Tommy Gibbs (Fred Williamson) was abused by a white cop named Captain Jack McKinney (Art Lund) before growing up to become the leader of Harlem’s black mafia. He ends up taking over the world for a while, but you know how gangster movies go.

Larry Cohen, who directed and wrote this, said that Sammy Davis Jr. wanted to be in it. He told Camera In the Sun, “Davis wanted to do a picture in which he was the star, instead of being a flunky to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. So I suggested that they do a gangster movie like Little Caesar, since he was a little guy, and so was Jimmy Cagney, and so was Edward G. Robinson. And I thought he could play a little hoodlum working his way up in the Harlem underworld.” Davis couldn’t pay, as he had IRS problems, so American-International Pictures was looking for a movie with a black star. The rest worked out splendidly.

Never mind that the movie ends with Tommy’s wife, Helen (Gloria Hendry), getting tired of all the abuse and helping rivals get the job on him. He gets shot a whole bunch of times but just won’t die, even beating the evil cop into gore with a shoebox. Then, he stumbled back into his old neighborhood where a gang beats, robs and kills him. Well, at least in Europe and then when it came to home video.

Never mind that Timmy was alive for the sequel, Hell Up In Harlem, which has him fall in love with religious woman Sister Jennifer (Margaret Avery) and learn that people close to him ordered the death of his wife Helen. I mean, sure. That’s a totally different reality from what I just watched.

It doesn’t matter. Larry Cohen could do no wrong, and Fred Williamson is the king of New York in this movie. Cohen was also bothered by real mobsters while making this, so he gave them parts in the film and put them on the poster. There were no problems after that.

This and Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off are the only movies with a James Brown soundtrack. It’s as amazing as you think it will be.

June 18: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Rock and Roll!

This movie is so much better than it has any right to be. The third movie in a series of air disaster movies with a Hot Topic aesthetic should not be this good.

Slade Craven (John Mann, lead singer of Spirit of the West) is the Marilyn Manson of this universe, set to play his final concert on a TransContinental Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Toronto that will be covered by Z-Web-TV, who has sent cameraman Ethan (Ben Derrick) and reporter Erica Black (Monika Schnarre, who of course we all know from Waxwork II: Lost In Time).

FBI agent Kate Hayden (Gabrielle Anwar) has been trying to arrest computer hacker Nick Watts (Craig Sheffer, Cabal from Nightbreed) and finally tracks him down, just in time for Craven to get replaced by Satanic superfan Simon Flanders, who wants to crash this plane into Stull, Kansas. FBI agents Frank Garner (Joe Mantegna, predating his FBI agent role on Criminal Minds) and Dave Barrett (Mike Dopud) come on board just in time for Satanic agents to blow up a control tower, killing an FAA agent (Brad Loree, who was Michael Myers in Halloween: Resurrection).

When fans see through Simon’s disguise, he reveals that Erika — and co-pilot MacIntosh (Rutger Hauer) — are both part of the plan to crash the plane. Why Stull, Kansas? According to Wikipedia, “Since the 1970s, the town has become infamous due to an apocryphal legend that claims the nearby Stull Cemetery is possessed by demonic forces.” The film even brings up the unproven story that Pope John Paul II refused to fly over the city because of how Satanic it is.

Craven ends up saving the day and with the help of the hacker — and a copy of Flight Simulator — he lands the plane. The hacker is supposed to be arrested, but we’re left with the idea that he’s about to have kinky sex with the FBI agent.

The funniest part is when Temu Marilyn Manson has to land the plane. He takes off his evil necklace and starts to pray to God. This is after a long scene where he gets checked by the TSA and has to show off every evil piece of jewelry he has.

The last movie released by Trimark, this was directed by Jorge Montesi — it has the look of TV shows, like his work on Total Recall 2070, Relic Hunter, Jake 2.0, Mutant X, Highlander, Forever Knight and the TV movies Omen IV: The Awakening and the remake of Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? — and written by Wade Ferley.

Do we not know that Craig Sheffer was in the last movie in this series in a different role? Is this prescient as it pertains to 9/11? Do I like the drugs even if they don’t like me?

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 17: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Lucio Fulci!

This is 39 of 57 movies directed by Lucio Fulci, so I have made my way through all of his genre films and am now in the comedy and musical movies. Like 1960’s Urlatori alla Sbarra, The Jukebox Kids is a musicarello, and Fulci was the first director — with this movie — to make just such a movie.

