Saturday, August 17, 2019

Slaughter's Big Rip-Off



I've hit a Blaxsploitation pocket in my current movie queue and "Slaughter's Big Rip-Off" has come up.

On paper, it's the perfect movie - it stars Jim Brown, James brown did the score, a car goes over a cliff with the hero in it and he survives without injury... and in the first scene an airplane with a machine gun swoops down and shoots Punky Brewster's dad in the head. But that's not why you called. The most fascinating aspect of the movie is that the powerful white villain is played by Ed McMahon. Yes, that Ed McMahon.


And the thing is, he's pretty believable. He has the 80s Mad glasses, a suit, he yells at his underlings and he's a convincing Bad Boss Man. He reminds me of Frank Rizzo. Of course, looking at the picture above, he also looks like Cameron Mitchell.

In the end, it doesn't work out for him. He tries to defeat Slaughter by giving him 3 ½ stars instead of 3 ¾ stars and Slaughter guns him down with a machine gun.

And I should re-iterate that it's a perfect movie on paper. In actuality it's pretty average fare.

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