Jim Kelly, the star of Black Samurai, was a multi-talented martial artist perhaps best remembered for his role in Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. Black Samurai is essentially a vehicle for his fighting skills in which he plays a secret agent out to retrieve his Japanese sweetheart from the drug-dealing Satanist who has abducted her to blackmail her father. His investigative skills are almost non-existent--much of the plot consists of his arriving at the villains' houses and hitting people. At the same time, the character's utter ruthlessness and the extravagant evil... of the villains, the chief of whom, Jannicot, is in the habit of sicking a vulture on his enemies, are entertaining enough and the 1970s styling unselfconsciously entertaining. The director, Al Adamson, was mostly famous for his horror films, and there is a Gothic extravagance to the sets and gimmicks here: Kelly's jet-pack sequence has to be seen to be believed. On the DVD: The DVD comes with a wonderful period trailer for The Green Hornet, the usual chapter selection, biographies of Kelly and Adamson (who was murdered in 1995) and a feature which enables you to look at the fight scenes in isolation. --Roz Kaveney [show more]
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