Black Belt Jones aka Dick Punch Jones aka Bad Maths and Psychopaths

Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming back. This week, we're going to be looking at Jim Kelly's first starring role - Black Belt Jones. It's an entirely different animal to Black Samurai in the respect that it's not Jim Kelly who's the lunatic in this one.

The movie starts with these stereotypical mafia types driving this big ass car through some fancy looking gates towards a big house which is also a vineyard. The vineyard is guarded by these big dudes wearing ringer t-shirts with polar bears on them so you know there’s something a bit dodgy about this place. Either that or it’s just a really bad ass vineyard with big dudes acting as front of house and it’s completely legit. So, the car goes through the gates and there’s a guy looking on from a balcony at the car pulling up. You later find out that this is Don Steffano and he’s kind of the main bad guy in this movie although you see a lot more of this black dude called Pinky and he’s kind of on main bad guy duties to begin with but we’ll talk more about him in a little while. There’re these two mafia guys in the car.  One of them is called Big Tuna because his name is Tunasari or something and the other is called Blue Eyes which I’m assuming is because he has blue eyes and not brown and they’ve just called him blue eyes ironically or something douchey like that. Big Tuna looks like your standard lunkheaded mafia guy while Blue Eyes is a creepy, Christopher Walken looking mother fucker who also kind of looks like a mortician. Actually, they’re both really stereotypical when I think about it. They wouldn’t be able to trick you into thinking they weren’t cold blooded killers or anything. You wouldn’t ask them to, like, cat sit or some shit. They get out the car with this other dude called Ellis. Ellis is working for the government as a spy and he’s wearing this watch with all this sophisticated radio shit in it because you cut to a small scene of these government types listening in on the conversation that’s going on at the vineyard. They escort him into this room with all these vats of wine. One of the vats has all this cash in. Big Tuna is fucking about with this cash, saying it’s hot now but in a couple of years, they can use it for shirts with big collars or something. Blue Eyes isn’t into all this fucking around and he just wants business over and done with. He asks Ellis if he’s brought the money for these photographs that the mob have acquired. I don’t know what these photographs are of. It doesn’t even allude to them being kinky bondage shots or anything. At this point, Blue Eyes and Big Tuna are clearly fucking with him and you know this is going to end in a really bad way for this Ellis dude. They ask him about his watch and if it’s the kind of watch that works underwater. Big Tuna starts to take the watch off Ellis’ wrist while Blue Eyes strangles him with what looks like a piece of bungee cord but I don’t think they had those in the 70’s so we’ll just say it’s coloured rope. 

'Say, that's a pretty nice piece of rope HURGH! OH, GOD! WHY?!'

I don’t know why they asked him if his watch was the kind that works underwater because you think they’re going to drown him but they don’t. These are weird mafia guys. So after they’ve iced this guy, they dump him in one of the vats which is surely going to spoil the wine. That’s bad business sense and it’s no wonder these guys aren’t in charge if this is how they do things. We cut back to the government types looking frustrated that one of their guys has been killed and one of them says to the other that they need to find ‘Black Belt’ so you know that this operation has been a cluster fuck right from day one.

We’re then introduced to Kelly’s character, Black Belt Jones. He isn’t called anything other than that, or some variation thereof, throughout this movie so you’re left thinking that this might be his birth name and some role has been forced upon him by his family, like this is some future Gattaca-esque alternate universe dystopia. I don’t think it is or anything, I’m just saying it could be. Kelly is at this TV studio where this South American diplomat is making an impassioned speech. The host of this TV show says that they’ll be right back after commercial but they’ll be talking to someone else so this is the diplomat’s cue to leave. Kelly is obviously working as some sort of bodyguard for this guy and his advisors because he has this muted conversation with them about leaving the building and you imagine that he’s said that he’ll go on ahead and scout for potential threats. Outside the TV studio, the diplomat and his guys are leaving. Now, Kelly’s strolling along without a care in the world when he happens to catch sight of someone behind a parked car, with a gun. He’s not being stealth or covert or anything like that. He’s literally just walking and when he spots the guy with a gun, it’s almost like he’d forgotten that he was supposed to be looking after these guys. Anyway, he spots these assassins and bang, we’re in business. This is where the title sequence kicks in and this is my favourite part of the movie. The title sequence is all shot in slow-mo and it keeps going to these freeze frames of Kelly in action or getting ready to kick some ass while this funk track plays over the top of it. Chronologically speaking, this is technically the first time we see Kelly punching people in the dick and in this movie, he sure does show you how to punch a guy in the dick. He does it twice in this scene alone and this is just the title sequence! Amazing.  Anyway, as the title sequence comes to its conclusion, Kelly shoots an escaping assassin in the ass, places the gun carefully back where he found it, gets in his car and promptly fucks off so I guess he did forget that he was supposed to be playing body guard for these guys in the first place.

