Some practitioners of the
horror genre argue that logic has no place in spooky stories. Fair enough.
After all, one would never argue that the events of, say, The Shining (1980) could take place in reality. Still, there are
limits. In the offbeat blaxploitation horror picture Lord Shango, murders happen in plain view of witnesses but
authorities never seem to get involved. And that’s just one affront to common
sense. Lord Shango is moderately
interesting because of the way it forefronts a clash between two belief systems, but the movie is a
frustrating mess. In the wild opening sequence, young man Femi (Bill Overton)
rushes to rescue his girlfriend, Billie (Avis McCarther), from baptism by a
group of overzealous Christians. They respond by drowning him in full view of an entire congregation. This enrages
Billie’s mother, Jenny (Marlene Clark), who turns to a local voodoo cult for
help exacting revenge. Enter Jabo (Lawrence Cook), a ne’er-do-well who may or
may not have mystical powers. He compels Jenny to make sacrifices to “Lord
Shango” in order to reincarnate Femi. And if you’re wondering how all this
stuff meshes into a coherent storyline, don’t bother, because it doesn’t.
Lord Shango unspools as a random
assortment of moments, some of which are creepy and some of which are merely
confounding. In the picture’s best scene, Jabo strolls onto the dancefloor of
a nightclub and shimmies toward a pregnant Billie, who’s grooving to one of the movie’s hot Afro-fusion beats. Jabo moves closer and closer to
Billie until her movements slow down to match his, and he stares into her eyes,
triggering some sort of hypnosis/possession/trance state. Afterward, Jabo frets
that he failed to achieve a supernatural task: “It’s always a struggle when a
restless soul tries to enter a body not yet born.” Built solely on acting and
mood and music, this scene has all the clarity and weirdness Lord Shango seeks elsewhere but usually fails to find. Incidentally, many of the same problems plague the 1973 blaxploitation
vampire picture Ganja & Hess,
which also stars Marlene Clark.
Lord Shango: FUNKY
Lord Shango aka The Color of Love is a really interesting movie about the clash of two religions, but yeah, the fact that the young man is literally drowned at he beginning for no real reason is really ridiculous. It was cool to see Laurence Cook, who starred in the cult fave The Spook Who Sat By The Door, as Jabo, the antagonist who may or may not be human as such. He should have had a much better film career, but he did have a long one in TV, at least. I like the film, even if it could have had a better ending.
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