A film genre we hate to love

The latest movie to both make fun of and pay tribute to the blaxploitation movie genre hit several theaters around the country last month. "Black Dynamite," directed by UNC-Chapel Hill graduate Scott Sanders, has co-writer and star Michael Jai White ("The Dark Knight") playing the titular archetypal protagonist, a leisure suit-wearing, bushy-'froed brotha who is down for cleaning up his community, romancing the ladies and putting his foot in the man's behind.

Although I haven't seen the movie yet (and I don't know if I will; there's still no release date for the Triangle), it got me thinking about blaxploitation (memorably coined by the NAACP in 1972), a film genre that I've had a love/hate relationship with over the years. When I was a kid and a soulful, cocoa-colored popcorn flick found its way on a TV station (usually on BET), my family would stop everything and plop in front of the tube. "Friday Foster" (oh, my first taste of Pam Grier!), "J.D.'s Revenge," "Blacula" - these movies were like fond memories for my fam, harking back to a time when people who looked just like us consistently graced the silver screen.

As blaxploitation films began getting reissued on video (especially after the 1988 release of the Keenan Ivory Wayans spoof "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka"), I also got acquainted with such blaxploitation staples as "The Mack" and "Coffy" (more Pam Grier!). Those two movies were also all-time favorites of Quentin Tarantino, perhaps the first white filmmaker to publicly admit to being influenced by blaxploitation movies. (Of course, he made sure that blaxploitation goddess Grier had a starring role in one of his movies.) Thanks to QT's seal of approval, blaxploitation leapt from to being a laughable movie genre to a legitimate one.

In my younger, more optimistic days, I saw blaxploitation movies as extravagant, escapist, often hilarious time capsules, with black people with hot air balloon-sized Afros mostly doing something cool to the funkiest soundtrack they could find. As I've grown older and delved more into the genre's wealth of movies, I've begun to view many of these films with my jaw agape.

For every "Shaft" (directed by the late Gordon Parks) or "Super Fly" (directed by the late Gordon Parks Jr.), films that broke through the cult-movie bubble and became recognizable examples of blaxploitation cinema in pop culture, there are dozens upon dozens of lesser-known blaxploitation movies that are just, for lack of a better word, awful. Actually, I can come up with a few other words: repugnant, embarrassing, crappy, horrendous - did I say awful already? I kind of already knew how bad blaxploitation could get when I viewed the films of Rudy Ray Moore, the raunchy nightclub comic who became the genre's answer to Ed Wood when he made and starred in the "Dolemite" movies. You haven't seen bad filmmaking until you've seen a climactic kung-fu battle take place in a dark room to hide the fact that it's the stunt doubles fighting instead of the actors.

But there are cheapo, low-grade, low-down blaxploitation movies that are lousier than any of Moore's work. A friend of mine recently suggested I put "Black Shampoo" in my Blockbuster Online queue. A loose, shameless, morally ambiguous version of the Warren Beatty film "Shampoo," it features some buff brotha named John Daniels as a barely believable hairdresser who takes down some sadistic white dudes when he's not getting white girls all hot-and-bothered. (In the book "That's Blaxploitation!" author Darius James points out the movie's redundancy by writing, "I don't get it. I thought Warren Beatty was already black.")

Watching a blaxploitation movie can be a teeth-grinding experience, especially if you're a person who believes 1) in the quality of cinema and 2) in black people doing better. If it wasn't for the black-and-proud man or woman who's usually front-and-center, most of these films would be just populated with junkies, pimps, prostitutes, scalawags, hoolihoos and other dregs of society. Thanks to blaxploitation, pimping is seen not only as a credible, enviable vocation, but a righteous way of living. (Two words: Katt Williams.)

But there are those who can see the positive aspects of blaxploitation. Film critic and IFC News host Matt Singer, who has written about offbeat, blaxploitation movies for IFC.com, says that even the most eccentric of these films aesthetically exhibit an earnest, DIY attitude that defines independent filmmaking.

"There are plenty of them that are just exploitative or they're just action movies or whatever it is," says Singer, who's admittedly a fan of Rudy Ray Moore's movies. "And then, there are the other ones, where people who can't get their hands on, you know, Hollywood money wanna make a movie and they have something to say and they do in the form of an exploitation movie. And there are some that you can find that are like that."

A can-do independent spirit - that's one plus in blaxploitation's belt. But there are other good things about blaxploitation. (Did I mention Pam Grier?) After all, if it wasn't for blaxploitation, I wouldn't have many fine soundtrack albums in my record collection. Ever since Isaac Hayes won an Oscar for composing the theme for "Shaft," other black artists were called on to compose blaxploitation film scores. Hayes' "Shaft" and Curtis Mayfield's "Super Fly" soundtrack still remain the gold-standard twin towers, but the scores done by Marvin Gaye ("Trouble Man"), Herbie Hancock ("The Spook Who Sat by the Door") Willie Hutch ("Foxy Brown," "The Mack"), Roy Ayers ("Coffy") and others are equally wonderful.

So, maybe I'm putting too much negative emphasis on the blaxploitation genre. These movies have many minuses, but their pluses are, as they used to say back in the day, solid.

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