Vinegar Syndrome announced this past week that a 2K
restoration (from the original 35mm negative) of actor/director D'Urville
Martin’s 1975 iconic Blaxploitation classic,
Dolemite,
will be available on Apr. 26 as a Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack.
Lawrence Woolner, a film producer and long-time associate of
Roger Corman, founded Dimension Pictures in 1972 and hit gold with such
low-budget productions as The Twilight People, The
Doberman Gang and Beyond Atlantis.
He saw the Blaxploitation
trend developing and jumped on it during February of 1975 with director
Jack Arnold’s Boss Nigger (starring and written by Fred Williamson) and
followed it up with a distribution deal for actor/producer Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite.
It was a monster at the box office (in certain precincts). But, let’s be frank, Dolomite is an anti-hero
film on steroids. Rudy Ray Moore as the
title character (in his film debut — he would reprise his role the following
year in The Human Tornado, plus such films as The Monkey Hu$tle and Disco
Godfather) is a mega-bucks pimp and actor/director D'Urville Martin’s
character (The Legend of Nigger Charley, Black Caesar, Hell
Up in Harlem, etc.), Willie Green, is a drug-dealing crime lord. A match made in heaven.
Bonus features include a vintage commentary track featuring
Rudy Ray Moore and biographer Mark Jason Murray, the making-of documentary
titled I, Dolemite and two featurettes — “Lady Reed Uncut” and
“Locations, Then and Now.”
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