Cult Movie Challenge 2018 | 31/52 | Blaxploitation
To the music of Muddy Waters, we descend on a run-down plantation in the Antebellum South called Falconhurst. A trader named Brownlee purchases three black men from plantation owner Warren Maxwell. Doc Redfield comes to see after a sick black woman they call Big Pearl. Doc, a veterinarian, diagnoses her as “in heat” and prescribes that Warren’s son, Hammond, have sex with her. Pearl is a virgin because she is a Mandingo, and Warren only wants to breed her with another Mandingo.
Charles Woodcroft, son of Major Woodcroft from Crowfoot Plantation and cousin to Hammond, comes by to visit. Warren thinks it’s a good time for Hammond to marry his cousin and Charles’s sister, Blanche, and produce an heir to Falconhurst. He also sends Hammond and Charles to find him a Mandingo man to breed with Pearl.
While at another plantation, the plantation owner brings two young women to Hammond and Charles. Charles takes one of them and beats her. Disgusted, Hammond takes the other, a virgin named Ellen, and tells her to look in his eyes, something she’s never done with a white man before. Later, Brownlee takes Hammond to an auction, where they bid for a Mandingo named Ganymede, Mede for short. In addition to breeding, Hammond intends to use him for fighting.
The film follows Hammond’s marriage to Blanche and his continued affair with Ellen. How will Mede play into this outrageous melodrama?
After you hang me, kiss my ass.
This film makes the insane choice of being both a more honest and unflinching depiction of Antebellum chattel slavery while also being a ridiculous exploitation flick. As a result, we get some of the least pretentious filmmaking about the plight of enslaved black people I’ve seen. It never pretends that it’s doing anything honorable or noble in its depiction.
The film plays into many horrible tropes, but it does so while giving humanity to several of the black characters. The film is quick to provide them with the briefest of glances — moments of recognition of what is being asked of them and just how beneath them it is — before they respond to the white characters. That said, it makes little to no effort to tell their stories apart from who they are in relation to the enslavers.
The white actors, not being very good, actually make their performances all the more horrifying, because they seem so nonplussed by all the horrific things they’re doing and saying.
The relationship between Hammond and Ellen is deeply fucked — the movie makes it so that Ellen falls for Hammond, or at the very least, does a far more convincing performance than is asked of any other black actors in the movie.
This is some tasteless trash. So is the interracial and incest porn that so many people consume on the internet. They both come from the same dark holes of white desire. Pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away. The white liberal’s notion of depicting slavery a la 12 Years A Slave means to create a sense of shame and disgust for this era of US History. But for those who wish it still were, 12 Years a Slave may as well be this movie — both convey black misery as entertainment, but at least this one doesn’t pretend to be anything else.