Jim Brown stars in one of the best of the Shaft imitators of the 70’s.  He plays Slaughter, an ex-Green Beret soldier out to avenge the death of his father.  Slaughter goes around shooting people in the forehead for about a half an hour until the Feds offer him a job to take out the main Mafioso responsible for capping his daddy.  Slaughter agrees and for the next hour or so busts a lot of heads and shoots a lot of white people.

Slaughter is a real treat to watch, mostly because of the great cast supporting cast.  Rip Torn chews up the scenery nicely as the sleazy gangster, Don Gordon is funny as Slaughter’s partner, and Cameron Mitchell is a blast in the smallish role as Slaughter’s bigoted boss.  Stella Stevens also looks damn fine as the love interest and has three major nude scenes (two sex scenes with Brown and a shower scene) too.  

Jim Brown is the reason to watch it though.  He kicks a lot of ass and blows away a bunch of white dudes, so any blaxploitation fan worth his salt needs to check this flick out ASAP.  You also get a great title sequence and cool theme song by Billy Preston too.

The only downside is that director Jack (Cleopatra Jones) Starrett uses some weird lens on the camera every time Slaughter does something cool.  Whenever this happens, everything gets stretched out and wall-eyed and it’s hard to tell just what the Hell is going on.  For example:  Slaughter will break down a door and beat somebody up.  Unfortunately, since we’re watching it through what looks to be a funhouse mirror, it makes what could’ve been a tight action scene seem incomprehensible.  Half star deduction for that.  But don’t let that stop you from checking Slaughter out.  It’s filled with wall-to-wall action and the Stretch-O-Vision nonsense is only a minor annoyance in an otherwise stellar blaxploitation action flick.

Co-screenwriter Mark Hanna, who also wrote such 50’s classics as Not of This Earth, The Amazing Colossal Man, and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman; was responsible for Slaughter’s tough guy dialogue like, “Get your narrow ass out of here!”

Leo Fong wrote, produced and stars as a chicken feet soup eating, Members Only jacket wearing detective who is hired by a rich industrialist (Troy Donahue) to rescue his daughter from a cult ran by the blind Yarakunda (none other than Cameron Mitchell).  Fong puts on a Toughman competition to see who’s got the guts necessary to help him storm the cult’s fortress and rescue the brainwashed bimbo.

You would think that any movie that featured Cameron Mitchell as a cult leader named Yarakunda who wears a Satanist robe and has a pentagram tattooed on his face would be worth a look.  Well, you’d be right.  The scenes where Mitchell hams it up talking a lot of gibberish about love and God are great fun, especially if you’re a fan of the man.  It’s just a shame that he’s actually a “good” guy and really believes he’s doing the Lord’s work.  Actually it’s his head of security, Karma (Akosua Busia) that’s the real villain who is just using Yarakunda for her own purposes.  Imagine how much fun the movie would’ve been if Mitchell had been TRULY nutzo.  Oh well, you can still have some fun spotting Tae Bo guru Billy Blanks in an early role as a guard.

Fong is OK in the lead and his fight scenes are decent for the most part.  The opening Sudden Impact style scene where he breaks up a robbery was well done, although most of the action looks like it suffers from a lack of time and money.  There is one hilarious part that makes the flick recommended.  It comes when Fong is battling a security guard and he steps on the guard’s head and crushes it.  The effect is nothing more than a watermelon with a face painted on it.  It’s almost worth sitting through this lifeless actioner just to see that WTF moment.

Oh and yes, true to the title, lots of people are dealt low blows.

AKA:  Savage Sunday.  AKA:  The Last Fight to Win:  The Bloody End.

Leo Fong is the “star” of this 80’s action flick, but the real reason to check it out is to see exploitation vets Richard Roundtree and Cameron Mitchell doing what they do best.

Mitchell plays a slimy crime kingpin that specializes in running guns who is fond of leaving no witnesses at the scene of a crime.  This means if he sends in his goons to kill a rival who is eating at a Chinese restaurant; they also have to wipe out every single customer in the joint.  He also gets his kicks by slapping around hookers, killing them and tossing their bodies into the river.  Fong is the cop whose trying to bring Mitchell to justice and Roundtree is the fed who helps out.

Mitchell hams it up like only he can.  Wearing an ascot and women’s sunglasses, Mitchell shoots TV’s that gives him bad press and bitches at his woman when her poodle shits on the floor.  There’s also a disturbing scene where he murders a waitress just because her baby was crying too loud.  (In his defense, the little brat DID shut up after his mama croaked.)  In short; classic Cameron Mitchell.  Stack Pierce is also excellent as Nighthawk, Mitchell’s cold-blooded right hand man.

The rest of the movie leaves something to be desired.  The action is sparse and Fong isn’t much of a leading man.  He kinda looks like an elderly basset hound with his droopy face and baggy eyes and doesn’t have much charisma.  His fight scenes are sloppily tossed together and indifferently filmed.  It also doesn’t help that his kung fu prowess is about the same as mine.  Roundtree is good, but it seems like he and Fong are starring is separate movies and they don’t have much screen time together.

Nighthawk gets the best line of the movie when he tells an underling:  “You mess this up, he’ll kill you, your mamma, your daddy, your sister AND your brother!”

Fong, Pierce and Mitchell all returned two years later for Low Blow.