Directed by William Witney
Written by George Armitage
Starring Trina Parks, Norman Bartold, Roger Mosley
PG • 1975 • 90 minutes

by Portrait in Flesh

Few things can fill me with more terror than the two words “musical comedy.”

After roughly two minutes of Darktown Strutters, Mr. Gimp turned to me and said, “And you chewed my ass out for making you watch When Women Had Tails.”

After telling him to shut up, I reminded him that the latter movie had no musical numbers.

The tasty dish that makes up the bulk fiber of Darktown Strutters is one that has soaked up the juices of 70’s non-PC Blaxploitation (I know I’m not the only one who is Of a Certain Age who remembers when the term “Afro-American” wasn’t anathema…not that Darktown Strutters gives a flying fuck about such niceties).

Anyhoo, the opening shot of this movie sent me into a conniption fit because the motorcycles they showed reminded me of the motorcycles I saw in Ankle Biters (which, if you haven’t seen, is about midget vampires…it also sports a rousing rap-based theme song with a chorus of “Three feet tall! Two inch fangs!”). These are honkin’ big monstrosities that look like bloated tricycles. And then I began twitching when I realized the flying monkeys from The Wiz were dressed more subtly than these women.

The twitching lasted for the remainder of the movie. (Arrr, here be spoilers for sure, laddie.)

The basic storyline can be summarized thusly: Syreena (the leader of the motorcycle tramps shown in the beginning of the movie) returns to her Watts neighborhood only to find out from her Black Belt Jones-obsessed brother that their mother, Cinderella, is missing. Seems Cinderella worked for the local BBQ pork rib baron, Louisville Cross, who looks like Col. Sanders’s skanky brother. At least he does when he isn’t dressed in a white satin caped pig costume. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Cinderella was in the process of starting up an abortion clinic for local girls just before she disappeared. Syreena sets out to find out what happened to her mother, and what she finds out will leave you with nightmares.

Nightmares in which you’ll flash back to things you’ve seen in the movie, such as:

• Bank-robbing pimp daddies.

• A sign of a speedo-wearing pig, the mascot of Sky Pig, where you’ll get a free watermelon with every bucket of ribs sold. (As an aside, Mr. Gimp and I both read the sign as saying “Slay Pig,” not “Sky Pig”…that’s some poor signage there.)

• Louisville Cross’s southern plantation, across from a strip mall in downtown L.A., complete with cotton fields and watermelon patches.

• A woman dressed up as Aunt Jemima and a man dressed up like Uncle Ben (these are Cross’s house servants…Syreena and company are later able to invade Cross’s house by using oversized pancakes Jemima provides to them).

• Motorcycle-riding klansmen (complete with oversized crosses as their sissy bars). (The Grand Dragon-red robe-wearing one also wears frilly red panties.)

• A Superfly Lite ice cream man who specializes in potsicles.

• A truly gratuitous lip synch extravaganza by 70s funky soulsters The Dramatics of their hit single “What You See Is What You Get,” who are being held prisoner by Cross.

• Some truly ugly-ass clothes…I swear, there was stuff Rudy Ray Moore would’ve been ashamed to wear.

The movie also features T.C. from Magnum, P.I. as Mellow the Love Machine. And there’s a character named V.D. who has to shoot you with a turkey baster/oversized syringe of fluid after he touches you. (At one point V.D. is used to shake down the pimp daddy of the mobile brothel of the movie.)

During the course of the movie (in an attempt to try to convince myself I wasn’t imagining what I was seeing) I tried to see if I could put my Nancy Drew detecting skills to use to solve the mystery of the movie. I kept thinking of Cross’s ribs (“Our ribs are bone-suckin’ good!”) and the fact that Prominent Black Citizens were being kidnapped by the clansmen and I kept trying not to go into a Soylent Black area and…well, let’s just say that I was way off. Turns out a birthing machine (complete with mechanical tit and kicking legs…a contraption that would have fit well in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) was involved and if you’re thinking klan clones you’re not far off. Turns out Cross wants the Black Vote, so he wants to clone Prominent Black Citizens. Cinderella found out about it by trying to set up an abortion clinic, so Cross kidnapped her.

During the movie (between the moans of despair), Mr. Gimp had this to say: “You know, as shitty as some of our movies are, at least this one looks and sounds OK. I mean, the acting bites and the art of it sucks, but the mechanics are pretty good. The blocking, the editing, the colors…too bad the rest of the movie sucks ass.”

Coming from him, that’s quite a compliment.

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