Uriah43 When a big-time drug dealer from Detroit by the name of "Guido" (J. C. Wells) comes to Las Vegas and gets involved with a local hoodlum known as "Ziggy" (Russ Tamblyn) a local detective named "Tony" (Geoffrey Land) and his partner "Kicks Carter" (Timothy Brown) become highly suspicious since Ziggy isn't in the same league as Guido and he doesn't deal in drugs. What neither Tony nor Kicks realize is that Guido needs about $100,000 in order to purchase weapons which he then intends to trade for high-quality drugs. Ziggy needs Guido's help to kidnap a courier carrying $250,000 from a security company. But in order to do that Ziggy needs information from a gambling addict by the name of "Terry" (Jana Bellan) who works at the security company. The problem is that Terry happens to be dating Tony and he doesn't want Ziggy anywhere near her. Now, rather than reveal what transpires next I will just say that I thought that for a blaxploitation movie produced in the mid-70's this particular film wasn't too bad. I especially liked the complex plot and some of the unexpected twists this movie presented. Slightly above average.

Michael_Elliott Black Heat (1976) ** (out of 4)A tough black cop (Timothy Brown) from Las Vegas, with the help from his white partner (Geoffrey Land), tries to stop some criminals who are bringing heroin, weapons and other items into a local hotel. Director Al Adamson tackled just about every genre and he managed to make both decent and horrible films in each of them. BLACK HEAT might not be as much fun as something like Dracula VS. FRANKENSTEIN but for the most part it's probably the best made film I've seen from the director. Had the running time been edited down another ten-minutes you might even say this was a good film from Adamson and that there would have been quite rare. The storyline itself certainly isn't anything we haven't seen from other Blaxploitation pictures but for the most part the cast is fun and we're given a couple good villains to help keep everything moving. On a technical level it appears to a little more effort went into the picture including a higher production value and some nice cinematography. There's a car chase towards the start of the picture that might be the best sequence from the director's filmmography and this includes a terrific shot of the action from on top of a cliff. Brown isn't the greatest actor in the world but I think he's good on screen and manages to help keep the film entertaining. Russ Tamblyn plays a drug dealer named Ziggy and adds a lot of fun and especially during his introduction scene. The film eventually runs out of gas and it drags too much during the finale but overall this is a minor effort in the genre that fans of the director's should like. The most bizarre scene is when a woman offers to do a gang bang if she loses a card game. She does lose but then tries to back out when the men force themselves on her. I'm really not sure what Adamson was trying to go for during this scene but it's pretty bizarre with the type of score on it.

Woodyanders Late, great grind-house trash movie-maker Al Adamson takes a stab at the blaxploitation genre -- and, surprisingly, the net result rates a cut or so above the norm, meaning that what we got here is a genuinely solid 70's drive-in black action opus. Former gridiron great Timothy Brown (whose other B-picture credits include "Bonnie's Kids," "The Dynamite Brothers," the Filipino women-in-prison potboiler "Sweet Sugar," and the third Cheri Caffaro "Ginger" feature "Girls Are for Loving") ain't half bad as rough'n'tough streetwise Las Vegas cop Kicks Carter, who's determined to get the goods on a fancy hotel operation which serves as a front for all kinds of illicit and illegal activities (gambling, bribery, gun-running, prostitution, y'know, the usual spit-in-the-face-of-both-the-law-and-morality kind of nasty stuff). The villains of this particular piece are an enjoyably vile pack of vicious down'n'dirty subhuman vermin: the ever-dependable Russ Tamblyn slimes it up delightfully as Ziggy, a brutish, loutish, obnoxious loan shark and nightclub manager (check out the scene where Ziggy gleefully beats a guy up with a sledgehammer and then crushes the dude's legs by running them over with a car!); Darlene Anders oozes coolly understated menace as the motel's evil, predatory lesbian owner, and J.C. Wells shows substantial smooth, slimy, sinister style as Guido, a bald, flinty, very business-like gangster who specializes in selling ill-gotten firearms. On the fetching femme side we've got the supremely sexy'n'slinky Tanya Boyd of "Black Shampoo" and "Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks" fame as a feisty, snoopy TV reporter and love interest for Kicks. And then there's Al's always welcome space cadet wife Regina Carrol, looking unusually haggard and worn-out, but still acquitting herself passably as a melancholy lounge singer (Carrol even belts out the unexpectedly lovely and heart-rending downbeat ballad "No More Mail Until Tomorrow").Under Al's uncharacteristically proficient direction (Adamson, by the way, can also be briefly glimpsed playing blackjack in a casino during a nifty montage sequence), "Black Heat" measures up as a perfectly agreeable and diverting little low-budget number: we've got typically sharp and crisp cinematography by the tireless Gary Graver, Paul Lewison cuts loose with a righteously grooving, get-down happening jazzy soul score, the gratuitous sex, profanity and violence level is suitably ample and explicit (the movie hits its scuzzy highlight when a disgusting bunch of greasy, grinning slobs cheerfully gang rape luckless compulsive gambler Jana Bellan after she loses a poker game to them and doesn't have any money to cover her loss), the action set pieces are pretty smoking (Carter and Ziggy's final no-holds-barred fisticuffs confrontation in a junkyard definitely hits the stirring spot), and both the hip, slang-ridden dialogue (the word "dig" is said a lot) and especially the gaudy, tacky, eye-wateringly ugly 70's clothes are every bit as laughably dated and ghastly as they ought to be. Granted, "Black Heat" sure ain't another "Shaft," but overall it still qualifies as an above average cops-and-criminals crime/action programmer from our ever-reliable Grade Z schlock flick pal Al. Rest in peace, Mr. Adamson.

cfc_can Black Heat is available under many titles, as are most films made by the late exploitation director Al Adamson. Also like many Adamson films, there are no major name stars, only a few washed up names and a few never-quite-made-it names. The story features a black cop in Vegas (Timothy Brown) out to nail bad guys. That's it. The plot is as thin as an average TV cop show from the same period. It's interesting to see Russ Tamblyn playing a really gritty, despicable character. It's hard to believe he's the same guy who played Riff back in the film version of "West Side Story". There's a couple of OK action scenes but the film is pretty tame by today's standards. At least it has a distinctive 70s feel to it. Brown is OK in the lead but didn't have much of a movie career.