Shout! Studios will be doing what the legacy “Hollywood” studios seem unwilling to do these days with their vast theatrical catalogs. Case in point, the May 20 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray collection titled Blaxploitation Classics, Volume 1, which showcases six Blaxploitation gems from the 1970s in an absolutely must-have collection of action films that introduced and transformed the likes of Yaphet Kotto, Fred Williamson and Pam Grier into silver screen stars.
That is what is promised (and delivered), with a second volume (YES!) already planned for release later this summer.
What is in this collection?
We begin with director Barry Shear’s Christmas-season of 1972 film adaptation of the Wally Ferris 1970 novel “Across 110th,” which was released theatrically as Across 110th Street. Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto topline in this film that critics of the time declared was excessively violent.
The next two films in the collection are from writer, director and producer Larry Cohen, a filmmaker who became a genre-fan favorite with the It’s Alive trilogy, Q: The Winged Serpent and The Stuff. Just about the time that Shear’s production of Across 110th Street was being wrapped in New York City, Cohen took his film crew there as well and delivered Black Caesar, starring Fred Williams as Tommy Gibbs, a lowly shoeshine boy (younger version played by Omer Jeffrey), who is beaten and framed by a bigoted cop on the take (Art Lund) and packed off to reform school.
The film opened in February of 1973 and was a huge success, so much so that Tommy was resurrected — he is clearly dying in the final scenes from wounds and a vicious beating by a teenage gang (full circle, so to speak) — and by the Christmas season of 1973, Fred Williams and Larry Cohen (writer, director and producer) had delivered Hell Up in Harlem, which cleverly reworks the ending of Black Caesar to allow Tommy to survive his wounds and continue his rise to power (he controls accounting records that detail corruption at the highest levels in New York).
As a bonus, there are archived commentaries for both Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem by auteur filmmaker Larry Cohen.
Pam Grier’s day job is that of a nurse (filmed in Los Angeles), but when not “on duty” she has “duties” of another kind … assassin of drug dealers, small fry at first, but she works her way up the ladder, exposing massive corruption and dealing with the worst of the worst (always in peril herself)!!
After reteaming with Jack Hill for Foxy Brown in April of 1974, Grier fulfilled her film contract with American International Pictures (AIP) with two final films in 1975, Friday Foster and writer/director William Girdler’s spring of 1975 film release of Sheba, Baby, which is the fifth film in this collection.
Rounding out this six-film collection is director Jonathan Kaplan’s summer of 1974 film release of Truck Turner, starring Isaac Hayes as a bounty hunter named Truck, who is partnered with Jerry (Alan Weeks).
A bail-skipper contract goes south and Truck is forced to kill the man, which sets in motion a revenge scheme cooked up by a woman named Dorinda (played by none other than Star Trek’s Uhura, Nichelle Nichols), who runs a well-organized prostitution ring.
A series of punks go down at the hands of Truck, before Dorinda ends up making a deal with the notorious “Blue” (Yaphet Kotto) to murder Truck. This eventually leads to third-act shootout where the bodies pile up and Truck ends up taking out the trash!!
Director Jonathan Kaplan provides commentary on Truck Turner.
No comments:
Post a Comment