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

Horror stories can take many forms, and novels in the genre can often be most effective when they focus on the mental states of the people who are experiencing awful, inexplicable events. However, some stories have such an internal focus that they end up not being all that scary, since they’re just taking place inside a character’s head, with little impact on anything else around them. That’s kind of the way I felt when reading Marcus Kliewer’s The Caretaker, which is a pretty good depiction of someone who is at the end of their mental rope but isn’t necessarily all that effective as a horror story.

Kliewer’s previous book, We Used to Live Here, also delved into the internal emotional state of a person who was experiencing weirdness, and he definitely has a facility for wringing horror out of mental health issues like depression and anxiety. I think we went a little too far in that direction here though. While he paints an effective portrait of someone who is struggling to survive after life has nearly destroyed them, his story ends up focusing too much on internal issues rather than the additional pressures that push them to the breaking point.

Perhaps my issue with the book is that what happens to the character is weird, but less scary than it could be. The plot here follows Macy Mullins, a young woman who is the sole guardian of her teenage sister Jemma after their father’s death a few years ago. The two of them are struggling, since Macy has had trouble maintaining employment and making enough money to pay rent on their shitty apartment, and they’re on the verge of being homeless. So when she finds a job as a caretaker/house-sitter for a remote house in the Oregon woods over a weekend, she feels like she has no choice but to take it, despite the weird details of the situation.

While the elderly woman who owns the house seems nice enough, she insists that Macy will have to follow the detailed instructions left behind by her late husband, who seemed to think that he was living on an interdimensional nexus of some sort and was the only thing that could stop an apocalyptic incursion. He may or may not have been insane, believing that there were otherworldly “visitors” stalking the house and that it was incredibly important to pay attention to whether lights are kept on or off during the night while also tracking the movements of rabbits in the woods. His instructions are odd, but they don’t seem too difficult, and his wife acts like they’re not that big a deal, being nothing more than the eccentricities of an old man who was not all there.

Macy takes the job, of course, but perhaps as a nod to the savviness of people in the modern world, a great deal of time is spent on arguments between her and Jemma about whether she should put herself in such a strange and potentially dangerous situation. That might be a weakness of some modern horror stories, with authors trying to justify the dumb things their characters do when they should know better than to enter haunted houses or wander into locations where slasher villains are likely to commit murders. We all understand that these stories are built on people making bad choices and failing to recognize dangers that should be obvious. Macy’s desperate financial situation should be enough justification, but Kliewer still has to have her spend most of the book kicking herself for her stupidity and having imaginary arguments with Jemma about whether she should run away.

While the events that transpire during Macy’s stint as the house’s caretaker are strange, the level of actual creepiness is fairly low for the most part. A lot of what happens involves lights that seemingly turn on and off by themselves or pictures that fall off the walls. As Macy deals with these issues, her reactions and behaviors seem similar to someone who struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, feeling like they have no choice but to carry out certain repeated actions and that the world is going to end around them if they don’t accomplish tasks exactly correctly. This matches up with the book’s focus on depression and other mental health issues, possibly making the whole thing a metaphor for the problems that can push people to the edge, especially when they do not have the resources to get treatment and are experiencing constant pressure from all sides.

Things do eventually take a more horrific turn, and Kliewer does a decent enough job of making Macy’s struggles with forces beyond her control seem scary, with a combination of chases throughout the house and emotional attacks on her worst insecurities. One’s mileage may vary, but for me, too much of the book focused on mundane details that were not as creepy as they seemed like they were supposed to be, without fully delivering on expectations. A final twist that’s meant to be upsetting falls kind of flat, and the book ends up being neither an effective depiction of a situation that should seem like the character’s world is ending nor an accumulation of horrors that make a mental breakdown seem inevitable. Kliewer does as good a job as he can when delving into the emotional state of a person in a desperate, impossible situation, but the book never quite comes together to deliver on the horror of mental illness leading to complete and total ruin. Too bad.

As I’ve said before, when professional wrestling is good, it seems like magic. When everything lines up perfectly, a situation that is blatantly false and manufactured becomes compelling drama, turning a frankly ridiculous situation, in which actors playing larger than life characters who are pretending to fight each other so that one of them can gain some semblance of the kind of victory that is achieved in “real” sports, into what seems like a life-or-death situation, a conflict where emotions are expressed physically and can only be resolved by one person lying on their back, unable to move while a referee counts to three.

Most of the time, the awareness of the falsehood of wrestling is ever-present, and one has to suspend their disbelief and come to a tacit agreement with the performers that what is happening has real stakes. That’s not so different from watching a movie or TV show and becoming invested in the plots and characters, even though one knows that they’re just actors on sets, often with special effects and other details filled in later. But the live nature of wrestling provides an additional layer of difficulty, since small mistakes the performers make have to be ignored, pauses must sometimes be built in so people can catch their breath, and if a crowd doesn’t have the right reaction, everything that is happening loses its urgency.

However, those same elements can work in wrestling’s favor, and in moments when everything lines up perfectly, any sense of disbelief one is feeling fades away, and it’s like you’re watching the most important human drama that could possibly be taking place. The crowd becomes fully invested, cheering for the good guy, groaning in disbelief when the bad guy seems like he’s going to prevail, and building to an anticipatory fervor when something amazing is about to happen before exploding in joy when someone pulls off an incredible move or cringing along with the performers when they are experiencing real pain. The performers feed off the energy, their every move, gesture, and facial expression fitting the situation and conveying the heightened emotions of the battle. A story gets told through human movements, building to a finale that provides an exhilarating sense of victory or the crushing disappointment of defeat. Few matches ever reach these heights, but one is always hopeful that the stars will line up and turn a fight between one’s favorite wrestlers into a battle for the ages.

The best example of this that I’ve experienced lately is the recent mask vs. mask match that took place in AAA, a wrestling promotion in Mexico that is now an affiliate of WWE. What’s especially extraordinary about it is that it features a couple of wrestlers who have been solid mid-card performers at best during their time in WWE but who managed to capture the attention of Mexican crowds and turn what started out as silly characters and a feud over who got to use a dumb name into incredibly exciting drama with what seemed like the highest stakes possible.

The story of El Grande Americano began over a year ago when Chad Gable, who had some solid skills in the ring but who was apparently destined to never rise above the level of fighting for lower-level championships and usually getting beaten by more popular wrestlers, was on a losing streak against various masked Mexican luchadores, including Rey Mysterio, Dragon Lee, and Penta. He was involved in a storyline in which he went to Mexico to learn the secrets of luchadores, and his return coincided with the debut of a mysterious wrestler who was clearly Gable wearing a star-spangled luchador mask. The whole thing was rather silly, especially since the name Gable chose for his secret identity seemed like something an American would come up with to try to sound Spanish, forgetting that it’s also something you can order at Starbucks.

Gable’s El Grande Americano persona was fun enough, but it seemed like the gimmick would have to end when he got injured and would be out of action for six months or so. However, he was replaced by a different guy wearing the same mask who initially claimed that he was the one who had been El Grande Americano all along, even though he was about a foot taller than Gable and had a much slimmer build (this would be Ludwig Kaiser, a German wrestler who had previously been part of a group of evil Europeans and was almost completely negligible).

Right around the same time that all this was happening, WWE purchased AAA, and some of its wrestlers started showing up in Mexico (plus some Mexican luchadores showing up in WWE, although to a lesser extent). Somehow, Ludwig Kaiser’s version of El Grande Americano became a hit in AAA, so a character that seemed like he was destined to either slowly fade away in WWE programming or serve as fodder for a rivalry once Gable healed up was a much bigger deal. Even though El Grande Americano would still occasionally show up on Monday Night Raw, where he continued to be a heel who would usually cheat to win by sticking a metal plate in his mask before he headbutted people, he made an effort to really connect with Mexican audiences. Kaiser dove headfirst into the luchador style, learning Spanish and serving as a great example of how welcoming Mexican culture can be for those who respect it.

So of course, when Gable finally recovered from his injury and made his return (during the Royal Rumble, where he and Kaiser replicated the “Spider-Man pointing at himself” meme), the two El Grande Americanos would have to have a feud. Had this taken place in WWE, it probably would have been enjoyable enough, but instead, they both spent time in AAA, letting their rivalry build to a fever pitch and culminating in a mask vs. mask match. While this could possibly have worked in the American wrestling idiom, it would probably have been little more than a goofy gimmick. However, the type of match where the luchador who loses has to unmask is a much bigger deal in Mexico, and after watching it play out in AAA rather than WWE, it’s clear that taking the traditional approach was the right choice.

The match itself was electric from the very moment the wrestlers were introduced. Gable’s Original El Grande Americano perfectly played the crowd as a heel, showing a disrespect for Mexican culture and audiences and drawing massive boos. This served as a great counterpoint for the introduction of Kaiser’s El Grande Americano, who had the crowd on his side from the moment his music started playing. The way Kaiser fed off their energy was incredible, showing his character’s total acceptance even though he’s also an outsider. Notably, one of the highlights that was shown in the lead-up to the match was Kaiser shouting (in Spanish), “A proud Mexican is not the color of your skin! It’s our culture, the most beautiful in the world! A Mexican is born wherever the hell they please!” That’s something that’s almost inexplicable to Americans, but it’s an awesome acknowledgement of how accepting other cultures can be for those who don’t treat them with disdain.

The match itself was a brutal affair that worked amazingly well, a no-disqualification affair that involved the characters having guitars smashed over their heads, being dropped through tables, hit with chairs, and all manner of other violence. Kaiser’s Americano was the underdog throughout, but both he and Gable took plenty of punishment, tearing holes in each other’s masks and drawing blood that poured down their faces. The match was given time to breathe, playing out much longer than the average fight and incorporating various storyline elements from other AAA characters, making it much more than a couple of non-Mexicans (and some additional non-Mexican sidekicks) showing up in Mexico to try to replicate something that has been meaningful to local audiences in the past.

By the time the battle was over, everyone was exhausted, from the wrestlers, to the audience, to the people watching at home. It seemed like an arduous battle that really took everything out of the people involved. While Gable’s loss was no surprise, since his version of El Grande Americano had already worn out its welcome a while ago, while Kaiser’s version of the character is still going strong, the image of him pulling off his mask, standing in the ring with blood still pouring down his face, and contritely accepting defeat is one of the most memorable of the night.

Describing the elements that made up this match make it sound absolutely ridiculous (two guys fighting to what’s treated like near-death so that one of them will be forced to reveal an identity that everyone already knew anyway), but the ability to take those elements and weave something so indelible is what makes wrestling special. For an hour or so, the ability of two performers to make us believe that they’re really fighting for something that matters more than anything else in the world causes all of the artifice to fall away, revealing the pure elements of human drama and demanding emotional investment in an outcome that highly exciting to witness, regardless of whether it was predetermined. This is the magic of wrestling, and this is what all fans are chasing when we keep watching. Long live El Grande Americano!

Ghost stories can be creepy, but horror can be even nastier when real-world issues become intermixed with seemingly supernatural threats. That’s probably an incredibly obvious observation, but it’s one that fits for the novel Model Home, which examines the life-long effects of trauma and the difficulties of reckoning with what seems to be inexplicable before providing an all-too-believable and horrific understanding of what its characters have been through. It’s a horror story that’s informed by both specific details that seem personal to author Rivers Solomon and a general sense of the ugliness under the surface of American society.

The book follows Ezri, a nonbinary/genderfluid Black person who struggles with mental illness and has a fraught relationship with their family members. They and their sisters, Eve and Emmanuelle, grew up as the only Black family in an affluent white neighborhood in Dallas, and all three of them are still reckoning with the trauma of living in a home that they believe was haunted by a ghostly figure they refer to as the Nightmare Mother or the Woman Without a Face. They’ve all become estranged from their parents and haven’t returned to their childhood home in decades, but tragic events force them to come together and confront what happened to them in their past. And hoo boy, that past turns out to contain some stuff that was pretty awful.

Solomon takes their time developing these characters and slowly revealing disturbing details about their lives. The ghostly goings-on seem creepy enough, but there are real questions about Ezri’s mental state and whether they engaged in harmful, destructive behavior as a child, to the point where Ezri questions their own memories about what they may or may not have done. There are also questions about whether their parents were abusive or allowed their children to come to harm, issues that led the family to become involved with Social Services and have youngest daughter Emmanuelle sent to boarding school to keep her away from a situation that seemed increasingly harmful.

The problem is, a lot of the siblings’ memories don’t seem to line up with the idea that they were being abused or that Ezri was a disturbed, sociopathic child. They all seem to have issues with their mother’s parenting style, but that style seems less abusive and more like she was pushing them to excel, expecting them to put forth their best efforts in everything they did. This is something that seems specific to certain parts of the Black American community, where parents exhort their children that they have to try twice as hard to achieve half as much as their white counterparts.

That’s part of the horror that serves as a constant subtext to these characters’ lives, and really to the lives of most Black people in the United States. The parents worked hard to achieve a good life for their children, but the realization of that dream, in which they could live in a nice house in a safe neighborhood and send the children to good schools, only added to their discomfort, since they faced near-constant hostility from everyone around them. Whether this took the form of a homeowners’ association that was constantly citing them for violations, neighbors who treated them coldly for years, or more insidious behavior, the feeling of constantly being on edge provided a sense of discomfort that reverberated throughout the family’s life.

While that’s just one aspect of the way Ezri and her siblings were affected, it ends up being the foundation for trauma that seemingly never ceased. Most of the book is narrated by Ezri, and seeing how their mental state, their sense of self-worth, and their belief that they deserved every bad thing that happened to them is heartbreaking. While what happened may seem to have a supernatural element, the effects of trauma are all too realistic, and the book serves as a harrowing portrait of what it is like to be inside the head of someone whose life has been built on a foundation of trauma that nobody should ever have to experience, much less a child.

Horror stories don’t necessarily have to be built on real-world trauma, although it does seem like that’s the best way to make literary-minded works of fiction relevant. Rivers Solomon uses some beautiful language here to pull readers into the mind of a person who has suffered damage that they don’t fully understand, helping both them and us come to a realization about the true nature of horror and evil and demonstrating the value of love, family, and community to ensure that healing can take place. As upsetting as this type of horror can be, it’s important to recognize it and validate the experience of victims, and that’s exactly what makes this book so powerful.

Boots Riley is a total weirdo, in the best way. He has a particular sense of comedy that seems to resonate with certain audiences, including those who are tuned in to Black culture, as well as those who get a kick out of countercultural ideas and a general sense of questioning the messages that are fed to the public by whatever passes for the mainstream media these days. He also has a flair for visual style, filling his movies with bright colors and eye-catching visuals. And while he believes in getting certain ideas across, he also loves silliness and surrealism, coming up with bizarre asides, weird ideas, goofy one-off jokes, and convoluted reasons for having strange, unexpected events happen. His work tends to be delightful for those who love to be surprised by whatever crazy stuff might happen next while also nodding along as characters deliver messages about fighting back against capitalist oppression.

Riley has been making music for a while as part of the rap group The Coup, but his big breakout as a filmmaker came with Sorry to Bother You in 2018. That movie resonated with audiences due to its look at the shapes people contort themselves into to gain success, as well as the way people are willing to step over others to try to survive, all while everyone is really working to enrich the greedy few who sit at the top of the pyramid. But at the same time, it was full of nonsense, including a villainous plot to turn people into centaurs. It was a great announcement of Riley’s talent, showing how good he is at delivering memorable social messages in the midst of wacky comedy and flights of fancy.

