Truly Dreadful Film

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Another bottom-of-the-barrel Graze Z exploitation quickie from director Al Adamson, widely considered to be one of the worst directors of all time (even worse than Ed Wood, yes...at least Wood's films were somewhat entertaining). After a run of shoddy horror epics in the late '60s/early '70s, Adamson, ever one to cash in on a popular cinema trend to make a few bucks, turned his hand to the blaxploitation genre and ran off a couple of thrillers (DEATH DIMENSION is another of his cardboard productions, slightly - ever so slightly - more interesting due to the introduction of martial arts). This is a boringly sub-standard cops-and-robbers thriller yarn in which a black policeman goes after the people running a crime syndicate from a brothel which fronts as a hotel. There's more than that, but the plot is so convoluted and contrived that you can't be bothered to care. The only good thing is the funky music score that permeates through the action.The main problem with the film is that the entire cast is so unappealing. The women are frequently naked (of course) which doesn't help and the men are just sweaty bad actors. Timothy Brown is the blaxploitation hero obviously modelled to be a Shaft clone, yet lacks the natural charisma his role demands - he just seems wooden and a clichéd macho-type (check out his hilariously dated - not to mention - Shaft-style love scene with a reporter). And Russ Tamblyn is just pathetic as a moustachioed villain, his weight blossoming and good looks vanished both at the same time (it's amazing that he enjoyed a second stage of his career in later life, even if it was in the hands of Fred Olen Ray).The action highlights include a hostage-taker who accidentally blows himself and his hostage up when his bomb becomes trapped in a car door, a handful of boringly routine shoot-outs in the street where bad actors clutch their chests as they die, and a really unexciting car crash where a vehicle rolls down a cliff in slow-motion after some poor editing attempts to convince you it was nudged off the road by another car. Adamson does manage a few choice moments, such as an uncomfortable spot which displays the downside of gambling where a penniless broad bets her body to a group of greasy thugs and loses, but these are few and far between. Mostly it's just rip-off after rip-off after cliché, with that old hoary chestnut of a rooftop chase being dragged out of the closet yet again for another airing down.The finale involves a police raid on the villains' headquarters, where the lesbian crime queen (!) is arrested and Tamblyn is impaled on a piece of scrap metal (the only moderately gory shot the film offers). Things still drag on though, to a showdown in the desert straight out of CHARLEY VARRICK, where the final bad guy (a Bobby Rhodes wannabe) attempts to escape via plane before it's blown out of the sky by an incredibly lucky - perhaps darned near impossible - shot from Brown's gun. One thing that did make me chuckle was the misleading box art for this video. If you check the top of the box carefully there's a drawing of an airliner exploding. The actual plane in the movie is a BI-PLANE! Yes, once again artistic license is to blame for making a film look more expensive than it really is. SYNDICATE VICE - a film only for those with acute insomnia and looking for a cure.

Black Heat (1976) ** (out of 4)A tough black cop (Timothy Brown) from Las Vegas, with the help from his white partner (Geoffrey Land), tries to stop some criminals who are bringing heroin, weapons and other items into a local hotel. Director Al Adamson tackled just about every genre and he managed to make both decent and horrible films in each of them. BLACK HEAT might not be as much fun as something like Dracula VS. FRANKENSTEIN but for the most part it's probably the best made film I've seen from the director. Had the running time been edited down another ten-minutes you might even say this was a good film from Adamson and that there would have been quite rare. The storyline itself certainly isn't anything we haven't seen from other Blaxploitation pictures but for the most part the cast is fun and we're given a couple good villains to help keep everything moving. On a technical level it appears to a little more effort went into the picture including a higher production value and some nice cinematography. There's a car chase towards the start of the picture that might be the best sequence from the director's filmmography and this includes a terrific shot of the action from on top of a cliff. Brown isn't the greatest actor in the world but I think he's good on screen and manages to help keep the film entertaining. Russ Tamblyn plays a drug dealer named Ziggy and adds a lot of fun and especially during his introduction scene. The film eventually runs out of gas and it drags too much during the finale but overall this is a minor effort in the genre that fans of the director's should like. The most bizarre scene is when a woman offers to do a gang bang if she loses a card game. She does lose but then tries to back out when the men force themselves on her. I'm really not sure what Adamson was trying to go for during this scene but it's pretty bizarre with the type of score on it.

