He's (Also) One Bad Mother: TRUCK TURNER

I have a great love for blaxploitation.  Sure, it’s exploitative (hence the term), and the characters are rarely shown in a completely positive light.  But characters were rarely depicted in a completely positive light in any kind of action movie from the ‘70’s.  Gene Hackman’s character from THE FRENCH CONNECTION was a total asshole; it was still a great movie.  More importantly, blaxploitation was about the only place African American audiences could see themselves centrally represented at the time.  Great blaxploitation movies were all about African Americans taking control of their situation and (usually) solving their own problems.  They even dealt with gender inequality by making women like Pam Greer stars of their own movies.  If not for blaxploitation, we would not even have the term badass.  Badass is the only word you can use for Isaac Hayes in TRUCK TURNER.  Well, that and slob. 

   

The Capsule:

Hard drinking, messy living, cat loving Mac “Truck” Turner (Isaac Hayes) is a skip tracer.  That’s bail bondsman lingo for bounty hunter.  He and his partner, Jerry, apprehend dangerous criminals who have skipped bail for ridiculously small amounts of money.  Sometimes they bring ‘em back alive, other times, less so.  Trouble comes when they take on a violent pimp named Gator.  Gator himself doesn’t cause that much trouble, because Truck shoots him.  Gator’s girlfriend, Dorinda (Nichelle Nichols), is the real trouble.  She rules Gator’s stable of prostitutes with an iron fist, which I guess makes her the Stable Mistress.  Not really up on my pimp terminology.  She puts out a hit on Truck, inciting her fellow pimps to go gunning for him.  Truck makes short work of them until the baddest pimp in town, Harvard Blue (Yaphet Kotto), brings in the heavy hitters.  They’ll go after his boss, his partner, his girl, even his cat to get Truck in their sights, but they’re going to find out no one hits harder than Truck Turner.

Truck Turner, played by and sung about by the legendary Isaac Hayes, is a bit of a mess.  He’s introduced waking up in his garbage strewn apartment wearing only his shoulder holster.  He has so much half eaten fast food around that he must have gotten his cat primarily for rat control.  I don’t see how he can be too mad at his cat for pissing on his last clean shirt.  I can guarantee that litterbox was not freshly maintained.  Besides, he wears the shirt anyway.  I hate to imagine what his other shirts were like if the one smelling of cat piss was his best option.  In addition to being a huge slob (which he resents being called), he’s not the world’s greatest boyfriend.  He forgets to pick up his larcenous girlfriend when she gets out of jail, and only buys her a box of chicken before taking her home to bone.  He does win her over with his tender side, though.  When it’s time for the lovin’, it’s hard for her to stay mad at Isaac Hayes.  Especially when Isaac Hayes is playing in the background.

This was only Hayes’ second movie, years before he would be the A Number One Duke of New York.  His delivery can be a little creaky at times, especially if compared to Richard Roundtree’s Shaft, which American International Pictures clearly wanted the public to do.  Hayes had just won an Oscar for the “Theme from Shaft”, after all.  Where Shaft is icy smooth and professional, Truck has a certain blue collar charm.  Very blue collar.  He and Jerry barely make enough money bringing in bail jumpers to get by.  The processing cop even makes a joke about it.  At least they are able to bargain slimy lawyer Fogarty (Dick Miller!) into giving them $1000 a piece for Gator.  Lucky for them they had a dead/alive clause.

Even for the ‘70’s, Truck has questionable morals.  He has no problem shooting someone in the back or finishing them off after they have been disarmed.  It’s never unprovoked, all of his targets are gunning for him, he just doesn’t believe in wounding.  If Truck only applied that kind of follow through with his cleaning habits, his apartment would be spotless.  Sometimes his methods can be extreme.  He dangles a creep out of a high window to get him to play ball, and even threatens to kill a totally innocent prostitute to get information.  To be fair, I’m sure he was only bluffing on both counts, but still.  That prostitute probably had a shitty enough life already.  She didn’t need Truck’s bullshit too.  

