A5p3ct Rat105

When tracing the origin of many a cinematic technique, Abel Gance's landmark 1927 epic Napoléon makes an entrance - this is also the case with the subject of film-makers operating with more than one aspect ratio in their films. Napoléon had the most of the movie in 1.33 ratio, but the finale expands to three cinema screens (Polyvision), which show three seperate images side by side, and at times one single very wide visual.

 CinemaScope is generally excepted to have arrived on the movie scene in 1953; this however ignores not only the early scope films of the early 1930's (The Big Trail and The Bat Whispers among others), but such unexcepted exceptions as William Dieterle's 1948 haunting, slightly boring ghost tale Portrait of Jennie. Most of the film was in full frame 1.37 aspect ratio and in black & white, but the final shot was in color. Ditto the color suprise (similar to The Picture of Dorian Gray movie released three years earlier),  some special theatres gave the storm sequence finale a green tint (restored for the DVD) and had a wider screen ratio of 2.18 (not restored on the current DVDs).

In the 1950's, to underwrite the way that a painter creates in many shapes of the frame, Henri-Georges Clouzot used two aspect ratios for his documentary The Mystery of Picasso (see previous blog entry on distorted visuals). Kubrick filmed Dr Strangelove using two aspect ratios (full frame 1.37 and 1.66) with in-camera mattes, which take turns during the movie to a little bewildering effect - the initial DVD release preserved this, but the anamorphic release changed the film visually to 1.66 only.

The act of using numerous screen shapes does rise its head from time to time, such as in director Alejandro González Iñárritu's cancer drama from 2010, Biutiful, which utlizes both the 1.85 and scope 2.35 ratios. Cartoon series like Samurai Jack push the concept of changing aspect ratios to self-consciously absurd extremes. IMAX productions have an endemic tendency to use numerous aspect ratios -- from a tiny square to utilizing the entire picture space that at its best fills the viewer's entire field of vision.

A film that is usually missing from the discussions on movies with multiple aspect ratios is Orson Welles' confusing noir The Lady from Shanghai - the lauded and much-copied (Enter the Dragon, anyone?) mirror finale has the film mutating to a letterboxed ratio of about 1.66, slightly wider from the full frame 1.37 that the film is in. According to Peter Boghdanovich, Welles' inspiration for the different aspect ratio -- done with in-camera mattes, was D.W. Griffith, and how he masked the image with the iris in his silent productions.

The finale of Lady from Shanghai however is not the only scene which dissents from the 1.37 ratio that the rest of the movie possesses -- the funhouse sequence earlier on instead goes the other route - an aspect ratio which was narrower, of about 1.19, conjuring up memories of early sound films which employed this particular shape (which was praised by Sergei Eisenstein for its dynamism), such as Fritz Lang's M and the excellent The Testament of Dr Mabuse (below), along with Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr.

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SFX maestro Douglas Trumbull's 1983 movie Brainstorm is a proto-Strange Days tale of technology that records human sensations for others to experience. The narrative scenes are in 1.85 while the sensorial tapes shot in POV widened the screen to scope (2.20 in 70mm, and 2.35 in 35mm prints). The sensation recordings are reminiscent of amusement park contraptions, where people would go standing in a dark room, and POV footage of rollercoaster rides and such was blasted on a big screen - they had these as long as still during my childhood in the early 1990's. The widescreen video releases of Brainstorm faithfully preserve the screen sizes, but here the letterboxing gets bigger in the sensation recording sequences due to the wider aspect ratio, causing the image aperture to actually diminish - not exactly what the film-makers originally envisioned.

  
Update: There's a Blu-ray disc of Brainstorm out now -- it is presented in 2.35 ratio, with windowboxing for the narrative scenes to maintain the smaller aspect ratio - while this accomplishes that the disc stays faithful to the fact that the picture indeed widens for the Xperience-O-Helmet shots, it comes with the cost of a tinier image and lower resolution, which make for most of the movie. This decision of presentation seems to have gathered mostly negative reactions thus far from film buffs.

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Hiroshi Teshigahara's arthouse horror The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) from 1966 is one tough, neat film. It's a situation where the director seems (m)eager to take creative risks at seemingly every corner. The movie centers on a facially sca(r)red businessman, who receives an astonishingly life-like mask, which gives him a reneissance in identity.

