Death Dimension

Get Sakata

Death Dimension
aka Freeze Bomb
USA 1978 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: There’s a ‘villain reveal’ in here by way of a spoiler.

I’ve been wanting to watch Al Adamson’s Death Dimension for a while now... possibly since before I even knew who Al Adamson was. After the slightly cheap but immensely entertaining Jim Kelly vehicle Black Samurai that Adamson directed (and which I reviewed here) I was really up for watching this one. Alas, asides from a few silly points the film is, sadly, not a patch on Black Samurai and it would be a bit of an understatement to say it disappointed somewhat.

Asides from eschewing the flashier Adamson titles, the film starts off with credits over footage which, I guess, is actually quite impressive. A doctor cuts into the forehead of an actress in close up as she tries to keep still and implants a microdot in her. It actually looks like he’s doing it for real and all I can say is that it’s an impressive looking prosthetic to be able to do that. Similarly, when the thing comes out later in the film... it still doesn’t look fake.

The doctor finishes his surgery and tells the lady to run while he distracts his boss with the test of the new scientific invention which he’d created as a weather control device to end drought. However, the film’s primary villain is using it as a ‘freeze bomb’ and we see it being tested on his prisoners. It basically explodes and then, in the area around the prisoners, it starts snowing until they freeze to death. If that sounds pretty lame, let me assure you, it’s cheaply done and looks even lamer. Luckily, that’s the last time we see the freeze bomb in action because the doctor kills himself and destroys his lab, entrusting the woman at the start of the picture, Felicia (played by Patch Mackenzie) to get the microdot into safe hands.

So now it’s down to heroic cop Ash to find the girl before the villains do. Okay, the plot is set up and... I haven’t mentioned the cast yet, have I. Well, for starters, Ash is played by kung fu guru Jim Kelly but it's the addition of two other iconic actors which make the film so memorable... well, memorable in a way. In Black Samurai, Adamson had a lot of nods to the James Bond-like shenanigans of the main characters. I think it was obvious he liked the Bond films. So in this one he’s got two famous Bond actors on board too and, after seeing how this turned out I have to ask... what were they thinking?

So we have Ash’s police captain boss Gallagher played by George Lazenby, the man who played Bond himself in the greatest of the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here). He doesn’t have a lot to do in this one but, when he later turns out to be a turncoat villain, he does have a fight scene at least, where he is electrocuted in a pool by Ash’s Chinese ally. I’ll get to him in a minute.

The main villain of the piece, known as The Pig, is played by none other than... and I’ll write it as he’s billed on the credits... Harold ‘Odd Job’ Sakata. Yep, the guy who played villainous henchman Odd Job in Goldfinger (reviewed here) is the main villain in this one, with a big talking role no less. That being said, he’s been overdubbed with the voice of James Hong for this movie. But to show that he’s just like a Bond villain, instead of stroking a cat throughout the film like Blofeld often did... here Sakata is constantly stroking his pet tortoise. So, yeah, a clever way for the director to highlight the similarities between the Bond films and... well this mess of a movie.

Aldo Ray also turns up in this one as a ‘buyer’ for The Pig’s freeze bomb (when he can get his hands back on the formula in Felicia’s head) and, last but not least, we have Ash’s Kung Fu buddy Li, played by Myron Lee. And, just to push the additional, obvious mood they’re going for, he’s credited here as Myron ‘Bruce’ Lee. He’s not terrible in this and he beats people up just as well as Jim Kelly but, yeah, this was his only movie role by the looks of it.

And it’s all the usual shenanigans. Curiously, just like in Black Samurai, the fight choreography seems to be better at the start of the picture with the end stuff being a bit underwhelming again. There’s not too much in the way of inventive camerawork during the film other than Adamson using that ‘fly’s eye’ lens again (I don’t know what it’s called) to effectively show Felicia’s state of paranoia as she walks the city streets and tries to find a safe haven. Also, the score which is credited to someone called Chuck Ransdell, who has this as his only soundtrack credit plus one credit as an actor in another film, sounds more like a needle drop assembly to me. I don’t know if he wrote the whole thing or just a cue here and there but, for the most part but it doesn’t quite seem to hang together. Most of it is wah wah but oddly generic funky action music but the more effective stuff at the start which is built around a continuous pulse sounds more like something Fabio Frizzi or John Carpenter might have come up with.

