Abar: the First Black Superman (1977)
I don't know why TCM listed the title this way - on IMDB it is simply listed as "Abar."
I'd like to say this was "so bad that it was good," but it really wasn't.
It starts with a black family moving into a wealthy white neighborhood where the whites are so racist they immediately start hurling the n-word and picketing the home of their new neighbors. The black family is led my a prominent doctor / scientist who refuses to be pressured to move (kind of like
Raisin in the Sun part II). Horrible acts are committed to drive the family out - up to and including attempted bombing of their house & running down one of their children in the street.
Ultimately, it has a comic book superhero plot - the doctor develops a serum that can turn a man into a superhuman. He hopes the serum can be used by someone worthy enough to help end all the racial injustice the Dr. and his family experience after they've moved into the rich white neighborhood. (Almost sounds like a Captain America meets Luke Cage scenario.) But the movie seems to take forever getting to the plot and wastes lots of time with go-nowhere scenes and things like guys riding motorcycles on the highway.
Abar (leader of a local black activist group) drinks the serum, but is framed by police for murder, and is hunted by the Dr. (who now wants to kill Abar because he thinks the man is unstable & may turn into a monster after drinking the serum). Soon Abar develops psychic powers that seem able to not only alter behavior but reality itself - the movie is a convoluted mess. Abar goes on a montage of fixing the ills of his neighborhood that is nothing like Superman's, Spider-Man's or even Robocop's "first night out" montages.
I was expecting a laughably bad "Blaxploitation" flick - and it is laughably bad.
But the movie doesn't seem sure what it wants to be. Sounds like it wants to be a superhero action flick, but never really develops into that. It's somewhat Blaxploitation what with 1977 jive-language and totally evil, overtly racist white bigots, but at the same time it gets preachy: with speeches of Martin Luther King running through it.
The acting is over-the-top bad. Almost like they went out of there way to find people who could not act. There's hardly an actor in this who can deliver a halfway believable line. And I can't give away the surprise ending with one of the white neighbors.
On the "Odd" scale I give this a 5 out of 5. On the bad scale I give it a 4 out of 5 (if it was a little more wacky & less boring it might have qualified as "so bad it's good"). On the good movie scale I give it a 1 out of 5.