Blaxploitation Classics, Vol. 1 - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

The 1970s was a hell of a transformative decade for film. At a time when the New Hollywood filmmakers were making their marks with major Hollywood productions, genre pictures were exploding across drive-ins and seedy city theaters. Through the haze of prestige pictures rose the Blaxploitation feature giving black actors and actresses a front-and-center position as the heroes of their own stories. Originally coined as a pejorative by Hollywood NAACP President Junius Griffin, these films became a matter of pride and appreciation and a piece of cinema history.

While easily criticized as glorifying crime and corruption, many films of the genre could stand tall among the gangster classics of the 1930s. Some were amazing, some not so much. But these films have a unique badass flavor letting fresh-faced talent stake their claim on the cinematic landscape. What started with Melvin Van Peeples’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song grew into an iconic genre all its own. Directors like LaLarry Cohen, Jack Hill, and William Girdler would make stars out of rising talents like Pam Grier, Fred Williamson, Yaphet Kotto, and Isaac Hayes. Shout Select delivers their first six-film Blaxploitation collection with some true cinematic heavy hitters. 

Across 110th Steet (1972)

Barry Shear directs this genuine classic crime thriller with Yaphette Kotto and Anthony Quinn as dueling cops trying to get to the center of a deadly heist. When three men posing as cops rip off the mob for $300,000, two detectives will have to find a way to work together to get to the suspects before every mafia hitman in the city. Quinn and Kotto light up this film as dueling cops on opposite sides of the ethical coin. It’s a pulse-pounding thriller featuring great turns from Paul Benjamin, Richard Ward, and Antonio Fargas, with a chilling villainous turn from Anthony Franciosa. Not just a great Blaxploitation film, it’s a great crime thriller full stop. 4.5/5

Black Caesar (1973)

Taking a page from classic ‘30s gangster pictures like White Heat, Larry Cohen directs this fan favorite with Fred “The Hammer” Williamson as the Godfather of Harlem, the cat with the .45 claws - Tommy Gibbs! Featuring the charismatic former NFL great Williamson, he’s joined by Gloria Hendry, D’Urville, and a creepy run from Art Lund. It’s a true “corruption of power” story as we watch William’s criminal empire rise and fall. Backed by an excellent soundtrack from James Brown, the film is a hell of a picture and a true gangster classic. 4/5

Hell Up in Harlem (1973)

You can’t keep a good hero dead when the box office receipts are oh-so-sweet. With Black Caesar being an incredible success, a sequel was ordered into immediate production - even though Williams’ Tommy Gibbs quite obviously died at the end. Miraculously surviving his attempted assassination and beating by a bunch of misfit youts, Tommy is out for revenge holding the books and cooking any fool dumb enough to try to take him on. Larry Cohen and company basically made the film up as they went and it shows. There are some great action scenes, the seaside invasion is a hoot, but the film is almost cartoonish compared to the original. On the plus side, Julius Harris gets a lot more time as Papa Gibbs complete with his own slick-as-hell theme song from Edwin Starr. A shadow of Black Caesar, it’s still wildly entertaining. 3/5

Coffy (1973)

She was hired as a switchboard operator, but she’d become a legend all her own, Pam Grier headlines one of her earliest hits with Coffy. Directed by Jack Hill, Grier is a shotgun-wielding vigilante bringing her own brand of justice to the streets. By day she’s a life-saving nurse. By night, she’s blowing the heads off pimps, drug dealers, and crooked cops that did her loved ones wrong. 1973 was a banner year for Grier as she took on this film, Black Mama, White Mama, and the classic Scream Blacula Scream. While I’d give more attention to Foxy Brown, Coffy is a slick Blaxploitation revenge flick not to be missed. 4.5/5

Sheba Baby (1975)

They can’t all be winners. After shooting, punching, kicking, stabbing, staking, and castrating her way through a series of Blaxploitation classics, Pam Grier headlines Sheba Baby. Directed by William Girdler, this P.I. flick is one messy action sequence after another as Grier comes home to Kentucky to stop a bunch of toughs from muscling in on her father’s insurance business. There’s some fun to be had, the last act is a blast, and Grier is as powerful and beautiful as ever and Austin Stoker is a great leading man love interest, but the plot is past being generic hokum. 2.5/5 

Tuck Turner (1974)

When someone jumps bale, the biggest, meanest skiptracer in the business is on the hunt - Mack “Tuck” Turner (Isaac Hayes). But when Dorinda (Nichelle Nichols), a madam aiming to control all prostitution in L.A. puts a hit out on Truck, it’s an all-out war in the streets of Los Angeles as Blue (Yaphet Kotto) takes the contract. Is it actually a good movie? I don’t care, it’s a badass movie! Complete with Isaac Hayes delivering the tunes, this flick is one entertaining feature complete with great turns from Hayes, Kotto, and Lt. Uhura, but characters like Dick Miller, Scatman Crothers, Paul Harris, and Charles Cyphers all make some memorable appearances. 4.5/5

Obviously, this is but a small taste of what the Blaxploitation genre had to offer. So if this set does well for Shout!, there are plenty of great films to populate a Volume 2 set. Personally, I’d love to see a Blaxploitation Horror-themed set, and not just because I love Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream and would pay real good hard-earned cash for those films in 4K. As a whole Blaxploitation Horror has some fun features in that very small catalog of titles that deserve much more attention. 

