One type of movie that just doesn’t seem to get made very often anymore is the “hangout film” that simply spends a couple of hours letting viewers watch people as they go about their normal routines. While these movies aren’t necessarily realistic, since they have to come up with some form of drama to make things interesting, they can provide entertainment simply by allowing people to spend time with people who bounce off each other interestingly and occasionally giving them something funny or dramatic to react to.

That’s the sort of movie that Car Wash is, and what’s remarkable about it is that it really does seem like a day in the life of a group of people working at the eponymous establishment as they joke around with each other, find what enjoyment they can get out of their work, and react to the random group of people who decided they needed their vehicles cleaned on that particular day. It’s less a movie than a collection of incidents, spending just enough time with the characters to get an idea of who they are and what working around them is like.

This movie seems to be at least a little bit more professionally made than a lot of what made up the Blaxploitation genre, probably because it had an actual budget and was funded by a major studio. By this point, director Michael Schultz had built some experience making movies like Cooley High and Honeybaby, Honeybaby, so he knew what he was doing. The results were pretty successful too, both critically (the movie was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival!) and commercially. Plus, it had a killer soundtrack, with the title song (by the band Rose Royce, who did several other songs for the movie, including “I Want to Get Next to You”) being good enough that people still sing along to it 50 years later.

It’s probably not necessary to go into too much detail about the plot of the movie, such as it is, since much of the pleasure of watching comes from just spending time with these characters. They’re a group of mostly Black men working at the Dee-Luxe Car Wash, and they range from older men who focus on just doing their work to young goofballs who spend as much time messing around as they do washing cars. In fact, the number of people working at any given time does make one wonder about the financial viability of the enterprise, but that probably comes from the desire to cram as many enjoyable characters into the movie as possible.

Perhaps the most prominent of these is T.C. (Franklyn Ajaye), a guy with a gigantic afro who spends most of the day running to a phone booth to try to win a radio call-in contest so that he can get some tickets to a local concert and ask out a waitress at a nearby diner whom he has apparently been harassing on a daily basis. He’s also trying to promote a superhero he created named The Fly, and his desire to be a crimefighter leads to one of the sillier scenes, where he becomes convinced that a customer is the notorious “pop bottle bomber” who has been in the news recently.

Other plots/minor conflicts involve a fat guy named Hippo (James Spinks) who patronizes a local prostitute who spends what seems like the entire day changing in the car wash’s ladies’ room (she’s involved in another ongoing bit of funny business involving a cab driver played by George Carlin who is searching for her because she didn’t pay her fare; because she was wearing a wig at the time, he keeps asking around for a “blonde Black chick,” not realizing that she has just switched to a different wig). Saturday Night Live’s Garrett Morris plays a bookie who gets arrested for having a large number of unpaid parking tickets. There’s an older ex-con named Lonnie (Ivan Dixon, who was the director of The Spook Who Sat by the Door) who gets upset when his parole officer stops by to check on him. And there’s a Black revolutionary played by Bill Duke (this was his first movie, and he went on to have a long career as a character actor) who everybody calls Duane, causing him to get mad and remind them that he has changed his name to Abdullah Mohammed Akbar.

Also of note is the character Lindy, a flamboyant gay man played by Antonio Fargas (from Foxy Brown, Across 110th Street, and plenty more). His initial appearance was worrisome, since movies of the time weren’t known for their nuanced portrayal of gay people. But perhaps because this movie was written by the openly gay Joel Schumacher (who would go on to become a successful director, even if most of his movies weren’t very good), he gets treated with some dignity, with the other characters mostly just accepting him for who he is. In one of the few moments where someone makes a comment about his sexuality, he gets a great comeback, telling the guy, “Honey, I’m more man than you’ll ever be and more woman than you’ll ever get!” It’s a quietly revolutionary depiction of queerness for the time, and even if it involves some stereotypical flamboyance, he’s as well-rounded a character as anyone in the ensemble.

Aside from whatever antics the workers get up to, the movie consists of various incidents when people come to get their cars washed, including an amusing bit where a white lady from Beverly Hills brings in her Mercedes while yelling at her kid to avoid puking inside the vehicle, spends her entire time at the car wash being rude to everyone, and refusing to give a guy a tip because of a speck on her car, only to have the kid puke all over the place immediately after she drives away. But the most notable visit comes from a fancy limo carrying a well-known preacher named Daddy Rich (Richard Pryor), who everybody gathers around and fawns over because he’s so rich and famous. After he gets into an argument with Abdullah, who calls him out for being a hypocrite, the women accompanying him (played by the Pointer Sisters) break out into an actual musical number in his defense. It’s a pretty delightful scene all around, and one of many in the movie.

As much as the movie is about fun times and characters who mostly enjoy working together, it manages to deliver a surprisingly emotional climactic scene. When Lonnie stays behind after closing to count the money in the cash register, Abdullah (who had been fired earlier in the day by the white man who owns the car wash) shows up with a gun to try to steal whatever money is in the safe. However, instead of going the usual route of 1970s movies and ending with a tragedy, Lonnie is able to talk Abdullah down, speaking to him from his own experience as an ex-con and admonishing him not to follow the same path. He provides comfort, hugging Abdullah and promising to help him get his job back so that he can have an actual future rather than the life of violence and isolation that so many young Black men end up with. It’s a remarkably intimate moment, and a reminder of the power of emotional connection, especially for those who are so often denied it.

The movie ends with something that’s fairly unique: closing credits in audio form, with the radio announcer who has been heard throughout the film naming the actors who played different characters as we see some of their memorable moments. That’s just one of the highly enjoyable elements of this movie, which ended up being a delight. As much fun as Blaxploitation movies can be when they depict action and crime among people who are struggling for recognition in American society, it’s also nice to get a glimpse of the vibrancy of Black communities, with people finding meaning and striving for more even when spending their days performing menial tasks. They might not make movies like this anymore, but the time is always ripe for a comeback.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night
The Education of Sonny Carson
Jive Turkey
The Black Godfather
Black Samson
The Dynamite Brothers
Shoot it Black, Shoot it Blue
Solomon King
Honeybaby, Honeybaby
Abby
Sweet Jesus, Preacherman
TNT Jackson
The Beast Must Die
Sheba, Baby
Lord Shango
The Black Gestapo
Dolemite
Cornbread, Earl and Me
Force Four
Cooley High
The Candy Tangerine Man
Bucktown
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Darktown Strutters
Let’s Do It Again
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Together Brothers
Take a Hard Ride
Mandingo
Mahogany
Friday Foster
Mean Johnny Barrows
Aaron Loves Angela
Lady Cocoa
Bad, Black and Beautiful
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Adiós Amigo
Black Shampoo
The River Niger
Velvet Smooth
Death Journey
J.D.’s Revenge
Drum
The Human Tornado
Devil’s Express

The genre of fantasy lends itself well to epic stories, although that epic-ness can take different forms. The most obvious involves large-scale battles and other world-shaking events, but in many cases, what can be most effective is the sense of a world that has thousands of years of history, with events that have affected people and shaped society in both the recent past and stretching back into antiquity. When the creators of fantasy worlds can sell the idea of a rich history and complex relationships between both individual people and larger forces, readers/viewers can easily become lost in these settings and want to explore them further.

That’s part of what makes the anime series Frieren so special, since it’s clear that the creators have thought through a world with an extensive history, with the title character being an elf who is well over 1,000 years old and has lived through untold changes over her lifetime. The exploration of her character over the course of the series is fascinating, both in how she has learned to relate to others and in how her philosophies toward the use of magic have developed.

Frieren is a combination of a wise old master and an emotional naïf. While she has never bothered to develop strong relationships with humans, since, from her perspective, their lives are over in the blink of an eye, she is coming to recognize the value of forming bonds with others. And at the same time, she’s a terrifyingly powerful mage who has spent centuries developing her skills. As the series slowly reveals just how powerful she is, it finds a nice contrast between her unassuming, almost childlike outward appearance and the depth of knowledge and experience below the surface.

The series also takes an interesting approach that is implied by the subtitle, beginning after the point when most fantasy stories would end. Frieren was a member of a party of heroes who went on the sort of quest one would expect to experience in an RPG video game, journeying through dangerous lands and finally defeating the villainous Demon King. We don’t actually get to see any of these battles; instead, the focus is on the aftermath, with the characters being celebrated for their heroism and figuring out what to do with their lives as things go back to some version of normal.

While the other members of the party, who consist of a fighter named Himmel who served as the leader, a priest named Heiter, and a dwarf warrior named Eisen, decide to settle down and live out the rest of their days peacefully, Frieren chooses to travel around on her own, seeking out interesting spells and building her magical repertoire. She remarks that maybe she’ll come and visit the others in 50 years or so, and sure enough, the series skips forward in time to the point where most of the rest of the party is old and on the verge of death.

After Himmel’s death, Frieren starts to wonder if her aloof approach to relationships has caused her to miss out on important experiences, but she doesn’t seem to know how to make the necessary changes to actually bond with other people. She ends up getting tricked into doing so by Heiter, who has taken a young human mage named Fern under his wing. He asks Frieren to translate an obscure magical tome, a task that will take several years, while providing Fern with some training in her spare time, although this is a pretense to get her to form a bond with Fern and agree to take her along on her journeys.

That ends up serving as the basis for the series, with Frieren and Fern traveling together and dealing with various obstacles they encounter. They do eventually come up with an overall goal, with Frieren deciding that she wants to travel far to the north, into a realm where people’s souls go after they die, so that she can connect with her friends one last time after neglecting her relationships with them during their lives. However, this is the type of story where the journey is much more important than the destination. While there is some action as the characters encounter monsters and other threats, much of the emphasis is on quiet moments as relationships develop and people contemplate the workings of the world and the changes that have taken place in this land over years, decades, and centuries.

One of the first indications that this series has more on its mind than typical fantasy tropes comes in an episode where Frieren and Fern travel through a village that Frieren and her compatriots had saved from a super-powerful demon 80 years ago. Unable to fully destroy the demon, they had sealed it into a statue-like form, but now, the containment is breaking down, so Frieren will have to take care of the situation. She informs Fern that this demon had created a horrific spell that wreaked havoc on humans during the war against the Demon King. But when Frieren awakens the demon, Fern is surprised to find that she can easily block his spells, which she describes as “ordinary offensive magic.” Frieren reveals that during the time the demon has been in stasis, human mages have incorporated his spells into their repertoire, building defenses against them and refining them into more powerful forms. Time has marched on in his absence, and the world has moved well past the point where anything he can do would be a threat.

That ends up being one of the themes of the series as a whole, with the 1,000-year-old Frieren being a witness to the ongoing development of nations and technologies. Her mentor, a human mage named Flamme, died centuries ago, but Flamme had a vision for a sort of democratization of magic, believing that it could be used not only to defeat the Demon King who had once seemed unstoppable, but that it could also serve as a benefit for society as a whole. Frieren has carried on Flamme’s legacy through fits and starts, sometimes playing a direct role in the development of magic and sometimes being a reclusive wanderer, but as she builds a relationship with Fern and forms connections with others she meets on their journeys, she begins to understand the impact that she has had on the world and the ways she may be able to help shape the future.

That bigger picture is fascinating, and it develops over the course of this season, but much of the series focuses on smaller moments. Frieren and Fern (and others who they encounter or who join their party, including a young, powerful axe-wielding warrior named Stark) come across a variety of regular people who are just living their lives, and they find that helping them out in small ways is just as satisfying as winning major victories in battle. There are numerous flashbacks to Frieren’s time with the other heroes who defeated the Demon King, often emphasizing the heroic nature of Himmel and the lessons that she learned from her time with him. While he’s kind of a stereotypical hero, the type of character who serves as a semi-blank slate that people playing an RPG can control and project themselves onto, his focus on helping people out in big and small ways while finding enjoyment in his adventures ends up being inspiring.

While the series features many quiet, contemplative moments, it also delivers on the action and spectacle that one wants to see in a fantasy epic. Frieren, Fern, and Stark come across various threats, and even though Frieren is revealed to be ultra-powerful, the series does a good job of coming up with obstacles that can’t be instantly surmounted. In some cases, this involves pitting Fern against opponents and demonstrating how she has developed impressive skills under Frieren’s tutelage, and in others, something happens to limit Frieren’s abilities. The action is depicted gorgeously, featuring fluid movements of characters during fights and lots of eye-popping visuals as beams of magical energy are fired and the environment is manipulated in dynamic ways. It’s exciting stuff, wringing the maximum amount of drama out of conflicts and providing one dazzling experience after another throughout the entire season.

The latter half of the season features a story arc that expands the series considerably, introducing a number of characters who will likely play a major role in future storylines and building an interesting conflict between Frieren and another powerful elf mage. The setup for this story involves a series of tests that Frieren and Fern need to take to obtain a certification from the authorities that regulate magic in the lands they are traveling through, and this provides some great opportunities to explore the ways magic is used by different characters. Between battles between different styles of magic, the need to come up with clever uses of magic to accomplish certain tasks, and clashes in philosophies between different characters, the whole arc provides a great look at the richness of the world that has been created. Plus, it provides a way for Frieren to really let loose with her magic, delivering a climax that has to be seen to be believed.

In keeping with the approach taken by the series, that climax comes a couple of episodes before the end of the season, allowing things to quiet down and return to the contemplative, character-focused approach that often serves as the series’ baseline. Even though the level of excitement the series can reach can be high, the willingness to spend time on small moments and explore the characters’ inner lives and the ways their journeys and experiences have changed them is what makes it really special. If it can keep up this same level of quality as it continues, it could definitely be among the anime greats.

People who enjoy bad movies (a group that I’m proudly a member of, or else I wouldn’t have watched nearly as many of them for this project) can often find something to like about amateurish, low-budget stuff that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but sure seems like it was fun to make. There are plenty of examples of that in the Blaxploitation scene, and while Devil’s Express is neither the best nor the worst, it has enough affable goofiness to make it worth watching.

By 1976, martial arts movies had become popular enough as both a subgenre of Blaxploitation and through imports from Hong Kong that it might not have been too hard to get another one financed. That could explain why this one served as a star vehicle for Warhawk Tanzania, who was one of the members of a personality-free ensemble in Force Four but here gets a chance to at least try to convey some relatable emotions. He probably could have benefited from spending as much time in acting classes as he did picking his stage name, but he’s surprisingly not terrible.

Tanzania stars as Luke, a giantly-afroed master of a dojo in New York City who gets to show off his skills fighting some members of a Chinese gang and fending off a supernatural presence. The movie actually opens in “China: 200 B.C.” with a scene in which a group of monks carry a large box through the woods and lower it into a cave along with some sort of mystical amulet, after which they all kneel down in a circle so the leader can execute every member of the group with a sword. Cut to New York for the opening credits, which intersperse scenes of city life with POV shots in which a camera moves through a subway accompanied by ominous sounds on the soundtrack. Has whatever was in the box escaped and made its way halfway across the world? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves; apparently, this is just a teaser for future creepiness.

The actual plot of the movie kicks in with a scene where Luke is providing some karate lessons to a local cop named Cris (Larry Fleishman), who is so impressed with the master’s skills that he says he could be a good asset to the police force. The very idea of working with the cops for more than rudimentary lessons pisses Luke off, and he tells Cris, “The next time you try to recruit me into that pig pen of yours is the day I stop pulling my punches and ice you!” Anyway, he can’t be bothered with that nonsense, since he and what is apparently his best student, a dumb guy named Rodan (Wilfredo Roldan), are traveling to Hong Kong to take some sort of test that will apparently certify Luke as a kung fu master.

In China, both Rodan and Luke test their skills against a guy who seems like he is meant to be a legendary figure in the world of martial arts. Neither one of them fares very well, although Rodan is bad enough that he gets dismissed with a disdainful hand-wave, while Luke is apparently promising enough that he is given a scroll that is meant to serve as a diploma or something (none of this is explained very well). After the test, the two of them are sent off on a rowboat to a neighboring island to meditate for a week. And wouldn’t you know it, when Rodan gets bored and goes wandering through the woods, he stumbles on the cave from the prologue, enters, and takes the amulet from the box that is still sitting there.

