I make no secret about my love for so-called "guilty pleasure" movies to the point that I don't even consider them a guilty pleasure. I'm proud to like movies of shady quality and ill repute and make it quite known. Chop-socky flicks, Grindhouse sleaze, Italian giallo and zombie gore. Sometimes I feel like I was born a couple decades too late and I should be wandering around the seedy side of Manhattan wearing a stained trenchcoat and mirrored shades. But no other sub-genre exemplifies this underrated time in cinematic history in the same way that Blaxploitation does. Sure, it's easy to write such movies off as "cheese" when the bulk of the characters in them are sporting bell bottoms, afros and jheri curls while spouting off jive and even easier to condemn them as exploitative when those very same characters are almost always junkies, pushers, pimps and prostitutes. But to me, "Blaxplotation" symbolizes everything that's real and true with moviemaking, even if the end result is usually lacking. There's no better way for me to explain it, so I'll let Blaxploitation legend and all-around badass Fred Williamson do it better than I ever could:
“I have no idea who was being exploited. Black people loved the movies, all the actors were being paid. I mean, if you compare it to Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood movies of the same time, they never called them ‘white exploitation’. It was a terminology they had to use to distinguish black film, because black films with heroes didn’t exist until [the 1970's].”
