Sugar Hill (1974)

Waste of time

Brilliant and touching

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Following a nightclub opening, the murder of her boyfriend sends a woman deep into the realms of a local voodoo master and soon sends a squad of zombies to do her bidding, forcing a police officer to stop her before she completes her vengeance-filled mission.This here was a rather enjoyable entry with a lot to like about it. One of the best features of it is that it manages a fantastic mixture of zombies and voodoo here, as both are mixed together to provide a lot of fun. Although it's not entirely PC for today's standards, the attributes which are shown here to attract that manage to make for quite a solid showing here with the racial slurs and different setups to cater to that audience all giving this one a lot to like. What also helps that is that the film has the voodoo ceremony occurs early in the film which is a really fun approach to the film with there being some really fun confrontations throughout. That there's a lot of gang-members here who are involved with this are killed off at a rather nice clip here, and it does it at great intervals which gives it a feeling of never being dull or boring at all. The confrontations themselves are incredibly fun, with the one in the cornfields being really creepy as there's the unknown factor of what's happening, there's a wonderful atmosphere to it and a fantastic payoff. There's more fun from the other zombie attacks, including the one in the train-yard and a later one in a bar while the other great one is the only one without the use of the zombies, where one is forced to take his life through the use of voodoo as it winds toward the inevitable where it becomes really tense and quite chilling. The zombies are really great-looking as well, with the dirt-covered rags that are effective in giving them a long-dead, decaying look, and with they're memorable eyes and dead stare, they're quite impressive-looking. There's also the full-on fun of their resurrection sequence, which here is one of the better examples of this type of scenes around. The image of the heaving ground giving way to a series of scenes with the heads coming out of the ground is simply spectacular. Combined with all the good over the incredibly suspenseful and creepy location where it all takes place, these here are what work for the film. There wasn't a whole lot wrong with this one. The main one here is that the film has a really different view of zombies than most other films. This one has them as a gang of mindless assassins sent out to do whatever their master commands them to do, and that is such a major change from what's normally accepted in a zombie movie. That alone might be enough for some of the die-hard fans to cry foul, but then the fact that they manage to resort to using tools and weapons like any normal villain, albeit indestructible one, really loses the distinctive touch of the zombie genre. The other issue here is that there's a really useless subplot in here about buying up the club which takes up some time is also wrong, which is where the middle section loses some ground compared to the other segments. Overall, though, it's not as bad as it could've been.Rated PG: Violence and Language

When her boyfriend is brutally murdered, after refusing to be shaken down by the local gangsters running their protection racket, Sugar Hill (Marki Bey), decides to call upon the help of aged voodoo queen Mama Maitresse; Sugar entreats her to call upon Baron Zamedi, the Lord of the Dead, for help in gaining a gruesome revenge.Whether or not this is a blaxploitation horror film, I have no idea. There is definitely a theme of the black heroine (a poor man's Pam Grier) taking on white crooks. And the police detective has a pretty impressive fro going on. But the line between blaxploitation and a film that just happens to have black stars is a blurry one in the 1970s...What I do know is that this is a fun picture from Sam Arkoff and AIP. Not particularly scary and never taking itself too seriously, we get about half a dozen people attacked (one at a time) by a zombie horde. And these are real zombies -- the voodoo kind -- not those flesh-eating zombies that have taken over the horror world today.Not the best film, not the worst, but definitely one that probably gets overlooked too often and is worth a peek for those who are into the voodoo zombies and already saw the bigger name films like "White Zombie" or "Serpent and the Rainbow". I get the impression that this film was an influence on Adam Green's "Hatchet" series, though that may just be my imagination.Interestingly, despite being made after George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead", this film finds its roots more in the racially-inspired zombies of the 1940s and 1950s. Namely "King of the Zombies" (1941), "I Walked With a Zombie" (1943) and "Zombies of Mora Tau" (1957).

"Sugar Hill" has a lot of what made "Foxy Brown" so compelling, but adds an interesting plot device for a novel twist. I've seen lots of black gangster films where black heroes (and anti-heroes) get over on The Man and The Establishment, but "Sugar Hill" is the only film I've seen where horror monsters (as opposed to gun-play and car chases) are the vehicle for social justice. Of course, there could be others. I don't get out much. (And no, I don't count "Zombie Nightmare", which is a vanity project, not a movie.) The heroine of the story loses her man to the predations of the local Mob when the Mob moves in on their nightclub. In order to exact revenge, she manages to contact a local voodoo cult (because in this film's social milieu, all black people in the South maintain contact with their pagan cult roots, don'chaknow) and convince them to aid her cause. Hilarity ensues.On the plus side: the makeup effects for the zombies were novel and extremely effective - I've never seen any other film use 'brass eyes and cobwebs' effects and bluish "bad skin" tints like this. Someone did a wonderful job coaching the extras on how to be convincing as cold, soulless, remorseless, shambling piles of ex-humanity. And they are framed and filmed and lighted in setups out of your worst nightmares. The setups for each of the revenge scenes are well done, and there is a lot of variety in the scenarios, as well as some macabre humor - the 'death by massage therapy' scene managed to be both funny and appalling at the same time, which is a great trick. Also on the plus side: The actress playing Sugar is very striking and carries the movie effortlessly. She's convincingly merciless and cold as she delivers judgment on each of her foes, and obviously relishes her revenge. The actor playing Samedi seems familiar; I think he shilled for "7-Up" some years ago. He's got a wonderful, deep, rich patois that resonates in the viewers' solar plexus. His sadistic glee and delight in the suffering and terror he inspires in his prey is enough to make you seriously considering defecting to the ranks of the "voodoun." On the minus side: Once Sugar gets the voodoo revenge ball rolling, it's just too damned easy for her - there is no struggle, or suspense at all. In "Foxy Brown", the heroine suffers rape and beatings and humiliation before she turns the tide on her enemies, and it makes the story more compelling because of it. Even in a Jim Brown "Slaughter" film, Jim had to sweat some to win the day. For that matter, Bruce Lee took some serious hits in his various fights for justice and revenge. But here, the Mob guys are dumb as toast and go down before the voodoo onslaught like mice under a field mower.That turns the film from a heroic struggle to an exercise in righteous sadism against a bunch of mannequins.And traditionally in films and literature, if the protagonist messes with "Dark Forces" to exact their revenge, they have to pay a price themselves. But Samedi just goes out and tears Sugar's foes apart like an obedient supernatural Pit Bull and it doesn't cost her a thing, at least not overtly. The protagonist's desire for revenge and/or justice is much more convincing if the story shows them paying a real price to achieve it. So again, the film is less than it could be; instead of making Sugar Hill's story a tale of revenge no matter the cost, it becomes an plodding exercise in vicarious power fantasy and butt-kicking.But still, it's a powerful experience, if only due to the fortunate accident of the makeup and the charisma of the two lead black actors. I'm glad I managed to catch it on Showtime, and if I ever see it on DVD for a reasonable price, I'll probably pick it up for my collection.

I did watch it and although I thought it wouldn't, it kept my attention. However, the above user and tagline are incorrect. She doesn't sell her soul if you recall where she makes the bargain with Baron. The white girl is her payment to him, for now. When she offered her soul remember he laughs and says "what do I want/need with a soul, I have something else in mind". That being said, I wonder what happened to her. She seemed like she had the looks for the time, although she wasn't even 30 yet when she filmed that yet she looked quite a bit older.