Late, great grind-house trash movie-maker Al Adamson takes a stab at the blaxploitation genre -- and, surprisingly, the net result rates a cut or so above the norm, meaning that what we got here is a genuinely solid 70's drive-in black action opus. Former gridiron great Timothy Brown (whose other B-picture credits include "Bonnie's Kids," "The Dynamite Brothers," the Filipino women-in-prison potboiler "Sweet Sugar," and the third Cheri Caffaro "Ginger" feature "Girls Are for Loving") ain't half bad as rough'n'tough streetwise Las Vegas cop Kicks Carter, who's determined to get the goods on a fancy hotel operation which serves as a front for all kinds of illicit and illegal activities (gambling, bribery, gun-running, prostitution, y'know, the usual spit-in-the-face-of-both-the-law-and-morality kind of nasty stuff). The villains of this particular piece are an enjoyably vile pack of vicious down'n'dirty subhuman vermin: the ever-dependable Russ Tamblyn slimes it up delightfully as Ziggy, a brutish, loutish, obnoxious loan shark and nightclub manager (check out the scene where Ziggy gleefully beats a guy up with a sledgehammer and then crushes the dude's legs by running them over with a car!); Darlene Anders oozes coolly understated menace as the motel's evil, predatory lesbian owner, and J.C. Wells shows substantial smooth, slimy, sinister style as Guido, a bald, flinty, very business-like gangster who specializes in selling ill-gotten firearms. On the fetching femme side we've got the supremely sexy'n'slinky Tanya Boyd of "Black Shampoo" and "Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks" fame as a feisty, snoopy TV reporter and love interest for Kicks. And then there's Al's always welcome space cadet wife Regina Carrol, looking unusually haggard and worn-out, but still acquitting herself passably as a melancholy lounge singer (Carrol even belts out the unexpectedly lovely and heart-rending downbeat ballad "No More Mail Until Tomorrow").Under Al's uncharacteristically proficient direction (Adamson, by the way, can also be briefly glimpsed playing blackjack in a casino during a nifty montage sequence), "Black Heat" measures up as a perfectly agreeable and diverting little low-budget number: we've got typically sharp and crisp cinematography by the tireless Gary Graver, Paul Lewison cuts loose with a righteously grooving, get-down happening jazzy soul score, the gratuitous sex, profanity and violence level is suitably ample and explicit (the movie hits its scuzzy highlight when a disgusting bunch of greasy, grinning slobs cheerfully gang rape luckless compulsive gambler Jana Bellan after she loses a poker game to them and doesn't have any money to cover her loss), the action set pieces are pretty smoking (Carter and Ziggy's final no-holds-barred fisticuffs confrontation in a junkyard definitely hits the stirring spot), and both the hip, slang-ridden dialogue (the word "dig" is said a lot) and especially the gaudy, tacky, eye-wateringly ugly 70's clothes are every bit as laughably dated and ghastly as they ought to be. Granted, "Black Heat" sure ain't another "Shaft," but overall it still qualifies as an above average cops-and-criminals crime/action programmer from our ever-reliable Grade Z schlock flick pal Al. Rest in peace, Mr. Adamson.

Black Heat is available under many titles, as are most films made by the late exploitation director Al Adamson. Also like many Adamson films, there are no major name stars, only a few washed up names and a few never-quite-made-it names. The story features a black cop in Vegas (Timothy Brown) out to nail bad guys. That's it. The plot is as thin as an average TV cop show from the same period. It's interesting to see Russ Tamblyn playing a really gritty, despicable character. It's hard to believe he's the same guy who played Riff back in the film version of "West Side Story". There's a couple of OK action scenes but the film is pretty tame by today's standards. At least it has a distinctive 70s feel to it. Brown is OK in the lead but didn't have much of a movie career.