BLACK BELT JONES

This afternoon, 10/9/2012, while on a lunch break from work, Karen (my better half) and I drove over to a local Best Buy store. We were there to buy the Blu-Ray/DVD release of “The Raven”, which is about a serial killer in the late 1800s dispatching his victims in ways that are found within the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe himself becomes a suspect but beyond that I don’t know what happens because we haven’t seen the movie yet.


Anyway, whilst shopping at Best Buy, I came across a four-movie set from Warner Brothers DVD which features 4 “blaxploitation” films starring Jim Kelly. The only one of the four I’d seen previously was this one, BLACK BELT JONES.

Now granted it was in the mid-80’s or so when I last screened BLACK BELT JONES, but it was so AWESOMELY bad and stupid that it still lingers in the canyons of my mind – kind of like a bad chili fart that rises to face level and stays there, singeing one’s nose hairs.

Director Robert Clause has had his share of stinkbomb movies. He never was able to equal or rise above the classic ENTER THE DRAGON (which featured Kelly). I remember DEADLY EYES which was about overgrown and hungry rats and GAME OF DEATH, which clumsily incorporated Bruce Lee’s last known movie footage into some nonsensical hodge-podge.

I do believe though, that BLACK BELT JONES takes the cake in utter “dipshittedness”. In fact, this movie is SO moronic that I felt compelled to invent the word “dipshittedness” just to describe it.

Jim Kelly IS a good and talented martial artist and for that he should be remembered and respected. However, doing movies as idiotic as this should NOT earn him respect. A way for him to pay the bills at the time, I’m sure, but so is working the drive-through at Winchell’s Donuts - and it would be less embarrassing.

But, having said that, let me also say that this movie is good for 90 minutes or so of (unintentional, I’m sure) laughs. Robert Clause was a real white guy and for a movie like this to have been able to “speak” to black audiences, you would have needed D’urville Martin or Gordon Parks or Melvin Van Peebles or even Rudy Ray Moore to direct this film so that it made an impact on the targeted movie-goers.

To add to the overall moronic experience of this movie, I will tell you that I rented it on VHS way back when and took it to my Dad’s house where a group of us sat watching this celluloid turd. On those rare instances when something marginally cool happened, I would say out loud “I rented this one”. When something stupid happened, I would say, again out loud, “Karen rented this one”. There’s nothing quite like throwing one’s spouse “under the bus”, as they say, when it comes to blaming someone for picking up movies like this.

Now the fun part is that there are two other Jim Kelly movies to watch here that I’ve never seen before – HOT POTATO and THREE THE HARD WAY. The fourth movie, BLACK SAMSON, does not appear to have Mr. Kelly in it. I’ll have to watch it anyway to see if it is “Kelly Worthy”, though.

So, if I can talk her into it, I will have Karen sit next to me on the couch and watch these three other movies if only to say to her “I bought this set” when good stuff happens and “you bought this set” when the doofus scenes come on. But hey, that’s what love’s all about!