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"Not a homage to brutality that the artist has invented, but a hymn from the mouth of reality," nothing less for Melvin Van Peebles as Jodorowsky's American cousin. He's the famished boy initiated at the bordello, the priapic prayer answered by the Good Dyke Fairy Godmother at the underground sex show. He's recruited as a bogus suspect by white cops, "just a little eyewash" until he witnesses them battering a young Black Panther, after which his manacles become bloodied brass knuckles. "As hot as little sister's twat," the taciturn Staggerlee on the run from South Central Los Angeles to the Mexican border. "Buy yourself a last supper. You're a dead man!" To upend the system is to upend the medium and vice versa, thus Van Peebles presides over one of cinema's rawest short circuits. (The kinship is to the Rocha of Black God, White Devil and Antonio das Mortes.) Splintered montage reigns, film stock shifts from grainy to grainier, freeze-frames and superimpositions and solarized smears are all components of a properly lacerated screen. "A real struggle from the womb to the tomb," per the neighborhood priest, eulogizing the lad dead "of an overdose... an overdose of Black misery!" The LAPD is but an updated lynch mob, the interrogation of the hero's friend is a bit of sensory torture out of Lewis' The Big Combo. The superstud mystique comes in handy when surrounded by sinister Hell's Angels, the fugitive fucks the chopper queen into submission and sends the callow militant away to safety, "he's our future, bro." Patrol sirens and howling hounds, gospel old and new, the Revolution's full cacophony spreading into the desert and beyond. "You bled my Momma—You bled my Poppa—But you won't bleed me!" The admirable companion piece is Baadasssss! by Mario Van Peebles, a son's celebration and exorcism. With Hubert Scales, Simon Chuckster, John Dullaghan, Rhetta Hughes, Wesley Gale, Lavelle Roby, and John Amos.
--- Fernando F. Croce |