Movie Details
| Title: | Abar | |
| Director: | Frank Packard | |
| Year: | 1977 | |
| Genre: | Soul Cinema | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 06.28.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 06.28.06 | Weird Wednesday | Finishing the night is Abar, The First Black Superman at Weird Wednesday. I thought it fitting to start my day and end it with Superman. Which did I like better? Put your money on Abar. This is one of the most blatantly ridiculous blaxploitation movies I've seen to date. Hilarious. Uproarious. Just Plain Wrong. Classic. So let's see... for starters, Abar has no eyebrows. Yeah, I don't know what that means... whether the actor underwent chemo just before filming or if he has the same disorder that Ed Begley had in Arrested Development or what... but for whatever reason, he is bald, black, beautiful, and sans eyebrows. Next up, he really only spends maybe 20 minutes of the movie as superman. He's not born into it but transformed thanks to a serum created by Dr. Kinkade. All that plot stuff is secondary though to the casually blatant racism of all the caucasoid cast. The sold-out theater laughed like hyenas and I honestly had a moment looking around and wondering if this was actually such a good thing, for a theater full of white people to be laughing this hard at a white person on screen being so utterly... wrong. I guess that's the exploitation seeping in though, huh. Seriously... especially toward the kids, the neighbor ladies are hilarious. The kids too though... they are such bad actors that lines like "I hate them for killing my cat" or "you're nothing but a watusi wobbler" are made funny by the worst delivery on the face of the planet. Nobody's winning any awards here though... Dr. Kinkade is just as bad and Abar, even though he's by far the best actor in the movie, can't help but draw laughs whenever he mentions the black ghetto and their struggle (and he mentions it a lot). The acting is bad, the fighting is bad, the bigoted terrorizing sucks, and the lab set is horrendous, but the house that the Kinkades move into is actually pretty sweet. I'd live in that house. Maybe change the desert motif in the front lawn but hey... it's even got a pool. With a diving board. Gosh, what else. This is one of those movies where there's so many great lines (and so-so lines with great deliveries) that it overflows my brain and leaks out by the time I get back here to write it down. Abar's psychic powers of messing with white folks at the end is so serene... and the moment where he's shot and sees god (in the form of a painting of jesus obscured by a cheap fog machine) is transcendent... causing him to sit in the Watts Towers - as if on a throne - and beckon bigoted cops to shoot at him so he can make them fight each other. Meanies in the neighborhood? watch out or Abar will turn a wind machine on your ass and shrink you down in a box on-screen... then make you think you've been black all your life and just passing as white. All of this stuff is actually in the movie. So... yeah, a home run week for Weird Wednesday. I can't believe that movie exists, but I am so glad I got to see it. |
