terrible... so disappointed.

Overrated and overhyped

Awesome Movie

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

According to the people who made that documentary entitled "The 50 Worst Films Ever Made", this mixture between horror and blaxploitation is irredeemably awful and hopeless. Luckily their opinions don't mean a damn thing to me and decided to watch it anyway. What I saw was a reasonably cool blaxploitation variant on "The Exorcist" with a strong first half and a sadly disappointing climax. The opening sequences are terrific and take place in the New Orleans of 1942. Loud-mouthed thug JD Walker is wrongfully accused of murdering his pregnant sister and executed on the spot by the real culprit; a jealous local big shot. Thirty years later in present New Orleans, the young law student and part-time taxi driver Ike volunteers to be hypnotized in a sleazy nightclub and becomes possessed with the vengeful spirit of J.D. Ike first suffers from a series of visions, showing in episodes what overcome to the real J.D, and from there onwards he becomes an instrument for extracting vengeance. With a sharp razor ready to cut anyone who crosses his path, Ike goes after Elijah Bliss – the brother who knocked up J.D's sister but nowadays pretends to be a devoted preacher. Okay, so here we have an obscure blaxploitation outsider with a relatively original premise, nifty set-up and a couple of really strong sequences during the first half hour. So this is great stuff, right? Not exactly, no… In spite of a satisfying first half and overall very enthusiast acting performances from the ensemble cast, "J.D.'s Revenge" inexplicably turns into a boring and cowardly lame film. Cowardly, because it never fully dares to develop into a horror flick and merely remains a prototypic blaxploitation effort with magnified clichés, like overlong preaches and exaggerated gangster stereotypes. One too many scenes of misogynist violence, too.

Accomplished, but unspectacular blaxploitation horror with a tremendously ripe lead performance by Glynn Turman in presenting two very different (from placid to extreme) personalities. He plays a genuinely high flying and collected law student Isaac that during a hypnosis session experiences shocking visions and begins to undergo a personality change of a brutally hot-headed and jive-talking 1940's street hustler J.D. Walker. Through flashbacks that erupted in Isacc's mind we learn that J.D was wrongly accused of murder and then killed. Now he's seeking revenge beyond the grave and he's using Isaac to do so.Director Arthur Macks doesn't generate anything particularly frightening with the flipped-out supernatural current, but works well with the gritty and murky air to cement tough groundwork. There is a ruthlessly razor-sharp vibe throughout, even though the make-up is cheaply done, it's Turman's tour-de-force performance that sells it. Despite a well-rounded story, there are moments in the script that seem to linger and succumb to repetitiveness with a conclusion that feels all too convenient. Robert Prince's unhinged music amusingly experiments with psychedelic sounds from foreboding electronic stings to funky cues. The rest of the performances are efficiently fair with Louis Gossett Jr. and Joan Pringle.

I saw this movie when it first hit the big screen in the mid 70's. I enjoyed it so much that Glenn Turman was the first actor I was inspired to do research on. When I found out he was married to Aretha Franklin, I really kept up with him. This is one of those flicks I can enjoy with company even if they've seen it before. One of those movies you can enjoy two or three times a year , like "The Five Heartbeats". I'm talking classic. It must have had some strong financial backing because the production quality was beautiful also. I don't have it in my sparse collection yet, but I'm going to get it. I don't know what it'll cost but if I have to, I'll pay as much as $20.00 for it. I know a few people I'd like to treat to a viewing of JD's Revenge.

The "possession by a vengeful ghost" storyline had probably gotten to be old and hokey already by 1976, yet a good movie that can make you feel the emotional drive of revenge could still have made such a story seem new and fresh. Here, the possessed hero seems more concerned with raping and insulting his girlfriend than with taking his revenge. This results in a rather plodding pace. I don't even know why I'm bothering to think about this film any longer; it's doubtful whether you should bother watching it. (**)