Yes, the film is even more shoddy looking and just as weirdly compelling as this poster. The Guy from Harlem is a Z-grade imitation of Shaft, which from all appearances could have been directed by alien life forms whose only knowledge of human culture comes from Blaxploitation. In a way, it was, since helmsman Rene Martinez, Jr. was an emigrant, working with a crew of other foreign expatriates in the Miami area, poorly directing a screenplay written by a 12 year old. You know you’re in for something special when the first scene involves a thug  menacing captive sister Wanda so unconvincingly, so ineptly, that the man had to be a non-actor picked up off the street Herzog style. At one point, when he must dole out a useless story-related nugget, he pauses midway through mumbling his line to read the rest of the line off his arm. The scene ends with Wanda calling him a “jive-ass fool” or somesuch nonsense, to which he replies “You sorry bitch, I’ll see you later,” without the slightest hint of conviction, walking out very calmly.

Then the character is never heard from again.

Anyway, there’s this P.I. workin’ the streets of Miami they call The Guy from Harlem. As you can see from his sepia-tinted poster, he’s “mean, clean, a fightin’ machine.” According to his theme song, this cat’s a “bad dude”. This glorious(ly bad) tune also gives us bits of info like “Get down!”, “Check out the groove!” and “Feel the rumba!” so he probably likes dancing, too. One thing’s for sure, he loves to avoid work, bitch at his secretary, get in very strangely choreographed dances/fights, and screw strange women in his girlfriend’s ugly-ass apartment. As played by Loye Hawkins, the Guy is actually a colossal, skinny, horny dick (in more than one sense) who never fails to act selfishly or cowardly. He also excels at sousing up the ladies with J&B whiskey, then slow-dancing to muzak before plowing into home base. When he isn’t overtly admiring the derrière of said base.

The first half of the story deals with The Guy protecting an African princess (with a Brooklyn accent) from incompetent stooges hired by the shadowy forces of “Big Daddy”.  His peeping tom-ism comes in handy during the first attempt, coming in just in time to prevent a masseuse from administering a mysterious dose of… something from a syringe. He gives her a $2 tip for her trouble. Next, he orders room service (in agonizing real time), then punches out the cross-dressing goon who delivers nothing but failure on an empty platter. We learn The Guy can “smell a New York strip steak a block away”. Because he’s from New York, you see. The next two dudes are less subtle, barging into the Pumpkin Orange Eyesore Suite without knocking. The Guy is there to dance/grapple/psyche them out. He gets the final holdout to submit by standing very lightly on the dude’s wrist. The thug cries “Ah, ah, ah!!” while the rest of his body remains paralyzed. Then, that laugh is topped by the film’s attempt at a badass one liner:

“You tell Big Daddy nobody fools with The Guy from Harlem, you dig?”

Tragically, we remain unaware of what occurs after the princess is shunted off to the Girlfriend’s Gaudy Apartment for a night of some very mild sensuality. In spite of some foreshadowing about “international repercussions”, there are no consequences for screwing the married wife of a political figure, just some strange inferences from The Guy to his much-abused secretary. “I nearly got my head blown off!” Whatever, on to Wanda and the inevitable screwing.

This thrilling second half is even more entertaining due to the inclusion of “Wildman” Steve Gallon as Wanda’s father, a coke dealer with a silver tongue to match his indubitable self-righteousness. A gifted improvisational comic with charisma to burn, Steve steals the show even though he appears in but two scenes.  Martinez would work with him later to develop the priceless Six Thousand Dollar Nigger. He hires The Guy to deliver $250,000 in cash, plus a cool half-million bucks’ worth of snow, to Big Daddy as part of a hostage exchange deal. You know how those Honkys prefer to carry out their business.  But The Guy’s smarter than the three dim-bulbs, presumably hired out of a homeless shelter or detox clinic, assigned to guard Wanda; he takes ‘em down guerrilla style! Mean! Clean! A dancin‘ Fightin’ machine!!

Actually he just hides in the bushes, waits for each person to walk by, proceeds to “fight” them, then drags the unconscious body into the overgrowth. We see this process carried out in real time, with each goon moronically walking into the trap and getting “beaten”, furiously intercut with Wanda screaming “How come 4 o’clock ain’t pass yet”. Yeah, it’s fairly surreal. It also goes on for a long time, way longer than necessary, and there’s still 20 minutes to go once The Guy peels out with Wanda in his huge boxy sedan. Destination: The Shag Pad.

One important thing about the “sex”: in spite of the usual breast exposure, and a horrifying moment where The Guy strips down to his skivvies, it never gets beyond second base, and there’s always an awkward fade-to-black when Martinez, in a rare instance of humility, discovers he can’t direct a love scene. Likewise the camera work, from some foreigner named Rafael Remy, swims around in a too-tight closeup in a rare instance of not being more than ten feet away from the action. Also, students of cinematography will cringe during this super smooth J&B muzak seduction.

