Turner, played by Isaac Hayes is a bounty hunter or “skip tracer” who takes all the jobs nobody else wants (his firm’s motto is “See me and be free!”). He carries a very large gun that he fires constantly and almost never reloads. He is described by one character as “a bulldog with eyes on his ass.” I have no idea what that means.

Hayes isn’t much of an actor but he’s a full-blooded badass; no one else would look quite so good in the wardrobe of denim suits. Truck and his partner Jerry (Alan Weeks) catch a child molester who keeps making racist comments and egging the bail bondsmen on: they wouldn’t be so tough if he didn’t have handcuffs on, etc. Truck promptly takes the cuffs off and beats him to a pulp. That’s some nice skip tracing Truck.

In self-defense, Truck and Jerry – who deserves a cooler nickname since he’s hanging with a guy who goes by the handle “Truck” – kill a bail-jumping pimp named Gator (Paul Harris). Nichols’ Dorinda is Gator’s woman, and she is so devastated by the loss that she calls together all the top pimps in the city and declares a price on Truck’s head: whoever kill him gets Gator’s stable of high-earning whores. Hence the hunter becomes the hunted, or perhaps more accurately, the truck becomes the cargo.

TRUCK TURNER has about a dozen different moods but they all somehow work. The credits run over shots of the ghetto, filled with the horrific real-world conditions of poor African-Americans. The action is slick and intense. Its hero is cool under fire, but Hayes and the screenwriters constantly goof on his gruff persona so we don’t take him too seriously. Rolling out of bed to go to work in his first scene, Truck finds that his girlfriend’s cat has peed all over his outfit (he wears it anyway). Later, after a rough gunfight, Jerry and Truck decompress in a bar. Jerry thoughtfully remarks, “You know, sometimes I think I should give it up.” Truck responds with a loud belch. Later, at Gator’s funeral, attended by all the pimps in the city, one woman is wearing a rainbow colored clown wig, and a pimp who has lost an eye wears a patch that matches his velvet leisure suit. According to the film, “they don’t make pimps like they used to.”

TRUCK also features one of the great car chases in movie history. When Truck and Jerry first spot Gator, he takes off in his pimpmobile and our heroes give chase. In the course of one very long car chase they run over a baby carriage, a flower cart, and the door of one car falls off. Then Gator gets out of his car, flees on foot, loses Truck and Jerry in a water and power plant (beautiful location photography, by the way), steals Truck and Jerry’s car, and drives off. Truck and Jerry commandeer another vehicle at gunpoint, and the chase continues until Gator goes into a bar and gives everyone inside fifty bucks to stop the two dudes coming in after him, whereupon the car chase spontaneously mutates into a bar fight. The whole affair is scored by Isaac Hayes’ awesome wakka-cha-wakka soul music. This one scene is cooler, funnier, and more exciting than 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS in its entirety.

I almost want to rate the film good on the basis of the terrific car chases and score, but there’s definitely an undercurrent of ugly running through most scenes, including Nichols’ tremendous performance. Besides the distasteful undercurrent of anti-women invective (very little respect toward the fairer sex in the film sadly), the costumes, the bizarre humor, the gunfight in a hospital where colostomy bags are spilled, and the sexual seduction using fried chicken, all suggest it’s a little too “out there” to recommend to a mainstream audience. But if you want the coolest blaxploitation you’ll ever see, I think TRUCK TURNER has your name on it.