I Love Boosters may be a little less focused in its messaging, but it is no less effective in showing how the rich and powerful exploit others and the power that workers can have when they band together to fight oppression. It does take a little while longer to get to a somewhat didactic (yet still effective) conclusion, but it makes the journey a fun one as the characters engage in various shenanigans, wrestle with technology that requires them to consider the philosophical underpinnings of their lives, and take detours into odd scenes related to a soul-sucking sex demon (played by Sorry to Bother You’s star LaKeith Stanfield) or a motivational speaker/cult leader (Don Cheadle, almost unrecognizable under heavy makeup) who keeps trying to hawk a stupid pyramid scheme.

It might be best to simply experience this movie without knowing too much beforehand (I knew pretty much nothing other than the title and some actors going in, choosing to approach the film with zero expectations and go wherever Riley wanted to take me), but it doesn’t hurt to explain a little bit of the plot. It follows a group of women living on the outskirts of society (they’re currently squatting in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant) who spend their time stealing fashionable clothing from high-end stores and reselling it on the street. The leader of the group, Corvette (Keke Palmer, from Nope and One of Them Days), is an aspiring fashion designer, but she has mostly lost hope that she’s going to find much success, so her activities are sort of her way of getting back at an industry that has rejected her. She’s accompanied by Sade (Naomi Ackie, from Mickey 17 and Blink Twice) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), who probably have their own reasons for their lives of crime, but they mostly seem to be along for the ride.

While a good portion of the movie simply follows the adventures of this group, who become known as the Velvet Gang, they eventually come into conflict with Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a major fashion designer, who develops into a raging, semi-cartoonish villain as she becomes obsessed with stopping them. Corvette has something of a love-hate relationship with Christie, admiring her work but coming to realize that she has built her empire on the exploitation of workers, including both American retail workers who experience indignities and low pay at a series of monochromatic fashion stores and Chinese laborers who are forced to put their health at risk to churn out cheaply-made clothes that can get sold at high prices almost solely for Christie’s enrichment.

As ridiculously villainous as she gets, Christie is an all-too-realistic figure, since even as she exploits everyone around her, she is constantly speechifying about the artistic importance of her work and the reasons why others need to make sacrifices to ensure that she can achieve her goals. It’s exactly the sort of thing that CEOs and the leaders of prominent tech businesses always say, making a big deal about how they’re moving society forward and breaking down barriers when all they’re really doing is enriching themselves through the labor of others.

The connection between the Velvet Gang and the Chinese laborers who work for Christie becomes explicit when their paths intersect through an experimental teleportation device. This is where the movie takes a goofy sci-fi twist as the Velvet Gang teams up with a Jianhu (Poppy Liu) to use the technology to scale up their criminal activities and hit Christie where it hurts. But they find that in addition to teleportation, the device has more philosophical settings for “situational acceleration” and “deconstruction.” If you’re like me, you didn’t expect to receive a lecture about dialectical materialism in the middle of a ridiculous comedy, but you certainly welcome it, especially when Riley comes up with some especially funny ways to illustrate his points, like having the deconstruction setting transform a character into her parents having sex, breaking her existence down into the moment of her conception.

That sense of silliness is what makes this movie so fun, especially when you never know what nonsense Riley is going to come up with next as the characters go about their adventures. For reasons that are never explained, other than possibly a general sense of artistic rebelliousness, the skyscraper where Christie lives is set at an angle, so when Corvette breaks into her apartment to confront her, she spends the scene struggling to walk on a floor that is at a 45-degree angle. During one robbery, Mariah goes undercover at a fashion store by holding her breath, which transforms her into a lighter-skinned woman (played by A Black Lady Sketch Show’s Robin Thede) so she won’t be viewed as suspicious by the staff. The climax of the movie, in which the Velvet Gang learns the secret of Christie’s much-vaunted high-end suits that are supposedly worth $100,000 each, goes in directions that are even more bizarre than the centaur-based schemes of Sorry to Bother You.

I can only guess at the strange workings of a mind that can come up with all of this nonsense while still making it highly entertaining, but I love that Riley can make movies that are so personal and so singular while still delivering messages that people should hear. Anyone watching this should be able to come away with an understanding of the ways people in positions of power exploit everyone else and the need for those who provide the labor that keeps society running to band together and fight for their rights. That’s wrapped up in a movie that looks amazing, from its bright colors and memorable performances to its wild special effects work. For those who love seeing a filmmaker put so much of himself on screen (even when they’re confounded by things like a surprisingly explicit scene involving demon/human copulation), this is a delightful sugar rush of a movie that has exactly the right amount of substance under its eye-catching surface.

Over the past 25 years or so, it’s been fascinating to watch the development of the comics field in the United States. Around the turn of the 21st century, superhero comics were still the dominant genre, although there were plenty of other interesting comics being made, ranging from self-published autobio comics to literary graphic novels and experimental art comics. But since then, the field has exploded. The majority of comics that people read are probably found in bookstores rather than comic shops, and they consist of longer works rather than pamphlet-format stories published on a monthly basis.

Some of the most exciting aspects of the comics field today are related to the diversity of the creators who are telling stories and the many influences they bring to their work. People from all backgrounds are telling personal stories, and the popularity of manga can be felt in the comics they create, resulting in unique works that probably wouldn’t have been given a chance in the past. Robert Mgrdich Apelian’s Fustuk is a great example of this, spinning a fantastical story about food and magic that’s influenced by his Armenian heritage.

While the story here takes place in a fantasy setting, it’s clearly inspired by Armenian history and culture. It’s the kind of comic that deals with food and cooking, meaning that Apelian fills his pages with lavish detail that makes the meals people prepare look delectable. He also takes care to make the clothing people wear distinctive and place them in lived-in settings. He comes up with some cool design elements, like panel borders with patterns reminiscent of Persian rugs and sound effects in Armenian and Persian that are inspired by the untranslated Japanese sound effects in manga published in North America.

Of course, all this detail would be pointless if it wasn’t used to tell a good story, but Apelian comes up with something pretty interesting. The book follows a family from the Hye (Armenian) culture that is living in a land currently ruled by the Pars (Persian) Empire. The father of the family was a famous chef who used to serve in the palace of a satrap, but he died several years ago. His two older children, Garo and Noori, have gone on to be chefs as well, but the youngest child, Katah, is kind of hopeless in the kitchen, and he mostly takes care of his mother, who has a health condition that is likely going to be terminal. But when Katah makes contact with a mystical creature known as a “div,” he thinks he might have found a way to save his mother’s life that will require the siblings to pool their resources and use their unique talents.

You see, the div, whose name is Az, had a relationship with their father, having left the magical setting of the Qaf Mountains to live among humans because he loves the food they make. He’s the kind of fantasy creature that loves to strike bargains with humans, so he agrees to heal Katah’s mother if the siblings can make him a meal that is equal to or greater than their father’s cooking. Cue squabbles between the siblings about what type of food would be appropriate, what ingredients should be used, and who should be in charge of cooking.

All of this serves as an exploration of the family’s culture and heritage, with Apelian throwing in plenty of detail that is clearly inspired by real-world issues. Older brother Garo is a traditionalist, cooking Hye cuisine because he wants to preserve his family’s culture as they live under the rule of another empire. Noori is more forward-thinking, combining her culture’s food with Pars-style dishes to come up with something new. This inevitably leads to conflict as Garo accuses Noori of forgetting her roots, while Noori believes that Garo is stuck in the past. It’s a great encapsulation of the struggles that people experience when they want to maintain connections to their heritage while living among people from other cultures.

While the book is inspired by Armenian culture and history, it isn’t a one-to-one translation into a fantasy setting. Apelian comes up with lots of other interesting ideas to fill out his story. Some of this involves the use of magical powers known as “jadoo” by Pars nobles, including some fantastical kitchen tools like serving platters that move around on their own or knives that chop vegetables perfectly with little effort. It turns out that Katah may have some jadoo powers of his own, even though this shouldn’t be possible, but this gives him a role to play in the proceedings as his siblings handle the culinary elements of their predicament.

Apelian comes up with some great visual ideas for the fantastical elements of his story. The design of Az is interesting, since he’s sort of like an animated serving platter, but he also changes shape regularly, shrinking down to a small creature that rides on the characters’ shoulders or expanding to a large, blob-like form that fills rooms. He’s usually cute, but he can take on a sinister aspect when it becomes clear that despite his friendly appearance, his bargains might not be as beneficial as they first seem.

There are also some neat formal ideas used to depict flashbacks and the visions that Katah has of his family’s past. These scenes use a different color palette, and they feature panel borders with detailed filigree, with these designs sometimes fading away as Katah comes back to the present. One flashback scene features some of the aforementioned rug-inspired designs, with these designs expanding around the borders of the panels as the characters become trapped in a difficult situation before completely falling apart when tragic events happen. The climax of the book is especially impressive, featuring multiple overlapping flashbacks in which the panel borders from scenes in different time periods intrude on each other and distort along with the emotions of the characters. It’s a visual tour de force that matches the emotional tenor of the revelations being provided.

With books like this getting released regularly, it’s clear that the English-language comics scene is strong. The ability to read personal stories that are grounded in real-world history and culture while coming up with nice visual ideas and depicting the lives of well-realized characters is a treat. Apelian is a talent to be reckoned with, and hopefully, this will just be the first notable example of the excellent comics he will create during a long and fruitful career.

While Fred Williamson was one of the leading Blaxploitation stars, he apparently took a while to figure out what to do when he was behind the camera. His directorial debut, Mean Johnny Barrows, had some notable elements, including hints of an understated emotional performance by Williamson as a damaged Vietnam vet, but it fell apart due to a weird, nonsensical script. With his second movie, Adiós Amigo, Williamson also served as writer and producer, but the ambitions are scaled back so far that there’s barely even a movie here.

The movie is ostensibly a comedy Western, but in practice, it’s a collection of scenes that barely hang together. It ends up mostly being a showcase for Richard Pryor’s stylings as a comic actor, and he’s definitely the highlight of the movie, but the whole thing is so ramshackle that it pretty much evaporates once it’s over. There are some decent jokes here and there, but there’s so much empty space around them that one wonders if there was an actual script or if Williamson just shot a bunch of scenes and then tried to stitch them together in the editing room.

It doesn’t help that the movie looks like it was shot by someone who figured they just needed to aim the camera in the general direction of the actors and hope that they would capture something interesting happening. The framing is often weird, making it hard to tell who is who in each scene, and in some action scenes, it’s almost impossible to tell what’s happening. There’s one scene where a bunch of people are gathered to watch and bet on a fistfight, but that’s not clear until the scene is halfway over, since all you can see is a crowd of people who are yelling at something. And to make matters worse, there’s lots and lots of padding around every scene, watching people walking around or riding horses until they get around to doing something interesting. In a movie that could benefit from crackerjack comic timing, there’s so much space around every joke that one wonders if half of them are meant to be jokes at all.

The story follows Williamson as Ben, a quick-drawing gunman who is always getting into trouble, even before he encounters Richard Pryor’s traveling conman character. In the first few scenes, Ben gets into a fight with some white thugs who are hassling a Native American shopkeeper. After he beats them, they want to get revenge, and a local businessman hires them to go and run off a “Black” who is keeping horses on some nearby land. This coincidentally (?) turns out to be Ben, and after he has a shootout with them, he comes into town to confront the man who hired him. When the thugs try to pull their guns on him, he shoots the guns out of their holsters, but then he gets arrested by the local sheriff for shooting up the guy’s business. This seems like it might be meant to be an example of racial injustice, but Ben accepts his fate with barely a shrug.

The actual plot of the movie, such as it is, kicks in while Ben is being transported on a stagecoach to a nearby prison camp. They get waylaid along the way by some trees that have been cut down to block the road, and sure enough, it’s Sam (Pryor), who approaches the carriage and says, “I is the robber, and you is the robbee.” During the robbery, he orders Ben’s chains to be removed, but he declines to bring Ben along with him, leaving him to fend for himself in the wilderness. As he rides off, he shouts, “Adiós Amigo!” which is how most of the rest of his scenes end throughout the movie.

The rest of the movie is basically a series of shenanigans in which Sam manipulates Ben into doing something that will allow him to make some money, as well as the occasional excuse for a shootout or fistfight. Some of these involve some decent jokes, although you often have to squint a little bit to actually pick them. For example, in the aforementioned scene where people are betting on a fistfight, Sam shows up and starts placing a bunch of bets, and then when Ben appears a few minutes later, Sam tells him that Ben is going to help them win $3,000. Ben asks how, but before he can finish getting the words out, he’s grabbed by one of the fighters and pulled into the fight, prompting Sam to run away and shout his catchphrase. That’s not a bad joke, but the fact that it was unclear that a fight was going on in the first place almost ruins it.

Other bits of silliness include Sam showing up at a bar where some guys are involved in a knife-throwing contest and convincing them that when Ben gets there, he’s going to defeat everyone (there’s a good bit of physical comedy where a big bruiser stabs the tip of a knife into a table and invites Sam to throw it at the target, but he’s too wimpy to pull it out), only for Ben to get into an argument with the knife-throwing champion and shoot his belt buckle, causing his pants to fall down. There’s a lengthy scene involving some sort of con where Sam gets out some surveying equipment so he can convince a town’s mayor that a certain piece of property is worth a lot of money, although since the parameters of the con aren’t really clear, most of the mileage comes from Pryor just acting goofy while he’s looking through a surveyor’s scope and putting little flags in the ground.

The scene that might best exemplify the movie’s difficulties with comedy comes when Sam comes across an old guy named Noah (Thalmus Rasulala, who co-starred with Williamson in Bucktown and who seems to be having a lot of fun here playing a grizzled old coot). Noah is accompanied by a couple of attractive young women (his daughters, maybe?), which may be Sam’s primary reason for stopping and spending time around their campfire. But when Noah asks if he wants to play cards, he senses the possibility of a con. They go several rounds, with each of them trying to out-cheat the other (first, Sam beats Noah’s four queens with four kings, then he beats Noah’s four kings with four aces, then when Noah plays four Aces, he looks at his hand of five aces and gives up). After Noah falls asleep by the campfire, Sam climbs into Noah’s carriage to get it on with the girls. When they make so much noise that they wake up Noah, Sam takes off running, apparently having stolen all of Noah’s money, and you can guess what he shouts as he exits. All of this has the air of comedy, but it drags on for so long, with so much downtime between funny moments, that one has to work to find it funny. Plus, Pryor keeps cracking up during the scene, possibly because he thought Rasulala’s old coot act was so funny, and Williamson apparently didn’t bother to do multiple takes.

So, I don’t know how to even assess a movie like this, since it’s barely even a movie. Williamson does seem to be trying out some new techniques to see if he can come up with something interesting. There’s a decent editing gag in which Ben, after being left behind in the wilderness by Sam, comes across a guy riding along on his horse and singing “Oh My Darling Clementine.” When the guy rides behind a bush, the film cuts to Ben coming out the other side on the guy’s horse, singing the same song in a purposely terrible manner. As filler between scenes, the movie occasionally cuts to illustrated pictures (storyboards?) of something that just happened, providing a little bit of visual punctuation to moments. There’s a halfway decent theme song by Luchi De Jesus (Lady Cocoa, Friday Foster, Black Belt Jones, etc.), and Williamson must have really liked it, because it gets played behind what seems like every third scene of the film. It seems like some fun was had while making this movie, but it would have been nice if that level of enjoyment had made it onto the screen more than around 20% of the time.

