Horror Express 2020 #1: Sugar Hill (Paul Maslansky, 1974)

Well, who on god’s earth could resist a poster like that if it popped up outside their local cinema?

Say what you like about American International Pictures, they sure knew their marketing, and the decision to mix up a blaxploitation female revenge story in the ‘Coffy’/ ‘Foxy Brown’ mould with a voodoo / zombie movie was not just a great idea, but an inevitable one, in view of the company’s place in the market circa 1974.

Not only were AIP the originators of the aforementioned Jack Hill/Pam Grier classics, but the success of the Count Yorga pictures had also put them in the forefront of the brief trend for contemporary, U.S. set reinventions of classic gothic horror tropes. Indeed, their blaxsploitation/horror crossover line was already thriving in its own modest fashion thanks to ‘Blacula’ (1972) and ‘Scream, Blacula, Scream’ (1973).

As it transpires, ‘Sugar Hill’ arrived right at the tail end of these trends’ parallel box office ascendency, just before Arkoff and Nicholson started trying to realign the AIP’s output from 1975 onwards. As such, it should really have been the crowning glory of the company’s achievements in this fertile era; the icing on an already fiendishly overstuffed grindhouse cake.

Trying to assign blame for the fact that it isn’t makes for a less than edifying assignment, but…. let’s just say that, whilst watching ‘Sugar Hill’, the only thing running through my mind from start to finish was: I wish Jack Hill had made this with Pam Grier.

I mean, clearly those guys would have knocked it outta the park. Can you even imagine? Pam in full effect as the voodoo queen, commanding her zombies, as Jack got the chance to mix up the visceral pulp mayhem of his black action films with the gleeful monster kid craziness of ‘Spider Baby’. Wonderful. The late Sid Haig would no doubt have been ragin’ around as some spike-toothed mob enforcer, and no doubt they’d find someone totally far-out - like Exuma, maybe? - to play the Baron Samedi / Vodou Loa character. Allen Toussaint and Dr John might be thrown into a studio together to cook up the soundtrack, and… oh man. It would have been incredible.

Unfortunately though, that’s not the film we got. I believe Hill was still finishing up ‘Foxy Brown’ around the time this was shot, and he subsequently cut his ties with AIP following disagreements with management on the set. Grier meanwhile stayed with the company, but after ‘Foxy Brown’ she (or perhaps, her management) seemed intent on trying to make a dent in the mainstream via watered down, PG-rated re-hashes of her earlier hits like ‘Sheba Baby’ and ‘Friday Foster’ (both 1975).

In lieu of the A-team, Arkoff instead placed a call with his buddy Paul Maslansky, erstwhile producer of such AIP-distributed European horror titles as ‘Castle of the Living Dead’ (1964), Michael Reeves’ ‘She Beast’ (1965) and Gary Sherman’s classic ‘Deathline’/’Raw Meat’ (1972). Having recently returned to America after fifteen years abroad, Maslansky apparently had a yen to direct. So, Sam gave him a brief run-down on what black exploitation films were all about, suggested that combining one with voodoo would be a dead cert, then he basically just handed him the keys and told him not to dent the bumper.

In order to keep costs down and avoid hassle with the unions, production took place in the less than atmospheric environs of Houston, Texas, subbing imperfectly for New Orleans, on a punishing tight three week schedule. A script was cobbled together from somewhere or other, and actress Marki Bey - top-billed for the first and last time after playing supporting roles in a couple of pictures for AIP director/producer Arthur Marks - was recruited to play the title character. She’s not bad, but… she’s no Pam Grier, that’s for sure. (1)

Likewise, ‘Sugar Hill’ is not a terrible film by any stretch of the imagination, but… it’s certainly not an exceptional one either. The very definition of ‘adequate’, it’s one of those movies that’s just kind of…. there, for the most part. It delivers exactly what you’d expect of a 1974 AIP-produced blaxploitation voodoo movie, nothing more, nothing less. Glimpses of innovation or inspiration are few and far between.

Predictably, the story begins with Diana ‘Sugar’ Hill propping up the bar in her upstanding boyfriend’s kitsch, voodoo-themed nightclub, where we get to see a bit of the floorshow, and hear Motown group The Originals’ laboured and rather heavy-handed theme song, ‘Supernatural Voodoo Woman’. (‘Theme from Shaft’ it ain’t.)

