Dolemite Is My Name first published by VODzilla.co When we first meet Randy Ray Moore in Dolemite Is My Name, he is stuck in the past. He has a bunch of LPs that even the DJ (Snoop Dogg) in the record store where he works refuses to play on the grounds that the old-fashioned songs…
King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen first published by SciFiNow The documentary King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen comes with a certain anxiety about oblivion. First there is that title, modelled on the self-consciously lurid form of Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold World of Ozploitation! (2008),…
Willie Dynamite first published by Little White Lies, as part 27 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column In the opening scenes of Gilbert Moses’ feature debut Willie Dynamite, its eponymous protagonist (Roscoe Orman) displays all the polished veneer of success within American patriarchy. He drives a flashily modified, purple-painted car (his name emblazoned across its customised plates)…
First published by Little White Lies Maybe it was the themes of individual empowerment, spiritual brotherhood and resistance to oppression, or maybe it was just all the anti-authoritarian ass-whupping, but in the US of the 1970s, apart from blaxploitation, only kung fu movies were able consistently to woo the African-American dollar. What’s more, it was…