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

Blaxploitation horror didn’t have an especially great track record, since it mostly involved “Black” versions of notable horror franchises with only minimal changes to make the stories more relevant to modern Black audiences of the 1970s. That may partially be because of the disreputable nature of low-budget horror at the time, with movies being cranked out fast and cheap without paying much heed to quality. But it does seem like the entries in the subgenre often missed opportunities to provide some social commentary and include symbolism that should have been obvious.

Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde is a case in point. It takes the basic framework of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and comes up with a twist in which its respectable Black doctor takes a serum that transforms him into a monstrous white man. This should have been great fodder for social commentary. Maybe the movie could have hinted at the horrific ways white people have treated other races while claiming to be more intelligent and cultured than those whom they were subjugating. Maybe it could have looked at how American society is quick to excuse violence by white people while punishing Black people for perceived slights, such as by having police be hesitant to take action against the evil white version of the character but jumping at the chance to gun down his Black counterpart. Unfortunately, the movie does none of this.

Instead, it spins a pretty formulaic horror story, complete with super-cheap makeup effects (by the legendary Stan Winston, who was so early in his career at this point that he had yet to make a name for himself), a plot that makes little sense, characters that don’t really behave in a recognizable human fashion, and plenty of violence. It does include some notable moments, but not the ones that I really wanted to see.

Bernie Casey (from Hit Man, Cleopatra Jones, etc.) stars as Henry Pride, a doctor who operates a free clinic in Watts and has dedicated his life to developing a serum that can regenerate liver cells. He’s been having trouble moving forward with his research, and he wants to move beyond testing his serum on rats and start experimenting on human subjects. He should probably take it easy though, because after testing the latest version of the serum on a rat, the pigment of its fur suddenly changes from brown to white, and it starts behaving aggressively toward other rats. Ominous!

When Henry learns that a patient has been admitted to the local hospital with a liver problem, he thinks he might have found his test subject. She’s an elderly woman who was brought in from a nursing home, and she doesn’t have any family members on record, so who will notice if something goes wrong? Henry’s research partner and love interest, Dr. Billie Worth (Rosalind Cash, from Uptown Saturday Night, Amazing Grace, etc.), is horrified to learn of his plans to begin human testing without receiving approval or even getting consent from the patient, and rightly so, since this is a massive breach of medical ethics. But Henry has become obsessed with his serum, so he goes ahead and sneaks into the hospital to give the woman a dose.

This causes the woman to undergo a monstrous transformation, with her skin and hair turning white, and she tries to attack a nurse before reverting to her regular appearance and dying. Nobody seems certain about what happened though, so she is simply reported dead, without Henry learning about the effects of his serum. Disappointed by a lack of other potential subjects, he decides to test the drug on himself, which seems like one of the least effective methods of research possible, given that he doesn’t have the liver condition that he wants to cure, and he has informed no one about his experiments, so nobody can actually monitor what happens.

As expected, the serum causes Henry to go into a sort of fit, which Bernie Casey either has trouble depicting or was only given one take before the director decided to move on. He transforms into a monstrous version of himself with white skin and greying hair. Actually, his skin is more grey than white, and he doesn’t actually look like a white man, but other characters refer to him as white, so it seems that we’re meant to think that this is a complete racial transformation.

The evil white version of Henry goes on something of a rampage, although he has enough intelligence that he can drive his Rolls-Royce into the city and ask around for someone named Linda. The movie hasn’t explained who Linda is yet, so this seems like a total non sequitur. But it does give him the chance to show up on a street corner in Watts and ask a group of Black men for directions to a local bar. They tell him he’s in the wrong neighborhood, and when he keeps insisting on answers from them, they try to beat him up, only to get thrown around like rag dolls.

Rather than continuing this action, the movie shifts focus to the bar he is looking for and introduces us to Linda (Marie O’Henry, who appeared in Three the Hard Way), a sex worker who plies her trade there most evenings. Some attention is paid to her relationships with other prostitutes, as well as a pimp named Silky (Stu Gilliam, who appeared in The Mack) and a drug pusher named Preston (who is only worth mentioning because he’s played by Marc Alaimo, who would go on to play Gul Dukat in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). Few of these characters have much of an impact on the movie, so why it spends so much time on them is a mystery.

The main purpose of the bar is to serve as a location for a pretty fun action scene when evil white Henry shows up, demands that Linda come with him, and then fights off a series of attackers who try to throw him out of the place. It’s a decent display of stunt work, with Henry either punching guys and sending them flying or picking them up and throwing them through tables or into walls. Eventually, he gets chased out of the bar, but he reverts to his regular self, and his pursuers don’t seem to notice that he’s wearing the same clothes as the “white” guy who came in and wrecked up the place.

The next day, we find out why Henry is obsessed with Linda. It turns out she’s one of his patients, and she has a liver condition that he wants to treat by giving her his serum. But before introducing her to the idea, he tries to sweet-talk her by taking her out to dinner and sort of implying that he has a romantic interest, even though he keeps unconvincingly trying to reassure her that he’s not looking for sex. At one point on their date, he drives with her to a local mansion and tells her that it used to be a high-class whorehouse where he lived as a child because his mother worked there as a maid. She had a drinking problem and developed a liver condition, and when she collapsed, he tried to get the women working at the establishment to help her, but nobody was willing to do so. Why he decides to lay his soul bare to Linda about this is unclear, especially since it doesn’t reflect well on his mental state, but it does serve to set up his motivations later.

Henry finally takes Linda back to his house to reveal the purpose of their date, which is to convince her to take his serum. When given the opportunity to try out an untested medical treatment with undisclosed side effects and little proof of actual benefits other than Henry promising that it will cure her, she understandably declines. But in yet another horrifying breach of medical ethics, Henry asks her, “What if I insist?” At this point, she seems like she’s just trying to avoid becoming a likely murder victim, so she tells him she’ll only take the serum if he uses it on himself first. He readily agrees, leading to another transformation, but she manages to escape during the ensuing chaos.

At this point, the movie shifts to a murder investigation as the cops start finding dead prostitutes around town. Since we know about Henry’s feelings toward sex workers, it’s clear to us what’s going on, and it’s only a matter of time before the police catch up with him for a final showdown. This eventually happens at Watts Towers, a distinctive landmark with several tall conical sculptures that look like they’re made out of twisted wires. The finale is somewhat reminiscent of King Kong, with evil white Henry trying to climb one of the towers before being shot by police and falling to his death. The end!

This movie is weird and unsatisfying, featuring a main character who acts in ways that are pretty inexplicable. Maybe if more attention had been paid to the script, some understanding could have been provided of why a seemingly gentle humanitarian would become so obsessed with one aspect of his work, to the point of flagrantly violating ethical boundaries and ignoring all recognized scientific procedures in pursuit of a nebulous goal. That sort of thing made much more sense in the Victorian era, but not in the modern society of the 1970s. While some have claimed that the story is relevant to Black audiences because it is reminiscent of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, that seems like a pretty big stretch, and based on the movie’s ignorance of the symbolism it was trafficking in, it seems incredibly unlikely that this was the filmmakers’ intent. Instead, it’s just a dumb monster movie of the type that tried to capitalize on the Blaxploitation trend without actually being relevant. What a missed opportunity.

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

The promise of DC Comics’ Absolute line is that it allows for reboots/alternate universe takes on recognizable characters, making some key changes to their basic makeup to make them seem new and fresh while potentially adding some relevance to stories about decades-old superheroes. The execution has been somewhat mixed, at least in my experience, with Absolute Batman being little more than a reskinned version of a familiar character with some attempts to be edgy, but Absolute Superman faring better by going back to the character’s 1930s roots to provide a populist hero who takes on evil authority figures.

Absolute Wonder Woman is more in line with the latter, although I’m not familiar enough with the regular version of the character to fully understand how extensive the changes are. I do know the basics, with Wonder Woman being a heroic champion from the all-female society of Themyscira who comes to “man’s world” to be a hero. However, I’m never sure how extensive her interactions with Greek mythology are supposed to be, or whether she really tries to focus on feminist ideals and find peaceful solutions to problems or mostly just serves as a generic superhero. I’m somewhat familiar with the bizarre stuff that happened early in her history, with creator William Moulton Marston using her as a vessel for his crazy psychological theories about bondage and submissiveness to loving feminine authority, but it’s understandable if that element of her history has mostly been swept under the rug.

So, with that basic understanding, many of the changes made to this version of the character are pretty obvious. While Absolute Wonder Woman is still from Themyscira, in this world, Zeus and other gods have apparently waged war on the Amazons or something, and they took Diana from her mother as a baby and brought her to the witch Circe (who I believe has traditionally been a villain in Wonder Woman comics), who ended up raising her while living on a small island in Hell. This serves as a way to give Diana a harsher backstory, as she and her adoptive mother are forced to survive in an unforgiving environment, but it also emphasizes her innate goodness, since we see her winning various demonic creatures over to her side and impressing Circe with her ability to find peaceful solutions to problems rather than always resorting to violence.

This backstory is delivered in flashbacks, alternating with present-day action in which Diana makes her presence known to the world as she defends Gateway City against an incursion by a series of kaiju-style monsters that seem to have some sort of relationship to Greek mythology. This provides a pretty great look at her powers, abilities, and approaches to conflict. She tries to convince the monsters to stand down before resorting to violence, and she coordinates with the military (including her love interest Steve Trevor, who also played a role in her backstory when she saved him after he ended up in the underworld) to try to minimize casualties and protect the civilian population of the city. Plus, she meets up with a few members of her supporting cast, including historian Barbara Minerva (who recognizes her as an Amazon and dubs her Wonder Woman) and witchy sisters Etta and Gia Candy.

Writer Kelly Thompson, who has a history of writing well-regarded female superheroes like Captain Marvel, certainly makes this version of Wonder Woman seem really cool. She not only has all of the typical superpowers you would expect, like flight and super-strength, but she has learned magic from her adoptive mother, so she’s constantly using spells to help her gain an advantage. Plus, she has one of those magical satchels that contain seemingly infinite space, so she regularly pulls out crazy weapons to use in battle, including a huge axe, a series of multicolored lassos that tend to get used as whips, and a comically large, Berserk-style sword. She rides into battle on a skeletal version of Pegasus, and she wears a somewhat rough outfit that consists of wrapped leggings, a skirt that’s like a cloth wrapped around her waist, and a top that’s more of an armored breastplate than the standard form-fitting Wonder Woman costume. She describes herself as the “princess of Hell,” and she really seems to fit that moniker, being strong and imposing while still maintaining a feminine energy that focuses on peaceful solutions to problems rather than dominating others through strength.

Primary artist Hayden Sherman takes a really unique approach here, depicting characters in a simplified style while emphasizing the emotions on their faces. He gives Diana aquiline features that demonstrate her Greek heritage, as well as large eyes and prominent eyelashes that are similar to her Golden Age appearance. But he also fills panels with details, coming up with cool monsters, dazzling magical spells, and exciting action. His panel layouts are especially interesting, forming unique shapes that make each page a cool design that emphasizes whatever action is happening or demonstrates the ways characters interact with each other. His work makes the comic a visual treat that combines action and emotion perfectly.

As the story proceeds, we do get an idea of the ongoing plot of the series. Diana has managed to escape Hell, and in addition to helping defend the world against mythological threats, she’s trying to find out what happened to her fellow Amazons, and she’s involved in some sort of ongoing conflict between the gods. Her entire existence is part of a scheme by various goddesses (Hecate, Artemis, Athena, Hera, etc.) to develop a weapon against what seems like oppressive rule by the likes of Zeus and Apollo, so the ongoing story may serve as a feminist fight against men who want to assert control and subjugate others.

That’s a big part of what makes this comic so compelling. It seems like a lot of modern Wonder Woman comics have portrayed her as a warrior, often giving her a sword and shield and having her be extra-violent so that she can stand alongside the likes of Batman and Superman. But while creators don’t necessarily need to go back to the character’s roots and combine bondage and feminism, it’s nice to see an approach that emphasizes her femininity and her desire to find non-violent solutions whenever possible. This version seems to split the difference, having her take a cerebral approach, look for peaceful alternatives, but be willing to pull out the big weapons when necessary and throw down for some awesome battles.

Of the comics in the Absolute line that I’ve read, this one may be the best due to its cohesive vision for the character, its unique art style, and its emphasis on intriguing ideas that go beyond the standard conflicts of superhero comics. It can be hard to come up with a take on an old character that feels new and fresh, but Thompson and company have done so here, at least from the perspective of someone who hasn’t spent a ton of time reading Wonder Woman comics. I’m definitely looking forward to reading the next volume, which is more than I can say for almost any other modern superhero comics that I’ve read.

People who enjoy seeking out and watching obscure movies will often need to lower their standards, especially when viewing truly independent films that serve as passion projects for directors and actors who just want to get a taste of potential stardom. A certain amount of leeway needs to be given to amateurs who are trying to put together the best movie they can, regardless of whether they have much in the way of filmmaking skill.

At least, that’s the approach that I take when watching the cheap, shoddily-made movies that sprung up around the edges of the Blaxploitation genre. Many of these movies are far from what would be considered “good,” but they do have elements that can be enjoyed, whether that involves laughing at wooden performances and nonsensical plot twists or getting a kick out of the odd eccentricities on display.

Bad, Black and Beautiful is a case in point, being a super-cheap crime/legal drama with a cast of obvious amateurs, a meandering plot that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and a bare minimum of exciting action and interesting drama. It’s not the kind of movie that highlighted actors who deserved to have future success or showed much in the way of promise for a budding writer/director, but there’s enough enthusiasm to make a real movie on display that I can’t help but applaud the can-do spirit.

The movie takes place in Dallas, Texas, and it’s mostly about Eva Taylor (Gwen Barbie), a criminal defense attorney who is passionate about defending people who have been falsely accused of crimes. She’s also one of those characters who is good at everything and liked by (almost) everyone. In addition to being a successful attorney, she spends her spare time participating in car races, flying planes, and generally being a badass. At one point, she’s hanging out in a bar, and the piano player insists that she take the microphone and sing a song, which the other patrons are pretty enthusiastic about. She could be a pretty cool character if she had been played by an actress with some charisma. Unfortunately, Barbie, like most of the other actors in the movie, is pretty stiff in her delivery of any of her lines, struggling to show any emotion at all. It makes for an amusingly disjointed experience, with everyone in the movie fawning over how great this lady is, even though she has little in the way of an engaging personality or an ability to seem like she understands anything she is saying.

Most everyone else in the movie has a similar level of acting skill. Eva’s main love interest is a local reporter named Mike Copeland (Sammy Sams), and he looks like he’s the second runner-up in a Sonny Bono lookalike contest. He spends his time fawning over Eva, but who knows what she sees in him, since he’s a total drip. At one point, she takes him for a flight in a small plane, and while they’re in the air, she tells him (in voiceover as we see shots of the plane flying) to unzip his pants so they can join the Mile High Club, and his response is an incredibly dorky “Whoo-oooah!” But even more ridiculously, he’s married, and his wife knows about his affair with Eva and wants to win him back, even though he seems like the last guy on Earth any women would want to fight over.