I Ladri, the first movie Fulci made, flopped. His career was on the line, so this populist film is what emerged. Record company owner Commander Cesari (Mario Carotenuto) and his granddaughter Guilia Cesari (Elke Sommer) are at odds over what music to release. He likes the classics, she loves rock and roll. He goes to jail, she goes out to the nightclubs and starts to sign bands to release; it’s very similar to Urlatori alla Sbarra, but you know Italy. Fin che la barca va, lasciala andare.

You get to see and hear Adriano Celentano and the Modern Jazz Gang,  I Campioni, Fred Buscaglione and his Asternovas, Betty Curtis, Tony Dallara, Gianni Meccia, Ornella Vanoni and more. Plus, Anthony Steffen years before he was an Italian Western star and Fulci himself showing up as a talent show boss.

Basically, Scopitones — a type of jukebox featuring a 16 mm film component; the Italian versions were called Cinebox — with a story between all the songs. It’s funny because the screamers, as these artists were called, were looked down on by adults and said to be so rebellious. Today, they seem quaint. So does the way Fulci shot them. No zooms. No throwing up entrails. Everyone’s eyes are safe.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

I have a love/hate relationship with Saturday Night Live. Maybe because it’s me coming from Pittsburgh, because that’s one of the few places where it didn’t air live, because Chiller Theater was such a big deal. Or maybe it’s because I would switch back and forth to the Youngstown affiliate — WMFJ 21 — and watch some of the original cast. I was so into comedy as a kid that while Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, John Belushi (I mean, he dressed as Godzilla!) and others made me laugh, I was raised on Monty Python, SCTV, Benny Hill and Dave Allen At Large, so SNL gradually impressed me less and less while also obsessing me. I couldn’t stay away from its pull for long. Soon, I was watching it every week, finding every movie its cast found their way into and deifying several of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players (and then hating them when they weren’t who I wanted them to really be).

Over the years, I’ve read just about every book and seen every documentary, and I am frankly at odds with how the show is made. Does it have to be live? Why do they write it in such an insane way, staying up all night? Why does it keep getting worse as comedy gets better? Why is there a messiah cult around Lorne Michaels and the casts of this show that is not shared by other groups he worked with, like the Kids in the Hall?

I also love Dan Aykroyd without reservation, despite his white man appreciation for Chicago blues — I get it, I love Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf too — going out of control and getting commodified into the House of Blues and in movies like this, which I blame for scenes where Anthony Michael Hall acts black and an entire club doesn’t stimp him but instead accepts him. But hey, he was Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute, so I will forever love him. Plus, he believes everything in Ghostbusters and initially wrote it under the name Ghost Smashers and Ivan Reitman said,  “It was set in the future…and it took place on a number of different planets or dimensional planes. And it was all action. There was very little character work in it. The Ghostbusters were catching ghosts on the very first page — and doing it on every single page after that — without respite, just one sort of supernatural phenomenon after another. By the 10th page, I was exhausted. By the 40th or 50th page — however many there were — I was counting the budget in hundreds of millions of dollars.” So fuck yeah, Dan Aykroyd, despite this movie.

I’m getting to it.

I also love the myth of The Blues Brothers, a movie made in chaos, fueled by cocaine, that movie theater owners didn’t want to run because it was too black. According to All the Right Moves, “…Mann Theatres (a major cinema chain at the time) then announced they wouldn’t be showing The Blues Brothers in all of their theatres. Owner Ted Mann believed that white people wouldn’t be interested in such a film, explaining his reasons to Landis: “It’s mainly because of the musical artists you have. Not only are they black. They are out of fashion.” This led to The Blues Brothers opening in less than 600 theatres across the U.S., less than half the amount a big-budget movie could usually expect.”

But don’t feel bad. “Despite this setback, it still managed to make $57 million at the domestic box office, and proved even more successful overseas, grossing $58 million.”

It was the kind of movie that my grandfather would watch over and over on HBO, gleeful at the scenes where the Nazis died, joyous at the cars exploding all over the screen, a movie totally not made for him but one that entertained him just the same, he telling all of us in the room to get ready for another part, giving us play by play of what was happening in his raptuous love of a film that was probably only equalled by The Bad Lieutenant and Terminator 2, the only movie — and thing — I ever saw that made that tough old steelworking man cry.

Seriously, a car blew up on him once, and his back had no skin. He barely registered it. I also once saw him get stabbed in the arm, and he took the steak knife out and kept eating breakfast.

I tell you all this to say that I want the sequel to succeed, but it falls victim to all the problems of the first movie, almost karmically being the recipient of that movie’s excesses.

