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1975 - USA Directed By: Lee Frost. Starring: Rod Perry, Charles Robinson, Phil Hoover, Edward Cross, Angela Brent, Wes Bishop, Lee Frost, Donna Desmond and Uschi Digard.
Current Availability
Available as a cheapo US R1 DVD from Diamond Entertainment, either as a stand alone release or on a value for money double-bill with Matt Cimber's equally wild black biker movie The Black Six. Both releases are VHS quality affairs but are dirt cheap making it hard to moan (I picked up the double bill for a mere £2.49 including postage).
Recommended?
Hardly good cinema but more or less a guaranteed good time for exploitation fans, delivering oodles of violence, unpleasantry, nudity, sex, a castration scene and some truly outrageous racial politics. What's not to love?
Review
With the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King in 1968 and widespread racial discrimination and upheaval the sixties and seventies were a difficult time for race relations in the United States. Inevitably this was reflected to a degree in the cinema of the era with certain exploitation pictures in particular playing the simmering racial tensions like a fiddle. Low grade shockers such as Robert A. Endelson’s ultra bad taste Fight For Your Life (1977) and even big budget mainstream fare such as The Klansman (1974) and the tawdry plantation drama Mandingo (1975), both released by Paramount shamelessly leeched off racial tensions and resultantly struck a chord with the inner city denizens of New York’s famed Times Square Grindhouse circuit where these films enjoyed their greatest popularity.
The Black Gestapo, while disingenuously tarted up as blaxploitation is in actuality a severe exploitation flick from genre stalwart Lee Frost (of Love Camp 7 fame) in which the scenario of a black militant group eradicating white shake down artists from a predominantly black neighborhood only to become corrupted serves as an excuse for much low brow brutality and bad taste.
The Black Gestapo takes place in the impoverished Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles where the black residents are intimidated and terrorized daily by white Italian racketeers who extort local black traders for protection and orchestrate drug and prostitution rackets.
Having tired of the mobster’s constant tyranny the black residents form a militant group dubbed “The People’s Army”. Led by General Ahmed (Perry), “The People’s Army” begins to viciously fight back against the white hoods and eventually succeed in violently ousting the bullying mob from the neighborhood.
However, having regained control of the Watts street’s “The People’s Army” promptly becomes corrupted. The organization is soon hijacked by the evil natured,power obsessed Colonel Kojah (Robinson) and under his leadership takes up the same drug, prostitution and “protection” rackets put in place by their white predecessors while adopting the self-serving Kojah’s fascist philosophy. When the ousted Ahmed hears of the power mad Kojah’s activities (for which the community is wrongly blaming him) he is enraged and sets out to free the Watts residents from this fresh reign of tyranny.
While The Black Gestapo was clearly influenced heavily by the racial and social upheavals of its time, in itself it is a film with no real message to give of its own. Director Frost and companies motivations are undeniably exploitative as The Black Gestapo offers an uncomfortable juxtaposition between spirited “black power” scenes of black militants brutally taking out white hoods and leering depictions of white on black violence, sleazy T&A and eventually jaw-dropping, borderline absurdist scenes of Kojah and his men lording it up and preening around in full-on Nazi garb. Stock footage of Adolf Hitler is crudely pasted into the opening credits just to ensure that even the dimmest of viewers picks up on the films less than subtle comparison. If the truth be known The Black Gestapo on its original Grindhouse run, was in all likelihood enjoyed by both inner-city blacks and racist whites albeit for entirely different reasons.
While the films aspirations are pretty lowly by anyone’s standards, if the viewer is able to disengage their brain (not to mention any moral scruples) for an hour and a half and accept Thew Black Gestapo as nothing more than a lowdown and dirty piece of exploitation then the result is a highly entertaining viewing experience for reasons both good and ill. The Black Gestapo is a film with a commendable sense of blatancy about it, doing little to mask its intended goal of flying in the face of good taste for the duration of its running length.
While Frost is no real auteur he seems to be loathe to leave as much as a minute of dead screen time and goes off at the deep end almost from the outset in terms of action, violence and distaste as sleazy, loathsome white hoods bloodily beat on a young black who dares to thwart a rape attempt, leaving him with a ruptured spleen. Their nefarious activities escalate from there as they are seen slapping around a naked prostitute accused of short changing them on trick money and shortly after they sadistically abduct, rape and batter a pretty black nurse. This final action proves to be the catalyst for “The People’s Armies” violent retribution as they break into the rapists house and castrate him in the bath then flush his chopped off chopper down the lavatory! All this takes place just in the first half hour! Predictably The Black Gestapo cannot do anything but slow down somewhat from here as the focus shifts away from the black vigilantes versus white mobsters street war and onto the infinitely less interesting battle of the wills between the moralistic Ahmed and the power crazed Kojah. All the same Frost still serves up the exploitation elements in generous quantities as we are treated to shootings, men being hurled through windows, car bombings and plenty of salacious nudity and sex, mainly provided by the pneumatically breasted exploitation and porn regular Uschi Digard who seems to spend almost all of her screen time as Kojah’s squeeze topless. Unfortunately a comically awful climactic poolside showdown between Ahmed and Kojah ends the film on somewhat of a bum note.
Ultimately the films indirectly made central point, namely that violently imposed regimes – however honorable in their intentions – soon become corrupt is a pretty hollow and superficial one as the oppressed predictably ascend to the role of the new oppressor. The Black Gestapo is certainly not short on the cheesy cringe factor either thanks to a score pitched somewhere between jive blaxploitation cuts and skin flick jazz, not to mention a collection of rather stilted, one-note performances although in fairness Rod Perry makes a strong impression as the resilient and likeable Ahmed. All the same, while hardly accomplished The Black Gestapo taken at face value is an enjoyable riot of distaste. The sight of black protagonists in Nazi apparel doing the ghetto goosestep (replete with crudely overdubbed “Zeich Heil’s”) viewed now has an almost surreally outrageous quality and it is impossible to imagine something so unapologetically un-PC ever being committed to celluloid now. Add to that a liberal and more or less relentless dose of gratuitous violence and the exploitative leeching off of its eras racial tensions and the sum total is a rollicking, guiltily amusing and often jaw dropping trash cinema time capsule. Offering up a choice menu of beatings, rape, shootings, car explosions, castration, some gob-smacking racial politics and more bad afro’s than you can shake a mobsters hacked off penis at - there may be better made exploitation films than The Black Gestapo, but how many offer this much for your money?
Also Try… Candy Tangerine Man / Black Shampoo / The Black Six / Fight For Your Life / The Klansman / Mandingo / Drum.
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