'You need more lead in your...ass. I was going to say 'diet' but that wouldn't make sense'

Next, we see Kelly in this government guys’ office and it’s the same guy from earlier on in the film who realised all too late that trying to infiltrate a criminal organisation wasn’t as easy as, say, a game of Snap. He’s saying that they need someone to break into Don Steffano’s operation and they’ve already lost three people to this asshole. Kelly isn’t interested because he thinks they’ll kill his ass too and so starts a running theme of Kelly holding down a government job with a lot of responsibility but not wanting to do what they pay him for unless he has a personal interest in it (see my ‘Black Samurai’ review). You’ve got to ask yourself; if Kelly doesn’t want to get shot, stabbed, burned, vultured, sacrificed or whatever, then why the fuck did he say ‘Yes’ when these agencies offered him a job? Why the shit did he apply for the job in the first place?! Anyway, he tells Government Guy to have a word with the big men upstairs to arrange to have a tank shoved up this mafia dude’s ass. Government guy shows Kelly this picture of Don Steffano having an all-tits-out-super-millionaire-party with these other guys and some chicks and says that three of the guys in the picture are like senators or something important so shoving a tank up his ass is out of the question. No one mentions shoving a tank up anyone’s ass, by the way. Kelly mentions tanks but he doesn’t say to shove it up Steffano’s ass. That’s just me getting into the spirit of things. Government Guy offers him $100,000 which in 1970’s money is, like, $100,000. Kelly tells them something cryptic which is a bit racist and he leaves the office. Government Guy picks up a phone and tells his superior that he thinks Kelly will accept the mission. I don’t know why he thinks this because the conversation didn’t really play out in their favour if you ask me.

Up next; back to Don Steffano’s bad-ass vineyard and there’s some bald mob guy talking to Blue Eyes about how they murdered Ellis. Don Steffano over hears this and tells this guy never to mention Ellis again. This dude is carrying a suitcase which has all these maps and important things in it. He tells Don Steffano that he had to call in a lot of favours for the information he's about to give him although I don't know why given that Steffano is already having super-dick-out parties with chicks and senators who could easily give him this info. The senators that is, not the chicks. They're just at the party because titties. He tells Steffano that there’s a central piece of land which is the key to the whole deal. That seems a bit hyperbolic though. The city wants to build a civic centre and the mob obviously want to get in on it but saying this shitty little building is ‘the key to the whole deal’ is odd. Just buy the building. Or offer to open the karate school in one of the new buildings or set it up in a nicer area of the city. There are a lot of other options open to him and I doubt ‘kill the shit out of everyone’ is the answer anyone would arrive at first. Bald guy tells Don Steffano that the building in question is a karate school owned by a guy called Papa Byrd (played by Scatman Crothers). Steffano looks up musingly like he's had dealings with this guy in the past. Holy shit, could we be getting some ultimate karate master showdown between Crothers and Steffano? Or between Steffano and Kelly? SPOILERS No.

'Papa Byrd...Papa Byrd...wait! Is he the big, yellow chicken guy from 'Sesame Street'? No? Oh, I don't know him then'

The next scene is where we get to meet Crothers as Papa Byrd and he's a bit of an irresponsible prick. He spends his time gambling and chasing girls even though he’s like a thousand years old and runs a karate school. He ignores conversations about business, won't marry his girlfriend even though she's been waiting for him to ask for fifteen years and doesn’t seem to understand the depth of the shit that he’s in at any point in this movie. He leaves the day-to-day running of the karate school to his head karate guys called Toppy and Quincy. He arrives at the school and goes into this back room where he starts having an argument with his girlfriend, Lucy. She's looking at this picture of Crothers and this little girl who we find out is Sydney, Crothers' daughter. Toppy comes in and tries to have it out with Crothers about how he's a useless piece of shit and doesn't even teach class anymore. Lucy suggests that he doesn't teach class because he’s tired and out of shape and spends all of his time woman chasing but again, it’s more likely that it’s because he’s a thousand years old and can't lift his leg without having a stroke. If they’re trying to sell me the idea that Scatman Crothers is skilled in martial arts, I’m not buying it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Crothers at all and he's a decent actor but I barely bought him as a psychic in The Shining so I’m sure as shit not going to buy him as a martial arts instructor. Shit, I barely even believe David Carradine could throw a punch and he was in Kung Fu.