Even if the dual light sources don’t bother you, surely the art direction will never fail to distract you from the non-action of The Guy from Harlem. It is so tacky that it becomes sort of brilliant in a way that imitations like Black Dynamite can only dream of emulating. Besides the terrible 16mm photography, pervasive Afros and disco leisurewear, the repetition of the theme song never fails to get a laugh, even if (or perhaps because) it is played at least a dozen times. It never fails to fail to establish the hero’s status as a badass to stand with John Shaft. Anyway, after stealing Steve’s money (in a passive aggressive way) and his daughter, The Guy goes after Big Daddy, who is a rather muscular embodiment of The Man.

Would you be the least bit surprised to learn Big Daddy is also is a student of The Guy’s school of Western Style Awkward Kickboxing and Grappling? Well, he is, and he has the armbands to prove it! Oh, SPOILER ALERT, if spoilers can even apply to something so hilariously derivative. The Guy From Harlem doesn’t have a narrative, so much as it fulfills a series of requirements through inept imitation. Yet it’s wildly entertaining and there are countless classic lines that I wouldn’t dare spoil for the uninitiated. It succeeds in all the wrong ways.

For curious souls, armed with this foreknowledge (and, preferably, some cheap malt liquor): some enterprising spirit has uploaded the entire film, and now The Guy from Harlem can be streamed direct, to your sloshed brain, in a matter of seconds! Just click the link below. Though I’ll never replace my battered Xenon VHS tape, this is a much less plastic-intensive alternative, even if the image quality takes quite a few hits from its already dubious source. Enjoy (with all the obvious caveats)!

GET DOWN!!

Let’s face it: The Acid West was going out of style by the time Blaxploitation was taking the country by storm. Combining the two disparate genres was a simple yet magical idea. Instead of commenting on Post-Civil Rights racism, the ass-kicking brothers could take aim at rich white slave owners as well as the typical Western outlaw scrubs. There aren’t a whole lot of Jive Westerns out there, much less many good ones. Fred “The Hammer” Williamson featured in two of the more entertaining examples of this curious hybridization. There was the sublimely ridiculous, ultra-violent, and profane (yet still PG rated) Boss Nigger, along with this more mainstream 20th Century Fox offering.

Take a Hard Ride was director Antonio Margheriti’s follow-up to The Stranger and the Gunfighter, another Western hybrid experiment that paired weary genre vet Lee Van Cleef with Hong Kong superstar Lo Lieh, who travel the untamed frontier with guns and flying guillotines close at hand.

The always poker-faced Van Cleef is the connective tissue between Marghereti’s two Acid Western fusions, of course; his presence at the very opening of Take a Hard Ride, where he rips off Charles Bronson’s Harmonica by playing an eerie ditty on his own harmonica, establishes the appropriate Spaghetti tone with alchemical precision. From there, it’s less than two minutes before old Lee, playing his usual morally ambiguous bounty hunter archetype, guns down a wanted man and his buddy in front of a church. But don’t let his disturbingly casual attitude towards ending human life let you think he’s a bad guy. Even though he’s instrumental in getting the film’s protagonists into all kinds of crappy situations, as well as orchestrating the massacres of several groups of people (duplicitous honkys, one and all), he just might have a heart of gold under his oily, leathery, cordite-stained exterior.

His persistent pursuit of Jim Brown, who has a sack of gold belonging to the estate of recently deceased Dana Andrews, draws in lowlifes from all four corners of the map. It’s clear from early on that his journey into Sonora will be fraught with peril. An early trip to the watering hole almost ends in disaster if not for the timely appearance of cardsharp Fred Williamson, who happens to carry around sacks full of poisonous snakes. Fred and Jim decide to join forces, each “watching the other’s tail”, bonding through frequent gun battles, sleeping on horseback. The two will Take a Hard Ride through a gauntlet of ignorant white oppression.

Don’t let that innocent PG rating on the poster fool you. They could have appealed to the Militant Black audience and retitled the film Jim Brown’s Wild West Honky Massacre without misrepresenting the product in any way.

After much ado, the boys’re eventually joined by mute “Indian” Jim Kelly, who does such a halfassed job with his fisticuffs, and his one dimensional character, that it’s curious why he was even included. A French actress named Catherine Spaak supplies some eye candy for what is otherwise a testosterone laden sausage fest. The story works into a rut once we’re back to the familiar Stagecoach model of “strangers bicker and travel, getting into gun battles every 10-15 minutes”. Despite what the classical structure, and Jerry Goldsmith’s unabashedly old-fashioned score, attempt to evoke, the essential blaxploitation nature bleeds through with each and every righteous killing. Yet, save for the alarmingly brutal murder of an innocent supporting character, none of the violence has any sort of impact.

None of the cast members look particularly beleaguered, battle-scarred or otherwise affected by the corrosive desert sands. A gritty atmosphere is never quite established, even though the Canary Islands locations look convincingly John Fordian, the action flows blisteringly, and the ever sneering face of Lee Van Cleef as he watches the carnage from the sidelines never ceases to be creepy. So how does Take a Hard Ride feel so inconsequential in light of its hair-raising body count and surplus of Black Power?

