The Black Street Fighter (aka Black Fist) (1975)

This movie tells the story of Leroy Fisk, a young black man that decides to make some cash as a street fighter.  He gets hooked up with some mobsters, who train him and organize his fights.  While the money starts to come in he starts to get squeezed by a crooked cop.  Eventually he finds out that the cop is on the mob’s payroll and that they have been getting him coming and going.  When Leroy gets his hands on the crooked cops notebook detailing all of the illegal doings he decides the time is right to get out of the fight game.  Only no one walks away from the mob and when they accidentally kill Leroy’s wife instead of him it is war!

The movie starts off with a lot of energy jumping right into the action.  But after the first fight it starts to drag and becomes a training montage followed by a montage of fights.  Which itself is followed by a montage of Leroy spending his time and money on his wife.  All of these montages are poorly edited together and give the movie an uneven feeling, as well as being just plain boring.  We get to see a few more fights then the movie switches gears suddenly as Leroy quits fighting and opens his club.  His wife is quickly killed and then this becomes a standard revenge flick. Unfortunately this is handled just as poorly with more bad editing and scenes that go on way too long.  Though I’ll admit the revenge part of the movie is much less boring and a little bit entertaining, at least until the ending.  Leroy is killing off the guys that did him wrong when suddenly he calls a higher up mob boss who has killed the last two men that Leroy was hunting.  This is confusing since nowhere does the movie establish that those two characters even now each other!

The low budget of the movie is very obvious from a technical standpoint.  The film is poorly light and the sound leaves a lot to be desired.  There are some scenes that you can neither hear nor see much of the action that is going on.  One of the best examples of this would be the scene where Leroy works over an informant in a men’s room, with all the dialogue echoing so badly you can barely tell what is being said.  There are a couple of exploding cars that look pretty good, but the rest of the action sequences leave a lot to be desired.  I think the movie gets away from the fights because of how terrible the fight choreography is. 

I know that a lot of people are going to get on my case about being this picky with an independently produced blaxsploitation movie.  But I’ve seen movies with similar budgets end up so much better than this one, so I’m only holding them to the standards that other movies like The Black Six and Mean Johnny Barrows set.  Compared to those this is a pretty poor effort.

1 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2010 John Shatzer