Being There

Getting To Know...
Peter Sellers was a true comedic genius. Brighid Mooney helps us get beyond the Strangeloves and the Clouseaus.

Couch Festival
Too lazy to go to a real film festival? Try one of our couch festivals. This month: "Gone To Bollywood..."

Unearthed
Brighid Mooney looks at a lesser-known pub rock live album, Dr. Feelgood's Stupidity.

Been There
Camouflage Nights' Ian McGettigan, a bottle of alcohol, and a flaming axe highlight this month's Been There.

Globetrotting
Russell Bartholomee continues this month with Part 2 of his look at Paris.

Hello In There
Dolemite. 'Nuff said.

Being There’s City Guide
This month’s rundown of some of the things happening in a few North American hotspots that we feel our readers might be interested in.

11x5
Our contributors pick five things they're digging this month.

Hello In There
By Zayne Reeves

I have certain habits that probably make me a very difficult person to live with. Now, don't worry, I'm not about to disclose any of my more eyebrow-raising peccadilloes on you, the unsuspecting reader....no, those come next month when Hello In There tackles the quartet of The Night Porter, Last Tango In Paris, The Comfort of Strangers and The Brown Bunny. The subtitle for that one will be “Charlotte Rampling: Damn, Girl” and it is destined to become a fixture of teachers' lounges for years to come. Anyway, back to matter at hand. I have a deep, deep affinity for what I like to call high trash cinema. Much, much more than "guilty pleasures," they function as mood regulators and the mere presence of Sid Haig or Grace Zabriskie in a movie beams the message to my synapses that everything is cool, everything is ok. I'd like to think something like that separates me from, say, guys who just like to get high with their buddies and watch The Tuxedo. When I'm writing, I put one on and will often let it play through two or three times because it helps me focus when transcribing an interview or figuring out how I can avoid mentioning John Hiatt's "Recovery Trilogy" once in a review of Master of Disaster. As I'm writing this article, Kingdom of The Spiders is approaching its sad, inexorable denouement. While it may be a poor man's Grizzly (which was a very poor man's Jaws), you have to hand it to any film that stars William Shatner as a two-fisted veterinarian named "Rack." Aside from being my Paxcil and an essential part of my writing process, it's also my sleep aid of choice. In the summer, I usually go with Attack of The Giant Leeches for its creepy backwoods saga of lust, murder and grown men wearing giant garbage bags, pretending to be leeches. When it hits fall, Earl Owensby's Wolfman is the one to beat when I have a performance review the next day and absolutely, positively need eight hours of peaceful sleep.

It all started when I was in high school and fixated on blaxploitation. Now, honestly, blaxploitation films are cool to all who haven't seen them because once you actually start watching Slaughter or Hell Up In Harlem, I promise that you will be up and making yourself a sandwich or catching up with the nightly news before the twenty minute mark. As for Shaft and Superfly, they boast incredible soundtracks but the films themselves suffer from leaden pacing and really aren't all that different from most B-grade actioners of the time, save for the fact that it's Richard Roundtree and not Charles Bronson who plays by his own rules. Even Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a film with real social impact, is virtually unwatchable and works much better as a symbol of defiance than it does a film with a compelling, coherent narrative. There are some exceptions; Willie Dynamite holds up as a genuinely entertaining film, J.D.'s Revenge is an atmospheric chiller, Blacula had William Marshall to give it some gravitas while The Mack and Car Wash both snuck in a little barbed social commentary as well as lively Richard Pryor cameos. And then there's Rudy Ray Moore. The term "blaxploitation" is a prickly one and Mr. Moore has long voiced his opposition to his films being labeled as such; and he has a point. Without getting into the sociopolitical ramifications of the genre (you'll want to get with Dr. Cornel West on that one), you simply cannot compare rote, mercenary tax writeoffs like Three The Hard Way with the bizarre, original and flat-out fun series of films that Rudy Ray Moore financed out of his own pocket back in the late 70's.

Moore first made a name for himself with a steady stream of jawdroppingly raunchy "party" records that featured titles such as Eat Out More Often and the even more direct This Pussy Belongs To Me. The covers were just as crazy and often depicted Rudy chasing naked women around a room. Back when there was such a store as Sound Shop, I found a bunch of these on tape and it is one of my great regrets that I loaned them out to a friend who promptly "lost" all of them. With the sales of Eat Out More Often far exceeding expectations (forcing one label exec to apologize to Moore for calling it a piece of shit), his endless touring on the so-called "Chitlin' Circuit" and the growing popularity of his spoken word "toast" about a Stagger Lee-like character named Dolemite, Moore decided it was time to get into the film business. According to Mr. Moore, the concept of Dolemite came from a wino friend named Rico who would tell wild stories about this hustler he named Dolemite in exchange for pocket money. Sensing the appeal of the bit, Moore decided to try it out in his nightclub act and it became a signature piece in his set. In Mr. Moore's stage act, Dolemite was a positively folkloric figure who "had a job in Africa kickin' lions in the ass to stay in shape" and who warned a prostitute that "I've swimmed across muddy rivers and ain't never got wet" before starting a marathon sex session. Obviously this is stuff that would be difficult to capture on film with the shoestring budget Moore's earnings afforded, so 1975's Dolemite portrays the character as a slightly more conventional modern day pimp/kung fu master out to avenge his wrongful incarceration and the murder of his nephew.