The next scene is some black panther looking dudes walking towards this club called ‘Hip Pocket’ which belongs to a big badger bearded mother fucker called Pinky. These black panther militants tell Pinky to stop selling drugs to the locals because it’s destroying the community. They don’t go into this confrontation very well prepared because Pinky’s men manage to capture them pretty quickly. Pinky’s about to do some dental work on one of the guys with a pool ball but then there’s a knock at the side door of the club. Turns out this is Big Tuna and Blue Eyes. The mob give him the job of putting the squeeze on Crothers because Pinky has been stealing money from them. There's a running theme of really fucked up maths through this film and it starts here. Big Tuna tells Pinky that they figure he's stolen about a million from Don Steffano by now and they say that he should pay half which, to Tuna, is two hundred and fifty thousand. That's...that's not half. Anyway, Pinky and these guys turn up at the karate school and start throwing the students around. Pinky likes calling people ‘ants’ which isn’t going to endear him to anyone and gets tiresome after a while. The students kick the shit out of Pinky and his men and you're left wondering why Pinky looks so indignant given that he's just taken a bunch of fat guys into a karate school and expected the owners to just hand everything over. Interesting note; one of Pinky's men, called Jelly, is played by Earl Jolly Brown who also appeared in Live and Let Die alongside Gloria Hendry who plays Sydney in this movie. Knowledge is power, kids.

If being bad at simple maths is the running theme here, then lack of basic logic skills is the sub-plot

Next, Kelly is acting as trampoline instructor for some chicks at the beach. The government can’t be paying too well if he has to work as security for South American dignitaries AND as a girls only trampoline instructor. It’s the hardest way to make an easy living I guess. He gets a call from Toppy at the karate school saying that Pinky’s men showed up earlier and they’ll probably be coming back later on that night. Kelly agrees to come and help do something about it although why they don’t call the police or community support or whatever is unknown. When Kelly arrives at the school, Toppy is concerned about Crothers because he's an irresponsible dick and he knows that he owes Pinky some money. It's a bit like Toppy can't make his mind up though because he asks Kelly to speak to him about being such a dick, Kelly agrees but then Toppy says that Crothers won't listen. Confusing but on the whole, Toppy is a responsible guy. 

So, it’s night time and Kelly is half naked at the karate school. He could have done all this in a tracksuit or something but he decides to do it half naked. Toppy is with him and they notice that Pinky and his men are coming so they turn the lights out. Kelly tells Toppy to ‘remember; every three seconds’ and you’re not sure what’s going on but this soon becomes clear. What Kelly is going to do is prowl around in the dark, all stealth and shit and Toppy will hit the lights so that Kelly can smack all of Pinky’s men in the mouth before he turns the lights off again. What follows, my friend, is amazing.

So the room’s dark. Pinky and his men are fumbling around looking for a light switch. All of a sudden Pinky shouts ‘who the hell hit me?’ and then either Kelly or Toppy shouts ‘Batman, motherfucker’ in a deep, dramatic voice. The lights come on and BANG! Kelly’s kicking ass in slow-mo before Toppy shuts the lights off again and the room is once more plunged into darkness.  This scene is my second favourite of the entire movie and it only falls short of the title sequence on the technicality that while awesome, it’s a bit silly. There’s a moment when the lights come back on and Kelly is wearing a hat. The lights are shut off and when they’re turned on again, it’s gone. For the briefest moment in time, you’re a passenger aboard the SS Fractured Brain Tank and you’re hurtling towards a haemorrhage on a sea of clown’s murder dreams. It’s truly insane.

'Hat Man, mother fucker!'

Pinky and his men retreat while Kelly and Toppy have a good laugh at their expense. Pinky and his men turn up at this bar and they start giving the staff some shit. Pinky asks the woman behind the bar who's in the back room and she lets slip that Crothers is in there. Pinky confronts Crothers at the back of the club while he’s playing poker. He tells Crothers that he owes him $11,000 which Crothers says is bullshit because he only owes him $1000. Pinky is continuing the trend for bad maths. He knows how much he owes Pinky so this guy knows when he owes someone money and he’s responsible enough to remember the amount so why doesn’t Crothers give a shit about it? I mean, by this point you know that Pinky and his guys are a pack of bastards so why try and fuck them on money in the first place? Anyway, Pinky asks one of his guys to rough up Crothers because he won’t give Pinky the money nor will he give him the karate school. Pinky’s men punch Crothers in the face a couple of times but Crothers must have a medical condition which gives him a really weak face because this punching kills him. There then follows this Viewing (I think it’s called a Viewing. I know it’s not a Wake because that’s after the dude has been buried but this is definitely before Crothers is buried) which is a really weird mix of black gospel but with some eastern influence because all his students are there doing some tai-chi around the coffin. When it comes to the funeral itself, the same shit is going there as well except this time, the eastern influence is mixed in with some traditional New Orleans funeral jazz. So,  Government Guy is at the Viewing and Kelly tells him to track down Crothers' daughter.