Speaking of those creative risks I mentioned before, halfway through the story, we are apruptly introduced to a sub-plot, which is parallel tale of a woman suffering a fate similar to the main character. The jarring narrative quality is enchanced by the sudden shift of aspect ratio (!) from full frame 1.37 to about 2.00, which lasts for a brief time.

Teshigahara's film is a must-see, in both of the screen formats it deploys.

Ending on a light note, a Video Nasty that should be on your to-see list is the campy (!!) concentration camp and war turkey The Beast in Heat - the sic-happy on-screen title during the lonesome opening credits actually is The Horrifing Experiments of SS Last Days. Above is the Dutch tape from the appropriately named video label - the (w)hole pride and glory(hole) of my VHS collection.

I don't have a clue about how the DVD releases of the film handle it, but the VHS has at least three different aspect ratios at work. This eclectic quality about screen formats goes to pretty absurd measures during the silly war sequences that stand in for the dubious finale - at times almost every single shot seems to be in a different aspect ratio - it's a true conflict on a meta-cinematic level as well, it seems.

Tha Es0teric Pleasures of Colorized Motion Pictures

In the late 1970's and during the 1980's, an ominous process began to take shape with old black & white films, which looked like it could lead to having them computer-colorized. This trend, which had media mogul Ted Turner as its antagonistic symbol for many a folks, produced a strong condemnation from high-profile film-makers, such as Martin Scorsese. Colorization presents a philosophy that color image -- in these cases, a yuckkingly over-saturated color scheme featuring people with Umpa Lumpa skin -- is somehow inherintly superior to watching black & white. B&W is seen as something inferior, something that is limiting. The movie buff counter-argument goes basically that monochromatic films were designed to be viewed in that particular way, and that B&W ought to be treated as its own unique thing, possessing features that is as good as color imagery is, but in its own right. Colorization as a process is perhaps analoguous to dimensiolizing 2-D films into stereoscopic 3-D (as is the case in the re-release of the Star Wars films and Cameron's Titanic). But those of us who're not on the totally puritanical disposition, colorized cinematic art does indeed offer some perverted pleasures of its own. This blog entry is dedicated to give a hint of these relishes.

 

The Special Edition DVD of the twisted crackpotty anti-marihuana propaganda opus Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children!) has a new colorized version provided by Legend Films. This version, clearly justly created with tongue firmly in saliva-filled cotton-mouthed cheek, features several different color tones for the marihuana smoke, each color-coded, depending on the severity of the character's addiction to the Devil's Weed (rooted in Hell).

 This brings to mind a heart-warming memory of a Bela Lugosi B-mystery chiller The Death Kiss made in 1932  - it was on late-night Finnish television about a decade ago, and was broadcast for some reason in a n obscure colorized form - a scene showing a fire breaking out in a projection room had an added surreal touch as the smoke was colored orange for some nutty reason!

In 1963, a rumour began to circulate that the last movie before that Lee Harvey Oswald saw before he committed his ungodly deed was the Frank Sinatra vehicle Suddenly, from 1954, which depicts a planned assassination of a U.S. president - Sinatra again dived onto similar territory later with The Manchurian Candidate. In 1986, a colorized version became available, and the neat thing about this is that, "Ol' Blue Eyes" was given a Brown Tone to his Windows to the Soul in an inadvertently subversive touch!

The afore-mentoned Legend Films corrected this flaw in their colorization re-issue of the flick.

 

Skull Island does acid.

Aaaah... the original King Kong. We all know that the monochrome version was great, but experiencing the flick with psychedelic-looking dinosaurs is a real treat, I tells ya! This one is a real corker. What in God's Name were they thinking when they did the colorization?!

In the monochrome original, there's a strange sort of plausibility going on with Kong as a character, but this is just utterly artificial, making the poor creature look like the clumsy puppet that it is. It's a distancing device. Hurry! Someone colorize a Bertolt Brecht movie! Yo, Adrian...!

Speaking of adorable monsters, Larry Cohen's It's Alive cums to mind. Cohen sought that the visual style to aim for was like a colorized film, with its saturated, unreal pastel visions, and some moments in the movie do archieve this somewhat.

An apotheosis of the 1980's colorization controversy came with the rumor that Ted Turner's company would colorize Orson Welles' seminal Citizen Kane. An elderly Welles complained about this to indie director Henry Jaglom:

"Don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons!"