Directed by D'urville Martin, who also played chief nemesis Willie Green, the film Dolemite begins with the protagonist being released from prison because the warden has been appropriately swayed by Queen Bee (comedienne Lady Reed) of his innocence and wants to help Dolemite catch Willie Green and stop the drug trafficking in the ghetto. It's worth pointing out that the warden's office looks suspiciously like someone's billiard room that had been cleared out with window shades thoughtfully pulled down so that we won't wonder how a prison could have a backyard. Once out, Dolemite looks up his old contact, the aptly named "Creeper," plots to take his nightclub back from Willie Green, gets laid, gets hassled by Mitchell & White, the dirty cops who helped set him up in the opening flashback, which leads to the single least convincing martial arts fight sequence in film history. After showing how easily they could frame him again for drugs, Mitchell & White rough Dolemite up and tell him to leave town. Tough hombre that he is, Dolemite responds by pummeling them with a series of kicks and chops that actually come within a couple of yards of connecting before pouring the planted cocaine over their prone bodies. With the cops and the hoods on his chase, Dolemite barges in to The Total Experience, his prized nightclub that he was cheated out of by the cops and Willie Green, and starts "cuttin' up the fuckin' carpet" to retrieve his rainy day stash of fifty thousand smackers that he uses to buy the club back. Well, he doesn't so much buy it back as he does declare that it's his again before unloading a man-sized beatdown on Willie G's entire posse. Furious at his henchmen for their incompetence, Willie doles one out himself as punishment. Again, much like the scene with Mitchell & White, the most you can say about this fight scene is that it is a reasonable facsimile of an actual fight scene.

Afterwards, Dolemite returns to the karate school where his girls are learning to defend themselves and informs Queen Bee that there will likely be a rumble over what happened at the club. The film glosses over Dolemite's role as a pimp so that our sympathies remain with him. We only see Queen Bee address the girls as outright prostitutes and when one girl steals from another, it is Queen Bee who slaps the thief, stating plainly "Don't nobody steal from one of Dolemite's ho's!" After Dolemite retakes the club, we are introduced to the corpulent Mayor Dailey who is, naturally, the real villain of the film. Dailey poses as a friend to the black community when he is actually using Willie Green to push drugs into the ghetto. It was Mayor Dailey who signed off on Dolemite's release so that he could be knocked off. Aside from being hideous to look at, Mayor Dailey is a poor criminal mastermind; he had Dolemite in prison, where he could be shivved in his sleep, and decided to release him onto his home turf where his army of prostitutes sporting black belts in karate are waiting in the wings. Eventually, Dolemite rips Willie Green's heart out, Blakely shoots Dailey (who also has a thing for strangling black prostitutes) as the crooked mayor is trying to board his private plane, and Mitchell & White are taken into custody after they try to ambush Dolemite in his hospital room.

Dolemite is strictly amateur night filmmaking in many respects, but in spite of things like the boom mike appearing in so many shots that it should be entitled residuals, it's one with an enormous amount of charm. The acting is atrocious but it's definitely the Ed Wood style of bad acting which is fun to watch as opposed to the Coleman Francis (a Mystery Science Theater 3000 staple with Beast of Yucca Flats and Red Zone Cuba) style which is so hideously bad that it can melt your eyesockets right out of your skull. And while it has the familiar blaxploitation motifs like evil white authority figures and gratuitous night club sequences where some marginal singer/dancer is given five minutes of screen time to not advance the plot while the main characters sit around a table together knocking back drinks, the character of Dolemite is not patterned after Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen or any other white action star. What makes Rudy Ray Moore's character special is his very unique use of language. Along with his other attributes, Dolemite is also a standup comedian who hurls insults at racist cops like "You no business born, insecure, jut-jawed motherfucker!" and can be easily prompted by dudes on the street to perform his “Shine & The Titanic” routine in parking lots. He's also capable of gunning down a gang of would-be assassins and having a good laugh as one of his toughest prostitutes castrates one of them.