After they leave and head back to the States, we see a shot of the box, and a monstrous hand smashes through from within. Yep, Rodan has unleashed a terrible supernatural creature that will be coming to wreak awful vengeance! But first, it has to get on a boat to New York, which it does by possessing a nearby businessman. What must have been a weeks-long journey goes by in the space of a single cut, and the possessed man gets off the boat and begins stumbling his way through New York in search of the amulet that Rodan stole.

I use the word “stumbling” because to signify the monstrous nature of the possession, the filmmakers have given the man gigantic googly eyes through the simple method of painting his eyelids white. This means that the actor (Aki Aleong, I think, since he’s credited as “Chinese Businessman”) has to grope his way through these scenes while also pretending to react in surprise at everything that is happening around him and act like he’s afraid of bright lights that he can’t actually see with his eyes closed. It’s pretty hilarious.

While you might think that the rest of the movie would be about this evil creature, that’s only part of what happens. A good portion of the plot has to do with Rodan being a fuckup and getting into fights with a local gang known as the Red Dragons. This begins when he and a buddy buy some cocaine from a guy in a suit who doesn’t seem too worried about holding a large drug transaction on a busy city sidewalk in the middle of the day, and they are immediately robbed by some Chinese gang members. As they try to get revenge, this leads to an escalating series of martial arts brawls that threaten to turn into a full-on gang war.

These fights are pretty fun, with choreography that isn’t too bad (even if the movie has to sell punches and kicks with sound effects when we can see that there is six inches of space between the fists or feet that have allegedly connected with their targets) and performers who clearly have some martial arts/stunt training. They’re pretty even battles too, with Rodan and his pals holding their own against Chinese opponents who one would expect to have a higher level of skill. They don’t get very far when they attempt to use weapons like swords though, but that’s probably because roundhouse kicks are a lot more fun.

While all of this is going on, an increasing number of bodies are showing up in the subway where the monster is lurking, and Cris’s investigation of these horrific murders is getting nowhere. He gets saddled with a new partner named Sam (Stephen DeFazio), who spends most of his scenes explaining his theories about mutant cats, rats, and alligators escaping from the sewers to the subway to anyone who will listen.

As the gang war gets out of control, Luke eventually decides to get involved, and after beating up a bunch of the Red Dragons, he gets taken to someone who gives him an explanation about what is going on. This is some sort of ancient Chinese wise man, played by an actor whom the filmmakers have tried to make appear Buddha-like by plastering a bunch of modeling clay on his face. He informs Luke about what we’ve already figured out: there’s an ancient demon that has been unleashed, and the only way to stop it is to take the magic amulet into its lair in the subway and have a mental kung fu battle.

During the big climax, the demon takes various forms that are meant to mess with Luke’s mind, like his girlfriend or Rodan. It turns invisible at one point, and it also makes Luke think he’s going to be run over by a subway train. Eventually, it reverts to a monstrous form that looks like a low-rent Swamp Thing, and he’s able to prevail, beating it up and banishing it for good. It’s too bad the monks didn’t think of that strategy 2,000 years ago, but maybe they just didn’t bring the same level of skill to the table as Warhawk Tanzania.

Anyway, once the monster has been defeated, all is right with the world once again (never mind about the cocaine or the war between the gangs; apparently nobody cares about that anymore). The cops, who were stuck in a magical freeze frame while the battle was happening, are apparently satisfied with Luke’s explanation even though the monster disappeared and there is no evidence. Case closed; let’s all go home and let the credits roll!

This is a really dumb movie, with lots of amateurish touches, like a lengthy scene where nothing happens but Luke and his girlfriend walking around town that’s only there to pad out the running time and provide something that can happen during a terrible song playing in the background. It has nothing to say about urban life or the philosophy behind martial arts (one would expect Luke to play the disappointed mentor when he learns about Rodan’s botched drug deal, but that never happens). But when the action heats up, it gets pretty enjoyable. Plus, it has some memorable touches, like the outfit Luke wears to fight the demon, which consists of a set of gold-colored polyester bellbottom overalls worn over a bare chest. That’s the kind of thing that situates this movie exactly in the mid 1970s for maximum appeal to sickos like me. As bad as this is, I can’t be mad at it.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night
The Education of Sonny Carson
Jive Turkey
The Black Godfather
Black Samson
The Dynamite Brothers
Shoot it Black, Shoot it Blue
Solomon King
Honeybaby, Honeybaby
Abby
Sweet Jesus, Preacherman
TNT Jackson
The Beast Must Die
Sheba, Baby
Lord Shango
The Black Gestapo
Dolemite
Cornbread, Earl and Me
Force Four
Cooley High
The Candy Tangerine Man
Bucktown
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Darktown Strutters
Let’s Do It Again
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Together Brothers
Take a Hard Ride
Mandingo
Mahogany
Friday Foster
Mean Johnny Barrows
Aaron Loves Angela
Lady Cocoa
Bad, Black and Beautiful
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Adiós Amigo
Black Shampoo
The River Niger
Velvet Smooth
Death Journey
J.D.’s Revenge
Drum
The Human Tornado

Some of the lowest forms of discourse when it comes to superhero movies involve fans who get upset that characters aren’t depicted exactly the same as they were on the page. That can be an issue with any type of adaptation, but it seems like comic book nerds can be especially outspoken and tiresomely nitpicky when they believe that their favorite characters have not been treated with the proper level of respect.

Changes are pretty much always necessary in adaptations simply to make characters and plots work in a different medium. Getting caught up in how a specific character or plot point wasn’t handled in the exact manner that a certain viewer would have preferred can derail any attempts at serious discussion over whether a movie actually worked. But sometimes, it’s hard to avoid focusing on these types of issues, if only as one minor element of a movie to discuss rather than as an assessment of its overall merits.

That’s the position I’m in when writing about Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which was a perfectly fine superhero movie that had plenty of good action and some nice character work. It’s just about the best that anyone can expect from the Marvel Cinematic Universe at this point, with enjoyably quippy dialogue, a propulsive plot that takes some interesting twists and turns, and various references to comics and hints about whatever might happen in future MCU entries. But as good as it was overall, its use of the character the Punisher left me scratching my head.

First off, I don’t believe the movie ever actually refers to him as the Punisher, with Spider-Man just calling him “Frank” throughout. I don’t think it even provides a complete view of the distinctive skull logo that he wears on his chest. There’s no attempt to explain who he is, what his motivations are, or why he gets involved in the plot, other than because he’s some sort of crime-fighter. That’s a bizarre choice; has any other Marvel movie or other superhero movie not bothered to introduce a major character or explain anything about them?

The movie’s entire approach to the character is confusing. He first shows up during a scene in which Spider-Man is trying to stop a tank that is rampaging through New York. Why he bothers to get involved at all is unknown, and who knows what he thinks he’s going to do, since he just chases the tank in his Punisher-mobile and fires grenades at it, which have no effect. He’s really just another obstacle for Spidey, who has to protect bystanders from the additional destruction the Punisher is causing while also trying to stop the tank. It makes the Punisher look like a violent idiot who doesn’t think through his actions and doesn’t care about whether they could harm anyone else.

This is borne out throughout the rest of the movie, where the Punisher doesn’t really do anything to help and usually makes matters worse. He seems pretty grumpy, but he softens over the course of the movie, eventually becoming an emotional mess over the fact that he may have hurt someone he cared about. He turns into yet another version of the standard wiseass MCU character, and while his antics are amusing enough, they’re so far from a recognizable version of the Punisher that one wonders why they didn’t just make up some random vigilante character to serve a similar role.

Part of the issue is that the Punisher is kind of an odd fit in the Marvel universe, in either cinematic or comic book versions. He was originally created as a Spider-Man villain in the 1970s, a character who could serve as a counterpoint to the heroism that readers expect from superhero characters. His deal is that he was a Vietnam veteran whose family was killed in the crossfire of a mafia hit, which led him to become a vigilante who waged a war on crime itself, hunting down and killing any and all criminals whom he believed were deserving of, well, punishment.

That was a compelling enough of a basis for a character that he quickly grew beyond his initial role, becoming a popular antihero. He fit right alongside many of the popular action movie heroes in movies of the 1970s and 1980s, who were often police officers who didn’t let things like laws or rules get in the way of chasing down and killing the people they had deemed the “bad guys.” His character was developed by writers like Mike Baron and Chuck Dixon, and it was perfected by Garth Ennis, who spent several years exploring how a character like this works and building incredible action and crime stories around him.

Ennis understood that one of the most important things about the Punisher is that he’s a fundamentally unhappy character, someone who is driven to do what he does but gets no enjoyment out of it. At best, he feels satisfaction, but he never gets anything more than a moment of solace, since he knows that there are more terrible people out there who are ruining lives and causing death and destruction. He’s a machine, driven by a constant need to continue his never-ending quest, refusing to let anything stop him from enacting vengeance on those who deserve it.

While these are the makings of a great pulp hero, the very nature of the character is incongruous with the rest of the Marvel Universe. He upsets the delicate balance that needs to be maintained when vigilantes operate outside the law but do enough good that the authorities allow them to continue operating. Superheroes may sometimes come into conflict with the police or the government, but by saving the day, they prove that they’re worth keeping around, or at least that we can suspend our disbelief about whether they would actually be able to continue acting in an extra-legal manner.

With the Punisher, there’s no way to maintain that suspension of disbelief. He’s an unrepentant murderer, and even if his victims are deserving, being murderous gangsters, drug dealers, and the like, the body count he has racked up is so high that there’s no way he would be anything other than public enemy number one. He would not only be the target of every local, state, and federal law enforcement agency, but regular superheroes would have no choice but to try to apprehend him as well. Some comics have tried to spin stories out of this tension, but the results have been unsatisfying, because due to the nature of superhero universes, the Punisher could never actually be captured or imprisoned, and he could never actually kill any of the heroes who tried to stop him. One side of the conflict or the other is going to come out looking stupid.

That might be why Spider-Man: Brand New Day can’t seem to figure out what to do with the character and is forced to make him just like its other superheroes, except that he uses guns. Spider-Man certainly wouldn’t be on board with his mission of murdering deserving criminals, so the movie can’t actually explain that this is what he does. One of the messages of the movie is about the need to avoid isolation and develop strong, supportive relationships with others, so the Punisher has to be forced into this mold, even if it goes against his fundamental nature as an antisocial vigilante who can never trust anyone, since they’re certain to betray him at some point. All of the sharp edges that might make people actually think about ethics and morality have been sanded off, resulting in a character that bears so little resemblance to the Punisher that the movie can’t even refer to him by that name.

As mentioned, this isn’t really a dealbreaker. The movie is fun, and the Punisher generally works well enough for the role he’s supposed to play. Due to the affability of the performance by Jon Bernthal, he fits right in to the rest of the ensemble. But whether people like me decide to get their panties in a twist due to the changes that have been made, or others who don’t really know who he is wonder exactly why he has been included, there are enough problems with his character that it might have been better if they hadn’t bothered to shove him into the movie in the first place.

The first Dolemite movie was kind of a proof of concept: could a popular comedian with little in the way of acting skills get a bunch of his buddies together and turn his personal into an actual movie? The whole thing was built around Rudy Ray Moore’s ability to deliver tough-guy one-liners, with at least some of the comedy coming from the incongruity of a somewhat dorky middle-aged man being a badass kung-fu action hero and a sex god that women couldn’t get enough of. It was very rough around the edges, sometimes seeming unsure about how seriously it should take itself, but there was plenty to enjoy, and it was clear that the well for additional comedy was just waiting to be tapped.

With the sequel, The Human Tornado, Moore and company improved on nearly every aspect, turning in a highly entertaining comedy that features exactly what you want to see: more goofball rhymes, excuses for action scenes with Dolemite doing ridiculous karate, sex scenes that go over the top in emphasizing Dolemite’s prowess between the sheets, and plenty of musical performances featuring sexy dancers. By this point, Moore had also figured out how to portray his on-screen persona without being stiff and unnecessarily dramatic; he plays everything tongue-in-cheek, recognizing the silliness of the character and the setting, while still getting a lot of mileage out of being one of the best people to ever deliver the word “motherfucker” (I’d say he was the reigning champion of the word until Samuel L. Jackson came along).

The plot of the movie is mostly beside the point, serving as a reason for Dolemite and his buddies to get into shootouts and karate battles with various bad guys. In the opening, Dolemite is a popular nightclub performer (unfortunately, we don’t get any long rhyming stories and only see a few highlights of his jokes intercut with a woman in a bikini doing an African-influenced dance), and he’s holding a party in a mansion that he has decided to generously donate to a children’s charity. This must be taking place somewhere in the South, because some white people driving by get upset that the mansion is filled with a bunch of Black people (that’s not the term they use, of course), so they get the local sheriff (J.B. Baron) to round up a posse and either shut the party down and run everyone out of town or just kill them all. During the confrontation, they stumble into a bedroom where Dolemite is having sex with a white woman, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s the sheriff’s wife! This leads to a car chase, which ends when Dolemite gets the drop on the sheriff, saying, “He think he bad and ain’t got no class; I’m gonna wrap this shotgun up his mothafuckin’ ass!”

With nothing left for them elsewhere, Dolemite and company (he has a core group of minions, one of whom is played by a young Ernie Hudson) decide to head to California, and when doing so, they accost a guy who pulls over when one of them is hitchhiking. In a bit of comedy that had me prepared to roll my eyes at the homophobia that was typical of movies of the time, the driver is a gay guy who is overjoyed that he gets to go to California. But even though he’s ridiculous and over-the-top in his effeminate manner of speech, he doesn’t seem to be a figure of mockery. Dolemite and the others just drag him along on their journey, and once they get to California, Dolemite seems delighted at how excited he is to be there.

In Los Angeles, Dolemite plans to connect with Queen Bee (Lady Reed, sort of reprising her role from the last movie), a nightclub owner who he knows, but she’s having some trouble of her own. A mobster named Cavaletti (Herb Graham) is upset that Queen Bee’s nightclub is more popular than his, so he sends some of his goons to smash the place up and kidnap a couple of the women who work there. He holds the women for ransom, forcing Queen Bee and her underlings to work for him, saying that he’ll kill them if she doesn’t cooperate.

That’s the main conflict of the movie, with Dolemite tracking down Queen Bee and making plans to combine their forces, find the kidnapped women, and take down Cavaletti. Also, the sheriff from earlier shows up, enlisting the local police chief to help him track down Dolemite and get some revenge. It’s all an excuse for ridiculous comedy, as Rudy Ray Moore postures around like the pimp-ish character he’s supposed to be, with everyone finding him to be the coolest cat in town.

In addition to Moore having figured out the right tone for his persona, the movie itself is put together in a way that emphasizes comedy. There are plenty of gags thrown in, such as when Dolemite is initally interrupted while having sex and is forced to run away naked and dive off an embankment, only for the movie to reverse and show the stunt a second time, flashing “Instant Replay” on the screen. Even goofier is a scene in which Dolemite seduces Cavaletti’s wife (Barbara Gerl), knocking on her door and pretending to be a salesman with a silly African accent. When he shows her a painting of a Black man and white woman having sex, it’s enough to send her into an erotic fugue, with the movie dissolving to a bizarre fantasy sequence in which a bunch of muscular, naked Black men pop out of children’s toy boxes and pose for her. When Dolemite does get into bed with her, it’s presented as the wildest sex ever, with the bed bouncing all over the room, the walls shaking, and the ceiling eventually falling down on top of them.