The club is proving a runaway success, so naturally the local, multi-ethnic mob (led by Count Yorga himself, Robert Quarry) want in on the action. Upstanding BF of course is having none of it, so before you can reach for the fast forward button, he comes a cropper in the car park, and Sugar is out for sweet revenge.

Naturally, her first stop is Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully), who lives a ghostly existence in a decaying colonial mansion amid a swampy estate swathed in prop department Spanish moss and gallons of dry ice. After the requisite sacrifices and incantations, Baron Samedi (a wild-eyed, permanently grinning Don Pedro Colley) arrives resplendent, as his ping-pong ball-eyed zombie slaves rise from the mulch of the forest floor to take care of business.

Before you can find any more synonyms for ‘predictably’/’naturally’/’of course’ etc, Quarry and his assorted despicable cohorts begin to meet their supernatural doom in a neatly episodic fashion, and….. that’s about as far as a plot synopsis needs to go, really.

On the plus side here then; even if the swampy, Louisiana atmos isn’t quite what it should be, the blind, silver-eyed zombies are an effective, distinctively creepy creation, and must have made quite an impression on audiences back in the pre-Fulci/Raimi era, when such soil-covered, filth-encrusted revenants were a rare sight indeed on the big screen.

Colley is full of fun too as Baron Samedi, going waa-ay off the deep end performance-wise, even if his top-hatted Loa character never really manages to move beyond the more obvious clichés of his part, and the ‘gags’ he dishes out as he drops in on his assorted victims are uniformly woeful.

Also providing excellent value for money is Quarry, who, despite reportedly being cast in this film simply because AIP were legally obligated to provide him with one more job before nixing his contract, nonetheless does sterling work. Giving every indication of having thoroughly enjoyed himself, he transforms his underwritten mob boss character into a hip, razor sharp figure who actually becomes strangely likeable, especially when sparring with his dim-witted, racist blonde girlfriend Celeste (Betty Ann Rees).

Those minor highlights aside however, there’s not really a lot to shout about here. Though there’s some nice lighting and camerawork here and there, in stark contrast to Hill, Maslansky’s direction is depressingly inert. It’s bad sign that he fails to invest even the calamitous early death of the boyfriend character with much dramatic weight, and for the most part proceedings remain equally flat thereafter.

Although he went on to enjoy a highly successful production career through the 70s and 80s (masterminding the ‘Police Academy’ franchise, of all things), it is notable I think that ‘Sugar Hill’ represents Maslansky’s only directorial credit. The drably utilitarian, “will this do?” vibe of most of the footage he captured here answers the question of why he never gave it another shot pretty concisely.

I probably can’t entirely blame Maslansky (who seems like a perfectly nice guy in interviews incidentally) for my next complaint – it sits more with a combo of him, Arkoff and Nicholson, writer Tim Kelly, the whole outfit really I suppose, but…. well, how can I best put this?

Whilst employing white writers and directors to make majority black cast films in the U.S.A. was never going to be an ideal scenario, my belief is that, when AIP hired hip white filmmakers like Hill, Larry Cohen and Jonathan Kaplan to make black action films for them in the early 1970s, those directors at least gave the impression that they were trying to engage with black audiences.

They positioned themselves on the same level as their hypothetical viewers and took an honest stab at reflecting their concerns back to them, sometimes pushing back against the more objectionable content demanded by the studio, and often allowing their actors to bend the material to their own creative/personal needs. To not put too fine a point on it, good movies resulted.

‘Sugar Hill’ by contrast merely feels like it’s patronising its target audience. Though the “revenge against whitey” plotline essentially isn’t much different to that of ‘Coffy’ or ‘Black Caesar’, there’s no real depth here, no impact or involvement. As each of the bad guys in turn prove themselves racist, corrupt or despicable before getting iced by Sugar Hill’s zombies as the guffawing Baron Samedi looks on, the payback is so predictable, so simplistic, that viewers – be they black, white, blue or green – simply feel as if they’re being played for fools, more than anything else.

