Let’s raise the dead on this week’s new review at B-Movie Enema!

It’s the second week of my little theme month exploring some gems of 70s blaxploitation horror films. This week, I’m digging into 1974’s Sugar Hill from director Paul Maslansky. First and foremost, don’t confuse this with the 1994 movie of the same name starring Wesley Snipes. While both of these movies have a crime element, the earlier film takes place in Houston, while the Snipes vehicle takes place in the Harlem neighborhood of Sugar Hill.

Also, Maslansky’s Sugar Hill deals with voodoo.

Yeah, this is an old school style of zombies we’re going to see in this movie. In a lot of ways, I think that hurts this movie because one of the criticisms often leveled against this movie is that it is almost laughably dated. Academic Peter Dendle stated that the zombies felt more akin to the exploitation horror films from the 30s and 40s that often poorly represented the culturally black practitioners of voodoo. The movie does have an additional piece of legacy as rapper MF Doom used several audio clips from the movie on his King Geedorah album Take Me to Your Leader.

Now… One of the things that might stick out like a sore thumb is the name Paul Maslansky. You might notice that doesn’t have a particularly African American-sounding name. That’s because Maslansky was a white guy. He just happened to have passed away last December at the age of 91. Yes, some blaxploitation films were made by white folks. However, I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Maslansky would not have had an invite to the cookout.

Maslansky was born in Harlem and played in a jazz band while he attended law school. For the most part, Maslansky was best known for producing films. Sugar Hill is the only film he directed. A few years later, his miniseries about Martin Luther King, Jr., appropriately titled King, was nominated for Emmys. A lot of them. It was nominated for nine Emmys, including for Paul Winfield as King, Cicely Tyson as Coretta Scott King, and Ossie Davis as King Sr.

And… hey! Cliff DeYoung was there too as Robert F. Kennedy!

Seemingly, Maslansky had a relationship with the Black community, if not a great deal of inroads, insights, and appreciation. What Maslansky did in the 80s, though, is what he’s really best known for. In 1984, he produced Police Academy. He would go on to produce six sequels and a television series. Despite the reviews or the general appreciation for the series, those Police Academy movies were popular and either did okay at the box office or made all that budget back on VHS releases and appearances on cable. I think the success of that series can also overlook the stinkers that are 1985’s Return to Oz and 1993’s Cop and a Half.

But I have faith that Sugar Hill will be better than those, and holy shit, in 15 seconds, I already know it will be just based on the theme song from The Originals.

So, according to The Originals, our supernatural voodoo woman does her thing at night, and it’s bad news if you don’t do her right. After the credits, we learn this voodoo ritual was a show at Club Haiti. We meet Langston, who runs the club, and his dynamite girlfriend, Diana Hill, whom he calls “Sugar.” While they celebrate the success of the club, some gangsters come to shake him down.

Here’s the deal: head mob guy, Morgan, wants Langston to sell the club to him. Langston does not want to sell the club to Morgan. He sends some goons, headed up by a guy who goes by “Fabulous,” to issue some direct threats. Langston tells Fabulous and the other goons that Morgan can take the offer to buy the club and shove it. Langston says that his woman sure is foxy, but Langston says they’d better beat cheeks.

Sugar is really worried. These guys do not seem to be messing around. She’s afraid they are going to hurt Langston. He says there’s nothing to worry about. Now, he’s got a meeting to go to and everything’s going to be fine. There’s no way those goons are waiting for him in the parking lot to lay a beatin’ on him.

So, anyway, Fabulous and the goons are waiting for Langston in the parking lot to lay a beatin’ on him. They first beat the shit out of him to the point that he passed out. Then, they threw him onto the ground and kicked the shit out of him until he DEFINITELY was passed out. Morgan tells the guys to leave him there on the ground because he’s just garbage. One of the club’s kitchen staff was taking out trash, found Langston lying on the ground, and got Sugar, who begged him to not leave her in a very chef’s kiss melodramatic way.

Langston is dead now. Morgan and his goons celebrate. Morgan says that’s how things are going to be run now. If Morgan wants something, Morgan takes it.

Also, Morgan and his goons are extremely racist. Like… in a cartoonish way. I mean, it’s still bad that they are as racist as they are, but it’s over-the-top in a cartoonish way. You know, like Twitter. Anyway, Fabulous is basically his token black dude working for him. When he’s not kicking ass and crushing skulls, he’s shining Morgan’s boots. I cannot repeat how Morgan talks to him, but let’s just say, there’s a very 1850s Alabama vibe between the two of them – if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Sugar’s friend Valentine arrives to talk after Langston’s death. Valentine is a cop. He’s also Sugar’s ex-boyfriend. He says he’s there to question her about his death. She corrects him and says Langston was murdered. She says that if she could fix it so, she would make sure they died one by one for what they did to Langston. It would be even better if they would die slowly. Ooooh! I bet she plans on becoming a smokin’ hot supernatural voodoo woman!

