Dolemite

Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore) is a pimp and a pusher. He gets set up by the FBI and his rival Willie Green. In prison, he is given a second chance by the warden with mutual friends Queen Bee and the governor. Crime has risen despite Dolemite's incarceration. He is to go back into the community to root out the real crime lord.

After watching Eddie Murphy's Dolemite biopic, I had to see the real thing. The production is better than I expected. The acting is surely amateurish. Moore himself is a bit stiff on the screen but has some genuine charisma. Best of all, he knows who he is. The writing gets messier in the second half. There is fun in this blaxploitation. I love his rap comedy on the streets. It has a purity to the scene. I also love watching the real thing after watching the Eddie Murphy recreations. This is fun.

Every bit as crude and poorly made as I had hoped. It could serve as a "how not to make films 101" in the sheer amount of continuity errors, poor audio, bad acting, bad writing, bad camera cuts and even an instance of bad lip-syncing.

But you can tell the sheer amount of heart and passion that is at the core of this movie, to the point that even with all the violence, gratuitous nudity, and coarse language, there is this odd sense of wholesomeness that occupied the whole picture. There's something about a bunch of friends coming together and making a film with absolutely no clue how to do it, and now given the backstory thanks to Dolemite Is My Name, and knowing the challenges the crew went through as well as their ultimate triumph, I found myself really respecting everything about this hilariously bad film.

That was one hell of a run-on sentence.

"Dolemite" was definitely not made for a "rat-soup-eatin', insecure honky MF" like me but I liked it anyway. The movie is a 'Blaxploitation classic' (which some people may consider an oxymoron) – it's hard to say what's worse: the acting or the karate fights, but it's also hard to say what's better: the pimp suits or the funk. I find it amusing that these extremely crude, subversive, counterculture movies now show up, unedited, on TV Turner Classic Movies – it's like seeing poisonous snakes in a display case at a petting zoo. Times have certainly changed. Worth watching for its own sake as well as from a cultural history perspective, as a lot of modern comedy and rap culture are rooted in movies like this.

The King of all Black Action films, Dolemite is the story of Dolemite, the most bad ass brother in LA. Go with Dolemite from the jail house to the mean streets of LA in search for the man who killed his fellow brother. Get the Unrated version to get the whole gut punching scenes with all the great moments. Need more? This film has a sequel...enjoy.

The blaxploitation genre certainly produced some bizarre oddities that's for sure. Dolemite is firmly in this category. On a technical level its appalling, with bad camera work, acting, action and story. The boom mic is visible so often that it really deserves a mention in the credits. But these considerations are ultimately irrelevant. In fact, the sheer scale of the cinematic incompetence is certainly one of the actual joys of the movie. The film-makers just didn't care and seemingly knocked this one out with little concern for such matters.

The rough and ready style of Dolemite kind of seems appropriate though, given the nature of the central character, who is a super-shady bad mutha in a pimp suit. This character, Dolemite, spends most of the film swearing in creative ways. His routines are like proto-rap and seem to have influenced hip-hop culture. The movie is really a superb time-capsule flick. The insane fashions and jive talk are all almost alien in their bizarreness now. While the movie sports various other strange characters such as Reverend Gibbs, the mayor and the Hamburger Pimp. The latter of which actually appears to be out of his head on something or other – I don't think this bloke was really acting! There's also an extended scene near the end in a nightclub that really has to be seen to be believed. It has a priceless performance from a soul act and a crazy dance routine with some guy battering hell out of a drum-kit, it then climaxes with Dolemite's swearing rap thing. It's strange, like the movie in general. This may be super-trashy but it's highly original. It's yet another example of why the 70's ruled when it came to movies.