There’s no Belushi, to start. Not even Jim, who couldn’t fit this into his schedule. Instead, we get John Goodman, who I also like very much, as the new member of the band. This is not an even trade.

It’s dedicated to the cast members who died: Belushi, Cab Calloway, John Candy and Junior Wells. While nice to mention, this is what we call a downer.

Anyways, Elwood (Aykroyd) is finally let out of jail, 18 years later, only to learn his brother is dead and no one is there to pick him up. He’s finally given a ride by Matara, who works for his old drummer, Willie Hall. This starts the movie’s idea of getting the band back together, as well as Elwood mentoring a kid named Buster (J. Evan Bonifant) at the suggestion of Mother Mary Stigmata. By the end, we have The Blues Brothers Band, which includes Joe Morton as Curtis’ son Commander Cabel Chamberlain,  Steve “The Colonel” Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Willie “Too Big” Hall, Tom “Bones” Malone, Lou “Blue Lou” Marini, Matt “Guitar” Murphy and Alan “Mr. Fabulous” Rubin in a battle of the bands against Queen Moussette’s (Erykah Badu) The Louisiana Gator Boys, who are Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Gary U.S. Bonds, Eric Clapton, Clarence Clemons, Jack DeJohnette, Bo Diddley, Jon Faddis, Isaac Hayes, Dr. John, B. B. King, Tommy “Pipes” McDonnell, Charlie Musselwhite, Billy Preston, Lou Rawls, Joshua Redman, Paul Shaffer, Koko Taylor, Travis Tritt, Jimmie Vaughan, Grover Washington Jr., Willie Weeks and Steve Winwood.

So yeah, it’s a 63-car pileup—more than the first movie and everything else—but it also has Blues Traveler in it.

Anyways, director John Landis said to the A.V. Club, “We’d always intended for a sequel with John, but of course when he passed away, it was obvious we weren’t going to do it. But Danny had been performing with John Goodman and Jimmy Belushi and the band, and he said, “You know, this is great, because this music is recognized now—let’s do a movie.” I said, “Great, sure, okay,” and we wrote what I thought was a terrific script. Then Universal Studios eviscerated it. That was a strange experience, because the first thing they said was that it had to be PG, which meant they couldn’t use profanity, which is basically cutting the Blues Brothers’ nuts off. The first movie is an R-rated film, but there’s no nudity or violence in it. It’s just the language. Then they said, “You have to have a child, you have to have…” The bottom line was that the only way that movie was going to get made was to agree with everything they said. You know the difference between a brown-nose and a shithead? Depth perception. That’s the only time I never really fought with the studio, because they didn’t really want to make it. So we did every single thing they said. By the time we’d done that, the script was kind of homogenized and uninteresting. Danny said, “It’s about the music. It’s just about the music, John, so don’t worry about it. We’ll get the best people, and we’ll make a great album, and get these people on film. We have to document these people.” It’s interesting because, as much as I make fun of Danny, three or four of those guys have passed away since we made that movie. People say, “Okay, you’ve got Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, and John Lee Hooker in The Blues Brothers—who’s in Blues Brothers 2000?” The answer? Everyone else. The first movie has five musical numbers, and the second movie has 18.”

He also killed Vic Morrow and made Max Landis, so what the fuck does he know?

A few years ago, Jim Belushi told Cinema Blend that Aykroyd — who makes a marijuana blend with him called Blues Brothers — is constantly pitching new sequel ideas: “Actually, you know, he’s always got ideas. I mean, he’s got this whole thing about, you know, ‘I find Jake’s brother in Albania, you know. I found out there was another brother, a Blues Brother. And I go to Albania and I find him and I bring him out. He doesn’t speak English.’ I mean, he’s got all kinds of ideas. The Blues Sisters, he wants to do one with the Blues Brothers but Blues Sisters. You know, he’s a creative son of a gun.”

There was also a Nintendo 64 game made. It didn’t come out until two years after this, and it made $32 million on a $30 million budget.

At least Paul Schaffer, the guy who got the original band together, finally got to play with them.

June 16: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is ‘80s Comedy!

In 1980, 8-year-old Sam was all in on MAD Magazine—every issue. It’s how I saw so many R-rated movies, as I couldn’t go to the theater but could read them as redone by Mort Drucker. Imagine my joy when the Usual Gang of Idiots decided to make a movie, just like those new kids, the National Lampoon.

A note: MAD has the humor of old school Jewish comedy, teaching me words like schmuck while the Lampoon was rich kids who went to an Ivy League school and did drugs. Also: Oversimplification can be funny.

