The mission of The Department of Afro-American Research Arts and Culture to identify the global significance of the creative contributions pioneered by an international diaspora of Blackness
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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Hickey and Boggs (1972)







Starring:

  • Bill Cosby
  • Robert Culp
  • Ta-Ronce Allen
  • Rosalind Cash

IMDB.com
Unknown or forgotten, and never released on video, this unexpectedly gritty film from Robert Culp (who also directed) and Bill Cosby is light years away from their popular I Spy series. As two low-end private eyes, neither has ever been more effective on screen before. An interesting, atypical contrast of styles in their acting; Cosby plays it humorless, (in a realistic, lived-in fashion, not a tough guy caricature) while Culp is alternates several nice modes for his character.

The earliest directorial effort from Walter Hill stands among the best of his career (it would make a fine double bill with his classic THE DRIVER), and also among the best of the rich era of 1970's crime dramas. It was released by United Artists and the rights-holders would do us a favor to release it for sale. It has some class-A action scenes and two terrific central performances. Hopefully will soon see the light of day again and gain some of the reputation it so deserves.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Black Mamba (1974)







Starring:

  • John Ashley
  • Marlene Clark
  • Pilar Pilapil

BlackHorror.com
Compared to Night of the Cobra Woman, Black Mamba suffers the double whammy of being less serpent-centric and less booby-centric, making for the dullest movie I've seen featuring zombies, voodoo dolls, a hunchback, Satan, "Manimal"-like transmutations, bestiality, an exorcism, and Death itself. The film opens with a hunchback doing what hunchbacks do best: robbing graves. He messes with the wrong tomb, though, when he takes a ring from the corpse of Dante, a man who happens to have once romanced a witch (Clark). Quasimod'oh! ......read more

Sister, Sister (1982)







Starring:

Storyline
Maya Angelou's story of the family stresses that occur when an older sister (Diahann Carroll, Claudine, Porgy & Bess) attempts to maintain a home, left by her revered father, in an ultra-moralistic way (regardless of the fact that she is secretly having an affair with the married preacher). Nevertheless, her uptight need to maintain a sense of propriety of course goes against the wishes of her much younger sister (Irene Cara, A Hero Ain't Nothin' But A Sandwich) who, as an accomplished ice skater, is striving for her own independence. And if this isn't enough, into it is suddenly thrust a third sister (Rosalind Cash, Cornbread, Earl and Me, Melinda), who is a single mother with a pre-teen son, who "comes home" with her boy after living for years in the ghettos of Detroit. And because she is the complete antithesis of her older sister in morals and deportment, she immediately sides with her younger sister against the strictures set down in the home.

Black Eye (1974)

























Starring:

Storyline
Fred Williamson stars as Stone, a Los Angeles-area private eye. After a movie star's funeral, the star's signature walking cane disappears. Stone discovers that the cane is somehow connected to a string of murders. Stone's investigation takes him onto a porn movie set and into a religious cult. A major subplot involves Stone's intermittent relationship with a young bisexual woman, and the tension therein.