Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984), by Chester Novell Turner

Black Devil Doll from Hell opens with this proclamation: "We all have our personal horror stories to tell. May yours never be as devastating as Miss Helen Black's." I'm glad that director Chester Novell Turner decided to include this expression of sentiment. Because now, I dread the day where I find an antique shop that sells a ventriloquist doll which will not only molest me, but call me a bitch over and over again, until I am driven mad. Verily, there is no worse fate on this Earth, save for perhaps enduring an existence without Black Devil Doll from Hell.

Helen Black is an ultra-Christian in a world of sin. Her friends call her up to brag about their gangbangs, and she runs into thieves selling stolen goods out of their car trunks on her walk back from church. She's sanctimonious and has a rather large stick up her ass, but many of her peers are just as bad. It's pretty great that her friends think they can talk about sex with her when she's told them time and time again about her beliefs on such things. Anyway, Helen eventually ends up at an antique shop where she is fascinated by a ventriloquist puppet. The store owner tells her it once belonged to an East Indian sorcerer, and it always finds its way back to the shop--she's sold it four times but it's returned one way or another every time. Helen decides to try her luck, bringing the doll home with her. Soon the doll comes to life and introduces her to the world of rape, consensual sex, and being called "bitch" every five seconds, all at the same time. These scenes are virtually indescribable because it's a woman being fucked by a puppet. When she wakes up she finds the puppet missing, and tries to replace him with flesh-and-blood men. This isn't the same, though, and she eventually remembers that the puppet always returns to the store. But you only get one try at puppet dick, because when she re-purchases the doll and tries to make it fuck her, its eyes light up and she dies from what appears to be brain hemorrhage. Fin.

This movie is upsetting on basically every level. Not only is about puppet-rape and its transformation into puppet-lust, presented as an apparent consequence for religious devotion, but aesthetically and directorially it is also a sensory mess. Scenes end too late, music comes in too earlier. The stylishly awful Casio just sort of barges in with no cares about appropriateness or dialogue mixing. For example, when the antique store owner is giving Helen the doll's backstory, a high-pitched squeal immediately breaks in and starts muting the dialogue through pure aural force. Characters will start talking but a lack of union between the cuts and cues fill their lines with unnatural pauses. And, if you want to see the "ultimate VHS movie" that's still visible through its sea of fuzz, look no further. This is SOV as fuck, and it's a miracle.

Then of course there is the script. Helen puts nylons on the Black Devil Doll from Hell, saying, "These will make you just a shade darker...you'll look more real." She follows this up with, "These are the only eyes to ever see me NEKKID...until we're married." So, is she gonna marry the doll then? When the doll pops out to knock Helen unconscious, not only is he played by a child, but the soundtrack appears to consist of velociraptor noises taken from a nine-year time-portal opening up to a showing of Jurassic Park. It just gets better and better.

The rape scene is simultaneously disturbing and laughable. We get lines like "Now that you have smelled the foulness of my breath, you can know the sweetness of my tongue" and "Heeeeeere's Johnny!" The foul breath in question is represented by filling the dummy's mouth with dry ice. The actors also go all-out on making sex sounds, so it does sound like porn if you look away. But when you look back, it's a two-and-a-half foot tall puppet fucking a human woman. There is no preparation for this.

Somehow, the whole affair does manage to be a little boring at times, due to a large amount of padding, but this simple tale contains enough vomitous horror for everyone and anyone who can dare its cruel mysteries. Just be ready to get shocked to your soul.

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The Primal Essence: The Mudman's Top Ten New Views of 2017

2017 saw a lot of growth for the A-List! I found a comfortable schedule wherein I could squeeze in three reviews a week, and I intend to hang onto that schedule for as long as I can. I opened a Patreon, which has been an exciting experience so far. I posted a bad movie sci-fi novella. I was able to find nine weird books to talk about--not as many as I'd hoped, but that's what next year is for. It was a marvelous time and I can't tell you how glad I was to have this site to go back to whenever the real world came down too hard on me. The fact that so many of you kept showing up week after week made it all the better. I may curate its entries, but it's really you guys who build my A-List...you're all on my A-List of People. You are the finest souls I know.

The movies on this list are the cream of the crop. They tore my heart from my chest and shook up my soul. I hope you track them down if you haven't already because they will reshape your life for the better. Well, actually, it's for the worse. But in a good way. Capiche?

FROM BEST TO BESTEST:

#10 - I AM HERE...NOW, by Neil Breen

It is only out of a stubborn respect for the later entries of this list that Mr. Breen ended up at the number ten spot...otherwise this one would be much higher. I Am Here...Now was the best possible introduction to Breen I could(n't)'ve hoped for. I've seen some pretty bizarre Ancient Alien stories over the years, but this one takes the cake--Breen is a sign that Weird Film is far from dead, even as the Intentional Bad Movies try to take their cut from the legacy spawned by the people whom Breen now succeeds. May self-awareness never touch you, Neil, ol' buddy. I'm so glad I have the rest of your filmography to discover.

