Brotherhood of Death

Yesterday I had the chance to see a rare 35mm print of the ultra-low-budget Blaxploitation flick BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH thanks to Dan Halstead and the Hollywood Theatre, so naturally I took it. After all, check out this premise: three African-American Vietnam vets return home from war and use guerrilla war tactics to rid their town of the Klan. Pretty irresistible.

BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH stars real-life Washington Redskin Roy Jefferson along with Le Tari and Haskell Anderson as the Vietnam vets in question. Shortly after they return from war to their North Carolina town, a local girl (Kandy Hooker) is raped by three rednecks. Although the sympathetic sheriff (Bryan Clark) is pretty sure he knows who was behind it, a connected Klansman, he lacks the evidence to make an arrest.

So our heroes spring into action and... get the local preacher (Ed Heath) to implore the African-American community to register to vote. That's right. Instead of immediately embarking on a kill-crazy, revenge-fueled bloody rampage, we have a "get out the vote!" sequence in the middle of an exploitation movie. It's charming. And timely.

Anyway, this just enrages the Klan even more, until it eventually does become out and out war with the sheriff turning up dead and replaced by a vile racist (Brian Donohue) hell bent on keeping the local African-American community in check.

Finally as the movie nears a close, our three heroes don their military uniforms and spring into action to enact a creative plan and exact bloody revenge on the Klan.

The film's incredibly low budget is most evident during the Vietnam scenes, not only because they're clearly not shot in a jungle of any kind but also because the military uniforms are completely unrealistic. I don't know anything about the military and even I could tell they were fake. It made me wonder why they bothered including Vietnam scenes, anyway. In other Vietnam revenge flicks like FIRST BLOOD and ROLLING THUNDER, we just start with the soldiers' homecoming and skip the stuff in country.

But, that's just a nitpick. It doesn't really matter. This movie has it where it counts. The mostly amateur actors are pretty good, the rednecks are suitably awful, and the narrative takes a few turns that are more interesting that you'd normally expect from an exploitation movie. For instance, it's funny that the sheriff is basically a good guy, rather than the ringleader of the Klan, and it's cool that the first plan of action is to get the community to register to vote, before resorting to violence. Another added bonus is the music is pretty groovy.

Although this flick was made in the 70s, its bold and decidedly un-Hollywood take on the ugly fact of racism in America is just as relevant today as it ever was. Amazingly, a billboard featured in the film advertising the Klan in broad daylight on the side of a main road was an actual billboard standing in the actual North Carolina location at the time the movie was shot. The dodgy production values and violent revenge story aren't for everyone, but it's worth a watch for any fan of grindhouse cinema.

By the way, there were a couple vintage blaxploitation trailers before the feature, including one I'd never heard of before but would like to see: GORDON'S WAR. This is another Vietnam revenge flick, but this time it stars Paul Winfield. I've only ever seen him as a supporting actor in movies like THE TERMINATOR, STAR TREK II and WHITE DOG, so to see him as an action star would be amazing. Maybe some day!