Truck Turner

Truck Turner (1974)

Runtime: 92 minutes

Directed by: Jonathan Kaplan

Starring: Isaac Hayes, Yaphet Kotto, Nichelle Nichols, Alan Weeks, Annazette Chase

From: AIP

I decided to continue on the path of watching blaxploitation films and despite hearing a lot of praise for this in the past, it was only tonight that I checked this out, via Netflix Instant. This was a wise decision on my part. To steal the plot description from the IMDb:

“Truck is a bounty hunter who gets a job to track down a guy named Gator. When he and his partner find him, a chase ensues and Gator is killed. This makes Gator's woman, Dorinda, very angry and she puts a hit on Truck. The man who agrees to kill Truck is named Blue. The question is whether Truck can survive with Blue and his gang on his trail.” A little awkwardly said, but that is the general plot.

This movie is loud and profane... which is fine with me. The same people that produced Black Belt Jones produced this (both movies share a few actors), and like with that, there's plenty of both intentional and unintentional humor. Truck is a disgusting slob with trash all over his apartment and he likes to curse out the cat owning to his criminal girlfriend (who spends part of the film in jail), and sometimes acts like an ass... but in a good way. He is still a character you think is awesome, and he spends time pal-ing about with his fellow skip tracer buddy (Weeks) and they exchange witty banter.

Gator happens to be a pimp and his girlfriend Dorinda is played by Nichelle Nichols. If you only know her as Uhura from Star Trek then this role will be a HUGE shock. She's pretty much very angry throughout and I think that every sentence she speaks has either a curse word or a racial slur. Her yelling at whores is incredible. It was quite the performance, for sure. It's the shame it's the only blaxploitation film that she wanted to do. But, there were nice performances throughout.

To go along with the entertainment value there's nice action scenes. People get blown away in bloody fashion. The highlight there is a long scene that starts off as a car chase and it ends not only in a foot chase but there's also a bar fight. That was great. Best of all, though, is the funeral for Gator. Many other pimps appear to pay tribute to him and their outfits are as awesomely stereotypical as you'd expect; their ho's are there too and one has a rainbow colored afro! Thankfully that scene is on YouTube, along with a compilation of Nichols in the movie. Both are below. This movie is highly recommended, especially if you dig the genre.

I shall return tomorrow night.