#9 - THE PHANTOM COWBOY, by Robert J. Horner / SMOKING GUNS, by Alan James

A dirty stinkin' tie! I knew I had to have one B-Western on here and no matter how much boiling down I did I couldn't pick one of these over the other. Smoking Guns is definitely the "better" movie, but the sheer shittiness of The Phantom Cowboy makes it feel truly alien. I'm starting to doubt I'll find Westerns weirder than these two, but if these are the best there are I'm in good company. I've definitely raised a lot of eyebrows in my time talking about the movies I watch with the people I know in Real Life. They've never been raised higher than when I tried to describe these two.

#8 - DRUMS O' VOODOO, by Arthur Hoerl

'Cause the drums make me happy...drums make me happy...my feelings on the so-called "race pictures" have shifted somewhat since I wrote this review due to some things I've learned about them (i.e. creative control was not in the hands of the actual black performers as much as I thought), but there's no taking away the talent from Drums O' Voodoo's cast. Aunt Hagar is still one of my favorite movie characters of all time, and to my dying day I won't forget the time she fucking sassed off Jesus. At this point, I feel I've seen every voodoo movies there is, but there's something deeply special about this one. I'm (ideally) getting a new copy soon, which may be from a different print...I may have to write something up if it turns out the lost footage is in this version.

#7 - JUNGLE TRAP, by James Bryan

I don't like getting hyped for movies because it's so easy for those sorts of hopes to get dashed. But not when James Bryan and Renee Harmon are at the helm. My heart nearly exploded when I learned this was a thing and it was a tough sweat waiting for it to come out. But it was worth it. Farewell to a pair of great careers...you guys made my life, one last time. Oh, how I wish you still had one left in you.

#6 - SWEET TRASH, by John Hayes

Now we're slipping into the New Weird. For me, that is. I spent so much of my life thinking I'd seen all the greats, but then this year came along and I started to see some trippy fucking shit. Sweet Trash is apparently not overly beloved even among trashsters, which is saddening. This movie dips into territory both grim and hilarious, often without warning, in the best of ways. As far as boggy-surreal nightmares go, this one just barely beat out Disconnected and Euridice BA 2037, which would make a great triple feature with this.

#5 - NIGHTMARE ALLEY, by Edmund Goulding

Gotta have at least one legitimately good movie on here. I guess this Ty Power guy is hot stuff, huh? Well, even if I had known that at the time, I would've been swept off my feet by this movie. A clammy, greasy, disconcerting expose of circus life, this one fits in perfectly with some of my other favorites from this year like The Unknown and The Amazing Mr. X, but this one is the best of all of them. I've been watching a lot of Hollywood dramas from the '40s now in the wake of sitting down for this three times in a row. I hope they won't make me sick.

#4 - BLOODY WEDNESDAY, by Mark G. Gilhuis

When I was writing the list I kept putting this on here for some reason. I'd take it off, asking myself, "Wha...really?" Then I would rewatch it and remember everything. For a while I would just quote that goddamn teddy bear, voice and everything, and sometimes people would hear me and worry about my health. Simultaneously the most depressing and hilarious movie about mental illness I've seen, Bloody Wednesday is so unsure of what the heck it's supposed to be that it becomes a psychedelic trance. I've found for myself a new classic of the slasher (?) genre, which isn't an easy feat these days.

#3 - INFRASEXUM, by Carlos Tobalina

Yes, I like this one more than Flesh and Bullets, because I'm a sucker. It's almost unbelievable to me that this was Tobalina's debut. This is a ballsy film to make under any circumstances, and yet porn is a weird thing, and thus he built a whole career out of this. I wasn't expecting to get a Pseudo-Philosophical Voiceover-Journal Inner-Quest Movie that also had a disembowelment scene, but at this point, I should know better. Art and trash go well together and this is a great example of how they pulled that off in the late '60s.

#2 - GRETTA, by John Carr

No explanation. It's not even based off the book--it just exists. It's like 35 movies got stuck in a blender and the director drank the result, and the camera implanted in his brain recorded everything he saw afterward. Or, alternatively, it was originally an 8-hour mega-epic like von Stroheim's Greed and they cut out too many reels. Why should we care about this occasionally-creepy romance when there are killer beetles...and vice versa? Better yet, it has a "sequel." If you count movies that recut other movies to make them even more confusing as "sequels," that is.

#1 - THE TELEPHONE BOOK, by Nelson Lyon

The best. The Holy Grail. This is why I got into reviewing movies. I laughed, I screamed. I could go on forever but The Telephone Book is really good, okay? Every new scene brought fresh surprises that I could never have expected--which is really what cinematic media is meant to be about. For a movie about sex, it felt like sex...it kept building, and building, and building, and then there was that ending and there was such joy. A vulgar, mind-boggling cartoon brought to life, I'll never see anything like it again; but then, I was lucky enough to see it in the first place. 