The pimp brigade in this is pretty great.  They are not quite as colorful as the pimps from BLACK DYNAMITE (Chocolate Giddy-Up!), but you can see where the influence came from.  One of them is a white cowboy pimp whose eye patch always matches his outfit.  The one he wears to Gator’s funeral is covered in rhinestones.  Another guy has fairly standard pimp gear, but one of his girls sports a rainbow afro (for clown fetishists?).  The procession of pimpmobiles following the hearse is also impressive.  The pimps are not just the comic relief though.  They are the major villains of the movie.  The film balances them well, showing them to be both horrible and ridiculous at the same time.  Even the retired pimp that Truck comes to for information (played by Scatman Crothers in an awesome toupee) slips a nasty streak into his benevolent elder statesman routine every once in a while.  

The worst of the batch is Nichelle Nichols, playing way against type as Dorinda.  She gives a very un-Uhura speech to her stable of girls.  While holding a pimp gathering, she introduces each one with a tally of their yearly earnings, like they were race horses.  In private, she berates them and threatens to toss them out of their posh life of degrading servitude.  Dorinda’s vendetta against Truck is the driving force of the movie’s violence.  She is foul mouthed, vicious, and cruel.  As far from her STAR TREK counterpart as you can get.  She certainly doesn’t do any fan dances.

Dorinda might be the nastiest, but the most dangerous is Yaphet Kotto’s superpimp, Harvard Blue.  Kotto is amazing in everything he does, and he absolutely shines here.  He’s introduced wearing a white crushed velvet suit and diamond studded tie.  Not a tie pin, the tie itself is studded with diamonds.  It must be dry clean only.  Most of the time, he comes off as chillingly commanding.  He’s someone you do not want to fuck with.  But he has his goofball moments, too, mostly relating to dialogue.  While trying to be charming with Dorinda’s girls, he says, “I’m rich, I have money, I’m cute, I’m handsome.”  He angrily describes Truck as “a bulldog with eyes up his ass.”  Is that a good or a bad thing?  I don’t see how that would be useful.  Regardless, it sounds badass when Yaphet Kotto says it.  

The action is nice and gritty, very ‘70’s style.  The first car chase has Gator’s pink caddie smashing into a flower stand, a baby carriage full of bagels (?), and a homeless man’s fire barrel.  The two guys carrying a large pane of glass must have been on a coffee break, because that’s about the only thing he missed.  The car even explodes while going over a cliff.  You would think it would blow up when it hit the ground, but fuel tanks were very touchy back then.  I love that Truck’s partner Jerry gets pulled over for speeding in the beginning of the movie, but the cops are nowhere to be found when he’s firing a gun out of his sunroof while zooming down a crowded city street.  There’s a great, knock down drag out bar fight that really takes advantage of Hayes’ imposing frame.  He really seems to be a guy who can take a pounding without slowing down.  When it comes to gunshots, they are not shy about letting the bright red blood fly.  Bodies explode like bags of red paint.  Half of their budget must have gone to squibs.  

The chaotic hospital shootout is a brutal and effective climax.  Not at the level of HARD BOILED, but still pretty satisfying.  It has a fantastic start.  Truck comes to visit his boss, Nate after Harvard Blue’s goons nearly beat to death.  While Nate is all laid up and bandaged in a hospital bed, Truck slips him a revolver.  When Nate asks him why, Truck says he might need it.  Literally one second later, Blue and his crew show up at the door.  Nate starts blasting from his bed and all hell breaks loose. Blue’s goons bite it pretty quickly, leaving Truck and Blue to go shooting indiscriminately through the hospital.  They knock down patients, disrupt operations, and send everyone diving for cover.  Blue ends up holding some little kid hostage to get out of there.  See, Truck, this is why we have such strict visiting hour policies now.    

As silly as this movie can be, Kotto has a legitimately stunning [spoiler] death scene.  It’s almost entirely silent, with an extreme close up on his face as he tries to walk away from a fatal wound.  He’s too tough to admit he’s dying.  

As typical with blaxploitation, the language can make a liberal white guy, like me, cringe.  It does have it's progressive side, though.  Most of the women in the movie are prostitutes and very one dimensional, but the role of Dorinda is extremely bold, if despicable.  Nichelle Nichols gets to be strong, sexy, and devious.  She really digs her teeth into it and is clearly happy not to be saying “yes, Captain” all the time.  Truck’s girlfriend, Annie (Annazette Chase) doesn’t have much to do, but is feisty and confident.  She calls Truck out on his bad behavior, and he seems to genuinely feel bad about it.  They actually have a pretty sweet relationship, even after he sets her up for shoplifting to make sure she's out of harm's way. In the end, he wins her back by giving her kitten who also pisses on his clothes.

