Todd’s Movie Blog

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.

Like last year I thought I would  toss out some film suggestions for viewing on Turkey Day.  Unlike last year, instead of intentional comedies, I would toss out some films that were meant to be taken seriously but just didn’t turn out that way.

First up is one the zaniest Star Wars rip offs ever to grace the screen, Starcrash.  Leather bikini clad Caroline Munro is a notorious smuggler who is given a pardon for her crimes by a bemused Christopher Plummer in exchange for traveling to the end of the Universe to find his lost son, David Hasselhoff who gives Munro a run for her money in the hair and eyeliner department, and save the Universe from an over the top scenery chewing pre-Maniac Joe Spinell.

Joining her are a laser sword weilding Marjoe Gortner, who puts both Munro and The Hoff to shame in the hair and eye liner departments, as an alien with “special powers” and great wisdom, and a ray gun packing robot space cop who talks like Yosimite Sam. He actually says “Take that ya varmit!” during a shootout.

This film is a hoot from start to finish.  We have “Amazons on horseback!” as the robot proclaims, Neanderthals scared off by a guy in a mask, a lazer sword fight where Gortner dies from a flesh wound even though he had earlier revived froma head blow that crushed his skull and shrugged off laser beam blasts to his chest, Plummer stopping time to avoid being blown up by a time bomb, a giant space station that is a big hand that grabs enemy ships (actually that part was kind of cool), space monsters that are literally floating red balls of light, and the climactic battle where soldiers crash through the windows of the enemy spaceship  for a shootout without the ship depressurising or anyone needing a helmet.

The film ends with Munro and The Hoff in the inevitabl clinch while Plummer smugly pontificates about the future while never losing the smirk he has had throughout the entire film, as if he is saying he he knows he’s slumminng but hey the man’s got bills to pay, so sit back and enjoy.

Before helping William Shatner with his early Tek novels and his own mystery novels about a wise cracking Groucho Marx solving murders in 1940’s Hollywood, Ron Goulart wrote a bunch of sci fi satire mysteries featuring overly competent laser packing heroes contending with interfering female reporters, inept rival investigators and sarcastic robots (the Tek novels being an obviously more serious version of these earlier books).

One of his last PBO’s was a bit of a departure from his usual futuristic comedies.  Skyrocket Steele is set in the late thirties.  The hero is a pulp writer who gets hired by a film studio to work on their new cliffhanger serial, Skyrocket Steele, a Flash Gordon rip off about an earth man fighting aliens on another planet.

Things take a strange turn when the writer uncovers that the props for the film, like ray guns and rocket ships, actually work.  Further investigations reveal that the studio has been infiltrated by actual aliens who are using the prop department to build weapons so they can take over the Earth and use it as a base for their continuing war with another planet in their own galaxy.  The studio is also infiltrated by their enemy aliens who are trying to steal the weapons from the prop department and take over the Earth for similar reasons, leading to an all out fire fight in the skies over LA.

The book is a breezy read with such humorous touches as the hero’s writing partner never quite getting around to writing anything due to a myriad of excuses always ending with a “relax, it’s Hollywood” slacker attitude, a budding  romance between the hero and a studio secretary full of Thin Man-esque quips and a dim witted thug with the hots for the studio’s biggest star who keeps popping up at the wrong time, misreading what he sees and punching out the hero.

Underneath all this is a growing sense of paranoia, as the hero, and the reader, are never quite sure who is and isn’t an alien.  A little more light hearted than Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Who Goes There, the fast paced adventure is a pleasant mixture of comedy, romance and sci fi action.