 Welles' original unusual RKO contract containing unusual creative freedom finally did it for Kane, and the colorization never took place.... Alas, not so for Welles' mutilated Kane follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, slightly less accomplished in terms of craftsmanship, but more human. It got mutilated to another degree with a colorized Turner release.

OK, finally fellas, let me make my stand clear: colorizing B&W films generally makes as much damn sense as -- cue a Noam Chomsky-like drawing of an unexpected analogy -- re-releasing Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert in black & white.

The act of colorization possessing artistic integrity is not an entirely impossible concept. The best example that pops up is the 1935 fantasy film She, which was originally intended to be shot in an early experimental color stock, and the entire production was constructed with this in mind -- but RKO studios at the last moment called it off, and the end result was a monohrome flick. Some years ago, Legend Films (the company that obviously is some kind of warped hero of this blog entry) under the supervision of Ray Harryhausen, the legend himself, colorized the film in  order for viewers to experience what She would look like in color. This was further a propos by the fact that 1930's color film stock possessed a similar faded, pastel quality that colorized imagery has.

Originally in the 1980's, some film-makers were actually enthusiastic about the technology, including Frank Capra, who wanted to colorize some of his classics, like the excellent study of individual vs community, It's a Wonderful Life, but was barred from the colorization booth when it emerged that the films were in public domain. This led the bitter Capra join with the anti-colorization brigade.

On a general level, colorizing old films might be a dumb idea, but if you do do it - then go the Reefer Madness way, and actually be crazy and creative with it, and have fun!

Aaaaah, an' one final quickie nugget:

Roger "The Man" Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors - in its original monochromatic form, veeeery innocent and tame kiddie fodder; but GodDaaaaamn the way the more gory moments start to look in the colorized version - this is beginning to be quite heavy stuff, all of a sudden, soon it's kissing cousins with Blood Feast. I was shocked. No wonder almost all gore films in cinema history have been in (blood dripping) color...   ?

dIsT0rTiOnS

  A real tour-de-force in the esoteric category of cinematic visuals of a distorted nature is here.

                                                                          Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son (Mat i syn) -                                                                          one of the finest films of the 1990's -                                                                           uses distorting mirrors and lenses to create an unreal visual style through-out the whole movie; the majority of its images are distorted in one way or nother ("Nother died"). An outstanding and uncompromising feature about the work is that no apologetic clear justifications, or rather excuses, are given for the visual appearance -- no-one is hit over the head with a club nor are there any beer mugs revealed on the foreground, as, say, in the Francis Bacon bio flick Love is the Devil.

We are priviledged to be part of the final moments of a mother and son's relationship, taking place in a secluded place in the countryside. Intimate views of the characters are intercut with landscape shots, stylized to a degree that they're reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, than regular master shots from films. The thing distinguishing this marvelous attempt from simply creating tableaux vivant versions of the director's favorite paintings is the true sense of time flowing, passing - unique for the cinematic medium. Here the ambiguous nature of the crooked visions gives a sense that we're inhabiting a place somewhere between life and death, a place of transition, of reality being in flux.

But to give a little historical context, the first and most common strategy in using distorted imagery in cinema is to create a narrative context for it which establishes that the distorted visuals seek to convey the disoriented perception of a given character in the picture. There's a ton of examples of this in Hollywood and mainstream cinema, but let's throw John Carpenter's Christine as one title among many. One fairly interesting early example is from the silent era, in the 1928 Teutonic short film Überfall, from Ernö Metzger. A milktoast guy gets in trouble, and is knocked out cold for his efforts by a brutish thug; this breaks the film - until then shot and edited in conventional manner - into a prolonged, ritualized montage of distorted faces and sights.


A little similar experiment was conducted by the illustrious Abel Gance in 1915 with the short La folie du Docteur Tube, which features a conehead-looking mad doc experimenting with a mystical powder, which goes off everywhere, and distorts the surrroundings - the movie is basically a self-justifying showcase for the then-novel visuals created by an anamorphic lens.

An' speaking of anamorphic . . . . .

