Hammer (1972)

21Jul08

Hammer IMDB Link

Directed By: Bruce D. Clark

Written By: Charles Johnson

Starring: Fred Williamson

If I had to diagram how much I enjoyed Hammer it would look like this:

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This is what a penis looks like in ascii:

8=====D

Sorry, I just read my first Kurt Vonnegut book.  For those who don’t know, blaxploitation was a genre that emerged in the 70’s that targeted the urban black audience by having a lot of stereotypical ideas that eventually caused an outrage. It also had similar content such as soul/funk music as the soundtrack, pimps, ho’s, black people being good and white people being bad. Luckily, we still have the healthy catalog of films and can watch them today. Hammer is a blaxploitation film but it  doesn’t go far enough to make it a great blaxploitation film.

The story is about BJ Hammer (I know, awesome name) , a worker on the docks who eventually starts boxing for a mobster. The mobster is bad. To show that he’s bad they have him banging a white girl, have extremely light complexion for a black guy, have a lot of white workers and have him prey on the black community. What a sell out. The mobster has Hammer box for him and Hammer does pretty good for himself. We soon learn that the mobster however, is in the drug and boxing fixing game. You can see where this goes and it goes, just not far enough.

I hate to compare films since another film shouldn’t inherently take away the merit of another but I also need to be truthful. Hammer just didn’t take it far enough for me. When I see Dolemite, with his ridiculous clothes and pimp cane say “You rat soup eatin’ mother fucker!” and drop a jive ass turkey or Coffy blowing the head off a sucka with a shotgun and then later say ” You gonna fly through them pearly gates with the biggest fucking smile St. Peter ever seen!” with Pam Grier sexiness, you have certain expectations. Hammer just didn’t reach that awesome “idea” level. It just felt derivative and seemed to put an emphasis on the actual technical aspect of the film rather than the ideas as if they were holding back or not accepting the genre. I was waiting for Hammer to make white peoples heads explode with his fists but sadly it never came.

And here I am tearing into the film when it wasn’t really that awful. Awful is a relative term. No one’s watching a blaxploitation film to see some Oscar worthy performances, they are watching what they expect. Hammer does have a sick soundtrack that follows the campy 70’s/quasi-porn funk sound which was written by Solomon Burke. The star of the film, Fred Williamson, is a former NFL player and that’s always fun to watch and he was reminding me of The Rock for some reason. The film also does have it’s fair share of good wordplay and slang. One phrase they said that surprised me was “don’t get it twisted” since I thought today’s MC’s started that. I guess their just bringing it back. And speaking of bringing it back.

“Next, on exploitation theater: Blacula, followed by Blackenstein, and the Blunchblack of Blotre Blame!” — Random TV Announcer on “The Simpsons”

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Tags: blaxploitation, Hammer, movie review