Jamaa Fanaka
A young man takes over as the head of a crack dealing outfit after his brother, the gang's leader, is murdered.
A man is framed for murder and sent to prison. He is beaten and tortured, then forced to fight the prison's worst killer, a martial-arts fighting midget called Thud.
An ex-con, on parole and trying to straighten his life out, decides to resume his boxing career when one of his prison enemies escapes and kills his girlfriend.
A hitchhiker named Martel Gordone gets in a fight with two bikers over a prostitute, and one of the bikers is killed. Gordone is arrested and sent to prison, where he joins the prison's boxing team in an effort to secure an early parole and to establish his dominance over the prison's toughest gang.
After wrongly doing time in prison for murder, a man seeks revenge on a racist law enforcement system and the detective who framed him.
Jamaa Fanaka’s first project plays off the Blaxploitation’s genre conventions, an adaption of Goethe’s “Faust” presented with a non-synchronous soundtrack and superimposed over a remake of Super Fly (1972). Often out of focus with an overactive camera, the film immediately exudes nervous energy, but unlike Priest’s elegant cocaine consumption in Super Fly, Willie’s arm gushes blood as he injects heroin. A morality tale in two reels. —Jan-Christopher Horak
