Plan Nine from Funkytown

Last week I watched a 2019 Netflix movie, Dolemite Is My Name. Unlike most Eddie Murphy vehicles of this century, it was very good. I just assumed the Dolemite character and the entire storyline were a general fictional parody of ‘70s “blaxploitation” movies. Then, at the end of the movie, a series of epilogue texts was intercut with clips of scenes from a laughable, ’70s-style movie, the very one that had just been closely replicated in Murphy’s movie.

This naive white guy was slow to realize that DIMN is a biopic. The subject is Rudy Ray Moore, a show business adventurer who kept revising his persona with such weirdly preposterous ambition that an account of his life really justifies a feature-length film. 

After watching DIMN, I noticed a movie on Amazon Prime, Dolemite. Not looking closely, I figured it was that Eddie Murphy-starring movie I’d just watched. Then I clicked on it and — nope, it was the 1975 movie that DIMN is built around. It’s not easy to describe. If you’ve ever tried to describe to someone a surreally ridiculous dream you experienced, you know what I mean. 

Since most people who read what I write are younger than I but about as white, maybe you’re like me in never having seen an entire blaxploitation movie. (Hunting around for something on cable long ago, I might have watched ten minutes of Shaft.)

Maybe I can tempt you to watch Dolemite if you’ve seen Ed Wood Jr.’s epic of incoherence Plan Nine From Outer Space. Try to imagine aspiring film makers who somehow get a movie produced with that “Plan Nine” cheerful innocence and absolute incompetence in scriptwriting, acting, and production values . . . but they’re black. If you enjoy Ed’s movies and have an elastic, multi-cultural imagination, you might be ready to watch Dolemite.

Stay with this energetic disaster of a movie; it’s fun. There’s a fight scene that’s the least convincing fight since, well, since the one in the plywood space ship in Plan Nine. The one in Dolemite, however, supposedly involves kung fu. Dolemite also has a scene representating sexual activity. Tried to think of an analogous Ed scene, but the closest I could get was Glen or Glenda, so I stopped thinking.

If you can make it to the 62 minute mark, you’ll witness a stage performance of a funk song that dramatizes the continuation, 110 years after the end of the Civil War, of the suffering experienced by black Americans.