When Dolemite tracks down the kidnapped women and rescues them, he breaks out his karate moves, which are also presented in a hilarious fashion, with the action being sped up for extra comic effect, while still featuring some halfway decent action choreography. Moore plays into the nonsensical nature of a middle-aged man being a martial arts action hero, doing lots of ridiculous kung fu poses, waggling his head back and forth, and making motorboat sounds with his mouth when beating people up. It’s sublimely silly, striking exactly the tone needed for this type of low-budget action-comedy extravaganza.

I don’t know if there’s much more that needs to be said about this one, since you’re either on the movie’s wavelength and find it to be the perfect combination of Blaxploitation tropes and ridiculous comedy, or you just don’t like movies that are hilarious and fun. In addition to the fun action and constant parade of wild 70's fashion, there’s a highly enjoyable theme song that was co-written and sung by Rudy Ray Moore, as well as lots of performances by various singers and dancers in nightclub scenes sprinkled throughout the movie. By this point, Moore had gathered a company of solid performers and people who could make up for their lack of filmmaking experience with sheer enthusiasm. It was enough to get at least a couple more movies made before the whole Blaxploitation thing petered out, and those will be something to look forward to.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night
The Education of Sonny Carson
Jive Turkey
The Black Godfather
Black Samson
The Dynamite Brothers
Shoot it Black, Shoot it Blue
Solomon King
Honeybaby, Honeybaby
Abby
Sweet Jesus, Preacherman
TNT Jackson
The Beast Must Die
Sheba, Baby
Lord Shango
The Black Gestapo
Dolemite
Cornbread, Earl and Me
Force Four
Cooley High
The Candy Tangerine Man
Bucktown
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Darktown Strutters
Let’s Do It Again
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Together Brothers
Take a Hard Ride
Mandingo
Mahogany
Friday Foster
Mean Johnny Barrows
Aaron Loves Angela
Lady Cocoa
Bad, Black and Beautiful
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Adiós Amigo
Black Shampoo
The River Niger
Velvet Smooth
Death Journey
J.D.’s Revenge
Drum

Is it even possible to objectively review The Super Mario Galaxy Movie? For most people, that would be a dumb question, because of course someone could look at this brightly colored parade of what seems like utter nonsense and render a verdict about whether it has a coherent narrative and believable characters or is simply a collection of video game references and fast-moving stuff happening. But for someone like me, who has spent several decades playing games featuring these characters and who gets a little thrill of recognition whenever I hear a familiar sound effect or music cue, trying to separate critical reactions from the ingrained positive feelings the franchise evokes is near-impossible.

I will say that the first animated Super Mario movie probably did a better job of building a story around these characters, which is likely harder than it may seem due to the fact that there’s little about the world of Mario that makes much sense. The original game seemed to be put together out of graphical elements that were recognizable enough to stand out, like a guy in overalls, some pipes, monsters that looked like turtles or walking mushrooms, a dinosaur-like villain, and a princess in a pink dress. As the years went on and more elements were added to the games, with little care about whether they made any sense or just looked neat, it became a sprawling world of weirdness and surreality as the plumber hero and his brother repeatedly went on adventures to rescue a princess who was constantly being kidnapped by a fire-spitting lizard man with a bevy of goofball children.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie tried to wrangle this into something that was basically recognizable as human drama, going the expected route of having Mario and Luigi be plumbers from the “real world” who entered a portal to a magical kingdom and became involved in a battle against Bowser and his minions as he waged war on the Mushroom Kingdom with the intent of marrying Princess Peach. Its story was nothing to write home about, but it was fun enough as a reference-heavy adventure that featured things like power mushrooms, invincibility stars, kart racing, and whatever else people who have played the games would expect to see.

The sequel pretty much does away with any attempt to ground its story in something approaching reality. Mario and Luigi are now adventurers who visit locales from various games in the series to take care of problems while spending their off-time partying with Peach and the denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom. The main conflict involves Bowser Jr. (voiced by Benny Safdie, making this an especially strange counterpoint to his performance as Agamemnon in The Odyssey) embarking on an intergalactic revenge plot against our heroes, requiring them to head off on a planet-hopping adventure that will eventually involve reuniting Peach with her long-lost sister, Rosalina (a family relationship that is an invention of this movie, for those of us who care about the nonsensical lore of these games).

The movie is just one thing happening after another, without any real logical progression, and each scene serving as a reason to come up with something that’s meant to be exciting. And it often is, with a few imaginative sequences and lots of bright, colorful visuals. One standout scene involves Peach’s visit to a casino (an environment that is more befitting of Sonic the Hedgehog than Mario) that is inside a giant cube, with each inner face having its own gravitational pull. After confronting the villain from Super Mario Bros. 2, King Wart (voiced by Luis Guzman!), she ends up fighting an army of Ninjis in a pretty dazzling bit of extended action choreography. Why this actually happens is beside the point; it’s just a few minutes of excitement until the movie can move on to whatever weird thing it wants to come up with next.

Along with the various excuses for action and the constant appearances of characters and items from the games, the movie is also packed with Nintendo references. Fox McCloud from the Starfox series (voiced by Glen Powell) shows up, remarking that he came through a portal from another universe, as if we really were worried about the sensicality of the presence of characters from other games. Bowser Jr. uses a Super Scope to transform Mario and Luigi into baby versions of themselves. And look! There’s some Pikmin! And R.O.B.! And Mr. Game & Watch! With the movie constantly hammering on viewers’ nostalgia nerve endings, long-time fans can’t help but have visceral reactions that seem positive, even if these elements don’t serve any other purpose.

One of the most overtly video-game-like parts of the movie comes in the climax, when Mario and Peach are mounting an assault on Bowser Jr.’s castle. They are forced to run a gauntlet of threats that are familiar to anyone who has played one of the “Bowser’s castle” stages of the various Mario games, including lava pits, fireballs moving in lines, and Thwomps. As this is going on, Bowser Jr. is operating the controls of the castle’s defenses while looking at a screen that provides a replica of the pixelated scenery from one of the classic sidescrollers. However, it’s an odd inversion of the way these games work, with Bowser Jr. playing the role of the person who is watching the screen and frantically tapping buttons on a controller, except he’s controlling the environment rather than the characters. It’s close to being a recognizable experience for many gamers, but they’re placed in the role of the villain here, being stymied by the heroes rather than shepherding them to victory.

That’s probably a deeper level of thought paid to what happens here than anything that came from the actual filmmakers. Any plot, character development, symbolism, or themes that may show up in this movie are secondary to the desire to create eye-popping visuals and exciting action. But really, that makes this one of the purest video game adaptations of all time. The nonsensical machinations of the plot and the minimal attempts at character development don’t matter in the slightest if one is having fun. Whether you’re actually able to do so may depend on how steeped you are in the mythology of Mario and Nintendo. While it’s perfectly understandable that some may be left scratching their heads and wondering what the hell they just watched, those of us who have spent years or decades moving these characters around screens will probably feel right at home.

Post-apocalyptic science fiction is a subgenre that has been around for well over a century, but in a world where civilization seems to be poised on the precipice of collapse, it feels like it’s more relevant than it has ever been. Of course, people in previous generations may have felt the same, especially when they believed that the world was about to be wiped out by nuclear war, but there’s something about our current moment, in which the effects of climate change are already being felt, are only going to get worse, and little is being done to reverse course, that makes it feel like the apocalypse is just over the horizon.

For many, that’s a recipe for despair, since it’s hard not to feel negative about the direction the world is taking. But science fiction is also a genre that’s based on hope. While much of the genre involves bright, shiny futures where people have amazing technology at their fingertips and humanity has left Earth to spread throughout the galaxy, even the most negative vision of the future most likely features some form of humanity surviving. Interestingly, Deb Olin Unferth’s novel Earth 7 departs from these trends in multiple ways, partially by featuring a future that’s even bleaker (and probably more realistic) than the typical post-apocalypse, but also by treating the situation with the opposite of despair. It’s not exactly hopeful, but it does leave one with a sense of solace, wonder at the miracle of life, and a feeling that our existence is worthwhile, even if it’s little more than a blip in the vastness of the universe.

Unferth’s story begins by following Rosemary, a neurodivergent-coded scientist living in what’s left of a world that has mostly decayed into desolation. There are some mentions of unspecified “depops” in which most of humanity has died off, possibly due to disease, famine, and the like, but some remnants persist, doing what they can to survive and keep the accomplishments of society from completely dying out. Rosemary is working with her colleagues to preserve a record of life on Earth through methods such as cryogenics, but even the depopulated Earth is too overwhelming for her, so she moves along with her daughter to live in an underwater pod somewhere in the ocean.

While Rosemary is perfectly happy living underwater and avoiding as much face-to-face contact with other humans as possible, she doesn’t seem to have thought through the effects of this life on a child. In fact, she barely seems to consider her daughter a person at all, to the point where she forgets whether she ever gave her child a name. The daughter, who we eventually learn is named Dylan, a name she has given herself in the absence of any sort of acknowledgement of her humanity from her mother, begins to chafe at the restrictions of her life as she gets older, and she eventually convinces her mother to let her leave and attempt some sort of life on the surface.

The rest of the story follows Dylan as she figures out who she is and how she’s going to live in this fallen world, which mostly consists of a desert filled with ever-spreading sand and the junk left over from civilization. It’s not a total post-apocalyptic wasteland, since there’s some unnamed company that appears to control the remnants of society, but there’s little left for people to do other than eke out a mediated existence where the decay of the world is hidden by holograms or live in anarchic encampments while waiting to die of disease or starvation.

Dylan starts out serving an internship at the lab where her mother used to work, but she shares some of the same antisocial tendencies, not really being interested in interacting with others and eventually falling into the role of a sort of groundskeeper. This is fairly pointless, since it mostly involves sweeping sand away from the outside of the building, only for it to pile up again a few hours later. But she does form a sort of kinship with the sand, using the scientific skills learned from her mother to make new discoveries and possibly come up with a more effective method of preservation than the power-intensive devices the rest of the scientists are using, which aren’t going to last beyond the next apocalypse.

While this might seem like a lonely existence, Dylan does manage to form a few connections with others. First, she begins communicating with Zee, a Martian who has been tasked with his own method of preservation. That is, he’s a member of a human colony on Mars who has taken a job in which he collects “traces” from Earth to send back home. Most of these traces are junk that has been left behind during civilization’s slow downfall, serving only as memories for people who are a few generations removed from any sort of life on Earth but who want to have some sort of connection with their past.

Even more crucially, Dylan gets sent to a singles resort, where she meets Melanie, a woman who most people think is a robot due to a large amount of cosmetic surgery that has given her skin an artificial sheen. She’s happy to let people think of and treat her as a robot as she’s working at the resort, but Dylan forms a connection with her, seeing her as another semi-broken person who holds everyone else at arm’s length but is dying to be seen. Their love story has some fits and starts, but it eventually develops into something that gives both women meaning.

As the story proceeds, it wanders off in some fanciful directions, in keeping with the unmoored sense of humanity in a world where the only thing to look forward to is a steady decline toward death and extinction. Unferth explores the lives of broken characters in a broken world, acknowledging the unfairness of the situation while emphasizing people’s ability to make the most of what they are given, even if they have little more to live for than basic survival.

But then, fascinatingly, the story gets cosmic, with what may be the last remnant of humanity witnessing the continued decline of the world and zooming forward in time to the eventual end of humanity, but somehow also flowing backward to the beginning of existence and watching the development of the universe in order to highlight the negligible-yet-marvelous blip that marks life on Earth in the impossibly huge scale of all of spacetime. It’s the opposite of cosmic horror; instead of being devastated by the insignificance of humanity in the grand scale of the universe, the book celebrates the tiny, beautiful wonder that our existence is a part of.

The book ends up being remarkable, a well-drawn character piece that looks at just a few of the imperfect people that populate our world as they make the best of their lives in a situation where there is no hope for any sort of future. Despite subject matter that is just about as bleak as could possibly be, it leaves one with a sense of positivity, an understanding that no matter how small and insignificant the life of one person may seem, it’s still worthwhile and something to be celebrated. The future may be scary, and the world may crumble and fall, but remembering that we were here, we had a purpose, and we mattered can provide some sense of meaning in a world that so often seems meaningless.

When awkwardness-based comedy is done well, it can be delightfully excruciating, causing viewers to squirm in their seats out of vicarious uncomfortability, laughing at the ridiculousness of the characters while wanting to scream at them to just shut up before they step on yet another rake. This can be especially effective in movies like The Drama, which comes up with a scenario that seems just plausible enough to be believable and then sends its characters down ridiculous paths as they react to a difficult situation in all the wrong ways.

Explaining exactly what this movie is about is somewhat difficult, since revealing the main conflict would spoil much of the surprise that makes it so delightful. Suffice to say that it involves a soon-to-be-married couple, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya), who struggle to deal with the fallout of a major revelation about something that one person (almost) did in the past. It’s the type of revelation that calls someone’s entire character into question, upending everything that the other person thought they knew about them. For a couple about to make a lifetime commitment to each other, this makes the stress and heightened emotions involved in wedding preparations exponentially more complicated, and it’s not surprising that things quickly spiral out of control.

The movie takes a wry approach to the situation, and instead of large, outsized reactions, the characters mostly encounter internal struggles. This requires some acting skill to really sell what the characters are going through, and Pattinson and Zendaya are definitely up to the task. Pattinson especially makes the emotional turmoil his character is going through seem skin-crawlingly visceral, with the conflicting thoughts he is experiencing being apparent on his face. Charlie is trying to weigh his past experiences with Emma against what he believed their future would be like, wondering if he can move past what he has learned and make the mental adjustments necessary to get back to a feeling of happiness and contentment.

Much of what makes this work comes from some skillful setup from writer/director Kristoffer Borgli. The early scenes of the movie provide some flashbacks to the early stages of the couple’s relationship, which are considered by the characters to be a meet-cute but actually reveal the flaws in Charlie’s character. He met Emma at a coffee shop when he saw her reading a book, so he looked up some basic information about the book on Google, then approached her and claimed that he really loved the book and wanted to talk to her about it. But when doing so, he didn’t realize that she was deaf in one ear and had an earbud in the other ear, so when it seemed like she was ignoring him, she actually didn’t even notice that he was talking to her. His response is to get all defensive and claim that he wasn’t hitting on her in the first place, at which point she finally notices him and gracefully gives him the opportunity to try again.

Something similar happens on their first date, when she tells him she has finished reading the book and starts discussing how it ended, but since he never actually read it, he’s forced to bullshit until he can’t do anything else but admit that he lied about reading it in the first place. Her decision not to run away at this point is almost miraculous (it probably helps that he has the looks of Robert Pattinson), but their interactions set the stage for a relationship in which Charlie is kind of mealy-mouthed, struggling to make the decisions until circumstances force his hand and doing whatever he can to wrangle a situation into something positive. This approach might work in low-stakes situations, but when relationships become fraught, he simply doesn’t have the tools to achieve anything close to satisfactory results.

Borgli also does an excellent job of using filmic techniques to illustrate the characters’ mental states. He visualizes their imaginations, letting their fantasies play out as they consider how others may react to the situation, sometimes providing multiple short flashes of potential scenarios in quick succession. At times, it can become difficult to determine exactly what is actually happening and what is only occurring in the characters’ heads, providing a great illustration of the emotional disorientation that they are experiencing.

At the same time, the interactions between Charlie, Emma, and other characters go in some wild (yet still believable) directions, becoming more and more awkward and upsetting. By the time the wedding rolls around, it seems destined for disaster, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint in that respect. One can’t help but feel for Charlie’s best man, Mike (Mamadou Athie), who is trying to hold the situation together, especially when his wife, Rachel (Alana Haim), who is Emma’s maid of honor, is poised on the verge of unleashing chaos due to her feelings about the revelation that kicked everything off. It’s a powder keg of a situation, and it’s expertly crafted to deliver maximum tension.

