Sheba, Baby

In honor of Black History Month I wanted to once again review some blaxploitation films, as I find it to be one of the most vibrant and interesting of exploitation subgenres and that usually even the mediocre films are worth discussing.

First up in the discussion, the Pam Grier starring, William Girdler directed, Sheba, Baby (1975).

-Count the commas in this post and win a prize!*

Up front I have to tell you that this is a lesser Pam Grier blaxploitation film.  Despite what the tagline claims, Sheba, Baby is not as strong when compared to her previous classics Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), as it tones down the sex, violence, and even the swearing that fans of Ms. Grier's previous efforts had come to expect.  The action scenes are also less dynamic, coming off a little flat and maybe even a bit goofy (especially the hand-to-hand, fist-fight stuff).


This would be one of Grier's final blaxploitation films (it was actually her last film under contract with AIP) and you get the sense that she was sort of done playing these types of roles.  You can see her just going through the motions in a couple scenes and her dialogue doesn't have much punch to it, but maybe that's just due to the way it was written..

Despite it's flaws, I did find Sheba, Baby to be a fun, rainy afternoon watch (which it was).  It has some memorable moments and supporting characters and the location shooting in Louisville and Chicago are interesting if you're from the Midwest (which I am) or maybe even if you're not.




The plot of Sheba, Baby goes like this:  Young, female Chicago detective Sheba Shayne (Grier) is called back to her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to help her father, a local businessman who is being threatened by the mob.  Sheba has to put her detective skills to use and bust some heads as she works her way up the ladder of the crime syndicate.  Along the way she romances an old acquaintance and her father's current business partner, Brick Williams (Austin Stoker).

Stoker is good in this, he's sort of casually cool, with a bit of squareness in there, but he doesn't really amount to much more than "romantic interest" in the movie.  It's what you would expect from a guy named 'Brick.'  I like the guy though; Stoker was in John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and also Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), not to mention a couple earlier films with director William Girdler, one of which was Abby (1974), otherwise known as The Blaxorcist (check out my review here).

The bad guys seem to be very typical of blaxploitation movies, but they're good and serviceable.  D'Urville Martin, who is always good and memorable, plays the mid-level, local crime boss Pilot, and he does it big and bold.  He of course plays it a bit more subdued when he's around the big villain/his boss, a white businessman named Shark (Dick Merrifield).  Shark is a slimy land developer or something…I don't remember.  He's a real jerk though, cold, cruel, and a bit smug.

Other than Sheba, Baby, Dick Merrifield's only other claim to fame would be a pair of supporting roles in movies featured on MST3k, The Hellcats (1968) and The Sidehackers (1969), both of which are motorcycle flicks.

Like I said, D'Urville Martin is always good and he had a nice career in blaxploitation films; the same year as Sheba, Baby he played Willie Green in Dolemite.  Interestingly, one of Martin's earliest roles was Diego, the elevator operator in Rosemary's Baby (1968).

Maybe the most memorable supporting character, and easily my favorite, is Walker the pimp (Christopher Joy), who might not be a literal pimp, but I can't help but refer to him as such.  He runs a pawn shop out of his car and pretty much single handedly fills the movie's jive-talk quotient.  Sheba leans on him for information and while he's cocky at first, he proves to be a coward and gives up the info.





Joy is a lot of fun in the role; he's what you think of when you think "70s movie pimp" and he is a highlight of the movie.  He would play Curtis the pimp, virtually the same character, in Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke (1978).







Backing up a minute, I also gotta mention Pilot's right hand man, Killer (Maurice Downs).  He doesn't do much really, other than be stern faced and appear to be without the capacity for joy, but there is this one scene where Pilot is giving a speech in front of his goons (and his ladies too, for some reason), addressing the Sheba situation, and this Killer guy is sitting behind Pilot chiming in with a "that's right" every two seconds.  It's funny and weird that there was emphasis put on this character quirk.  I like it.

"That's right."

