The greatest movie ever!

Lack of good storyline.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Blistering performances.

Blaxploitation is a seriously underrated genre. Bottom line, it you enjoy blaxploitation you'll love 'Black Shampoo' he's one bad mother... shut your mouth.Actually the hero Mr. Jonathan isn't a vigilante. He's just the only straight hair stylist at a salon catering to desperate white housewives. Inevitably Mr. Jonathan ends up giving his clients more than just shampoo, that is if their daughters don't get to him first.Mr. Jonathan gets into a tussle with a give turkey heroine smugger whom wants Mr. Jonathan's love interest back as his black sex slave. When Mr. Jonathan tries to defend her, their salon is vandalized by thugs.The whole thing ends in a bloody showdown involving chainsaws, axes, and pool sticks. Surprisingly violent.So the plot's light but 'Black Shampoo' delivers on the classic blaxploitation is promises.The recent film 'Black Dynamite' failed as a parody of blaxploitation because it failed to realized that blaxploitation is funny enough on its own.

I got a fair amount of entertainment out of this diverting if forgettable blaxploitation entry, but then I approached the whole thing looking at it as tongue in cheek. If one were to take it seriously, they might well find it in the "so bad it's good" category. A stiff, not too charming John Daniels is cast as Mr. Jonathan (whether that's his first or last name doesn't matter), owner / operator of a hair salon and also irresistible stud muffin to a variety of (mostly white) women. Trouble brews when Brenda (Tanya Boyd), his secretary, is threatened by her former employer, a mob boss named Mr. Wilson (Joseph Carlo). Wilson and his thugs mean business, and among their methods used are the trashing of the salon and the sodomizing of one of the employees. This dumb but fun movie comes complete with the expected funky music score with the ever present "wacka wacka" guitar, two flagrant gay stereotypes, and what will be the most appreciated by exploitation fans, an ample serving of female nudity. This certainly is a trashy outing, as the over sexed daughters of one customer unrelentingly come on to Mr. Jonathan, and it can be a very funny one as well. Just witness the awkwardly staged and ridiculous salon trashing episode. One has to see it to believe it. Hell, there's even a Western themed costume party in which one party goer is absurdly dressed in ballet gear. Things really pick up towards the end, where Mr. Jonathan is pursued by the sadistic mob flunkies armed with a miniature chainsaw. Now, we don't get to see too much detail when he carves them up, but this is an amusing bit of business nevertheless. In fact, the climax in general is pretty violent. With the level of exploitation on display, this should entertain some viewers, and it manages to generate some hearty laughs as well; the music score is at times utterly ridiculous. All in all, this probably won't become a classic or get too many retrospectives but it's a mild hoot for people with certain tastes. Seven out of 10.

Hmmmmm.......whilst often cited as a blaxploitation version of the 1975 Warren Beatty hit, Shampoo, the only real similarity between the two films is that the main protagonists are hairdressers...and of course the titles are ever so slightly similar of course....um....anyway, in this offering, our hero, Mr Johnathan is a man as much in demand for his man tool as for his curling tongs. And in a nutshell there is the intrinsic plot of the film. Well, OK there is a bit more to it then, involving one of our heroes conquests being the 'property' of a mob boss and the said slimebag's subsequently ever more violent methods of trying to get her back, however, it has to be said that the film itself is sadly, for the most part so mundane that it is hard to pay much attention to the unfolding 'events'. Thankfully, the final twenty or so minutes do kick into overdrive with a particularly gory climax but such a bizarrely violent finale ultimately seems strangely, completely juxtaposed with all that precedes it.Certainly I've seen far worse flicks in my time but in all honesty I can't recommend this for either Blaxploitation nor bad movie fans; Note: Tedium doth not a good film make.

one of the better low budget blaxploitation films of the 70s. Great bits as the hero comes home to his beauty parlor to find it ransacked and his gay hairdressers kidnapped! He gets vengeance a la chainsaw.