My August selection in Blaxploitaudient, Lord Shango, got me asking the question:
Just because a movie features primarily Black people -- in this case all Black people -- and is set in the 1970s, does that necessarily make it a blaxploitation film?
Ray Marsh's 1975 film came on my radar by doing a search of the word "blaxploitation" on Kanopy, earlier on the very night that I watched it. See, I had only 11 films in my Blaxploitaudient list of potential candidates for this series on Letterboxd, meaning I'd need at least one that wasn't on the list. I considered watching Coffy, one of the remaining four I had not yet watched, but I get the sense that this is another film fronted by a female badass, and I've watched a film that profiles like that in two of the past three months with Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones. I'm saving Ganja & Hess, which I understand is a horror movie, for October, and I'm questionable on whether I am going to ultimately watch either Dolemite or Shaft in Africa, since I've already watched a Rudy Ray Moore movie and a Shaft movie.
And I actually did welcome the change in subject matter with Lord Shango, which deals more with the occult than the traditional blaxploitation elements of drugs, crime, guns and groovy music. Whether or not that makes it a blaxploitation film, well, I may leave that up to wiser people than me, and in any case, with MIFF on this month, I'm definitely not going to fit in another one.
I was concerned at the start that this might be extremely low budge, and that the film's technical limitations might make it even more of a B movie than usual in a series comprised of essentially B movies. It did pick up in its confidence a bit as it went, though it likely still remains the most anonymous movie that I've watched, considering that I wasn't familiar with a single cast member -- a first for this series.
And here's an interesting indication of the obscurity of Lord Shango -- it does not have its own Wikipedia page. It's mentioned in the Wikipedia pages of some of the actors who appear in it, but it never got its own. Which is a shame, because I watched this last week and wanted a refresher on the plot. So I've just got to do my best on that one.
Let's start with the logline on IMDB: "A tribal priest returns from the dead to take revenge on non-believers." News to me, ha ha.
So the movie opens with a woman Billie (Avis McCarther) being taken for her christening in a lake ceremony. Her fiancee Femi (Bill Overton) arrives to try to break this up, I believe since he is pagan. (Is he the tribal priest? I did not get that.) In the struggle to remove him from the ceremony, though, Femi accidentally drowns, sending Billie into a pit of despair.
The main character then becomes Billie's mother, Jenny (Marlene Clark), who knows that a mysterious bystander to this ceremony named Jabo (Lawrence Cook) has a connection to the occult. The movie takes on the thrust of summoning the spiritual leader Lord Shango to save and protect Billie, though of course this has unintended consequences, and certain people who wronged the pregnant Billie are likely to get quite the comeuppance.
I ultimately gave this film three stars on Letterboxd, but my only memory of it now is hazy, and I can't say it did a great job keeping its audience up to speed with the plot points. This is becoming a theme in my posts, but I watched it on a night I was really tired, and there were naps involved. Cognizant of how busy I would be during August because of MIFF, I watched it before the festival started, but you could rightly say I was sort of jamming it in just to tick it off the list. There were ultimately things about the film that I thought worked enough to give it this narrowest of recommendations, but since I can't fully recall what they were now, it feels a little empty. I think just best to move on.
One realization I had during the movie, when retroactively pondering my August choice, is that although this series was inspired by watching Elvis Mitchell's Is That Black Enough for You? at the end of my 2022 ranking period, I don't believe I've watched many, if any, films that I learned about from that movie. There were a lot of blaxploitation movies I already knew about that I hadn't seen, and those have made up the bulk of the series so far.
So I have now vowed to check the inevitable online list of all the movies mentioned in Is That Black Enough for You?, and choose two of them to go along with Coffy and Ganja & Hess for the final four movies in this series. September seems like a good time to do the first one.
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