Bad, Black and Beautiful

Frustrated by his inability to resume his old job after returning from Vietnam, a young man by the name of "Johnny Boyles" (Terry Starnes) angrily confronts his former boss and in the heat of anger punches him. Not long afterward the man is found dead, and Johnny is arrested even though he had nothing to do with the murder. Fortunately for him, his girlfriend manages to get an extremely good defense attorney by the name of "Eva Taylor" (Gwynn Barbee) to represent him even though the case seems airtight. Meanwhile, a young prostitute has recently turned up missing and a private detective named "Rich Jacobs" (Levi Balford) has been hired to track her down. Unbeknownst to either Eva or Rich is the fact that their two cases are related and the influential person responsible has no intention of allowing either of them to interfere in his criminal affairs. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this was a cheap, low-budget production which directly suffered as a result with a poorly written script, wooden acting, awful action scenes and extremely bad editing to show for it. Yet in spite of these obvious flaws, I thought that the overall story was fairly interesting. Having said that, however, I seriously doubt anyone other than a die-hard fan of "blaxploitation films" would be even remotely entertained by this film and in good conscience I cannot rate this film any higher than I have.

The previous reviewer explained the "plot"--such as it is--pretty well, so I won't bother going over it. Suffice it to say tat this film is terrible on pretty much every level--writing (convoluted), directing (virtually non-existent), photography (washed-out and often out of focus), acting (wouldn't pass muster on a one-day porno), "action" scenes (laughable), sound (tinny and the level goes up and down so much it's often hard to decipher the dialogue--which is actually no great loss), and it gets worse. There's really only one reason to watch tis thing--lead Gwen Barbee is an incredibly beautiful woman, and is the one thing that makes this film worthwhile. Unfortunately she can't act to save her life, but considering this film's tsunami of deficiencies, that's not a deal-breaker.

I'm actually a fan of blaxploitation films--they have a grittiness and a sense of fun I admire--and, more importantly, Pam Grier came out of them. But this one is jut too much even for me.

Besides Gwen Barbee, it has absolutely nothing to recommend it. At all. Watch it if you want to see what truly terrible filmmaking is like. Otherwise, skip it.