Director Jonathan Kaplan came from the Corman factory, so he was already versed in filming exploitation.  He had already done a Jim Brown movie (THE SLAMS) the year before.  He continued in the action vein for the rest of the ‘70’s, branching out afterwards.  He is probably most famous for THE ACCUSED with Jodie Foster, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her role.  Props to Foster, of course, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t have to go half the movie with a shirt smelling of cat piss.  That honor goes to Hayes.

C Chaka

A Grime Fairytale: THE DARK BACKWARD

        

Some movies just make you feel dirty.  It usually comes from watching gritty, unpleasant characters do unappealing things.  You might even feel like you need to take a shower afterwards.  Be aware, after watching THE DARK BACKWARD, there is not enough soap in the world to make you feel clean again.  If you can stomach it, there’s actually a lot of fun to be had.

The Capsule:

Perpetually sweaty sad sack Marty Malt (Judd Nelson) is a garbage man by day, standup comic by night, and terrible at both.  His jokes fail to generate anything but apathy.  He is encouraged to continue by his best friend and human cockroach, Gus (Bill Paxton).  Marty’s depressing life takes an unexpected turn when he grows a third arm out of his back.  He looses his nightclub standup gig, his horrified girlfriend, Rosarita (Lara Flynn Boyle) leaves him, and his mother won’t look at him.  But Gus and sleazebag agent Jackie Chrome (Wayne Newton) immediately scheme to exploit Marty’s freakish condition to push him, and them, into fame and fortune.  But even with three arms, happiness is always just out of Marty’s reach. 

To call THE DARK BACKWARD a black comedy is a severe understatement.  It’s more of a grime fairytale.  Everything in the film, people included, seems to be coated in a layer of oily filth.  It almost permeates the screen.  Even the opening credits seem to be written in grease.  It’s based in a nameless city during an undefined time period.  Going by the clothes, it seems to be the 1950’s or early ‘60’s, but it has more of a stagnant, timeless feel to it.  It certainly isn’t anywhere in reality.  The city is dank, dirty, and covered in trash (the garbage men don’t so much as pick up the trash as spread it around).  There is no sunshine, no one is happy (except Gus), and there doesn’t seem to be any hope of it getting better.  It’s like the Anti-Disneyland.   If this movie had a Tinker Bell, she would have syphilis.  

The movie has a number of interesting parallels to the Disney adjacent WALL*E.  Both are set in a world composed of garbage.  Both are worlds people seem to have given up on.  The big difference is that instead of leaving little robots to clean things up, the departing humans left behind a bunch of losers and creeps to make things worse.  And like WALL*E’s Buy N Large, the world of THE DARK BACKWARD has its own ubiquitous commercial monopoly, Blump’s.  It seems to have a hand in everything from sanitation to musical instruments, but it specializes in food products.  Terrifying food products.  Billboards advertise Blump’s Squeezable Bacon, commercials hawk Blump’s Cheddar Scented Cheese, refrigerators are filled with Blump’s Pork Juice.  Blump’s is the detail that completes the twisted fairytale world, making it feel real and (thankfully) unreal at the same time.  Of course Blump’s is the corporation that would cater to and rule this world.  Like the Radiation-Free Reindeer Steaks from HARDWARE, it’s perfect product placement. 

The movie doesn’t really have a hero, it has a schlub.  Judd Nelson is almost unrecognizable as Marty Malt.  He somehow transformed himself from the angry tough guy in THE BREAKFAST CLUB to a human version of Golum.  He’s pale and skinny and always hunched over.  The only difference is Golum told better jokes.  He’s so timid, hiding behind his coke bottle glasses, greasy hair, and oceans of flop sweat, it seems more like he’s on a firing squad line instead of behind a microphone.  His jokes are so bad that the depressed patrons of Syd’s Nightclub don’t even bother to heckle him.  They just stare blankly, or quietly sob, and continue to slowly drink themselves to death.  Tough room. 