At the funeral, we’re introduced to Sydney who Crothers hasn’t seen since she was five years old. Sydney’s a hard bitch because she sees Crothers’ girlfriend crying and she tells them that she did all her crying on the way over. I don’t know how much I believe that. I also think she’s bi-polar and/or a malfunctioning android because she fluctuates between being sultry and seductive to satanically nasty within the blink of an eye. To be honest, she’s the worst part of this movie. It’s weird because the actress was ok in Live and Let Die but she’s just horrible in this. Kelly asks Quincy to take her to her hotel but she manipulates Quincy into dropping her off at Pinky’s pool hall where she squares off against a load of Pinky’s men with a display of some impressive karate skill but she spoils the moment with a homophobic slur which doesn’t even make sense.  After she’s kicked everyone’s ass, her demeanour changes. She goes all cold and monotone but then changes to all sweetness and light. To be quite frank, she’s scary. When she’s talking to Quincy in the car, she asks him a series of questions, one of which doesn’t make any sense and even Quincy, who let us not forget is a character in a movie working from a script, can’t answer her because he's too confused. When she first walks into the bar and asks for Pinky, she speaks like the fucking Terminator, like she has a pre-programmed set of speech parameters which she can’t deviate from. It’s difficult to understand why Kelly finds her so attractive when she has the personality of a serial killer. The fact that she can back up this detachment from humanity with lethal karate skill is nightmarish. Oh, and she also likes punching people in the dick.

'BZZZ DOES NOT COMPUTE. WHAT IS THIS THING YOU CALL 'MOURNING'? BZZZ'

Back at the school, Quincy tells Kelly how bad-ass she is in a fight. He goes for a walk with her and talks to her a bit about her father. Sydney tells Kelly that she's jealous of his relationship with her father so she's mastered this one emotion so far. Meanwhile, Pinky has been to see Steffano to explain that one of his guys can punch a man to death and that the karate school now belongs to someone called Sydney. In this scene, we're given some insight into Don Steffano's issues with Aspergers because Big Tuna tells Pinky to walk on his left side and never to walk in front of him. Earlier in the film, Steffano has an issue with the bald mob guy because he's smoking. It's pretty weird. Anyway, Pinky has brought in some hard asses from out of town who go over to the school looking for Sydney. His men have told him that Sydney is a chick and he's pretty pissed that his guys got beaten down by a woman. He shouldn't feel too bad though because she's comprised of living tissue over a metal endo-skeleton. Pinky and his new bunch of heavies beat the shit out of the students at the school and he demonstrates more bizarre maths saying that Crothers owed him $250,000. Pinky kidnaps Quincy and holds him to ransom. Toppy then makes a quick call to Kelly to tell him that Pinky has abducted Quincy and probably failed his SAT's in maths. 

Kelly is pretty pissed off about this and takes a gun out of his suitcase and tucks it into his waistband but he really needs a holster. Perhaps he can't afford one. I don’t get it though because if he’s not earning enough to buy a holster as a government employee and has to teach big titty chicks how to trampoline properly, why does he have such a massive house and all these sharp suits? His car is a piece of shit though. I mean, it looks new but it seems small. It’s really confusing. I think Black Belt Jones II should have been about Kelly getting on top of his finances. It’s easy to see why Kelly can’t balance his books because he doesn’t seem to understand what Pinky is doing when he adds more and more money to the IOU. He gets all confused and tells Toppy that he’s coming over and it sounds like he wants to get the financial side of things straight in his head before he even considers a rescue. Maybe it’s the way he learns best.

'So that's five and...carry the ten...no, mother fucker, I hadn't forgotten about the decimal point! Can't you hear me trying to work this shit out?!'

Kelly calls Government Guy and asks him to come over to the school. The whole civic centre plot line comes out and the penny finally drops for everyone concerned. Kelly asks Government Guy for some help in retrieving Quincy and Sydney offers to give Pinky the school but Kelly tells her that this isn't necessary. When Sydney is talking, she tries very hard to approximate human concern for Quincy's well-being. I can’t give her any credit for this but I’ll give her programmers at Skynet 5 out of 10 for effort. Kelly tells Toppy to wait for a call from Pinky and tells him what to say. Pinky makes a call to Toppy who says that it'll take a few days to get the money.

