Big Bad Voodoo Mamma - SUGAR HILL

Since February is both Black History month and Women In Horror month, two themes I wholeheartedly endorse, I always feel obliged to talk about movies that intersect each.  Unfortunately, there aren’t as many great representations as there should be.  I tackled one of the best, DEMON KNIGHT (I <3 Jeryline), in the early days of Schizocinema, so I settled into a Blaxploitation horror vibe for my official February picks.  First came BLACULA, which I had seen and loved, so the next year I hit up the sequel, SCREAM,BLACULA, SCREAM (not quite as good).  While BLACULA is an excellent and surprisingly romantic film, William Marshall is such a powerful presence that Vonetta McGee’s character gets overshadowed.  Even the mighty Pam Grier plays it a little subdued in the sequel.  Both characters were well drawn and fitting to the tragic romance of BLACULA, but they weren’t the feisty asskickers I had hoped for.  So I wasn’t feeling overly optimistic about giving another Blaxploitation horror flick, Paul Maslansky’s SUGAR HILL, a first time spin.  I'm happy to say that this time, it's the leading lady that casts the biggest shadow.

The Capsule:

Diana “Sugar” Hill (Marki Bey) has a good thing going running a voodoo themed lounge with her boyfriend, Langston (Robert Quarry).  The good times end when Morgan (Richard Lawson), the local racist mob boss, gets designs for the club.  When Langston refuses to sell, Morgan’s goons beat him to death and leave him for Sugar to find.  Bad move, chumps, because Sugar uses her voodoo connections to summon Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley), the Lord of the Dead, in order make the gangsters pay.  Soon, Morgan’s goons are dropping like chess pieces as Sugar maneuvers the top man right where she wants him.  Will Sugar’s ex lover cop, Valentine (Richard Lawson) figure things out before Sugar gets her ultimate vengeance?

SUGAR HILL is most famous for its silver, bug eyed zombies, but what it really should be known for is its star, Marki Bey.  The fact that Bey didn’t go one to the same success as Pam Grier is more criminal than anything committed in this movie.  She’d only appeared in a handful of movies before this, and after a few years in television (Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch, and the like), she left acting altogether.  This makes me weep, because Bey is absolutely badass as Sugar Hill.  

Sugar is a force of nature right from the start.  She’s the kind of character who gets it all done with attitude, confidence, and cunning.  Plus an army of zombies, but they are only a means to an end. She is sexy without being objectified, and doesn't rely on seduction to get what she wants, a trope that was highly leaned on in Blaxplotation/Exploitation cinema at the time.  Every major character, including Barron Samedi, underestimates her, which she ruthlessly uses to her advantage.  The scenes were she boldly negotiates business with Morgan, brushing off his heavy handed intimidation and shutting him down when he extends himself too far, are delicious.  If that crew wasn’t a bunch of racist dirtbags, you would feel sorry for them.  They have no idea what they are getting into.

Sugar is a fascinating, unconventional lead.  Brimming with righteous satisfaction at every turn of the screw, she is driven less by vengeance than by a brutal social justice.  Langston's death may have set her down this path, but it feels more like an excuse than an ultimate motivation.  She certainly isn't so broken up about the loss of her lover that she can’t flirt with her ex, Valentine.  Like BLACULA’s Prince Mamuwalde, Sugar is technically the villain, making a deal with the devil to punish those who wronged her, but she always has our sympathy.  Her fury only extends to those who deserve it.  When Valentine’s investigation gets too close to the truth, Baron Samedi wants to kill him, but Sugar insists on arranging a painless “accident” to keep him out of the action.  Sugar isn't power mad, she's just pissed off.

A big part of the fun of Blaxploitation is seeing over the top bigoted villains get what’s coming to them, and SUGAR HILL does not disappoint.  The deaths of Morgan’s henchmen aren’t especially gory, but they are inventive.  Goons are hacked up with machetes, sliced up via voodoo doll, compelled to stab themselves, massaged to death by zombies, and stuffed in a casket full of snakes.  When one poor sap gets fed alive to a pack of pigs, Sugar shouts to the hungry beasts, “I hope you like white trash.”  Zing!    

Marki Bey isn't the only one with a juicy role.  Don Pedro Colley gets to sink his gold capped teeth in as the flamboyant Lord of the Dead, Baron Samedi.  He gets a surprising amount of screen time, too.  When Sugar first summons Samedi, I expected him to just hand out a few zombies and only return at the end of the movie to collect his debt (noteworthy, he prefers to be paid in hoochie rather than souls).  Samedi, however, is not about to be sidelined to the netherworld and miss all the fun.  He inserts himself front and center at each of Sugar’s traps, either as a disguised bystander smiling on, or as an active participant in the vengeance.  My favorite is when he pulls up in a cab to drive one of the hoods to his impending fate, making foreboding chitchat with the unsuspecting dope the whole way.  Samedi is a hands-on boogyman.

