Black Heat (1976)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Excellent adaptation.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Another bottom-of-the-barrel Graze Z exploitation quickie from director Al Adamson, widely considered to be one of the worst directors of all time (even worse than Ed Wood, yes...at least Wood's films were somewhat entertaining). After a run of shoddy horror epics in the late '60s/early '70s, Adamson, ever one to cash in on a popular cinema trend to make a few bucks, turned his hand to the blaxploitation genre and ran off a couple of thrillers (DEATH DIMENSION is another of his cardboard productions, slightly - ever so slightly - more interesting due to the introduction of martial arts). This is a boringly sub-standard cops-and-robbers thriller yarn in which a black policeman goes after the people running a crime syndicate from a brothel which fronts as a hotel. There's more than that, but the plot is so convoluted and contrived that you can't be bothered to care. The only good thing is the funky music score that permeates through the action.The main problem with the film is that the entire cast is so unappealing. The women are frequently naked (of course) which doesn't help and the men are just sweaty bad actors. Timothy Brown is the blaxploitation hero obviously modelled to be a Shaft clone, yet lacks the natural charisma his role demands - he just seems wooden and a clichéd macho-type (check out his hilariously dated - not to mention - Shaft-style love scene with a reporter). And Russ Tamblyn is just pathetic as a moustachioed villain, his weight blossoming and good looks vanished both at the same time (it's amazing that he enjoyed a second stage of his career in later life, even if it was in the hands of Fred Olen Ray).The action highlights include a hostage-taker who accidentally blows himself and his hostage up when his bomb becomes trapped in a car door, a handful of boringly routine shoot-outs in the street where bad actors clutch their chests as they die, and a really unexciting car crash where a vehicle rolls down a cliff in slow-motion after some poor editing attempts to convince you it was nudged off the road by another car. Adamson does manage a few choice moments, such as an uncomfortable spot which displays the downside of gambling where a penniless broad bets her body to a group of greasy thugs and loses, but these are few and far between. Mostly it's just rip-off after rip-off after cliché, with that old hoary chestnut of a rooftop chase being dragged out of the closet yet again for another airing down.The finale involves a police raid on the villains' headquarters, where the lesbian crime queen (!) is arrested and Tamblyn is impaled on a piece of scrap metal (the only moderately gory shot the film offers). Things still drag on though, to a showdown in the desert straight out of CHARLEY VARRICK, where the final bad guy (a Bobby Rhodes wannabe) attempts to escape via plane before it's blown out of the sky by an incredibly lucky - perhaps darned near impossible - shot from Brown's gun. One thing that did make me chuckle was the misleading box art for this video. If you check the top of the box carefully there's a drawing of an airliner exploding. The actual plane in the movie is a BI-PLANE! Yes, once again artistic license is to blame for making a film look more expensive than it really is. SYNDICATE VICE - a film only for those with acute insomnia and looking for a cure.

When a big-time drug dealer from Detroit by the name of "Guido" (J. C. Wells) comes to Las Vegas and gets involved with a local hoodlum known as "Ziggy" (Russ Tamblyn) a local detective named "Tony" (Geoffrey Land) and his partner "Kicks Carter" (Timothy Brown) become highly suspicious since Ziggy isn't in the same league as Guido and he doesn't deal in drugs. What neither Tony nor Kicks realize is that Guido needs about $100,000 in order to purchase weapons which he then intends to trade for high-quality drugs. Ziggy needs Guido's help to kidnap a courier carrying $250,000 from a security company. But in order to do that Ziggy needs information from a gambling addict by the name of "Terry" (Jana Bellan) who works at the security company. The problem is that Terry happens to be dating Tony and he doesn't want Ziggy anywhere near her. Now, rather than reveal what transpires next I will just say that I thought that for a blaxploitation movie produced in the mid-70's this particular film wasn't too bad. I especially liked the complex plot and some of the unexpected twists this movie presented. Slightly above average.

Black Heat was more like a Monday afternoon made-for-TV movie. There's the usual whodunit mystery and then we meet the bad guys. Not your usual blaxploitation flick , the main star is ex-Philadelphia Eagle Timothy Brown who seems a lot less "black" than lets say...Jim Brown, or Fred Williamson. Brown plays "Kicks" Carter who doesn't really live up to his name. I've seen a more violent Timothy Brown in M.A.S.H. than in Black Heat. Sure he plays the tough cop who gets his information and leads but in this movie he doesn't use much of his fists or legs but uses his gun in some parts of the film where it could have used climactic fight scenes. Russ Tamblyn of West Side Story fame plays the bad guy and he plays his part well. In short words, we watch Timothy Brown films to see him fight . On the other hand he plays it well with the ladies in the film.

Black Heat is available under many titles, as are most films made by the late exploitation director Al Adamson. Also like many Adamson films, there are no major name stars, only a few washed up names and a few never-quite-made-it names. The story features a black cop in Vegas (Timothy Brown) out to nail bad guys. That's it. The plot is as thin as an average TV cop show from the same period. It's interesting to see Russ Tamblyn playing a really gritty, despicable character. It's hard to believe he's the same guy who played Riff back in the film version of "West Side Story". There's a couple of OK action scenes but the film is pretty tame by today's standards. At least it has a distinctive 70s feel to it. Brown is OK in the lead but didn't have much of a movie career.