Black Samurai (1976) May 11, 2007
Posted by Cal in : Blogroll, Action, Blaxploitation, 1970s films, Bad Films , trackbackDirector: Al Adamson Starring: Jim Kelly, Bill Roy, Marilyn Joi Territory: USA Production Company: BJLJ International Corp.
Agent of D.R.A.G.O.N Robert Sand (Jim Kelly) is ordered by his shadowy bosses to save his own girlfriend from certain death at the hands of the ruthless drug lord Janicot who has kidnapped her and is holding her hostage in a tower. Although he’s on holiday at the time, Sand grudgingly agrees to save her. What a guy. Blah blah voodoo rituals blah villain has own personal army blah blah blah overwhelming odds etc etc. You know the story.
There certainly are a few revelations in this film. The first is it’s apparently based on a novel by a guy called Marc Olden, and amazingly some of his books appear to be still in print – even after this film. The second is that this Blaxploitation picture is a bit of a departure for the director, who was more at home in the horror/ B movie field. A quick glance at his filmography makes me want to go and see his films, with titles such as: Blazing Stewardesses, I Spit on your Corpse! (You’ve got to include the exclamation mark or the title just doesn’t have the impact), Lash of Lust, Blood of Ghastly Horror, Dracula Vs Frankenstein, Horror of the Blood Monsters and Satan’s Sadists. Sadly, I understand he was murdered and hidden under the floor of his own bathroom in the 90’s.
Anyway, the film. Everyone should know by now I like the occasional “bad film” and I don’t think they come any worse than this. It’s utterly utterly hopeless. The acting is some of the worst I’ve ever seen, with some delightfully bad dialogue thrown in. The open-air end fight is strange, too: the trash talking dialogue between the two combatants seems to have been dubbed on later from a small room. There are also some crazy ideas in here – a couple of wrestling dwarfs and an attack vulture to name but two. But rest assured, there’s more where that came from.
You’ve just got to love an organisation that calls itself D.R.A.G.O.N – you can’t help thinking of the head of the organisation sitting around at a board meeting saying, “I want an acronym, and make it sound TOUGH!” And of course we never get to find out what D.R.A.G.O.N (God, I hate typing that) stands for. Or what it does…
Jim Kelly was expected to be a big star of the seventies after his “introduction” in Enter the Dragon, but when he made stuff like this, it’s not hard to see why it never happened. That being said, Kelly himself is reasonably OK most of the time – it’s just the film itself that’s a stinker.
Sadly, the only currently available version of this film has many problems. The transfer is awful. Sub VHS, even. Secondly, it seems to be quite badly cut (either that or the editing is worse than I thought). There even appears to be some dubbing or obscuring of swearwords in places too. If someone were to remaster this in its uncut form, stick a “Quentin Tarantino Presents” sticker on it and put it out on sale, I think we’d have a winner on our hands. But presumably Jim Kelly will be too busy lookin’ goood on the tennis court to do any promotion for it.
Comments»
I think the R2 DVD is the same as the R1, in that the film is cropped from 1.85:1 to 1.33:1 and it’s the friendlier TV version, which had nudity and swearing cut out. It still has some dodgy editing anyway, but this is pretty poor treatment regardless.
TV version? Yeah, I suppose that explains it. Shame. Yes, I believe the R1 version is identical to the R2, so I’m not going to touch it. Hopefully a proper version will surface at some point.
Holy feet of fury! Al Adamson had a shot at martial arts movies to?!? I didn’t realise that - he was quite (in)famous in the exploitation world for managing to consistently churn out complete crap. I remember watching The Female Bunch on VHS about 15 years ago, expecting some rather erotic violence; needless to say I was quite disappointed and pis*ed that I’d spent a pound hiring out that piece of sh*t.
Female Bunch (1969) is notable for being an example of the depressing depths an actor’s career can hit once their heyday is well and truly over (in this case, Lon Chaney Junior).
I wasn’t going to say anything, but I wondered if you’d heard of the guy! You’ve got to admit though, Blazing Stewardesses sounds like a winner. Actually, ANYTHING with stewardesses in it has got to be a winner.
Interesting comment on Lon Chaney Jr being in one of his films - kind of parallels Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood’s films then?
Yes, it seems so. Even Boris Karlof signed a contract for a quartet of crap Mexican movies in his latter days, when he was largely wheelchair bound.
In light of that, it’s kind of amusing to imagine what the likes of ’superstars’ like Nicholas Cage and Julia Roberts might be putting their names to in twenty odd years time
Nicholas Cage has already put his name to some highly questionable stuff!
Sh*t, I’d put my name to ‘Big Boys With Big Hoses, Part7′ for twenty million fu**ing dollars!
I’d do it for 2.
Million, not dollars. I do have SOME self respect.