Four Blaxploitation Films Off the Beaten Path

By this point, we're all familiar with "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" and "Superfly" and "Shaft,"...

“J.D.’s Revenge” (1976)
Directed by Arthur Marks

Male power fantasies dominate blaxploitation; “J.D.’s Revenge” is the unusual entry that actually examines and interrogates those fantasies. Superficially, the film is a blaxploitation/horror hybrid (think “The Exorcist” meets “Superfly”) with Glynn Turman playing Ike, a sensitive law student who takes part in a hypnotist’s nightclub act and finds himself haunted by the ghost of a brutal gangster named J.D. Walker (David McKnight). Initially a man so conservative he’d rather get a good night’s sleep than have sex with his girlfriend, Ike begins to lose control of his impulses and eventually disappears completely as J.D.’s ghost takes over his body.

The film sells the idea that someone really could be possessed by a supernatural hood (and that the police might actually believe them when they use that as an alibi), but leaves enough room to read Ike’s transformation as a disturbing tale of repressed male aggression run amok. When Ike’s initially put into his personality-altering trance, the hypnotist explains that he won’t be able to do anything under hypnosis that he’d be morally opposed to when he was conscious. A few scenes later, he’s stabbing people with a straight razor as “J.D.”

Set in New Orleans, the film’s opening scenes revel in the easily accessible vices of the Crescent City; Ike and his friends hop from one bar to the next and think nothing of taking in a floorshow at a strip club, a sharp contrast with later sequences where Ike-as-”J.D.” roughs up his girl during sex and suffers harrowingly violent hallucinations. Most of the thematic load is carried by Turman, who does a remarkable job delineating Ike’s Jekyll-and-Hyde personas. Still, he’s nearly upstaged by Louis Gossett Jr. as Elija Bliss, the closest thing this movie has to a Father Merrin figure. His role as a hustler-turned-bombastic-reverend, with ties to J.D.’s murder, paints a rather cynical picture of religion: Bliss’ church is just another moneymaking scheme until Gossett is met face-to-face with an honest-to-goodness ghost.

The most significant knock against the film is an ending that lets Ike off the hook and lets the air out of many of the movie’s more troubling implications. “J.D.’s Revenge” teaches us that it is impossible to erase the dark deeds of the past; that the film essentially does exactly that for Ike feels like a copout in an otherwise uncompromising vision.

“Brotherhood of Death” (1976)
Directed by Bill Berry

It’s easy to dismiss a movie like “Brotherhood of Death,” with that particular title and that tagline (“When these brothers stick it to you…it’s fatal!”) as a gory grindhouse trifle, until you actually watch it and discover there’s a bit more going on here. I like how Bill Berry’s film puts political and physical action on nearly equal footing: before the heroes take their fight to the Ku Klux Klan, they take it to the voting booth, starting a registration drive that gets the rednecks who run the county quaking in their boots. The action scenes are more than adequate, but the extra care put into the character work is especially impressive, especially given that one of the three leads, Roy Jefferson, was a former member of the Washington Redskins.

Jefferson and his co-stars Le Tari and Haskell Anderson play longtime friends who escape the institutional racism of their hometown for the hell of Vietnam. The jungles of the ‘Nam look an awful lot like the backwoods of Carolina — obviously because the film didn’t have the budget to shoot anywhere else — but who cares? If anything, it only emphasizes the similarities between the two places, and underlines the fact that they’re no safer in the States than in Southeast Asia. When the trio return home after their tour of duty, trained in guerilla warfare, they’re less willing to put up with the Klan’s nonsense, but they’re also sensible enough to at least try to find a legal recourse through the system before resorting to their personal stash of landmines and assault rifles. When the vets turn the tables on the KKK, they kidnap their leaders and deliver a withering deflation of the group’s mystique. They laugh, “Did you really believe that you could put on evil spirit costumes and call yourselves dragons and burn crosses and all of us would shake in our shoes afraid to fight your white supremacy?” Berry puts in enough violence to get the film over with genre fans, but his approach is more measured than it has any right to be. Messing with these brothers might be fatal, but it’s certainly not dumb.

[Additional photos: "Truck Turner," American International Pictures, 1974; "Brotherhood of Death," Downtown Distribution Co., 1976]

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