Black Dynamite

Impressions before seeing it
The trailer was hilarious, and I love the idea of not only setting a movie in a certain era, but taking it a step further and pretending it was actually filmed in that era as well.

How was it?
I don't think I've ever actually watched a whole blaxploitation film, but as long as you know enough about the genre I don't think you have to in order to enjoy Black Dynamite. First, a reminder: "parody" is defined as "a literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule." Black Dynamite is a parody because it does exactly that. Films like Epic Movie and Disaster Movie are NOT parodies, because they do not do that. Smart people know this already, but the word parody has been thrown around too much and with the exception of Black Dynamite and Walk Hard there hasn't really been a good parody movie in at least 10 years.

Anyway, this movie perfectly captures the blatant cheesiness of 70's movies. There are continuity errors, boom mikes, bad acting, cheesy dialogue, over the top action, ridiculous plot elements (my favourite being a scene where Black Dynamite and his friends talk their way through a trail of clues using obscure knowledge that no average person would ever know, and having no logical reason for using the methods in which they discover the clues), and nun-chucks (whatever happened to nun-chucks anyway? You don't see them in modern movies that much anymore). Usually when you put all of these things together it makes a god awful piece of crap, but only when it's unintentional. Obviously they are mimicking the genre here so in that case they hit the nail on the head and the combination of bad filmmaking elements just makes it lots and lots of fun. If I hadn't known about this movie and recognized a few familiar faces in it, I really would have thought it was made in the 70's. Kudos to the lead actor, Michael Jai White, for also co-writing this. I like when actors do some behind-the-camera work as well.

Recommendation
You definitely have to check this one out if you enjoy real parody and love cheesy lines. Lots of cheesy lines.