It’s as if Arkoff told Maslansky, look, you’ve gotta knock off whitey (and some corrupt, black criminal types too, just for the sake of balance) – that’s what sells the tickets. Lesson learned, he’s just ticking the boxes for his boss here. Social relevance? Implicit understanding of the economic inequalities underpinning racial strife? Reflections on the blighted legacy of slavery lurking behind all that voodoo/colonial mansion shtick? Sadly there is precious little of any of that here.

And that’s before we even get to the “only in the 70s” ending, which sees the aforementioned Celeste (the real villain of the piece, to all intents and purposes) being ritually offered up to Baron Samedi as the ‘offering’ to repay him for his hard work icing all the bad guys, leading to us being implicitly invited to cheer in approval as Colley, grinning ear-to-ear, closes in for what he must assume to be a post-credits supernatural rape scene. HAPPY ENDING, everybody!

Boy oh boy. Let’s just skip over unpacking the questionable implications of that one, shall we? It might take a while.

In a sense, ‘Sugar Hill’ reminds me more than anything of the British horror directed by Vernon Sewell for Tigon in the late 1960s, ‘The Blood Beast Terror’ and ‘Curse of the Crimson Altar’ (both 1968). It carries the same terrible stench of wasted potential, of the lightning-in-a-bottle potential of a unique confluence of time, talent and ideas being squandered, just because the guys in the back office were more concerned with delivering exploitable pictures as quickly and cheaply as possible than they were with actually making a movie anyone in their right mind would wish to see more than once.

When undertaking creative work, I’ve always tried to remember the old axiom that, if you aim for ‘good’, hopefully you’ll get something average - but if you aim for ‘average’, you’ll inevitably end up with shit. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘Sugar Hill’ is shit – it’s a perfectly serviceable movie, and certainly worth a look for fans of this particular aesthetic terrain. But, if the film’s makers had borne the above wisdom in mind, it could easily have been worth two looks, or even eight or nine, if you get my drift. And the restless spirit of Mr. Arkoff may wish to note that we’d still be paying for it every time too.

Now if only they’d got Jack Hill to make this, and persuaded Pam Grier to star, and….

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(1)In fairness to Bey, this is a criticism which can just as easily be levelled at literally anyone else in the film industry. (Werner Herzog? I mean, he’s ok, but he’s no Pam Grier.)

Soul Pulp: Shaft Among The Jews by Ernest Tidyman (Corgi, 1972)

Adding to my small collection of blaxploitation paperbacks, we have what I believe is the second of seven Shaft novels written by the character’s creator Ernest Tidyman, and… yes, the title here’s a little on the nose, to say the least.

As anyone who has read much about mid-century New York will appreciate, the city’s working class Jewish community was still just as much of a marginalised, ghetto-bound culture as NY’s African-American milieu at this point, and underworld interactions between the two were generally characterised by a spirit of resentment and distrust, so… I don’t think the title and plot synopsis here indicate that Tidyman’s novel is inherently racist, but when it comes to a WASP writer addressing this kind of subject matter, the title is at best misguided, and it’s a safe bet that 21st century readers who dare venture between these pages are liable to encounter some pretty, uh, ‘salty’ content.

Believe it or not though, I didn’t just pick up ‘Shaft Among the Jews’ just in order to shock people by leaving it sitting on the coffee table – that symmetrical, proto-disco montage cover painting – attributed online to Fred Pfeiffer - is absolutely swell.

Oh, and I think we get a glimpse of Tidyman’s sense of humour via his dedication:

Soul Pulp: Keller # 1: The Smack Man by Nelson De Mille (Manor Books, 1975)

Bloody hell. As if to demonstrate the scarcity of these ‘blaxploitation pulps’ in my collection, not to mention the frighteningly rabid conservatism prevalent in these ‘70s ‘men’s adventure’ series books, we’re already down to this one for our second (and thus far, final) Soul Pulp post.

Born in 1943, Nelson De Mille began writing series detective books from the mid ‘70s onward and is still writing thrillers at a prolific rate to this day.

Trying to determine exactly how many ‘Keller’ novels he turned out is however complicated by the fact that some if not all of these books seem to have first been published as outings for the author’s on-going character Joe Ryker, and were sometimes credited to his Jack Cannon pseudonym, except when they weren't. For reasons unknown, these Ryker books were then retooled as Keller books, with “Joe Keller” taking over as the protagonist.