Movies like this have to walk a fine line, providing just the right level of turmoil for the characters without becoming too broad and unbelievable. Borgli definitely knows what he’s doing, and he manages to take a situation that’s relatable (and relevant) and spin as much awkward comedy as possible out of it. Watching the characters contort themselves into ever-more-ridiculous positions as they try to make sense of chaotic emotions is delightful. While the current state of cinematic comedy is not as robust as it could be, movies like this provide hope that it can always get better.

Mandingo wasn’t especially good as a Blaxploitation movie, given that it focused on white enslavers rather than the Black people being enslaved, but it was fairly entertaining as a transgressively lurid potboiler that highlighted the depravity of people who believed they had the right to subjugate, own, and brutalize others. While one might expect that its sequel, Drum, would be more of the same, it seems that lessons were learned about what was done wrong the last time around, with the filmmakers attempting to focus on the people who actually matter in the story (that is, the Black people who are straining against years of subjugation), while also providing a much more satisfying conclusion.

The differences are stark from the beginning, which features a prologue in which a narrator explains the brutality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This serves to provide a backstory for some of the characters, including a white woman named Marianna (Isela Vega) whose reputation was ruined after having sex with a former African king who had been enslaved and bearing his child. She’s forced to leave her home in Havana, Cuba, so she and her personal slave Rachel (Paula Kelly, from The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Uptown Saturday Night, and more) relocate to New Orleans, where she becomes the madam of a famous brothel and passes her son Drum (Ken Norton) off as Rachel’s child. (Kelly and Norton were also in Mandingo, but they play different characters here.)

The real story starts when a patron of the brothel, a creepy Frenchman named DeMarigny (John Colicos), decides that Drum is going to fight a slave of his, Blaise (Yaphet Kotto, from The Liberation of L.B. Jones, Across 110th Street, Truck Turner, and more). Marianna doesn’t want to allow it, since she has protected Drum and had him serve in a butler-like role, but DeMarigny threatens to withdraw his patronage and ruin her, so she’s left with no choice. Blaise mostly beats Drum up during the fight, but the latter manages to gain the upper hand after biting a chunk out of the former’s side and using other brutal tactics. It’s a pretty bloody affair, and in case anyone was unsure about the type of movie this is, all the scenes in and around the brothel are populated by many, many naked women.

After the fight, DeMarigny is so disgusted with Blaise’s performance that he gives up ownership of Blaise to Drum (or probably to Marianna, really). He also offers to give Drum anything he wants, and when Drum asks for a Black woman of his own, he trots out a group of female slaves and has Drum take his pick. The woman Drum chooses, Calinda (Brenda Sykes, who was also in Mandingo, as well as movies like Black Gunn and Cleopatra Jones), protests at first, demonstrating some internalized racism by saying that she can put up with being raped by white men but not by a Black man, but she changes her mind when Drum assures her that he can love her like no white man ever could.

Unfortunately, things don’t go well for the new couple, since the first time they’re getting ready to have sex, DeMarigny enters the room and tries to join in. He had already shown some indications of homosexuality (which was likely to be treated as a sign of villainy in 1970s movies) when he tenderly stroked the face of his underling, and here he has no interest in Calinda, wanting to have his way with Drum. This leads to a struggle involving the three of them, and to protect Calinda, Drum strikes DeMarigny, leading the latter to swear revenge. Later, he arrives with some other slaves and orders them to kill Drum, and during the fight, Rachel jumps in and tries to protect her “son,” leading DeMarigny to shoot and kill her.

While all this has been going on, the movie also spends a little time with another popular customer of the brothel, Hammond Maxwell, the main character from Mandingo. A couple of decades have apparently passed since the first film, and Hammond is now played by Warren Oates, star of several classic movies of the era, including Two-Lane Blacktop and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. He fully understands the assignment, turning Hammond into a lecherous old bastard who doesn’t really care about anything except running his slave plantation, Falconhurst, and sleeping with his “wenches.” While he has had two wives in the past (one of whom died during Mandingo), he’s not really interested in getting married again, but he’s hoping Marianna can hook him up with a “ho” who will live with him and run his household while he’s busy breeding new slaves to sell and satisfying his sexual urges.

Marianna apparently isn’t willing to part with any of her women, but she does connect Hammond with Augusta (Fiona Lewis), a woman from a respectable family who has experienced some form of unexplained disgrace. She’s apparently hoping that Augusta can whip Hammond’s household into shape and convince him to marry her. Plus, since she’s afraid for Drum’s life, she agrees to sell him and Blaise to Hammond so they can go live on his plantation in relative safety (or at least as safe as any Black man might be when he’s under the yoke of a slaveowner who may or may not have murderous urges at any time). Hammond isn’t willing to take Calinda, since he doesn’t like his slaves to have any personal attachments, but he has also purchased a new woman whom he is excited to make his new bed wench, Regine (Pam Grier, who sadly doesn’t get a whole lot to do here).

So, the rest of the movie follows Drum and Blaise on Hammond’s plantation as they encounter problems that leave them with impossible choices that are likely to lead to brutality and death for themselves or others. A good deal of time is also spent on Hammond’s relationship with Augusta, who doesn’t approve of his sexual proclivities and who is shocked to hear him frankly discuss the breeding of slaves in the company of his teenage daughter Sophie (Rainbeaux Smith, who was in plenty of lurid movies in the 1970s, including an erotic version of Cinderella).

The interactions between Hammond and Augusta are some of the most amusing parts of the movie. At one point, when Augusta complains about his discussion of the fornication of slaves, he says, “Miss Augusta, you just gotta get used to the idea that n***** fornicatin’ is what Falconhurst is all about! If my n*****s stop fornicatin’, we stop eatin’!” When she complains about how he is constantly having sex with slave women, he says, “Now Miss Augusta, you ain’t gonna start meddlin’ in my poontang now, is you?” Oates knows just how sleazy and loathsome to make his character so that you can laugh at his depravity but also cheer when anything bad happens to him.

And bad things certainly do happen, but it takes a little while to get there. Behind Hammond’s back, Sophie is constantly trying to have sex with the male slaves, which, in a sane world, would be the equivalent of her father’s nighttime activities, but is actually treated as if it is an affront to God and humanity. She uses the classic white woman tactic of telling the men they have to do what she says, because if they don’t, she’ll tell her father they tried to rape her. Drum manages to resist Sophie’s advances, but he finds out that Blaise hasn’t been so steadfast. When he manages to catch Sophie and Blaise in the act, he breaks it up, knowing that it’s only going to lead to bad things for Blaise. The two of them argue over the situation and get into a fight, which is trouble enough on its own, because they know that Hammond doesn’t allow fighting among slaves. Sure enough, when Hammond finds out, he orders both men to be beaten, but since he believes that Blaise was the instigator, he gives him a disproportionate amount of beating, leading to additional animosity between the slaves.

Everything comes to a head when Hammond and Augusta decide to get married. This makes Sophie angry, because she doesn’t want to behave properly in the way that Augusta insists on. Lashing out in the only way she can figure out to hurt her father, she tells him that Blaise tried to rape her. This is enough to send her father into a murderous rage, with plans to castrate and hang Blaise. But first, they have to have an engagement party!

A whole bunch of fancy guests show up for the party, including DeMarigny and Marianna. With most of the cast of the movie reunited, it seems certain that something dramatic is going to happen. In the middle of the party, a notoriously brutal slave trader named Montgomery (Royal Dano, an actor with a distinctively grizzled visage who showed up in tons of Westerns and crime movies) knocks on the door to see if Hammond has any business with him. While Hammond is too busy to deal with him at the moment, he lets him stay in a guest house for the night and has his group of 30 or so slaves bed down in the barn, which is where Blaise is also currently being kept in chains.

When Drum comes to check on Blaise later that night, Blaise convinces him to set him free so that he can run away instead of being sold to Montgomery. But that’s not what happens. Instead, Blaise sets Montgomery’s slaves free as well, and they convince all the other slaves on the plantation to rise up and revolt. And that’s the climax of the movie, with the slaves going all Nat Turner on the white people’s asses and getting some cheer-worthy revenge. It’s pretty glorious, with one horrible enslaver after another being righteously killed and the plantation house going up in flames.

Drum himself gets in on the action, although he takes far too long to do so, first trying to convince Hammond to forgive the slaves and stop the fighting. This is hopelessly naive, since with so many white people being killed and so much property destruction taking place, there’s no way any slaves involved in the revolt, and probably any slaves in the nearby area, weren’t going to be put to death. But while Drum is trying to get Blaise to agree to give up the revolt, DeMarigny suddenly shoots and kills Blaise. This is enough to cause Drum to give up on any idea of peace and join in the fight, getting his revenge against DeMarigny by literally ripping his junk off.

It’s not exactly a happy ending, since all of the slaves end up dying at the hands of men who come to put down the rebellion, leaving only Drum to try to run away to freedom as the credits roll. As lurid and over-the-top as this movie is, it apparently had to meet some semblance of historical accuracy. But its climax is about as satisfying as a movie like this could be, with a large number of white enslavers getting what they deserved, and a large number of Black people who had spent their lives in subjugation getting a few moments of exhilarating revenge during the incredibly brief period of freedom they were able to seize for themselves. It’s highly satisfying, and it definitely beats the “one evil person died, and another one briefly felt bad about it” ending of Mandingo.

While this movie doesn’t have the torrid sexuality and sense of forbidden lust of its predecessor, it does provide a better sense of the concerns of actual Black people who lived under slavery. Rather than focusing on the white people’s struggles and the bizarre mental gymnastics they had to do to justify their actions, it looks at the concerns that enslaved people had as they just tried to get by, knowing that simple mistakes, accidental signs of humanity, or even just the whims of white people could get them beaten or killed. That’s what makes the glorious retribution they inflict during their rebellion so satisfying. For people who have spent their lives being beaten down, the ability to inflict a small fraction of what they have experienced on their tormentors before the horror of their lives can come to an end is just about the only thing to live for. As has been said in the past, the fact that Black people today just want to live in peace rather than getting revenge for the wrongs that have been done to them over the centuries should be seen as an incredible gift to white people who don’t really deserve it.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night
The Education of Sonny Carson
Jive Turkey
The Black Godfather
Black Samson
The Dynamite Brothers
Shoot it Black, Shoot it Blue
Solomon King
Honeybaby, Honeybaby
Abby
Sweet Jesus, Preacherman
TNT Jackson
The Beast Must Die
Sheba, Baby
Lord Shango
The Black Gestapo
Dolemite
Cornbread, Earl and Me
Force Four
Cooley High
The Candy Tangerine Man
Bucktown
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Darktown Strutters
Let’s Do It Again
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Together Brothers
Take a Hard Ride
Mandingo
Mahogany
Friday Foster
Mean Johnny Barrows
Aaron Loves Angela
Lady Cocoa
Bad, Black and Beautiful
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Adiós Amigo
Black Shampoo
The River Niger
Velvet Smooth
Death Journey
J.D.’s Revenge

There weren’t a whole lot of movies in the subgenre of Blaxploitation horror that were very good. That’s partially due to the low standards of horror movies of the time, which were often cheap and schlocky, but it also seems like a real lack of imagination on the part of filmmakers, who often figured the key to success would be to make a “Black” version of something that was already popular, such as Blackenstein or Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde, without actually considering what would make these stories compelling to Black audiences.

It’s always nice to come across a movie that bucks this trend, and J.D.’s Revenge benefits from being a unique, original horror story rather than a knock-off. Whether it actually qualifies as a horror movie may be somewhat questionable, since it doesn’t actually seem to be trying to be scary. Instead, it’s a story about a guy being possessed by the spirit of someone from the past and being forced to do awful things that harm those around him. There’s a bit of horror to that concept, although it’s somewhat dulled by a central performance that’s so over-the-top that the ghost might as well be a cartoon character.

After a brief intro in which we learn that the J.D. of the title (played by David McKnight) was a New Orleans gangster who was killed in 1942 because he was wrongfully accused of murdering his sister, the movie follows Isaac “Ike” Hendrix (Glynn Turman, making yet another appearance in a mid-1970s Blaxploitation movie), a law student in 1970s New Orleans who seems to be a stand-up guy, living in a happy relationship with his girlfriend Christella (Joan Pringle). While out on the town with some friends, Ike participates in a hypnotist act at a nightclub, and this is apparently enough to open up his soul to possession by the spirit of J.D., who is out for revenge on the people who were responsible for his death.

The movie mostly consists of Ike acting more and more strangely and out of character, sometimes behaving violently and aggressively as J.D.’s spirit begins to take over. He keeps having visions of J.D. whenever he looks in the mirror (including in one nice shot where he smashes the glass, leaving a spider-web-like appearance that still features J.D.’s image in a hole in the center, laughing at him), and at times, J.D. takes over completely, lashing out violently against anyone nearby and leaving Ike with no memory of what happened.

All of this is meant to be disturbing due to the sudden transformation of Ike from a good guy into a violent criminal. While J.D. may have been wrongfully killed, he obviously was a pretty terrible person, since it seems like he terrorized everyone around him by constantly exploding into sudden fits of rage. There are a few scenes that are meant to be disturbing when Ike acts out against Christella. First, he gets angry at her for no reason, hits her, calls her names, and throws her out of the apartment. Since he was possessed by J.D. at the time, he has no memory of this happening, and he’s very apologetic, eventually convincing her to come back to him. But then it happens again after he changes his hair to the relaxed style favored by older Black men of the time, beating her up and attempting to rape her.

This is all upsetting, although what’s potentially worse is the response that other characters have the first time domestic violence occurs. Christella’s friend offers her some shelter, but she doesn’t seem too bothered when Christella decides to move back in with Ike. But Ike’s friend reassures him that the whole incident isn’t that big a deal. He tells him that he was just letting off some steam, and really, women like it when men tell them where the line is. This is horrific, and it’s exactly the kind of attitude that forgives and enables abusers and lets them continue on the same path until they end up committing murder. While the movie definitely believes that the abuse itself is bad, it’s far too eager to sweep it under the rug and let it happen again.

It’s possible that this is part of the point, and the movie is meant to be an examination of people’s violent tendencies and other people’s attitudes toward them. When Ike first starts being affected by J.D., there’s a little bit of excitement about the rogueish nature of his actions. When he gets sexually aggressive toward Christella (prior to the abuse), she gets turned on by the way he’s acting rougher than usual. His actions are meant to have a little bit of an allure to them until they tip over the line between exciting and dangerous.

One could even argue that the story serves as a struggle between the perceptions of Black men as violent and dangerous and the more enlightened ways of thinking that had come about during the Civil Rights era. Being from an earlier time, J.D. was rougher, cruder, and used to using violence to get what he wanted. He was almost animalistic, behaving aggressively as a way to exert power over others. But in the decades since, Black people learned about the power of non-violent resistance and used it to effect real change, allowing them to become upstanding citizens like Ike. Of course, this whole idea is racist, playing into stereotypes of Black men being strong, aggressive, sexually violent, and impossible to control until they learned to become “civilized.” Even if the movie is trying to treat J.D’s attitudes as a relic of the past or lump him in with violent gangsters of all races, it’s still a pretty offensive portrayal of a Black man with pretty much no redeeming qualities.

The problem with all of this is that Glynn Turman’s portrayal of the J.D.-possessed Ike is anything but subtle. While some level of outsized acting is probably necessary here in order to make it clear that J.D. is in control, Turman goes so far over the top as this version of the character that he starts to seem ridiculous. He uses a crazy old-timey gangster accent, and he makes all sorts of goofy faces. In the climactic showdown with the target of his revenge, he spends most of the scene spinning around in circles and cackling maniacally. It’s so absurd that it turns many of the scenes in which he’s meant to be violent and dangerous into comedy rather than seeming as disturbing and horrific as they should.