Despite being a schlub, Marty isn’t completely alone.  His accordion slinging friend Gus is the best thing about the movie, and all because of Bill Paxton’s manic performance.  The character is possibly the most vile, disgusting person ever created, but Paxton plays him with such relish he is almost lovable.  Okay, lovable is the wrong term.  Horrible fascination is more accurate.  It’s like seeing footage of someone popping a particularly ripe pimple.  You don’t want to watch, but you can’t turn away.  Gus is the only person who seems to legitimately enjoy living in this world of filth.  He’s a figurative pig in literal shit.  His greatest talent is not his accordion playing, it’s his ability to eat things that would kill any normal person.  Or animal.  He digs into putrid chicken like it was fresh out of the fryer.  He’s actually delighted to find a half-eaten sandwich discarded in the landfill.  

He also has the least erotic sex scene ever committed to film, and this is after he licks a corpse.

Continuing the Disney analogy, Gus is the Jiminy Cricket to Marty’s Pinocchio.  He relentlessly encourages Marty in his quest to become a real comic.  Most of his encouragement, though, is blatantly dishonest and self-serving.  It might make Marty momentarily feel better, but it usually just makes things worse.  When Marty sprouts the extra arm, Gus actively exploits the situation to tag along into the limelight (or at least that world’s grim, sad version of the limelight).  He emotionally bullies Marty into doing things he doesn’t want to, and guilts him into being grateful.  Just when you think he might have the slightest genuine regard for his friend, Gus (somehow) seduces Marty’s ex-girlfriend to insure no positive influences can get close to him.

Almost as bad is Wayne Newton’s sleazy agent Jackie Chrome, who is so insincere he might as well have dollar signs instead of pupils.  With his shiny, colorful suits and drawn-on mustache (sometimes crookedly), he’s actually the movie’s classiest character.  That’s saying something.  What’s great about Jackie Chrome is that he is only marginally more successful at promoting Marty than Gus.  He changes Marty’s name to Desi the Three Armed Wonder Comic, gives him a full makeover that doesn’t change his appearance in any way, and books him on a horrifying kids TV show, The Twinky Doodle Amateur Showcase.  Marty’s brand new act consists of him doing a slow twirl to show off his third arm after telling the same terrible jokes. 

There is no explanation for why Marty grows a third arm.  It starts off as a lump on his back.  When he goes to see Dr. Scurvy, played brilliantly by James Caan, the doctor just berates him and slaps a band-aid on it.  He does the same thing when Marty returns with a baby hand sticking out of his back.  The joke of the movie is that Marty never does anything with the arm.  It’s merely a freakish accessory, highlighting what a weirdo he is.  No one can look further than the obvious gimmick.  It’s sort of implied that Marty doesn’t even have full control of the arm, it seems to have a mind of its own.  It might be the most sympathetic character in the movie.  When Marty is looking longingly through a window at his ex-girlfriend, the arm pats him on the shoulder.  It provides more comfort than any whole person in Marty’s life.

[SPOILER for the end]  Keeping with the theme, shit just gets worse for Marty.  Just when he finally gets the attention of a reputable talent scout, Dirk Delta (played by Rob Lowe), and is bound for Hollywood, his third arm disappears.  Both Gus and Jackie are furious with him, as if he somehow did it on purpose.  Marty convinces Jackie to call Dirk, be honest, and see what happens.  Jacky nervously spills the beans and waits for the rejection, but his face lights up at the response.  Beaming, he relays the message to an eager Marty and Gus.  “They said…send the accordion player.”  Gus and Jackie do not give Marty a second thought before hopping into a limo and leaving him in the dust.  Marty tries to reconnect with Rosarita, but she’s gone, too.  He slinks back to the only thing he has left, the open mic at Syd’s Nightclub.  But in the movie’s singular ray of hope, Marty finds that as he relates the pain of his last few days, he starts getting laughs.  Creating a routine on the fly, you can see Marty start to break out of his sad, suffocating shell.  He’s finally able to do what he’s always wanted, to give people a short reprieve from their shity, shity lives.