The film has some nice ideas for set pieces such as a speed boat chase and ‘on board’ fight but most of them are just not executed with any real flair it seems. And I know Adamson does have a certain style to his work (especially in some of his early crime pictures) so I don’t know what factors combined to give us this. That being said, the sequence where Jim Kelly is in a helicopter and having a shoot out with one of The Pig’s henchman, who is shooting back from a cable car, is a nice idea and it’s not too terrible. I mean, yeah, it’s pretty terrible but... not too terrible.

I’ll quickly mention that there’s a car chase which suddenly winds up in desert roads and, knowing Adamson, I was waiting for the car to go over the cliff in that same footage he favoured from previous films and, sure enough, that happened. Similarly, I knew just how The Pig would meet his end when I saw a light aircraft (probably piloted by Adamson’s sometimes acting and director friend John 'Bud' Cardos, I should think) coming to pick him up in the desert. I knew it would somehow explode with him in it and I knew the exact ‘stolen footage’ moment Adamson would once again cut to in an attempt to fool viewers into thinking the plane had actually exploded. I’ve seen this second or two of film so many times now as I make my way through this boxed edition from Severin, the Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection. Sadly, this is not one of the films in this set which would qualify as a masterpiece by anyone’s standard, I would have thought. This is not the entertaining thrill ride of a film I had hoped it would be but I’m really glad I have it in Blu Ray quality, at least. I now have five more of the 32 films in this box set to watch. Reviews will be coming soon.

Blood and Flesh - The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson

What Lay Beneath

Blood and Flesh - The Reel Life
and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson
USA 2019 Directed by David Gregory
Severin Films  Blu Ray Zone A/B
As part of the Al Adamson -
The Masterpiece Collection 32 film Blu Ray set

I’ve only, at time of writing this, seen one of Al Adamson’s movies before. That was the incredibly bad but hugely entertaining Dracula Vs Frankenstein (reviewed, succinctly, by me in my early days of this blog here). However, there were a few I had on my list to try and get hold of but then Severin, who are a label worth reckoning with, released this limited edition, very long term project they’ve been working on for... well something like a decade, I think. And it’s really expensive too... probably the most expensive set I've ever bought. I finally pulled the trigger on this thing right before it sold out because... well I’d saved money from not travelling during the coronavirus lock down and it was likely that I would never again have the opportunity to see these films unleashed all in one place at the same time... 32 movies. So I wept into the remains of my tattered wallet, bit the bullet and ‘done the deed”.

This set also features this brand new feature length documentary film... Blood And Flesh - The Reel Life And Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, which was directed by David Gregory, who had made Lost Soul - The Doomed Journey Of Richard Stanley’s Island Of Dr. Moreau, which I watched and reviewed earlier this year (right here). Now, normally I would leave the documentary in a new set until after I’d watched all the other films but I figured, in this case, since I knew so little about Adamson (but had heard some disquieting rumblings), that it might be worth watching this thing so I could get an overview of his career and the strange way he finished his life.

Turns out Adamson was the son of an old, early Hollywood cowboy star/director called Denver Dickson (Victor Adamson) who turned down an offer with Universal studios in favour of making his films for his own production company. He had numerous movies coming out just at the tail end of the 20s and into the 30s, 40s etc as well as appearing uncredited in many movies and TV shows over the years up until his final appearance in the aforementioned Dracula Vs Frankenstein (he appeared in 285 productions according to the IMDB). So I guess the world of B-movie show business was somehow in Al Adamson’s blood when he started trying to direct/produce and also appear in his own films.

He was very much one of those kings or princes of the American made exploitation films and I guess you would think of him in the same breath as people like Herschell Gordon Lewis or, in some ways, a poor man’s Roger Corman, with even smaller budgets than Corman but making pictures which did very well on the drive in circuits in the 1960s and 1970s. This documentary details his story with interview footage from producers, friends, co-stars and even some of his stars, such as the legendary Russ Tamblyn, who was in a few of his movies like biker gang film Satan’s Sadists, Black Heat and the Dracula Vs Frankenstein movie. It also has appearances by Adamson himself in archival interview footage which must have been taken not too many years before the ghastly death mentioned in the title.