The original musical soundtrack is pretty good, maybe not as iconic as the scores from Coffy or Foxy Brown (by Roy Ayers and Willie Hutch, respectively), but still solid.  The music was composed and recored by Monk Higgens, legendary Chicago saxophonist.  I like it.  It's funky.  Check it:

This was writer/director William Girdler's fifth feature film and, following the relative success of Abby, this was the first time he had a decent budget to work with.  Girdler never made big budget movies, but this is definitely when his career took a step up the quality B-movie ladder.  Sheba, Baby is not overly exciting visually, but the movie looks okay and there are some noteworthy sequences, namely the boat chase during the climax.  Pam Grier in that wetsuit and riding around on that old school jet ski is something to see too.

There's another memorable scene where Sheba is chased by Pilot's goons through the grounds of the Kentucky State Fair.  The rides and the people are interesting to look at, especially since the people in the background are mostly looking directly at the camera.  This happens in another scene too, when Brick and Sheba are having a nice romantic walk together.  It's like the people in Louisville freeze when faced with a camera.

I had mentioned that the action scenes aren't all that exciting, but there is one stunt that I thought looked kind of dangerous.  During this scene, Sheba is running up a grassy hill when a car full of bay guys comes driving over the top and looks like it comes very close to hitting her.  Could just be the camera angle, still looked dangerous to me.

Overall I would say that Sheba, Baby is a minor work and that anybody new to the blaxploitation genre should start with another movie.  Also though, I would say that if you are familiar or a fan of the genre and you haven't seen Sheba, Baby, I would suggest checking it out.  It's like a cleaner, Saturday afternoon version of a blaxploitation movie, but taken on its own terms, it's not bad and can be an enjoyable watch.  Dig it.

*= No prize for counting commas.

Abby

In the summer of 1973, William Freidkin's The Exorcist was unleashed to theaters and onto the general public.  The subsequent storm of publicity, controversy, and ticket sales resulted in Oscar nominations and recognition as one of the biggest films of the year.  It didn't hurt that is was also pretty damn scary.  The popularity of the film of course meant one thing:  knockoffs.

They came from around the globe, Turkey (Seytan), Italy (Beyond the Door), Spain (The Possessed), and Mexico (Alucarda), but right here in America we had one of the more infamous Exorcist knockoffs, if only for the resulting lawsuit.  Released in 1974 (on Christmas Day, no less), Abby is a possession film that supposes one thing differently than The Exorcist:  what if it happened to black people instead?  Ostensibly remaking The Exorcist as a blaxploitation film (an early working title for the film was The Blackorcist, I shit you not), Abby is a shameless attempt at cashing in on the success of Friedkin's film.  It's not a very good movie, but I'm going to talk about it anyway.

After a fairly static, expository opening scene (set in a very nice city park) the film flashes to Egypt, where Bishop Garnet Williams (William Marshall) is on an archeologic dig searching for information on the God Eshu.  Uncovering an old dusty idol, Bishop Williams accidentally unleashes the evil spirit of Eshu into the world.  The spirit manifests itself as a wind storm, blowing shit around and knocking people down as it escapes the cave.  Halfway across the world, the Bishop's son, Rev. Emmett Williams (Terry Carter) and his wife Abby (Carol Speed) are moving into their new home.  It's not long before that evil wind blows into the house, resulting in the spirit of Eshu possessing Abby.

Soon after, she is speaking in a lower octave, trying to cut herself with a knife, levitating off the floor, getting the crazy eye, and she even throws a guy through a door before she spits up foamy vomit on him.  Of course, this all plays second fiddle to the major change in Abby:  her sexual appetite.  It seems the evil deity of Eshu is a sex God, manifesting itself in Abby and turning her into a nymphomaniac.  This is a major problem for a preacher's wife.

Witnessing his wife trying to hump anything that moves (while speaking in a voice 3 pitches lower), the Reverend does two things:   inquire about her drug history to her brother, detective Cass Potter (Austin Stoker), and take her to the hospital where doctors run a bunch of tests on her.  She has no history with drugs and medically she's completely normal, but Abby gets all freaky when he takes her home to recover and she kills an elderly caretaker by giving her a heart attack.  After that, Abby escapes, and her husband, her brother, and the just-returned-from-Egypt Bishop Williams have to track her down and try to exorcise the demon.

