Black Shampoo (Greydon Clark, 1976) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Craig Lindsey

You're crazy for this one, Crizzle.

Black Shampoo is a startlingly amateur, low-budget Blaxploitation film, seemingly made in order to capitalize on the previous year's Hal Ashby / Warren Beatty project. Much like Shampoo's George Roundy, Black Shampoo's Mr. Jonathan (John Daniels) is a high-class hairdresser who doubles as a gigolo, bedding down with his wealthy white clients. Black Shampoo avoids any overt Black stud / Mandingo stereotyping, but the film clearly means to trade on the "forbidden" frisson of Black men and blonde white women getting down. There is no hardcore action -- it's scrupulously following the DJ Assault principle -- but women and men alike pay an inordinate amount of attention to Mr. Jonathan's crotch, the suggestion being that he's got something in those bell bottoms that folks just can't wait to wrap their lips around.

In just over 85 minutes, Black Shampoo tries to articulate a bare-bones plot in between all the fondle and frolic. Mr. Jonathan's new receptionist Brenda (Tanya Boyd) is threatened in the salon while the boss is away, by three thugs who work for a crime boss (Joseph Carlo) who feels he owns her. In order to keep her co-workers safe, she returns to the creep, setting the stage for Mr. Jonathan to come to her rescue. The final showdown has the hairdresser trying to take down the gangsters with a chainsaw, which is only just so effective against guns. It's a distance / proximity thing.

Black Shampoo, like other MST3K-style cinematic aberrations, walks a thin line between total incompetence and jaw-dropping moments of surreal wonder. There are a few irredeemable aspects of the film. The acting is uniformly terrible, and Daniels is a sucking vacuum of charisma. Considering that Mr. Jonathan is the universal object of desire, he sure does lack any notable qualities. He shuffles around, mumbling, occasionally throwing hands and coming off a bit mentally damaged. But in a way, the piss-poor performances allow us to pay more attention to the bizarre formal and narrative choices, those moments when expediency becomes its own kind of ragged poetry. To wit:

-- When Mr. Jonathan takes Brenda out for a date, they are seen in a romantic montage that includes sitting on large rocks, wandering through Echo Park grinning like idiots, and finally taking to the lake on a paddle boat. For reference, the couple are not in their 70s.

-- They go to dinner in an unspectacular looking restaurant on the Strip. One close-up of Brenda shows a large fly crawling on the window outside. No reshoot necessary.

-- One could easily use Black Shampoo for a drinking game, since someone says "Jonathan!" every few seconds.

-- When Brenda first goes missing, Jonathan goes looking for her. This leads to a pointless series of car shots around L.A., with Jonathan observing various random Angelinos on foot. Nope! That's not Brenda. After about five minutes, he returns to the salon. I'm glad he's a hairdresser and not a detective.

-- Clark begins and ends most scenes with a high-contrast negative still of the first image in the shot, which then switches to positive and starts moving. A weird, unexplained device that looks like Pat O'Neill or Scott Bartlett on the cheap.

-- The soundtrack is an endless loop of what I can only call Blaxploitation Muzak. A single phrase of a woman singing, "can you feel the love?" Over and over.

-- Black Shampoo adopts an admirable-for-the-time attitude toward homosexuality, with Jonathan employing two gay men (one Black, one white) and treating them with consistent respect. However, the film plays their effeminacy for cheap laughs, and then, out of nowhere, the thugs come back to the salon and torture the white guy by sodomizing him with a hot curling iron.

All the same, I'm not sorry I saw Black Shampoo. Like certain Ed Wood productions, this film collapses as a diegetic narrative and becomes little more than a document of its own making. There's something charming about this degree of haplessness, and it speaks to the broad cognitive potential of moviegoers everywhere. From scene to scene, we must will Black Shampoo into coherence, mentally eliding the many speedbumps and potholes, imparting far more meaning than we are given.

[Available to stream on -- need you ask? -- Tubi.]