Editorial Product Review: :After he sang the praises of a certain black private dick named Shaft (but before he started slinging hash in the little town of South Park), mega-baritone crooner Isaac Hayes got a chance to personally bust some heads in this little known but ultra-cool blaxploitation classic. Hayes (who would later spoof his rock-solid performance in I'm Gonna Get You Sucka) is the titular ex-linebacker and bounty hunter who's determined to clean up the savage streets--with extreme prejudice. A ...
Editorial Product Review: :Pam Grier in a women-in-prison movie? Why did no one think of this sooner? OK, they did. Several times. But this one is different. Black Mama, White Mama is a bizarre update of The Defiant Ones with a little Cool Hand Luke and Chained Heat thrown in for good measure. Grier stars as Lee Daniels, a pimp-and-drug-lord's moll who's looking for a way to escape both prison and her thug boyfriend. The dynamic Margaret Markov ably backs her ...
Editorial Product Review: :This middling but entirely watchable blaxploitation thriller from 1975 stars football-legend-turned-actor Fred Williamson as the brother of a murdered bar owner in a racially divided town. After bringing in a gaggle of tough street buddies from the old neighborhood to help break up a corrupt police force, Williamson's character figures he can settle into domestic bliss with Pam Grier. But there's a snag: the hero's restless posse decides to take over the white cops' graft operation, forcing a ...
Editorial Product Review: :Fred Williamson returns as Tommy Gibbs, the self-styled Godfather of Harlem in Larry Cohen's quickly made sequel to the low-budget Black Caesar. The film opens with a different perspective on the finale from the earlier film, this time with Gibbs surviving an assassination attempt with the help of his estranged father (Julius Harris), who becomes Tommy's new chief lieutenant in his rebuilt organization. Tommy takes his revenge on those who set him up but faces a new threat ...
Editorial Product Review: :Based on Chester Himes's novel, this film marked actor-writer Ossie Davis's directing debut. Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques play Himes's volatile police detectives, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, who are on the trail of white men who pulled an armed stickup at a Back to Africa rally in Harlem. The money belongs to the poor people who paid for a chance to return to the motherland--but was it really a stickup? Or is the flashy preacher ...
Editorial Product Review: :From Keenan Ivory Wayans, the man who brought us Jim Carrey (initially just one of the bunch on Wayans's television comedy-sketch show, In Living Color), comes I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), a comedy spoof on the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Wayans plays Jack Spade, an army private just returning from the service. He comes home to find his younger brother June Bug dead of a overdose of gold chains (an 'O.G.') He vows revenge, and with ...
Editorial Product Review: :Cooley High has frequently been compared to American Graffiti, and for good reason. Like that classic, Cooley High has a loose, multicharacter structure, autobiographical origins, and the rich texture of its time. Set in Chicago in 1964, the movie follows aspiring writer Preach (Glynn Turman) and local basketball star Cochise (Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs, who went on to star in Welcome Back, Kotter) as they wander their neighborhood, drifting in and out of their classes at Cooley Vocational High School. ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Pam Grier, the voluptuous queen of blaxploitation movies (and the foxy title character of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown) reigns supreme in this kick-ass action flick. Bodacious nurse Foxy takes the law into her own hands after her main squeeze is murdered in cold blood. The standard revenge plot of Foxy Brown moves along on fast-forward, and the violence ratio (some of it quite gruesome) is high. Director Jack Hill, a master of the low-budget drive-in movie ...
Editorial Product Review: :It's been branded with the 'blaxploitation' label, but there is little that's exploitive in J.D.'s Revenge, a film of well-drawn, articulate characters dragged into a supernatural showdown. Glynn Turman (Cooley High) is especially fine as the sensitive and quiet Ike, a determined student moonlighting as a cab driver, so wound up he's on the verge of cracking. Enter (literally) the ghost of J.D., a violent, vengeful gangster murdered in the opening moments. He could be Ike's own Mr. ...
Editorial Product Review: :Pam Grier is Friday Foster, a photographer's assistant at a glamour magazine assigned to cover the secret arrival of a reclusive black millionaire (Thalmus Rasula). 'Just get your cute little behind out there and take your little pictures and goddammit don't get involved!' Of course she does: The scene erupts into an attempted assassination, and Friday digs up a conspiracy that reaches to Washington, D.C., and involves sassy, flamboyant fashion designer Eartha Kitt, lascivious but good-at-heart minister Scatman ...
Alienware's flagship gaming laptop, the Area-51 m9750, has plenty of appeal for high-end gamers, but the alien head aesthetic seems dated, and newer components are right around the corner.
Thanks to a rich set of features and some great new additions, Evite maintains its stature as the top service for issuing e-invitations —but competitors are catching up.