AND THE BOOK OF THE YEAR IS... *DRUMROLL PLEASE*
...
...
...

THE UNHOLY THREE, by Tod Robbins

Man, I sure read a lot of bullshit this year. How could the Book of the Year be anything but this when the competition was Space Jason and voodoo sharks? The Unholy Three is a weirdly kinetic pulp pseudo-masterpiece, whose presence on this list means I can live with myself for not including The Unknown. Lon Chaney is a powerful figure even when he's not directly involved; and besides all that Tod Robbins is an accomplished enough writer to keep me hooked. Next year I'm gonna grab a copy of Robbins' "Spurs" to take a look back at the origin of Freaks, and this book will get a mention, as I've said, when I get to touching on Todd Browning's The Devil-Doll. Robbins also wrote a book called Mysterious Mr. Martin, which looks like a delight. More to follow!

So that's 2017! See you next year! I loved all the time we spend together and I can't wait to start again soon. In the meantime, you can check out the $1 tier on my Patreon to hear some of my Movie Thoughts. Otherwise...keeping dreaming, true believers!

Disco Godfather (1979), by J. Robert Wagoner

PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON IT!! Rudy Ray Moore rocked the blaxploitation world in 1974 with the admittedly-flawed classic Dolemite. Dolemite, for those unaware, is about the titular criminal Dolemite, played by Moore, going after the bunch of no-business born-insecure rat-soup-eating motherfuckers who sent him to prison, led by Willie Green, the Baddest Motherfucker the World Has Ever Seen. While definitely not the first '70s blaxploitation movie, Dolemite is certainly the most recognizable, containing and creating many of the over-the-top camp tropes that would definitely the subgenre. Comedian Moore would go on to make Dolemite his stage persona and play permutations of the character over the course of several other blaxploitation films, including Dolemite's sequel The Human Tornado. Now I have seen both Dolemite films, and points to those who can guess what the third Moore flick I've watched is. And points to those who can deduce which of them is my favorite. Ding-ding-ding!

Disco Godfather tells the tale of Tucker Williams, aka the Disco Godfather, a former cop who now runs the local disco joint--for indeed, Moore's character is a true good guy in this one, being more a Godfather to the community, and not in any sort of ironic sense. The opening few minutes are an excuse for Rudy Ray Moore to show up in his extremely '70s sequined vest, and make goofy faces at the camera while wiggling his hips like a disco Elvis. It's pretty incredible. Anyway, Williams' nephew Bucky is getting himself caught up with some gangsters in the employ of Stinger Ray, the local PCP salesman. Bucky has a prosperous academic and athletic career ahead of him, but he's also quite fond of the dissociative high of phencyclidine. Inevitably his trip goes sour and he begins hallucinating the patrons of the disco club as zombies, hags, and skeletons, in one of the most amazing cinematic sequences ever. Seeing the effects of PCP in a personal way haunts Williams, and naturally, being a Rudy Ray Moore character and thus a hard-up motherfucker, he's going to take on this so-called "wack" with the skills he's picked up as a cop and a community organizer. Much of the movie features the Godfather putting together his "Attack the Wack" campaign, and before long you'll have heard character say "Attack the Wack" even more than you'll hear Moore's screech "Put your weight on it! Put your weight on it!" at his disco guests. All of this is intermixed with increasingly hallucinatory disco sequences, all leading to the best ending I've seen in a film this year.

Where to begin? Disco Godfather is a movie which enters the outrageous realm of self-parody while also sidestepping some of the vices that made Dolemite not so fun a ride for me. Dolemite is a movie that's famous because of its anarchy. It plays by no rules, including the rules of cinematic narrative. That's why when I first watched it I panicked when I realized the movie was done and I hadn't paid attention in over thirty minutes. Disco Godfather tries to be funny often enough to call it a comedy, and in that sense becomes chaotic, but what contains the movie as a whole is the fact that it never becomes any more outrageous than disco actually was. It is, if the lengthy dance sequences are any indication, some kind of disco porn. You're meant to bring a date to it, snort some coke over the end credits, and then go down to the club. Or something to that effect. I don't know what Rudy Ray Moore would want from us, but he'd want us to have fun.

