HELL UP IN HARLEM

Hell Up In Harlem is the sequel to Black Caesar, features most of the same cast, and makes almost no sense at all.

Fred Williamson is back as Tommy Gibbs, but he left his limp (from the beating he took from McKinley, which was a major deal in Black Caesar mentioned at least five times) in the other movie. After being shot by whitey and left for dead in Harlem, Gibbs is pissed off and ready to put lots of bullets in lots of people.

Turns out Tommy didn't die in Harlem after a bunch of kids stole his watch and pretended to beat him up. Hell Up In Harlem recaps the ending of Black Caesar, but adds in a scene where Tommy, after killing McKinley, conveniently calls his estranged father (who he hated so much he was ready to shoot in the face earlier, but we'll forget about that for now), and tells him to meet him where they grew up. Tommy's dad brings him to a park, where the most loyal of Tommy's men show up and drive him to Harlem Hospital.

That parts needs a little elaborating, because it's one of many scenes in Hell Up In Harlem that is just a lot more crazy than it needs to be. First of all, when Tommy's guys show up at the park, they don't just run over to him and put him in the car, they start vaulting over park benches at a full sprint like they're in the Olympics or something. And it's not like one or two, either. It looks like they're going out of their way to find park benches and jump over them. There are many shots of guys jumping over park benches and short fences, and the funny thing is if they had just walked down the path it probably would have saved them a lot of time.

When they get to Harlem Hospital I guess they figure the best way to get Tommy help is to yell and point guns at everyone they see. This kind of thing must be pretty common at Harlem Hospital, because while everyone is pretty freaked out by all the pistol waving, nobody really panics or anything. And I don't know much about surgery, but you'd think holding a doctor hostage with a revolver to his head while he operates on a powerful mobster would not exactly help the procedure go smoothly.

For some reason during this whole mini-siege at the hospital, the security guards and police stationed there have no idea what to do. Apparently they are the only law enforcement officials in America not trained on how to fight bad guys. They call the evil district attorney for help, instead of like the chief of police or something, and he tells them to just go in to the operating room and blow everyone away. I guess that strategy makes sense, especially if you're an evil white district attorney who hates black people, but the head cop does not want to die, and decides just letting these guys go about their obviously illegal and highly dangerous business with as little interference as possible is the best solution.

So Tommy's men drag him out of the hospital, and while the cops watch, they hijack an ambulance and get the fuck outta there.

Now Tommy Gibbs is all pissed off. Those damn white people he worked so hard to put in place are starting to get uppity, what with shooting him in the guts and all, so he decides to stage one of the single greatest action scenes in blaxploitation history.

Tommy takes his men down to the Florida Keys, where some Italian mobsters are hanging out in their mansion. You know these guys are evil Italian mobsters because there's an establishing scene with white guys with big sideburns and big rings sitting around outside smoking cigars and saying "Eeeeey!" a lot while girls in bikinis play volleyball and the black maids look disgruntled.

Then they cut to like a mile off shore, where Tommy's Harlem gangsters have gone fucking Navy SEAL, complete with scuba suits and harpoon guns and shit. They swim to land and suddenly they all have machine guns, which doesn't make any sense for a bunch of reasons - for one, they just showed them all swimming without machine guns, and for another machine guns would get all fucked up if you took them underwater, but whatever, because when they get to the beach they just unload on every white person in a cheap suit they can find. Also, the line "And who says black people can't swim?" gets said here, which is cool because right after Fred Williamson says that, some white guy gets a harpoon through the back and falls off a big rock.

There's like ten minutes of white people being shot up by machine guns and falling off things and getting harpooned in the chest, and all the girls in bikinis go scrambling for cover, except for this one chick who is obviously the hottest girl there. She goes kung-fu all over Fred Williamson, kicking him around a little bit and finally knocking him over. The whole time she's going at him, he just has this look on his face like "Who the hell does this white bitch think she is?" and then he gets up and dropkicks her in the face.

Even the maids get guns, and start blowing away the mob bosses with .357 magnums, smiling about it like it's the best thing that ever happened to them. When everyone is dead except for the three big bosses, Fred Williamson, smoking a cigar I'm assuming he stole from the Italians since it would have been soaking wet if he brought it with him, forces the mobsters to eat soul food. Apparently you can murder people for the better part of an afternoon, but the best way to really send a message to a white guy is to feed him grits.

The movie goes back to Harlem, and we witness Tommy's father go from a kindly, hunched over old man to a badass womanizing cop-killing sharp dressing mother fucker, complete with his own theme song (called "Big Papa"). A good chunk of the movie is devoted to Tommy Sr. shooting people in the subway or knifing a guy at the opera or stealing someone's babies. In Black Caesar he just wanted to meet his son and get to know him, but in Hell Up In Harlem he's like "This old man gotta get some of that action!" and starts punching hookers and shit. It's really strange to see an old guy dressed in a fur coat and big pimp hat walking around with three ladies on each arm, but then again Hell Up In Harlem is a pretty strange movie, so somehow it all fits.

Also, I totally didn't realize it until he turned into a badass murdering criminal, but the actor who plays Tommy's father is the guy with the claw hand from Live and Let Die. It's a small world after all, I guess. One day you're in a Fred Williamson movie pimpin' hoes and smokin' cigars, the next you're fighting Roger Moore on a train.

Anyways, back to Hell Up In Harlem, since I seem to be determined to make this thing way longer than it needs to be. The majority of the conflict in the movie comes from Tommy Gibbs' second-in-command, this big guy named Zack. Besides having a really dumb name for a big threatening guy, Zack is a little power hungry, and decides to get in cahoots (yes, I used the word cahoots) with the evil district attorney and push Tommy out of power. Apparently this involves strangling Tommy's girlfriend with a scarf and fighting Tommy's father to the death in hand to hand combat down by the railroad tracks.

When Tommy moves to Los Angeles to try and go legit, Zack tracks him down and shoots up his house. Zack gets away, but Tommy kills a few more people, and decides it's time to teach Zack a lesson. You know that scene in every good action movie, where the hero has finally been pushed too far and it's time to start kicking ass? Fred Williamson does that. He grabs his fucking sniper rifle, flies back to New York, and starts picking off mobsters in the middle of Times Square. This really pisses off Zack, especially when Tommy shows up at his headquarters (which is in the middle of a rock quarry or something). Tommy kills like ten guys and narrowly escapes being crushed by a bulldozer, only to find out Zack is personally on his way to Los Angeles to murder Tommy's adopted son.

In one of the most bizarre chase scenes ever, Tommy chases Zack to the airport in a car from the 40's or something, but Zack's plane ends up taking off before Tommy can stop it, so Tommy gets on the very next plane, and ends up catching up to him in LAX, where they have a knock-down, drag-out brawl on a luggage conveyor. Tommy shoots Zack in the middle of the airport with seemingly no consequences, and goes home only to find the evil district attorney is holding his son hostage.

Of course, Tommy Gibbs ain't standin' for that shit, so he hangs the district attorney from a tree with his own necktie. It's a pretty brutal scene, obviously done to mirror (or top) Tommy's treatment of McKinley at the end of Black Caesar. As the district attorney swings from the tree, kicking at the air and strangling to death, Tommy even makes the comment "This must be the first time in history a black man has lynched a whitey!".

The film ends with Tommy reunited with his son, and the screen freezes with some text telling us that Tommy disappeared with his son and was never heard from again, thus bringing to an end the life story of Tommy Gibbs, a story that took two movies and three hundred dead white people to tell.