1978’s Supersoul Brother, Also known as “The Six Thousand Dollar-” Noooooooooooo no. we won’t be calling it that…that we will not be calling it…Sees us return after something of an absence to the blaxploitation genre. I have a fondness for the genre, but I always seem to never quite get round to covering more of them. So! I’m hoping to change that today! And here we have a picture that…well, it kind of defies genre definition. The closest I can really pin it down to is that it’s basically a knock off attempt at making a Rudy Ray Moore film, but without Rudy Ray Moore. Instead, filling the position of the man of action is “Wild Man ” Steve Gallon. A comedian, entertainer and media personality who clearly wanted a piece of the pie that Rudy had established with films such as “Dolemite” and “The Human Tornado ”.

Going one further, Steve was actually friends with Rudy Ray, having appeared in one of Rudy’s films “Peaty Wheatstraw”. And so, in 1978 with a skeleton crew, whatever money could be fished out from the couch cushions and a lot of heart. Steve reached out to up and coming talents “Rene Martinez Jr.” and “Laura S. Diaz” with the pitch that he wanted to make a picture that was a comedic take on “Superman” with an all black cast. The first Christopher Reeves film was in production around this time, so Steve presumably felt like it was a good opportunity to capitalise on it. However, the budget wouldn’t stretch that far, and so, revisions had to be made. And as time went on the film’s scope and scale shrunk and shrunk until eventually…we arrived at “Supersoul Brother” one of Florida’s finest outputs…im not kidding.

The film opens in a laboratory belonging to one, Dr. Dippy and his assistant Peggy. Dr. Dippy is a little on the suspect side and is currently receiving funding from two gangsters called Bob and Jimmy in an attempt to produce a serum that, when injected, will hopefully turn the subject into a super strong, bulletproof ultraman. All of the experiments so far have been conducted on mice and they’ve garnered mixed results. The serum has done the job up to the point of transforming the mice into ultra strong killers. But the downside it comes with a side effect where the subject, once injected, will only live for 6 days. At which point they’ll die a painful death.

The Gangsters are happy with the former developments, but not the latter. When Pressed Dr. Dippy says work on a ‘Neutralizer’ that’ll prevent death after 6 days is in the works, but isn’t quite there yet. Not content with the slow progress Bob and Jimmy press Dr. Dippy to jump to Human trials. Dippy says that no one in their right mind would agree to be the test subject for a serum that is not only completely untested on humans, but is guaranteed to kill them after 6 days. But Bob and Jimmy don’t much care for ‘experts’ and basically head out to go and round someone up.

And it’s here that we’re introduced to Steve, a homeless Wino down on his luck who’s the victim of repeated attacks from people in the neighbourhood who accuse him of stealing bottles and newspapers. After a particularly unpleasant encounter in which Steve is knocked out cold. He’s spotted by Bob and Jimmy, who pick him up, take him to the lab and promise him a home and supplies if he agrees to undergo some examinations and testing. Steves out of it but half agrees and before we know it we’re back in the lab and Steves getting a physical from Peggy, the pair hit it off briefly and the results come back saying he’s all clear. As such, Bob and Jimmy push Dr. Dippy into running the experiment on him.
In order to butter Steve up for the experiments, Bob gifts him a place, and leaves him in the company of a young lady in a VERY saucy maids outfit, with the promise that she’ll do whatever he wants her to, no questions asked…So naturally, The first thing on his mind…is a delicious feast and someone to wash his ass…im not kidding, that’s literally all he wants…oh yeah they have sex. But that’s treated as an afterthought, an “Oh yeah! And while you’re at it” moment if you will. Anyway, after a good night’s rest, Steve returns to Dr. Dippy’s office refreshed and ready to undergo some further tests. At the end of this, he’s given some medication and told to rest up and NOT TO EAT A SINGLE THING beyond midnight, as the experiments will formally begin the next day at 10am. (This points never brought up again)

Overhearing that Steve needs to take it easy and be cared for, Peggy offers to head home with Steve to keep an eye on him and make sure he’s as peaceful as possible. The gang reluctantly agree and as soon as they get home, Peggy tries to look after Steve while Steve tries to have sex with Peggy. And this goes on for AGES with a fair dollop of homophobic and questionable humour thrown in to boot! This all leads to the revelation that Peggys a virgin. At which point Steve practically drags Peggy to the bedroom for some rather sketchy “Bouncy Bouncy”.