And have fun we do. In a lot of ways, everything about this movie is pure camp. This is one of Moore's campiest roles, perhaps even campier than Dolemite, if nothing else because he's so absurdly gentlemanly. He's something sort of like how I'd imagine the Third Doctor if Doctor Who was an American show...brusque, curt, hard on the things he hates, but doing what he does out of heart and caring. The Attack the Wack campaign is a hilariously cheesy After School Special affair, sounding more like open warfare on masturbation than any sort of battle against drugs. I made a coke joke earlier, but in all seriousness: it is weird to think about an anti-drug campaign forming in a disco, of all places. Dance clubs attract young people which means there are bound to be many social activists in the club scene, so that's somewhat realistic to my mind at least, but a lot of the disco-goers of the '70s from what I know, at least the white ones, would probably have a lot of sympathy for someone who likes going all Night of the Chainsaw before hitting the floor. That's not to say that everyone who dug disco when it was alive slunk off to the bathrooms to shoot up (after all, drug problems were still yet to worsen in the club scenes as far as the 20th Century was concerned), but there's almost no time spent at all on the clientele's reaction to Williams' campaign outside of their appreciation and support. That gives the movie a decidedly optimistic slant, however, and I can totally dig that. Dolemite left us with harrowing images of heroin abuse; Disco Godfather shows us some hilarious exploitation psychedelia, thus generally confining its affair with drugs to the goofy side of whatever spectra govern the shape of drug films. Even the ending has a way out, as hopeless as it seems at first.

PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON IT!!! Disco Godfather is a liberating experience, an experiment in mood, humor, and sound. If you like your movies funky this will probably hit every spot you've got to hit. See it at once.

Drums O' Voodoo (1934), by Arthur Hoerl

Let me start at the beginning.

I don't know why I became obsessed with Drums O' Voodoo (alias Louisiana alias She Devil). It surely must have cropped up in my research when I commenced this long '30s/'40s horror kick I've been on lately, but I have no idea how that's possible, given that this is one of the least-written about titles I've ever come across, which, trust me, is saying something at this point. There's my answer, I think: when I find rare movies with interesting details about them, which no one else has seen or reviewed in a generation or three, I want to track it down. The title already had me; its status as a '30s race film perpetuated things. (A desire to watch an all-black horror movie from the early days of film while tracking down a copy of Drums O' Voodoo spurred my watching of Son of Ingagi.) Slowly, I learned more and more about it, including that: 1) it was based off of a stage play by J. Augustus Smith, who also acts in the film; 2) after one week, that play was either pulled for censorship reasons or booed offstage, not sure which; 3) the director of the film was the writer of Reefer Madness; 4) this is considered to be the first all-black horror film.

That last bit, though! How am I only the--to the best of my knowledge--second critic to write about this movie on the Internet? I really can't find anything to contradict the idea that Drums O' Voodoo is the first black horror movie, even if its horror elements are relatively toned down...from what I know, if there was any predecessor, its identity is lost to history. And I say that with the knowledge that many of the movies made by black people, or even involving black people, are similarly lost to time. The best alternative to Drums being the first that I could find is this: in 1924 the black auteur Oscar Micheaux made A Son of Satan, about a man forced by a bet to spend the night in a haunted mansion, a la Ghosts of Hanley House. This however was apparently more of a crime movie, with long sequences of domestic violence and nightclub degeneracy. It may have been a remake or rerelease of a 1922 film called The Ghost of Tolson's Manor, which definitely sounds like a horror film, but about which even less is known. Both films are lost and contemporary reviews don't specify if they feature real supernatural elements. Whatever the case, I am simply glad that Drums O' Voodoo is not among the roll call of Movies Lost. Indeed, a lot of sources will even say that this movie doesn't exist anymore, but it most assuredly does! Even with some lost films, where there's a will, there's a way...especially if "way" means "unlisted VHS tape." So here we are!

Myrtle and Ebenezer want to get married, but the whole world's against them. You see, a sleazy mobster type named Tom Catt--yes, really--rolls into a small Louisiana town and opens up a juke joint which as his base of criminal operations. He quickly fixes his eye on Myrtle and intends to make into one of his girls whether she likes it or not. Meanwhile, Ebenezer's grandmother Aunt Hagar (Laura Bowman, who played Dr. Jackson in Son of Ingagi) is a voodoo priestess, who warns the couple that Myrtle's mother had a curse on her that kills the bearer when they have children; hence why her mother died bringing Myrtle into this world. This curse is hereditary and so Myrtle's marriage to Ebenezer would be her death sentence. Myrtle's uncle Amos Berry, the local minister, wants to keep his niece safe from Tom Catt, but is unable to do so because Catt has some good ol' blackmail to hang over him--years ago, Amos spent four years on a chain-gang for murder. In spite of this, Father Berry is willing to go to any distance to get Catt out of his town, and that includes joining forces with Aunt Hagar and her voodoo cult.