It shows many of the people who he worked with in some capacity or another such as... well lets just do a little list to whet your appetite...  Colonel Sanders (the real one, promoting his Kentucky Fried Chicken in one of Adamson’s shoots), Charles Manson (he shot one of his movies on the ranch shortly before, or possibly during, the famous murders), John Carradine, Jim Kelly, Lon Chaney Jr, J. Carrol Naish, George Lazenby and even Forrest J. Ackerman. Some of these are seen only in clips from the director’s movies and some of them in archival footage. And it’s a rare treat listening to some of the stories his friends and crew tell... many of them who were working for ‘experience’ and no fee on Adamson’s shoots. It’s also amazing to discover that he was working with the likes of such famous cinematographers as Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács very early on in their careers too.

Additionally, there’s the tale of the unseen footage, enough for three movies, where Adamson was called in to make a dramatised documentary film about UFOs. He was a total non-believer in the stuff until, it’s alleged (and then the various interview subjects clam up when they realise the camera is still running), he was taken to meet a fully documented alien/human hybrid person and that, after a while, everyone backed away from the film they had been making because they all thought it was too dangerous because... yeah, government and ‘other worldy’ intervention.

It’s also tells of the tragedy of his losing his wife Regina Carrol, who starred in most of his films, to cancer a few years before Al’s untimely death. Followed by that tragedy itself as Al was hammered to death by a friend who he was hiring to work on a ranch he was living at, only to be buried in a bag under where the old jacuzzi was, which had been ripped out and replaced with his corpse before being cemented in and having tiles laid out over the top of him. The last part of the documentary plays like a police procedural set of interviews as friends, relatives and various law enforcement officials talk you through the details of how the missing director was finally ‘discovered’ and how they found the culprit living in Florida with his latest girlfriend and her young child, safely bringing the killer (who denies it to this day but the evidence seems pretty damning) to justice (of a kind).

And, yeah, it’s certainly an interesting narrative... usually when a documentary of this kind surfaces, it doesn’t end with the director getting murdered in a way which wouldn’t look out of place in one of his own, sometimes gory movies. It’s a hell of a way to finish up a movie which suddenly takes a turn in a different direction from the way it started out and, of the two documentary films I’ve seen by David Gregory, as interesting as that other one was, I think this one is even better. It really is a nicely put together, informative and straight-on look at one of those ‘maverick’ directors, if I may use the term, who probably wouldn’t be remembered in a lot of people’s top ten movie lists but who certainly gave the backdrop of American cinematic culture an added layer of questionable texture and who is... unforgettable in his own way.

Of course, it goes without saying that Severin’s amazing new box set is crammed full of extras for each and every film (including this documentary) and is beautifully packaged as a book in a slip case with the fourteen Blu Rays housing the 32 films in a series of double page spreads including poster artwork from the films, not to mention a sizeable bound book talking about these, also housed within the slipcase. And if you don’t want to shell out for this full retrospective career of the man’s work, painstakingly restored by Severin in ways that you wouldn’t expect films like this to be enthusiastically resurrected, then this documentary can also be bought as a stand alone release from the same company. If you are into the history of exploitation films of all kinds... secret agents, blaxploitation, horror, sexy stewardesses and various examples of ‘niche’ moviemaking, Blood and Flesh - The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson is probably something you’re going to love. Definitely worth checking out, that’s for sure.

Mr. No Legs (aka The Amazing Mr. No Legs)

I Am Leg End

Mr. No Legs 
(aka The Amazing Mr. No Legs)
1979 USA
Directed by Ricou Browning
DVD Gear Region 0

Warning: Seriously! You care about spoilers on this?
Are you ever gonna watch it?

I went out of my way to turn up a copy of this movie to be able to review it for you here... and almost wish I hadn’t.

Almost.

