Soul Vengeance

SOUL VENGEANCE  (1975, aka WELCOME HOME BOTHER CHARLES, directed and written by Jamaa-Fanaka)
Reviewed By Goat Scrote

    A movie about a killer cock should be far more entertaining than this, especially when it isn’t about a homicidal rooster. I really wanted to like it. Most trashy low-concept movies – no matter how incoherent or badly-paced or cheaply produced - have at least a few things to enjoy. This one is punishingly dull, with only one scene worth watching, and even that one scene isn’t really that great.

    The lewd and lurid concept is so promising that it’s hard to imagine how it could fail to be entertaining somehow. It falls into both the Blaxploitation and rape-revenge genres, since it’s about a black man driven to serial murder by a genital-mutilating white cop. The attempted castration scene 12 minutes in is quite melodramatic acting-wise, but nothing is really shown. That sure sounds like pretty intense exploitation material even without the murder-by-penis angle but somehow it was ineffective. How do you leach almost all the horror out of a scene like that?

    Racist lawyers and a hypocrite judge protect the cop and send the victim to jail. Once Charles is free the people who wronged him start dying off… but not until after Charles has seduced their women, who become his hypnotized slaves. Then we learn about the superpower he mysteriously developed in prison. I’m not quite sure how having your penis slashed leads to its becoming a gigantic, super-strong, prehensile tentacle that dispenses vagina-rattling sex and throat-crushing death in equal measure. The movie never tries to explain it either, it just happens after Charles has a dream one night. I was willing to roll with it for the sake of a good payoff at some point.

Whatever you do, don't cut off my dick because it will only grow larger?

    Well… let’s just say that there's only one big scene and when it arrives it's a pretty big letdown, especially considering all of the boring bullshit you sit through to get there. Maaaaaybe it would have had more impact if I’d gone into it “Crying Game” style without knowing the “shocking twist”, but I really fucking doubt it. More likely I would have turned it off long before the halfway mark. Everything about the movie seems to say that the writer/director thought the overwrought hyper-Freudian sexual metaphor of the movie really was some kind of serious statement. It felt like the “twist” at the end (Spoiler: He kills with his penis) was just one more grim, joyless exercise in forcing us to choke down (ha!) Jamaa-Fanaka’s message. What message? White society tries to emasculate the black man because the white man fears the vigorous power of the black man to enslave white women, who are vicious bitches until a truly mighty penis has tamed them. Big black cock is unstoppable!

Please enjoy this very artistic shot of peanut shells and a can of A&W

    How do you make sex-obsessed, politically-incorrect, penis-strangulation Blaxploitation film boring? Watch this movie to find out. Or, better yet, don’t. The murders are presented in a way that conceals the murder weapon, which makes it pretty hard to figure out what the hell is going on at all. Are they having a staring contest? Whatever. Even when the killer cock was finally on display it was a little difficult to piece together exactly what was going on, because the movie just wasn’t very well put together. Seriously, I’m truly aghast at how completely unwatchable this movie turned out to be. I was so excited when I found out it existed. That sounds so awesomely socially unacceptable and over-the-top on paper. How does a movie like this turn out so muted and unenjoyable? I saw the “Soul Vengeance” version, which may have had cuts made, but frankly I don’t see this movie being improved by adding more of it. One hour and thirty-eight minutes of this shit is plenty.

    12 minutes, vague genital mutilation just off camera.

    58 minutes, Charles meets with his doctor and has a discussion about his ‘condition’. “Do you think I’m lying?” “Of course I don’t think you’re lying, after I look at the the scar tissue staring me in the face” – “If a man tries to cut my manhood off, what the hell am I supposed to do, nothing?”

Seriously! Why is this movie so boring?

    65 minutes, he shows his cock to the wife of his first target and she just falls right into his arms. They have sex and she turns into his obedient puppet. She lets him into the house after dark so he can kill her husband, the cop who mutilated Charles.

    69 minutes, the first attack begins – but all we see is Charles’ face, straining, and we hear a little groaning from off camera.

Wow that's a giant anaconda! 

    82 minutes he starts another white-woman seduction.

    84 minutes the big scene begins with victim number two, the racist lawyer. This is the first time we find out what Charles’ murder weapon actually is. We see his naked ass and dick from behind as it grows between his legs, then it slithers across the room and attacks. The victim is too terrified by the sight of a giant pecker to do anything other than wait for it to climb into bed with him so he can grab hold of it tightly and writhe against it while it pushes closer and closer to his face…  Hmm, come to think of it, that doesn’t sound like terror. The dick wraps around his neck and chokes the life out of him while Charles makes funny faces. (Maybe he's feeling a little sexually conflicted. "I'm enjoying this for the revenge, not for the sex. There is nothing gay about this!")

Get that beautiful snake over here!

    90 minutes, Charles shows up at the judge’s house. He reveals that he has banged his honor’s aged wife too and put her under his hypnotic influence. Before he can put the squeeze on the judge, the police arrive and interrupt things. Charles is only halfway through his deathlist when the movie comes full circle, with Charles on the roof. His woman screams at him to jump. He does. What the fuck? Roll credits.

Get that camera out of my giant nostrils

Argh, get this foul smelling gardenhose off my neck

That's right Lancelot Link crossbred with Joe E. Ross it was all a misunderstanding