Considered one of the worst films ever made, I don’t think it is quite that bad, though it is pretty silly. Made to cash in on both the Blaxploitation craze and the popularity of Jim Kelly from his break out role in Enter the Dragon, the film bounces through several cliches that are turned on their head.
The plot involves The Mafia trying to muscle in on Scatman Crothers’ Watts based karate school. When he can’t be intimidated, The Mafia joins forces with their Watts rivals to trick him into being killed in a crooked card game. His best student Jim Kelly decides to leave the CIA and teams up with Crothers’ daughter Gloria Hendry, to get some martial arts revenge.
The plot is pretty serious but it is the images that will make you laugh so hard, tears will run down your face. This is one goofy film, from the minute a toupe wearing Crothers whips out some stiff karate chops on some stuntmen to the ending battle in an out of control car wash spewing suds everywhere. In between we find that the hero’s name is actually Black Belt Jones (everybody just calls him Belt), a romantic romp on the beach between Kelly and Hendry that is really a running karate battle, an assault on The Mafia’s headquarters by Kelly and a bunch of beach girls that hang around his house with all of them dressed like Ninjas, a car chase where Hendry is trying to get dressed and loses her panties out the passenger window (guess where they land and what their reaction is), and of course the climactic karate battle with everybody in waist high soap suds where Kelly knocks them senseless and then Hendry tosses them into a garbage truck by their crotches.
I have to wonder if Black Belt jones was a spoof and nobody got the joke. On the one hand, it is hard to believe that anyone would take this film seriously, but then again Holllywood is known to take some bizarre films as serious endevors (Howard the Duck anyone?). Maybe the makers thought it was a comedy and the producers thought it was an action film. Whatever the case it is a fun viewing experience.