Finally, the day of the experiment arrives, Steves nervous, but after some reassurance, he willingly takes a jab to the buttocks and BOOM! Within an instant our homeless alcoholic is now the world’s strongest unmurderable man! Which they illustrate by having him bend a steel pipe, lift a heavy safe and as a bit of a treat, Bob takes Steve back to the scrubland where the people who accused him of stealing papers hang out, where Steve gets to wail on them uninterrupted for a bit.

And it’s here really that we enter our final act. As Bob manages to convince Steve that he’s in the business of testing other businesses’ security systems and that, as a practical joke. He wants to take Steve to a jewellery store and take their safe away while the front desk is distracted. Steve questions the plan because it doesn’t sound like THAT funny of a joke. But Bob responds that it’s a joke that the Jewelry store owners would understand and that it’ll also help them tighten their security when they see how easy it was for someone to walk in and take their safe. Steve seems happy enough with this, and with that! The raid is on!

In a…actually kind of slow going final act. Will Steve find out the truth about Bob, Jimmie and the super serum? Will Peggy and Steve let their true feelings be known!? and…Why is Dr. Dippy living as an underground dodgy doctor when he’s been able to design a serum that can literally *temporarily* create an army of super soldiers. The total value of the project is $6000 which in modern day money is almost $27 grand. Which is NOTHING compared to some budgets for medical research/testing or production. This man made super serum for around the same cost of some cars. There would be some companies willing to bite his arm off for that kind of patent. ugh…I don’t know…what I DO know is that all this and more WILL be answered if you check out ‘Supersoul Brother’

And to be completely up front with you, this movie isn’t very good. Apart from the fact that the films only 74 minutes long and that it takes 45 minutes for the ACTUAL advertised plot of the movie to begin. I found it to be a rather flat and uninteresting experience in all honesty.

For starters, the scripts a bit of a piss take honestly. There’s some serious structuring issues on display here, with the first and second acts kind of blending together into a one note, repetitious and padded mess. Seriously, all that really happens in the first 2 acts of this thing is, we get told about the serum, Bob and Jerry find Steve, bring him in, feed him, clothe him and let him fuck. And then it’s the final act! There’s a weird tonal shift in the 3rd act as well. The first 2 felt like some kind of ‘real life’ ‘drama’ (I hate using that term here because it doesn’t fit, but it’s the best I can come up with) with heavy handed and dire comedy elements dropped in randomly, but the third act feels more like a narrative driven thriller with a lot more physical comedy present. Which is a bit jarring honestly, it kind of feels like there’s 2 films here (everything up to the jab and post jab) battling it out for the audience’s interest. Which is quite unusual for a piece like this.

As I mentioned earlier this film is very reminiscent of the works of Rudy Ray Moore, and what I like personally about Rudys films is that his films not only have a sincerity about them that came from Rudy as a person. But the comedy throughout was a layered mixture of intentional and unintentional gags. I personally find the standup sections of ‘Dolemite’ to be a bit dull, but I LOVE Rudy’s characters when they play larger than life and oftentimes it can just be the way he delivers a line or reacts that can be the saving grace of a movie.

Here? Steve is clearly trying to make a film that apes Rudy’s style. And while I wont deny he has heart and this film *largely* feels sincere. It completely lacks that element of the unintentional. There’s maybe a handful of lines that are delivered in such a way that raises a chuckle, maybe the occasional look to camera that could startle a titter. But the vast VAST majority of the film’s comedy comes from Steve trying out his standup material. And he’s just not got that solid a set to carry the film on that alone in my opinion. His attempts at being over the top feel forced and at times can just come across as irritating. I can appreciate what he’s trying to do here. But I couldn’t escape the fact that this was a film built on bad comedy, with maybe a 25% hit rate if i’m being generous and the cheapness of the whole production just made things feel a bit desperate. This film absolutely didn’t need attached to it.

Only making things worse, most of the dialogue is over written, convoluted and lacks fluidity. I mean, the cast don’t help the situation (more on that later) but this is a very wordy, very ‘written’ sounding script that really lacks the sharpness or finesse that a comedy like this needs. I think it absolutely needed a few more drafts, and I was left thoroughly irritated by the fact that the film’s main marketing point, the thing that SOLD the movie. Was relegated to 24 minutes at the back end of the picture with next to no actual development of that idea beyond a single heist and a total lack of spectacle when it came to the ‘superhuman’ powers. All we get is Steve lifting 2 heavy things about 4 times total. With over 50 minutes of the production being a total runaround waste of time.

