Tag Archives: Blaxploitation

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Sheba Baby

Sheba Baby
Sheba Baby

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 8 February 2016

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: William Girdler

Writers: William Girdler, David Sheldon

Cast: Pam Grier, Austin Stoker, D’Urville Martin

USA 1975

90 mins

Pam Grier’s third outing as a tough 70s Blaxploitation action lady is fun although not as exhilarating as Coffy and Foxy Brown.

After the breakout success of Coffy and Foxy Brown, Pam Grier had become hot property in mid-1970s Hollywood, with studios keen to snap up the head-turning Blaxploitation star. She was, after all, the first African-American woman to become a bona fide leading lady – and she kicked serious butt.

Sensing they might lose her, American Independent Pictures (AIP) ensured she retained lead billing status, with this third round of low-budget action pandering to some extent to her request for less sleaze and more story. As a result, it lacks the gritty charm of those previous outings, although Grier still holds her own with ease.

The story, such as it is, pitches Grier as a private investigator out to beat a local crime pin (D’Urville Martin) who is plotting to do in her dad. The action is set in the director’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Helped by her father’s business partner (Austin Stoker), who has a soft eye for her, Sheba’s pursuit of justice ensures car smashes and explosions galore, with some neat gun play between the sexes along the way. It is as one would expect: fast, frothy and funky (Monk Higgins’s score works well).

Although it received mixed reviews upon its original release in 1975, Sheba, Baby marked the peak of Grier’s screen career, prior to her return in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown more than 20 years later. Blaxploitation became increasingly divisive among the black community with its stereotypes and motifs, before being hijacked by the studios in the years that followed, with stories perpetuating sexual violence and slavery (Mandingo and Drum) signaling the death knell for the genre.

Grier, who began her career as a receptionist at AIP, has endured as the popular face of Blaxploitation over the years. Even this relatively lightweight vehicle shows the star in her element, delivering a series of no-nonsense responses to thugs that dare cross her path. It’s a shame that no one has managed to match her on screen in the decades that followed. Even more than that, it’s depressing and familiar to consider that her starring roles all but dried up after her brief flurry of hits – and that her leading lady status never quite materialised as it should have.

Still, as a companion piece to Coffy and Foxy Brown, it’s worth a spin. Grier is always great value and, as Tarantino knows only too well, a hugely underrated talent. This anniversary set comes with a high definition print of the film, plus a commentary and interview with screenwriter-producer David Sheldon, and featurettes on Grier and the film from critics and enthusiasts.

Ed Gibbs

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Coffy

Coffy
Coffy

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 20 April 2015

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Jack Hill

Writer: Jack Hill

Cast: Pam Grier, Booker Bradshaw, Robert DoQui

USA 1973

91 mins

**** out of *****

‘I killed them all,’ says the beautiful, coffee-with-cream-coloured beauty sitting on a comfy couch, cradling a mega-pump-action shotgun. ‘I don’t know how I did it. It seems like I’m in a dream and I’m still in this dream.’

Coffy (Pam Grier) is a lean, mean, killing machine with a soul that’s all woman. By day, she’s a caring, highly skilled inner-city nurse, but by night, she transforms into a show-no-mercy vigilante who takes on the underworld, pusher by pusher, pimp by pimp and gangster by gangster. Vengeance drives her, and with every explosive killing she thinks of her teenage sister, lying in a vegetative state in a rest home, the child’s mind and body decimated by drugs, forced sex and all manner of exploitation at the grubby paws of vile men from the lowest orders of their gender.

When her handsome, corrupt boyfriend, an African-American politician, seduces her with his words of hard truth tempered with racial caring (‘Our people want dope to make themselves feel better, but we’re gonna take that money and put it back in the hands of our people.’) and tenderness laced with a let-Daddy-put-it-all-right-again (‘All ya have to know, baby, is that I am your Man and I’m gonna take care of you.’), her gelato-smooth dream becomes not unlike that of fairy tale princesses and Prince Charmings. But when the silly dream of Barbie Doll acquiescence is shattered by the real truth, the dream reverts to the nightmare it’s always been. It’s the suffering necessary to put things right in the world.

Such is the blood-soaked reverie that is Jack Hill’s ground-breaking 1973 action picture Coffy, which is so thrilling, politically charged and exquisitely crafted one hesitates to slap the Blaxploitation monicker upon it to simply categorize the picture with a convenient label. There’s nothing ‘convenient’ about Hill’s picture. His smart, nasty screenplay betrays all expectations whilst kneading in the tropes of the genre when needed, but doing so in a manner that twists the necessary machinations like a pretzel-maker gone mad.

The legendary Pam Grier was already a fixture in the world of Blaxploitation when she played the title role, but this is the film that put her on the map to drive-in movie superstardom and into the hearts and minds of eager, slavering 13-year-old boys (like me, when I first saw it) of all ages (as I have been and am now over 40 years later and with well over 20 viewings of this film behind me).