Sugar finds a creepy ass place to go to figure out just how she can get that revenge. You see, this movie is in Houston, right? Well, Houston is along the Gulf of Mexico (yeah, I know what it is supposedly called now, and I do not give a fuck). That’s where all the voodoo is in the United States. At least that’s what pop culture tells me. New Orleans, of course, is the North American continental capital of voodoo, but I guess Houston is close enough.

Anyway, in this spooky house full of spider webs and giant ass boas, Sugar is looking for Mama Maitresse. By the way, I think that means “Mother Mattress Firm” in French. Anyway, Mama and Sugar have some past history because when she finds Mama, she asks Sugar why she has returned to this place.

Sugar says she needs Mama’s help, but Mama says her troubles are radiating off her. Sugar says she was in love, and some bad hombres beat him to death. Mama says she’s too old, tired, and weak now. She’s not so sure she can help Sugar anymore. Mama eventually agrees to help, even though Sugar was never a believer in voodoo before. But… Sugar has something stronger than belief, and even her love of Langston. Her hatred and need for revenge are even greater.

Mama seems real keen now to help. She even seems more spry now that she knows hatred and revenge are gonna pay these bills. Mama takes Sugar out into the swamp…? Wait… Does Houston have swamps? Should this be Louisiana? Actually, you know what? Just by looking this up, sure… Not only could Houston have swampy areas with fog as thick as the ball sweat and mud butt you’d have while there in the summertime, but it’s actually a little closer to Louisiana than I thought.

As I was saying… Mama leads Sugar to a little altar to communicate with Baron Samedi. Little did you know, but this was Baron Samedi’s first role after hitting it big in Live and Let Die. So this was a pretty big get for Sugar Hill. Mama tells Baron Samedi that they called him for help. Sugar tells him she seeks power for revenge. He wants to know what she will give him for this power. She offers her soul. Looking her over, he wants something else.

Alas, Baron Samedi is curious about what Sugar wants. He’s especially interested because she is not at all scared of him. She explains she wants some dudes dead. He awakens his army of the dead. Up from the ground, his zombie slaves rise. And, oh baby…

Ping pong ball eyes!

Sugar Hill must have gotten the makeup guy from Beyond Atlantis on loan. I love these kinds of choices in these movies. On one hand, the silver ping pong ball eyes and the blue makeup do give these actors playing the zombies an otherworldly look. However, on the other hand, they also look like aliens… from the 50s. And, yet, on a third hand (yes, I have three hands, what of it?), the bug-eyed black zombie character of the Caribbean/bayou is an extremely outdated thing. By 1975, this was already outdated by three or four decades.

Still, I do love me some ping pong ball eyes on my monsters.

Sugar looks around at the rising zombies with a lot of confusion and maybe a little concern. Mama looks around with glee and excitement. Man, Mama might be a pretty cool chick to roll with. She’s not bothered in the least about zombies coming up out of the ground and surrounding them. I’m definitely choosing her for my team when I need revenge.

Yes, WHEN I need revenge. Not IF I need revenge. I WILL need revenge before I check out of this mortal realm.

You do gotta love it that Baron Samedi told Sugar to use his zombies for evil because that’s all they know. That’s… That’s just great. Better yet? It’s exactly what Sugar plans to do with them, and she does not waste a single moment. She finds one of the guys who was there that night working at his warehouse, who goes by the name Tank Watson. She sic’s the zombies on him, and they mess him up but good.

Valentine arrives to investigate the murder (and beheading) of Tank, and discovers something peculiar at the scene. He finds the manacle from one of the dead slaves. What’s more, from Tank’s neck, they found mold and lots of cells from what would normally be his attacker, but the cells were all dead. They’ve been dead for a long time. Valentine laughs this off, but also doesn’t really know how to follow up on this.

Morgan meets with Sugar. He’s a little surprised to discover Langston left Club Haiti to her. Morgan says she really should sell the club to someone who has more experience running a nightclub than to worry her pretty little head about all this business. She is surprisingly level-headed during this meeting. She smiles all the way through, even when Morgan’s girlfriend calls her an n-word. Sugar says she always keeps her commitments to the dead and leaves Morgan thinking that there is still room to negotiate a buyout.

