Truck Turner (1974) is as supercharged and rollicking a film as the pumping score provided by star Isaac Hayes. Not just content with winning the Oscar for the ‘Theme to Shaft’ and establishing the sound of what would be termed Blaxploitation, Hayes decided to try acting as well. As the title character, a former football player turned bounty hunter, Hayes is a little bit rough around the edges as a performer, which works completely for this bleary, rugged character, who wakes up in an apartment strewn with fast food detritus and a cat that urinates on his shirt. Brandishing a huge revolver and exchanging in crude banter with his partner, Jerry (Alan Weeks), this is also a rough movie in terms of its humour and violence, so won’t be for all tastes. Yet I found it undeniably entertaining with how over-the-top the movie becomes, incorporating neo-noir and western genre motifs into its spin on the super-cop movie. For a 90 minute movie, it structurally keeps changing things up and escalating at every half hour mark, beginning as a laidback LA noir hang-out with these two dudes driving across town, chasing down delinquent criminals, before running afoul of a vengeful madame Dorinda (Nichelle Nichols, yes, from Star Trek) and the calculating and cold pimp Harvard Blue (Yaphet Kotto). Caught up inadvertently in the pimp wars, the movie becomes a comic-book as nefarious villains join forces to take out this super-hero and climaxes in a bloody hospital shoot-out with echoes of slow-motion Peckinpahesque brutality. Directed by Jonathan Kaplan (Over The Edge), Truck Turner features great LA locations and street shooting with a great supporting cast including Dick Miller, Sebastian Shaw, Scatman Crothers and Charles Cypher. Nichols and Kotto are also brilliant in their respective roles, adding so much to the proceedings with their respective strengths. And then that’s Isaac Hayes score, which was an immediate post-movie purchase from its thundering title tune to its summer vibe instrumentals to a seductive croon that Hayes amazingly sings over a sequence of him in a romantic scene with his ex-con lady Annie (Annazette Chase). Streamed from the Criterion Channel but available on iTunes in Australia. Recommended.
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