It is the last sentence of that synopsis which provides the most intriguing detail about the plot of Drums O' Voodoo: voodoo is presented almost entirely as a positive force. A mysterious and ancient force, with secrets that are unknown and perhaps unknowable to the generally public, but a positive one all the same. Aunt Hagar, and, it seems, her cult, are an accepted part of the community, and she's free to come and go from the church to meet with Father Berry whenever she likes. And that's the thing about it, too: this is a movie where the clergyman protagonist is in league with a voodoo sorceress! But then you think about Sugar Hill, which also portrayed voodoo in a positive light (albeit one of revenge), and it makes sense. To people who practice voodoo, and people who know people who practice voodoo, or live in places with strong relationships with voodoo like Haiti or New Orleans, voodoo is certainly the religion of evil the movies usually make it out to be. Additionally, a lot of branches of voodoo have incorporated Christian beliefs, so relationships between Christian and voodoo communities are often better where voodoo is comparatively common. Amos still condemns voodoo in some way now and again, but one major theme of the film concerns how the "White God" (as the film's narration calls Them) exists concurrently with the "Black Gods," the "jungle gods." There's even a scene where Father Berry tells Aunt Hagar something about "Jesus told us to forgive our enemies." Hagar replies: "Yeah, well, Jesus didn't know Tom Catt!" A '30s film where a voodoo practitioner gets away with sassing off Jesus Christ himself--yeah, this was worth it.

Actually, this movie has a lot going for it where it would have probably been heinous in its time, proclivity for polytheism aside. Our first introduction to Myrtle is her in the juke joint dancing to jazz in, horror of horrors, a miniskirt! Hell, it was a big deal to show off someone dancing in a miniskirt in a movie in the mid '60s, much less the mid '30s. While there's definitely a lot in the script to add credence to the "booed offstage" theory regarding the short life of the play version, this stuff, plus some other stuff I'll get to, is enough to suggest that someone set up an obscenity charge. Maybe that was a total shitstorm. I wish I knew more.

And I wish I knew more about this movie in general--about its production details, yes, but also about the plot. You see, unlike a lot of my reviews, I haven't spoiled the ending of this one, and there's a reason for that. The ending of Drums O' Voodoo may be impossible to spoil, ever, because there is clearly much footage lost, which seems to include the proper conclusion. Now maybe the producers of my VHS copy had access to a faulty print, but Turner Classic Movies says that footage was cut. And how--IMDB and TCM alike list the movie as 70 minutes, and my copy doesn't even make it to 50! While this leads to one of the most hilariously jarring conclusions of all time, the idea of this movie missing over twenty minutes of footage is disheartening to say the least. The fact that we don't know how much was lost to censorship and how much was lost to film decay is almost worse than not knowing what was on those missing frames. TCM helpfully fills in the blanks, revealing that what's missing is only an extrapolation of what we already see (it's not like there were going to be hidden zombies or anything), but still. That's why I'm especially disappointed that no one else has talked about this movie. If the missing footage is still out there, no one is looking for it, and even if it was found by accident no one would care.

I can understand why even people who have seen this wouldn't care. Drums O' Voodoo has plenty o' faults, with the biggest one being one which afflicts so many old horror movies based off of stage plays: it's essentially a filmed version of the play, with no strong use of the effects that film can offer. There are times where you will find it merciful for a shot of two characters talking to be suddenly interrupted by the dynamic change of showing one of the characters in close-up instead. And when all the characters are hugged together on the cramped "backyard" scene with its terrible, obvious matte painting background, you will suddenly feel like you're sitting in front of a stage. Adding to the tedium this induces is the fact that a lot of the movie is dedicated to a church scene. In fact, the church scene, wherein characters sing, dance, quote scripture, and accuse each other, is arguably the primary scene of the movie, just because of how much time it eats up. That's upsetting, because this scene, once the gospel music stops, draaags. I do not enjoy listening to Biblical sermons even if I find a movie's religious themes interesting. It was a mistake for the filmmakers to spend so much time watching the characters at church when they could have been developing them as people or doling out voodoo vengeance instead.

And yet there is a lot to love. There are fun performances, interesting backstories, and that voodoo cave set has some actual atmosphere to it. There are also some fun trash qualities, like the fact that the movie has a weird humorous approach to naming its characters. It's hard not to fall for a slick, sleazy crook type from the city with a groovy name like "Tom Catt," and I can't believe that the insistence on calling Amos Berry "Elder," or more specifically "Elder Berry," was an accident. It's not fully played for laughs but it kinda sets a tone in your mind. Similarly odd is a character named Brother Zero who we meet during that lengthy sermon sequence. Brother Zero may have the highest-pitched voice I've ever heard in an adult man, and I don't know if this is supposed to be funny or not. The first time he spoke, I had to take a break just to give myself time to "...what?" IMDB tells me that Brother Zero's actor, Fred Bonny, had a lengthy and successful career in vaudeville prior to this, so it probably is supposed to be comedic. Finally, there is the scene where the town lays a trap for Tom Catt and get ready to hang him, so he doesn't whisk away any more girls. Aunt Hagar stops them so that they aren't tainted with unjustly-spilled blood, but not without going on a verbal beatdown against Catt, basically saying that the townsfolk should hang him for how worthless his soul is, and how even though she saves him today, the voodoo spirits will catch up with him eventually for his crimes. She doesn't spare a breath in letting this guy know that she hates his guts. Aunt Hagar is awesome all the way through, and I am officially a Laura Bowman fan for life.