We all know where this kind of story is going.  You can’t make a deal with the devil without eventually having to pay your due.  Karma always comes around, even to the  most justified (again, see BLACULA).  Well, surprise suckers, because Sugar skates out scot-free at the end of this one.  Once the last slimeball is crossed off Sugar’s list, the Baron does demand payment for his service.  However, instead of giving her hand to Samedi, she instead offers up Morgan’s deplorable girlfriend, Celeste (Betty Anne Rees), to be his zombie bride.   Samedi happily accepts, hauling the screaming hussy down to the underworld.  Yes, it does play into the old stereotype of the lusty black stud with an eye for the white woman, but I got the feeling Samedi was so impressed with Sugar that he was happy to let her off the hook.  I kept expecting the director to sneak in some moralistic consequence, but nope, Sugar makes it out without an ounce of comeuppance.  She even gets to keep Samedi's voodoo daddy cane.  I’d like to think she went on to be the venerated voodoo queen who wronged women seek out to balance the scales, giving the Baron a little wink whenever she summons him up for a job.

Like all Blaxploitation, especially one directed by the white dude who made the POLICE ACADEMY movies, SUGAR HILL has its share of problematic issues.  It is certainly not a realistic look at Haitian religion, but what movie was in those--or even these--days?  It is also cheap and hokey as hell (lightning and thunder effects during broad daylight was a bold choice).  However, Bey’s fierce and uncompromising leading woman and the movie’s consistently fun tone balance things out.  And sometimes, you just want to see a badass woman toss a creep’s money in his face and bury him in a coffin full of snakes. 

C Chaka

Holiday in Confusion - PUNK VACATION

Tonal shifts in movies can be risky business.  A perfectly timed hairpin turn is exciting; startling the audience and deepening their engagement.  Perfect is hard to pull off, though.  An awkward shift breaks the flow, pulling the watcher out of the story.  The filmmakers need to know exactly what they are doing or it could be disaster.  If you can't nail it, don't even try.  Alternatively, go in all the way.  Throw in so many tonal shifts, redirections, and crazy tangents that the watcher is left punch drunk, staggering through the movie in stunned fascination.  Guess which approach Stanley Lewis took for 1990’s PUNK VACATION?

The Capsule:

In a quiet Californian desert town, Deputy Steve Reed (Stephen Fiachi) fills his days with unsuccessful target practice in an empty field, responding to false alarms, and getting yelled at by his paranoid, commie hating boss, Sheriff Virgil (Louis Waldon).  The monotony ends on the night an eclectic gang of bike punks ride into town.  An altercation over a Dr. Pepper vending machine outside a diner leaves the owner dead, his young daughter catatonic, and one punk in the hospital.  While Reed and the other cops bumble around, his girlfriend, Lisa (Sandra Bogan), vows vengeance for her father and sister.  She hunts down the gang on her own, but finds herself on a head-on collision with its equally strong willed--and frighteningly psychotic--leader, Ramrod (Roxanne Rogers).  Lisa's fate, and that of the entire town, will wind up in Deputy Reed's hands, and no one is happy about that.

This direct to video cheapie was released in 1990, but is a product of the '80s all the way.  Early '80s, at that, Billy Idol "White Wedding" period.  The anachronistic aesthetic is just the first sign of this movie's serious case of multiple personality disorder.  In the beginning, our punk vacationers seem like they have rolled straight out of DEATH WISH.  They come just short of Jeff Goldblum’s vile band of caricatures as they torment and ultimately murder Mrs. Kemper.  The DEATH WISH comparison is so pronounced they even use the same catatonic daughter cliché, though thankfully the sexual assault is implied rather than shown (at least I think its implied, there is zero exposition explaining what is wrong with her).  The trajectory is set for a full-on revenge flick, swapping a despondent father for a pissed off sister.  Straight forward, right?

Except, a weird thing happens.  The longer the movie spends with the punks, the less they seem like vicious animals and more like a quirky collection of misfits, each with their own unique look and personality.  There’s the French chick who looks like Siouxsie Sioux from Siouxsie and the Banshees.  The bandana wearing emo guy who plays a sad harmonica.  The bald Goth punk who carries nunchucks but doesn’t know how to use them.  The skinny white dude who dresses like Prince.  Two valley girl punks discuss future career opportunities while on guard duty (one wants to be an electrical engineer).   