As he seeks revenge in Ike’s body, J.D. tracks down the guy who killed him, Elija Bliss (Louis Gossett, Jr.), who used to be a gangster but has become a popular preacher. While there are indications that his conversion was part of a scheme to bilk money from the congregation while continuing to engage in other criminal activities, he seems to have come to believe the words he is preaching, and he wants to put his violent ways behind him. Maybe this is meant to serve as another alternative to the violence of the past, with religion being the civilizing impulse that can tame men who were previously nothing more than wild beasts.

The movie eventually comes down to a showdown in which J.D. reveals that Elija’s brother Theotis (Fred Pinkard) was the one who killed J.D.’s sister. Once the true culprit is identified and vengeance is had, J.D’s spirit apparently moves on, leaving everyone to walk away happy. Never mind all the violence they witnessed and the abuse that Christella suffered; it was just one of those crazy experiences that they can look back at and laugh.

While this movie works well enough for a goofy ghost story featuring occasional violence, its approach to the material doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and it wastes some of the potential for horror by being silly instead of scary. The real horror comes from unintended sources, including attitudes that may have been fairly common in the 1970s but can be recognized as harmful a few decades later. Such is the nature of watching old movies, I suppose, but at least I get to pretend that I’m more enlightened than people from the past, even as I watch American society continue to make the exact same mistakes.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night
The Education of Sonny Carson
Jive Turkey
The Black Godfather
Black Samson
The Dynamite Brothers
Shoot it Black, Shoot it Blue
Solomon King
Honeybaby, Honeybaby
Abby
Sweet Jesus, Preacherman
TNT Jackson
The Beast Must Die
Sheba, Baby
Lord Shango
The Black Gestapo
Dolemite
Cornbread, Earl and Me
Force Four
Cooley High
The Candy Tangerine Man
Bucktown
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Darktown Strutters
Let’s Do It Again
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Together Brothers
Take a Hard Ride
Mandingo
Mahogany
Friday Foster
Mean Johnny Barrows
Aaron Loves Angela
Lady Cocoa
Bad, Black and Beautiful
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Adiós Amigo
Black Shampoo
The River Niger
Velvet Smooth
Death Journey

These days, it seems like everybody either loves AI or hates it. Of course, the version of AI that we’ve gotten isn’t what has been promised in decades of sci-fi stories; rather than powerful computer programs that are super-intelligent and may or may not be able to understand human emotions, we have chatbots that act like they’re authoritative but frequently make mistakes, all while flattering users and being apologetic about any problems in order to increase engagement. Some people have found this to be compelling and have come up with novel uses of the technology to do interesting things, while others have decried the entire AI industry as a plagiarism machine that is cranking out slop like badly-written prose and ugly images while making it harder for people to determine what is and isn’t real.

As with many forms of technology that have wrought major changes in society, it can be hard to nail down the “correct” reaction to AI. It can definitely be beneficial in certain circumstances, if only because the powerful calculations that computers can do and the algorithms that people create can solve problems that were once beyond the capability of humanity. But as with anything, over-reliance on technology can have drawbacks, especially when people fail to understand the biases that went into its creation. The true impact of AI may not be fully understood for years to come, but we’re already wrestling with the ways it has started to impact fields ranging from criminal justice to healthcare.

Justin C. Key’s The Hospital at the End of the World focuses on the latter, positing a future world in which AI technology mostly created by one powerful company has taken over the healthcare system, almost entirely removing the human element from medicine and using algorithms to examine patient data and determine the most effective treatments. While the CEO of this company, which is known as The Shepherd Organization or TSO, believes that leaving healthcare up to machines will make medicine much more efficient while eliminating the possibility of human mistakes, Key spends the book refuting these ideas and arguing the importance of human connection between doctors and patients.

The story follows Pok Morning, a young man living in New York City who is preparing for a successful career as a doctor once he gets accepted into one of the top medical schools, all of which are controlled by TSO. He and his father Phelando, an accomplished doctor himself, are at odds in their philosophies regarding medical care, with Pok, having grown up immersed in a society where everyone is constantly using technology, believing that AI-based medicine is superior, while Phelando is more old-school, believing in the power of hands-on connections between doctors and patients. Phelando has been hoping that rather than receiving an education from TSO, Pok will attend his alma mater, the Hippocrates School of Medicine in New Orleans, which is the last bastion of human-focused healthcare outside of TSO’s influence.

When an unexpected tragedy strikes, Pok is forced to give up his dreams and go on the run, leading to a fairly standard series of scenes that one would expect to see in a story about a computer-controlled dystopian society. But that mainly serves to get Pok to New Orleans, where he can begin to receive an education in all of the forms of medicine that he had previously discounted as backwards and inferior. He’s forced to question everything he thought he knew while learning all about the multitude of messy factors related to patient care that machines simply can’t account for. And as one would expect, there are various plot twists involving conspiracies related to TSO and Phelando and the company’s plans to destroy Hippocrates as part of the CEO’s schemes for world domination. It’s a perfectly fine collection of drama and intrigue, providing Pok with the opportunity to grow and learn about the way of the world as events happen around him that could shape the entire future.

As a story, this works well enough, although it often seems like a vehicle for a message that one may or may not find compelling. Key, who is a practicing psychiatrist in addition to being a writer of sci-fi and horror stories, appears to be advocating against the use of AI in medicine and arguing that the doctor/patient connection is all-important. That’s all well and good, but he goes a bit overboard in that direction, positing that there is an invisible, almost mystical connection that doctors form with patients, which characters refer to as “the essence.” There’s a lot of focus on “natural” cures and doctors being able to “feel” what is wrong with patients, giving them insights that computers would never be able to replicate. While this serves as a counterpoint to the cold, overly clinical approach taken by TSO, it comes close to being a rejection of modern medicine in favor of focusing on ancient practices that are supposedly better.

There’s a place for that sort of thing in medicine, given that the psychological component of medical care can be just as important as what happens physically. The placebo effect and similar issues that are difficult to quantify, including the intuitions of doctors, can play a huge role in the outcomes of treatment. But treating this as some sort of powerful, invisible force that is more important than the insights that have been developed through decades of research and technological breakthroughs doesn’t seem to be necessary.

The message is also somewhat muddled by the characters’ acceptance of some forms of technology, but not others. Along with herbs and natural cures that the doctors at Hippocrates use, there’s an emphasis on the use of honey with healing properties from genetically-modified bees. Why is this type of artificial manipulation of nature acceptable while others are not? It’s hard to resolve that tension between “traditional” medicine and newer technologies, although that may be part of the point. Perhaps the doctors at Hippocrates have the right ideas, but they have also become entrenched in their ways due to their resistance to TSO, and they need to learn to find a balance between following what they have always known and using the new tools that may be available.

Ultimately, this is a well-written story that provokes some thought about the use of technology in our lives. While it focuses on medicine, there are plenty of other areas of life in which it would be worthwhile to examine how AI and other technologies are changing things, whether we want to accept these changes, and whether we should push back and emphasize the human touch whenever possible. Even if you don’t fully agree with Key’s take on things, his depiction of a world ruled by powerful companies that can manipulate people’s lives without them fully understanding what is happening until it is too late is compelling. The techno-dystopias that have proliferated in science fiction for decades seem closer on the horizon than ever, and understanding what may be coming might help us figure out if there is any way to avoid the worst possible future.

I’m inclined to give filmmakers some leeway when it’s clear that they’re in the process of figuring out how movies work, but less so when they continue to make bad movies when it really seems that they should know better. One would think that Fred Williamson, who had starred in more than a dozen movies by 1976, would have some idea about how movies are made, but by his third movie outing as a director, he still seems pretty clueless. He can manage to put together some halfway decent action scenes, but stringing them together into something coherent appears to be beyond his capabilities.

Death Journey features a pretty classic action movie setup in which a tough guy has to escort a much less physically impressive person a long distance while fending off attackers along the way, but despite the simplicity of the plot, it’s hard to tell why anything happens, how each scene leads into the next, what the characters’ motivations are, and how close or far away the ultimate goal is at any point. It’s the kind of movie that’s aggravating due to its failure to include the most basic information that would help viewers understand what it happening and why they should care.

The plot of the movie involves a high-profile criminal trial taking place in New York City in which some sort of gangster is on the verge of getting off scot-free because the witnesses against him keep dying in what his defense attorney refers to as accidents, even though they consist of bombings or shootings. There’s one last witness who can testify, but he’s located in Los Angeles, and the district attorney doesn’t trust any police officers to escort him to New York, since it’s pretty clear that the officers who were supposed to protect the other witnesses were on the take. So he opts for what he claims is an even better solution: hiring a loose-cannon ex-cop named Jesse Crowder (Williamson) to escort the witness cross-country.

The judge has given the DA 48 hours to produce the witness, so the clock is ticking, supposedly lending the whole affair some urgency. You wouldn’t know it based on the way the rest of the movie proceeds though. We’re introduced to Crowder practicing some karate moves in a local dojo when he gets the call from the DA, and he spends a while finishing his workout before leaving. Then, while he’s spending some time with a lady, he gets interrupted by another lady, who claims that the DA sent her (based on a previous scene, we know that she was actually sent by the gangster who is on trial). Not being a very suspicious sort, he has sex with her and accepts the gift of a fancy watch before embarking on his journey with the witness, a chubby bald guy named Finley (Bernie Kuby).

The entire rest of the story follows their journey across the country, barely consisting of enough plot to make an actual movie (the whole thing is only around 78 minutes long). Williamson and company barely seem to understand the amount of time it would actually take to travel long distances across the United States. Much of the journey takes place via car, bus, and train, even though each option would take several days to get halfway across the country. Crowder and Finley do eventually make it to an airport, but it certainly seems like the 48-hour deadline would have passed well before reaching that point.

This isn’t an issue that had to be fatal. A competent filmmaker could have fudged the details and made it seem like they managed to cover long distances quickly simply through some interstitial dialogue or other methods. When Crowder initially decides to try to drive rather than taking Finley directly to the airport because he realizes he’s being tailed, he could have said something like “Don’t worry, we’ll make it to Phoenix in a few hours, and we’ll catch a flight to New York from there.” Then, as other obstacles arise, additional bits of dialogue, shots of their vehicle passing street signs, or some other details could provide an indication of where they are in their journey, how much time they have to get to the next destination, and how urgent it is that they accomplish each specific goal.

The movie does none of this. It’s just one chase scene, fight, and shootout after another, usually with bad guys showing up out of nowhere and Crowder having to fend them off while still wrangling the cowardly Finley along the journey as he complains about the danger they’re in. There’s so little explanatory material that one might believe that this is an artistic attempt to strip a movie down to its barest elements if it weren’t so clear that all of the shortcomings come down to ineptitude.

Perhaps the best example of said ineptitude comes in an early scene when Crowder and Finley stop at a gas station. Near where they stop, a mechanic is working on a car, and he’s played by D’Urville Martin (who appeared alongside Williamson in movies like Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem). Martin is listed as a “Special Guest Star” in the opening credits, so one would think that his appearance would affect the plot in some way or that he would be given the opportunity to say or do something that would make people notice him. However, he only manages to say a few unremarkable lines before some bad guys pull up and start shooting, killing him in the crossfire. Why make an effort to have him appear in the movie only to do nothing at all with him?

If one ignores the pointlessness of the proceedings, the actual action isn’t terrible, even if it seems pretty ridiculous that the various assailants tend to ignore Finley, their ostensible target, in order to have fights or shootouts with Crowder. Williamson gets to perform some of the clunky karate moves that he tended to do at this point in his career as an action star, and he fires off a few attempts at snappy one-liners. He’s still a good enough tough guy to make action work for the most part, but he can’t build a good enough movie around himself to make any of it feel like it matters.

It’s probably not worthwhile to outline how everything works out, although I’ll note a few more missed opportunities. Throughout the journey, there are several moments where Finley gets too scared to run away from the bad guys along with Crowder, and Crowder’s response is always to say something like, “Well fine, just stay here then!” and head off on his own. This makes him look incredibly stupid, because he’s not going to get paid unless he delivers Finley to the DA. At one point while the duo are traveling via train, Crowder gets approached by a sexy Black woman, and he has sex with her in a sleeper car, but Williamson somehow missed the opportunity for the obvious visual joke of inserting a shot of a train going into a tunnel (she turns out to be an assassin, but Crowder stops her before she can kill Finley and throws her off the train, shouting “Happy landing, bitch!”).

When Crowder manages to deliver Finley to the DA in New York, he accepts his payment and walks away, with the movie not bothering to provide any closure to the story. Were all of the efforts that he went through to get Finley across the country worthwhile, or was there a dark irony to everything, with the gangster avoiding a conviction anyway? Who knows, and the movie doesn’t seem to think we’ll care. This could be a signal that Crowder is something of an antihero who is only out to make a buck, but it’s really just another sign of ineptitude.

In the movie’s final moments, Crowder returns to the woman who seduced him at the gangster’s behest back in L.A. (even though she had come to town for the sole purpose of doing so and had no reason to stick around) and gives her the watch back, because he realized that it contained a tracking device, which was why they kept being found by bad guys along their journey. When she asks why he’s returning the watch, he says, “I just didn’t get a bang out of it, baby,” and as he walks away, we hear an explosion on the soundtrack. That’s as close as this movie gets to an amusing joke, but even something that clunky is too clever for a story as dumb as this one turned out to be. Williamson apparently liked the Jesse Crowder character well enough to bring him back for several sequels, which I’m now dreading having to sit through. Hopefully he’ll prove me wrong and turn out to have learned something by his fourth or fifth time in the director’s chair.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night
The Education of Sonny Carson
Jive Turkey
The Black Godfather
Black Samson
The Dynamite Brothers
Shoot it Black, Shoot it Blue
Solomon King
Honeybaby, Honeybaby
Abby
Sweet Jesus, Preacherman
TNT Jackson
The Beast Must Die
Sheba, Baby
Lord Shango
The Black Gestapo
Dolemite
Cornbread, Earl and Me
Force Four
Cooley High
The Candy Tangerine Man
Bucktown
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Darktown Strutters
Let’s Do It Again
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Together Brothers
Take a Hard Ride
Mandingo
Mahogany
Friday Foster
Mean Johnny Barrows
Aaron Loves Angela
Lady Cocoa
Bad, Black and Beautiful
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Adiós Amigo
Black Shampoo
The River Niger
Velvet Smooth

Tom King is a fairly well-regarded comics writer, with a number of the series he’s written receiving acclaim and winning awards. While he made a splash in the late 2010s with comics like The Vision and Mister Miracle, it does seem like his star has fallen somewhat as people realize that he often comes up with overly serious, dour takes on superheroes. That works well enough when he’s writing Batman, but when he’s reimagining fun, brightly-colored characters into yet another example of grimness and grittiness, that sort of thing can get tiresome quickly.

I don’t read a whole lot of superhero comics these days, and I definitely tend to avoid those that take children’s characters and try to make them seem important by filling stories with violence and death in order to seem more mature. That’s Tom King’s stock in trade, so I can mostly just ignore his output. But I thought it might be worth it to check out the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow miniseries that he wrote a few years ago, since it served as the source material for the recent Supergirl movie. While I’m not exactly glad I did so, I did at least find the rare example of an adaptation that was better than the source material.

King’s story follows the same broad strokes as the movie: a girl on an alien planet named Ruthye is seeking revenge against a bad guy named Krem who killed her father, and she attempts to recruit Supergirl to help her. Krem shoots Supergirl’s dog Krypto with a poisoned arrow and then flees into space, so Supergirl and Ruthye go after him so that they can get the antidote from him. Krem hooks up with a group of murderous space pirates who are cutting a swath of violence across the galaxy, and Supergirl and Ruthye are horrified at all of the death and destruction they leave in their wake. They eventually catch up to him and get some form of justice, and lessons are learned, I suppose.