The fresh Finnish DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot's feature documentary The Mystery of Picasso from 1956 isn't really technically what it ought to be. The entire movie basically observes Picasso's pictures being made, and the twists and turns his creative process possessess. Perhaps a little too tedious for my money, at times feeling like watching paint dry - ha! - but it's an interesting little movie  (I do prefer Clouzot's documentary on Herbert Von Karajan) which not only mixes together monochromatic and color imagery, but also various aspect ratios. The original theatrical release, and also the U.S. DVD, have the film mostly in the square aspect ratio, but about halfway through Picasso remarks I need a bigger canvas, and the screen expands into CinemaScope. The U.S. DVD has these sections letterboxed, but the Finnish DVD - while being superior to its U.S. counterpart in terms of color and image sharpness - insanely has this stretched completely anamorphically, as you can see in the above screenshots, the Finnish dvd is the one on the left and the U.S. on the right - just like in politics, natch?

Weirdly enough, stretching these paintings even more than goo' ol' Eugene Tooms could bear, seems to give them an additional Picasso-esque quality!
But I still personally prefer letterboxes.

Too bad this anamorphicity (is that a reel word?) extends beyond the showing of paintings on the DVD presentation. This maybe takes too big a step towards making Picasso look like something out of Resnais' Night and Fog:

Meditations on Visual Style

    

 Usually visual styles are most self-evident when a film incorporates numerous of them, like in the Hollywood flicker Traffic, where each of the storylines has their style: yellowish and grainy for the Mexican portion (with Tomas Milian!), bluish and bleak for the Michael Douglas drug czar portion and so on. The most interesting moments are when the stories overlap and the characters tresspass on each others' territory; Catherina Zeta-Jones for example appears in a visual style that's unlike her own segment.

The presence of this kind of visual profiling is highly felt in TV series like CSI: Miami and CSI: New York, where both cities are given a visual style that tries to characterize the place. One crossover episode took place in both cities, where the contrast between the orange-saturated sunny Miami and the bleak, bluish NY became pretty apparant even to visual illiterates.

One of the cliches of visual styles, in Hollywood productions especially, seems to be the high and mighty Bleach Bypass.

Muted colors. High contrast. Don'tcha just love it... mothafucka.

The origin of bleach bypass is John Huston's movie adaptation of Moby Dick from 1956. The film-makers wanted to create a pastel-like faded color scheme to suggest the days past, and accomplished the feat by using a film developing process that could be summed up saying that both monochromatic and color versions of the image were fused together, with some added silver to spice things up. A very similar technical process would be at the heart of creating bleach bypass in the years to come - but in today's world of digital cinema, the question is more about plug-ins and pressing the right buttons than about lab chemicals.

The First Official Bleach Bypass Movie was a product from that finest species of numerous new waves, the one from Japan. The film in question was Kon Ichikawa's drama Her Brother from 1960; the results were much subtler than subsequent products utilizing this visual look.

One of the most outstanding examples of the process came in the 1980's with the Orwell adaptation 1984 made in... well, you know when - and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice (Offret), wonderfully lensed by Sven Nykvist. The streak continued in  the 1990's - Spielberg's Saving Ryan's Privates deserves a mention. Slowly bleach bypass began to resemble a cliche in this decade... especially in the arena of still photography used in movie poster art.

But(t), can a visual style gain an importance to itself that seems unjustified? A case in point is the animated feature Metropia from 2009 - an entire film that's been made around its visual style. In the film what makes the visual style unique goes beyond mere color palette or grain structure, and arrives at the very shapes and appearances of things. Here you get a unique sensation that you're watching something that hangs in some weird middle ground between live-action and animation.

Even though this visual approach is very titillating, it's just ain't enough, buddy. It might be for a short flick - if that. The only item worth of interest content-wise is a dystopian, but oddly compelling depiction of a future Europe, where nation state borders have been more or less dissolved. The whole plot is forgettable claptrap, and the unusual appearence of the movie seems to have nil to do with the actual events, themes, the story and characters. Just watching the imagery itself has its dreadful pleasures, alas, not enough to sustain anything over thirty minutes.

Perhaps an example of something that has fared a little better in this ballpark is Richard Linklater's Dick Film A Scanner Darkly - the rotoscoped imagery at least takes some steps into being in union with the themes of alienation and the unreliable nature of reality that the story features.