The plot of the movie is kind of hard to follow, and it often meanders into odd directions, sometimes forgetting about Eva altogether for long stretches and following other characters with an equal or lesser amount of charisma. Early on, Eva is asked to help Johnny, a Vietnam vet who got in trouble after punching his former boss (his story is illustrated by stock war footage, and we see the moment when he punches the guy out, although he’s shot from behind and appears to be played by a different actor than the one who portrays him during the rest of the movie). But then, in a different scene, a local crime boss named Spencer (Luke Ward) says that he’s framing Johnny for murder to try to take the heat off the guy who actually did the crime. That’s the crime that Eva ends up defending Johnny against, and she’ll have to fend off threats from Spencer and deal with other problems throughout the movie.

The other main plotline involves Rich Jacobs (Levi Balfour), a private detective who makes up for what he lacks in personality by wearing a pretty cool three-piece plaid suit throughout most of the movie. Early on, he gets hired by a local madam to find a young prostitute who has gone missing. He doesn’t really do much investigating; instead, we find out that the missing woman has some information that could be damaging to Spencer, and he wants her dead. At least, that’s ostensibly the conflict that the plot is supposed to be about, but the “little grey book” that the bad guys are looking for doesn’t really play a significant role in the plot, and most everything that happens to the woman ends up not mattering anyway.

The movie’s editing issues do tend to make things more confusing. Part of the plot follows a hit man working for Spencer who ends up killing the missing woman, and then he tries to lure Rich to a location where he can kill him, I guess because he knows too much about what is going on? There’s a scene where Rich meets with the madam, she informs him that the missing woman is dead, and he says that he already knows. But this is immediately followed by Rich’s partner following up on the hit man’s false lead to try to find the missing woman at a warehouse where she’s supposedly being kept. He gets ambushed by some thugs that the hit man hired, and even though they were introduced practicing some karate kicks, they don’t do too much during the fight. Rich’s partner defeats them pretty easily, finishing the last of them off with a move where he stomps on the guy’s back and twists his foot, which is apparently enough to knock him out. But after leaving, he’s stabbed in the back and killed by the hit man, calling into question the need for the whole ruse in the first place.

Things eventually come down to Johnny’s trial, which involves some of the least dramatic courtroom scenes in any movie. After Eva makes an opening statement in which she declares that her client is innocent, the next thing we see is the verdict, where Johnny is found not guilty. But then, the hit man suddenly appears in the courtroom and shoots the jury foreman! This doesn’t make any sense, since the trial is already over, but it allows for a shootout scene in which Rich, who is apparently allowed to carry a gun in court, shoots the hit man, and I think the guy who actually committed the murder also gets killed in the crossfire (it’s hard to tell, since it’s only a brief moment during the shootout, and nobody remarks on it or lets us know that this plot thread has been wrapped up). Hilariously, everything just kind of goes back to normal after the shootout; Eva congratulates her client on winning the case, and then she casually steps over the hit man’s body and walks out of the courtroom.

There is some additional action as Spencer and another of his henchmen try to kidnap Eva as she’s leaving the courthouse, and Rich engages in a pretty halfhearted car chase to rescue her before shooting and killing both of the criminals. For a crime lord, Spencer seems to be pretty far from a criminal mastermind. Since all the plots have been resolved (including Eva deciding to break up with Mike so he can go back to his wife), the movie ends after teasing a potential romance between Eva and Rich. They may be perfect for each other, because they’re both uncharismatic people who everyone else seems to love for some reason.

As mentioned, this movie has some amateurish charms, but it’s kind of inexplicable, trying to juggle various uninteresting plots that only barely connect with each other. It’s clear that there wasn’t enough actually going on in the movie to fill out its short runtime of around 82 minutes, so various strategies are used for padding. In addition to the aforementioned scene where Eva sings a song, there’s a bit where Rich goes to a topless bar and watches a woman’s dance routine (which involves a lot of headstands). Then he talks to the bandleader and asks him to play a song called “Woman-Hatin’ Blues,” leading to a scene where the white musician lip-syncs to a song that’s clearly sung by a Black performer. There’s also a scene where Eva and Mike frolic next to a pond, with the movie continually cutting to a bunch of shots of rainbows and ducks.

As with certain other movies in this series, this is one that should probably only be watched by completionists. It’s pretty bad, and even though I had fun watching it, I don’t know that others who have not committed to delving deeply into the world of Blaxploitation would get much out of it. Watch at your risk.

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

The phrase “banality of evil” is usually used to refer to people who serve as functionaries in evil regimes, who supposedly don’t share the ideology of their leaders but who enable violence, oppression, and murder through their complicity. The claims that someone was simply following orders and didn’t fully understand what they were involved in often seem to be made in bad faith after the realization that a person is on the wrong side of history. In reality, these mid-level functionaries are just as likely as anyone else involved in these regimes to harbor ill will against those they believe to be deserving of violence and oppression.

The novel Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World serves as an example of this, although it does so in a way that does not seem to be intended by the author. Its protagonist works for an evil corporation in New York City, and not just the sort of evil that corporations get up to in the real world, but the type that involves consorting with elder gods, invoking dark curses, and making blood sacrifices to influence world events and consolidate power. Oddly, the book seems to treat this as if it’s a normal way of doing business, with the company simply taking advantage of the opportunities available to it, and the ends of earning profits and serving the goals of the powerful figures who run the world justifying whatever violent and horrific means are necessary to do so.

The protagonist is treated as something of an underdog, a guy who has struggled to get ahead all his life, even as those who are prettier, more charismatic, and more popular have stepped on him in order to get ahead. But as the story proceeds, it becomes clear that he also has something of a vengeful streak, a belief that he deserves success and that anyone who has crossed him in the past or who believes themselves to be superior to him deserves to suffer. While he seems at first to be in over his head, struggling to survive in a company where the competition from coworkers is literally cutthroat, he actually fits right into its ethos.

So, when Colin is trying to figure out how to get out of a situation where sabotage by a coworker is likely to lead to his termination (which, at this company, will result in the end of his life as well as his job), he gets the opportunity to secure a promotion and become the assistant to the CEO. Unfortunately, in doing so, he inadvertently unleashes an ancient evil that promises to devour the entire world. Soon enough, people throughout New York start disappearing as the creature consumes them and becomes more and more powerful. This means Colin will not only need to figure out how to survive in an increasingly dangerous corporate environment, but he will have to try to come up with a way to defeat the evil that he has unleashed.

As a story, this all works well, providing plenty of excitement and intrigue as Colin navigates a confusing world of magic, ancient gods, and mystical artifacts while also dealing with mundane issues like scheduling meetings and handling communications between different departments. He gets to have a cute romance with a guy that his roommate sets him up with, and he makes friends with Lex, a non-binary member of the company’s research department. Everything is mostly treated as a lighthearted romp, making for an amusing contrast to the dark dealings that are going on around him.

But because of that approach, it seems like author Mark Waddell either didn’t fully consider the implications of the story he was telling or that he genuinely doesn’t have a problem with oppressive evil and vengeful behavior. The implication is that any steps Colin takes to realize his ambitions are justified. Those who have crossed him in the past are deserving of any suffering they experience. Notably, while Colin is a gay man, he doesn’t experience any actual discrimination or mistreatment based on his sexuality. Instead, all of the slights against him have to do with people being rude and acting superior because they are better looking or had other advantages in life. Anything bad that happens to those people, up to and including torture and death, is presented as something positive.

To make matters worse, the evil that Colin has unleashed leads to the deaths of a massive number of people, and this is treated as little more than an inconvenience that could potentially threaten his path toward success. As long as he can protect the small number of people he actually cares about, any death or suffering affecting others can be ignored. He ends up coming off as something of a sociopath, and the book appears to sign off on his attitudes, as if his desire to succeed at all costs is a virtue.

With a few tweaks, this book could have served as an indictment of the modern version of the banality of evil, in which people blithely participate in the oppressive actions of powerful entities because they are focused solely on themselves and don’t care about how others may be affected. Occasionally, it seems like it might be going for a somewhat satirical approach by acknowledging that corporations are going to use all available opportunities to increase value for shareholders, even if that makes them beholden to the most evil entities in existence. But ultimately, the book appears to come down on the side of the oppressors, deciding that evil is justified if it allows for the success of a few. Whether this is because Waddell was trying to keep things light and fun or because he shares the attitudes of his protagonist doesn’t really matter; the foundation that this book is built on is an ugly one, and it has an insidious message that should be decried.

If I were to give out a “most improved” award for people involved in the Blaxploitation scene, I think it would have to go to director Matt Cimber. He made one of the absolute worst movies in the genre with The Black 6, but he improved significantly with The Candy Tangerine Man, which was a passable (if pretty disreputable) action movie about a pimp with a secret identity as a suburban family man. With Cimber’s third Blaxploitation outing, Lady Cocoa, he and screenwriter Mikel Angel (who also wrote the previous two films) actually turn in a pretty good crime drama, with only a few qualifications that need to be added to that assessment.

I may be grading on a curve here, since I’ve watched a lot of low-quality movies for this series, but when a movie features a decent plot, fairly good and believable acting, something approaching an actual point of view, and twists that actually work pretty well, I have to give it credit, even if it still looks incredibly cheap. A good portion of that credit should probably go to star Lola Falana (who previously appeared in The Liberation of L.B. Jones), since her performance is compelling enough to hold everything together, but Cimber and Angel built a good enough movie around her that she doesn’t have to do all the work.

Falana plays Coco, a woman who is being held in a prison in Nevada on a contempt charge because she refuses to testify against her boyfriend, a gangster from Harlem who is trying to make inroads into the state. However, she has apparently changed her mind and agreed to testify against her boyfriend before a grand jury, so Ramsey (character actor Alex Dreier), a guy from the attorney general’s office, is tasked with transporting her to the hearing and keeping an eye on her in case the boyfriend gets any ideas about eliminating her as a witness.

While Coco has agreed to cooperate with the authorities, she isn’t going to make the situation easy for them. She immediately displays a spitfire personality, calling Ramsey and the cop accompanying him names and arguing with them constantly. When Ramsey complains about her attitude, she says, “I agreed to turn state’s evidence and testify to the grand jury, but I didn’t agree to be agreeable!”

The three of them hole up in a hotel/casino in North Lake Tahoe (the King’s Castle, which was probably an investor in the movie, given that it gets thanked in an opening title card) for the night, and that’s where most of the movie ends up taking place. Rather than interacting with Ramsey very much, Coco spends most of her time in the company of Doug, a Black cop who questions whether he was recruited for the job because he has experience patrolling the ghetto. And during that time, she does a lot of complaining, about the way she’s getting treated, about the artwork on the hotel room walls, about the quality of food in prison, and about society in general.

Since the movie limits a great deal of its runtime to simply hanging out with Coco and Doug, these scenes have to be compelling to keep viewers from losing interest. Fortunately, Coco carries these moments through sheer force of personality. She acts very dramatic, regularly leaving the suite’s main room in a huff so she can go take a shower (she takes at least three of them during the course of the movie, which may have served as an excuse to have her wear nothing but a towel in as many scenes as possible). She repeatedly orders food from room service and then changes her mind when it gets delivered by a waiter with a ridiculous French accent. The movie tries to eke as much comedy as possible out of her shenanigans, and fortunately, Falana is game to do whatever it asks of her.

Through all of this, it becomes clear that while Coco is obnoxious, she’s not a dummy who got caught in the orbit of a dangerous criminal simply because he dazzled her with money and jewelry. She has her own philosophies about the way of the world and what it takes to get ahead, and she’s well-read enough to quote from books and other sources to back up her arguments (although her occasional errors provide another source of comedy, such as when she mispronounces the name of René Descartes). But her arguments are compelling, coming from a world-weary place that seems realistic for Black people in general, and especially those like her who have been unjustly imprisoned. When she manages to get Doug to reveal some of his backstory, telling her that he almost lost his leg after suffering an injury as a soldier in Vietnam, but he would rather die than be a cripple, she responds by saying, “So a soldier loses an arm or a leg or whatever. You ever think of what you do to people when you bust them for a traffic ticket or possession of a little grass? You don’t just take away an arm or a leg, you take away their whole freedom! And you wonder why people are always screamin’ ‘Fuck the pigs!’”

Doug is played by Gene Washington, who was one of the pro football players who starred in The Black 6, and while he has shown some improvement in acting skills since that movie, he’s still kind of stiff here. But that ends up working well for his character, partially because he’s kind of square as an uncool cop, but also because when going up against a force of nature like Coco, most would wilt under the pressure. Doug does his best to remain steadfast and refuse to bend to her abuse, but it’s not too long before she’s seducing him by getting him to rub lotion on her back and telling him how sexually frustrated she has been after all these months in prison.

After spending so much time cooped up with Coco, Doug finally gives in to her pleas to let her out of the room. First, he takes her dress shopping at a store downstairs, where the two of them meet a couple of young newlyweds, a stoner surfer dude and a woman who is more mousy and reserved. They get invited to join the couple for some music and dancing later, and Coco insists that they go. However, we know that any time spent outside the room is dangerous, since from the moment they left the prison, they’ve been followed by a couple of thuggish characters (played by “Mean” Joe Greene, who also appeared in The Black 6, and Matt Cimber himself, who makes the wise choice to keep the two of them from uttering a single word of dialogue throughout the entire film) who take a room opposite to hers and start monitoring her through a rifle scope.

It’s probably not too much of a spoiler to reveal that few of the characters are who they seem to be and that Coco’s boyfriend (James A. Watson, Jr.) has been paying attention to the goings-on. When he conspires to separate her from Doug and Ramsey so he can meet with her, she reassures him that she has no intention of testifying against him and is just using this as an opportunity to get out of prison for a day or so. But it becomes clear that he’s decided she’s too much of a threat, and he signals his minions to go ahead and kill her.

Coco escapes the assassination attempt, of course, and the aftermath provides some action that’s not half bad, with Doug trying to chase down the crooks and engaging in shootouts. The way the chase avoids much in the way of real destruction, even when the bad guys try to escape by driving their car through the casino, is a conspicuous signal that Cimber is trying to minimize expenses. But it’s still pretty fun and exciting, at least for this level of low-budget filmmaking.

Better still is the final twist of the movie. Not the one where Ramsey turns out to have sold Coco out to her boyfriend; that one is kind of obvious. No, what happens after that is what turns out to be a nice reversal of expectations. After Coco and Doug escape to a nearby Lake Tahoe marina where they can hide out on a boat owned by a friend of his, the hit men track them down and apparently shoot them. Except no, it turns out that they actually were on a different boat, and Doug got the drop on them. When Ramsey shows up, Doug and Coco confront him, realizing that he was the only one who could have sold them out. Ramsey says that nobody will take their word over his, and there’s no way to prove that he did anything, and it seems like he’s right, since the cops are about to show up. But instead of shooting him, Doug opts for a more subtle form of revenge. He swaps guns with Ramsey, giving him the gun that was used to shoot the two thugs. Now Ramsey will be lauded as the hero who saved Coco, allowing her to testify against her boyfriend, which is something that will certainly raise the ire of the criminal who paid him off. That’s clever and unexpected, making for an enjoyable way to close out the movie as Coco and Doug head off into the sunset.

I certainly can’t claim that this is a great movie, but it was much better than I expected it to be. If there’s anything to complain about, it would be the music, which was composed by Luchi De Jesus (Friday Foster, Black Belt Jones, etc.). The theme song is sung by Lola Falana, and while she puts a lot of energy into it, it’s a version of “Pop Goes the Weasel” with some rewritten lyrics, perhaps because this was an alternate title for the movie. The recognizable motif from that song is repeated throughout the movie, including in ominous tones whenever the hit men are watching and preparing to kill Coco. Why anyone thought this was a good idea is kind of inexplicable, but fortunately, it’s a minor enough part of the movie to keep from derailing the proceedings.