The big difference here is that the quest to find Krem doesn’t have the three-day time limit that’s present in the movie. Instead, Supergirl and Ruthye take months to find him as they wander across the galaxy, which seems questionable if Krypto is on the verge of death, while also calling Supergirl’s superheroic abilities into question. As in the movie, she has come to a planet with a red sun (which dampens her superpowers) in order to get drunk for her 21st birthday, and it takes her some time to get back to a solar system where a yellow sun will fully charge up her powers. But even then, the amount of time it takes her to track down a group of murderous brigands who have murdered thousands of people makes her seem like a pretty bad superhero.

Much of the story ends up being a tour through the aftermath of the brigands’ wake of violence, with Supergirl and Ruthye constantly reacting in horror to everything they see. There’s a visit to a planet where they stay in a place that is somehow a perfect replica of a small American town out of the 1950s, and they’re horrified to discover that it’s an obvious analogue to racism, with the supposedly normal people who live there having turned a despised underclass of citizens over to the brigands to be murdered. There’s a Jack Kirby-esque cosmic warrior lady who struggles to deal with the emotions of having her loved ones killed, so Supergirl insists that the lady attack her, insulting her until she lashes out so that she can get an emotional release. And so on; it’s all meant to be very serious and moving, but it really just calls into question why Supergirl (or other superheroes, such as the Green Lantern space cops of the DC universe, who are supposed to deal with threats like this) hasn’t put a stop to all this murder already.

King does provide excitement and adventure throughout the journey, and he gives artist Bilquis Evely plenty of opportunities to come up with cool visuals, but he also drags down the proceedings through a surfeit of over-written narrative captions in the voice of Ruthye. She speaks in elaborate, flowery language that King seems to really like, often delivering long-winded speeches about her desire for revenge. Page after page is filled with captions in which she goes on and on about her life growing up on a farm or her relationship with her father, as well as how her experiences with Supergirl have changed her outlook on life. King does provide a little bit of an excuse for all of this, implying that the story we’re reading is actually being told by an older Ruthye, who has embellished the narrative to give it more literary flair. But that doesn’t really make it any better; turning a page hoping to get some action and seeing yet another sea of captions as Ruthye goes on and on about the nature of heroism or whatever can be pretty damn tiresome.

To spoil the twist ending, it turns out that Krypto was never really in danger, and the whole plot was meant to give Supergirl a chance to teach Ruthye a lesson about the emptiness of revenge, or something like that. But it ended up changing Supergirl as she witnessed the true evil of the genocidal brigands, so by the time she catches up to them, she’s thinking of becoming murderous herself. Except that Ruthye has also witnessed Supergirl’s true goodness throughout their journeys, so she manages to remind Supergirl of her heroism. At least, that seems to be the intent, but the book spends so much time wallowing in misery that none of this hits like it’s meant to, and it ends up feeling like a whole bunch of nothing.

This is a book that tries to have it both ways, being a gritty and “realistic” take on the problems that heroic characters face when they go up against true evil, while also taking the dumb shortcuts that superhero comics expect readers to wave away because that’s just the way these stories work out. Supergirl spends months tracking down some bad guys that shouldn’t be all that hard to find, but when the time comes for it, she can summon her super-horse, Comet, so that they can outrun a magical weapon in a galaxy-spanning chase. She can solve problems instantly, except when the plot calls for her to struggle with them. King also gives her a pretty filthy mouth while maintaining plausible deniability by bleeping out the swear words with #%@$ symbols. Ooh, so mature!

The saving grace of the book is Evely’s art, which is full of gorgeous alien vistas, freaky alien creatures, cool sci-fi technology, and hard-hitting action. Too much of the book is full of mundane details accompanied by constant narrative captions (such as a full page dedicated to shots of Supergirl’s and Ruthye’s hands as the former teaches the latter about the proper sanitary procedures after using a space station bathroom), but when King allows Evely to let loose, the comic looks amazing. Even dumb details, like the brigands flying around space in a vessel that looks like an actual pirate ship, get brought to life in a manner that doesn’t seem completely ridiculous due to Evely’s artwork. She also has a flair for facial expressions, making us feel Supergirl’s anger or frustration or showing Ruthye’s faltering determination to get revenge. As aggravating as the writing can be, the art is what makes the book truly readable.

This is exactly the type of comic that has made so many modern superhero stories so tiresome. It tries to make everything so serious and mature that it leeches all of the fun out of what should be an exciting story about a heroic character with awesome powers defeating evil. The balancing act between trying to seem edgy and following the expected tropes that come with super-powered people fighting outsized villains is nearly impossible to pull off, and King is not one of the few who can do so effectively. Based on this foundation, it’s almost surprising that the movie was able to pound the story into the expected cinematic superhero framework and make the whole thing work as well as it did. While it wasn’t great, it was much more enjoyable than this, and it’s the rare case where I would encourage people to watch the adaptation and skip the original.

When creating a Supergirl movie (or any story featuring the character, really), there are two issues that creators need to figure out. The first one is the same problem that plagues anyone who tells a story about Superman: when you have a character who is, by their nature, more powerful than pretty much everyone else, how do you come up with interesting challenges for them? Writers have spent decades trying to come up with answers, to varying levels of success, and their solutions may range from establishing weaknesses to making other characters just as powerful or creating threats that can’t be solved with pure strength alone. The best approach to take, if you ask me, is to emphasize that Superman’s true power comes from his innate goodness, which may make him the squarest of superheroes, but also the most iconic and enduring.

The other issue is inherent to Supergirl: what makes her different from Superman? Is she just a female equivalent of her more popular and longer-lasting cousin, with all the same qualities except that she has long hair and wears a skirt? That’s kind of boring, and it means that she’s always going to be in Superman’s shadow, a version of the character that boys who aren’t interested in “girl stuff” don’t have to care about. But what’s the alternative? How is her personality, her approach to superheroism, or her general outlook on life any different? That’s an issue that has never really been settled, which is why the character in the comics always seems to be in limbo, with nobody sure about whether she has a secret identity, whether she lives in Metropolis alongside Superman or somewhere else, whether she is or isn’t as powerful as Superman (the “girl” part of her name certainly implies that she’s less mature), or any memorable details at all. Every writer has to reinvent the wheel and establish a new status quo for the character, since the only thing anyone knows about her is that she’s like Superman, but, you know, a girl.

The new movie struggles a little bit with both of these issues, but even if it doesn’t exactly come up with an especially revolutionary take on the character, it works well enough. The thing that makes this version of Supergirl (Millie Alcock, who previously appeared as the young version of Rhaenyra Targaryen in the first few episodes of House of the Dragon) somewhat unique had already been established in her cameo in 2025’s Superman reboot, where she was portrayed as a sort of intergalactic party girl who only dropped by Earth to pick up her dog Krypto before flying off to some other planet to get drunk. Here, her alcohol-soaked ways are revealed to be less of a fun-loving existence and more of an unsuccessful attempt to cope with the emotional difficulties of not just being one of the last members of her society to survive, but also feeling out of place next to her cousin, a beloved and well-established hero. Without any real sense of purpose, she’s been spending all her time on planets with red suns (which, depending on how much one knows about the ins and outs of Kryptonian biology, reduce her powers, as opposed to yellow suns, which charge up her powers) where she can regularly drink herself into a stupor. Will something happen that will cause her to put these irresponsible ways behind her and begin using her powers for good? Anyone who doesn’t know the answer to that question must be completely unfamiliar with how superhero stories (or fiction in general) work.

So, as expected, a young girl asks Supergirl for help getting revenge on some bad guys who killed her family (they’re known as Brigands, which is usually a generic term for pirate/barbarian types, but here it seems to be the actual name of their alien race). While Supergirl is initially reluctant to help, the Brigands also shoot Krypto with a poisoned arrow and then steal her ship, so she’ll need to track them down to get the antidote while also reawakening her sense of heroism and helping the girl avoid the emotional trauma that comes with revenge (which is something that’s only ever an issue in movies like this).

The ensuing quest plays out pretty much exactly as expected. Supergirl faces a variety of obstacles along her journey, and they’re mostly related to the first problem outlined above, with the movie having to constantly come up with reasons why she can’t easily defeat the bad guys right away. Sometimes the color of the sun on whatever world she’s on stops her from using her powers, and other times, she gets poisoned, or somebody pulls out some Kryptonite or something. But when the time for the climax rolls around, you know that she’s going to fully power up, take the Brigands down, and save the day.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a pretty formulaic way of handling the story. While Superman made at least a few attempts to differentiate itself from what has become the standard style of superhero movie in the 21st century, the world where this movie takes place is pretty much the exact same as you would get in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, except maybe a bit less colorful. There are spaceships and alien creatures, but most people look like regular humans, although they have powers and weapons that make them a little bit more formidable than the bank robbers or mercenary soldiers that Superman gets to fight back on Earth. It ends up being a standard version of the type of superhero movie that takes place on other planets, which are somehow always populated by peasants who cower in fear when lawless barbarians show up to slaughter everyone or capture women for the purposes of sex slavery (an unsavory element of the plot that doesn’t really get much attention, even though freeing women from abuse and subjugation would seem to be a natural fit for a female superhero).

The appearance of Lobo seems like it’s meant to be a big deal, but he doesn’t get a whole lot to do here. In the comics, the character is meant to be satirical, being an ultra-violent, amoral, metalhead tough guy who stands in contrast to characters like Superman. His whole point was to be the complete opposite of everything superheroes usually stand for while giving creators license to be as ridiculous and over-the-top as possible as they came up with violent antiheroic adventures for him to have. Supergirl gets the look of the character down, with Jason Momoa playing him exactly as one would expect, and the basic details are correct (he’s a bounty hunter who kills a lot of guys, and he’s known for being incredibly violent), but he doesn’t really seem to be very different from the Brigands or any of the other monstrous alien criminals who hang around the interplanetary bars that Supergirl likes to frequent.

So what we end up with is a formulaic plot, a setting taken straight from other sci-fi/superhero movies, lots of familiar-looking environments, characters with murky motivations, and contrived reasons to keep Supergirl from winning until the plot decides that it’s time for her to do so (this becomes especially apparent near the climax, where the bad guys have hidden on a planet with a green sun that has Kryptonite-like effects on Supergirl, but for some reason, they decide to hang around on the side of the planet where there’s a yellow sun that gives her her powers back just in time to save the day). Is the whole thing too dumb to tolerate?

Actually, no. While the clunky machinery underlying the movie becomes apparent with a little bit of thought, it all works well enough while it’s going on. Much of what makes the movie enjoyable comes down to Millie Alcock’s performance. She sells everything that her character goes through, from the listless sense of self-destructiveness that she starts with to the slow awakening of her sense of justice and righteousness, as well as her ability to seem like a destructive force of nature when it’s time to unleash her full might. The various action scenes are fun, and the finale is a pretty awesome bit of violence and destruction, set to a cover version of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” (while I know that slowed down covers of popular songs with female vocalists have become something of a cliché in movies in recent years, this one really worked for me). While the final resolution to the conflict about whether Supergirl’s young charge should kill someone out of revenge doesn’t really work, it’s in keeping with the generally clunky nature of the movie’s plotting and characterization, so it can mostly be ignored along with various other flaws.

This movie is kind of an odd choice as the second entry in this version of the DC cinematic universe, given that it doesn’t do anything to establish said universe as anything more than a pale imitation of its more popular counterpart. But it’s a good way to establish Supergirl as a character who people should want to see more of. Whether we’ll get the chance to do so remains to be seen, but Alcock is talented enough to make this version of the character work, and she could easily fit into the role of a more world-weary counterpart to Superman who is trying to fit into her expected superheroic persona. Here’s hoping she won’t be relegated to cameos and background appearances; she deserves better.

When one watches enough low-budget, low-quality movies, an appreciation eventually develops for filmmakers who don’t really know what they’re doing but are still trying their damnedest to put together something cool. It’s especially nice to see them develop their skills across multiple movies, eventually managing to come up with something pretty fun after a few tries. The best example of this that I’ve found so far during this project would be Lady Cocoa, which wasn’t a great movie, but it was still pretty enjoyable, and it was so far of a step up from the director’s previous films that it was hard to believe that he had managed to improve so much.

Velvet Smooth isn’t quite at that level, but it’s a marked improvement from the filmmakers’ previous film, Force Four. That was a bottom-of-the-barrel martial arts movie that was charming as an example of some people from a local karate dojo getting together to try to make a cool action flick, but it was nearly plotless and contained so much pointless filler that it was hard to stay awake between fight scenes. Their second effort is much better, with a plot that actually keeps things moving, some decent excuses for action scenes to happen, and some attempts at delivering performances that aren’t completely wooden. It would have been nice to see continuing development in future films, but sadly (for sickos like me at least), this was the last one they would make.

The story this time around isn’t much to write home about, but it works well enough as an action delivery device, and really, if the movie had starred professional actors and wasn’t so obviously amateurish, it could have made for a halfway decent bit of Blaxploitation action. In some nameless city (I think it might be part of New York, but it’s hard to tell), a group of masked thugs are trying to take over the numbers racket run by a local crime lord named King Lathrop (Owen Wat-Són, recognizable as one of the stars of Force Four due to the rat-tail sticking out the back of his afro; he was also the martial arts choreographer for this film). To get to the bottom of what is happening, he hires Velvet Smooth (Johnnie Hill), a lady detective with some martial arts skills and some badass assistants backing her up.

And, well, that’s pretty much all you really need to know. One of Velvet’s assistants follows a guy working for King, and when the thugs attack him, she beats them all up. Velvet does some investigating at a local casino, and when she gets back home, some thugs have broken into her apartment and try to threaten her into dropping the case, but she gets the upper hand and kicks their asses. Velvet has another assistant look into King’s financial information, and while everything seems to be on the up and up, his assistant Calvin (James Durrah) is sure acting suspicious. Soon after that, another of King’s employees gets attacked and killed (he tries to fend off the attackers using the briefcase he is carrying in a manner that would be reminiscent of Jackie Chan, except this was before Jackie was famous), and he was someone that Calvin hadn’t told Velvet about, so it sure seems like he’s the culprit.

There are other various twists and turns to the plot, but it’s not necessary to explain them in detail. Velvet strikes up a relationship with the owner of the aforementioned casino, and he’s played by the closest thing to an actual star the movie can come up with: Emerson Boozer, a former pro football player who is named as a “special guest star” in the opening credits. There are a couple of police detectives who show up to start investigating, with the more senior of them, Ramos (Frank Ruiz), doing his best to be a cool, wisecracking tough guy, although it’s hard to shake the feeling that he’s reading all his lines from cue cards placed just off camera. The other detective, Barnes (Moses Illiya), turns out to be the big mastermind behind the evil scheme to take over King’s rackets, which isn’t really a spoiler, partially because that doesn’t really make sense, but mostly because the writers had to figure out who would be the big bad guy and he was the only character available.

Really, the whole thing is just an excuse to string a series of fights together, and while said fights aren’t amazing or anything, they at least feature some people with a modicum of martial arts training doing roundhouse kicks, karate chops, and judo flips. The choreography works well enough, although it’s far from convincing, being the kind of thing where a group of bad guys circle around the hero and mostly stand there waiting for their turn to attack and get beaten up. All the action is accompanied by some pretty low-rent sound effects, including repeated clips of some guy making an “oof!” sound that’s less convincing than the one that’s used in Roblox games. It’s all quite fun, and each action scene tells its own story rather than just being an excuse for some wannabe stuntmen to jump around for a little while.

So, we get a pretty fun brawl in a pool hall that features some stick fights using pool cues (another Jackie Chan-style scene). There’s a rooftop battle and chase between King and Barnes that occasionally features sped-up footage, making it seem kind of like a silent comedy. Everything culminates in a big fight between Velvet and her compatriots and all the thugs working for Barnes, and it’s a raucous affair that even Ramos gets involved in, even though, as a guy who’s kind of short and chubby, he’s the least convincing martial artist of all. If you’re going to make a low-rent martial arts flick, you’d better throw in lots of ridiculous fights, and this movie definitely delivers on that front.