It’s one of those movies that make me feel a little bad about finding it so funny.  Oddly, it never feels mean spirited.  The misery is evenly spread around.  Even though the undeserving seem to succeed in the end, I doubt they are going to be any happier than when they started.  Their success is built on a sham of happiness.  Marty is the only person to have achieved something genuine, meager though it is.  That seems to be enough for him.

Writer/director Adam Rifkin is pitch perfect with the dark, cynical tone of this movie.  His post BACKWARD work has been all over the place, including a number of family films.  The only one I’ve seen is MOUSEHUNT, which I was pleased to see retained a bit of the Rifkin darkness.   No corpse licking, though.  Probably for the best.

C Chaka

More Than a Mouthful of Action: RAW FORCE

I love an ambitious failure. I love when someone's vision far exceeds their capabilities.  More importantly, I love it when that person realizes this, but pushes ahead valiantly anyway. Sometimes, the ambition overcomes the failure.  Sometimes there is so much heart and passion poured into a project that you have to overlook the obvious shortcomings.  Other times you get a glorious mess that leaves you dumbfounded.  On the rarest occasions, you get Hitler jumping up from behind a tombstone with a rocket launcher.  This and so much more awaits you in 1982’s kung fu/zombie/booze cruise adventure RAW FORCE.

Capsule:

A gang of leering creeps transports a plane full of kidnapped women to a mysterious island. You know these creeps are bad news because their boss is a chubby Hitler in a white suit. He's going by the name Mr. Speer and wearing Clark Kent style glasses, but who is he kidding?  They sell the women to a bunch of weirdo monks for chunks of raw jade, which look a lot like green painted styrofoam, but what do I know about geology. Cut to a cruise liner captained by a perpetually drunk Cameron Mitchell. Three members of the Burbank Karate Club (most likely the only members of the Burbank Karate Club) want to sail to the mysterious Warriors Island.  According to legend (documented on the forbidden island’s travel brochure), disgraced martial artists from around the world go there to die in the hopes of being resurrected.  It’s a long journey, so that leaves them plenty of time to pal around with a sleazy middle-aged horndog, attend drunken parties, and find romance.  Their fun is interrupted when Chubby Hitler’s goons attack their cruise ship to keep them from the island.  They manage to escape, along with a tough SWAT policewoman, a kung fu fighting steward, and a few others, only to wash up on Warriors Island, where the real action is about to begin.  

I so want a Burbank Karate Club tee shirt.  It has to be the dorkiest name ever for a martial arts school, and it fits these guys perfectly.  I’ve seen this movie a few times now, and I still can’t remember any of their names.  The IMDB page doesn’t help much (67 roles listed, four with photos).  I just know them as the stoic romantic, the hothead, and the worthless guy with the mustache who has to be rescued by the other two.  They are competent if unspectacular fighters, though the hothead does a dramatic, slow motion flying kick into a truck.  SWAT Lady is much more impressive, since she’s played by Jillian Kesner, star of the thoroughly entertaining exploitation kung fu flick, FIRECRACKER.  All the other female characters in the movie are pretty stereotypical, but Kesner is a serious ass kicker.  She gets the best kill in the film, or at least the most technically impressive. If I was stuck on a zombie filled island, I'd stick by her. 

The real star of the movie, though, is Cameron Mitchell.  He was slightly past his prime in 1982 (by about 20 years), but you wouldn’t be able to tell from his performance.  Actually, you can instantly tell, but Cameron Mitchell certainly can’t.  He plays Captain Dodds with such gusto that you have to love him.  I’m just not sure what movie he thought he was making.  All the rest of the cast might be hopping around with their high kicks and their fancy stunts and what not, but all Mitchell needs is a revolver and a (off camera) bottle of booze.   He lumbers around like a dangerous grandpa.  While taking cover with the others during a shootout, he tells them, “I saw Clint Eastwood do this in a movie once.”  Then he just stands up and starts firing randomly.  Right, he must have been thinking of that one movie where Clint shoots a gun at something.  I’m betting he improv’d that line.  And his entire part.  You don’t direct Cameron Mitchell, you just roll camera and let him go.