Okay... so this appears to be directed by Ricou Browning, who some of my regular readers will recognise as being one of the two primary 'actors' in the gill-man costume in Universal’s iconic Creature From The Black Lagoon trilogy. It’s interesting, though, that if you follow the link from this movie into the IMDB entry for the man himself, you will not see this film listed there as being something he has directed. I suspect he wanted to get this one deleted off his CV, is my guess.

Having seen it now... I can understand why.

Now, when I first heard about this film... and it being a “wheelchair guy of death” movie... I was stunned and imagined it was kind of like a Death Wish meets Ironside kind of deal. I was wrong... but that premise maybe does need looking into at some point (Hollywood take note!). The movie also does put a strain on good taste (if you subscribe to such a ridiculous notion) and it’s really just not as good as its central gimmick sounds. And there are some easy identifiers as to why.

The thing is, this film has an actor called Ron Slinker who genuinely has no legs and out of all the cast in this film, he does a pretty good job actually... although this is the only movie he’s been in, according to the aforementioned IMDB. He isn’t however, in this single role at least, someone who you can sympathise with. In this film, which seems inappropriately titled to me, Mr. No Legs is actually a villain... and for pretty much all of the movie he is just a henchman. This has got to be an unusual phenomena in movie history I reckon. Can you imagine if they’d have named a Bond movie after the villain? We’d have movies like Oddjob or From Grant With Love. My only clue as to what the producers were thinking on this is that Slinker’s act is so much of a novelty that, compared to the rest of the film when he’s not on screen (and he really isn’t on screen all that much), the novelty of his character kind of carries the movie in some respects.

So, okay. Let me tell you about the one good thing in the movie, mostly represented by one scene in which the title character’s boss has sent some assassins to get rid of his insubordinate henchman, Mr. No Legs. This guy is muscular and dextrous enough to be able to jump out of his wheelchair, spin around on his arms and kung fu the bad guys to death (well... badder guys) while making silly Jim Kellyesque noises with his mouth (believe it or not, Jim Kelly actually turns up in a blink and you’ll miss him long shot cameo in this film... which I think may even be a stolen shot for all I know). Slinker also has his trusty wheelchair which is a rolling arsenal of death, since it has shotguns built into the arm rests and a handy ninja throwing star hidden on it, which Mr. No Legs uses in this particular scene.

So yeah. Antagonist with no legs, who does unnecessarily noisy kung fu, has shotguns built into his wheelchair and uses a ninja throwing star. And as brilliant and as mind blowing as that sounds... this still manages to be a drab and terrible movie.

The film features another longtime 50s horror/sci-fi B movie legend, John Agar, as the two main protagonist detective’s police captain but, although there are a few character actors like him scattered around here and there, the majority of the acting is pretty useless. Now some of that might be the very... well let’s just say 'naive' scripting. There’s stuff here which the heroes and villains alike get up to which seems to have no 'real world' impact or follow through and it’s kinda like the whole cast of characters are living in some kind of mythical screen land where the only real rules of cause and effect are dictated by whatever the writers want to happen... as opposed to the natural course of what would actually happen.

The framing is not particularly good either and, though the editing is certainly competent, some of the transitions between scenes seem like they’re not really transitions at all. In fact, they look like weird blackouts in the middle of a scene where the production ran out of money to film the rest of those scenes or just forgot to send the second unit out to do pick-up shots. I’m not saying hand on heart that is what happened, I just don’t know. But there does seem to be a heavy atmosphere of unexpected curtailment hanging over the majority of the movie. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me.

The film ends with what amounts to a massively long car chase which, bafflingly, mostly doesn’t feature the two main protagonists or, indeed, Mr. No Legs... up until the very last few minutes when our 'heroes' kinda cameo in their own denouement. It’s pretty unspectacular, consists mostly of long or medium shots with the occasionally baffling 'in car' shot cut in randomly for good measure but... frankly I was just waiting for it to be over to get to whatever happens next. Which turns out to be the end credits, as it happens.

Overall, while the “what the heck” premise and promise of this film were too tempting for me to resist ever being able to see it, I would have to say that I found the film lifeless, naive and ultimately just very dull. I don’t feel I could recommend this to anyone except those who are as seduced by the idea of the central character and his weaponised wheelchair of mayhem as I was... and only then, not without a severe warning and world of apology.