They are an odd crew, and none odder than Feggy (Billy Palmieri), who clearly did not read the entire job description when he answered the Punks Wanted ad.  He’s a bit of a hippy peacenik, always whining when Ramrod wants to play it tough.  He usually falls in line, until eventually making a stand and declaring he doesn’t want to be involved in "senseless violence or car theft."  Not exactly the poster boy for the renegade punk lifestyle, yet everyone in the gang not only puts up with him, but genuinely cares for him.  The family that stabs diner owners together stays together, I guess.

Incidentally, true to the title, this is literally a punk vacation.  The gang aren’t on a drug run, or on the lamb, they are just taking a road trip, getting out of the hustle and bustle of L.A. for a few days.  When they are holed up in a barn after the unplanned murder, Feggy even complains that he thought they were just going fishing.  I think he is actually carrying traveler’s checks.  

Whether this was the intent or not, I started to like these lunkheads.  Every once in a while, there will be another radical tone change and they will become threatening again, but for only so long.  For instance, pistol packing Lisa confronts Ramrod at their barn hideout, but the punks get the jump on her.  The next scene has her tied to a tree in her underwear, which doesn’t bode well.  It turns out she was only stripped because Ramrod needed her clothes to sneak into town disguised as a normal, non-punk girl (pretty clever, really).  The punks guarding Lisa have their minds more on stick sword fighting rather than anything sordid.  At one point, Lisa is tied to the ground with rat cages at her hands, but no one lets the rats out, and Lisa doesn’t seem overly concerned.  It’s like the Spanish Inquisition staged by elementary schoolers.

Ramrod is the only legitimate badass in the bunch and stays on point the entire time.  It’s an interesting group dynamic.  She is so intense that no one dares question or challenge her, but she has a fierce, almost maternal attachment to her band of freaks.  She keeps things democratic, like asking for a vote on what they want to eat. Her administrative skills are solid.  She gets seriously fucking scary at times, like when she faces down Reed, ignoring his gun and makes her gang vote if they should rape the deputy before killing him.  I think she’s just trying to intimidate Reed (it works), but since she was the one getting aggressive with the daughter, who knows?  During a Viking funeral for some of her fallen punkmates (they just toss the bodies on the fire rather than making a fancy pyre), she advocates rampaging through the town and killing all the cops.  So, yeah, she’s a firecracker.  The dodgy kind, that might blow up in your hand as soon as you light the fuse.

Whether this was an intentional feminist nod or not, I like that the story is advanced by two assertive and (comparatively) competent women.  Lisa, while not as badass, is fearless in her personal pursuit of justice (not just revenge).  She certainly runs rings around the fantastically inept, all male police force.  Maybe if Lisa was the sheriff instead of the clueless, commie obsessed doofus, Virgel (“Did Patton call for the State Troopers when he invaded Iwo Jima?”), they wouldn’t be so useless.

This includes her boyfriend, Deputy Reed.  I’ve never seen a main character this bad at his job outside of a (intentional) comedy.  He  takes out one of the punks fleeing the scene of Mr. Kemper’s murder completely by accident.  He hits him with his car while pulling into the parking lot, knocking himself out in the process.  His investigative skills aren’t exactly razor sharp, either (“If they haven’t left the area, they might still be around.”).  At one point, he goes into the hospital carrying some girl we’ve never seen before.  When the nurse inquiries about what happened, he just says “Don’t ask.”  Both the girl and the nurse react like this isn’t unusual for Reed, and we never hear about it again.  My guess is that he accidentally shot her while trying to get her balloon out of a tree.  Again.

After Lisa is kidnapped, the movie switches tracks once more as Reed teams up with fellow cop Don (Don Martin) to come to the rescue.  Kind of a LETHAL WEAPON vibe, but with morons.  So, more like SAMURAI COP.  They make the smart call of not telling Sheriff Virgil what they are up to, because that lunatic would have gotten everyone, killed.  Instead they break into an unspecified house, steal some guns, and handle it themselves.  Astonishingly, not only do they get Lisa out unharmed, the take out a couple of punks along the way.  Also, Reed shoves a cucumber on to the barrel of his shotgun before shooting someone.  I…don’t know why that happened.