Publisher William Gaines — yes, the same guy who did Tales from the Crypt — told The Comics Journal, “What happened is that we had a contract with Warner Brothers to put out a MAD movie. It’s like four years old now. They came up with a script that we didn’t like, and then they came up with a script using our scriptwriters that they didn’t like, but meanwhile they threw this script onto our desk … Although there were many things in it that I thought were offensive and should be removed, generally, I liked the script. And I thought, “Well, in addition to a MAD movie, there’s nothing wrong with having something like Lampoon did with Animal House.” Animal House was “Lampoon Presents” and really had nothing to do with the magazine; it was just using their name, and it was a good movie, and it was very successful, and it made Lampoon a lot of money. I guess. So we were going to do the same thing. “MAD Magazine Completely Disassociates Itself from Up the Academy“. But that was too long for them; they couldn’t think in that many words. They put the damn thing out without all the deletions they had promised to make, which means they’re liars. I’m talking about one of my sister companies [laughter] … And there we were connected with it, and there wasn’t much we could do about it. I paid Warner Bros. 30 grand to take MAD‘s name off for television. So, for $30,000, we got out of being associated with it on Home Box Office. It won’t say “MAD Magazine Presents,” and Alfred E. Neuman won’t be in it. And it was well worth $30,000.”

It is quite like many other sex comedies that came after the men of Delta House. Chooch (Ralph Macchio) is the youngest son of an organized crime family; El-Hashid “Hash” Amier Jr. (Tommy Citera) is the son of an oil sheik; Eisenhower “Ike” MacArthur (Wendell Brown) is the son of a faith healer who keeps marrying young wives and Hash keeps schtupping them (see, I did learn from MAD!). Oliver Holt (Hutch Parker) has a governor for a father and just wants to sleep with his girlfriend Candy (Stacy Nelkin, who is Ellie Grimbridge, and if you get that, welcome to the site), except his father doesn’t want a teen pregnancy getting in the way of his re-election.

Chooch wants to go straight, so enter new recruit, Rodney Ververgaert (Harry Teinowitz), who likes to make things explode.

They’re all being brutalized by Major Vaughn Liceman (Ron Leibman, the Emmy and Tony-winning actor who asked for his name to be removed from this movie; he was also married to Linda Lavin and Jessica Walter, which is pretty good when you think about it), your typical bad guy in a teen sex comedy.

Candy ends up getting sent to military school as well, so Liceman sets the couple up and takes pictures of them in the act while demanding that he gets to sleep with Candy to protect Oliver’s father’s election. There’s also a snobs vs. slobs soccer game, Tom Poston playing the most stereotypical mincing gay character ever, Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas as a coach, and the mind-blowing Barbara Bach, Lady Starke as Bliss, the teacher every boy in school wants.

Also, it’s not good. It’s aggressively bad.

Directed by Robert Downey Sr., who said it was “one of the worst fucking things in history,” and written by Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses, it was so bad that MAD skipped a letters column to present MAD Magazine Resents Throw Up the Academy, which called out Leibman taking his name off the movie, the fact that actors had to have been pubished by being in it and just two pages of the writers, artists and editors being so mad about the movie that they all quit.

Here’s just a sample of this hit piece:

“Once upon a time, there was a Publisher of a magazine. He was a happy man, publishing his magazine. But one day, he said, “Wouldn’t it be swell if they made a movie and my magazine sponsored it?! It would help sales! Isn’t that a wonderful idea?” All of his Yes-Men agreed that it was a wonderful idea, and so the smart people in Hollywood made a movie, and the magazine sponsored it. But did the Publisher live happily ever after? Not on your life! He overlooked one little thing while summoning images of millions of people rushing to see the movie and then rushing to newsstands to buy his magazine. The thing he overlooked was to find out if the movie was any good! Well? Was it? If you’ve seen it, you already know the answer to that question!”

I had never seen a magazine hype something and then apologize. It really was a big deal to my young brain.

It also has a terrifying real-life Alfred E. Newman, designed by Rick Baker. I can only compare this, as the end of the movie, to taking a painful shit and then wiping, only to find blood all over the toilet paper.

Yes, Rev. MacArthur, Ike’s dad, is played by King Coleman, the man who sang “(Do The) Mashed Potatoes.”

At least the soundtrack is good, filled with stuff like The Stooges’ “Gimme Danger” and “Night Theme,” Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” and “X Offender,” The Kinks’ “Yes Sir, No Sir,” Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle,” The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” David Johansen’s “Girls,” Nick Lowe’s “Heart of the City” and Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” There’s no reason to have that many great songs in a film this fecund.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.