But as far as a taste test for Blaxploitation, this first six-film collection from Shout! Select is a strong jumping-off point. If you’re a genre fan you’ll score some classics. If you’re a newcomer you’ve got a nice chunk of film history to dive into. If this hadn’t been a collection and left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have grabbed Sheba Baby or Hell Up in Harlem on 4K, they’re fine fun films, but not “essentials” for my personal collection’s needs. But Coffy, Truck Turner, and Black Caesar are insanely fun films and Across 110th Street is a truly great crime thriller. 

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 
Shout! Select ticks the clock back to the 1970s for the slick Blaxploitation Classics Vol. 1 six-film 12-disc 4K UHD + Blu-ray boxset. Each film in the set, Across 110th Street, Black Caesar, Hell Up in Harlem, Coffy, Sheba Baby, and Truck Turner gets its own Region Free BD66 disc for the 4K version, and a BD50 serving the films up in 1080p. Each film also gets its own two-disc standard black case featuring the original poster artwork. These are two-disc cases with separate trays so no stacking. The whole set is held together with a hardstock cardboard slipcase. The initial artwork was resoundingly rejected by fans online to the point that Shout! cut the original art and just left the red/purple hazy visual motif which I personally think is pretty stylish. Funny enough, that controversial original artwork is featured on the main menu of every film!

That’s right, each film opens to what is essentially the exact same static image main menu, the only change being the title and bonus features options. 

It’s a little difficult to assess these films on their own when universally they’re all very good but feature hallmarks of their standing as low-budget genre pictures. While decently funded, they weren’t often considered prestige pictures so their filmmaking style and approach were much more gritty and rougher around the edges. Despite their inherent rough-around-the-edges nature, these films look great on 4K. Some small bits like fine scratches or a little speckling might pop up here and there, but nothing serious or distracting. None of them look like they were scrubbed or hit with any DNR.  

Across 110th Street
This one sports a strong and healthy cinematic appeal. I was immediately struck by the sense of image depth and clarity. KLSC brought this film to Blu-ray back in 2015 and it was only okay. Clearly sourced from a dated master, it was in pretty rough shape back then. Obviously, a lot of care was put in for this edition leaving the image looking cleaner and stronger than ever. Film grain might be more prominent from one shot to the next, but it’s still a gritty stylish presentation. Dolby Vision works nicely to pull fresh color saturation, and skin tones, and improve some of the black levels and shadows that would dip into crush for previous releases. 4.5/5

Black Caesar
Similar to Across 110th Street, when it’s at its best, it’s bold and beautiful looking in 2160p Dolby Vision. When it’s a product of a hurried shoot, it can look a tad amateurish. There are a few places where a Williamson or another actor missed their mark and they’re just slightly out of focus. It’s always looked that way, but the shot-to-shot quality discrepancies are a bit more noticeable now. That isn’t to say this is a bad transfer, not at all. It’s easily the best I’ve ever seen this one and the Dolby Vision grade goes a long way toward giving primaries plenty of flourish, healthier skin tones, and richer shadows and black spaces. There are just some cooked-in issues that can’t be fixed. 4/5

Hell Up in Harlem
This film started shooting even before the screenplay was even close to being finished and the hurried editing and shooting style really shows in 2160p Dolby Vision. The opening is a mishmash of new footage and inserts from the finale of Black Caesar. At times it looks really great and stable with crystal clear details like the wild beach incursion action scene. Other times it can look like they barely had time to get one lamp up to light the scene before shooting and it can look quite flat and obscure. Likewise, grain thickness can shift dramatically almost from shot to shot as if they used different stock runs or trims to shoot some scenes. Like a lot of these films, things that can’t be fixed but stand out in 4K. HDR grade is again quite nice, making the best of the situation. 4/5

Coffy
A little cleaner, a little more professionally shot but still has that visceral grit, Coffy is a highlight of this set in 2160p Dolby Vision. Right from Pam Grier’s first vigilante revenge-fueled takedown to the big grand finale shotgun blast, this is a stylish-looking flick that makes a great run on HDR. Details in facial features and costumes are sharp and clear. Grain is present but not overly thick or distracting. HDR gives the colors a lot of punch. Image depth is really peaked nicely with healthy shadows and nice deep inky black spaces. 4.5/5