Three The Hard Way

Hard Three Way


Three The Hard Way US 1974
Directed by Gordon Parks Jr.
Warner Brothers Region 1

Right, this is a film I’ve been meaning to see for a long time now because it’s got three classic heroes of 70s blaxploitation cinema all in one film... Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and the incomparable Jim Kelly. They are the Three... who are having to do things... The Hard Way... apparently.

Okay, so this one’s directed by Gordon Parks Jr, who also directed Superfly which, apart from the awesome score on it, I didn’t really dig all that much when I saw it. This movie is much more palatable to my visual taste buds but the score on this one by Richard Tufo, while still okay, is not a patch on Curtis Mayfield’s epic for the former movie. But it is still quite funky (when nobody actually sings over it) and it doesn’t really matter all that much because this one’s got...

Brown! Williamson! Kelly! Doing things the hard way. The three of them together. Doing things the hard way. Watch them doing it hard! All three of them. In... Three, The Hard Way!

Um... sorry, don’t know what came over me there.

Alright... the plot on this one is unbelievably non-politically correct. I’m almost afraid to even mention it in this review because it’s just so racist and if anyone tried to make a film with this plot device in today's climate, they would be handed their backsides by the media and public alike. However, I’m reviewing the movie here so I’ll just go ahead and say it...

A sleazy group of neo-nazi white boys have been kidnapping and experimenting on black people in order to perfect a new toxic chemical which will only kill black people. Their plan is to dump it in the city water supplies in three test areas and start “cleansing the nation”... of black people.

Seriously, I’m not making it up. That’s the premise!

The opening, pre-credits sequence shows a friend of Jim Brown escaping from the villains’ compound and, after the credits have rolled to an interminably questionable choice of opening title song, the wounded guy hooks up with Mr. Brown and enlists his help. Pretty soon after though, the group of “good ol’ white boys” finish their ex-prisoner off with some bullets and kidnap Jim’s girlfriend from the hospital in the process. Not good.

Soon Jim Brown has enlisted his friends Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly to help him tackle the problem head on. This seems to involve the following process.

Jim goes to see Fred Williamson who has been showing his romantic prowess in a previous scene. Jim and Fred get chased by evil guys and shot at and everybody has a big fight in which the group of white guys all get soundly trounced. Then they go off to see if they can get ahold of Jim Kelly, who has been beating up the police who are trying to frame him, with his ultra-fine, slow-motion kung-fu techniques and impressive array of what can only be described as “kung fu whoops” coming from his mouth. The three of them all get attacked by the villains and kill them all apart from one guy they capture. After a few more shenanigans of this nature, the three separately go to the three cities targeted by the “bad guys” and each stop the toxin from getting dumped in their water supplies. They then regroup and “hit” the compound together to kill all the bad guys and rescue Jim Brown’s gal.

Now you might think from this description that this movie is immensely entertaining... and you’d be kinda right actually. It’s nowhere near as slick or as enjoyable as, say, the Shaft trilogy or the first Cleopatra Jones movie, but it has got a certain vibe to it and it’s also got a raw gutsiness that you wouldn’t necessarily expect in some of the more commercially “clean” product of this genre of movie. For instance, there’s a brilliant sequence where Fred Williamson calls in three dominatrix friends to find out what their captured bad guy knows. After a while they come out all topless and sweating and send Fred and Jim in to pick up the pieces. The guy is so terrified of what’s been happening to him, even though there seem to be no marks on his body even, that he tells all... then dies of fear before the ladies can continue their perspirational work. These are some mean mothers and not anything like the more common images of dommes associated with the BDSM scene these days (and perhaps is worth something from the point of view of a historical document to those interested in such things). Even though there’s a lot of humour in this sequence, it also has a very dark undertone and it lends this movie a certain credibility or edge which some other films in this sub-genre lack.