The climax brings another whiplash, putting us in the punk's camp when they face off against Virgil’s posse of drunken redneck hunters (including a Vietnam vet wearing a pith helmet, as Vietnam vets are known to do). The punks are automatically more sympathetic because ‘80s movie law always has drunken rednecks higher on the asshole scale.  Only Nazis rate worse.  The punks initially have the advantage because of Ramrod’s decisive planning.  Then they split up, and without her direct motivation, everyone’s bloodlust tanks, even the dude who was Special Forces in ‘Nam (or maybe just ROTC, they weren’t super clear on that).  The traps they set for the hunters make Kevin from HOME ALONE look like Jigsaw.  Rednecks get knocked off a pipe into a four-foot ditch, tripped down a slight hill slope, and caught in a net.  Luckily, the boozed-up gun nuts are too dumb to just lift the net over their head, so that buys some time for our heroes/villains.  

Everything boils down to the final confrontation between Lisa and Ramrod, the movie's emotional core.  And yes, there is an emotional core, and character arcs, though they resemble a Richter scale measurement more than a graceful arc.  Bullets are exchanged, justice is served.  Maybe?  I might have mentioned early that this movie can be a tad confusing.  

So many questions are left unanswered, such as what the hell did I just watch? Was this a gritty revenge story or a screwball comedy?  Will Feggy ever go fishing?  Director Stanley Lewis followed this up by not making movies anymore, as did most of the cast, so we may never know.  PUNK VACATION is a mess, but for reasons I can't explain, I still dig it.  Sometimes we should just follow Deputy Reed's advice and don't ask.

C. Chaka

Doube (Barrel) Dose of Grier - COFFY

Dear Pam Grier,

I’m sorry.  I’ve been running Schizocinema for over two years and have reviewed over a hundred movies, but only ran my first Pam Grier movie a couple of weeks ago.  Worse yet, it was SCREAM BLACULA SCREAM.  Fun to write, but not a worthy entrance for someone of your caliber.  Don't get me wrong, there is no such thing as a bad Pam Grier performance.  Your voodoo priestess was the star of the show.  And while you were the one to make Blacula scream, I just wanted more.  I wanted you to stare down a vampire until he quaked.  I wanted you to put a racist cop in his place.  I wanted you punch a bat.  You didn’t get to call anyone a motherfucker.  In short, I wanted the full Pam Grier experience.  So, to make it up to you, and to me, and to everyone, I’m closing out Black History Month with a double dip, the quintessential Pam Grier movie (that doesn’t end with BROWN).  Get ready for Jack Hill’s 1973 Blaxploitation gem, COFFY.

The Capsule

To everyone who knows her, Coffy (Pam Grier) is a hard working nurse who wouldn't hurt a fly.  But when her darling 11 year old sister is turned into a vegetable by some bad junk, Coffy takes her double barrel sized grudge against dope dealers to the streets of L.A., leaving a trail of dead pushers in her wake.  Just when she is thinking of retiring her shotgun, her friend Carter (William Elliott) gets beaten into a coma for being the only cop not on the take.  Her soon to be congressman boyfriend, Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw)
says he is going to clean up the crime, but Coffy's wheels of justice turn faster.  She is going to work her way up the ladder, starting with King George (Robert DoQui).  The dapper, high society pimp gets her a personal meeting with big time crime boss Arturo Vitroni (Allan Arbus), but just before she can ice the main man, his vicious henchman, Omar (Sid Haig) gets the jump on her.  While Vitroni decides what to do with her, Coffy gets an unpleasant surprise that pulls the rug from under her.  Down isn't out, though, and Vitroni's gang are in for their own surprises when Coffy unleashes her righteous fury.

Ask anyone, in the know, to picture Pam Grier at her most badass, 9 times out of 10, that image is going to be from either COFFY or FOXY BROWN.  Both are the work of legendary exploitation writer/director Jack Hill.  He made mean, gritty movies that were exactly what the '70s drive-in crowd wanted, heavy on the violence, nudity, and attitude.  Hill knew how to push the boundaries way outside of good taste, while keeping it fun and satisfying.  His morally questionable heroes always went through hell, but they gave much more than they got.  None more so than his #1 pistol packing mama, Pam Grier.  He knew he had something special in Grier ever since her breakout role in THE BIG DOLLHOUSE (yeah, you can also thank Hill for the Women in Prison genre boom).    

Hill takes all the torrid tropes and gleefully dials them to the max for COFFY.  The film opens with Coffy seducing mid-level, fashion conscious dope dealer, Sugarman (Morris Buchanan).  His proposal is drugs for sex, her counter-offer is a shotgun to the face.  Hill isn’t graphic, but he doesn’t leave anything to your imagination.  His violence is cheap, blunt, and hits like a hammer.  The carnage ranges from pulpy to disturbing, depending on who is dishing it out.  The scene where Sid Haig’s proudly racist Omar drags one of the characters behind a moving car, and into every barrier he can manage, is straight-up horrifying.  

