Blaxsploitation Feminism and Zombies. The Watching Hour.

#15: Sugar Hill

This 1974 entry into blaxploitation exemplifies all of the shopworn tropes of that genre but, unfortunately, has neither the pacing nor the sense of anticipation necessary to make a truly great, if low budget, horror film.

In this film, Diana "Sugar" Hill, who is apparently a fashion photographer in her professional life, inherits a Haitian voodoo-themed nightclub when local underground forces kill her fiancee because he refuses to sell out. The local mob is admirably racially diverse but ultimately no match for Sugar once she enlists the assistance of childhood mentor and Voodoo priestess, Mama Celesete, and an army of undead lead by head zombie Baron Samedi. One by one Sugar and her zombie gang take out the circle that protects the mob chieftain until no one is left but the chief himself and his blonde gun moll companion. Each victim is informed that he is about to die for his role in the initial murder, even the guy who did not participate in the original murder but has to die just the same. Sugar does not quit until each has been killed and the gun moll handed off to Baron Samedi; her body to serve as payment for the Baron's assistance in lieu of Sugar's own.

This film is slow, lacks suspense, and even the fight scenes lack the enthusiasm one usually associates with 70's blaxsploitation. The fashion is super fly and the good guys are relentlessly hip in the face of the "honk" white cops and mobsters. Having said that, without the Curtis Mayfield soundtrack, deviant take on 1930's Warner Brothers horror classics, or afro-kung fu moves, it turns out that blaxsploitation is almost intolerably didactic and about as much fun to watch as a home economics film strip on gynocolocical hygiene. Visually these are the hippest zombies I've ever seen but they just aren't very scary.

The redeeming quality of the whole adventure lay in its slightly sideways take on morality. Sugar is obsessed with vengeance (she doesn't even pretend that what she seeks is justice). In her initial evocation of Baron Samedi Mama Celeste warns Sugar that the spirit she seeks is a greedy spirit. After offering her jewelry and engagement ring as payment for the services of his zombie army, she offers him her soul. Samedi rejects her soul, saying that he wants flesh. All of this sets up the story as a kind of bargain where Sugar gets her revenge but, in traditional morality cliche, she should find that the price is high and that she must pay for her single-minded violation of the basic Christian principle of cheek turning.

But no.

In the tradition of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song the normal standards of morality do not apply. Sugar is not held accountable for her deal with the undead. In fact, she avoids the one price she is expected to pay, that of handing her body over to the Barron to be used for his pleasure, by handing over the N-bomb dropping concubine of the head mobster who disappears, screaming in terror, into the mists of the graveyard. Sugar gets the revenge she desires and escapes without a scratch on either body or soul. The morality here is one of the cleansing virtue of bloody revenge, not of proportionality or even less of forgiveness of trespasses.

With its depiction of upwardly-mobile African Americans in trendy and highly remunerative professions, Sugar Hill offers up the very images cherished in this genre of film. It functions as an unironic take on pimp fashion (you haven't seen fierce until you've seen the scalloped lapels and checkered silver lame unitard with matching suit jacket and fedora on display here), and a slave revenge fantasy (the undead are Yellow Fever victims from the bowls of a slave ship from the 18th century dumped into mass graves on the outskirts of New Orleans). At the same time it suggests a black nationalist resistance to the dominant white culture using voodoo tropes and unmitigated violence. Sugar dresses to the nines and even in her grief finds the gumption to flirt with old boyfriends and use her tough, independent, and overt sexuality to divert the suspicion of the mob capo as she sets up her bloody revenge.

Perhaps the most surprising part of this film was the pristine quality of the archival 35 mm print dug up and screened by Keith Garcia, programming manager for the Denver Film Society, and the good people of the Starz Film Center. I am accustom to seeing these American International films from the 1970's with the faded color projection, jumpy splices, and looking like they've been edited by a caffeinated Freddy Kruger. This print is beautiful. The colors are rich and the editing and reel changes smooth. Seeing this film in this original form calls into question the obtrusively low quality that one normally associates with films of this era an caliber. Once again Quentin Jerome Tarantino seems to have missed the point of the genre he caricatured in Grindhouse.

I could get behind all of this if the zombies were just a little scarier.