It’s also competently shot and, while some of the action sequences may seem a little less heart pumping to modern audiences, there’s certainly enough enthusiasm for the running/jumping/fighting by all concerned. And, to be honest, I always find it fun how some of these 70s action movies pan out. There seems to be some vehicles in this one, for example, that just wanted to explode for no other apparent reason than they hit a small bump in the road or went up a curb. I reckon 70s cars must have been built to spontaneously combust if Hollywood movies of the time are anything to go by. I’d be really cautious about driving one myself... it seems like all you have to do with these things is lean on the bonnet and you’d suddenly see your car and body engulfed in flame. Not a prospect I’d relish.

Three The Hard Way isn’t exactly a top notch action movie... but it does have a lot of heart beating within it to inject a little soul into the proceedings and, like I said before... a lot of enthusiasm. The plot is absolutely outrageous and the music varies wildly from cool n’ funky to downright corny as hell (usually when somebody starts singing) but ultimately, if you’re a fan of this genre, then this is one you should probably add to your “to watch” list if you haven’t seen it already.

See it because it’s Brown! See it because it’s Wiliamson. See it because it’s Kelly! See it because they are three friends with a mission... doing it the hard way. Three... The Hard Way!

Spud Wiser?

Hot Potato 1976 US

Directed by

Oscar Williams

Warner Brothers

DVD Region 1

Ok... when I first sat down to watch Hot Potato I sat down thinking... this is going to be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. But you know what... it wasn’t. There are worse movies around than this mess of a movie... but this one is still pretty terrible, all the same.

Hot Potato is a sequel, of sorts, using the title character from Black Belt Jones. I wasn’t 100% sure of that at first because it seems to bear no relation to the previous film (to the point where Jim Kelly’s character is only referred to as Jones in this movie) and it makes absolutely no mention of the “previous adventure” in the main text of the film that I can see... but credit is given to the creators in a “based on a character created by” card which sites two of the original movie’s writers so it’s pretty much a sure thing.

Now I didn’t really like Black Belt Jones in all honesty (see my review here) and it didn’t really measure up to some of the other blaxploitation and kung-fu-sploitation movies I’ve seen... so it would be fair to say that Hot Potato isn’t a whole lot more dreadful than the first film... but it is certainly quite dreadful.

The plot involves Jones and some “colleagues” he picks up on the way, snatching back a kidnapped VIPs daughter from a group of fighty, chasey, bad people (you can tell I was really paying attention here by this point can’t you). There is a bit of an attempt at a twist with the heroes snatching a fake double of said daughter to throw them off the scent but, honestly, we really didn’t need this bit of fakery because there’s no real payoff or consequence to this... it all seems merely padding.

I’m guessing that this movie had a troubled production. Sound dubs are quite bad in some places. In other places, like the opening credit sequence, the soundtrack deliberately swamps the dialogue... presumably because the dialogue was so terrible and boring that they needed to distract you from it. It’s like some bizarre Altmanesque sound experiment gone wrong. There are shots in there with Jones and one of his buddies walking through hundreds of extras with lips moving and no sound coming out that I swear must be stolen shots. They probably weren’t dubbed back in because nobody could remember what was being said on the day.

This really is a bit of a train wreck. Just a string of fights with occasional really monotonous cuts back to the villain of the piece being quite boring and “you-have-failed-me” shouty with his henchmen! And the sensibilities of the movie seem to me to be like a film which has been put together in a rush because somebody in production really liked watching Terence Hill/Bud Spencer movies (that’s okay, they can be fun) and tried to tap into that without understanding anything about the character chemistry and how a fight should best be staged and edited. All of Jones mates act crazy and one of them, Rhino, is definitely supposed to be the Bud Spencer part of the equation. But with a little less charm.

Added to this is an unsatisfying score which is an absolute rip-off of the main theme from Kelley’s breakout movie Enter The Dragon, (augmented very occasionally by the base line of Monty Norman’s James Bond Theme). Seriously, I’m amazed that Lalo Schifrin didn’t sue the producers of this movie... it’s that close... but a bit hollow sounding.

I know this is a short blog again but there’s probably not much more I can say about this one. I think I’ll just add one more comment which should sum up nicely how bad this movie is. In 1978 there was a third film in the series made called... Black Belt Jones 2. Yep. Hot Potato is so bad that it seems they wanted people to forget that it was the “original” follow up to Black Belt Jones.