Now, two brief examples of visual style glory in conclusion:

Carl Theodor Dreyer's excellent Vampyr (1932) features a shoddy, greyish, low-contrast monochromatic look, which is augmented brilliantly by the muddy soundtrack. The visual look was famously conceived when during the making of test footage, some light accidentally leaked on the undeveloped film, which gave unusual visual sensations - the actual execution of that look in principal photography was created through gauzes being used as filters.Watching Vampyr gives the sensation (unique for a 1930's film) like you're in fact viewing a film made in this day, which in some Guy Maddin-ish way seeks to mimic old cinema, but retains a vague modern undertone.

And on other hand, there's E. Elias Merkhige's 1989 arthouse horror Begotten. The movie's furiously dull, and a definite lackluster. The soundtrack is lame and fails to ignite the visuals, which do have potential in their unusual appearance, which strives to present only black and white tones in extreme contrast. Back in pre-digital days the creation of this look took hundreds of grueling hours worth of post-production work, while today it would take just a press o' a button. Begotten is the kind of movie that, if you view stills from and read a synopsis of it, it strikes as potentially tremendous, but the actual watching of it is a cruuuuuuel awakening. Merkhige later was hired as the director of the nosferatu movie Shadow of the Vampire in an interesting Eraserhead-David-Lynch-hired-to-direct-Elephant-Man sort of way.

That's it for this subject... for now... (insert ominous music)

Style: all that is not technique.
Robert Bresson in Notes on the Cinematographer

Ramifications on black and white + color

This perhaps is a topic I might have a slight fetish on: the introduction of color into a black & white film (or vice versa) for a brief moment. Having spoken about the topic in many a forum, here are a few observations that never have found their way into any other context (hey, waddya think this blog is about if not for emptying my mental trash bin?).

A nice starter. The practically forgotten 1958 B-horror The Return of Dracula is black & white, featuring a terribly bland Drac, and only one quick unexpected cheering up via the film form. Now tell me if you've heard this one before: it's a monochromo movie, and then one scene has blood appearing Simply Red, while the rest of the film's in black & white. Well, back when this was made that cliche didn't exist, Simply due to censorship regulations; if you ever saw blood at all, it certainly was not in color. But here ya have it, ladies and gentlemen: near the end, a staking of female vampire has a close-up of crimson in color.

Intellectually you're aware that what you're witnessing is something horrendous, but at the same time you can't ignore the fact that you're enjoying it. Yeah, it's that sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5, where a comic book fan (see, I didn't use the word "geek" - naaah, I'm beyond that) reading a B & W (indie?) comic book gets sucked inside one, where the teen (in color) fights a B & W Freddy in crummily painted monochromatic sets. This scene ends up as the highlight in this rather tedious outing. Here's a quote from that classic of books, Official Splatter Film Guide Vol 2:

"The plot's a bore, sure, and Freddy and his 'sharp wit' take a back seat this time, but director Hopkins and his FX folks pour on the psychosexual imagery and surrealism with such Buñuelian abandon that the film almost becomes an experimental art movie"

                                                                            Sergei Eisenstein used color in the second part of his uncompleted Ivan the Terrible trilogy. Shot on wildly saturated Agfacolor film stock captured from the Nazis, the film equates color with the banquet room, where the lavish but sinister party finale takes place. The otherwordly colors are exactly what you would have excepted the palette of this highly artificial film to be, judging from its preceding B & W moments. The interplay between the banquet room in color and the monochromatic outside world is quite fantastic.

Going towards his doom, Vladimir halts at the room's exit and is washed over by the color green. This cuts to the corridor outside the room, in black & white. Then, subversively for its time, the film cuts back to the banquet room - again in color: Vladimir comes back to his senses, and the green color disappears, and he continues his way to his death. One film scholar described this as a color equivalent to James Joyce-like stream-of-consciousness.

Did I see just see that, or was it something in my eye?                 Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound possesses not only juicy-but-oh-so-brief dream images designed by Salvador Dalí, but also some flair in terms of its cinematic language in the finale, where the main baddie (aaawww, Hollywood...) turns the gun on himself in a startling POV shot, and pulls the trigger. While the gun fires, the screen turn into a comic book-like red explosion for a few frames... so try not to blink, gov! Like it is the case with older films with very limited color footage, most prints are totally monochromatic (like how many times have you seen Eisenstein's Potemkin with the flag being red as it should?), and such is also the case with this Hitchcock film. Even some DVD releases omit the almost subliminal red flash.

