Nigger Lover

To review this film under its intended title is my main priority. To point out its reverse bottlecap propaganda is my second. Given the nature of this film and its history, Nigger Lover, also lovingly known as Tom, The Bad Bunch, and The Brothers, is a film directed by a civil rights activist turned schlock maestro. As per his unusual occupation, Nigger Lover is a film that gets all too confused in conveying which message it supports. Consider the branching extensions of this film universal. You can plug and play this film into any meaning or racial ultimatum which also happens to do something for the swept sake at stake. This is the film that they didn't want you to see, with reason enough however. Nigger Lover is a film wrapped up in its own lost ideology and features a sympathetic look at the white man and dealing with many pig-headed and angry "niggas" as the "bad bunch" cavorts around the streets with intention to harm "Whitey." Nigger Lover surely is the pièce de résistance of Greydon Clark's expansive gutter career. I support independent idealism transgressed to film but the only thing Clark's created of social importance is regrettably this anchored look at the fabled "aggression gene" present in all blacks.

Restoring my faith within the cracked-black case of cassettes and the corroded picturesque look at materialism in the age of exploitation, Nigger Lover starts centering itself within the conversation of a black and white GI stationed in Vietnam (but is obviously shot in a neighbor's backyard). After discussing what they believe home to be like, the wise black man begins to say that the war is still going back home and that he knows the answer on how to stop ebony & ivory confrontations and bring peace to all sides. Lucky for us he is suddenly and humorously shot and utters a violent scream before he can whisper the secret vaccine for Helter Skelter. Bringing a letter back home for his fallen friend's family, he encounters a brother reeking of soul who approaches with incredible hostility. It's our dearly departed soldier's brother name of Tom. But don't call him by his slave name, his name is now "Makimba." Along springs his gang of groovy, white-women stealing soul brothers and after utilizing some heavy intimidation tactics, Jim decides to cut his losses and leaves. Makimba, having nothing to do with Jim's lack of confrontation, decides to assault him at an ethnic fair before two "corrupt" detectives break it up waving their pistols around and calling Jim a "Nigger Lover" after claiming Makimba is his friend, obviously to extinguish any more violence from the Negroes.

As you can expect, a campaign of disinformation is thrust upon the sexually-frustrated Jim. While the camera hops between an endless void of interracial nudity and forced repressed ethnic ideals, Jim brings around a heavy aura of indecisiveness while he hops between the love of his life, Nancy (I think I recall that they've been dating for "2 months"), and some barfly hooker named Bobbie. To beef up the story devices of this film and the jolting ending, Clark sets out to humanize Jim but fails halfway and creates a socially incompetent Frankenstein of faults and idiosyncrasies. While drunk later in the film, he proposes to the bubble-headed Nancy out of reverse-engineered hostility towards her decision to not move in with him because of Sin as a deciding factor. So after the plans and arrangements are set, he makes a progressive decision to possibly not go through with the marriage, thus sparking a several minute long conversation with the priest about the sanctity of marriage. Necessary scene or a clever time divergent? Assessing the run time of Nigger Lover at a measly hour and thirteen or so minutes, I suppose this film could use every cutting room floor scene in a final last ditch effort to achieve feature length before a certain deadline.

When you take the poster image of a prone negro holstering a rifle at a fleeing white couple, you can no doubt theorize that this film image is one of the near end shocks of agonizing still-life and the unquestionable lives taken on account of ignorance. Although Makimba had the right to protest and attest the vicious beatings at the hands of the two "pigs", such wonderful lines came out of their confrontations e.g. "Niggers sure bleed!" Of course, no film countering the image of blaxploitation could be without its very own scenes of Jewish discretion! At a pool party, Makimba and his beasts patiently await the arrival of Jim, as they are visiting as his "friends." In the meantime, the bull Negro of the lot decides to mingle with the white women, topless of course. After stealing all the white women with his superior masculinity, the giant picks up a tiny white male and begins to have the females goad the inferior White's size calling him "little man" and "tiny." This infuriates Makimba as he sees this pool turn into a integrated cesspool of spoiled races mixing with such fervor that his devious pose & stare become all the more aggressive with each passing frame. In no time, as the party picks up and the whites become more settled with their chocolate counterparts, one grabs the arm of one of the militants, provoking an angry reaction. Fearing for his safety, he babbles "Is he anti-Semitic or something?" which garners the response "if he iss, we ALLL in trouble!"

What Nigger Lover accomplishes is providing a sleazy shell for some disturbingly true stereotypes. These soul militants provide excellent opposition to the weakling Vietnam veteran but to some degree, also dampen the credibility of the constant peace talks from Jim. Trying to take the higher ground dug this Honky in deeper trouble than he originally planned and by the time the credits roll with image and sound intact, we hardly mourn the fate of our white brother. It's yet another casualty of not doing something sooner and elongating the process of physical contact. For scenes of white police officers seeming unfazed by a mention of a murder plot against a white man, only to suddenly become enraged when hearing they were kidnapping white women, Nigger Lover provides many hilarious sociopolitical thematic elements and enough subversive VHS sleaze to keep a jaded blaxploitation treasure hunter at ease for the time being. If you can handle the atrocious and flimsy editing, that is. Might I add that this is not nearly as anti-white as the original intentions set out to engrave upon the face of exploitation. In the end, Nigger Lover stands triumphant as nigger kitsch.

-mAQ