The film was such a commercial success that a sequel, The Human Tornado, was quickly shot and released in order to capitalize on the momentum. Where the original Dolemite was often slack in its pacing thanks to D'urville Martin's zombielike direction (he hated being involved with the film), The Human Tornado is a positively zippy film and, wisely, it jettisons the pimp angle altogether to make Dolemite a nightclub Don Juan. A racist sheriff (J.B. Baron) barges in on a party simply because it's a party full of black people at a nice house and taunts the guests. Things go from bad to worse when the sheriff discovers that his wife is sleeping with Dolemite. Enraged, the sheriff orders his deputy to execute both his wife and Dolemite. The wife is murdered but Dolemite escapes, shooting the deputy and jumping off a steep hill while ass naked. They even rewind the sequence just to prove that Moore did the stunt which was thoughtful of them. Dolemite and friends (including a young Ernie Hudson) escape and head out to California to stay with Queen Bee who is now running the best nightclub in town. Threatened by that success, rival club owner Cavaletti orders his hoods to rough up Queen Bee and kidnap T.C. and Java, two of her most shapely employees. When Dolemite & Co. arrive and find Queen Bee's club deserted and her home abandoned, they set out to find out what happened. After hitting all the nightclubs, they discover that she's now working at Cavaletti's skeezy dive bar. Bee tells them about T.C. and Java's abduction, which Dolemite decides to get around to solving after he puts the moves on old flame Hurricane Annie. This leads to one of the most whacked-out sequences in a whacked-out decade full of crazy shit you just can't get away with anymore. Dolemite learns that the best way to discover where Cavaletti is hiding the girls is by seducing his main woman who just happens to have a thing for black guys. We are then treated to a dream sequence where Mrs. Caveletti watches on as several musclebound studs emerge from a giant toy building block and, one by one, sail down a children's slide into her bosom. Dolemite proceeds to, well, screw the information out of her by rutting so hard that the entire room collapses around them and she screams out the location of the girls; "At the house! On the hill! In Pasadena!" While this is going on, the cracker sheriff from the beginning of the movie is hot on their trail, telling the local authorities that Dolemite murdered his wife. Jerry Jones (who wrote this script as well) is on hand as Detective Pistol Pete, the hardboiled cop who is after Cavaletti. Dolemite overtakes Cavaletti's guards at the house on the hill in Pasadena in an extended fight sequence that must be seen to be believed (and not in the House of Flying Daggers way) and frees the girls while Queen Bee and the gang, with help from 70s karate superstar Howard Jackson, stage a coup at Cavaletti's big party. This all leads to Detective Pete, the sheriff and Dolemite converging at Cavaletti's. Sensibly, the film ends with Cavaletti's testicles being chewed off by a rat and the sheriff shooting Dolemite three or four times in the back. After the sheriff leaves, Dolemite gets up and, in voiceover, explains that he wasn't killed because he's The Human Tornado.

I watched this movie with my two best friends from high school, Josh Copeland and Fred DeLoach. I fell asleep at the halfway point only to be awoken by their incredulous scolding. "You mean you made us watch that movie while you were sleeping? You bastard!" With The Human Tornado, I had apparently found the film that could break two MST3K veterans and reduce them to unblinking shock. What amazed them the most, and they repeated this fact many times over the course of the night, was that there was no editor credited to the film. "That motherfucker said Uh-uh, I ain't got nothin' to do with it!" was just one of many imagined encounters between the editor and Rudy Ray Moore over The Human Tornado. To be fair, we were talking about the VHS version, which was badly clipped in many places, and the DVD does address that as well as throw in some additional scenes that were missing from its earlier incarnation. Eventually, their bemused anger gave way to grudging affection for this one-of-a-kind film and, by the beginning of the next school week, they were both staunch Dolemite fans. The Human Tornado casts that kind of spell over you. It's Z-grade stuff to be sure, but it has a spirit and cock-eyed originality that makes it compulsively watchable.

They've also got legs. These films are thirty years old and they continue to build upon their sizeable following and show no signs of slowing down. The other biggie in Rudy Ray Moore's filmography is Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-In-Law, which I won't get into because technically it isn't a Dolemite film. Rather, it is an update of an old folk tale about a murdered man who agrees to marry Satan's hideous daughter in exchange for more time on earth to take care of unfinished business. I'm also leaving out Monkey Hustle and Disco Godfather because they lack the energy and fun of the Dolemite films. As commercially successful as the Dolemite films have been and as hugely influential as they've been hip-hop culture, this hasn't really translated into a big fat check with a "Thank You" written on the memo line to Rudy Ray Moore. He continues to play the nightclubs and makes the convention circuit when he should be a millionaire for these films. Regardless of whether or not any of them have one-fifteenth of The Deer Hunter's artistic credentials, they've sure made someone a lot of money and it isn't Rudy Ray Moore. I'm also surprised that an enterprising distributor hasn't already lined up Rudy Ray Moore and Jimmy Lynch (Moore's frequent co-star and a raconteur in his own right) to do commentary tracks for some special edition release (Dolemite has just had it's 30th anniversary and The Human Tornado's is next year come to think of it!) because, not even taking into account the entertainment factor, these would be a proverbial gold mine for all involved. Marketed properly, you could get every single fan of the films, and there are at least five to ten million in this country, to shell out twenty five bucks a pop just to hear Rudy Ray Moore give us the blow-by-blow on "Creeper" and tell us whose idea it was to intercut scenes of passionate lovemaking with Dolemite eating a plate of ribs.

Please check out Rudy Ray Moore's official website, http://www.shockingimages.com/dolemite/ for more information and, if you're a fan, please support him by taking as many of your friends as you can to see him live.

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