Instead, we can simply enjoy a movie centered around an actress who really threw herself into her character, seemingly bending a mediocre crime story into an entertaining shape through force of will. It’s a shame that Falana didn’t have many more roles during her career, since she’s highly entertaining here. At least she got one movie to show off how good she could be.

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

Mike Mignola has had a long, fruitful career in comics, during which he has developed a unique, singular style that combines deep shadows, macabre details, deadpan reactions by characters to strange events, and the occasional breakout of large-scale action. His latest project, a series of stories that take place in a setting called Lands Unknown, has provided him with the opportunity to draw a bunch of stuff that he apparently enjoys while building out a strange world full of fantastical happenings and a deep history of gods and monsters that wreak havoc on the lives of regular people.

The first volume in the series, Bowling With Corpses, was a collection of short stories that served as an introduction to the setting, but with this second volume, Mignola has put together something with a little bit more structure, following the adventures of the title character as he goes on a quest to connect with the world’s lost gods. However, this also serves as a series of short stories, since his journey consists of a series of weird incidents in which he interacts with demons, monsters, and other supernatural creatures until he eventually gets some answers about the metaphysics of this world.

Mignola does seem to have a plan in mind for a sort of ongoing plot that is playing out in the background of this series, but as with the first volume, he’s really just having a lot of fun exploring the world he has created and coming up with memorable things to have happen to the semi-inexpressive characters that populate it. Fortunately, following him on this journey is incredibly enjoyable, because you never know what he’s going to come up with next. A character might run across a supernatural being who provides assistance, or he might be menaced by demonic figures that try to tempt him into selling his soul. He might get accosted by bandits or pirates, or he might come across large-scale monsters that could be either antagonistic or beneficent. It’s a constant parade of incident, all of it being highly compelling due to Mignola’s flair for atmospherics.

To delve a little bit further into the actual plot, the book follows Uri Tupka, an elderly, bearded scholar who has studied the gods of this world and who wants to learn why they all seem to have disappeared. In the past, the gods apparently played a much more active role in the world, interacting directly with people and influencing events, but they are now mostly a memory. There are still plenty of supernatural events that take place, but they mostly involve demons or other lesser beings that menace people or influence events obliquely, raising questions about who is in control of the world, if anyone or anything.

Because of his opinions about the gods and his outspoken beliefs, Uri gets branded a heretic and an enemy of the government in the country where he lives, so he is forced to flee, which is what sends him on his quest. His journey ends up being a series of crazy events in which he comes across all manner of supernatural beings, some of which may be gods, fallen gods, demigods, or associated with gods, but few of which provide him with any of the answers he is looking for. However, for every monster that menaces him, there also seems to be some sort of benevolent being trying to protect him. The gods may not directly interact with the world, but they still have some presence, and they eventually provide him with some understanding of why the world is the way it is.

As mentioned, Mignola may have a plan for where the over-plot of this world is going, although these aren’t necessarily the types of stories in which large-scale cosmic conflicts need to be resolved. He’s much more interested in the human-scale events that affect regular people. While there is some background information about the internal and external conflicts affecting nations, the stories mostly deal with Uri Tupka’s interactions with the people who are just trying to survive in a world where attacks by vampires, ghosts, or other monsters are a regular threat.

Fortunately, those stories give Mignola the opportunity to draw a lot of the kinds of things he likes, including Lovecraftian monsters with lots of eyeballs and tentacles, large-scale creatures that get into huge battles where people are crushed like ants, and weird, devilish fiends that haunt people from the shadows. My favorite of the incidents involves a demonic figure that tries to convince Uri Tupka to enter into an agreement that likely involves selling his soul. It starts off as a moody, atmospheric story, with Uri coming across a creepy building in a remote forest that is filled with ominous characters, but when he refuses the offer and strikes a blow against the demon, everything explodes into a chaotic swirl of devilish figures that is colored in bright yellows and oranges. It’s the type of amazing work one expects from Mignola, and he delivers exactly what you want to see while still coming up with new, exciting twists on his typical style.

Mignola seems to have been energized by this series, so it should be fascinating to see him continue to develop this world and come up with bizarre events and striking imagery. He’ll be following this installment up with a direct sequel later this year titled Uri Tupka and the Devils, so he definitely has more to explore along these lines, but I’m sure he’ll soon head off in other directions and tell more stories about strange mythology and people struggling to live in a world full of creepy magical beings. That will definitely be a journey worth following.

This movie got a lot of attention around the end of 2025, and for good reason. It’s a great example of the type of adult drama that we have to turn to non-American filmmakers to make, because studios in the United States have largely abandoned that sort of storytelling. It’s a wonderful character piece that exists primarily to let some really good actors demonstrate the difficult-yet-invisible craft of appearing to have real, relatable emotions.

Rather than going over the movie as a whole, I wanted to delve into a pair of scenes that I found to be the heart of the movie, showing off some acting that is pretty remarkable. That does require some explanation though, so here’s a brief description of the plot: Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, an acclaimed filmmaker who has a rocky relationship with his daughters due to the fact that he has been largely absent in their lives after getting divorced from their mother. One daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve, who also starred in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World), has become an acclaimed stage actress, and the other, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who had starred in one of Gustav’s films as a child, has left the business behind to become a mother. But now, Gustav has re-entered their lives with plans to make a new movie that is based on his mother’s life, and he wants Nora to star in it.

When Nora refuses, Gustav gets up-and-coming American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) to fill the role instead. She features in the first of the scenes I wanted to highlight, where she rehearses a scene from the movie. It’s a dramatic monologue, and she throws herself into it, emoting at a high level of intensity and summoning tears, in a way that makes it seem like this will definitely be the clip used during awards ceremonies as an example of how good her performance was. However, at the point in the movie, we don’t know enough about the story of Gustav’s film to understand what she’s actually talking about. The performance is context-free, making it almost meaningless, an empty example of an actor acting really hard.

We do learn the context for the scene throughout the rest of the movie, as it seems like Gustav is wrestling with his mother’s legacy, since she had been imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis during World War II, and she died by suicide while he was a child. But the true meaning of his film becomes more clear in the second scene I wanted to note. Late in the film, Agnes is given a copy of the script for Gustav’s movie, and after reading it, she realizes that there’s more to it than an examination of his mother’s life and death. She brings it to Nora and asks her to read it, pointing out one specific scene, which turns out to be the scene that Rachel was rehearsing earlier.

As Nora reads the scene out loud, she does so in a flat monotone, only considering the actual words on the page rather than how they would be delivered in the movie. But now that we understand more about the family’s situation, the actual meaning of the words becomes clear, with the monologue serving as a sort of confession from Gustav, an acknowledgment of the ways he has hurt his daughters due to his absence from their lives. As Nora understands what she’s reading, she gets emotional, with tears building up and her voice shaking, making for a quiet, mostly internal realization of her father’s love for her and his attempt to make a gesture of atonement in what may be the only way he knows how. It’s an incredible bit of acting, standing in contrast to the outsized emotion of Rachel’s version of the scene. It’s one of those moments of acting magic that seem to capture realistic emotions, making one marvel at a performer’s ability to sink so deeply into their character that we fully understand who they are and what they’re feeling.

While these two scenes sort of serve as the backbone for the movie, they’re far from the only elements of note. The movie as a whole is an excellent drama, deserving of all the acclaim it has received. Anyone who wants to see some pretty great performances and assured filmmaking in the European style should check it out if they haven’t already.

It Was Just an Accident
Written by Jafar Panahi, Nader Saïvar, Shadmehr Rastin, and Mehdi Mahmoudian
Directed by Jafar Panahi
2025

Jafar Panahi is a filmmaker I’ve heard about for years, but this is the first of his movies that I’ve actually seen. Some knowledge of his life does provide some essential context for the movie. He’s an Iranian filmmaker who has been at odds with the country’s government, including being convicted of crimes that supposedly involved propaganda against the regime and causing harm to national security. He was banned from writing or directing movies, and he was placed on house arrest for several years, although he continued to make movies in secret during that time. He’s an inspiration for anyone who believes in standing up against oppression and continuing to express oneself despite serious persecution.

It Was Just an Accident seems like a direct response to his experiences, an attempt to reckon with the harm done to people who have been subjected to violence and torture, the desire to get revenge for the wrongs that have been committed, and the struggle to maintain some semblance of personal morality in this type of impossible situation. It’s a look at the damage done to people who have been rounded up, imprisoned, and tortured for reasons that make no sense, leaving them struggling with impotent rage about what has happened and wondering if they can or should succumb to their worst impulses when given the opportunity for revenge.

The movie follows Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a man who had previously been imprisoned by the regime in the country where the story takes place (said country is never named, but one can assume that it’s Iran). He happens across a man who he thinks might have been one of his jailers and torturers. While he never saw the man’s face during his imprisonment, he recognizes the distinctive sound made when he walks, since he has a prosthetic leg. He kidnaps the man and plans to kill him, but then he has second thoughts when the man claims that he’s not the person Vahid thinks he is.

The movie ends up being kind of a comedy of errors (albeit a pretty dark one) as Vahid experiences doubts about whether his captive is the man he thinks he is, leading him to recruit others who were imprisoned to try to see if they can confirm the man’s identity. They all want to get revenge as well, but they can’t agree on how to do so, and they all have differing levels of certainty about whether the guy is the one who tortured them, whether murdering him will make them as bad as the regime that has caused so much harm, and whether revenge will make any difference at all, either in their own lives or in their struggle against oppression as a whole.

It makes for a fascinating examination of the ways oppressive regimes can not only cause direct harm against the people they oppress, but also how their actions can erode the moral fabric of an entire society. In addition to considering the emptiness of revenge in a situation like this, the movie also looks at the importance of maintaining some moral clarity, with Vahid going against his worst impulses and deciding to do the right thing when he learns about something that could threaten the family of his captive.

The movie makes one ponder some fascinating issues related to the harm people suffer in situations like this and the struggles they face as they try to come to terms with what has happened and what can be done about it. For those of us who can view these events at some remove (at least for the present), it provides some interesting philosophical ideas to wrangle with, but for people like Panahi, these concepts are incredibly personal, and they are ongoing concerns that affect their daily lives. The movie may have provided him with the opportunity to exorcise some of the demons that have come from the treatment he has been subjected to, and one hopes it can make others pay close attention to the moral issues that it raises as well.

Sirāt
Written by Santiago Fillol and Oliver Laxe
Directed by Oliver Laxe
2025

In the past, I’ve been admonished about my tendency to look at movies that may be kind of confusing and ask what they mean without making a serious attempt at interpretation. I’ve tried to avoid that sort of thing, but it’s hard with a movie like this, which definitely seems symbolic of something but leaves enough room for interpretation that one may find themselves unsatisfied.

The movie follows Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man who, along with his pre-teen son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), is searching for his missing daughter at a rave in the middle of the desert in Morocco. While he doesn’t find her, he learns that there is another rave that will be happening soon in a location that’s even more remote, so he decides to follow a group of free-spirited rave-goers in a trek through increasingly dangerous territory on a quest that may or may not lead anywhere.

While there is ostensibly a purpose for what is happening here, this is one of those stories that is much more about the journey than the destination. At first, it’s somewhat lighthearted, with the straight-laced Luis being encouraged to lighten up a bit and be more like the fun-loving, drug-using nomads that he’s following. But eventually, tragedy strikes, and the journey shifts from an exciting adventure to a grueling struggle for survival in which the characters begin to wonder if it’s even worth it to keep moving forward. Rather than finding anything in the way of closure, they end up in sort of a holding pattern, never getting any answers or learning any lessons from their experiences.

So, when one begins to ponder what this all means, the movie provides little in the way of definitive answers. And that may be the entire point. Throughout the movie, there are hints of larger goings-on, with the characters hearing news reports on the radio about an impending war that may escalate into a devastating conflict that could affect the entire world. At one point, one of the characters muses that it seems like the world is ending, and they’re not sure if there’s any point in continuing to move forward. We could be witnessing a breakdown in world order, with a few people being left on their own as they travel through the beginning of an apocalyptic event. While things haven’t yet progressed to that point in the real world, the movie does seem to reflect fears that things are breaking down, and people are going to be left on their own to try to survive, without much chance of getting through difficult situations unscathed.

Aside from the apocalyptic undertones, the movie may serve as a look at the uncertainty that affects everyone and the random events that can cause chaos in people’s lives. It shows that different approaches to life, from the free-spirited, pleasure-seeking hedonism of the ravers to Luis’s more sensible attempts to keep his family safe, don’t really matter when outside events lead to death and destruction. Horrific things can happen suddenly and without warning, and people are left to determine whether it’s worth it to pick up their lives and keep moving forward. While the movie doesn’t really provide any answers in that respect, it’s at least a compelling look at the chaotic nature of the world. It may ultimately be unsatisfying by design, capturing the feeling of a world on the brink as we all wonder whether we’re poised for destruction. That’s as good of an example of life in the mid-2020s as anything.

Romeo and Juliet is one of the most well-known works of literature in the English canon, but it’s also old enough that anybody can go and claim that they’ve written a modern update. That means that a large number of supposed adaptations bear only the slightest resemblance to what Shakespeare wrote. If someone really wanted to adapt the play, they would not only try to come up with a story about a couple of people from different backgrounds falling in love, but they would also make sure to show the fallout of their actions, the violence that occurs as a result of their dumb teenage horniness, and at least some form of tragedy. Unfortunately, it seems like too many modern “adaptations” stop at the first part, if they even get that far.

Aaron Loves Angela tries to put a Blaxploitation spin on Romeo and Juliet, but it can barely even figure out how to bring together two people from different cultures. Which is kind of odd, since West Side Story had already provided a pretty good template for updating the story to a mostly-modern urban setting, with two characters associated with different New York street gangs falling in love, leading to violence and tragedy. This movie barely even bothers to come up with any animosity between the characters’ cultures, seemingly thinking that having a Black kid in Harlem fall in love with a Puerto Rican girl is enough to make its story sufficiently Shakespearean. There is a little bit of violence that occurs, but it’s mostly incidental, and rather than tragedy tearing everyone apart, everything works out all right in the end.

It’s probably best to put aside the comparisons to Shakespeare, since any adaptational qualities are so vague that they’re barely there. However, it’s worth noting that one of the qualities of Romeo and Juliet that I’ve seen people mention more often in recent years is the way all the tragedy of the story spirals out from the fact that the title characters are teenagers who are making really bad decisions. This is sort of replicated in Aaron Loves Angela in the way the movie depicts teenage love fairly realistically, with the characters being incredibly awkward, acting impulsively, and generally being kind of embarrassing. That doesn’t exactly make it a love story for the ages, and in fact, it causes the proceedings to get kind of tedious, but at least it’s a pretty good look at kids being kind of dumb and ridiculous.

So anyway, the movie follows Aaron (Kevin Hooks, from Sounder), a teenage kid living in Harlem who is the star of his high school basketball team, but even though his father Ike (Moses Gunn, from Shaft, Amazing Grace, and Cornbread, Earl and Me) has high hopes that he’ll become a professional athlete, he’s pretty average overall. During a game against a high school from a Puerto Rican neighborhood, he notices a cute girl among the spectators, and he quickly becomes obsessed with her. He and his buddy Willie (Leon Pinkney) conspire to meet her so they can hang out together, and pretty soon, he and Angela (Irena Cara) are an item.

