VELVET SMOOTH

d. Michael L. Fink (1976)

Blaxploitation essentially presents an Afrocentric world where super hip, super smart, super fly black people easily swat away Whitey's conventions and rewrite injustices for themselves. It's a macho, often unconscionably sexist place, but there is also room for distaff John Shafts: beautiful, intelligent, strong women who can kick arse just as well as their male counterparts. Sometimes, as with the Pam Grier characters Coffy and Foxy Brown, our heroines are driven to action by revenge or necessity; sometimes, like Cleopatra Jones and the wonderfully and even more improbably named Velvet Smooth they're just preternaturally cool and in charge from the get go. 

Velvet (Johnnie Hill, who gives a slightly stilted but appealing performance and only ever appeared on screen in this one film) is a sassy and switched on private eye investigating a hostile and violent takeover of her ex-boyfriends crime syndicate. That's the story, a fluid ounce in a quart pot. Velvet is calm and collected and sleeps with whoever she damn pleases. She has two girlfriends who help her out, and they're a formidable team, so much so that they solve the mystery in about fifteen minutes and then have to hang around for the rest of the movie.

The crime lord is a surprisingly nice guy, who spends his spare time having pillow fights and has a very distracting braided pig tail hanging out of the back of his afro. He's played by a gentleman called Owen Wat-Son, a surname I'm familiar with but have never seen spelled in quite that way before. Wat-Son was also a martial arts instructor, and was responsible for the interminable fight scenes here, where the same dozen guys get beaten up again and again, one after the other*, really, really slowly. Rather cheekily, Wat-Son has a featured fight of his own, which is notable for having most of the action sped up to make him look shit hot, but nevertheless remains more Benny Hill than Bruce Lee.

Clearly filmed on the fly on the streets and in hastily reconfigured and re-purposed borrowed rooms (you can see the light patches where pictures were recently hanging), Velvet Smooth fails to live up to the sophisticated promise of its title in almost every way but has an endearing earnestness about it, as well as a Kojak gag that must have been out of date by the time the film crept into selected cinemas.

* Why do villains never attack en masse? If you greatly outnumber your opponent, it's moronic to give them the advantage of being able to knock you off individually. Pile in!