifftrax version is on pluto channel. And the less edited, regular version showing on roku channel. Johnnie hill is velvet smooth... the only role she ever did! When someone starts taking their payoff money, the gang goes to a detective agency to get answers. Which is what you do, when someone steals your gang's money! I guess. And of course, bodies start piling up, and the coppers take about three minutes to investigate, then take off. The run time is listed as ninety three minutes in imdb. The pluto version is only seventy four minutes, but on roku, it's ninety three minutes. Pretty big differences. All kinds of cussing, so it wasn't the swears that were cut out on pluto. Lots of badly choreographed gang fight scenes in parking lots. The actors mostly stand around, and sometimes walk to the center and fake fight someone. You'll see rené van clief , who was also in dolemite! Filmed in brooklyn, according to imdb. The picture quality is pretty rough on pluto. For most of the film, there are tiny residual marks of film decay in most of the screen. But they have been cleaned up on roku! Directed by michael fink. One of the two films he directed. And now we know why. It's so bad. No wonder rifftrax mocked it. Certainly interesting as a blacksploitation film from the 1970s.

This little known film is worthy of seeking out . So o.k the production values are limited and the walls move when they close doors , but don't yours ? Our heroine is the foxy detective who is trying to find out who is breaking in to a local drug tzars turf , with plot lines skipping all over the place she soon learns not to trust anyone .. why was she hired in the first place..whats the alteria motive of the gang leader. Velvet soon discovers the truth and unleashes a whole can of "whoop ass" on the hapless baddies. Its not the best but its a hell of a lot better than the worst , and our leading lady..whoa !

'Velvet Smooth' has to be the least convincing martial arts movie I've ever seen. I was laughing so much I got a pain, I could have beaten most of these guys/gals and I'm disabled!

It really is bottom of the barrel stuff but it gets a 1.5 for entertainment value, for Johnnie Hill-Hudgins in her one and only acting role, as Velvet Smooth, (who came across better than any of the other actors in the film) AND for the last line which just had me staring at the screen in disbelief...I mean WTF :-)

If you love watching bad movies that are hilarious then I direct you to 'Velvet Smoooooooth'!

OK, I believe an in-depth analysis is not exactly necessary for this one. Its only value is in the unintentional laughs it has to offer. The martial-arts choreography is a disgrace to the words "martial" and "arts". The girls may be sexy and smooth, but I'm sorry, a weekend's training in combat is just not enough. The stuntmen are a joke. The fights are slow, clunky, and graceless. "T.N.T Jackson" has better fight scenes than "Velvet Smooth". Peter Sellers and Burt Kwouk have better fight scenes in the "Pink Panther" films. "Benny Hill" has better fight scenes - wait, "Benny Hill" has no fight scenes, I just got carried away by all the sped-up action. Well, you get the idea anyway. I think 0.5 out of 4 stars is a fair enough grade.