Movies: Blaxploitation cinema

In 1950s Harlem a vicious Italian gangster (Frank deKova) tries to muscle in on a black racketeer's (Paul Harris) numbers game....

A doctor in a Watts clinic takes his own medicine and becomes a monstrous white killer of hookers....

Ben and Beatrice Chambers discover that their son Norman is gay and so Ben is intent on setting him right....

With archive film clips and interviews, this brief look at a frequently overlooked historical period of filmmaking acts as an introduction rather than a complete record. It features interviews with some of the genre's biggest stars, like Fred William...

Young black man teams up with a Chinese kung-fu expert to fight a drug ring....

A pair of tough cops go after the mob who jinxed the martial arts tournament and injured their buddy....

A band of female pirates go undercover at a prison camp on a coffee plantation to rescue their leader's sister....

When a prominent abortion clinic owner goes missing along with a string of other black community leaders, her singing daughter and her fellow female biker gang members investigate....

After a fundraiser for a black politician is robbed, Detroit police put two detectives, one white and one black, on the case, who try to work together under boiling political pressure....

A rookie cop on the undercover narcotic squad falls for the junkie who can help him nab a ruthless pusher/killer....

CIA trained detective Solomon King has to use all of his dirty tricks and experiences to get revenge on the person responsible for the murder of his girlfriend. A trail leads him to a desert in the Middle East....

To make money, a Los Angeles street-fighter goes to work for gangsters....

Fearful that their star witness might be murdered, two attorneys hire a protector to bring him from Los Angeles to New York. Jesse Crowder (Fred Williamson) is a no-nonsense tough guy. He buddies up with the witness, an accountant, and they hit the r...

Retired cop and celebrity DJ Tucker Williams (aka The Disco Godfather) takes to the streets as a dangerous hallucinogenic drug called Angel Dust begins to take hold of the neighborhood....

A documentary on funk and P-funk and the bands and artists that made it all happen: James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Maurice White and his Earth Wind & Fire, Average White Band, Kool & The Gang and lots more. It tells the story...

Although notorious New Orleans gangster J.D. Walker is shot and killed in the 1940s, his spirit remains restless for three decades, until a hypnotist's supernatural nightclub act allows him to take over the body of a mild-mannered law student and see...

A black soldier comes home to Harlem after a tour in Vietnam and discovers that his wife had become a heroin addict and died of an overdose. Infuriated, he gathers three of his ex-GI buddies and they lay out plans to fight the drug dealers....

A roller-coaster ride through the history of American exploitation films, ranging from Roger Corman's sci-fi and horror monster movies, 1960s beach movies, H.G. Lewis' gore-fests, William Castle's schlocky theatrical gimmicks, to 1970s blaxploitation...

In 1971, director Melvin Van Peebles turned the figure of the black hero in US cinema upside down with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song: the story of the making of a seminal movie that initiated the Blaxploitation movement, a short-lived but highly ...

Fred Williamson chop-sockeys his way through this popular blaxploitation adventure as Jefferson Bolt, a Kung Fu expert assigned to deliver a cool $1 million to Mexico City from Hong Kong with a stop in Los Angeles. When Bolt discovers the cash is dir...