Hot City

This movie is correctly graded as a B picture. And yet it is more: an honest hommage to a real, existing town in the throes of death. Before I picked up Original Gangstas as a cheap video cassette, I did not know that the town of Gary existed. I didn't even know a town like Gary could exist (this proves once more: maybe we Europeans are kind of naive in the ways we evaluate the US's wealth and power and its effects.). Now I know better.

There is a certain similarity between this film and Jules Dassin's legendary documentary/crime movie The Naked City of 1948. Both use a style that wants to "tell a city". With the title credits the town is introduced to the viewers, with aereal footage, ordinary street scenes and a voice-over that tells something about the history of the town and a few selected buildings (the bakery, the cinema etc.). It is really educational. Very good location shooting gives a vivid impression of the specific urban wasteland. Gary becomes a real place. I also had the impression that the mood of the people who are forced or willing to live in present day Gary is accurately recorded: A mixture of anger, shame and - above all - fear. People are desperate, they don't see a future and the affiliation of youngsters to a gang appears for many to be the only way to survive.

In the story the main character played by Fred Williamson (also the producer and a Gary native who certainly put some very personal feelings into this movie) descends on the town as an aging "knight in shining armour". He assembles his old, middle aged buddies (plus Pam Grier!) and stages a war against the gangs. I did not care much for the story and its action scenes with unvariably high death tolls, but I must admit that this movie realistically highlights in a specific place a specific problem that is disquieting and difficult to solve.

A veteran cast make this update of the blaxploitation genre worth watching. Fred Williamson (Black Caesar), Jim Brown (Slaughter), Pam Grier (Coffy/Foxy Brown), Richard Roundtree (Shaft) and Ron O'Neal (Superfly) join forces to combat the newer, younger version of the same gang they formed some twenty years prior. Not enough Roundtree or O'Neal and barely enough action but a decent enough entry. For fans of the genre.

A blaxploitation-movie with the stars of this genre, Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Richard Roundtree, Ron O'Neal and Pam Grier. One year before "Jackie Brown" Pam Grier and Robert Forster starred together in this movie. B-movie veterans like Charles Napier and Wings Hauser complete the cast and that is a good reason to watch this movie.

It's like old home wee when stars like Jim Brown (Slaughter, Black Gunn), Fred Williamson (Starsky & Hutch), Pam Grier, Ron O'Neal (Superfly), Richard Roundtree (Shaft), and Paul Winfield (Sounder) get together to teach some young punks a lesson. Heavys of the 70's blaxploitation genre are called home to get some revenge and clean up the town. Lots of talking and shooting and good old fashioned fisticuffs.

Pam Grier (Coffy, Foxy Brown) is back in the form we like. She was one of the first female action stars in Hollywood. Looking forward to a retrospective this weekend when they replay two of her best.

This is a powerful film and I hope you see it. Caught it here recently on THIS TV Network, so likely it will come around again.

The opening scenes of Gary, Indiana present as an arresting message of what happens to prosperity when do-gooders, Wowsers, Uplifters, Eco-messiahs, Carrie Nations, lunatics, and other chronic nuisances chase industry and jobs away in the name of saving something or other. Plants close and shortly rust. People quit their homes and leave them to face nature's relentless onslaught along with the thugs who move in and make them into Den's of iNiquity.

Richard Roundtree, Fred Williamson, Ron 'Superfly' O'Neil, they're all here along with the great Pam Grier, Jim Brown - Captain Anders in 1968's "Ice Station Zebra", along with the late and very much missed Paul Winfield who evinced touching cinemagic in 'Green Eyes'.

Even if you don't enjoy films in general, let alone the Blaxploitation genre, anyone who's into UE, Urban Exploration, sometimes called Industrial Archaeology - and if you're not, you should be - you'll swoon as serial images of one decrevalent building after another after oxydizing blast furnace after abandoned ten storeys-high heat stoves march across your screen. Yes, Gary, Indiana in "Original Gangstas" is prime Urban Exploration territory.

The film's message is poignant as ever: Don't incite people, particularly those wise in years, to righteous indignation. It's an unwise practice to do so.

Be sure to watch for the David Lynch-esquire visual anachronisms, e.g. the film takes place in 1996, yet many police cruisers hail from the 80s as well as the 90s. The Gangstas drive cars whose model years span a fifty year period, thus keeping you off balance until the stunning conclusion.

The wry humor, "there goes the neighborhood", will catch you off guard as well, and send you tumb-bumbling off the couch, onto the floor, and scurrying to your video store for your own copy of "Original Gangstas". If you don't own a copy of this, you should. Now. So do it. Now.

Paul Vincent Zecchino

Manasota Key, Florida

11 October, 2010