The Human Tornado (1976, R)

This movie was pretty ridiculous.  I haven't seen a lot of blaxploitation movies before, so I don't know if the things that struck me were tropes of the genre or not.  I don't think it was intended as comedy (but maybe it was), but just one of those 70's B-movies that we can watch and laugh at today: there was some horribly mid-dubbed dialogue with what I'm pretty sure is an entirely English-speaking cast, and the small-town white people in the first scene were caricatures of next-to-retarded racist hicks.  Elements that I know were common tropes were the "martial arts" fighting, and the song and/or dance numbers in the nightclub scenes.  The premise of the story is that the main character, Dolemite (who apparently is the lead in a series of films), is on the run from the small-town racist sherrif and when he looks for his friend, Queen Bee, in California he finds out she's in trouble of a different kind, so he decides to help.  Her (mostly black) nightclub has proven to be too much competition for a mafia-backed (white-owned, clientelle is largely black with some white) nightclub, so the Italian owner starts some trouble.  I thought that most of the middle of the film was pretty slow-moving despite a couple scenes of amusing absurdity, so the movie felt longer than it was (under 90 minutes).  It's a surprisingly long time before Dolemite finds out about Queen Bee's trouble, and another surprisingly long time before they get to the bottom of it.

If you liked Black Dynamite or the blaxploitation genre in general, then you'll like this movie.  As a side-note, Back Dynamite is a semi-recent comedy that is an intentionally and obviously tongue-in-cheek parody of the genre, and I wholeheartedly recommend it even if you don't usually gravitate toward it (as long as you don't specifically avoid it).  If you prefer movies with a more racially-integrated cast, or if the subculture differences between yourself and an entirely 1970's African American cast of protagonists will leave you with too much of a disconnect, then you might enjoy a different movie more.  Who am I kidding... this is a B-movie, so if you're not into it to begin with, you probably won't like it at all.  This is for folks who like to watch cheesy B-movies and laugh (and there's plenty to laugh at in this film).  But I didn't get enough enjoyment per minute for me to recommend it to someone like myself without a crowd of like-minded B-enthusiasts to laugh with.  So for me, it's probably 2.5 stars.