Had they structured the film properly, the first act would have dealt with them finding Steve, preparing him for the experiment and getting him jabbed, the 2nd act would have been him learning about his powers, maybe doing a few spectacular things and maybe a couple of heists. And the 3rd act would have had Steve find out he’s being played and the confrontation with the doctor, Bob and Jimmie. Instead, it’s a wash out.

As mentioned the script was written by Laura S. Diaz. This is her only writing credit and if IMDB is to be believed, she never worked in film again. The film was also amended and directed by Rene Martinez Jr., an at the time, up and comer with 3 directing credits and 2 writing credits. Their best known work is probably another blaxploitation flick “The Guy from Harlem” but their other credit “Road of Death” is apparently well liked and known too. This was their final directing credit and they also seemingly dropped away from directing shortly after this film.

On the direction front. Again, it’s just…not that great. We’re dealing in the absolute barest minimums here. Rene is able to wrangle lighting, sound and camera to work together in such a way that’s produced a product that JUST…JUST manages to hold itself together across the runtime. But that is by NO means an indication of quality. While these elements have resulted in a production that can *just about* be CALLED a production. They’re all running fairly independently and as such there’s a definite case of peaks and troughs in terms of what’s been presented. Good direction wrangles all the elements of cast AND crew to create a piece of cinema that is both competent, clean and coherent while also giving the film a sense of style or distinction that acts as the directors signature mark.

This film is not distinct, it’s a film from 1978 that almost looks as rudimentary as some of the poverty row monster movies of the 1940’s. In fact, in some ways it’s even less than the poverty row monster movies of the 1940’s because at least THOSE movies would often have action, suspense, a monster of some description. This thing has NONE of that. Its flat, lifeless “Get the job done” fodder, that almost HAD to be that way due to the incredibly low budget of the production. There wasn’t a lot of money for sets, props or other things, so the majority of the film is shot outdoors or in locations that the crew had access to film in. As such it feels VERY cobbled together and spur of the moment.

Direction of the cast doesn’t fare much better, we have a rather small cast list, with most actors outside of the core cast of 5 appearing on screen for less than a couple of minutes each. And not ONE person here outside of Steve looks like they have a SINGLE idea what the hell is going on, because the cine is so basic, and no doubt retakes were limited due to the cost of film stock. Most of the actors stay firmly bolted into place throughout there scenes, reading their lines as if it was the first time they’d ever seen it (with mixed results) largely with a look in their eyes that would suggest that something horrendous was going on just off screen. They seem confused, aimless and I genuinely get the impression that the director, AT MOST, talked them through a scene and then just did a take until they got the lines as close to right as possible. It’s shocking quality…it really is.

The cine is positively lifeless. Shots are washed out, drab and uninteresting, with no thought, rhyme or reason put into composition. Everything appears ‘floodlit’ meaning a lot of the sets have heavy shadowing as the cast go through their scenes, there’s almost no experimentation, everything is basically wides, mids or head and shoulder reverse shots for conversations. The most extreme cine we get is a pan for god’s sake…it’s just dire…it really is.

It does get worse though, because the cine is SO basic, it has a knock on effect with the sequence building, and I am 90% convinced this thing was cut with a knife and fork at this point. For the most part, they’re overly basic sequences with maybe a couple of shot types cut in to help break up the flow, nothing intense, nothing creative. It’s better than just cutting raw rushes together. But not by much. What IS a problem however, is there are some scenes where, for some reason, they’ve absolutely failed to cut the film correctly.

The one that sticks out in my mind is the footage around the Jewelry heist. For some reason, they decide to use smash cuts from an ‘over the shoulder’ 2 shot of a conversation, to a reverse shot thats a close up head and *sort of* shoulder shot of the jewellery store clerk. But the way they’ve timed the cuts means she’s always *just* Out of time in responding to the conversation, they cross the line to put her face on screen, and they use mixed audio sources, meaning she goes from sounding distant in the over the shoulder shots, to crystal in the forward facing ones.

To your average joe, they may pick up on the fact that something is not quite right with the sequence. But as an editor. This film made me want to commit war crimes. It’s just so underwhelming, irritating and poorly planned, it’s worse than some of the lower budgeted SOV movies I’ve covered on here in the past, and THAT’S saying something. Not helped either by the fact that the existing film print for this picture, as you can see, is absolutely trashed. I’m told that the DVD release for this is actually a MASSIVE improvement over previous releases, which were apparently basically unwatchable. But even so, this looks rough.

