Lurid doesn't even begin to describe this slave plantation melodrama directed by the one and only Russ Meyer, and it's an unusually provocative and sleazy project even by his standards. Annouska Hempel, now Lady Weinberg, plays Lady Susan Walker, a whip-wielding harpy who runs a sugar cane plantation on a Caribbean island in the 19th century. She keeps the slaves in line by dealing out rough and ready punishments, aided and abetted by her slave driving foreman Joxer (a scenery chewing turn by Percy Herbert) and her black French military force led by foppish gay (!) Captain Raymond Daladier (Snoop-lookalike Bernard Boston). The slaves are variously whipped (in very dubiously sexualised, Sadeian s&m scenes), tortured, insulted (there's liberal use of the word "nigger") and murdered. Into this hotbed of exploitation (on the part of the characters and the filmmakers!) comes 70s Brit B movie lead David Warbeck, as a English gent wanting to find out what happened to his disappeared brother, the previous husband of Lady Walker. Believe you me, he doesn't want to know.
The film intriguingly charts the slaves' political journey from placid sufferers under the rod of their bosses, kept in line by violence from others and their own colonially installed Christian beliefs although occasionally stirred by a firebrand martyr, to fully Africanised rebellion, turning the tables on Lady Susan, Joxer and the rest and meting out as good as they got. One feels very little for the whites who get killed (although they are such florid characters that it does seem a kind of shame to let them go) but also there's an uneasy feeling that the blacks when in charge of their own lives won't be exactly uninfected by the violent circles of history, a feeling which belies the touchy-feely images of contemporary black and white couples with whom the film ends. There's a sense to which, behind all the film's monstrous fustian, it is a catastrophic vision of a humanity in which every human fights for his or her own lusts, survival and will to power, all of them heading for the fire (a bit like Shakespeare's monstrous Titus Andronicus, with whom it shares an uneasy mix of lurid violence and dark humour).
There's something wholly unacceptable about Meyer's slavery film, as if he were taking one of the most sensitive areas of history and using it to mock everyone whether on the left or right of the political spectrum with a vision of humanity as utterly insane and corrupt. In a weird way, there's something positively Blakeian about the film's vision of a depraved world presided over by a monstrous and lustful female will, populated by Satanic selfhoods and involving Biblical prophecy, crucifixion and the consumption of a Babylonian Whore by fire. Yes, finally the Russ Meyer of Black Snake can be safely sat alongside the Marquis de Sade, William Shakespeare and William Blake.
The film intriguingly charts the slaves' political journey from placid sufferers under the rod of their bosses, kept in line by violence from others and their own colonially installed Christian beliefs although occasionally stirred by a firebrand martyr, to fully Africanised rebellion, turning the tables on Lady Susan, Joxer and the rest and meting out as good as they got. One feels very little for the whites who get killed (although they are such florid characters that it does seem a kind of shame to let them go) but also there's an uneasy feeling that the blacks when in charge of their own lives won't be exactly uninfected by the violent circles of history, a feeling which belies the touchy-feely images of contemporary black and white couples with whom the film ends. There's a sense to which, behind all the film's monstrous fustian, it is a catastrophic vision of a humanity in which every human fights for his or her own lusts, survival and will to power, all of them heading for the fire (a bit like Shakespeare's monstrous Titus Andronicus, with whom it shares an uneasy mix of lurid violence and dark humour).
There's something wholly unacceptable about Meyer's slavery film, as if he were taking one of the most sensitive areas of history and using it to mock everyone whether on the left or right of the political spectrum with a vision of humanity as utterly insane and corrupt. In a weird way, there's something positively Blakeian about the film's vision of a depraved world presided over by a monstrous and lustful female will, populated by Satanic selfhoods and involving Biblical prophecy, crucifixion and the consumption of a Babylonian Whore by fire. Yes, finally the Russ Meyer of Black Snake can be safely sat alongside the Marquis de Sade, William Shakespeare and William Blake.