After coming off yet another successful comedy tour, Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore, a cultural force) has a party at his mansion that soon gets gate-crashed by the fuzz. They’re racist, they’re angry, they’re reactionary: they’re cops. They also want to kill Dolemite for sleeping with the sheriff’s wife, so they shoot her just in time for him to kill a deputy. He did not shoot the sheriff, so to speak.

The story changes up to have Dolemite head out to save Queen Bee (Lady Reed) from a pimp named Cavaletti (Herb Graham), all while the sheriff (J.B. Baron) pins the murder of his wife on our hero.

Like many of Moore’s films, this was directed by Cliff Roquemore and written by Jerry Jones, Moore and Jimmy Lynch, who is Mr. Motion in the film. A young Ernie Hudson appears, as does the Bronson Cave, the same place Batman lives. Watch this and know: no permits were necessary. Rudy Ray Moore famously operated on Dolemite Time, which meant filming until the cops showed up or the money ran out.

Like a deranged Tom Jones, scenes of male-on-female oral sex are intercut with fried chicken eating, as well as moments when Dolemite services a woman so effectively that the entire house falls down around the bed. Dolemite breaks the fourth wall, pausing and rewinding the action, and there are evil female torturers with witch makeup. This feels like the product of the stickiest of the icky, and I would have it no other way.

There’s an anachronistic moment where Dolemite screams at an effeminate man, played by Doug Senior, who appeared on our live stream this weekend. Doug may not enjoy this part, as it’s really homophobic, but he had great things to say about Dolemite, who he said was soft spoken and kind when the cameras were off, but barking and wild when he needed to be.

This scene is part of the hyper-masculine, often reactionary tropes found in 1970s street comedy. However, the contrast between Moore’s onscreen persona and his off-screen kindness is a well-documented part of his legacy. He was a savvy businessman who played a character to empower a specific demographic, even if that character carried the prejudices of its time.

Made for $150,000, this made back $4.5 million. Talk about return on investment.