Cult Cinema: Darktown Strutters (1975) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of New World Pictures

Detroit born Gene Corman, the younger brother of indie film producing guru Roger Corman, broke into the film scene in the 1950s becoming an agent and vice president of MCA and also helped Roger’s first film Monster from the Ocean Floor secure distribution.  Working in tandem producing many pictures directed by Roger, Gene was regarded as the underappreciated driving force behind the Roger Corman brand. 
 
Forming the film production and distribution company New World Pictures which released many lower budgeted pictures including Jack Hill’s The Big Bird Cage as well as Ingmar Bergman’s Oscar nominated Cries and Whispers, Roger and Gene collaborated frequently often on microbudget quickies often featuring budding as well as time honored character actors like Dick Miller.  In maybe the company’s wildest year of 1975, the same one that brought audiences Death Race 2000 and T.N.T. Jackson, Gene Corman tapped eventual Grosse Pointe Blank director George Armitage to pen ostensibly a bonkers gonzo blaxploitation musical comedy entitled Darktown Strutters.
 
Reportedly written in a period of only three days and shopped about directors before landing on Old Hollywood serial and Bonanza director William Witney, this goofy and silly politically-incorrect romp concerning four Black biker gang girls Syreena (Trina Parks from Diamonds Are Forever), Carmen (Edna Richardson), Miranda (Bettye Sweet) and Theda (Shirley Washington) amid their day to day misadventures with rival gangs, corrupt White cops and a plot by the Ku Klux Klan to control the black populace is sort of like Russ Meyer or Jack Hill by way of Arthur Marks or Melvin Van Peebles. 

 
A rapid-fire comedy that both parodies and channels the tropes of the blaxploitation film, absurdist yet adorned with strong female characters, reminding of the anarchic energy of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, the soulfulness of Coffy and the screwball antics of a Mel Brooks or The Naked Gun parody film, it is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink smorgasbord with the improvisational nature of a Happy Madison production.  Technically speaking it sports colorful regional cinematography by Joao Fernandes who would later shoot both Children of the Corn and Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter and boasts production design from the legendary Jack Fisk of There Will Be Blood and The Tree of Life and is overall a fun movie to look at even when set pieces like an underground dungeon look like a paper-mâché.

 
With the skin of a blaxploitation action-adventure film that fires on every cylinder replete with wild motorcycle chase sequences, the largely uncategorizable slapstick comedy features a behind-bars musical number with The Dramatics, John Gary Williams and The Newcomers singing acapella in the street and a whole James Bond villain subplot involving an underground lair.  Mostly its about Syreena, the leader of the motorcycle gang played with gusto by Trina Parks, trying to find her mother who has disappeared in conjunction with Commander Cross (Norman Bartold), a Colonel Sanders lookalike with overtly piggish leanings.  

Early on, Dick Miller fans will spot the character actor as a bumbling racist cop.  Notably playing off of Trina Parks’ sex appeal is Roger E. Mosley as rival gang leader Mellow known for George Armitage’s Hit Man and the thriller film Terminal Island while time honored character actor Stan Shaw of The Monster Squad shows up as one of the rival gang’s goons.  And there’s Otis Day from National Lampoon’s Animal House who brought the house down in that John Landis comedy epic but more on that later.

 
Initially produced for a Tennessee based distribution company that fell through before sending it to Roger Corman through their New World Pictures company in 1975 in Cleveland Ohio and Detroit, Michigan where it spread word of mouth as a maximalist screwball blaxploitation romp, Darktown Strutters was eventually re-edited in 1977 with a few minutes shorn off and retitled Get Down and Boogie.  Politically incorrect and funny in the time-honored tradition of the Gene and Roger Corman film, much like what we’ve seen in recent years with Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Pictures, Darktown Strutters is somewhat grounded in reality but is mostly a silly and carefree yet empowering female led blaxploitation yarn. 

 
Yeah there’s some black face in a couple parts and the N-word is thrown around by racist white cops but that kind of comes with the territory of this wild regional fare that is very clearly designed to be a crowd pleasing blaxploitation comedy/parody film.  Ripe for rediscovery from boutique labels like Vinegar Syndrome while gaining traction among revival 16mm print screenings, Darktown Strutters aka Get Down and Boogie is the kind of take-no-prisoners anarchic comedy as both rallying cry and cause for celebration, a movie that yes provokes still but in an escapist and even whimsically impish way that makes you feel uplifted somehow.

--Andrew Kotwicki