While one would think the movie would be about the differences between the characters’ cultures and their attempts to overcome any obstacles that are keeping them apart, only the barest of lip service is paid to these ideas. There’s one scene where Aaron is walking Angela home, and after dropping her off, some of the guys from her neighborhood chase him and try to beat him up. This is almost immediately forgotten. In another scene, Aaron and Willie visit a nightclub where Aaron is disturbed to see that Angela is on a date with a Hispanic guy. He gets jealous, and it seems like maybe he’s going to get into a fight, but he ends up passing Angela a note that repeats the movie’s title, and she immediately forgets about the other guy and wants to only be with him. The characters seem to think that they need to keep their relationship secret, but as far as I can tell, nobody else really cares that they want to be together.

Without much in the way of external pressure, any drama that the movie tries to drum up is based on the awkwardness of the relationship. After Willie sets Aaron up with a room in an abandoned building where he can take Angela for some hanky panky, he tries to do so, but she rebuffs his advances, disgusted that he’s like all the other guys who only want one thing. But after he explains himself and she realizes that he’s just as intimidated by the idea of sex as she is, she consents, and soon enough, the two of them are spending most of their time in the abandoned building, succumbing to their teenage horniness, playing at being a couple, and talking about running away together and getting married.

With so little in the way of drama related to the leads, the movie has to invent some external pressure so that something interesting can happen. A subplot throughout the film involves Beau (Robert Hooks, who played the main character in Trouble Man), a pimp/drug dealer who serves as a sort of corrupting influence for Aaron. Early on, a white gangster that Beau associates with asks him to find some cocaine for a major deal, and he spends much of the movie trying to make connections with other criminals and scrape together enough drugs to earn a big payday. Eventually, he claims that he can get five kilos, and he’ll sell the drugs to the gangsters for $250,000. But when the transaction goes down, he shoots the buyers and tries to run away with the money, only to get shot in the back and die himself. And wouldn’t you know it, this all happened in the abandoned building where Aaron and Angela were hanging out.

With his last words, Beau gives the money to Aaron and tells him to use it to get out of Harlem and live comfortably. This is meant to provide some big drama in the last act of the movie, but it’s kind of too little too late. Angela doesn’t want Aaron to keep the money, but he thinks that it’s the only way he’ll be able to have a good life. He tries to convince her to run away with him, but by this time, the gangsters have tracked him down, leading to a climactic chase. Could this be the reason for a tragic, Shakespearean ending? Nope, sorry, Aaron decides to throw the money away so he and Angela can run off together as the credits roll.

Unfortunately, as realistic as the leads of the movie are as a couple of dumb, lovestruck kids, that doesn’t make their story very interesting. The movie does try to fill in some drama around them, especially in scenes featuring Ike, who we learn had a brief career as a college football star but who fizzled out as a pro. He’s obsessed with Aaron’s success, continually delivering speeches about how he needs to focus on individual stardom and scoring as many points as possible, since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar makes enough money that he earns several hundred dollars for every point he scores. There’s a fairly upsetting scene where Aaron comes home to find that his father has been drinking and become violent, smashing up their apartment and berating Aaron about how having to take care of a child has held him back in his life. All of this does inform some of Aaron’s actions related to the money, but since that whole plotline seems bolted on, none of it ends up being very effective.

Without much of a backbone to hold up this movie, it ends up being kind of forgettable, which is a shame, since it has a nicely-realized Harlem setting and some memorable characters hanging around its edges. It’s got a decent soundtrack too, with songs by Jose Feliciano, who also appears and sings a couple songs in the aforementioned nightclub scene. But in terms of either adapting Shakespeare or portraying an interesting romance, the movie is a dud. The best thing one can probably say about it is that it’s a nice indication that by 1975, the acceptance of Black-focused stories in movies had increased to the point where corny romantic dramas weren’t out of the ordinary. A rising tide may lift all boats, but it would be preferable if those boats were worth boarding.

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

As I did last year, I wanted to look at the biggest WWE event of the year, which can provide the opportunity to examine the state of professional wrestling, the stuff I’m currently enjoying, the frustrations I have with how storytelling is being handled, and all the various details involved in the bizarre spectacle of people waging fictional physical battles with each other. As ever, there is plenty to enjoy with wrestling, including some great performers and exciting matches, but there is plenty to complain about as well.

A year ago, it seemed like WWE was doing a great job of balancing good storylines with excellent in-ring action. Since then, the quality of the storytelling has diminished significantly, with matches often being thrown together with little buildup, feuds stopping and starting abruptly, and some major characters left languishing with little to do (such as Jade Cargill, the current women’s WWE champion, who has had a total of one championship match since winning the belt last November). But even when the stories behind the matches have been suspect, the matches themselves have often been great, making the whole thing fun enough to keep watching, despite certain frustrations.

For those who care about behind-the-scenes politicking, some of the current issues with WWE have been attributed to its ownership by TKO, the company behind UFC and some boxing promotions. People have complained that they have jacked up ticket prices and are doing everything they can to squeeze as much money out of the company as possible. Last year, WWE also abruptly ended its relationship with Peacock, switching over to ESPN, a streaming service that carries a much higher monthly subscription fee and is reportedly very confusing to use (fortunately, in countries other than the United States, WWE events are streamed on Netflix, so there are other ways to view them…). As a result, it seems like viewership has dropped, and ticket sales are down. While the company isn’t exactly struggling, it seems like things are less rosy than the decision-makers would like, and this may have influenced the haphazard storytelling and other forms of rockiness.

But that can mostly all be ignored as we simply focus on the matches that are going to be happening this weekend and the big events that are likely to occur. Let’s see what’s going to be happening and how it may or may not play out:

Saturday:

Logan Paul, Austin Theory, and iShowSpeed vs. Jey Uso, Jimmy Uso, and L.A. Knight

Because WrestleMania is the biggest WWE event of the year, there are some matches that get thrown together just to ensure that as many people as possible can be involved. This one sort of makes sense as part of an ongoing feud between a faction known as The Vision, which currently consists of YouTube-star-turned-wrestler Logan Paul and fairly generic heel Austin Theory (more on that faction later), and various good guys. The Usos, who had been the World Tag Team Champions until recently, and L.A. Knight had been involved in ongoing conflicts with The Vision, so putting them all together into a match makes sense.

The involvement of iShowSpeed, a Twitch streamer who occasionally shows up at WWE events (he was a surprise entrant in the Royal Rumble in 2025, where he took a brutal spear from Bron Breakker before being eliminated), is the odd factor here. WWE does like to get celebrities involved in matches from time to time, with varying results. In this case, Speed’s participation has been a pretty funny element, with him inadvertently causing the Usos to lose the tag team championship to Paul and Theory, forcing him to reluctantly team up with The Vision out of a sense of self-preservation. Seeing how this match will play out when he’s not really a wrestler and is sort of at odds with everyone involved should be pretty entertaining. Fortunately, all the actual wrestlers in the match are very talented, so they should be able to make it fun to watch.

Predicted winners: I think Logan, Theory, and Speed will prevail, which may hasten along the heel turn for Jey Uso that has been teased for the last six months or so.

Unsanctioned Match: Jacob Fatu vs. Drew McIntyre

It always amuses me when a WWE match is “unsanctioned,” meaning that the company has supposedly disavowed any responsibility for the harm that the wrestlers may inflict on each other because they hate each other so much. In practice, this basically means that a match is a street fight with no disqualifications, and the wrestlers are going to do things to each other that seem especially brutal and painful. There’s nothing like seeing people suffer agony for our entertainment.

This match does at least have some decent buildup, serving as part of a long-running storyline where anger between Fatu and McIntyre has been building for months. Sometime last year, Fatu was attacked backstage by an unknown assailant, which is usually a storyline reason for a performer to be out of action for a few months while recovering from an injury. Since his return, he has been sure that McIntyre was the one who attacked him, although Drew continues to deny his involvement. Fatu has continued to attack McIntyre or get in his way whenever possible, culminating in actions that caused McIntyre to lose the WWE Championship to Cody Rhodes (what actually happened was that Fatu prevented McIntyre from cheating to win by hitting Rhodes with a chair, but in keeping with his character, McIntyre blames someone else for his own failures).

All of this gives the characters some history that should serve to underscore the action as they try to kill each other. While I’m not sure that the level of animosity truly merits an unsanctioned match, these guys are both really solid wrestlers, so I’m sure the fight should be entertaining. Fatu is especially fun to watch, being the kind of wrestler who consistently impresses by being far more agile and acrobatic than one would expect a guy his size to be. McIntyre is no slouch either, serving as a tall, muscular powerhouse who has great skills but who often gets so frustrated about his inability to deliver when it counts that he has to turn to underhanded tactics. I’ll get ready to cringe when they do things to each other that really seem like they hurt.

Predicted winner: This one could go either way, and its real point is brutality. I guess I’ll go with Jacob Fatu, and maybe he’ll finally get some answers about whether Drew McIntyre or someone else was the one who attacked him.

Women’s Tag Team Championship Fatal Four-Way Match: Nia Jax & Lash Legend vs. The Bella Twins vs. Alexa Bliss & Charlotte Flair vs. Lyra Valkyria & Bayley

Speaking of matches that are meant to get as many people as possible involved, this is one that has been building for a while as various tag teams vie for the championship. When the feuds related to singles championships are limited to just a couple people, everyone else tends to get thrown into a tag team to make sure they have something to do. Fortunately, most of the women involved in this match are pretty excellent wrestlers, so I’m sure they’ll come up with plenty of entertaining action.

Of the people involved, I’m always happy to see Alexa Bliss and Charlotte Flair, since they’re a couple of pros who know exactly how to put on good matches every time they’re in the ring. Charlotte went through a bit of a rough period around a year ago as fans kind of turned on her for acting as if she deserved success without really working for it. However, she managed to turn things around by teaming up with Alexa, with the two of them acting as sort of frenemies who eventually came to respect each other and work together to achieve success. This will likely lead to an eventual breakup when one of them turns on the other (that pretty much always happens at some point when two singles wrestlers are put together into a tag team), but for now, they still seem to be having fun by working together.

Bayley and Lyra Valkyria are also very good, with the former being someone who can almost always be counted on to turn in a good match and the latter being a younger upstart who has plenty of great moves and is likely to have a fruitful career ahead of her. The current champions, Nia Jax and Lash Legend, are a couple of dominant strongwomen who serve as big, tough bullies. Nia isn’t my favorite, but she works well with Lash, who is a fairly recent addition to the roster. I would eventually like to see Lash, a former WNBA player with real athletic chops, break free from the tag team and set out on her own, but that probably won’t happen for a while.

And rounding things out are Nicki and Brie Bella, who recently made a return to WWE after years away. Around 10-15 years ago, they sort of led the charge for the rise of high-quality women’s wrestling, but they’ve been eclipsed by the many talented women who have followed. While they may not necessarily have the same level of ability as many of the others involved in this match, WWE loves to play on nostalgia and bring in characters that people liked in the past, and this is their opportunity to win the Women’s Tag Team Championship, which didn’t exist the last time they worked as a team.

Predicted winner: I’m sure it’s going to be the Bella Twins, who will get to take a victory lap for a few months before re-retiring. That is, unless Nicki Bella, who recently suffered an ankle injury, won’t be cleared to compete in time for WrestleMania, which would require a substitute team to be brought in, such as the Kabuki Warriors (Asuka and Kairi Sane). If that happens, all bets are off, but maybe Bayley and Lyra Valkyria will win, since they haven’t held the Women’s Tag Team Championship together yet.

Women’s Intercontinental Championship: A.J. Lee vs. Becky Lynch

Speaking of nostalgia, A.J. Lee, who was also a prominent women’s wrestler back in the early 2010s, recently made a return to WWE. Like the Bella Twins, she was one of the women who led the charge of women’s wrestling, although she left the company before things started to really get good. She’s been involved in a feud with Becky Lynch, perhaps the best of the female wrestlers who followed her, although the idea that she somehow has Becky’s number and can make her tap out to a submission move that doesn’t seem all that painful is a bit overblown.

Lynch made a heel turn after last year’s WrestleMania, and she’s been pretty entertaining as a villain, taking every possible opportunity to remind everyone that she is considered by many to be the best female wrestler of all time (“It’s not just me saying it! Sports Illustrated says it! The Bleacher Report says it!”). While Lee has generally been fine since her return, both in the ring and on the mic, it does kind of seem like Becky has been carrying her through this ongoing feud. If A.J. is going to stick around for very long, I hope they give her more to do, and then Lynch can move on to other feuds as well.

Predicted winner: I’m hoping Becky Lynch wins it and that she’ll get to do more with the Intercontinental Championship as she continues to tout her greatness.

Gunther vs. Seth Rollins

Okay, now is when we can try to provide some explanation of The Vision and the drama surrounding it, which is an interesting example of the ways wrestling storylines are forced to evolve and change based on unforeseen events. At last year’s WrestleMania, Seth Rollins made a heel turn, convincing the manager character Paul Heyman to turn on both Roman Reigns and C.M. Punk and join him in creating a faction that was meant to serve as the future of the WWE. They were soon joined by Bron Breakker and Bronson Reed, a couple of younger powerhouses who seemed poised for greatness.

However, The Vision has been plagued by injuries, starting with Rollins himself, who hurt his shoulder soon after winning the World Heavyweight Championship. This prompted a twist in which Breakker and Reed turned on him and forced him out of the faction. After bringing Austin Theory and Logan Paul into the group, both Breakker and Reed also suffered injuries, leaving the group floundering and preventing the expected match with one of them from happening after Rollins healed up.

So, when Rollins did make his return recently, he was left without a major opponent. The only antagonist left for him was Paul Heyman, who is most definitely not a wrestler. But since he had to face somebody, Gunther has been brought in. The storyline reasons for this are still unknown, but hopefully there’s an actual plan in place, such as having him take over The Vision or forcing Heyman to advocate for him and put him in the championship picture.

Regardless of the surrounding story, I expect this one to be a good match, since both wrestlers can be great when given the opportunity. Rollins has been one of the most consistent performers over the last decade (frequent injuries aside), and Gunther is perhaps the best all-around wrestler on the roster. While he’s portrayed as a physically dominant bully who wins much more often than not, he’s really good at bringing out the best in his opponents, making it look as if he’s really feeling their blows and being staggered by their attacks before coming back and dominating them. Between the two of them, they should be able to come up with something good.

Predicted winner: Seth Rollins, since he needs to maintain his ongoing comeback.

Women’s World Championship: Stephanie Vaquer vs. Liv Morgan

I’m hoping this match will be good, although I’m worried that it has become lost in the midst of everything else that has been going on. Stephanie Vaquer has been excellent over the past year, demonstrating a great talent for physical action in the ring. Unfortunately, as seems to happen far too often these days, her reign as the Women’s World Champion has been fairly quiet, with drama mostly happening among other characters. Give her a good opponent, and she can deliver an excellent match, but she hasn’t been given the chance to do that all that often. This is a consistent problem for WWE; as mentioned above, Jade Cargill’s championship reign has involved almost no matches, and something similar happened with Iyo Skye in 2025, where she spent a good portion of the year as the Women’s World Champion but rarely faced any actual challengers.