You know what immediately springs to mind when I’m watching this? “Where’s Cameron Mitchell?” Look, no disrespect to Robert Quarry. The man’s a fine actor. But if this movie were made just a few years later? 100% Morgan would be played by my main man, Cameron.

Morgan’s girlfriend, Celeste, really hates black people. I mean, REALLY hates them. She not only says that Sugar “has no class, she only has color,” but after Morgan says she should get some class, Celeste follows Sugar back to Club Haiti and tells her to leave her own property. This leads to a bitchin’ catfight that ends with Celeste on the ground and Sugar dumping a whole bucket of ice on her fucking face.

The next guy to get the revenge treatment is picked up by a cab driven by Baron Samedi himself. He says that Morgan wants to speak to him, and he plays off the “dumb/simple black guy” act pretty well. He leads the dude, O’Brien, out to a shack in the middle of nowhere. There, Sugar and some zombies are waiting for him. She has the zombies put O’Brien into a pig pen full of hungry hogs that eat him.

Okay, so maybe Valentine laughed off that whole dead tissue and mold thing found with Tank’s body, but he also started to form a hunch. He goes to visit Sugar at her photography studio to follow up on that hunch. After all, these are two of the guys she blamed for killing Langston. Also, she already said she sure would like to punish them for what they did. There are also multiple deaths connected to Morgan’s gang and those accused of killing Langston.

Valentine leaves, but cautions Sugar to be careful messing around with Morgan because he’s a pretty bad dude.

Next on Sugar’s hit list is George. She approaches him at a pool hall and flirts with him. It doesn’t take much convincing to get him to go to her place, but once there, he gets pretty weirded out by the setup. Something seems off. So he resorts immediately to slapping her around.

After Baron Samedi gets involved, George gets seated across from Sugar with a voodoo doll on the table between them. This is a really dark, but very cool scene. George asks what the doll is for. Sugar snaps her fingers, and a fuse lights, leading right to the doll. Also on the table is a knife. She says that when the doll is engulfed in flames, he’s going to pick up the knife and use it on himself. He won’t have a choice in the matter. She has the power to destroy him with his own hand. Sure enough, when the doll ignites, she tells him to use the knife, and he stabs himself in the gut.

She then sends a piece of George to Morgan and Celeste in an urn.

Valentine visits a professor at the local voodoo museum. He shows him the manacle, and the professor says that it was probably from around the 1840s. He says there were a lot of slaves coming to the area from Guinea. What’s more, it could be used as a very powerful ju-ju. That would be something that can definitely be used in some sort of spell or curse. Meanwhile, Morgan is really starting to get nervous because his guys are being picked off one by one, and no one is willing to talk to any of his guys to give any indication of who is behind this.

Morgan sends another of his goons, King, out to shake people down to find out who might be picking his colleagues off. He asks a piano player in a bar if he knows anything. When the piano player says he doesn’t know anything, King smashes his fingers to remind the poor fella to tell him whenever he hears anything. Shortly after, King gets grabbed by a couple of zombies in the bar, and Sugar tells him he’s the next to go, even if he wasn’t there the night Langston died. She uses another voodoo doll to cut his throat.

I’m betting the poor piano player, Preacher, wished they led with that instead of waiting until AFTER his fingers get mangled in the piano fallboard. That would have been nice of her to have done. Morgan’s guys aren’t exactly the nicest of dudes. She had to know that Preacher was at least going to get a little roughed up. Sic those goddamn zombies on the guy before he can hurt an innocent. It’s like her judgment is too shrouded by her need for revenge or something.

Preacher tells Valentine that the guys who killed King sure looked like corpses. He goes back to the voodoo museum and studies up some more on the art. The professor there says that there is still a voodoo priestess in the area. He says she was so powerful, it was said she could raise the dead.

Valentine talks to Sugar about how each of the crimes seems to have something voodoo-related. He wants to speak to Mama Maitresse to see if she can help him in his investigation. After she declares that Valentine is not a believer, Baron Samedi, posing as her gardener, warns him to not follow Mama. If she wants to see him again or talk to him, she will seek him out. Valentine tells Sugar that he does believe in some supernatural shit, and he’s kind of unnerved by all that’s been going on. He leaves and tells her that he’ll talk to her later.

Baron Samedi has a crazed look in his eye as if he might need to get rid of this dude. I mean, he always has a crazed look in his eyes. It’s just that, this time, he seems extra crazed.

Sometime later, Sugar takes a meeting with Morgan and Fabulous. He has an offer for her to buy Club Haiti. She knows he’s lowballing her, but he more or less says that if she doesn’t let him have the club at such a low price, it’s not going to be good for her. She says she’ll sell if he throws in an extra $10,000 under the table. He begrudgingly agrees.

