The second feature made by
Jamaa Fanaka, who later found minor success with the sleazy boxing-behind-bars
melodrama Penitentiary (1979) and its
sequels, Welcome Home Brother Charles
is an incoherent crime drama that has something to do with a black man getting
railroaded by the corrupt legal system that’s controlled by racist white men.
Although it feels like producer/writer/director Fanaka envisioned his movie as
a shocking statement about race, perhaps along the lines of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
(1971), Fanaka didn’t come close to emulating the political sophistication or
the stylistic ferocity of Sweetback
helmer Melvin Van Peebles. Instead, Fanaka created muddled scenes that feel
both disassociated from each other and internally confusing, so it’s often hard
to track what’s happening from moment to moment, let alone what’s happening in
the overall story. Furthermore, Welcome
Home Brother Charles is edited as badly as it’s shot, and the acting is
almost wall-to-wall terrible, to the point where saying Welcome Home Brother Charles looks like a first-year student film
would be an insult to first-year student films. In the broadest strokes, Charles
Murray (Mario Monte) gets arrested on trumped-up charges, subjected to inhumane
treatment by police officers (one of whom tries to castrate Charles with a
knife), and used as a test subject by prison doctors who are conducting weird
experiments. Once Charles leaves prison, he seeks revenge, which seems to
largely comprise sleeping with the wives of his white oppressors. All of this
drifts by in an ugly blur until the movie arrives at its single distinctive
moment, a murder scene featuring one of the strangest weapons in movie history.
As Charles stands over his next intended victim, sweat pouring down Charles’
pulsating forehead, a Graduate-style
through-the-legs shot reveals the appearance of Charles enormous phallus, which
somehow moves like a tentacle across an
entire room until it coils around the neck of the victim, choking the poor
bastard to death. Too bad the title Shaft
was already taken.
Welcome Home Brother Charles: SQUARE
1 comment:
If I had to sum up how bad this movie is, I'd do it by pointing out that almost half the movie consists of lingering shots and extraneous scenes meant to pad the runtime, and yet it still clocks in at well OVER 90 minutes anyway.
I also couldn't help noticing that the dirty cop who mutilated our title character was never shown getting his in the movie I watched, but thanks to the director's ineptitude I find it perfectly believable that he simply forgot to write that part in rather than it being cut from my print. Seeing how he spent so long following both the dirty and not-so dirty cops' little adventures early on that I thought they were taking over as protagonists, it's no great leap to think Fanaka got so sidetracked with the almost 10-minute long scene of Charles revenge-porking the dirty cop's wife that he simply forgot to actually deal with the dirty cop himself. No way I'm giving him benefit of doubt after the time he stole from me by bloating his 20 minutes of actual story out to a full hour and 45 of plodding B-roll footage, set to jarring and annoying music that sounded like a cat hopping onto a Moog synthesizer.
Since Jamaa Fanaka was so horrible at his job I feel kinda like a bully for picking on him, I'll grant that the prehensile dingus was an inspired bit of lunacy, but the "entertainingly crazy" to "pathetic and boring" ratio is incredibly lopsided. Maybe a few less shots of people walking all the way to and from their cars and an extra scene or two of him using his magic pecker to get stuff down from tall shelves or assist the neighbors in painting their fence could have helped.
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