If this match is given enough attention, it could be very good. Liv Morgan is very charismatic, and even though her character is usually involved in backstage drama, she’s solid in the ring as well. As the de facto leader of the faction The Judgment Day, she often ends up focusing on drama involving her teammates, including her storyline boyfriend Dominik Mysterio and the other women in the group, Raquel Rodriguez and Roxanne Perez. There have been some attempts to build drama between her and Stephanie, but there’s not a whole lot of substance to their feud. That may not matter, since once they get in the ring, Vaquer’s physical skills will be pitted against Morgan’s deviousness, hopefully to great effect.

Predicted winner: Liv Morgan, who will get to advance various Judgment Day storylines as she holds the belt.

Undisputed WWE Championship: Cody Rhodes vs. Randy Orton

As the guy who is currently the face of WWE, Cody Rhodes had to be involved in one of the main events. He’s been the WWE Champion on and off over the last year (he lost the belt to John Cena at last year’s WrestleMania, then won it back later after convincing Cena to make a nonsensical face turn, then traded it back and forth with Drew McIntyre for a while), and now he’s going up against a newly-villainous Randy Orton. It’s a match that seems obvious, partially because the two of them have a history (they were once in a faction together that highlighted the fact that they’re both sons of famous wrestlers from the past), but also because they’re the same type of old-school wrestler with decades of experience and the ability to deliver when it counts.

Orton’s heel turn, which was not exactly unexpected, given that he has traditionally been a villain, provides at least a little bit of drama for this match. Everyone involved has really been trying to sell the idea that he has become more evil and diabolical than ever, which is to be expected, but it does seem to be a bit of a stretch. Unfortunately, this has been kind of diluted by bringing in Pat McAfee, a former NFL player, current sports commentator, and sometimes WWE announcer, as his advocate. McAfee has always been someone who has been tolerable at best in his WWE appearances, but this villainous version of his character, in which he complains about how terrible wrestling has become, seems like it’s going to quickly get tiresome.

The issue with Randy Orton is that he can be really good when he appears to care about whatever storyline or match he is involved in, but if he’s not engaged, it’s really clear that he’s just going through the motions. Fortunately, he has apparently been enjoying himself in recent years, and his return to his traditional heel role looks like a chance for him to get back to basics and be a brutal badass. He and Cody know how to put on a good match, so this one should be a fun time.

Predicted winner: Randy Orton, who probably won’t be able to catch up to the number of championships that John Cena won during his career, but he’ll get a little bit closer.

Sunday:

Brock Lesnar vs. Oba Femi

I do not like Brock Lesnar. I’ve always found him to be incredibly overrated, with storylines treating him as an unstoppable monster even though he doesn’t really seem to have very much in the way of actual wrestling skill, and his matches tend to involve him doing the same four or five moves over and over as his opponents try really hard to sell the idea that everything he does is devastating. When he was implicated in the sex scandal that finally brought down Vince McMahon, I was hoping that he would be gone from WWE forever.

His absence was too good to last, unfortunately, and he made a return to the company last year as one of the last few opponents for John Cena. The best thing one can say about Lesnar’s return is that his appearances have been brief, since he seems to be content to show up just long enough to collect a paycheck and no longer. Every time he’s onscreen, I roll my eyes, laugh at the way his legs look so skinny when compared to his overdeveloped upper body, and then sigh in relief when he’s gone.

If Brock has to be involved in WrestleMania, Oba Femi is probably the best possible opponent for him. He’s another huge, powerful guy, but he actually has some charisma and plays a real character rather than a guy who just beats everyone else up for no reason. The story over the past few weeks has been that Oba has been surprisingly dominant, actually making Lesnar seem like the underdog in their matchup. That makes me worry that their WrestleMania match will provide Brock with a chance to reestablish his dominance and defeat an opponent who is younger, stronger, and better in pretty much every way. I would hope that WWE would know better than to bury one of their promising newer talents in favor of a part-timer who is clearly in the twilight of his career, but good sense has rarely gotten in the way of their dumb decisions in the past.

Predicted winner: God, I hope it’s Oba Femi, and while I’m at it, I hope Lesnar loses so bad that he gives up and retires, never to be seen again.

Intercontinental Championship Ladder Match: Penta vs. Je’Von Evans vs. Rusev vs. Dragon Lee vs. J.D. McDonagh vs. Rey Mysterio

Everyone loves a ladder match, especially when it features some of the most exciting high-flyers in WWE today. Penta, the current champion, provides some great highlights pretty much every time he gets in the ring. Je’Von Evans is amazingly exciting as well, and as a young talent with energy to burn, he seems like he’s dedicated to coming up with something new and crazy in every match he’s in. J.D. McDonagh is one of those guys who has little sense of self-preservation, to the point that you worry he’s going to really hurt himself with some of the stuff he does (he was out for several months last year after he threw himself out of the ring and into the announcers’ table so hard he broke some ribs and punctured a lung). Dragon Lee has been doing some pretty wild stuff lately too, and it’s clear he’s trying to prove himself as a talent that people should be excited to watch.

And then there’s Rusev, who may serve as the big bruiser who gets to beat up on all these smaller guys, although he’s probably in the match just because they needed someone else. Rey Mysterio was a late addition, possibly as a way to get him into WrestleMania one last time before he retires, which one expects will happen any day now. While he may have been a high-flyer similar to all those other guys in the past, he’s too old to be doing that sort of thing now, although he’ll probably come up with at least one good spot to make sure we remember him. Whatever happens, this one should be tons of fun, with death-defying acrobatics that make people wonder how these guys manage to stay alive when they do this sort of thing on a regular basis.

Predicted winner: I think it’ll be Rey Mysterio, giving him one last victory lap as a champion before he has a match with “Career Killer” Gunther later in the year that will force him to retire.

Finn Bálor vs. Dominik Mysterio

This is a match that has been brewing for a while, with Finn Bálor, who previously served as the leader of the heel faction The Judgment Day, having made a recent face turn so that he can go up against his former teammate. The dissolution of The Judgment Day (at least in that form) had been a long time coming, since Finn had kind of been left adrift after Liv Morgan and Dominik Mysterio became the focus of the group. At least a year ago, it seemed like he would be leaving the group, and even more so after Dominik won the Intercontinental Championship at last year’s WrestleMania by pinning Bálor.

The delay in pulling the trigger on the inevitable Dom/Finn feud may have been a result of Dominik’s increasing popularity. He has been one of the most consistently enjoyable guys to watch for the last couple of years, although more because of his character work than his actual wrestling (he has gotten better in the ring as well, turning in matches that are consistently entertaining). As the son of Rey Mysterio, he was originally one of those legacy characters that people complain about who gets the opportunity to be a pro wrestler without demonstrating much talent, but when he made a heel turn and joined The Judgment Day, he became much more watchable. He then continued to improve by leaps and bounds, and his victory at last year’s WrestleMania marked the turning point where he went from being someone the fans love to boo to someone they began to cheer for without any reservations.

The other big development last year was WWE’s acquisition of the Mexican promotion AAA, which allowed a bunch of luchadors to start showing up in WWE while also having a bunch of WWE stars start appearing in Mexico. Dominik has become one of the top stars who split time between WWE and AAA, and he spent much of the year as a double champion, holding both the Intercontinental Championship and the AAA Mega Championship. His prominence in that area may have been a reason to hold off on anything involving Bálor, but if they’re going to kick off a major storyline for the two of them, WrestleMania is the time to do it.

As for Finn, he has kind of been languishing in near-obscurity for the last few years. He made a big splash around 10 years ago when he first came up to the main roster, but his only major championship reign lasted for one day due to an injury, and he’s never been able to climb back up to the top of the mountain. As part of The Judgment Day, he usually either teamed up with J.D. McDonagh to fight for the Tag Team Championship or hung around in the background. But recently, he seems to have woken up and started caring again, having a couple of good matches with C.M. Punk and deciding to finally stop enabling Dominik’s weaselly nature.

For the WrestleMania match, Finn is returning to his persona of The Demon, which I’ve always found to be kind of silly. It’s supposed to be a more feral, aggressive version of his character, or something like that, but I’ve never seen much difference between the way he wrestles when he’s The Demon or he’s regular ol’ Finn. He ends up looking kind of goofy, because he’s functionally equivalent to his normal character, but he also has a lot of face and body paint on him that inevitably wears off during a match. However, I’m open to seeing him put forth the effort to show that he shouldn’t be forgotten. Dominik should continue to be a good foil for him for as long as their rivalry may last.

Predicted winner: Finn Bálor, since he’s not going to bring The Demon out of cold storage and then lose right away.

United States Championship: Sami Zayn vs. Trick Williams

This is a match that should be good, although it wasn’t necessary to involve the U.S. Championship. Sami Zayn is beloved, and he’s one of those characters who hangs around the mid-card for most of his career, occasionally winning minor championships but never able to win a world championship. Trick Williams is a younger upstart who recently moved up to the main roster, and he’s been electric, the perfect example of a heel who is incredibly sure of his greatness and has the talent to back his opinions up. He has served as an antagonist for Zayn, needling him about his failure to ever win a big championship, which is a perfect setup for a feud and a good WrestleMania match.

That could have worked perfectly on its own, but they had to go and get the U.S. Championship involved to try to increase the stakes. That’s not out of the ordinary, but it resulted in the burial of the previous champion, Carmelo Hayes, who has been putting on great matches on a weekly basis as part of an ongoing “open challenge.” He won the championship in an absolute banger of a match against Ilja Dragunov back in December, and their rematch that took place a few weeks ago was even better. He’s consistently entertaining to watch, and by all rights, he should have had a WrestleMania match of his own where he could show off how good he is, facing off against either another young talent or a veteran who wants to share the spotlight.

Putting the belt on Sami just for WrestleMania seems like an unnecessary move that has robbed Hayes of his rightful opportunity. But there is one saving grace of that decision, and it’s the continuing development of Zayn’s character. He is usually known for his goodhearted nature and his insistence on doing the right thing (except for the periods of his career where he’s been a heel, of course), but he engaged in some minorly underhanded tactics to defeat Hayes, signaling that maybe he’s going to start looking out for number one and doing whatever it takes to finally win the world championship he’s been chasing for so long. Minor adjustments like that are what great wrestlers like Zayn can do to keep things from getting stale, and it should be interesting to watch things play out.

Predicted winner: Trick Williams, giving him a championship reign as his rise continues and freeing up Sami Zayn to go after a bigger foe.

WWE Women’s Championship: Jade Cargill vs. Rhea Ripley

WWE doesn’t seem to know what to do with Jade Cargill, who has all the hallmarks of a muscular badass who can dominate everyone she goes up against through physical force, but little in the way of personality. When she gets really fired up during a match, she can be pretty compelling, such as in a match prior to her championship win last year where she busted her head open on the ring’s steps and screamed directly into the camera in triumph while blood was pouring down her face. But most often, she just beats her opponents up a bunch and wins easily, which doesn’t make for very interesting drama.

Since WWE couldn’t figure out how to make Jade interesting, they’ve apparently thrown up their hands and served her up to Rhea Ripley. While Rhea is also muscular and powerful, she’s Jade’s opposite number in terms of personality, since she can always be counted on for great character work both inside and outside the ring. She’s been sitting at the head of the women’s division (and WWE as a whole) for several years now, so of course she needed to be in a championship match at WrestleMania. If anybody can get a good match out of Jade, she can.

Actually, that’s overly harsh. Cargill is a perfectly fine wrestler, with some amazing physical skills and a presence that should be awe-inspiring. I just tend to get bored when a person is portrayed as being so dominant that they easily destroy every opponent. Fortunately, there’s no way that’s going to happen when she’s going up against Ripley, who is a force of nature of her own. This match has the potential to be excellent, and I hope it delivers.

Predicted winner: Rhea Ripley, if only because WWE needs a women’s champion who can have good matches on a regular basis.

World Heavyweight Championship: C.M. Punk vs. Roman Reigns

This is another match that sort of happened by default. C.M. Punk was pretty much the only choice to be the World Heavyweight Champion after Seth Rollins got injured last year, and Roman Reigns is the other big star in the company, so the two of them got thrown together in hopes that they’re both popular enough to make a can’t-miss main event. Unlike some of the other matches on the card, they’ve had plenty of time to build to this one. Possibly too much time, since the matchup was set back in January when Reigns won the Royal Rumble, but that’s unavoidable these days.

There is at least a little bit of history between Punk and Reigns, since way back in 2012, Reigns made his debut as part of the faction The Shield, with them sort of serving as enforcers for Punk during his landmark championship reign. But so much has happened since then that their history is barely even remembered. Punk left the company in 2014, and Reigns went on to become one of the company’s biggest stars (after a rocky start where fans didn’t like the way he had apparently been anointed as the company’s chosen top guy, although they eventually came around on him). He had a championship run that lasted for almost four years, and his time as the head of the faction The Bloodline made for a good ongoing storyline. By that point, he had left Punk firmly in the past.

Since Punk made his return to WWE a few years ago, his interactions with Reigns have mostly been limited to a triple threat match featuring them and Seth Rollins at last year’s WrestleMania. However, the main point of that match ended up being to shift Paul Heyman’s loyalties from Reigns to Rollins and solidify the latter as one of the company’s top heels and the leader of the faction that eventually became The Vision. Reigns, who has mostly been a part-time wrestler even during his time as champion, didn’t really interact with Punk until the time came to start building up to this year’s WrestleMania. So now he has suddenly decided that he hates Punk and has made it his mission to see him fail.

Fortunately, even though the storyline smacks of artificiality, Punk and Reigns have done their best to sell it over the last couple of months. Punk in particular has sold the feud really well, delivering a series of blistering promos that have reminded everyone how good he can be if they just give him the mic and let him talk. He and Reigns have done their absolute best to make this seem like a match that everyone should really care about.

It’s possible that the match will live up to the hype, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that even though Punk is as good at talking as he’s ever been, at 47 years old, he’s not really physically up to the task of standing toe to toe with the top talent in WWE. He certainly wants to keep wrestling as long as he can, but he’s definitely nearing the end of his shelf life. I’m sure he’s going to try his best to put on a great match, but I just don’t know if he has the ability to do so anymore. Reigns might have to carry him, and he’s good enough at what he does that he can probably make things look as good as possible. I don’t have high hopes that this will be great wrestling, but hopefully it will be good enough drama to end WrestleMania on a positive note.

Predicted winner: I think it’ll be C.M. Punk, allowing him to keep what will probably be his last championship reign going for a little while longer.

Well, I think that’s everything, although there may be some last-minute changes, as well as a few minor interstitial matches that get thrown in so that somebody or other can make a cameo or an unexpected return. We’ll see how well all of my predictions turn out, but as always, I’m hoping to be surprised and delighted. There’s plenty of possibility here, with some potential for excellent wrestling. That’s always the hope, and that’s why I keep coming back to this silliness. Wrestling can be great, so I’ll be watching expectantly to see if it lives up to that promise.

One nice thing about the Blaxploitation movement was the opportunities that it provided for Black filmmakers, both behind and in front of the camera. By 1975, a few prominent Black actors got to direct films, including Sidney Poitier (Buck and the Preacher, Uptown Saturday Night), Ossie Davis (Cotton Comes to Harlem, Gordon’s War), and D’urville Martin (Dolemite). With Mean Johnny Barrows, Fred Williamson got to join their ranks. Unfortunately, he apparently didn’t pay too much attention to what a director is supposed to do in the movies he previously made, because his first outing behind the camera can probably most generously be described as “inept.”