Sheba Baby
This one is another case of when it looks great it’s great, when it doesn’t it’s just a simple product of being what it is. Outdoor scenes tend to look the best, there are more interesting objects and spaces to fill the area so those details pop more interestingly. A lot of interiors are pretty flat and boring with simple single-camera staging. It’s one of those things where the scenes that almost look like they were shot gorilla-style without permits on city streets look better than the staged interiors. At least the ridiculous jetski chase looks amazing! It’s not bad, it’s just not as exciting to look at as the other films in the set. Details are generally sharp and clear, elements are in pretty great shape. The Dolby Vision grade again goes a long way towards giving those sharp colors new life with healthier skin tones than the old Arrow Blu-ray. Likewise, the shadows and black levels are better managed without any crush troubles. 4/5

Truck Turner
Last but not least, in fact, it might even be the best of the box, Truck Turner bursts onto 2160p with an excellent Dolby Vision transfer. It’s a better, more interestingly shot film, and the production design is more active and attractive. Right from the opening shots of Truck’s nasty dirty apartment, there’s more visual punch to enjoy and let that extra resolution fly. Facial features and clothing details are sharp and clear, film grain is appropriately rendered while still maintaining that signature grit. Colors are bright and bold, skin tones are healthy, and black levels and shadows are right in the sweet spot with some excellent image depth. 4.5/5

Each of the films in this box set sports a DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono track. Universally they sound great giving plenty of attention to the dialog and key sound effects. More importantly, the funk soundtracks for each film sound pretty damn fantastic. When you’ve got guys like James Brown, Isaac Hayes, and Edwin Starr delivering the tunes, you gotta put them at the top of the mix. Dialog is generally clear, some rough ADR floats over some scenes, not really blending into the mix or matching the mouth movements - but that’s more of a feature than a bug. Again they’re all in very good shape, their nitpick differences weren’t exactly worth breaking out individually. The only two film's audio mixes I had some small issues with were Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem. Black Caesar has a few moments where dialog just doesn’t land as if the boom mic was out of position and it wasn’t looped in post-production. Hell Up in Harlem had a couple of sequences with some slightly loud hiss that aren’t as present throughout the rest of the film. The hiss doesn't completely pull you out of the moment or is overly distracting but it's still noticeable. 

Across 110th Street - 4.5/5
Black Caesar - 3.5/5
Hell Up in Harlem - 3.5/5
Coffy - 4/5
Sheba Baby - 3.5/5
Truck Turner - 4.5/5

Bonus features for this set are a bit of a mixed bag of new and old materials. We get an excellent 40-minute doc about the Blaxploitation features coming out of A.I.P. - but that’s only Part One so it’s safe to assume Part Two is being saved for the next set. The audio commentaries for five of the six features are informative and interesting from their respective personalities and the interviews with the likes of Jack Holl, David Sheldon, and Pam Grier are worth the time. It’s unfortunate more isn’t available here, but as exploitation features, not a lot of on-set making-of promotional content was created and sadly a number of key personalities involved in these films have passed on. All of the featurettes and interviews are on the included Blu-ray discs, where applicable, the audio commentaries are on both discs.

Across 110th Street - Blu-ray

• It’s Where the Action Is: The Blaxploitation Films of AIP Part One (HD 39:49)
• Trailer  

Black Caesar - 4KUHD/Blu-ray

• Audio Commentary featuring Larry Cohen
• Trailer

Hell Up in Harlem - 4K UHD/Blu-ray

• Audio Commentary featuring Larry Cohen
• Trailer 

Coffy - 4K UHD/Blu-ray

• Audio Commentary featuring Jack Hill. 
• Interview with Jack Hill (HD 18:50)
• Interview with Pam Grier (HD 17:38)
• Trailer

Sheba Baby - 4K UHD/Blu-ray

• Audio Commentary featuring David Sheldon
• Interview with David Sheldon (HD 15:15)
• Trailer

Truck Turner - 4K UHD/Blu-ray

• Audio Commentary featuring Jonathan Kaplan
• Trailer

2160p Dolby Vision HDR, Six films, 562 minutes of classic Blaxploitation entertainment. Shout! Select’s slick Blaxploitation Classics Vol. 1 4K UHD collection delivers six iconic entries in the coolest cinematic sub-genre to make it to the big screen. Stars like Fred Williamson, Pam Grier, Yaphet Kotto, and Isaac Hayes light up these features giving their characters larger-than-life personalities. And they all look and sound fantastic on 4K disc! Each film has been lovingly restored from its original camera negative complete with a judiciously applied Dolby Vision HDR grade ensuring they look sharper and cleaner than ever but still maintain the gritty integrity these films were known for. The original mono tracks sound great for their respective features. Bonus features might be a tad slim, but what’s here is worth digging into. Hopefully, the assumed eventual Blaxploitation Collection Vol. 2 will go bigger and harder as there are plenty of great flicks itching for this kind of home video treatment. As it stands, this first set is Highly Recommended