Abby, being the horny demon she is, heads out to a local club, looking for some action.  First she picks up a guy and takes him out to his car to have sex, which of course gets a bit freaky (smoke starts pouring from the car interior, as (off-screen) the guy screams).  Abby then goes back inside and starts dancing and grooving with a pair of hip, tough-looking studs, but after her husband and brother show up, Abby starts throwing people all over the bar, over tables, and smashing the place up, before the Bishop appears and starts the exorcism process with the help of the Reverend and the detective.

Doning some ceremonial robes and engaging in verbal combat with the demon, the Bishop believes he is not actually dealing with the God Eshu, but rather a wannabe demon.  Whether this is the case or not, the movie sort of leaves ambivalent, but either way, after some levitation and some speaking-in-tongues (not to mention some real cheesy special effects), they eventually drive the demon out of Abby and send it back into the idol that it had originally escaped.

Like I said above, I don't consider this a good movie, even by exploitation standards.  Overall, the acting is okay, everyone seems to take it seriously, despite all the ridiculousness.  The story doesn't quite make sense, like how or why the demon flies from Egypt all the way to America just to possess Abby, or why her husband is such a bonehead.  The special effects are goofy, there's no real shocks or scares (no head-spinning), and the print of the movie is really rough looking, with the colors all washed out and muddy, not to mention the heavy amount of film scratches.

Abby does some wholesale lifting from The Exorcist by setting the opening in Egypt, emphasizing the power of faith, showing the befuddlement of the doctors, using levitation, vomit, and colorful language (she says "fuck" a lot), and by having subliminal flashes of the demon's face, which should be scary, but it unfortunately it looks like this:

What do you expect from a movie made for less than $200,000??  More silly than anything, Abby would still go on to be a minor hit, but it was pulled from theaters as Warner Bros. (owners of The Exorcist) sued (and won), claiming copyright infringement.  The WB took almost all of the profits from the film (close to $4 million) and the producers and writer/director William Girdler never saw a dime of money from the film.  (In this day and age, a lawsuit like that would never fly, or there wouldn't be half of the movies out on the direct-to-video market like there are).

Carol Speed would get the lead role in Abby after the original actress dropped out when her demands of an on-set masseuse were not met.  Speed would write and perform a song in the movie, "Is Your Soul a Witness?"  She also starred in Jack Hill's The Big Bird Cage (1972), The Mack, Savage! (both 1973), Black Samson (1974), and (one of my favorites) Rudy Ray Moore's Disco Godfather (1979).  If interested, you can read a good interview with her on the making of Abby over on her website HERE.

The same year as Abby, Terry Carter was also in the blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown.  Austin Stoker would also star in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) and John Carpenter's amazing Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), as well as William Girdler's other two blaxploitation pictures: The Zebra Killer (aka The Get-Man, 1974) and Sheba, Baby (1975) with Pam Grier.

William Marshall was very vocal about his unhappiness with the production of Abby, as he was promised script revisions that never occurred.  He did however alter his own dialogue, adding much of the content in regards to the Yoruba religion of West Africa.  Marshall is best known today for two things: his titular role in Blacula (1972) and it's sequel, Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973) and as the beloved King of Cartoons on television's Pee-wee's Playhouse.

Director William Girdler was an expert exploitation filmmaker, making nine films in seven years, in genres like action, blaxploitation, and horror.  Some have called him the "king of the ripoffs," namely because of Abby and his 1976 film Grizzly, which is essentially "Jaws with claws." Such labels can be rather dismissive of the man and his work, and while the quality of his films may vary at best, his movies always deliver in the areas of excitement and "oh-shit-did-I-just-see-that?".  Even Abby, which is a lesser work for sure, still has a certain watchability just because it's unlike anything else you've seen.

Unless you've seen The Exorcist...

"Damn, Abby.  You crazy."