There’s a germ of a good idea in Mean Johnny Barrows, since it focuses on the travails of a soldier who fought in Vietnam after he is forced out of the military and struggles to find work. That was a relevant issue in 1975, especially as the Vietnam War was ending and men were coming home to learn that the public reaction to them ranged from indifference to outright antipathy. For Black men who already had to deal with racism, who had most likely been drafted into military service against their will, and who had been traumatized by their experiences, returning to something resembling normal life must have seemed impossible. That’s a great starting point for a Blaxploitation movie, and it could go in any number of directions, ranging from realistic, street-level struggles to exciting opportunities for action when characters with military skills get involved in crime or violence.

The movie does spend some time looking at the difficulties that the title character (played by Williamson) faces, and that’s when it’s at its best. Williamson plays him much more internally than the types of charismatic action heroes he usually portrays, making him seem desperate to survive but too proud to compromise his morals. He’s determined enough to try to survive by doggedly looking for work at businesses throughout the Los Angeles neighborhood he returns to after being dishonorably discharged, but he’s clearly struggling as he keeps getting turned down. A scene in which he stands in an alley and contemplates picking up some food out of a garbage can because he’s incredibly hungry, but can’t quite lower himself to that level, is a great example of how good he can be when he acts solely through posture and facial expressions.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t seem to believe that Johnny’s struggles are compelling enough to support a movie on their own, so it spends just as much time following the conflict between a couple of local Mafia families, one of whom keeps trying to recruit Johnny as an enforcer. A guy named Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman) recognizes Johnny as a local high school football star who seemed to have a promising career ahead of him before he was kicked out of college because of some sort of scandal. He also heard that Johnny went on to become a hero of sorts in Vietnam after killing a bunch of enemy soldiers, so he believes that Johnny has the skills and killer instinct the Racconi family needs. While Johnny isn’t willing to do that kind of work, Mario is sure that he’ll come around once he gets desperate enough.

The Racconi family is at odds with the Da Vince family, which has recently set up operations in a local flower shop. Unfortunately, that seems to be as far as the writers of the movie thought the conflict through. The mechanics of their conflict make little sense, with the Racconis being upset that the Da Vinces are using the flower shop as a front for running drugs to Black and Mexican communities (apparently, numbers are the only less-than-legal operations that the Racconis engage in, and most of their success comes from legitimate businesses like wineries and linens, which makes one wonder if they qualify as a Mafia operation at all). Mario’s father Don Racconi (Luther Adler) uses the least effective tactics possible to try to resolve the situation, including sending in a single hitman who is so inept that he immediately gets killed and then trying to negotiate with Don Da Vince (Tony Caruso) in a situation that sets him and Mario up to get gunned down.

However, before getting into that, we should back up to the movie’s opening scene, since it not only provides a reason for Johnny’s dishonorable discharge, it ends up being relevant later, in a manner that’s highly nonsensical. Johnny is leading a training exercise of some sort (it’s unclear whether it’s supposed to be happening in Vietnam or stateside) where he’s instructing men on how to find land mines. Immediately after he tells them that they’re in an area without any live mines, he steps on a mine that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was apparently placed there by a white officer, who makes fun of Johnny for being in such a dangerous situation. After Johnny escapes by using a pin to try to reset the mine, having the other men place their flak jackets around his feet, and jumping off the mine just before it explodes, he punches out the officer, which is apparently enough to end his military career. All of this is just as confusing as it sounds, and it’s shot in a way that makes it hard to tell what exactly happened.

Anyway, as the Mafia-related plot develops, Johnny keeps refusing to work for them, choosing instead to take a job at a gas station where he gets yelled at by the white owner a bunch and spends all his time mopping floors and cleaning the bathroom instead of getting to pump gas and service cars like he wants to do. If the movie had focused on this aspect of the story better, it could have served as an example of the indignities that Johnny and men like him have to face, being at the mercy of a boss who acts like he’s doing him a huge favor by giving him work, belittles him at every opportunity, and refuses to pay fair wages. When Johnny eventually snaps and punches him, this doesn’t even provide some deserved comeuppance, because some cops who happened to be driving at the time show up and arrest him.

Even when he’s at the end of his rope, Johnny isn’t willing to enter the world of crime, but he changes his mind when he finds out that Nancy (Jenny Sherman), a woman who worked for Mario, has been kidnapped by the Da Vinces. Except, in a dumb twist, she is actually conspiring with one of Don Da Vince’s sons, Tony (Roddy McDowell, taking a huge step down from the Planet of the Apes movies), to take over the family or something (their actual goal is never explained). Johnny is apparently in love with her, even though the two of them have barely even interacted with each other, so when she lies to him and tells him that her captors raped her, that’s what finally spurs him into action.

The subsequent scenes of violence are…not terrible, but they’re not exactly engaging either. Johnny sneaks into the flower shop and takes out the other son of the Da Vince family. When Tony tries to flee to Mexico, Johnny stows away on his boat and kills him too (if his plan was to have Johnny kill everyone else in the family so he could take over, he did a pretty terrible job of planning for potential contingencies). Finally, Johnny commandeers a delivery van from the flower shop and takes it to the poorly-defended Da Vince residence, where he blows away the don while wielding a full-length, double-barreled shotgun in each hand. During all of this, Williamson transforms into what seems to be a completely different character, throwing around quips and dressing in fancy suits, all of which is completely at odds with what had previously been established about the kind of person he is.

Eventually, Johnny gets tracked down by a mysterious assassin, and when he finally confronts the guy, it turns out to be the officer who got him thrown out of the military way back at the beginning. After prevailing in a fight in which both characters display karate skills that had previously gone unmentioned (a fight that is won through the use of a ninja throwing star), Johnny decides to head off into the sunset with Nancy, but after they share a kiss, she shoots him, because, as we knew, she was actually evil. Then, when she walks away, she steps on the same type of land mine as in the opening scene and blows up. The end, even though none of that made any sense at all!

This almost seems like two separate movies that got stitched together really poorly. The movie wants to be about the difficulties faced by Vietnam vets who were returning home (it even ends with a title card reading “Dedicated to the veteran who traded his place on the front line for a place on the unemployment line. Peace is hell.”), and when it focuses on that, it almost works as an earnest, depressing drama. But by trying to shoehorn in a Mafia plot that doesn’t make any sense and is populated by actors who seem to have no idea what they’re doing, it destroys any goodwill it had built up.

There is one interesting scene featuring “special guest star” Elliot Gould, a big 1970s movie star who must have owed someone a favor. In the aforementioned scene where Johnny is trying to avoid eating from the garbage, Gould suddenly shows up and informs him of the amazing benefits he can receive by going to a soup kitchen that serves homeless people. He’s only on screen for about a scene and a half, but he’s a commanding presence, being a flamboyant, scarf-wearing weirdo who is also apparently homeless and knows how to work the system. It would be the perfect example of this movie’s schizophrenic nature, with weird bits that don’t really make sense intruding on the realistic drama. However, it differs from the rest of those types of scenes in that it features some acting that is actually good.

The other less-than-terrible thing about the movie is the music, with a soundtrack by violinist Gordon Staples and some pretty soulful singers (he seemed to have some connections after working with Motown Records’ The Funk Brothers). The songs that background Johnny’s problems finding work go a long way toward selling the sadness and desperation of his situation. Another song that plays over the closing features a memorable “Peace is hell” refrain, almost closing the movie on a positive note. But not quite, since any positivity is tainted by the memory of the general ineptitude on display. Fred Williamson directed several more movies after this, so one can only hope that he had nowhere to go but up.

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

Pam Grier was one of the best stars in the Blaxploitation scene, not just because she was super-cool and could deliver some believable action, but because she actually had some range. In Coffy, she brought an emotional vulnerability to a character that could have been little more than a cold vengeance delivery vehicle. In Foxy Brown, she played a similar version of that same character, but she brought a furious anger to the fore, letting the tragedies the character suffers fuel her rage and her determination. When directors knew what to do with her, she could even liven up small parts in movies like Hit Man and Cool Breeze (when they didn’t, we ended up with movies like Scream Blacula Scream).

Even though Grier’s run as one of the top Blaxploitation stars came to an end in 1975 with Friday Foster, it’s nice that she got to go out on a positive note. The movie is a pretty fun detective story that provides plenty of opportunity for action, and it gives her a chance to play a role that’s less dramatic, having fun as she gets into various scrapes and throws herself into dangerous situations without worrying too much about whether she’ll survive them. It only makes the vaguest of gestures toward social commentary and comes up with a series of ridiculous justifications for bits of action, but that’s part of what makes it fun. It’s a pretty lightweight romp, but it’s definitely an enjoyable one.

Part of that lightweight nature likely comes from the movie’s source material. Friday Foster was a newspaper comic strip that ran from 1970 to 1974, and it’s notable for being one of the first to star a Black female character (the creators were a white writer named Jim Lawrence who also wrote a James Bond strip and a Spanish artist named Jorge Longarón). The strip was mostly a soap opera, following the adventures of a model-turned-photographer, and even if it didn’t last very long, it was syndicated by the Chicago Tribune, so it probably had some name recognition at the time. The movie seems to be in keeping with the style of stories the strip told, with a focus on dramatic goings-on but a light tone and a main character who smiles and jokes her way through her adventures.

So, Friday Foster is one of those old-school photographers who is always stumbling onto criminal schemes. In the opening scenes, her editor at Glance Magazine (Julius Harris, from Trouble Man, Black Caesar, and more), with headquarters in Los Angeles, sends her to get some photos of Blake Tarr (Thalmus Rasulala, from Cool Breeze, Blacula, Bucktown, etc.), a billionaire described as the “Black Howard Hughes,” as he returns to the United States. Friday sneaks into the airport where his private plane is landing, but at the same time, a trio of men posing as security guards (they’re led by Carl Weathers, playing a character who manages to avoid speaking throughout the entire film) also sneak in and attempt to assassinate him. She gets pictures of everything and barely manages to escape without getting shot herself.

While all of this business was going down, a friend of Friday’s named Cloris (Rosalind Miles, who appeared in Shaft’s Big Score! and The Black 6) calls her for help, but she doesn’t explain what’s wrong. Later, Cloris’s boyfriend comes stumbling into her apartment, and he’s one of the assassins; he got shot during the chaos, and he dies before she can do anything. The next day, Friday attends a fashion show, which seems to be the sort of thing she usually photographs, where she runs into a private detective friend of hers named Colt Hawkins (Yaphet Kotto, from The Liberation of L.B. Jones, Across 110th Street, etc), and she spots Carl Weathers there as well. Cloris is one of the models at the fashion show, but when she’s introduced by fashion designer Madame Rena (Eartha Kitt, hamming things up in a pretty delightful fashion), she stumbles out onto the runway with a knife in her back, and she warns Friday about some threat known as Black Widow with her dying breath.

This kicks off a plot that’s a twist-filled mystery, although it doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. It’s mostly an excuse for one scene of action and intrigue after another. For example, during Cloris’s funeral, Friday once again spots Carl Weathers in attendance, but he gets in a car and drives away after he gets noticed. To keep him from getting away, she steals the hearse and goes on a car chase, pursuing him into an abandoned building in a manner that seems especially foolhardy, since she knows he’s a murderer, and she isn’t carrying any weapon other than her camera. She escapes after a short scuffle, of course, but just so the plot can keep moving on instead of for any believable reason.

As the plot continues, Friday and Colt travel to Washington, D.C. to get in touch with a senator that Cloris was associated with (this is done through one of those classic gags in which her editor vociferously states that he will never allow her to fly to Washington to continue the investigation, followed by a jump cut to her getting off a plane in D.C.). There’s an appearance by a flamboyantly gay informant played by Godfrey Cambridge (Cotton Comes to Harlem, Watermelon Man), and she gets to go to a fancy party where she meets up with Senator Hart (Paul Benjamin, Across 110th Street), who informs her that Tarr is somehow involved in the whole Black Widow thing.

Back in L.A., Friday and Colt (who seems to have turned into her partner by this point) get involved in various other scrapes, continuing to fend off attempts by Carl Weathers to assassinate anyone who is involved in the plot. She meets up with Tarr, who wants to help with her investigation. They eventually figure out that Black Widow has something to do with assassinating prominent Black leaders, and they think that Hart is somehow involved, so they head back to Washington to stop him. After hearing a cryptic clue about “when the walls come tumbling down,” Friday figures out that the plan must have something to do with Jericho, the compound of a lecherous preacher she met at the party (Scatman Crothers), so she races there to stop whatever is going to happen. For some reason, she steals a milk truck to do so, partly because it makes for an amusing visual, but also so that when a bad guy tries to stop her, she gets to pull out a bottle of milk and smash it on his head.

It turns out that Hart doesn’t have any devious scheme; his meeting was part of what he had termed a “unity initiative” in which he gathered the most prominent Black leaders in the United States to have a conference on…something or other. But actually, the Black Widow scheme was being done by his chief of staff, who has gathered a makeshift army to storm the compound and assassinate all the leaders. Why does he want to do this? That’s unexplained, although some of his soldiers are white guys wearing afro wigs and blackface makeup, so maybe they’re trying to make it seem like the Black community is tearing itself apart and can’t be trusted (when Friday questions why some of the other soldiers are Black, Hart tells her, “Some n***** will do anything for a dollar”). Fortunately, Tarr shows up with an army of his own to stop the bad guys, and he’s accompanied by Colt, who gets to chase down the chief of staff and beat him up while delivering a bunch of quips.

Any social commentary that the movie is trying to deliver doesn’t seem to be thought through especially well, but that’s in keeping with the plot, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. Why would a senator who is trying to put together a major initiative involving prominent leaders keep the meeting secret? Why do random people like a model and fashion designer have inside information about the plot, and what would having them assassinated accomplish? How does Friday stay alive when she’s constantly throwing herself into dangerous situations?

But really, none of that matters, since it’s all an excuse for Pam Grier to jetset around being glamorous and getting into predicaments. Friday is a great character for her, not just because of her positive attitude and her penchant for comic-strip-style adventures, but also because she’s fun to spend time around. She’s an example of the sexually liberated women of the 1970s, sleeping with both Hart and Tarr and being unapologetic about her enjoyment of the opposite sex. She’s fiercely independent, and her rebellious streak goes a long way toward keeping her adventures light, even as violence is happening all around her.

And that violence is pretty entertaining, providing plenty of nice action. In addition to the aforementioned car chases, there are fights and shootouts, including a nice rooftop chase and brawl between Yaphet Kotto and Carl Weathers. The whole thing devolves into a big battle with machine guns and helicopters, with Scatman Crothers freaking out and Friday getting to engage in the heroic killing of at least one racist. There’s rarely a stretch of more than 10 minutes until something exciting happens. Plus, it’s all backgrounded by a bouncy score by Luchi De Jesus (who was also the composer for movies like Detroit 9000 and Black Belt Jones) that serves as a great example of the music that made so many Blaxploitation movies so distinctive. (There’s also a decent theme song composed by De Jesus and sung by Ward L. Chandler that’s not exactly one of the great Blaxploitation themes, but it’s still fun.)

While I wouldn’t call Friday Foster one of the top tier of Blaxploitation movies, it falls just below that particular stratum. It doesn’t hit hard enough to truly make an impact, but as a goofy action movie featuring likeable characters, it serves as time well spent. If any movie had to serve as Pam Grier’s last hurrah during the 1970s, it might as well have been this one, since it allowed her to go out on a positive note while making us wish she could have continued making movies at this level of quality or higher for the next several decades. If only…

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