Black Cobra is essentially Cobra, with Williamson as Det. Robert Malone instead of Stallone as Marion Cobretti, and with the woman targeted by the murderous gang being the photographer and not the model. Just the same, they want to kill her, and Williamson won't let that happen. Normally that would be the end of it, but this gang of baddies is particularly persistent, and when they can't get through him, they kidnap his boss's daughter. Now Williamson has to get her back, protect the other woman, and take this gang down.
This is more of the Williamson you came for. He just can't not be good in any of the scenes he's in, and it's impossible not to root for him. He elevates the material beyond simply a Cobra ripoff, so it's more like a Fred Williamson cover, but one where you can say you like both versions, if that makes sense. The baddies in this are sufficiently bad enough, which makes Williamson that much badder when he takes them down. On top of all that, for a limited budget, like most Italian directed low-budget films, this makes the most of what budget they had to deliver some fantastic action scenes. This is one of those ones that doesn't just make me say "why don't I have more Williamson on the site?" but also "with all the great stuff from the 80s out there that I haven't covered yet, why am I bothering with so many new movies?" Why indeed.
What more can you say about Williamson? The reality is, if I hunkered down and stuck to doing more of his films, he could have the most of any Hall of Famer, even more than Dolph. The question then is, why doesn't he? First and foremost, he suffers from the fact that I came into this with Dolph as the impetus for me creating the site, so I focused more on Dolph flicks. Then, when I first started doing the site in the late 2000s, a lot of the great Williamson stuff wasn't as available. I didn't let that keep me from putting him in the Hall of Fame, but it made me negligent in doing more reviews, which was bad on my part. Finally, I took my hiatus, and felt I needed to catch up on newer things I missed while I was out. That was perhaps the biggest mistake, because I've missed out on a lot of this great stuff and Williamson has been left with fewer tags.
One of the striking things about this film is that you have a black cop in Williamson against a gang of lawless thugs that are all white--not a white diabolical baddie with all kinds of resources at his disposal and grand plans for world domination, we're talking about a white face representing the lawlessness that was the rest of the world's view of New York at that time. This was part of how Williamson tried to change the way black men were depicted in films, and was especially important for a film that took place in New York in 1987 at the height of the crack scourge that was plaguing the city and was shown in the media as being a predominantly black problem. That representation led to mandatory minimum and three strikes laws targeted toward young black males, and a militarization of the police force that led to more killings of black men and brought us to 2020 and the images we saw of Black Lives Matters protesters being rammed with SUVs and shot with tear gas and flash bangs. The shame really is that this movie and Williamson's other movies didn't reach more people as a counter to the narrative that was so prevalent at that time. Williamson's importance goes well beyond his contributions to the DTV and exploitation realm, often his films, like this one, stand for something beyond the great action, one-liners, and slick looks at the camera. Just the same, we still love them for the latter as well, so we can enjoy them and respect the message he's telling us.
This is directed by Stelvio Massi, and he's actually credited as Stelvio Massi. The name he often used instead was Max Steel, which I put right behind Bruno Mattei's Vincent Dawn as my favorite name used by an Italian director. I guess there was a fear that we wouldn't trust the movie enough if we didn't think it was directed by an English speaking person, specially if it ran in the theaters and people saw an Italian name attached to it. I wonder how they picked their names? Was it the way we did porn names in the US: middle name plus the name of the street you grew up on? That would make mine Rene Armour. I think for my Italian director English name I'd go to the Elvis movie character well, like Clint Reno, Vince Everett, or maybe part my hair on the dangerous side with something like Tulsa McLean.
They always say, never act with kids and animals, and while I've never really agreed with the kids part of that, I totally get it when it comes to animals. The only person to steal scenes from Williamson was his cat Purvis (Ty and Brett already beat me to the "did he spell it 'purr-vis'?" joke, another downside of me being late on reviewing these). How do you not love that guy? I'm always up for a good cat or dog in a movie, and as I've said before, I think movies should use them whenever they're considering casting a kid. Dogs and cats are better than kids, might be rule number 2 after the 90-minute rule.
And with that, we'll wrap this up. You can stream this on Tubi, which I think is a great deal. This is the great 80s Williamson you came for. Don't do like I did and procrastinate, just get it done, you won't regret it.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092765
No comments:
Post a Comment