Movies being negative

Films usually tend to feature inverted imagery only in their camera negatives, but some movies do make an exception. All kinds of movies, ranging from Man Ray's experimental films from the silent era to today's mainstream Hollywood have created interesting inversions. Weirdly enough, none seem to use the technique (intellectually) to convey something being its actual opposite; what a negative image is in relation to a positive. But still film-makers have utilized this slice of filmic vocabulary in other intriguing routes. This very first posting gives a brief celebration of this.

Wedlock House: An Intercourse,1959

The wildly eclectic U.S. experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage made this short film as an autobiographical summary of the first months of his marriage, starring himself and his wife. This is one of Brakhage's more, ahem, figurative films, but still quite abstract and impressionistic in terms of its narrative content. A couple inhabits a gloomy house and we witness their mysterious, tension-filled everyday (or rather night, as the film has no moments set during daytime) moments. There are instances of graphic visuals of lovemaking, that have been inverted into negative. This makes the moments of sex to be very explicit, and yet shrouded and suggestive at the same time. Still, this is incredibly racy stuff for its time.

Nosferatu, 1922

Murnau's silent film is an interesting adaptation of Dracula; the scene, recreated numerous times in subsequent films, has Jonathan Harker being escorted to Dracula's castle by a sped-up carriage. To convey that we're entering into a zone that is esoteric indeed, the image turns to negative to bizarr-O effect.

  

Valkoinen peura (The White Reindeer), 1954

This Finnish horror fantasy, lauded by Jean Cocteau on its release, is set in Lapland and dwells on Sami mysticism. The negative shot marks the first appearance of the mythic white reindeer, to which the heroine of the story is magickally transformed. To underwrite the mystic quality of this moment, the film-makers shot a dark reindeer galloping against a snowy white background, and inverted this, making the reindeer white (this gives it a kind of perverted kinship to Black Gestapo, featured up a head). I double-dare you to try to find another mainstream Finnish film of this era that uses such a thing as negative imagery, let alone in such a way that at least strives towards artfulness.

El gran amor del conde Drácula (Count Dracula's Great Love), 1974

This deliciously violent (although many minutes of gore and sexy depravity was scissored before the release) movie by Javier Aguirre  from (S)pain is perhaps the best of Paul Naschy's horror efforts, which isn't saying much, folks. The film has several vampiric scenes printed in negative because... well... OK, who knows why, but they're pretty interesting, nonetheless.  The film's claim to fame has been its beginning, which officially has been heralded as The Greatest Opening Credits Sequence Ever, where we see a person falling down the stairs dead... and then we see it again. And again. And again. And again... and again.

Alphaville, 1965

Jean-Luc Godard's arthouse-scifi is unusually restrained for the director - or is at least to some degree. As the futuristic world around lead dick Lemmy Caution starts to crumble near the end, so seems the filmic language itself, as the image aimlessly turns into negative and back. Godard did a similar trick in his later Weekend, when a car wreck unleashes a wreckace on the film image itself.

Devil Doll, 1964

Lindsay Shonteff's quite impressively creepy horror flicker (which has some interesting plot parallels to Cronenberg's later Scanners) has a riveting scene of hypnosis near its beginning. A sinister magician (Bryant Haliday) puts a man from the audience under his spell; the man's falling onto the magician's mental grip is conveyed through a close-up of Haliday's eyes which turn to negative. The negative image used here was apparantly a still frame, as Haliday's face is utterly static even though he starts to speak - this goof lends the scene some surprising supplemental creepiness. Yummy mummy.

The Black Gestapo, 1975

The film is a sort of paranoid interpretation of the militant 1970's civil rights organization The Black Panther Party (for Self-defense), portraying them as a bunch of hypocritical, criminal black nazi-like thugs. The wonderful concept is completely wasted to a stunning degree in this boring outing, which has almost nothing going on politically or in terms of blaxploitation cinema. The "almost" being the opening credits, which are a juicy wet dream of political incorrectness. Newsreel footage of Hitler and the nazis are shown to us, and as the title comes up, a sight of Hitler turns to negative to... well, you know, make his skin seem like it's black. A standing ovation to exploitation veteran Lee Frost for this particular touch, which makes for a potentially fun Youtube clip. But shame about the rest 0' this cinematic calamity.