It’s enjoyable enough at other times too, partially due to the cool outfits everyone wears. Most of the men wear fairly standard 1970s leisure suits made of polyester and velvet, with wide collars and bizarre patterns. Velvet gets to wear a variety of glamorous dresses, and she and the other women usually put on some loose-fitting bellbottoms when the time comes for fight scenes. They all look pretty stylish from the perspective of several decades later, although it’s possible that this was just the kind of thing that people of the time could just grab off the rack at their local store.

The music isn’t half bad either (aside from what seems to be meant to be high-energy jazz during many of the fight scenes that just sounds like people making noise with horns), with a decently funky score, an over-the-top theme song featuring a singer wailing the title character’s name, and a break for a band to play a nice soul song during a party scene. This really gets close to being an actual movie (more so than several others that I’ve watched), and while it’s very, very far from being great, it’s still a fun time for those who enjoy lots of obviously fake kicking and punching. It’s too bad some filmmakers who were starting to show some promise didn’t get to keep improving.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night
The Education of Sonny Carson
Jive Turkey
The Black Godfather
Black Samson
The Dynamite Brothers
Shoot it Black, Shoot it Blue
Solomon King
Honeybaby, Honeybaby
Abby
Sweet Jesus, Preacherman
TNT Jackson
The Beast Must Die
Sheba, Baby
Lord Shango
The Black Gestapo
Dolemite
Cornbread, Earl and Me
Force Four
Cooley High
The Candy Tangerine Man
Bucktown
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Darktown Strutters
Let’s Do It Again
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Together Brothers
Take a Hard Ride
Mandingo
Mahogany
Friday Foster
Mean Johnny Barrows
Aaron Loves Angela
Lady Cocoa
Bad, Black and Beautiful
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Adiós Amigo
Black Shampoo
The River Niger

Steven Spielberg has been associated with aliens for almost all of his filmmaking career, although that mostly comes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., which both came out within his first decade of directing movies. He has dabbled in alien stories since then, but mostly as a producer on TV shows and miniseries that don’t rank alongside his best-known work. His adaptation of War of the Worlds is something of an outlier, with an alien-invasion story serving as a metaphorical lens for the post-9/11 era. In most cases, he seems to approach aliens with his signature sense of wonder as characters connect with something that’s bigger and more meaningful than they can comprehend.

While Spielberg’s alien stories had seemed quasi-religious in the past, Disclosure Day goes all the way in that direction, treating aliens as godlike beings that manipulate people from afar until it’s time to finally reveal themselves. The story seems particularly rooted in the 2020s, featuring sinister semi-governmental authority figures who attempt to use something that they don’t fully understand to nefarious ends, although there’s a level of optimism here that seems kind of divorced from reality. That may be part of why the movie doesn’t really work, but the real issue is its assumption that most everyone shares the same beliefs about the certainty that otherworldly beings have visited Earth, that they have benevolent attitudes, and that the revelation of their presence would most likely cause humanity to unite in harmony.

The story here follows a few characters who get caught up in events that they barely understand as they obtain proof of the existence of aliens and carry out actions that don’t seem to make a whole lot of sense but will inevitably lead to the day indicated in the title when the truth becomes known to the world. It’s full of the types of exciting action and crowd-pleasing moments that Spielberg is so good at crafting, but when one takes a moment to stop and think about what exactly is happening and why, it sort of falls apart.

So, we’ve got Josh O’Connor (from Challengers and a number of other movies that have made him one of the more interesting movie stars of the moment) as Daniel, an IT security specialist who has come into possession of a collection of flash drives full of videos proving the existence of aliens, and Emily Blunt as Margaret, a local-news weather reporter who suddenly starts exhibiting psychic abilities that have clearly been granted to her by aliens. Daniel is on the run from a Palantir-esque agency that seems to be only tangentially connected to the U.S. government, led by a gruff, grey-whiskered guy named Noah (Colin Firth). Daniel is also getting assistance from Hugo (Colman Domingo), a former government/security company employee who has gone rogue as part of an underground resistance movement with plans to reveal aliens to the world.

That all works as a setup for lots of action, with the parameters of the plot only slowly becoming clear and confusing events happening regularly as the all-powerful aliens apparently pull everyone’s strings from a higher dimension or something. While the movie is trying hard to seem hard-edged and realistic, with powerful operatives pulling off secretive schemes meant to keep the powers that exist under wraps and under their control, it’s also strangely naive about the ways people would react to inexplicable things happening around them. Margaret’s psychic abilities are of the type where she can instantly discern all of the personal issues that people are struggling with and say exactly the right thing to fix all of their problems. Everyone she comes in contact with is dumbstruck at her abilities but is willing to believe everything she says and put her words into action to better themselves. That’s a pretty optimistic view of humanity; in reality, people would be much more likely to view her with suspicion and then dig in to their worst impulses, refusing to make any changes.

That’s not to say that a movie like this has to be realistic, but it’s also inconsistent about when alien powers work and when they don’t, as well as when the evil characters will succumb to Margaret’s manipulation, fight back with violence, or give in and become believers. One of the biggest action scenes, a re-do of a famous train-based moment from Spielberg’s first movie, Duel, that gets much bigger and more over the top, comes after Margaret has rescued Daniel from the government’s clutches by making his captors think she was someone who was important to each of them. This apparently works in the moment, but it’s not effective for more than a few minutes, since one of Noah’s minions shakes off the whammy she put on him and comes after them with murderous intent. Do her powers work, or don’t they? Why would the aliens gift her with abilities that are only partially and fitfully effective? They certainly work in mysterious ways.

That’s ultimately the message of the movie, and it’s one that religious types share as they try to figure out why the deities they believe in allow seemingly random events to play out in real life. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it may be necessary for people to try to make sense of a chaotic world, but there’s a lot of distance between “everything happens for a reason” and the idea that all events and human behaviors are part of a preordained plan that serves a supreme being’s ineffable design. This movie tends toward the latter part of that spectrum, which is why its ultimate message ends up being distasteful to those of us who try to avoid the spectrum altogether.

An analysis of the failures of this message will require an exploration of the movie’s ending, so beware of spoilers from here on out. All of the chases eventually lead Margaret and Daniel to meet up with Hugo, who, along with a team of mostly-unnamed assistants who seem to be very trusting in the idea that his inexplicable actions make any sense, has managed to build a perfect replica of Margaret’s childhood home, all for the purpose of recreating the abduction that took place when she was 10 in which the aliens gave her psychic powers. Why is this necessary? How did Hugo know how to get everything in the home right down to the smallest detail? The answer is “because aliens, that’s why,” which might seem to shut down all arguments, although it really begs the question of why Hugo needed Margaret and Daniel to do anything in the first place if he had such power at his fingertips.

That question becomes even more prominent in the finale, which sees Margaret return to the news station where she works so she can break into programming and broadcast Daniel’s collection of alien videos, finally revealing the all-important secret to the world. Even though Noah and his minions chase them to the studio, he decides to give up and relent to Margaret’s broadcast, because of reasons. Why his second-in-command, the guy who previously shook off Margaret’s program to try to kill her and Daniel and who expresses outrage at Noah’s decision, doesn’t try to use the many well-armed thugs he has with them to stop everything is even more questionable, but impotently stalking off in anger and disgust is apparently meant to be a fitting end to the villains’ character arc.

Anyway, we see that people around the world are amazed and captivated when they are provided with seemingly irrefutable proof of the existence of aliens, with the various actors playing network anchors working overtime to tell us that all of these videos are real and nobody should ever question them, even though that’s yet another element of the movie that is totally contrary to human nature. But to top things off, during the broadcast, Hugo wheels an actual alien into the studio so that it can commune with Margaret and Daniel. Apparently, he had an alien just sitting off-screen the whole time and could have revealed it at any time. That would have invalidated the entire plot of the movie though, so it had to wait for the moment when it would be most dramatically effective.

There are some exciting and effective moments on the surface of this movie, but if you dig below that surface in the slightest, it’s near-meaningless. However, being a sort of religious text, it doesn’t seem like it’s meant to actually be pondered as anything other than a message about the truths that it’s purportedly revealing. It’s similar to stories about the Christian rapture, with the second coming of Christ revealing the existence of God to the world so that the believers can glory in the fact that they were right all along, and everyone else can suffer due to their lack of faith. It doesn’t matter that everything leading up to that rapture demonstrated the arbitrary and capricious nature of an all-powerful deity who didn’t care too much about the world’s suffering and only wanted to prove a point. The mysterious and unknowable actions of God/aliens are not for human minds to understand; we are but tools to be used at the whims of higher powers. How that sort of idea can be meaningful and comforting to believers is hard to understand, but that’s the power of religion.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Martha Wells’ Murderbot series is the continuing growth of the main character, a part-human, part-robot being who exhibits some neurodivergent qualities and is highly competent in some areas (protecting people in dangerous situations, hacking into computer systems, overcoming foes in exciting action scenes) but who struggles to manage emotions and relate to others. The novellas and novels that make up the series have seen Murderbot move from being someone who doesn’t like being around humans very much and would prefer to shut the world out and focus on watching entertainment media to a person with a network of people who both rely on it and offer support of their own. As much as it still struggles to process emotions and understand the ways humans act, it has learned that it is possible to trust others, and it has found satisfaction in being a reliable source of protection for people it cares about.

This volume is an interesting one, containing one novella, “Fugitive Telemetry,” that follows the previous volume in the series, and a longer novel, System Collapse, that picks up directly where the previous standalone novel, Network Effect, left off. The former is a pretty good story, providing Murderbot with the opportunity to demonstrate some expertise by helping to solve a murder mystery on the Preservation space station where it lives. But the latter story is the real highlight of the volume.

System Collapse is kind of unique among Murderbot stories in that it’s a direct sequel to a previous story. All the stories in the series are sequential, but before this point, they had mostly been standalone, with each one having its own beginning, middle, and end before Murderbot would proceed on to the next adventure. This one, however, is highly dependent on Network Effect, taking place in the same location immediately after what had happened previously and dealing with many of the same conflicts. That’s fine, but it would have been pretty confusing if I hadn’t read Network Effect in between volume 2 and volume 3 of the series.

Reservations about whether an instruction manual is needed to enjoy this series aside, the story is a good one, with a bit less action than usual, at least at first, but making up for it by dealing with some internal issues that Murderbot is experiencing. Previous stories had seen it struggling to figure out how to manage its emotions, especially as it comes to care about others and worries that it may not always be able to protect them. The previous story was highly traumatic, since it involved the apparent death of Murderbot’s best friend and possible romantic attachment ART (short for Asshole Research Transport, a name that Murderbot gave it because it is a powerful AI that controls a scientific transport vessel and regularly reminds others of its high level of intelligence). While ART managed to avoid deletion, the up-and-down emotions that came with its death and resurrection were difficult for Murderbot to take. To add to the turmoil, Murderbot and ART also decided to create an AI offspring to handle certain tasks during their adventure, but it sacrificed itself after displaying some unexpected behavior that convinced another SecUnit similar to Murderbot to throw off its programming and become autonomous. All of this is affecting Murderbot’s performance, making it wonder how well it will be able to protect people and worrying that it could shut down at the worst possible time.

The plot of System Collapse involves the discovery of a hidden colony on a part of a planet that is out of contact with everyone else due to interference caused by some terraforming engines that are operating nearby. Murderbot and a few humans (along with a version of ART downloaded to a drone temporarily) head into the dead zone to make contact, hoping to convince the colonists to leave the planet, which is dangerous because of an alien infection, and resettle someplace where they can be in control of their own destiny. However, a corporation that had previously controlled the planet has sent its own team into the dead zone, and they want to recruit the colonists into indentured servitude, which is the standard form of labor in this ultra-capitalist future.

As Murderbot and company try to get these people to trust them and show why their counterparts should not be trusted, they nearly despair until Murderbot hits on the idea of using media. It spends so much of its downtime watching TV shows, and it understands the power of imagery that tells a story. So why not put together a sort of documentary showing how corporations essentially use their “employees” as slave labor, keeping them indentured for generations, forcing them to work beyond their physical capabilities, and using SecUnits like Murderbot to keep them in line? It’s an exciting idea, and it’s one that Murderbot is uniquely suited for due to its enjoyment of media. For a series where most of the excitement comes from chases, fights, and shootouts, it’s surprising to have a scene of media editing provide the most thrills.

When things devolve into the expected violence, we get excitement of the sort that this series usually features, but it was nice to see some development of new skills that Murderbot may be able to utilize in the future. There may also be some potential for Murderbot to encourage freedom and autonomy for people of all sorts throughout the galaxy, since it keeps finding ways to free other SecUnits. While this makes for a good example of the types of stories that the series does so well, I’m ready to move on to new planets or space stations and new adventures. Whatever crazy situations that Murderbot, ART, and company get themselves into, I’ll be happy to accompany them.

In recent years, much has been made about the slow deterioration of the internet, with negative experiences online now beginning to outweigh any positive impact that constant, ubiquitous digital connections have had on people’s lives and society as a whole. There is definitely something to these claims, with what was once a sprawling, democratized atmosphere mostly being consolidated into a few sites that are all controlled by massive corporations owned by billionaires who want to remake the world in their twisted image, as well as AI slop taking up so much bandwidth that nobody knows what is real anymore. But the idea that there is little of value left online is somewhat overblown, given that there are still many thriving online communities that are coming up with interesting, creative ideas that sometimes manage to escape the bounds of the internet and make an impact on the wider culture.

While the Backrooms movie is the latest example of this, it’s just one of many instances in which regular people have been doing interesting things that have gained well-deserved recognition. I’ve mentioned several of those here, such as the Dungeon Crawler Carl novels, which began as stories serialized online; the book We Used to Live Here, which started as a series of “creepypasta” stories posted on Reddit; and the mind-bending sci-fi novel There Is No Antimimetics Division, which grew out of the SCP Foundation, a wiki-based storytelling site. I may have even forgotten a few examples, and this is really just scratching the surface of the cool forms of art and expression that can be found if one knows where to look.

The issue that can sometimes arise when something that is popular online becomes available to people who were not already aware of its intricacies is how to balance the needs of different audiences. People who are already fans may not want to go back to an entry-level version of a story, and they can be alienated if too much of what they liked in the past has been changed. But at the same time, the purpose of a movie, TV show, or other form of mass media is to attract as wide an audience as possible, so if something is only for the fans, everyone else is going to be left scratching their heads and wondering why they should care.

That can be a difficult needle for creators to thread, especially in an era where certain types of outspoken fan communities can make people’s lives miserable if they decide that they haven’t been pandered to enough (which is one of those negative aspects of the internet mentioned above). It does seem like certain communities are more welcoming than others though, especially those that skew younger and haven’t been taken over by toxic nerd culture. Fortunately, the horror community (or certain pockets of it, anyway) tends to be one of those, and with something like the Backrooms, the excitement of shared storytelling and diving into weird lore may encourage people to be more open about the types of stories that can be told.

All of this is to say that the Backrooms movie does a pretty great job of introducing its concept, delivering all sorts of weirdness and hinting at additional depths that may be explored. Director Kane Parsons didn’t originate the Backrooms concept, but he gained enough acclaim making YouTube videos about the idea that he got the chance to expand his work to feature length. Even though he’s pretty young, what he’s come up with is strikingly assured, featuring some great production design, some good performances by well-known actors, and an excellent sense of ominousness whenever anyone ventures into the eponymous nether region.

I don’t think any prior knowledge of the Backrooms is really necessary to enjoy the movie. About all I knew going in was the basic concept of the online phenomenon, which originally started with an anonymous post on 4chan in which someone shared a picture of a creepily empty office featuring fluorescent lighting and empty rooms with sickly yellow wallpaper, along with a short paragraph about the possibility of stepping out of reality and becoming trapped in an endless series of corridors that may be populated by freaky extra-dimensional creatures. People online ran with this idea, coming up with all sorts of different levels to this dimension and the horrors that people may experience when trapped there, and apparently Parsons was the most successful at coming up with good visuals and extending the original idea into something effective enough to build a pretty big fanbase.