From the late ‘80s onward, it seems that De Mille revised and republished all of these books as Ryker novels, and removed all mention of “Keller” from his bibliography, with most online sources following suit. Currently, some ‘Ryker’ books being sold on Amazon even have ‘Keller’ cover art attached to them, so… who knows. I have no idea what was going on with all that, to be honest.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, ‘The Smack Man’ usually seems to be listed as the fourth Ryker book, despite appearing here as the first Keller one.

As to the book itself…. well it seems to be yr standard trudging police procedural business, enlivened largely by frequent and bold use of expletives, detailed drug use and other such tough guy shit, with some rampant misogyny, bone-crunching violence and ugly racial stereotyping thrown in for good measure. As such, there's probably some good, cynical fun to be had here, if you're nasty enough to dig it.

For a pure dose of 1975, just check out this central card ad page and the text that surrounds it. Nice.

Soul Pulp: Superspade # 2: Black is Beautiful by B.B. Johnson (Paperback Library, 1970)

As our previous post here touched upon the sparks that flew when the aesthetic of the early ‘70s ‘black action film’ hit the literary world, I thought I might as well pull a few choice volumes off the shelf and instigate a (sadly very short) mini-series looking at what I suppose we’re contractually obliged to term “blaxploitation pulp fiction”.

First up then, we’ve got one of my favourite recent finds, and to begin with a quick note on the cover art - I wash my hands of even trying to find an art credit for this one, but I quite like the effect the artist has created by leaving most of the secondary figures as pencil sketches, just filling in (presumably) the main protagonist and antagonist.

This gives it a kind of dynamism that sets it apart from yr average example of this early ‘70s ‘action collage’ style, although whether we should treat this as the result of deliberate artistic intent or merely “we need this at the printers by Friday goddamnit, put the fucking brush down and gimme what you got so far”, I will leave to your discretion.

Moving on the the book itself, it is notable I think that it appeared in the same year that the movie version of ‘Cotton Comes To Harlem’ set about gently lampooning the Black Power movement.

The Black Panther Party, needless to say, had been big news in the U.S.A. in 1969, with the organisation’s membership reaching an all time high and Panther-related violence making waves in Chicago, New York and L.A. Bobby Seale meanwhile was under arrest charged with ordering the murder of a suspected police informant, and December saw Fred Hampton gunned down in an exchange of fire with cops in Chicago.

Clearly the editors at Paperback Library wasted no time in exploiting the publicity surrounding these events to the max, and the enigmatic B.B. Johnson knocked out no less than five ‘Superspade’ novels for them in 1970, with one further book following in ’71.

Like Ossie Davis’s aforementioned movie, ‘Black is Beautiful’ obviously takes a pretty cynical view of Black Power, skirting the fringes of libel (“Ridge Hatchett”? - c’mon) as it “exposes” the allegedly self-serving con men behind the revolutionary rhetoric.

At least Davis (and Chester Himes before him) had the advantage of actually being black when they expressed such opinions however; though Paperback Library may have dug up the coolest author photo in recorded history for “B.B. Johnson”, I will eat my neckerchief if the individual behind these books was actually a gentleman of colour.

Skim reading a few chapters of ‘Black is Beautiful’ in fact, the authorial voice seems more suggestive of a middle-aged, white divorcee typewriter jockey mopping his brow with a gingham handkerchief in a back office somewhere, scouring the local black community paper to try to get the right lingo down whilst cursing his editors for not just letting him do another Bond rip-off. (The book eventually runs with the idea that the Panthers – sorry, ‘Jaguars’ – are a front for Castro’s Cuba incidentally, which puts my hypothetical author back on the more familiar ground of good ol' anti-commie paranoia.)

But, who am I to make such assumptions? Prove me wrong if you dare, and if it turns out ‘Superspade’ actually WAS a side-gig for Melvin Van Peebles or Isaac Hayes or somebody, I’ll be on neckerchief sandwiches all week.

Either way, I fear this book is no classic, but its value as a cultural artefact is mighty indeed.

200% Cotton.

(Penguin, 1974 / Cover by Paul May / John Claridge)

(Dell, date unknown [presumably 1970] / artwork taken from the movie poster by Robert McGinnis.)

