It’s that time of the year again – Horrorfest! For the last three years now I’ve watched 31 horror films in 31 days and written about all of them in honor of Halloween. The first year was kind of made up as I went along, including flicks I’d already seen before but felt like watching again. The last two years I tried to go out of my way to watch films I had never seen before, or had only seen part of, working off of “best of” lists. The problem with that is, eventually you’ve seen everything on most “best of” lists.
So, this year, I’ve decided to watch the highest rated films available through the Netflix watch instantly service. This limits the possibilities a little bit because, of course, Netflix has a limited catalog. Also, it isn’t really a “best of” in the traditional sense, since this is based on audience ratings. Still, I was able to come up with the top 31 highest rated Netflix watch instantly films that I haven’t seen yet, and that’s what I’ll be watching this month.
We’re starting with SUGAR HILL, a mixture of Blaxploitation and horror from American International pictures. I don’t think I’ve done any Blaxploitation in previous Horrorfests, so I was excited to see this picture.
It starts familiarly enough, with a bizarre voodoo ritual, a common opening for voodoo/zombie films of this sort. But, the film comes quickly with the surprises as the opening credits are set to a funky song called “Supernatural Voodoo Woman” and the voodoo ritual is revealed to be a stage show at a Haitian-themed night club.
We’re quickly introduced to the owner of the night club, Langston (Larry Don Johnson) who is dating the titular heroine (or anti-heroine as the case may be) Sugar Hill (Marki Bey). Sugar Hill ditched her nice-guy cop boyfriend (the awesomely afro’d Richard Lawson) for the somewhat sleazy and pimpy Langston, who is refusing to sell his night club to an evil white crime lord (American International mainstay Robert Quarry). Langston is repaid for his refusal when the white crime lord sends a group of thugs led by the even more pimp-esque Fabulous (Charles Robinson) to kill him.
Distraught with her lover’s death, Sugar Hill springs into action with a revenge plot. This is where the horror elements come into the story – instead of settling for the usual Pam Grier method (guns), Sugar Hill approaches the local voodoo priestess (Zara Cully) who raises an army of undead ex-slave zombies, led by the equally undead Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley, possibly the most pimp of all).
What follows is a series of gruesome murders in which the zombie army follows Sugar Hill’s orders to destroy her enemies while Sugar Hill reads out their death sentences and watches with grim satisfaction, working through the gang of thugs and up to their boss.
SUGAR HILL starts off as a promising unique take on 3 dramas – it makes zombies, revenge and Blaxploitation seem new simply by combining them. Unfortunately, it is repetitively paced and after the premise is set up there is little to keep the viewer interested other than gore and the magnetic central presence of Marki Bey as Sugar Hill. I wish she had more to do – as it stands, she mostly looks on in satisfaction as zombies carry out her will, which gets old after a while.
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