The Black Gestapo

This grimly counter-revolutionary exploitation flick was created by white filmmakers with the ambition to benefit from the trend of blaxploitation films while also reproachfully warning against the danger of the Black Panthers movement. Propped up by trashy appropriation of grand themes and insipid adaptation, which the same team had previously demonstrated with the Nazisploitation Love Camp 7 (1969) and the shocking A Climax of Blue Power (1974), they teeter on the edge of bad taste and uncontrolled ignoble entertainment. It could be said that they were only innocently trying to revive the classic categories of exploitation and trash films in the context of the blaxploitation trend, as they demonstrated three years earlier in an absurd variation on B-movies about mad scientists and their creations in The Thing with Two Heads. This time, however, with that combination of Nazisploitation and African-American motifs, they got closer to how the Black Panthers saw Richard Nixon and his minions than how the African-American community saw them. Apart from that problematic level, The Black Gestapo nevertheless remains a gloriously cheap bit of trash that holds the viewer’s attention with a steady supply of ketchup scenes and bare breasts (even including those of Uschi Digard) until the grand climax, which gives the impression of being a sweded Commando. (2020.11.22)

I expected it to be a much bigger hit than what I ultimately got, I thought it would be really rough, but the film settles for just a few scenes that are truly worth it. Like the flush, that really got me. Otherwise, it's more on the boring side and there are a lot of talks, not that much action. (2016.09.02)