That just says it all about these three... the hard way.

Please fasten your Black Belts!

Black Belt Jones 1974 US

Directed by Robert Clouse

Warner Brothers DVD Region 1

Whoop! Whoop! Ptshh! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!

Kablang! Whoop! Whoop! Ohooooohoooho! Ptush!

And there you have my full review for Black Belt Jones if I were doing it as an onomatopoeic translation of how title star Jim Kelly might have reviewed the movie... or, you know, it could be my lame intro to try to hook you into reading the rest of this post. Who can tell for sure?

So, yeah, a blaxploitation classic I’ve been wanting to see for a while... Black Belt Jones doesn’t really quite make it for me compared to some of the other genre classics like the FIRST Cleopatra Jones movie, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Shaft etc. Which is a shame because I really like what I saw of Jim Kelly when he was facing off bad guys shoulder to shoulder with Bruce Lee and the legendary John Saxon in Enter the Dragon (anyone watching that movie for Bruce Lee has obviously been blinded to the Saxony-goodness embedded into every frame of celluloid ;-)

But I digress. Black Belt Jones is quite a simple and silly film - nothing wrong with that, I laughed quite a bit as I was watching. Just like in Enter the Dragon, Jim Kelly lets out those bizarre and highly comical “whoops” as he martial arts the bad guys to their early demise. I don’t know exactly why he does this... but it’s very entertaining. And the beautiful Gloria Hendry is on hand as “Sydney” when her father gets killed (played by Scatman Carruthers who is supposed to be a kung-fu legend in this but... well, you are missing out if you haven’t seen Scatman Carruther’s attempting kung-fu). She has bizarre kung-fu skills too. See her go to work on her enemies as a female powerhouse of martial arts mayhem. When she gets mean... she clocks the bad guys clean! ... uh, oh... I might just write most of the rest of the review with phrases like this!

This is what this ridiculous, terrible and strangely watchable movie has to offer any readers who wish to take the plunge in this celluloid frenzy of fist flared funk!

1. A fight scene in a train carriage where every bad guy gets thrown out of a different, shattering window. Im sorry? How many windows has an average train carriage got to smash? Especially when the fight goes on in only one end of the carriage. Eight windows? Ten?

2. A soundtrack that manages to be outrageously funny AND funky at the same time.

3. A main character who’s name really does seem to be “Black Belt”. At times he’s called on as “Belt” (as in, "Hey, Belt. Check this out!") or “BB” or... WHAT? Lucky this character wasn’t christened Bible Belt Jones or I’d be watching a movie about religious tomfoolery in the US!

4. Jim Kelly. He’s a lean, black, fighting machine. Watch him beat up people, often without even actually connecting with them due to bad camera angles. Honestly. Enter the Dragon was just so much better than this one. But I don't care because Jim Kelly is pretty watchable!

5. A really terrible, overlong, anti-climactic fight scene in a car wash as Black Belt Jones and Sydney take on all the bad guys in a big puddle of constant soap bubbles. Frankly, this would have made a lot more sense if there was at least one villain to fight who wasn’t an overweight blob who doesn’t look like he could take on Alfalfa out of The Little Rascals let alone slaughter-machine Jim Kelly.

6. The tagline on the cover... Enter JIM “Dragon” KELLY. HE CLOBBERS THE MOB AS BLACK BELT JONES. Yep... definitely a mob-clobbering movie. If Jim Kelly was blue-eyed Benjamin Grimm The Thing he’d shout out... “It’s Mob-Clobbering Time!” before blinding them with his orange afro!

7. A stupidly, drawn out, padding the movie, lets see Jim and Gloria court each other’s ass by chasing, frolicking and pounding the @*&% out of each other so they can get themselves in the mood to have heavily censored sex!

Ok. That’s probably all the good reasons I can think of for you to either watch or steer clear of this movie... depending on your personal taste. As for me... I’m now up for getting hold of a copy of 1978’s Black Belt Jones 2: The Tattoo Connection. Can anyone who’s read this far recommend that one to me?