More people should know about Drums O' Voodoo, for all its drawbacks. It's not a great movie, but I am glad to have seen it. It is available from Sinister Cinema even if it's not on their website. (Don't order it from Loving the Classics, the only other source I've found to ostensibly sell it, as the Better Business Bureau and others list them as having scammed a lot of people.) It's a forgotten piece of history, and it has stuff to offer even besides having that distinction. Check it out!

Son of Ingagi (1940), by Richard C. Kahn

*

1930 saw the debut of Ingagi, a sewn-together cinematic mess of stock footage and staged vignettes which serves as a good contender for the title of the first Mondo movie. Technically the Mondo genre started in 1962 with Mondo cane, but Ingagi carried the usual Mondo motifs: a fraudulent "true story" premise; copious stock footage; animal violence (according to some accounts); and, of course, real human exploitation. I've always felt wary of Mondo movies because, while they are technically from the same kingdom of being as the other exploitation movies I watch, it's sort of like saying that a cat is in the same class as an octopus or a spider. Like. Mondo movies feature real animal death, real human death--both caused on occasion by the filmmakers (caused often, I should say, in the case of the former). Mondo filmmakers have participated in human trafficking to make their movies. Ingagi typified that by having its primary selling point be a supposedly real sequence wherein an African tribe marries their women off to the titular Ingagi, a larger-than-average gorilla. They then proceed to beget gorilla-human hybrids, represented by black children with fur glued to their faces. All fake, with gorilla suits and everything. But presented to an audience who wanted it to be true, to confirm their ugly beliefs as authentic.

Ingagi is mostly lost today and that's probably a good thing. I say "mostly lost," because there are at least two prints said to remain in existence, and the film has enough demand where those prints may once be used to spare the film before they degrade beyond repair. But in my opinion, it should be presently exclusively as a historical document--a significant part of the history of exploitation cinema, and, similarly, an artifact of erroneous beliefs on race that were spawned by prejudicial and hateful social conditions. I'm thinking something rather like the DVD release for the Warner Bros. censored shorts. They could be respectful about it even while realizing there's no way to be perfectly respectful.

I'm not here to talk about Ingagi, however, because like 99.999999% of the living human race of the present, I haven't seen it. I'm here to see a film which, at first glance, must seem like a sequel to Ingagi. Unless there's something I don't know about, the two films are unrelated, at least as far as plot continuity goes. Think of Son of Ingagi instead as the anti-Ingagi--a movie which, instead of being a slander against black people, is created by and produced for the benefit of black people. While I don't know for sure, I suspect that this was the purpose behind Son of Ingagi's creation, during the period of the segregated "race films"--some accounts suggest the opposite, that Son of Ingagi was made to celebrate Ingagi, which, like many jungle films of the time, was appreciated by black audiences. It's possible that both are true. It's possible to be a fan of something and yet want to do it better.

Let me tell you, the cast and crew of Son of Ingagi did it do it better. Whatever Ingagi looks like, Son of Ingagi is more riveting and compelling than whatever was put to film in that 1930 outset. Son of Ingagi is a manic mess to rival the weirdest and lousiest of the Monogram '40s pictures. It is a fun fantasy thriller and you really shouldn't miss out on it.

We open with the wedding of Bob and Eleanor Lindsay, and one of their guests is Dr. Helen Jackson. Jackson is a miserly woman who is extraordinarily wealthy but refuses to pay her lawyer, Bradshaw, more than $5 per session, even when he writes out her will. Her will, incidentally, is made out to the Lindsays, because for all her bitterness Jackson is mostly lonely at heart, and was charmed by their decision to invite her to the celebrations. She was also friends with Eleanor's parents, and helped them marry. This will become important later; first we have to learn about Dr. Jackson's trip to Africa. A visit from her thieving brother Zeno reveals that not only did Jackson steal a fortune in gold from several countries of the continent while adventuring out there, and she's also brought something a bit more animate from back there: the implicitly titular Son of Ingagi, N'Gina, a half-man half-ape represented by, no joke, a guy in a ski mask with fur taped to his sleeves. (Interesting that "N'Gina" is a near-acronym of "Ingagi.") N'Gina is used as Jackson's private enforcer while she perfects a scientific formula of some kind which is the conclusion of her work. It seems N'Gina drinks the potion, which causes him to go berserk and kill the good doctor. Unfortunately, it does sound pretty suspicious for Jackson to suddenly amend her will to feature two strangers as the sole beneficiaries, just days or hours before her mysterious and violent murder. Between the police, the Lindsays, and Zeno, N'Gina has a lot of people he wants to kill. Will our couple get their happy ending...or will they find themselves the victim of a horrible monster?