Nudity is also ladled on liberally, most notably in what could accurately be described as the “Catfight at the Boob-A-Rama Bowl.”  Coffy infiltrates superpimp King George’s swank penthouse headquarters by posing as a sophisticated Jamaican call girl (clearly from her accent, King George has never been to, nor heard anyone one from, Jamaica).  His number one lady, Meg (Linda Haynes) doesn’t like all the attention her lover/boss/abuser is giving the new girl, and rallies the rest of the gals against Coffy.  Eventually, all the tension boils over into a call girl throw down where EVERYONE ends up topless.  I swear, if one of the girls had been in a space suit, she still would have a boob out by the end.  The ribald rumble comes to an end when Meg gets a handful of the razors Coffy hid in her hair.  I’m not sure if she had other plans for them, or if she just knows that Catfighting 101 states eventually a bitch will grab your hair.

Speaking of which, Coffy has a talent for hiding weapons.  She uses her hair again to stash a sharpened hair clip, and keeps a silenced pistol inside a stuffed lion.  Still not sure where she was concealing the double barrel shotgun from the beginning.

The rogue’s gallery Coffy is up against is so cartoonish, like the camera-shy hitman with one blacked out glasses lens (I’m glad Snake Pliskin went with the eye patch), or aggressively offensive, like kinky sadist Vitroni (he’s sort of a racist Joel Grey), that you can’t feel bad when they get wasted.  King George is the one exception, mostly because nobody deserves his horrendous fate (not at Coffy’s hand), but also because he earns a modicum of sympathy for how he comforts a post-catfight Meg.  He tells her he loves her and gives her a couple of weeks to rest before turning tricks again.  As pimps go, that’s almost gentlemanly.  Plus, he has his own theme song.  

That bigoted bastard Omar, on the other hand, deserves everything he gets.  Haig plays him like a grinning mad dog, gleefully anticipating his next chance to cause harm.  Omar smugly struts around like he owns the place, so its immensely satisfying when he goes out like a punk, looking terrified and begging for help.  

Though she clearly does not mess around, Grier doesn’t play Coffy like a cold-blooded killing machine.  She has doubts about the dark path she walks.  She gets scared, and is overpowered by Vitroni’s goons.  The one thing she doesn’t do is cower and wait to be rescued.  Even before her cop friend Carter got his noggin bashed, Coffy was all on her own.  She thinks fast, follows through, and she fucking well means business.  When a hooker she is trying to get information from pulls a knife on her, Coffy's first impulse is to smash a liquor bottle and wrap her coat around her arm like she’s a gladiator ready for battle (the hooker wisely backs down).

And for god’s sake, do not betray this woman.  [Spoilers coming] Turns out, her moralizing politician boyfriend is in bed with Vitroni.  To worsen the sting, Brunswick looks Coffy in the face and gives her up to Vitroni just to save himself.  Naturally, after she plows through the gangsters, dirty cops, and hitmen (literally), Coffy ends her spree at her ex’s house.   



Up until now, Coffy has been on a righteous crusade against the toxic dregs of society.  She’s kept some distance between her deeds and herself.  Brunswick is personal.  Not only did she love the conniving congressman, she believed in his commitment to the black community.  Learning that he was full of shit on all fronts crushes her.  Even after everything she has seen and heard, she still wants to believe him.  The smooth talking weasel almost has her convinced he’s still a stand-up guy, too, until his topless, white girlfriend pops out from the bedroom.  Coffy ends the debate by shooting him in the dick and taking a beach side walk in the sunrise.

Having just come from seeing BLACK PANTHER, the racial politics of Blaxploitation tends to be eye rolling at best.  Even though the priority of these movies was less about tackling social issues and more about selling tickets, the value cannot be dismissed.  The ‘70’s produced dozens of movies starring a predominately black cast, showing African Americans as heroes and ass kickers.  They handled their own problems, because the system was rigged against them.  Bad guys tended to be blatantly racist, and almost always got their comeuppance.  Blaxploitation may not have offered a nuanced, realistic representation of African Americans, but it was still representation.  The genre died with the decade, leaving the '80s a conspicuous void until directors like John Singleton showed the market for African American themed cinema was still alive and hungry.  Just imagine how the genre could have evolved if it had escaped its exploitation roots of the ‘70’s, filling the gap between Melvin Van Peeples and Spike Lee, weening out the stereotypes while maintaining the spirit.  At the very least we would have gotten more Pam Grier movies.

C Chaka