Black Heat (1976)

Directed by: Al Adamson
Starring: Timothy Brown, Russ Tamblyn

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Ziggy: The world's about to come down on your head baby... the cops are here!

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Director Al Adamson was behind a lot of great exploitation movies in the 70's: Jim Kelly's Black Samurai, sexploitation comedies like Naughty Stewardesses and Blazing Stewardesses, the sleazy I Spit on Your Corpse! and my personal favorite, Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (a movie that features less than a minute of the titular fight). Black Heat was one of his attempts at making a blaxploitation movie, and for the most part, it's a pretty alright movie. It stars Timothy Brown as Kicks Carter, a kickass cop trying to shut down a massive coke-for-guns deal in the means streets of... somewhere. I guess I wasn't paying attention. But hey, the title sequence promises to "introduce J.C. Wells as Guido," and that's all that matters.

There's not a whole lot of plot here: the boss behind the deal is Ziggy (Russ Tamblyn), an appropriately scummy crook who runs the town. Kicks wants to stop him, because he "cares for his brother-man." When Kicks isn't trying to stop Ziggy, he's either getting laid, or simply off-screen for large portions of time. When that happens, its usually so that we can follow the story of Terry (Jana Bellan), a compulsive gambler who bets her way into prostitution and then... well... nothing really.

When you watch this movie, you'll probably notice that it continually jumps between Kicks's and Terry's story, and that - apart from a few supporting characters who interact with both protagonists - the two plots have very little in common. The reason for that is that director Adamson and producer Sam Sherman decided to shoot a movie that could run as either a blaxploitation or sexploitation film, depending on which intro reel was shown. And that's exactly what they did... the film ran as Black Heat in the urban markets and Girl's Hotel in the southern drive-ins. That kind of crazy shit seems impossible now, but stuff was different back when movies were schleped from town to town, changing titles and getting edited as they went. The DVD contains some deleted scenes and the Girl's Hotel intro, and you can get a sense of how much a few changes could alter the whole feel of the movie.

There's a great sequence when Kicks's partner has his car forced off a cliff by a gangster. It goes on for 5-6 minutes, with the two cars slamming into each other, dashing along the winding road, and the eventual car-goes-over-a-cliff scene where the car rolls 15 or 20 times. Then, suddenly, the movie cuts to a medium shot of Kicks talking to a roomful of people. "And that's the story. He's dead." Nice and simple.

Other highlights include Adamson's wife, Regina Carrol, as the worst-dubbed lounge singer in film history, and the inappropriately funk-scored rape of Terry by a half-dozen sleazy bikers. Actually, I'm not sure if it's technically a rape scene... she's playing poker, runs out of cash, and agrees to "take on all you guys" if she loses. With Aces over Jacks it seems like a safe bet, but slimebag #3's got quad-sevens. She tries to back out of it, but a bet's a bet. So I guess it was more like an anti-welching scene. Oh, and I guess this is a spoiler, but it's a major crowd-pleaser when Ziggy gets thrown from the roof of a building, gets impaled on a random pipe, but manages to flip off Kicks before he dies.

For those not fortunate enought to catch this flick as part of the Alamo Drafthouse's weekly Weird Wednesday series, there's a fantastic DVD release by Retro Shock-O-Rama. I'm not too familiar with this company, but - with one caveat - they've put together a great package for this movie. We've got an informative audio commentary by the producer, extensive liner notes from "noted Al Adamson historians" (I wanna party with those guys), a reproduction of the original pressbook, deleted scenes, outtakes, the Girl's Hotel intro, trailers for movies like Possession of Nurse Sherri and Naughty Stewardesses... for an 30-year-old exploitation flick that's damn impressive. What's less than impressive - especially considering the stellar treatment the film got - is the DVD's front cover:

For a company that seems to get what makes a film like this so great to go and package it with a cover like that... it makes no sense. If I, as an exploitation movie-goer saw that cover in the stores, with the proud 'URBAN SHOCK SPECIAL EDITION' tagline, I'd pass it by as a mid-90's straight to video piece of shit. I understand that, in the grand scheme of things, there's not a ton of us blaxploitation fans out there, but I've gotta think that the cover wouldn't even appeal to your average moviegoer browsing in Blockbuster. So who's the market that picture appeals to? It's gotta be somebody, I suppose, because Shock-O-Rama is doing the same thing with other Adamson movies (Possession of Nurse Sherri, Mean Mother). I can't complain too much though, because they've done such a damn fine job putting together the package. All in all, its a company worth your business... just stay away from Feeding Them Asses (Review).

- Micah