This movie is defined in a lot of ways by the quality of its performances, and indeed, there are a lot of different types of performers on display here. There's a brief cut, during an amusing scene where the wedding party decides to crash the Lindsays' wedding night (!!!), to a performance by a swing/jazz group called the Four Toppers. If their music doesn't say "the beginning of rock and roll" I don't know what does, and they're amazing to see in action. I know that the origin of rock is an intense debate, but the genre wouldn't exist without black people and "race music"; race music in a race film. Most of the musical culture we take for granted in America was created by black people, to be frank, and there is really just something about this performance which prefigures rock in a way that I haven't seen before in any early '40s music I've heard...anyway, I digress. The Four Toppers are awesome, and they bring even more class to already classy cast.

Laura Bowman as Dr. Jackson is especially great. I want to look for more of her movie appearances. She is simultaneously cheesy and wooden, and it works well for the prototypical '40s mad scientist, in a very Bela Lugosi sort of way. She brings us a particularly artistic scene in the film, which is, incidentally, her death scene. When N'Gani closes in on her, we cut back towards the cool, calculated face of the ape-man, and her wide, panicked eyes. It's a little silly-looking, but as he strangles the doctor an inkwell falls from her desk and spills out--resembling nothing less than blood in black and white. It's a clever way of having a bloody death in a necessarily-bloodless film. (Thanks, Hays Code.)

Once again, I wish I knew more of the origins of this movie, and how the thinking came about for the title. I've always liked movies that are cash-ins/sequels/fan-films which also criticize the movie they're based off of. Is Son of Ingagi some sort of meta thing for Ingagi? Or was it played straighter than I anticipated? (Generally the film is ruled out as a sequel, for at no point is it suggested that N'Gani is a gorilla-human hybrid, a literal Son of the gorilla Ingagi--the general implication is that he's the missing link, meaning he is more of an evolutionary throwback.) I've found no production details on this film whatsoever, nor have I been able to divine the true relationship Ingagi had to black audiences of the '30s and '40s. Someone help me out! Sometimes the most beguiling thing about B-movies of this vintage is that we know nothing about them. But I want to change that. There's got to be something of interest here.

Movies like Son of Ingagi laid for the ground for movies like Sugar Hill and other blaxploitation films. I am fascinated by these race films of the '30s and '40s, not merely for their role in the history of blaxploitation. I also feel like they stand as a statement of important history in our country; as soon as there was film, there were people of color working on it as eagerly and skillfully as their white counterparts. Watching these movies calls up many similarities to other films I've seen from the Golden Age of Hollywood--and it really makes me wonder. I don't claim to be immune to perpetuating racism; I am white and have white privilege. I fight against racism, however, because I am faced persecution of my own and I know it's not right to let that happen to others. And so, fellow white people, when I see movies like these, I see how undeniable it is that black people are just like us. For someone to be unable to see black people as having the same qualities and thoughts and feelings as us white people, while also preserving a vital difference and diversity, is incomprehensible to me. Once, I was worried that showing off these cheap movies would be racist; I would be celebrating movies that showed nadirs of talent, which would surely count as poor representation. But in my mind, movies that are wrought with cheapness, and mistakes, show another dimension, a positive one, to the imagination, ambition, and talent of filmmakers. It shows a tenacity to not give up despite budget limitations; it shows people having fun with their friends. Anyone who sees these films and takes them as justification for barriers between people of different races is in the wrong. Trash is universal; everyone can make it. And we humans--we make it so good.

* This title card's improper cropping is a fault in the YouTube version of the film, not my version of the image. This is due to a fault in the print scan used for the video.

Sugar Hill (1974), by Paul Maslansky

I think I've said it before, but I am grateful to my fellow critics. Obviously, I would have never seen these films if someone in the world hadn't recommended them to me, however indirectly they did so. If your main hobbies are like mine and include watching movie reviews to cover up for the pain and horror of being utterly insignificant, you'll begin to recognize cinematic trends, sub-trends, and sub-sub-trends within the big chunky genres you previously took for granted. Studying blaxploitation for example will lead one to the genre's outset as the "race pictures" made between the 1910s and the 1950s, starring all black casts and marketed to all black audiences--films that reinforced segregation but nonetheless encouraged and enabled black creators and black representation in the media. Race pictures became blaxploitation in the early '70s, arguably beginning with the mandatory Black Panthers initiation watch subject Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971. Blaxploitation has continued long since the death of '70s funk, or at least, genre films made by and starring black people have continued. Some that come to mind are Black Devil Doll from Hell, Tales from the Quadead Zone, Devil Snow, Ax 'Em, and Don't Play With Me. Because these are movies that I like they are probably not the most flattering examples of this, but I considered them all to be truly wonderful films. You can even see movies today that get theater showings which arguably carry on the blaxploitation spirit, in the form of the films of Tyler Perry, which, despite being shredded by critics, do get high audience scores and even get the dubious distinction of top billing at my workplace's Redbox.

