My mom, sister and I saw a LOT of movies together in the summer of '76, which was of course totally fine by me.
Even at the age of ten, I was already feeling the pronounced rumblings of what would turn out to be a lifelong fascination with film and film history. Not only was moviegoing a fun and cheap way to beat the L.A. summer heat, but just being able to see Hollywood movies in (or near) Hollywood was a real thrill for this Midwestern boy — it felt closer to The Source (not the Sunset Strip vegetarian restaurant, though of course it was close to that, too), like I was getting a baguette fresh from the baker instead of a pre-sliced, shrink-wrapped loaf from the shelf of the A&P.
I wasn't especially particular about what we saw, just as long as it wasn't a movie "for kids" (I hated being condescended to, even back then) or a foreign flick with sub-titles. If it looked cool, funny, exciting or featured a big-name star, that was lure enough for me — I just wanted to absorb as many movies as possible. And we weren't especially particular about where we saw them, either; that summer, we hit screenings everywhere from Century City's pristine multiplexes to crumbling Art Deco picture palaces like the Pantages and the Wiltern.
Wiltern photo by Anne Laskey, 1978.
We often traveled via public transportation on our moviegoing expeditions, so it was hard to time our arrival perfectly; often as not, we would arrive at the theater a good 30-45 minutes before our intended screening. And since the Wiltern was always showing double features, we would usually just walk in and catch the last reel of whatever was playing before our film. This was not always a sound decision — the last twenty minutes of Food of the Gods, which perversely preceded (I think) The Gumball Rally, were fully responsible for instilling me with the fear of rats that, er, plagues me to this day. And then there was the time we went to see the Burt Reynolds flick Gator, but wound up catching the end of J.D.'s Revenge. I didn't understand what the hell was going on in it, at all — something about a cackling ghost appearing in a broken mirror, someone getting shot, and a bald man sobbing hysterically. It scared and saddened and confused me all at the same time, and made me wish we had just stayed in the lobby until after it had ended.
Last night, 43 years and change later, I decided to give J.D.'s Revenge another look. Directed by Arthur Marks (Friday Foster, The Monkey Hu$tle) the film has often been cited in books and articles I've read over the years about blaxploitation cinema — specifically those dealing with the horror sub-genre that gave us such classics as Blacula, Abby, and Sugar Hill, and it's been kicking around the bottom of my various streaming queues for a while now. But I only recently learned that J.D.'s Revenge was shot in New Orleans; and, having recently returned from an all-too-short vacation there, I was curious to see if the Crescent City of the mid-Seventies looked anything like I'd remembered from the brief visit my family made to New Orleana in the summer of '74.
On the latter score, J.D.'s Revenge definitely came through: the film features numerous shots of the French Quarter, including a Bourbon Street that's less chaotic but significantly sleazier than the present-day version, just as I'd first experienced it. (One of my most vivid memories from that 1974 trip is of watching horrified parents holding their hands over their children's eyes as they walked past one Bourbon Street strip club after another.) As a film, well... I found myself confused and a little upset by it all over again, albeit for somewhat different reasons than when I caught the end of it back in 1976.
The basic plot: An earnest and upstanding young law student named Ike (Glynn Turman) becomes possessed by the spirit of a zoot-suited hood (David McKnight), who seeks revenge on those who killed him and his sister back in 1942. It's a straightforward if improbable conceit, but it isn't helped by a convoluted screenplay (written by Jason Starkes, who later went on to co-write the basketball comedy The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh) or some strange casting choices — most notably, the great Louis Gossett, Jr. playing a sixty-something jackleg preacher. Gossett would have been about forty at the time of the filming, and an extremely vital and young-looking forty, at that; it seriously took me about two-thirds of the way through the movie to figure out that his character had been one of the people involved in J.D.'s death, because he looks like he would have still been in nursery school at the time.
The film features a fair amount of violence, some of which is cartoonish and played for laughs. But the scenes where J.D.'s spirit abuses and rapes Ike's wife (Joan Pringle) are downright nasty, and the footage of a cow getting disemboweled in a slaughterhouse (which is repeatedly shown as part of J.D.'s flashbacks) is both sad and deeply disgusting. All of which makes it hard to recommend J.D.'s Revenge to anyone other than devoted blaxploitation fans.
That said, Turman is truly excellent in this, really sinking his teeth into (and chewing up) the scenes where J.D. takes over Ike's body and personality. Though occasionally absurd — "You don't like yo' Daddy's CONK?!?" he glowers, when Ike's wife bums out on his new 1940s-style 'do — these are by far the most entertaining moments of the film, with J.D. coming off like a cross between Dave Chappelle in his "Time Haters" skit and a genuinely dangerous Rudy Ray Moore.
While I don't think I'd watch it again, I have to say I'm glad I revisited J.D.'s Revenge. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older, but over the last few years I've found myself drawn back to a number of films I haven't seen since childhood — not out of nostalgia, per se, but rather to unlock long-forgotten memories of those days, as well as to try and better understand how my young brain perceived life and art, and why certain things stuck with me while others vanished almost instantly from my consciousness. Call it film therapy, I guess, though I don't think I'm ready to give Food of the Gods another shot.
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