The Black Six

I picked this one up from the racks of one of my local dollar stores for two reasons. One is that I was hoping it was perhaps the blaxploitation genre’s homage (or at least attempt to copy) to the films in the lineage of The Seven Samurai - your Magnificent Sevens, Wild Bunches, even your Star Wars and Three Amigos for example. The other reason is that the primary cast is made up of football players from the 1970s - Mean Joe Greene of those four-Super-Bowl-winning “Steel Curtain” Steelers being the most prominent member of the cast (though not the main character). A gimmick, yeah, but one that I’ve never seen before and I was pretty curious about Mean Joe’s acting chops.



The movie actually opens with no particular main character, and I like it’s basic premise. The Black Six are a bunch of guys back from Vietnam, disillusioned and worn out by what they’ve experienced. They’re not really a “biker gang” per se, more like a group of dudes who happen to travel together on bikes. They travel around mostly rural areas, doing farm work for board and a little pocket cash, otherwise just camping out and going wherever suits them. A totally excellent sort of life, in my opinion, and this background bought the movie quite a bit of slack with me for it’s otherwise incredibly low budget production values and almost complete lack of acting talent.

The movie starts with a young black boy and white girl meeting for what turns out to be a secret tryst on a school football field well after dark. They’re kicking some balls, talking about their future, etc. a very sweet scene if not featuring any potential Academy Award nominations. Suddenly the girl’s brother, a very seventies looking fellow named “Moose”, shows up with his white biker gang who it turns out are a bunch of racists and don’t approve of this whole interracial dating thing. So they chase the poor guy around and beat him to death with chains.

We then cut to our introduction to the Six, who are working for a nice old white woman doing some hay baling and boarding up her barn. She invites them in for dinner and is basically hecka sweet, so we establish up front that this is not going to be one of those “all white people are the White Debbil” sorts of blaxploitation films, it takes a more even handed look at the racial issues of it’s time and place. From here the Six just kind of roam around in a series of long highway shots a la Easy Rider (except the soundtrack is replaced by Superbad wah-chika-wah music). They eventually end up in some racist bar which Mean Joe accidentaly trashes with his super strength.


I think this was a Norman Rockwell painting

The movie just seems to be meandering along kind of aimlessly as it’s protagonists are, until the Six stop for gas in some little town and check their General Delivery mail at the Post Office. At this point, Bubba (played by Gene Washington of the 49ers/Lions - fun fact, he’s the current director of football operations for the NFL) steps forward to take over the Main Character duties and the rest of the Six, Mean Joe included, are just sort of supporting muscle. The kid we saw get killed at the outset is Bubba’s younger brother, so Bubba breaks from the group and heads back to his hometown to find out what happened.


Mean Joe turns into such a teddy bear when you toss him a Coke

Bubba’s investigative work leads him first to an old girlfriend turned hooker, and then finally to the girl his brother was dating. The racist white biker gang doesn’t really go to any great pains to hide what they’ve done, so the rumble is about to be on. Fortunately the rest of the Six decide to pick this exact moment to meander on in and back up Bubba before the white trash gang (seriously, it looks like they went down to the local dive bars and rounded up whatever hobos and winos they could get who weren’t too inebriated to make it over to the set) trashes him up. This goofy detective and his ridiculous Uncle Tom partner also happen to wander in and break up the action before it can really get started, so a date is set for later discussions vis-a-vis the race brawling.


I think this was also a Norman Rockwell painting

The movie climaxes with a brawl between the Six and Moose’s gang. Now, bear in mind up to this point there hasn’t been any physical violence except that undertaken by the white bikers. When the Six do anything it’s more like a slapstick comedy show where bars fall apart at the seams and stuff but presumably nobody actually gets hurt. Suddenly, Moose’s gang draws chains and pocketknives on them and without any compunction the Six take their weapons from them and just start killing them left and right. Moose meets a particularly bad end having his head graphically beaten in with a blood stained rock. Now up to this point the movie actually had been shaping up as something more than just typical action-based blaxploitation, ham-fisted and poorly acted though it might be it seemed to have a sort of social message that it wanted to pursue and the Six’s frequent calls for “peace and love, man” indicate perhaps higher moral values at work here, even a sort of Buddhist outlook on their part. So it actually could have been a rather emotionally effecting and even shocking scene when we suddenly see them revert to cold blooded killing machines, except they decided to play music that sounds like something out of a Blues Brothers chase scene over the slaughter (picture some guy getting his skull smashed open or a switchblade driven slowly into his chest to the strains of “Don’t Turn Me Loose” and you’re not too far off from the experience here).


It was nice of his Mom to make him that shirt

With the Six slaughtering white bikers left and right, this one ratty looking guy takes it upon himself to avenge the Klan or whatever by dropping a flare into his gas tank and driving right into the middle of the brawl. The movie ends with confused shots of a motorcycle jumping over the camera and random flames everywhere. The fate of the Six is left unclear - a montage of pictures showing them in better times leads you to believe they got wiped out by Exploding Knievel, but then the movie ends with this message :



So will they return from beyond the grave as Ghost Rider-like apparitions? Or zombie bikers from hell maybe? Tragically, this apparently did not garner enough box office success to merit a sequel to give us a conclusive answer to this question.

So it looked like it was shaping up to have some sort of a sociological context, low-budget as it may have been, but I guess the ultimate lesson that the Black Six leaves us with is that no matter how fed up you are with violence, the only appropriate answer when someone murders your brother is to continue the cycle. By using your super kung fu skills to brutally wipe out an army of bikers.

Links :

* Trashin' The Cracker Bar