That night, he sends a guy with her cash to deliver it to her. Fabulous tells Morgan that it’s just crazy talk on the streets about some sort of voodoo curse being to blame for the killings. Morgan is positive it has to be someone from out of state trying to horn in on his business. He orders Fabulous to stick to him like a second skin.

Meanwhile, the guy delivering the money for Morgan gets attacked… by a severed chicken foot.

Yeah, a fuckin’ chicken foot! That’s a new one on me, but that guy immediately recognized what was up with that. He apparently also knew how to combat such an attack… until he ran into the closet of zombies. That’ll happen, though, I guess.

After killing the money man, Sugar goes to Morgan and tells him and Fabulous that the guy never showed up. Morgan is still completely clueless. He realizes that Sugar may not necessarily like him after all the grief he gave Langston. She plays along well enough until he wants to sex her up a little bit. But he is at least smart enough to tell her that if she is trying to mess with his shit, she’ll only live just long enough to regret it.

Fabulous is the next to get got. Fabulous gets a sensual massage every Thursday. Sugar pays the place for what she calls a practical joke on a friend. She replaces his normal girl and works on him a bit. She says she could get a couple of the other girls in the place to work on him as a group. She fills the room with zombies who strangle him.

After getting rid of Fabulous, Sugar, Mama, and Baron Samedi talk about Lt. Valentine. Sugar wants him out of the way and to stop him from going any further into his investigation. She does NOT want him dead, just stopped. Maitresse and Samedi use a voodoo doll to cause him to fall down the stairs and land in the hospital. She visits him, and Valentine tells her he has a pretty good idea of what’s going on and hopes she has nothing to do with this.

Later, Sugar tells Morgan that she has decided to not sell Club Haiti after all. Pissed, Morgan decides to go to her place to fix her and get her out of the way, like he did Langston. She lures him out to Mama Maitresse’s place. He searches for her inside the house while Celeste stays outside in the car. Zombies eventually surround both of them.

While zombies bust through the windows of the car to get to Celeste, Morgan finds Sugar and Baron Samedi with all his former goons, now zombies themselves. Unsure what to do, he backs up terrified until a cat jumps out at him, causing him to fall out of a window to the ground. He runs through the swampy woods until he’s finally trapped by zombies and Sugar. She reveals that she vowed to get him for what he did to Langston. He tries to run away, only to run into a zombie, causing him to fall off a bridge into the most dangerous thing to ever exist in nature – quicksand!

As for Celeste, she’s being held by zombies. Sugar gives Baron Samedi Celeste to become another of his undead brides until he can someday have Sugar for himself.

This movie kind of rules. Yes, it’s quite silly. Like, not really the revenge plot for Sugar, but the whole thing with Morgan. Morgan is losing guys left and right. Pretty much his entire roster of goons is wiped out over the course of a week or two. Why is he still carrying on like business as usual? Oh, sure, he gets ruffled when he learns his people are dying. Yes, he thinks there is some sort of competition trying to get to him, but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about. He’s so dead set on obtaining Club Haiti. Why? It’s not really explained. He just likes running nightclubs, okay? He never wavers from trying to get that club, even as everyone around him is getting murdered in pretty peculiar ways.

Yes, all of that is silly, but in pretty unoffensive ways in the grand scheme of things. What makes this movie so totally great and an incredibly fun watch is Marki Bey, Sugar herself. Not only is she very hot and easy on the eyes to watch, but she is dripping in melodramatic line delivery in this movie. Everything she says is sharp and overacted. It’s brilliant.

Everyone knew what they were making, and we all know the score from the audience side. This is not quite as serious as the previous blaxploitation horror films released by American International Pictures, Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream. I would say, however, this one actually has more fun to it than those other two. They are fun for what they are, but seemingly much more serious in overall tone and intent. This one is just goofy fun. Sugar Hill makes for a great option to watch with friends at a fun movie night. Yes, it is a product of its time in terms of some of the language used (derogatory and otherwise), and, yes, it’s outdated even for the era it came out in, but it’s a lot of fun.

Next week, we continue Black Horror Halloween with one that isn’t as easy to pin as an actual horror movie. Whereas Ganja & Hess certainly has at least the idea of vampirism to fall back on to make it a horror-fantasy, the next movie does not. What it does have is a prehensile dick. Join me for Welcome Home Brother Charles.

Until then, I’m gonna go visit Mama Maitresse to see if I can get some revenge on my local Taco Bell for giving me the fire shits.