The Dynamite Brothers and Black Heat, Al Adamson's two blaxploitation-type films starring Timothy Brown are an intriguing case: a pair of films that relatively put-together on a technical level and have a facet understanding of the genre being utilized for their product, while simultaneously feeling like assembly line products of sorts: films built from particularly crazes (in this case, blaxploitation and martial arts (undoubtedly a surge in popularity from Bruce Lee's output and the subsequent rip-offs that followed)) and understanding what needs to be included and omitted.
Dynamite Brothers fuses the jazzy, race fueled elements of the myriad films making bank at the time (the thought of even noting a few is a fool's errand--the big guns that were released in 1972 and 1973 are remarkable) with the kung fu picture, joining together Timothy Brown's wonderfully named Stud Brown with Larry Chin (Alan Tang), a martial arts expert who stowaways from China in search for his brother Wei Chin (James Howe, yes!). Things move along at their expected clip, with the moderately entertaining narrative, while mostly void of surprises, providing some amusement in the pairing of Brown and Tang and the sporadic martial arts interludes that give a nice energy to the proceedings.
Black Heat minimizes many of these idiosyncratic elements and plays the material a bit more straight to an almost detrimental effect. Brown's also wonderfully named "Kicks" Carter, a cop partnered with the white Tony, work together in Vegas to bring down a crime gang whose vices are the trifecta of drugs, loan-sharking, and prostitution while Kicks finds romance with Terry, a reporter also looking into the gang. Unlike Dynamite Brothers, Black Heat feels more like a checklist effort of sorts, a narrative that could exist outside of the blaxploitation moniker with just a few tweaks, almost superficially using the genre for marketing purposes over anything else. Much of the films pleasure works in the usual Adamson way: competent in regards to budget and in recognizing the limits of such a production along with a few modestly entertaining action sequences (bonus points for a nicely maniacally Russ Tamblyn, the last of his collaborations with Adamson). But the movie is fairly rote, feeling mostly like a quickie genre effort rather than anything engaging with its elements.
And because no set of notes on an Al Adamson film would be complete without some title adjustments or different versions: in an effort to maximize any potential audiences fully, Black Heat was released under different time. While Black Heat worked just fine in areas predominately Black, the picture was marketed as another sexploitation Adamson effort under the title Girl's Hotel, which is essentially the same picture except for an opening prologue that tease some sex and nudity, and The Murder Gang for drive-ins.
The Dynamite Brothers
Dir. Al Adamson
90 Minutes
USA
1974
Starring: Timothy Brown, Alan Tang, Aldo Ray, James Hong, Don Oliver, Carol Speed, Claire Nono, Lung Chan
**1/2/*****
Black Heat
Dir. Al Adamson
94 Minutes
USA
1976
Starring: Timothy Brown, Jana Bellan, Russ Tamblyn, Geoffrey Land
**/*****
September 3rd, 2020