While the creepiness of a liminal space that is lurking just outside of reality and threatening to escape its bounds is a pretty good concept, and it might make for plenty of effective short videos, the question remained about whether it was enough to support an actual movie on its own. The story Parsons and company have come up with works well enough to give us just enough to care about before weird stuff starts happening. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, the owner of a struggling furniture store with a goofy pirate theme who has some serious emotional issues that he hasn’t yet worked out, despite regular sessions with his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve). When Clark discovers an apparent portal (it’s really just a wall that looks solid but lets people pass right through it) in the basement of his store that leads to a series of creepy yellow hallways, he becomes obsessed with exploring them, apparently unconcerned about the ominous creatures that seem to be lurking in its shadows.

Really, that’s about all there is to the plot, although some of the horrors of the Backrooms do play into Clark’s tenuous mental state, and Mary manages to get trapped there as well in an experience that probably forces her to consider every bit of psychological theory she has learned. The real meat of the movie is the exploration of this weird space and the inexplicable things found within. It’s not just an endless series of empty corridors; there are objects that seem like degraded replicas of items that can be found in reality, including pieces of furniture that are fused together or wrap around corners in ways that look like tangible versions of glitchy video game graphics. Everything is strange and unsettling, even before unseen beasts start moving within the shadows and stalking characters through this seemingly endless realm.

Parsons also deftly moves between found footage style segments that are akin to what one would expect on YouTube, with shaky handheld cameras providing a sense of visceral unease as characters run through increasingly freaky environments, and slick, professionally-shot scenes that appear to have been filmed on real sets, even as the action moves through terrain that should be impossible. It’s as good of a realization of the Backrooms as one could hope for, providing a memorable horror setting that develops in increasingly disturbing directions as the film goes on.

While it’s unlikely that there’s anyone who needs my seal of approval before checking out this thing that all the kids are excited about, I’m happy to report that this is a really solid horror movie. While there are certainly some references that went right over the heads of those of us who aren’t steeped in Backrooms lore, there’s nothing alienating that should make anyone feel like this movie isn’t for them (at least, nothing that would be outside the bounds of horror, which is supposed to be creepy and upsetting). Sometimes a popular thing also turns out to be good, and as long as the more elderly and less chronically online members of the audience are willing to go on a journey to an unexplainable and threatening dimension, they should have a good time.

James Earl Jones didn’t really do Blaxploitation, although a few of his movies may have approached the genre. In 1976, he hadn’t yet gained fame as the voice of Darth Vader, and he was probably best known as a stage actor, although he did get nominated for an Academy Award for The Great White Hope, playing a role that he originated on stage. But even though there were probably some opportunities for him to either play an action hero or a more stately figure in a Blaxploitation movie, he didn’t go for them.

The River Niger might be the closest that Jones came to Blaxploitation (although he did later appear in the third Sidney Poitier/Bill Cosby movie, A Piece of the Action), since it does feature some gang violence. But it only barely fits into the genre, being an adaptation of a Tony-winning play by Joseph A. Walker. It’s mostly a family drama, and while it does have some memorable dialogue and good performances, it probably played better on the stage than it does on screen.

The movie isn’t bad, but it’s pretty slow-moving, with long stretches where little of interest is happening. It’s pretty bland visually, although director Krishna Shah does at least try to spice things up at dramatic moments by cutting to split-second shots of various traditional African decorations in a family’s home. There’s also a score by the band War (of “Low Rider” and “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”) fame that can get pretty funky at times but also devolves into nearly tuneless warbling during certain dramatic moments (it doesn’t help that the version of the film available on streaming featured a soundtrack that occasionally sounded like a vinyl record that was slipping off the turntable). While an audience watching the play live on stage would have been able to focus on the actors, the movie fails to make their performances really come to life.

There are plenty of examples of stage plays that have been adapted into movies really well, but this just isn’t one of them. But it’s also possible that what may have seemed like a dynamic and interesting portrayal of African-American life in the early 1970s isn’t all that remarkable with 50 years of distance. There’s a plotline about a young Black man who struggles against the expectations placed on him by his family and his community, and potentially some stuff about a couple struggling financially, although that mostly gets forgotten in favor of more dramatic developments. The intrusion of street-level violence into the characters’ lives seems kind of forced, with some twists that end up being pretty nonsensical. It seems like this should be the stuff of good drama, but it just doesn’t come together into something compelling here.

James Earl Jones plays Johnny Williams, a blue-collar family man living in Watts. He and his wife Mattie (Cicely Tyson, another well-known Black performer who mostly avoided Blaxploitation) are excited to welcome home their son Jeff (Glynn Turman, from Five on the Black Hand Side, Thomasine & Bushrod, Cooley High, and more) after a stint in the Air Force. Other notable characters include Jamaican doctor Dudley Stanton (Louis Gossett, Jr.), who mostly serves as a sounding board for Johnny until the plot calls for him to use his medical skills; Jeff’s South African girlfriend, Ann (Jonelle Allen); and Moe (Roger E. Mosley, from Sweet Jesus, Preacherman), a childhood friend of Jeff’s who now leads a local street gang that pretends to be part of a Black revolutionary movement.

This being a play adaptation, the plot mostly takes a backseat to scenes of dialogue, which are generally fine and occasionally feature some pretty good writing. Jones certainly seems to be doing his best to play a memorable character, being a bit of a loudmouth who is constantly going on about how proud he is of his son, a quality that is exacerbated by his regular drinking. He’s a poet, and while he seems kind of embarrassed to recite his work to others, he spends a good portion of the runtime working on a poem that shares the movie’s title, finally getting the chance to deliver it at a climactic moment in a scene that seems like it should be powerful but ends up being kind of lifeless. There is a big scene where he goes over the top with emotional expressiveness after getting some bad news, and he mostly manages to sell the character’s anguish, although it’s yet another moment that almost certainly worked better on stage.

Most of the other characters get overshadowed by Johnny, although Jeff gets some good moments too, including a long speech where he reveals that he flunked out of navigator school, and he’s not coming home in a moment of glory but because he left the Air Force in disgrace. He talks about how he couldn’t handle being a “super n*****” who had to live up to the expectations of everyone around him and serve as a shining example of the potential greatness of the entire Black community. While this is a good emotional moment, especially as Jeff wrestles with how he has disappointed his parents while also feeling like a weight has been taken off his shoulders, the dilemma his character is facing is rooted in a particular moment in time, almost seeming quaint after several decades of Black progress (not that the feeling that Black people need to strive harder to get ahead has completely faded away, especially during a time when the president of the United States and his cronies seem to be trying to erase as much of that progress as possible). Notably, Jeff himself tells Moe that “It’s not the 60s anymore” and that the idealism of the Civil Rights movement isn’t as relevant as it once was.

That struggle between Black revolutionary ideas and the reality of life in the 1970s seems like it could be something interesting to explore, but it kind of gets short shrift here. The portion of the plot relating to Moe’s gang almost seems like an afterthought (maybe it got more time in the stage play) until it has to serve as the basis for the big, dramatic climax. There’s some business about a police officer who had been killed by a member of the gang, but nobody knows who, and there’s apparently somebody who has been snitching to the cops. When Moe comes up with some sort of scheme to flush out the snitch, everything goes sideways, and the gang members all end up hiding from the cops in the Williams house, leading to a confrontation where Jeff reveals that he was the one who committed the murder, even though that makes little sense. This provides Johnny with a reason to get involved in a standoff and make a big sacrifice to save his son and/or encourage the gang members to live up to their revolutionary ideals and do something that actually makes a difference. Sure, that’s one way to build dramatic stakes, but it all feels pretty forced. It does allow the movie to end with a good line from Cicely Tyson though, so at least she got to do something of interest during the movie instead of just being a long-suffering wife who gets cancer so that her husband has a good reason to emote.

I wanted to like this movie a lot more than I did, and while I can give it points for injecting literary sensibilities into a more street-level mileiu, I think it just didn’t work in this format. A lot of its best qualities would have worked better on stage or in a movie where a director emphasized the intimacy of the performances. It feels like some material was cut to fit the runtime of a movie, but there are still plenty of moments that didn’t really need to be there and only serve to slow things down. While it might be interesting to see a new version that corrects some of these issues, the story is tied to such a specific time that it just isn’t as interesting to modern audiences. Oh well, I guess this one can just be chalked up to a decent attempt at drama that fell well short of greatness. I’ve definitely said a lot worse about some of the movies I’ve watched for this project.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night
The Education of Sonny Carson
Jive Turkey
The Black Godfather
Black Samson
The Dynamite Brothers
Shoot it Black, Shoot it Blue
Solomon King
Honeybaby, Honeybaby
Abby
Sweet Jesus, Preacherman
TNT Jackson
The Beast Must Die
Sheba, Baby
Lord Shango
The Black Gestapo
Dolemite
Cornbread, Earl and Me
Force Four
Cooley High
The Candy Tangerine Man
Bucktown
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Darktown Strutters
Let’s Do It Again
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Together Brothers
Take a Hard Ride
Mandingo
Mahogany
Friday Foster
Mean Johnny Barrows
Aaron Loves Angela
Lady Cocoa
Bad, Black and Beautiful
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Adiós Amigo
Black Shampoo

There was a certain subset of Blaxploitation films that seemed like obvious attempts to capitalize on trends, taking familiar titles or plots from popular movies and recreating them with Black characters, sometimes doing so by simply adding “Black” to the title. Aside from horror movies like Blacula and Blackenstein, there were movies like Thomasine & Bushrod, which seemed like an attempt to make a Black version of Bonnie and Clyde, or Black Caesar, a Black version of the classic gangster film Little Caesar. That’s not too surprising, especially for people bankrolling exploitation movies who were hoping to make a quick buck, but occasionally a filmmaker would take inspiration from unlikely sources.

That’s the case with Black Shampoo, which is sort of based on the Hal Ashby movie Shampoo, which came out the previous year. That’s certainly an odd source of inspiration, since it was a vehicle for the incredibly popular Warren Beatty, who starred as a hairdresser who got away with sleeping with all his clients because everyone assumed he was gay, with the plot providing some social critique as it played out during the 1968 presidential election. Ashby is a pretty revered filmmaker who had a deft comic touch, leaving a legacy that would be built on by later filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Alexander Payne.

Needless to say, Black Shampoo director Greydon Clark isn’t anywhere near the same league as Ashby. He spent the 1970s cranking out cheap exploitation movies, and he’s probably best known for making some notoriously dumb films during the 80s, such as Joysticks, The Forbidden Dance, and the killer-cat horror movie Uninvited. Is he up to the task of creating a sexual romp featuring a Black hairdresser, lots of horny women, and some gangsters? In a word: no.

John Daniels, star of The Candy Tangerine Man, stars as Mr. Jonathan, the owner of a popular hair salon on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. His clientele mostly consists of white women who want to have sex with him, either angling to seduce him in the private suite of his salon or convincing him to make house calls. The many trysts he has with these women verge on pornographic, some of them seemingly lifted straight from the notorious letters people write to Penthouse.

For example, when making a house call to one client, he gets accosted by her two young daughters, who inform him that they’ve shared men before, all but force him to sit in a pool chair, strip off their bikinis, and start climbing on him. Their mother gets upset that they’re making time with the guy who was supposed to be there to service her, so she whips them with a belt and forces them to jump into the pool before pulling up her dress and climbing on Jonathan herself. This is either meant to be hilarious comedy or ultra-sexy business, but it ends up being neither. It’s mostly just off-putting, especially because Jonathan treats the attention he gets as an annoyance, as if having constant sex with all these women is just one more aspect of a job that he doesn’t really like very much.

The actual plot of the movie that manages to creep in between sex scenes involves Jonathan’s receptionist, Brenda (Tanya Boyd). She’s only been on the job for a few days, and while Jonathan is off making a house call, some thugs show up at the salon, inform her that their boss told them to track her down, and try to force her to come with them. When she refuses and they start to get rough with her, the other hairstylists at the salon, who are the stereotypical flamingly gay men one would expect, try to stop him and get beaten up for their efforts. Amusingly, one of them spends the rest of the movie wearing a cervical collar that he has decorated with a jaunty scarf.

Jonathan convinces Brenda not to go back to her old boyfriend, the gangster who sent the thugs after her, because she’s apparently the one woman who he actually likes, even if he’s no less enthusiastic about having sex with her than he is with anyone else. But after the boss sends the thugs to smash up Jonathan’s salon, she relents and goes back to him. Jonathan spends the next day searching for her, to no avail, but then the boss simply sends his goons to bring Jonathan to him so that he can see that Brenda is there of her own free will. Jonathan agrees to leave her alone, although he does make sure to tell her that her new relaxed hairstyle looks like shit.

This would seem like it would be the end of things, with Jonathan being kind of miserable even after the other hairdressers invite him to a party that they describe as “an old-fashioned bar-bee-cue” and introduce him to various countercultural friends (one John Waters type, after being informed that Jonathan is straight, says he wants to see if he can bend him a little bit). He decides to retreat to a remote cabin that he owns to lick his wounds, leaving his underlings to rebuild the salon in his absence.

However, we also see that Brenda isn’t as happy with her gangster boyfriend as she professed to be, since he slaps her and threatens her when he sees her looking at a secret notebook he keeps with information about all his criminal activities. She decides to steal the notebook and go running back to Jonathan, but the gangsters chase her to his cabin so that the movie can end in a violent showdown.

Well, that seems to be the intent, but aside from one memorable moment involving a chainsaw that Jonathan had been using to cut wood in a previous scene, it’s mostly an interminable chase through the woods, with everybody getting exhausted after lots of running and Jonathan doing a bad job of fending off some attackers who should have been easily defeated. It’s an unfortunately anticlimactic end to a movie that didn’t really have a plot that was worth a climax in the first place.

In the end, I’m not sure who exactly this movie was for, aside from audiences who were starved for sexual content and would be happy to see anything in which a bunch of women get naked. Clark apparently wanted to avoid making a movie with the types of characters who usually showed up in Blaxploitation movies, like pimps and drug dealers, so he tried to come up with a story involving the travails of a Black business owner. But Jonathan’s troubles are so far removed from anything that would happen to normal people that he might as well have been a secret agent or something.

It doesn’t help that John Daniels isn’t especially charismatic. He mostly seems grumpy throughout the movie, not getting any enjoyment from all the sex he’s having or finding any fulfillment from his business or his personal relationships. While there’s little explicit racism in the movie (the gangsters don’t even throw around any racial slurs, which actually makes it kind of an outlier among these sorts of movies), the whole thing is built on the same stereotypes as movies like Birth of a Nation, perpetuating the idea that Black men hold some sort of sexual power over white women. That’s pretty gross, even if the movie is meant to be a goofy romp that wasn’t trying to deliver any sort of message. But that’s the thing about art, even of the low-quality variety; the underlying biases of the artist are often all too clear.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take
Truck Turner
Three the Hard Way
Amazing Grace
Uptown Saturday Night
The Education of Sonny Carson
Jive Turkey
The Black Godfather
Black Samson
The Dynamite Brothers
Shoot it Black, Shoot it Blue
Solomon King
Honeybaby, Honeybaby
Abby
Sweet Jesus, Preacherman
TNT Jackson
The Beast Must Die
Sheba, Baby
Lord Shango
The Black Gestapo
Dolemite
Cornbread, Earl and Me
Force Four
Cooley High
The Candy Tangerine Man
Bucktown
Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold
Darktown Strutters
Let’s Do It Again
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Together Brothers
Take a Hard Ride
Mandingo
Mahogany
Friday Foster
Mean Johnny Barrows
Aaron Loves Angela
Lady Cocoa
Bad, Black and Beautiful
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Adiós Amigo