And never mind just the lads, Grier was a hero to women all over the world. Not only was she a classic screen beauty, but her lithe form was inextricably linked to her prowess as an actress. Nobody moved on screen like Grier; she embodied her character here (and subsequent roles) with the kind of skill that most actresses can only dream about. In Coffy she represented a heroic figure to women of all ages and races because she brought grace, intelligence and humanity to her ass-kicking. Grier embodied the ultimate feminist femme fatales she played with Dirty Harry cool and Veronica Lake sex appeal, all with the soul of Cicely Tyson. There’s never been anyone like her, and her performance in Coffy is perfectly matched to the great Jack Hill’s inspired writing and stunning directorial aplomb.

Watching the film again on the Arrow Blu-Ray, so soon after suffering through the loathsomely directed contemporary smash hit Furious 7, I was again reminded how genuinely talented filmmakers like Jack Hill were. God knows, Quentin Tarantino recognizes this, but we’re stuck in a horrible rut of critics, studios and ADHD-afflicted audiences responding positively to herky-jerky movies that have no sense of spatial geography because they employ a jumble of edits driven, not by story or even character-related emotion, but by sound – screeches, thuds and overwrought scores. Coffy has one terrific action set-piece after another that puts most current pictures to shame. (It’s also got the cool musical styling of soul-funk-jazz composer Roy Ayers working with the film’s visuals instead of noisily, annoyingly driving them.)

There’s an astonishing chase scene involving Pam Grier on foot as corrupt cops in their black and white cruisers pursue her on, across and through a crazy-ass Los Angeles freeway and eventually into a wide-open rail-line storage field, which is so edge-of-the-seat thrilling because Hill uses superbly composed wide master shots, spare mediums and close-ups only when necessary. We see real choreography and real danger. There isn’t a single frame of Furious 7 and most other modern pictures of its ilk that can match the sheer virtuosity of Jack Hill’s meagerly budgeted Coffy.

It’s not a franchise, it’s a film.

Greg Klymkiw

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Ganja & Hess

Ganja and Hess
Ganja & Hess

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 26 January 2015

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Bill Gunn

Writer: Bill Gunn

Cast: Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Bill Gunn

USA 1973

123 mins

Ganja & Hess was conceived as a black vampire movie: producers Jack Jordan and Quentin Kelly wanted to capitalise on the recent success of Blacula (1972) and other ‘blaxploitation’ films Hollywood had started making to appeal to African-American audiences. Playwright and novelist Bill Gunn readily accepted the producers’ offer of $350,000 to make his first feature film, but was determined to create something far more ambitious than a genre film. He decided to use vampirism as a metaphor to explore the idea of addiction in all its forms.

Ganja & Hess is utterly original, but if I had to compare it to another film, it would be Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, which was released the following year: both films are set in a large house where statuesque actors and actresses engage in dreamlike scenarios where time telescopes. More broadly, in its uncompromising creativity Ganja & Hess reminds me of the supremely unusual films, past and present, screened in Paris’s Latin Quarter: films that are experienced first and understood only later (if ever). Films where the only thing certain is that you’ve never seen anything quite like them. Films so fresh and innovative that you feel anything could happen. Films that restore your youthful impression of time and space opening up before you with unexpected possibility.

Ganja & Hess is worlds away from the cool swagger and forthright action of a film like Shaft. Professor Hess Green is an academic who surrounds himself with books and art, rides in an elegant chauffeured car and speaks in French with his son. As the film’s producer and editor point out in the DVD’s extensive extra material, this was revolutionary, as audiences had never before seen a film centred on a cultivated African-American character. Actor Duane Jones was particularly well suited to the role: although he is best known as the star of Night of the Living Dead (1968), he also worked as a college professor. The director himself appears as George Meda, the assistant who infects the professor with vampirism. Marlene Clark plays Meda’s wife, Ganja, who comes looking for her missing husband and quickly develops a relationship with the professor.

Ganja & Hess appropriates the vampire myth into a specifically African-American context through richly layered cultural references that include ancient legend, art, song, and costume. The film is bookended by documentary-style footage of an African-American evangelical church, seen as a place of passion and togetherness as well as a source of comfort and salvation.

The film was released in its original version for barely a week. It was this version that won Best Film at Critics’ Week in Cannes but was reviled by critics at home. The producers accordingly hired a different editor to recut it as a sexploitation film, which screened at drive-ins under various titles including Blood Couple, Double Possession and Black Evil. The director, one of the producers and the original editor were so disgusted that they had their names removed from the film. This new home entertainment release finally gives audiences another chance to see this ambitious and innovative film as its creators originally intended.

Alison Frank