According to an interview with director Jamaa Fanaka in Josiah Howard's book Blaxploitation Cinema, 'Welcome Home, Brother Charles' was made while he was at UCLA; it certainly looks and feels like a student film, and one that would have barely scraped an E for effort, if it wasn't for one jaw-dropping moment.
The first half an hour is so disjointed that it's very hard to tell what is happening. to whom and why. It starts with a man about to jump off a building, his wife trying to talk him down. Then the 'wakka wakka' funky music kicks in, and suddenly it's all pimps and hos and drug dealers. After an old man tries to score with a hooker, the action cuts to hustler Charles Murray (Marlo Monte) as he is apprehended by 'the man', his arresting officer, Harry Freeman (Ben Bigelow), attempting to cut off Charles's manhood with a razor, a case of inferiority complex (in an explanatory scene, we see Harry returning home from defusing a radioactive bomb at an airport to discover that his wife has been screwing around, the woman unsatisfied with the size of her husband's junk).
After a kangaroo court finds Charles guilty of dealing drugs, he goes to prison, his time inside shown as a series of black and white photographs (thereby keeping film-making costs down). After three years, Charles is released to find that his girlfriend Twyla (Jackie Ziegler) is now sleeping with his old friend N.D. (Jake Carter) and his brother Teto (Jimmy Butler) is hanging with the wrong crowd. Charles decides that he is going to go straight, but first he has some scores to settle with those who sent him down.
Terrible direction, awful editing and weak acting make this a chore to watch, the cruddy performances from the amateurish cast intercut with random scenes featuring members of the local community, which lend proceedings a gritty realism, but only add to the overall cheapness of the film. Thankfully, Fanaka has an ace up his sleeve (or should that be down Charles's trousers?), one so bizarre that it makes the slog just about worth it. As Charles carries out his plan for revenge, he hypnotises the wives of his victims and has sex with them. But that's not it. No, the film's BIG surprise comes when Charles drops his trousers to reveal a humongous trouser snake (we're not talking inches here, but feet--and double figures!), the monstrous appendage crawling across the floor to strangle a man to death. It's so utterly unexpected that one can only marvel at the insanity of the scene and applaud its originality.
The film ends in a suitably bizarre fashion, as it started, with Charles cornered on a rooftop by the police and threatening to throw himself off. His girlfriend, former hooker Carmen (Reatha Grey), shows up and instead of trying to save him, she shouts 'Jump!'. Huh?
Not a great film - it's technically weak in almost every department - but definitely memorable and recommended to fans of cult oddities. 4/10, plus an extra point for THAT scene.