And of course there were and are blaxploitation horror films. That is one of those sub-trends I mentioned above: in 1972, of course, we had Blacula, which heralded such films as Blackenstein, Ganja and Hess, and Abby. There had been earlier black-produced horror films, such as the ever-elusive Drums o' Voodoo from 1934, but this new vein was often crossed with the badass protagonists and dicey gang politics of the crime-oriented blaxploitation movies. This is the ground from which Sugar Hill grows, and admittedly I have not seen any of the other famous '70s Blaxploitation movies, by the simple merit of Sugar Hill ranking higher on my priority lists. The reviews always made it sound like a blast, and a blast it is. If Blacula and the others are as good as this, then I have a lot to look forward to.

The plot is pretty straightforward, especially by blaxploitation standards, save for the zombies. Black people own a club, white people wanna steal it. In this case, it's Diana "Sugar" Hill and her boyfriend Langston who own Club Voodoo, subject of intended theft by white crime lord Morgan. When Langston refuses to give in, Morgan kills him, prompting Sugar's quest for vengeance. Fortunately, the voodoo priestess Mama Maitresse can help her. Sugar makes a pact with the witch and Baron Samedi, the voodoo lord of the dead, to receive an army of turkey-killing zombies. Soon everyone in town is paying for the price for offing Sugar's man. Will Sugar manage to find her special brand of justice?

By the end of the thing you'll be hoping she does. The film casts its leads well. While the entire cast puts on a good performance, the black actors shine the brightest, especially Marki Bey as Sugar Hill, who presents a genuinely sympathetic, attractive, and badass voodoo queen, and Don Pedro Colley as Baron Samedi, who is one of the hammiest hams to ever beautifully ham. Those two are charming and you get attached to them. Baron Samedi in particular is a very strange and intriguing character. He is in some ways a continuation of the character of the same name from Live and Let Die, and that version of Baron Samedi was the only reason why most of us watched that movie to begin with. Sometimes he goofs off; sometimes he's menacing; sometimes he's mocking, especially when he's talking to white people. When white people think they can boss him around, he starts talking like, well...let's just say it's sort of like a banned Warner Brothers cartoon. It's kind of jarring to hear, but the movie makes it clear that all parties know that he's doing it to piss these people off. Because what are they going to do? This isn't a guy calling himself Baron Samedi--he is a legitimate voodoo loa. Weapons are not going to work on him. He calls them out on their racism, and when they try to shove him and Sugar down for that (instead of, y'know, stopping the whole being racist thing), they are killed by zombies. Baron Samedi's got a system, and the system works.

Helping you root for the heroes is the fact that the white people in this movie are bastards. Sure, sometimes they have a glimmer of respectability, but basically all of them spout the n-word whenever they get a chance, and pull all sorts of bullshit about "betters" and the like. Worst of them all is Celeste, Morgan's girlfriend, who is so racist that even he shrugs her off like a rotten corpse. She drops the n-bomb more than anyone in the film, and takes a personal jealousy in Morgan's wandering eyes when Sugar's around. Naturally, she is saved for last, and her implied fate is so dark that I laughed at it out of astonishment. But you really can't feel bad for her.

That her death is memorable is impressive, given that whenever someone dies in this movie it's pretty great. That's because the zombies in this movie are great. They have these weird silver cups over their eyes, and they also have cobwebs all over them, even though they all seem to have been buried sans coffins in earthen graves. (Are underground spiders a thing? Should we fear them?) I swear to God that the first scene of the zombies rising from their graves goes on for ten minutes. For however long it is, it's not long enough. Intercut with scenes of these zombies crawling from the earth are shots of Mama Maitresse and Sugar Hill getting really excited over the prospect of having an army of zombies, along with Baron Samedi's sweet, sweet mugging. Whenever these zombies kill someone, it's usually done in a way that resists repetition, making each individual kill scene satisfying. The quirkiness of some of these deaths, along with their roots in vengeance, reminded me in a lot of fun ways of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Which is funny because I also realized that this movie almost shares a plot with Bad Magic. I guess a lot of revenge horror films have similarities.

If you want to get a good taste of archetypical '70s exploitation, Sugar Hill is a great start. If I have somehow failed to convince you, I should say that this movie's is a Motown funk piece called "Supernatural Voodoo Woman." The movie also contains a large, large building called "the Voodoo Museum and Research Library."

P.S. Originally this review was meant for January until I had to do some schedule rearranging for the site. In the course of it I forgot that February was Black History Month. I find it to be a happy coincidence that I post this now. I'd say that a movie where a bunch of black people avenge themselves on some racist white gangsters with zombies is a good anti-racist text.