The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Blaxploitation refers to a genre of American films that emerged in the early 1970s featuring Black actors. This was a period when the Civil Rights movement had started to kick in in the US and the African-American population were achieving a relative degree of social equality. It was an era when cinema started to celebrate the rise of the African-American as their own social entity and the first time the screen had seen Black actors in lead roles.
The first Blaxploitation film was Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). The Blaxploitation film was popularised by Shaft (1971), which celebrated the Black man as an incredibly virile and cool hero, and produced a great many imitators. The majority of Blaxploitation films were Action Films, some Martial Arts. The genre produced stars out of names like Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson.
It was not long after this that the Blaxploitation fad begun to turn to genre material beginning with Blacula (1972). This led to a small spate of films revisiting horror classics but recast with Black actors – Blackenstein (1973), Dr Black and Mr Hyde (1976) and other treatments like Abby (1974), a Black version of The Exorcist (1973). When these died up, we began to see some imaginative treatments of other themes like vampires and voodoo.
The Blaxploitation fad died away by the late 1970s although gained a renewed popularity with Quentin Tarantino’s enthusiasm for the genre in the late 1990s, a period that saw several homages and parodies, particularly when it comes to the over-the-top fashions and hairstyles that the genre popularised.
Musical modernisation of The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York City with an All-Black cast. Despite a clear budget arrayed, the film lumbers and never much comes to life
From Melvin Van Peebles who made the first Blaxploitation film, a satire in which a white man wakes up to find he has turned black. This takes a savage bite out of race relations but ends up without teeth in being distracted by Godfrey Cambridge’s raucous loudmouth performance
Dismissed at the time as a copy of Young Frankenstein even though it had been made earlier, this is a none too funny vampire comedy featuring David Niven as Dracula
Conceived in the aftermath of the Austin Powers films, this is a rather funny parody of the Blaxploitation film from Spike Lee’s cousin Malcolm D. Lee
Ray Milland is a dying white racist millionaire who has hit head transplanted onto the shoulders of a Black man. A film that sees the absurdities of its premise and plants tongue in cheek.
A wonderfully paranoid film where drug dealer John Boyega discovers illicit mind control experiments are being conducted on a ghetto neighbourhood and that he is one in a series of clones
The eighth James Bond film and Roger Moore’s debut in the role. This is one of the most variant Bond films also incorporating Blaxploitation and voodoo elements
A Blaxploitation film where decent law student Glynn Turman is possessed by the spirit of J.D., a petty hood who was shot in the 1940s and now sets out to take revenge
Modestly effective Blaxploitation take on House on Haunted Hill that concerns voodoo rites being conducted in a big old Southern mansion
Fascinating Blaxploitation vampire film. In contrast to the more popular and cheesier Blacula, this is arty, oblique, almost an experimental film that manages to offer a unique take on the vampire film
Harrowing and difficult to watch variation on The Last House on the Left where a trio of escaped convicts brutalise a decent black family in a series of humiliations
After the Blaxploitation fad gave us Blacula and Blackenstein, there came this wild variation on the Jekyll/Hyde story where a good African-American doctor takes a potion and turns into a rampaging white monster
Part of an attempt to revive the Blaxploitation film, a gospel horror film of sorts in which a young African-American divinity student fights the demon Temptation
One of the film from legendary bad movie maker Al Adamson. While it has some SF elements, this is mostly an action film where Adamson has set out to mine the burgeoning Blaxploitation and kung fu genres of the day
Blaxploitation homage designed as a vehicle for Snoop Dogg. Essentially a version of A Nightmare on Elm Street with Snoop as a pimp come back to haunt those who killed him
A hit among the Blaxploitation fad of the 1970s, this has the novelty of casting a vampire film with African-American actor William Marshall. A whole series of Blaxploitation takes on horror themes followed.
Blacula was a big Blaxploitation hit and was quickly followed by this Blaxploitation take on the Frankenstein film. While others that followed did great things, this only seems a quickie designed to jump aboard the fad
Amicus film that manages the novel idea of combining a werewolf with an an Agatha Christie styled whodunnit as people try to guess which among the guests gathered at a mansion is a werewolf
Third of the Austin Powers films and the point where the amusements of the other films topples over into a pandering indulgence to Mike Myers’ mugging, which is allowed to overtake the whole show
A Blaxploitation copy of The Exorcist – so blatant that it was sued for copyright infringement. Worth seeing for its entertaining absurdities including the climactic exorcism held on a disco dancefloor