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DVD REVIEW ARCHIVE
BLACK SAMURAI (1976)
Revelation DVD (region 2)
d. Al Adamson; pr. Barbara Holden; assoc pr. John Bud Cardos; scr. B. Readick; ph. Louis Horvath; ed. Jim Landis; cast. Jim Kelly, Bill Roy, Marilyn Joi, Roberto Contreras, Essie Lin Chia (82 mins)
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Making a Cult from Beloved Ineptitude?
The films of Al Adamson are both beloved and ridiculed by fans of low-budget Z-grade exploitation.
Notorious for his supposed incompetence as a director, and thus compared to such as Ed Wood, Adamson has nevertheless earned a place within the folklore of Drive-In Americana. Indeed, Adamson’s formula of rip-off genre films with lurid titles, extremely low budgets and has-been cast members still with some name recognition was used throughout the 1970s to release a number of works in the most popular staples of exploitation cinema – horror films, sex films, biker films and blaxploitation. For the last of these, Adamson teamed with actor Jim Kelly, who since starring opposite Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon had a cult following as an African-American marital arts icon. The popularity of Hong Kong cinema with African-American audiences had not gone unnoticed amongst exploitation film producers and a number of karate-themed blaxploitation films had duly emerged. Kelly was determined to establish and cater to this market and it is partly through his iconic status that an American martial-arts movie had both a generic presence and a home-grown star. With Adamson, Kelly latched onto a series of novels by Marc Olden which also had a minor following. The result, Black Samurai, was successful enough with audiences to enable the duo to make another cross-genre effort in Death Dimension.
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Synopsis (contains spoilers)
Jim Kelly stars as the secret agent of the title, working for a mysterious organization known as D.R.A.G.O.N. In Hong Kong, thugs trail an Asian woman and kidnap her.
She is revealed to be the daughter of an influential politician noted for his honesty. When contacted, Kelly is informed of the likely suspect behind the actions – a Devil-worshipping cultist and drug lord. Kelly realizes that it may indeed be his own girlfriend who has been kidnapped and so has no choice but to go in search of her and investigate the incident. As Kelly follows, he must face an onslaught of foes, apparently working for a rival organization / religious cult with designs on power. Although Kelly is partnered by an informant, he thinks this man is double-crossing him and so sets out to use his loyalties. Meanwhile, the satanic villain is gaining control over many in authority and has designs against Kelly. Kelly soon falls in with an African-American prostitute and from her is able to determine which makeshift jail the kidnapped woman is now being held in. He makes his way there, intent to save a woman who is slowly emerging as the last innocent soul in a wholly corrupt world. However, Kelly and the partner he doubts are both taken captive by the Satanists. As the leader confronts them, Kelly soon realizes that the prostitute will play a greater role in the rituals this cult now plans to set in motion. Kelly must free himself and battle all if evil is to be stopped.
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Cultural Differences, Sexual Perversion & Gender Expectation in Subversive Chop-Shlocky Cinema
Jim Kelly stars as the secret agent of the title, working for a mysterious organization known as D.R.A.G.O.N. In Hong Kong, thugs trail an Asian woman and kidnap her.
She is revealed to be the daughter of an influential politician noted for his honesty. When contacted, Kelly is informed of the likely suspect behind the actions – a Devil-worshipping cultist and drug lord. Kelly realizes that it may indeed be his own girlfriend who has been kidnapped and so has no choice but to go in search of her and investigate the incident. As Kelly follows, he must face an onslaught of foes, apparently working for a rival organization / religious cult with designs on power. Although Kelly is partnered by an informant, he thinks this man is double-crossing him and so sets out to use his loyalties. Meanwhile, the satanic villain is gaining control over many in authority and has designs against Kelly. Kelly soon falls in with an African-American prostitute and from her is able to determine which makeshift jail the kidnapped woman is now being held in. He makes his way there, intent to save a woman who is slowly emerging as the last innocent soul in a wholly corrupt world. However, Kelly and the partner he doubts are both taken captive by the Satanists. As the leader confronts them, Kelly soon realizes that the prostitute will play a greater role in the rituals this cult now plans to set in motion. Kelly must free himself and battle all if evil is to be stopped.