The best (and worst) part of the movie is undeniably the boat party raid.  There are so many things astonishingly wrong with this section.  One of them is that the director apparently decided to film a college frat movie in the middle of his kung fu action movie.  Our BKC heroes go to a boozy social held in the cruise ship’s wood paneled rec room (not someone’s basement, honestly).  There they party down with the sleazy horndog,  his clueless wife, SWAT Lady,  her sister, tipsy Cameron Mitchel and the horrible cruise director all arguing like the Lockhorns.  Oh, and about 20 people we’ve never seen before.  These aren’t just background extras, these people have multiple, unrelated scenes with full dialogue.  There’s the remarkably average guy who is somehow a chick magnet.  He’s also a devout Christian, or possibly a Satanist, not entirely sure where they were going with that.  There’s the bartender who looks like a human troll doll and smashes blocks of ice with his forehead for no reason.  There’s the gangster’s kinky ex-girlfriend seducing an oblivious square.  There’s the knucklehead in the bathroom who doesn’t understand how pants work attempting to undress the woman from I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE while she stands on the toilet drinking a beer.  That was weird.  It’s seriously like two completely unrelated movies accidentally intersected.  

At least they had an exit strategy for getting out of the spontaneous frat movie.  A boat full of Chubby Hitler’s goons sneaks onto the ship and brutally slaughters every extraneous character.  But even this is incredibly bizarre because all of the creeps are dressed like they are infiltrating a Halloween party.  We have a swordsman in a silver Ziggy Stardust vest three sizes too small.  There’s a guy in Kabuki face paint and a balaclava.  A dude dressed like the Village People construction worker.  One of them is wearing a Superman shirt (most likely not endorsed by DC Comics).  One is in ski goggles and bumblebee pants.  It's all pretty amazing.  I’m fairly sure the Costume Designer was the director’s 8 year old niece.  I’m amazed no one was wearing fairy wings or tutus.  

The best part is that this section is played entirely straight.  These are serious criminals.

The survivors of the doomed frat ship eventually wash ashore on Warriors Island.  After a firefight in a graveyard with the remnants of Chubby Hitler’s men, our heroes (plus the horndog) meet the monks and learn the truth of the island.  It’s the same truth that was spelled out in the travel brochure, except that it turns out the monks get the power of resurrection from eating people.  Mostly women, so maybe it has something to do with estrogen.  Either that or they are just sexist cannibals.  On a side note, this may be the only movie where the zombies don’t try to eat you, but the living do.  Also, it’s never explained why the monks are resurrecting the dead martial arts warriors anyway, since they never do anything with them.  The zombies just shuffle around the island, slashing the occasional undeserving victim or very deserving horndog [SPOILER FOR SOMETHING YOU WERE WAITING FOR THE WHOLE MOVIE].  I don’t see why any martial arts warrior would bother coming there to die in the first place, disgraced or not.  It’s not a thrilling afterlife.  They don’t even get a training montage.

The last part of the movie is a long fight against blue skinned ninjas and samurai zombies as our heroes make their way to Chubby Hitler’s plane.  The cannibal monks don’t fight, by the way.  They just walk around laughing and looking way too pleased with themselves.  Seriously, they stop just short of high-fiving each other.  They get no comeuppance at all, other than having to live on a boring island with a bunch of zombies.  At least their supply line of tasty prostitutes has dried up, so that sort of sucks for them.  


Chubby Hitler, on the other hand, gets a much more satisfying end.  [SPOILER]  He jumps into a lake while trying to escape, despite the clear warnings over and over during the movie that it is filled with ferocious Asian Piranha.  It’s even mentioned in the travel brochure.  Just to make sure you know what’s happening, he actually says “I’m being eaten by piranha!”  Cue the piranha stock footage, some bloody makeup, and a few plastic fish pinned to his suit, and Chubby Hitler gets his just dessert.  Or just becomes dessert.

This was director Edward D. Murphy’s first film, and he jam packed it with as much awesome as he could fit into one movie.  Then he stuffed about three more movies into it.  He wound up with the most demented episode of Fantasy Island ever.  It is literally an embarrassment of riches.  Very, very cheap riches.  And in the enthusiastic spirit of the movie, it ends with TO BE CONTINUED…  Only in our hearts, Edward D. Murphy, only in our hearts.

C Chaka