Normally, I’d try to avoid putting two copies of the same book side by side on my shelves, but when I scoped the exquisite American Dell copy of Chester Himes’ ‘Cotton Came To Harlem’ - featuring artwork taken from the superb poster for the 1970 movie, courtesy of Robert McGinnis, as well as a rather nice font - I knew I had to make an exception and stack it up next to my Penguin copy.

I like the Penguin cover too, but the Dell really is a thing of beauty. I only wish my crappy scanner could do justice to the detail of McGinnis's illustration. And no, I’m not sure what “the wild new ‘inside’ movie” is supposed to mean either, but hey – that’s 1970 for you.

If you’re unfamiliar with Himes and his work, I’ll save you most of the hyperbole and simply state that I consider him one of the best American crime writers, period, and that this 1964 belter is a great place to start.

Need more info before committing? I’ll let the back office boys at Penguin and Dell step in to do their damnedest;

The inspiration for this post by the way comes from the fact that I recently got around to watching the aforementioned movie adaptation of ‘Cotton Comes To Harlem’, directed by Ossie Davis. It’s not a bad effort by any means, but whilst it keeps the events and characters of the novel pretty much intact, it falls well wide of the mark when it comes to actually capturing the tone of Himes’ writing.

True, the broadly comic elements and madcap chase antics prioritised by Davis’s film are certainly present in the novel, but the difference is, Himes managed to put them across whilst remaining hard-boiled as fuck, with a burning rage against those who seek to take advantage of the black, urban poor boiling under every page. The movie, essentially, does not.

Significantly downplaying the wanton bloodshed and sweaty, sexualised energy of Himes’ book, as well as the grittier elements of his social realism, the movie plays safe, largely limiting its social criticism to a rather mild lampooning of the contemporary Black Power movement. Meanwhile, the white establishment largely gets off scot-free, with Digger and Ed’s clueless superiors eventually rewarding them for their zany, crook-catching ways much has you’d expect at the conclusion of any light-weight buddy cop movie.

Such compromises though are perhaps inevitable when we consider that ‘Cotton..’ was a major studio venture released several years before ‘Shaft’ and ‘Superfly’ helped make the black action film a viable proposition at the U.S. box office. If Davis was required to take a somewhat whimsical approach to ghetto life and black criminality in order to get his project to the screen though, he and his collaborators nonetheless pulled out all the stops to deliver a eminently entertaining picture, full of solid performances, wild action scenes and evocative location shooting, all of which make it well worth checking out, even if it fails to hit the lofty heights of its source material.

What I liked about the film most of all though is that it reminded me of reading the book – and when the book in question is this good, that alone is enough to earn the movie a pass.

Deathblog: Jim Kelly (1946 – 2013)

“Where you going?”

“Out in the moonlight, baby.”

Sad to hear yesterday of the death of karate and tennis pro and sometime totally-awesome-movie-star Jim Kelly.

Just a few weeks ago, I spent a nice afternoon on the couch watching ‘Enter The Dragon’ on VHS – first time I’d seen it in a while, and a welcome reminder of what an extraordinarily entertaining picture it is. Post-screening, conversation turned, as is inevitably the case, to what an incredible bad-ass Jim Kelly is, what a bad decision it was to kill him off before the film’s finale (oops – spoiler alert?), and how sad it is that he only played significant roles in about five films, rather than, like, a thousand.

I’ve not yet had the pleasure of catching any of his subsequent blaxploitation flicks (‘Black Belt Jones’, ‘Three The Hard Way’, ‘Black Samurai’ etc.), but based solely on his performance in ‘..Dragon’, I think it’s safe to say he had the potential to be one of the most effortlessly cool, charismatic, capable and just plain funny action stars of all time. R.I.P.

Fears of a Go-Go Girl.

I found these scans this weekend on the Random Acts of Geekery blog, and, whilst I hopefully won't make a habit of stealing other people's content, I thought they were too cool not to share - original artwork by Jack Kirby, from the unpublished "Soul Love # 1".

It's interesting to note the extensive alterations to the central character's features in places - presumably to make her look 'more black' - but that aside I think this is an awesome piece of work - the dancing splash page in particular is just freakin' wonderful.

Some background of "Soul Love", and Kirby's work on the equally unlikely "True Divorce Cases", can be found here.