Black Dynamite

Post date: Feb 27, 2010 10:58:50 PM

If you ever watched and loved Shaft, Super Fly, The Mack, Sweetback, or any other Blaxploitation movie -- and maybe even if you haven't -- you need to see Black Dynamite IMMEDIATELY! Back are the driving funk/soul anthems and saturated colors; the well-groomed pimps with purple hats, huge collars, and rhinestone jackets; the overacting and the underacting; the perfect afros and sloppy kung fu. Writer-director Scott Sanders has captured and delivered the essense of 70s flavor to the 21st century, preserving the look and feel of grindhouse classics while amping up the self-awareness and the over-the-top laughs. Michael Jai White is Black Dynamite, a Shaft-style avenger who finds out his brother was shot by a pack of two-bit crooks, so he polices the streets for pushers though he isn't with the force. Unlike Shaft, though, who was a private detective, he doesn't have a real profession to speak of . . . other than being a badass and ladies' man. He gathers up his buddy Bullhorn, who speaks in verse, Cream Corn, a stylish goofball, Gloria, his politically active love interest, and a handful of local Black Panthers to uncover a government conspiracy to peddle smack to orphans and to take away black men's advantage in the bedroom. There are cameos from the ghost of Abe Lincoln, Tricky Dick, and the founder of Roscoe's. Revealed are the origins of Roscoe's discovery that chicken & waffles make a better combination than chili & donuts, as well as the real (kinky) reason Nixon needed to cover-up Watergate. There's so much to say about this movie that I can't even say it. There is simply an unthinkable amount of awesomeness in Black Dynamite, almost too much for one movie. If you, my readers, are the film lovers that I think you are, watching this trailer should be enough to convince you. Can you dig it?

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