Margheriti (directing under his Anglo nom de plume of Joseph Manduke) has a feel for grand Western vistas, and throws us the occasional artistic composition between the action sequences, which were directed by Hal Needham with the passion he would later apply to destroying cop cars with Burt Reynolds. Some lame “intrigue” with Fred Williamson’s morality leads to naught save for a pointless, dusty fist fight that adds nothing to the story except some slight homoerotica. Of course the brothers are going to remain together, to blow away more faceless waves of Caucasian horsemen and possibly detonate several pounds of dynamite to, uh, blow away even more of them.

Sergio Sollima could handle moral ambiguity and jarring plot twists in even his laziest work; his nihilistic style would doubtless have improved this frivolous material. Margheriti/Manduke is too in love with deep focus and the natural splendor of the Canary Islands to worry about characterization or nuance. Despite his prolific output of exploitation fare, there is nothing truly exceptional in his body of work, though he did well enough to be casually name-dropped in Inglourious Basterds.

For its  artistic shortcomings, Take a Hard Ride still delivers on a base level, and fans of 70s cheese will delight in its Jive Turkey trappings. Those expecting anything other than a lot of dead white dudes will be sorely disappointed. Hell, even those who stick out the entirety of their Hard Ride will be let down by its colossal anticlimax. Is Van Cleef supposed to be a Death figure, or a manifestation of White Guilt? Why doesn’t he recieve his just desserts? Is it just because he’s that cool that he can get away with being pure evil? Oh well, that’s how it goes in the Acid West.

We all know what prison movies are all about. A bunch of sweaty men packed into together, ready for shanking, power playing, and raping. In Jamaa Fanaka’s Penitentiary, you won’t be disappointed with these incarceration clichés, but I still highly recommend this flawed film. For all its goofiness, Penitentiary is a tightly shot and surprisingly well-acted film, and the actors often go beyond the outlandish screenplay to add a touch of emotional urgency to what are otherwise exploitation stereotypes. Even better, the screenplay takes the Jive Turkey Theater boilerplate dialog and occasionally elevates it to a poetic, sarcastic, and even optimistic eloquence. It’s as if Huggy Bear were running the show, and then Barack Obama suddenly shows up to give some stirring oratory.

The opening of Penitentiary is absurd enough. Our African American hero Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone (a smooth and level-headed Leon Isaac Kennedy) is minding his own business, snoozing underneath his makeshift tent on the side of the highway. A bunch of long haired punks on dirt bikes start tearing up the pea patch around his one-man slum tenement, so it’s time for Martel to move on. He is hitchhiking on the highway, and naturally some red-hot hooker named Linda (the red-hot Hazel Spears) stops to pick him up in her luxury conversion van. ‘Cause you know, those sorts of things happened in the 70s. She offers him a freebie in the back of the van, but her amorous advances are interrupted by a business prospect making itself known over her CB radio. It’s business before pleasure, so the couple stops at a roadside diner so Linda can meet her date and make a living.

From this innocuous opening, things go south quickly. Linda thinks these two honky rednecks are her dates, but they instead they impugn her honor, as roadside diner rednecks do. Martel jumps in and prevents her rape, and he gets knocked unconscious for his trouble. Next thing you know, Martel is now serving hard time in the penitentiary, taking the fall for the murder of one of the rednecks. From here, Penitentiary turns into a strictly prison survival film, with Martel having to protect his sweet, sweet ass from a twisted gang of rapists who want to make him their “property.”

For all its rough living conditions, the penitentiary of Penitentiary has some pretty liberal policies. In the first prison yard scene, there is full funk band (with electric instruments) jamming away as other prisoners are making coordinated dance moves straight out of some bad episode of Soul Train. Then the warden organizes a full-on boxing tournament, inviting the women prisoners to watch the proceedings. The grand prize of the tournament is a “connubial visit” with a woman in a trailer. During the boxing tournament, several of the prisoners actually get to have some consensual heterosexual sex in the restroom.

But Penitentiary somehow manages to transcend its ridiculous trappings. The key scenes involve a wizened old man Hezzikia “Seldom Seen” Jackson (a wonderfully grumpy Floyd Chatman) who Martel eventually shares a cell with. I really liked Seldom Seen in his soaring, well-earned bitterness, and Chatman gets to fire off some of the sharpest and darkest dialog in the film. And Martel is a strong and appealing character as well. He not only protects his own dignity, but also inspires another prison bitch to finally stand up for himself. How this rape victim finally changes his mentality is a lesson we could all learn from, believe it or not. There are some superb exchanges here that make you realize that though the Fanaka is mostly goofing off, he can turn deadly serious when need be. The grueling fight scenes are fantastic in their street-hard authenticity, in both the boxing ring and the cells.

Penitentiary is an entertaining, very well-edited, and oddly poignant film. The film strikes a hopeful and honest note that I found myself in accord with; you have to continuously struggle for your freedom, for despair will only lead to slavery of the body and mind. And that’s what Jive Turkey Theater is all about.