Darktown Strutters

Black babe Trina Parks will always have a place in movie history - and in my heart - for her role as Thumper in one of the most memorable scenes of "Diamonds Are Forever", where she and Bambi team up against James Bond. Before seeing "Darktown Strutters", I was hoping for an action flick along the lines of "Cleopatra Jones", but this film is more of a (literally) dopey / surreal spoof, with bright colors, outrageous props and outfits, sped-up slapstick, out-of-nowhere musical numbers, and a loony sci-fi plot involving cloning. The main problems are two: 1) It's not funny enough, 2) The lunacy cannot sustain this movie even for just 81 minutes. Still, its audacity makes it worth a look, and the women that comprise the title gang are all beautiful. (**)

DARKTOWN STRUTTERS is pure soul-crazed 70s entertainment at its maximum! I strongly urge all archivists of blaxploitation cinema to go out and hunt down this one-of-a-kind rarity, a blaxplo-comedy-musical that knows no bounds when it comes to absolute weirdness. Everything from the opening sequence ("Any similarity between this true life adventure to the story Cinderella...IS BULLS--T!") to the rest is genuine cinematic trash, but it's well worth the agony! ALABAMA'S GHOST was just as weird! I'm not too crazy about comedies, but the erraticly innovative formula was far ahead of its time (for 1974). Still, this is a one-way ticket to Funkland Junction! Among the highlights you'll get to see are a police car with a gargantuan siren and a cloning machine, which are hard to believe. The oddball taste does appear to fit well in DARKTOWN STRUTTERS, making this an enjoyable trip through a time when fashion trends and moral values have gone through mass transition. It does contain a familiar musical number by The Dramatics, singing "What You See Is What You Get". It's more than just a classic TV sitcom taped in front of a live audience, it's a campy experience that has recently gone timeless while it improves with age. See this film only once in your life and your infatuation with CAR WASH will be all over! Too bad a lot of you have missed this one!

Like something out of a twisted 70s nightmare, DARKTOWN STRUTTERS is 100% entertainment for all the wrong reasons. I don't know if this movie is supposed to be taken seriously or is supposed to be a farce, but it certainly is unique in a way that no other blaxploitation film is.

Trina Parks (who is great, by the way) is Syreena, a black Queen biker who leads a gang of outrageously dressed black female bikers who at first race against, then become friends with a bumbling male biker gang, led by Roger E. Mosley! Syreena is trying to find her mother Cinderella, who has disappeared. Her kung-fu fighting brother has no information about her whereabouts and Syreena must turn to some pretty far out pimps and hookers to not only find Cinderella, but to expose a plot to clone black leaders by a racist Colonel Sanders-look alike who charges a fortune for mediocre rib dinners at his restaurants. Why clone black leaders? So they can be programmed to vote for white leaders! Sound like fun? It is!

The 70s fashions are out of this world, bumbling racist cops with a sonic siren harass the girls, The Dramatics sing "What You See Is What You Get" in a jail cell, the restaurant owner puts on a black-face minstrel show on a special stage in his dining room, a clone of "Colonel Sanders" comes out in diapers, amazing bike races and chases, and the final musical number while the credits roll is great! The musical score is great, making me wish a CD release was in the works (yeah right, like that will happen!). I really do love Trina Parks and her performance in this has made me anxious to track down her other films. No other notable performances, even though Dick Miller, the ultimate cult movie star, appears as one of the racist cops.

Highly recommended, DARKTOWN STRUTTERS is just a fun, kick-back kind of movie that needs not be taken seriously. Don't question anything in this movie, just watch, laugh, and you will guaranteed remember it for the rest of your life!

Nothing to really recommend about this unfunny attempt at a mid-'70s "blaxploitation" "musical" featuring a group of jive-talking' mamas on three-wheeled motorcycles who constantly tangle with a group of incompetent L.A. cops while simultaneously dealing with the threat of an evil Colonel Sanders-look-a-like who plans on creating a cloned race of...well, actually I was never really sure what he was trying to do. The boring plot is razor thin, the performances are sub-high school drama class and there's just not enough good music to make it worthwhile. The highlight of the film is a sequence with the Stax-signed vocal group The Dramatics performing their hit "Whatcha See is Whatcha Get" on a dungeon set(?). That was cool. The rest is barely worth a look. You have been warned.

Darktown Strutters has to rate right up there with The Forbidden Zone for goodnatured, unbridled kinetic energy, outright insanity, and its willful desire to offend. This is a surreal flick in which everything is over the top to such a degree you have to wonder if it was due to drug use or if it was a purposeful creation of satire. In any case, I was entertained and appalled at the same time. But then again, I don't think that a middle aged white guy in the 21st century was really the intended audience for this film. The audience for this flick was the inner-city black-theater crowd of the mid-seventies. I just wonder how it played back in the day? Did they laugh along with the exaggerated black stereotypes, seeing it all as a satirical take on how black culture was seen by the mainstream? Or were they up in arms, seeing it as a slap in their collective faces by white filmmakers? I wonder. Was Darktown THE definitive satire of the "Blaxploitation" genre, or was it the genre's nadir?