Performance wise? The only performer worth your time here is Wildman Steve, he’s got the largest share of lines in this movie, he tries to keep animated and lays the jokes on thick and fast, and overall I’d give him a pass. He doesn’t have much in the way of range here. But he’s solid enough. Joycelyn Norris as Peggy is fairly solid, but unfortunately doesn’t get too much to do here. Which I am genuinely a bit upset about because, of what I’ve seen of her performance I think she could have had scope to be a decent ‘Straight guy’ to Steve’s pratfalling mischief. Instead she’s relegated to a supporting role that doesn’t give her a lot to do, but I personally think she’s a bit of a hidden gem here and that, with the right director she probably could have given a relatively solid performance.

The rest of the cast really kind of failed to ‘light my fire’ they all felt stiff as a board and twice as wooden. As mentioned, none of them seem to really know what’s going on for most of the runtime, most of them do NOT deliver their lines confidently and, for the most part I wouldn’t be surprised if they either had cue cards off screen or if there was a chronic need to look up lines because, whats on display here has got to be some of the worst read dialogue i’ve heard this season…and THAT’S saying something. They barely animate, they don’t utilise props or set space effectively, they might as well be on a black backdrop for as much as the set matters to these cast members. It’s honestly ridiculous.

And finally; The Soundtrack, if you like slightly demented funkadelic sounding music that sounds like it’s being played underwater, this is your soundtrack! It’s muffled, bizarrely utilised with some scenes getting music and others having total silence. And it sounds almost like they raided a sound library and grabbed whatever they could. Because the mixed quality of the recordings is beyond distracting. It’s not a hit by any sense of the word.

The general audio quality is a mixed bag too, I have to assume they didn’t get much in the way of room tone when they shot this movie, because what’s presented here is a patchwork of audio recordings ranging from relatively clear for low budget 1978, to basically inaudible. But rather than picking the best take and synching sound around that, they cut from audio take to audio take with no processing to help smooth over the cuts. As a result it’s a VERY jankey mix with a balance that goes all OVER the place and is incredibly distracting. This is not a great cinematic experience.

Supersoul brother was released on VHS by Xenon Home Video in 1989, I’m also led to believe there were a couple of bootleg iterations of the movie floating about before ‘89 and after the official release. But Im struggling to nail down any specific dates or labels. I don’t doubt there were boots floating around, I just can’t find anything concrete. But if you know of any, do let me know in the comments! From what I can gather it also had some DVD bootlegs in the 2000’s, but its official DVD premier arrived in 2015 when Vinegar Syndrome teamed up with the AGFA to put the film out on shiny shiny disc.

As mentioned the picture quality is pretty atrocious, and this is the film with some level of remastering so, lord knows what the condition of the unremastered film print looks like. It’s watchable, But it’s a FAR cry away from their usual output. No extras on the release either! Just the movie and a scene select on a basic menu. Which is a shame, as I’d genuinely love to learn a bit more about this picture, trivia is very thin on the ground. So this could have been an ample opportunity to help make the film come alive. Instead, it does rather have a bit of a ‘dumped on disc’ feeling about it. In either case, it went out of print in 2023 after one of vinegar syndromes flash sales, but there are copies floating around on Ebay if your curious…not that i’d recommend it.

Supersoul brother has heart. To a certain extent it has charm. But that’s where the niceties begin and end unfortunately. This is a production that, ultimately has been hindered both by the lack of budget and the lack of a skilled cast and crew. In proper hands, I haven’t a doubt in my mind that this film could have been one of the greats, the pitch sounds brilliant! But because money was so tight and the crew were winging it for the most part, it left a film that has an underdeveloped and overly wordy script, direction and cine that’s basic, bland, lifeless and drab. A patchwork soundscape, performances that could best be described as “startled” and comedy that has an incredibly low hit rate, with comedians trying WAY too hard, to the point that it almost becomes irritating. And that’s not even the half of it.

The only way I could recommend ‘Supersoul Brother’ is if you were doing a Rudy Ray marathon and wanted something to help add a bit of variety in, in between pictures. Outside of that, this films a really poor show in my opinion, not one I’ll revisit on its own and not one I can recommend, even if you’re into the blaxploitation genre. There are WAY better productions out there and honestly? This isn’t worth your time.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/supersoul-brother/1/