The sexual perversion, rampant cruelty and vile humanity in this film reveal a very scathing and perverse view of the exploitation field.
Although Adamson seeks to combine the martial arts film and the blaxploitation vehicle, he does so with such unmitigated cynicism that the ethnographic and sexual tensions within the genre are rendered both provocative and also inherently sinister. Yet Adamson also sees the transgressive potential in such sexually and racially charged material and by highlighting the perversity he stresses the nihilism within it. Such nihilism is bound to the representation of the grotesque and the sinister: thus, the film abounds with offbeat physical types – martial-arts fighting midgets, black narcissists – and so emerges as a whole-hearted but rather budgetary-limited effort to delineate the sexual “other” operating in those exploitation films filmed in part in the Philippines. Figures of different races are offered in what is an imperative to locate the “exotic” in sexualized figures as a process of genre commoditisation: the sexual grotesque as a kind of operating principle behind narrative structure and genre iconography. As intriguing as such concepts are, they are only fleetingly developed and exist within an elaborate but strained and often unintentionally amusing style. Although Adamson has ideas, his ability to realize them as powerfully as he believes them is problematic: the intent is there nonetheless.
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Hong Kong Verite James Bond as an Emasculating African-American Man!
The fullscreen transfer is merely competent although such is listed as preserving the film’s original aspect ratio.
There is a sunny and faded cinema verite quality to the early Hong Kong street scenes and a pulpy credits sequence is an allusion to the James Bond ethos the film nicely perverts. Kelly is a most ironic Bondian playboy, depicted as an arrogant narcissist (and is shown vainly preening himself before a mirror) who enjoys the trappings of the high life (tennis, sports cars, women) but whose moral code is both reactionary and empty. In this, there is a minor juxtaposition between the much vaunted 1970s playboy lifestyle (available also now for black Americans) and the genuinely sinister sexuality of the satanic cult. The film may deal unashamedly in racist and misogynistic stereotypes but there is throughout it the subtextual prospect of a black and Asian cultural amalgam inherent in the film’s eroticism of the exotic. Fight scenes are routine and laughable although some of the more unusual physical performers (the midgets) add a sense of the grotesque to the film’s intended quality of the exotic. Daylight scenes and the film’s colour sense look greasy in this print, adding to the film’s lurid qualities. Some tilted angles are deployed and some editing jumps suggest at least a measure of censorship. Kelly delights in groin kicks, making him an amusing and self-reflexive vision of the emasculating black man.
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Lounge Music & Psychedelic Satanism
The sound transfer is in Dolby Digital mono only.
There is an oriental quality to the funky score as perhaps inevitable in the genre following Lalo Schifrin’s phenomenal scoring work on Enter the Dragon for Robert Clouse. This score segues into street ambience well enough although the dialogue is often badly synchronized. There is also a self-conscious comedy to the score as the light lounge music when revealing the kidnap victim nicely suggests her naïve obliviousness to the world around her, and hence her innocence. Indeed, the music is nicely cued to that innocence throughout, suggesting the film almost as an allegorical battle for the fate of the innocent woman – the only figure arguably not sexualized. Curiously, there is a psychedelic quality to the Satanist scenes, especially in the finale, in fine contrast to the lounge music and other scoring. Diegetic effects and background ambience are minimal and kept to the level of functional realism although there is some stylization in the slaps and other noises of physical contact during the fight scenes. Likewise, punches, kicks and hands-through-the-air effects are used to indicate the speed of the fights, even though the staging and editing do not carry the same intent. The voices often have an unrehearsed quality to their line delivery with dialogue mainly expository or perfunctorily-handled characterization. The villains use the expected racist epithets.
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No Treats for the DVD Enthusiast Here
In the way of special features are a trailer for the DVD release of the Bruce Lee movie The Green Hornet, a section linking to the film’s fight scenes (but such scene selection is without any accompanying explanation and seems an abridged chapter selection) and two brief text biographies, of Kelly and Adamson.
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AMAZON.COM DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: BLACK SAMURAI
AMAZON.CO.UK DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Black Samurai [DVD] [1976]
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