Welcome to the Tomb on this fine Tuesday, and a happy
Satanic New Year to you all! When picking the movies
for this special update, I wanted to dig up some great
stuff. I’ll admit, I’m no great fan of devil movies.
The Exorcist and The Omen bored me to tears with the
exception of a couple of interesting scenes.
Rosemary’s Baby I can watch for some reason, even
though it should be every bit as boring as the
aforementioned flicks. And don’t get me started on
the piles and piles of new devil movies produced in
the last decade. C’mon, Ahnold vs. Satan? And the
ending of Lost Souls still makes me want to hit
someone with a tire iron.
But devil movies should be fun, dammit! After all,
his music rocks a whole bunch. It’s potentially great
subject matter usually hamstrung by the fact that
people are trying to fight the devil, not outwit him.
If you use Satan as a monster, he’s kinda like
Godzilla; you can’t stop him with tanks and bombs and
guns (I’m looking at you, Governor of California). So
to make a good devil movie, you can’t use him as a
monster, you have to use him as a shady trickster,
trying to fool people into giving up their own souls
instead of just coming in to take them (see Devil’s
Advocate for a prime example of a great devil movie
done this way). Then, if you add some blaxploitation
humor by way of Benny Hill, it should be a damn riot,
right?
Which brings us to my first feature today, Petey
Wheatstraw. Petey is born during a hurricane, and
comes out already able to walk, talk, kick ass, and
eat watermelon. He meets a wise old man named Bantu
who teaches him the noble arts of kung fu, but it’s
not enough. Petey’s a lover, not a fighter, and he
wants to spend his life bringing joy to the masses, so
he goes on his way and becomes one of the greatest
standup comics the world has ever seen.
Years later, one of Petey’s tours makes a stop in a
town where the slimy duo of Leroy and Skillet have
just borrowed a large sum of money from some unsavory
characters to start their own variety club. When
Skillet discovers Petey is opening his show the night
after their club premieres, he’s afraid the
competition will drive them out of business and the
mob will come a-callin’.
What starts as some harmless strong-arming ends in
bloodshed when a boy putting up posters promoting
Petey (say that six hundred and sixty-six times fast!)
gets gunned down by Leroy’s goons. The next day, the
goons gun down the whole funeral procession, including
Petey, as they’re leaving the church. But this isn’t
the end for our intrepid hero. Lucifer himself
arrives on the scene and makes Petey a deal: Lucifer
will roll back time to return Petey and all his
friends to life, and give Petey a magical pimp cane to
take revenge on Leroy and Skillet, if Petey will marry
Lucifer’s ass-ugly daughter and provide him with an
heir to Hell. Petey agrees, and the next day pays a
visit to Leroy and Skillet’s goons. They make several
attempts to finish what they started, but are thwarted
by the powers bestowed upon Petey’s magical pimp cane
(which, I should point out, is supposed to be topped
with a huge jewel which is in fact a wadded-up ball of
tin foil).
Once Leroy and Skillet are out of the way, it’s time
to figure out how to out-smart Old Scratch. After
all, Petey’s a smooth motherfucker! He don’t wanna
marry some ugly ol’ bitch queen from Hell! They’s
plenny o’ fine ho’s right here inna city!
So Petey concocts a plan wherein one of his friends
constructs a Petey life mask, and they stick it on a
drugged-out wino, who will be taken to Hell in his
place, and by the time Lucifer realizes he’s been had,
they’ll long gone (where exactly they think they can
go to hide from Satan is beyond me, but far be it from
me to question Petey).
They almost get away with it, but the wino wakes up
and Lucifer’s henchmen (and by henchmen I mean guys in
capes and red leotards wearing the least convincing
glued-on dime-store horns I’ve ever seen, and I‘ve
seen a few) come back for Petey. When the henchmen
are defeated, Lucifer himself arrives for a showdown
with Petey on the rooftop. Petey finally bests
Lucifer with his magical pimp cane and wins his
freedom…or does he?
I really wanted to love the hell out of this movie.
The tagline is “The Godfather of Rap meets the Prince
of Darkness”. Tell me that doesn’t make you want to
see it. It’s one of those that’s been recommended to
me for years, and now that I’ve finally seen it, it
doesn’t really live up to the hype. Sure, it’s funny
and entertaining (and the scene with Petey’s demonic
bachelor party is only missing yakkity sax to make it
the greatest Benny Hill skit that Benny Hill never
made), but it’s just not as awesome as it should be.
The first half of it isn’t really anything different
from your typical blaxploitation fare. In fact, it
reminded me a lot of Monkey Hustle. Aside from Rudy
Ray Moore being cool, there wasn’t much going on until
Lucifer showed up and it turned into The Devil and
Daniel Webster with jive-talk.
As my buddy Bob said, it would be better if it didn’t
know it was silly. I expecting the humor to come from
the fact that they took themselves seriously. And
honestly, if Rudy Ray Moore wasn’t in it, it would
have just flat-out sucked. Only by sheer force of
Rudy’s charisma is any of Petey Wheatstraw funny. The
man could wipe his ass and make it look cool. On the
Billy Dee Williams scale of cool, ol‘ Rudy is five
bottles smooth.
So there’s another legend debunked. Petey is better
than most blaxploitation I’ve seen, but that doesn’t
take much. Think Ed Wood from the ghetto with a
bottle of Schlitz malt liquor. Come to think of it, a
bottle of liquor would probably make this movie a lot
more fun.
The Moral of the Story: Romance without finance is a damn nuisance.
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