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#664 - Sugar Hill
Paul Maslansky, 1974
When her boyfriend is killed by a group of gangsters, a woman turns to voodoo and raises an army of zombies to help her take revenge.
Delving into obscure grindhouse cinema beyond the most beloved cult classics proves to be quite the gamble because you never know if you're going to get an obscure piece of fun or a film that deserves to be forgotten. Sugar Hill came out during the early years of the blaxploitation boom and it obviously wants to distinguish itself from all the other low-rent crime dramas that use revenge as the drive behind their extremely basic plots. To this end, it has its titular protagonist decide to get revenge on the criminals who murdered her boyfriend by contracting a local voodoo practitioner, who puts her in touch with the mysterious forces at play. As a result, Sugar Hill gets herself an army of voodoo zombies that are raised from the dead to do her bidding, and so begins a whole movie worth of supernatural vengeance. To be fair, I do appreciate that this film attempted to do something different to the usual blaxploitation films and it definitely seems like the premise has some potential due to its inclusion of the paranormal - that's what made Sugar Hill seem halfway promising.
Unfortunately, the problem is that Sugar Hill fails to provide much in the way of genuine entertainment. I'd even go so far as to say that it fails to provide anything in the way of genuine entertainment. While you can sort of accept that '70s blaxploitation is naturally going to have some fairly unimpressive production values, you kind of hope that it'll at least prove to be fun in one way or another. Sugar Hill isn't fun at all. It's an incredibly dry and boring film that runs the blaxploitation playbook page by page. The problem is that its main gimmick of the heroine getting her revenge using voodoo ultimately doesn't work. Whereas films like Coffy or Foxy Brown showcase the heroine taking revenge on her own and ultimately generate some tension thanks to her putting her life on the line, Sugar Hill lacks any serious tension due to its heroine being able to take down all her enemies using voodoo, which mainly involves zombies with the occasional variation such as the use of a doll. Even the warning that doing so will force her to sell her soul to Baron Samedi doesn't seem to mean much to the rest of the film. The use of zombies is neutered by the near-total lack of violence featured in the film - though some villains' demises are implied to be horrific (one of them gets fed to pigs, after all), there is barely anything remotely resembling the pulpy thrills associated with your typical blaxploitation flick. What kind of blaxploitation film has a PG rating? As a result, there is nothing to recommend about Sugar Hill. The nicest thing about it is that it's at least kind of short, but that doesn't seem to matter when it can't generate anything of even the slightest worth. Only worthwhile for blaxploitation die-hards; even then, it still seems to lack just about everything that makes blaxploitation films worth watching.
Paul Maslansky, 1974
When her boyfriend is killed by a group of gangsters, a woman turns to voodoo and raises an army of zombies to help her take revenge.
Delving into obscure grindhouse cinema beyond the most beloved cult classics proves to be quite the gamble because you never know if you're going to get an obscure piece of fun or a film that deserves to be forgotten. Sugar Hill came out during the early years of the blaxploitation boom and it obviously wants to distinguish itself from all the other low-rent crime dramas that use revenge as the drive behind their extremely basic plots. To this end, it has its titular protagonist decide to get revenge on the criminals who murdered her boyfriend by contracting a local voodoo practitioner, who puts her in touch with the mysterious forces at play. As a result, Sugar Hill gets herself an army of voodoo zombies that are raised from the dead to do her bidding, and so begins a whole movie worth of supernatural vengeance. To be fair, I do appreciate that this film attempted to do something different to the usual blaxploitation films and it definitely seems like the premise has some potential due to its inclusion of the paranormal - that's what made Sugar Hill seem halfway promising.
Unfortunately, the problem is that Sugar Hill fails to provide much in the way of genuine entertainment. I'd even go so far as to say that it fails to provide anything in the way of genuine entertainment. While you can sort of accept that '70s blaxploitation is naturally going to have some fairly unimpressive production values, you kind of hope that it'll at least prove to be fun in one way or another. Sugar Hill isn't fun at all. It's an incredibly dry and boring film that runs the blaxploitation playbook page by page. The problem is that its main gimmick of the heroine getting her revenge using voodoo ultimately doesn't work. Whereas films like Coffy or Foxy Brown showcase the heroine taking revenge on her own and ultimately generate some tension thanks to her putting her life on the line, Sugar Hill lacks any serious tension due to its heroine being able to take down all her enemies using voodoo, which mainly involves zombies with the occasional variation such as the use of a doll. Even the warning that doing so will force her to sell her soul to Baron Samedi doesn't seem to mean much to the rest of the film. The use of zombies is neutered by the near-total lack of violence featured in the film - though some villains' demises are implied to be horrific (one of them gets fed to pigs, after all), there is barely anything remotely resembling the pulpy thrills associated with your typical blaxploitation flick. What kind of blaxploitation film has a PG rating? As a result, there is nothing to recommend about Sugar Hill. The nicest thing about it is that it's at least kind of short, but that doesn't seem to matter when it can't generate anything of even the slightest worth. Only worthwhile for blaxploitation die-hards; even then, it still seems to lack just about everything that makes blaxploitation films worth watching.