Back at the Government Guy's office, Kelly is telling him what he needs to get Quincy back. They're thinking that they can kill two birds with one stone and take down the mob as well as get Quincy back. Kelly asks for an additional $55,000 dollars from Government Guy who seems agitated by this. Maybe he's thinking that Kelly's maths is off and he doesn't actually need that much money but arguing with him would require a couple of hours and a whiteboard to show him how the figures work out. So, Kelly enlists his trampoline girls into his private army and offers to pay them $5,000 each if they'll help him out with a job. You then get this montage of them setting up all their gadgets for whatever it is Kelly has planned. There's a great moment where Kelly is showing one of the girls how to use a Polaroid camera. I appreciate that in the early seventies, Polaroid's may not have been that common place but it's still pretty stupid to not know how one works.

As Kelly and his trampoline ninja's are making their way into the grounds (which seems really easy - again, the government should probably have asked him to do this first then they wouldn't be down one expensive spy watch), Don Steffano is having some sort of big meet up with other mafia guys. Steffano greets everyone around this dinner table and tells them that they've been having some problems but it is a peaceful time between them all so they should just have something to eat and not talk about any unpleasantness although it's debateable that no one would have brought it up anyway so he's just the worst kind of host if you think about it. Kelly and the titty ninjas are making good progress by this point. They're kicking ass and setting up this intricate series of devices to fool Steffano into thinking that everything is ok. Steffano has all these security cameras up around the grounds so what Kelly has done is attach polaroid pictures to the fronts of the camera's so it looks like the camera is still pointing at the grounds.

'This plan is so stupid that it just might work'

The plan all along has been to steal the money that Steffano keeps in that wine vat and give that to Pinky. Kelly and Sydney escape with the money and that envelope of pictures which no one in the film has mentioned for over an hour. Kelly and Sydney turn up at this warehouse where Pinky is holding Quincy. Pinky is a double crossing piece of shit because he takes the money and gets his men to kick the shit out of Kelly. Sydney makes her way around the building to help Kelly out and her and Quincy escape while Kelly pulls off this fucking awesome kick which is all done in slow-mo. Kelly escapes and makes a call to Big Tuna to tell him that the money Pinky has given him is the same money that was stolen. Back at Pinky's place, Big Tuna and Blue Eyes are seriously going to kill Pinky because he's a double crossing piece of shit. Tuna counts the money in the bag and comes to $250,000 but then asks Pinky where the rest of it is. I think Tuna was just to embarrassed to correct himself earlier and was hoping that Pinky would be able to do the maths himself. Now he's got to kill him because they're both so shitty at division. Pinky manages to convince Tuna and Blue Eyes that it wasn't his men because they're all fat and that they wouldn't have been able to do all that kung fu in the first place. Obesity serves as scientific proof enough that he's telling the truth and they let Pinky go.

Kelly and Sydney are at the beach just talking through some stuff about their experiences and what Sydney is going to do next. She mentions that she'll be going back to New York but will continue to run the karate school. Kelly deems this as logical a point as any to try and get fresh with her and this should act as a cautionary tale to all who want to get sexy with a malfunctioning instrument of death that hasn't been programmed to do anything but destroy. This whole scene is supposed to be cute but it just comes across to me as a hunt for a rogue cyborg. When Kelly does manage to catch up to her and subdues her with his junk, I’m surprised that she doesn’t rip his dick off, apologise unconvincingly and then try and re-attach it with a hot glue gun while vomiting motor oil. Sydney also gets to showcase more of her disturbing and aggressive homophobia. During the sex chase, they come across a guy who's just playing some guitar on the beach. Sydney takes the guitar off him and tries to smash it over Kelly's head but completely destroys it against this wooden post. This guy looks seriously fucking crestfallen and they both run off without an apology or anything.

'That's the third guitar I've lost to a kung fu sex chase this week'

After the rude and uncomfortable beach sex, Kelly and Sydney are back at his house. Blue Eyes, Big Tuna and pretty much everyone else turn up at Kelly's house to kill him. Pinky calls Kelly from the car phone and screams at him about the money and the pictures so they're important enough to get the main bad guys all riled up but not important enough to explain to the viewer in any way nor mention that much. Kelly puts a quick call into Government Guy but he's not available (which is actually the second time that's happened in this movie). Kelly and Sydney jump the wall and steal a car off two tourists because they've not done enough to offend and upset innocent people in the last few hours and get into a car chase with the mob. Kelly gets diverted into a garbage truck depot but they can't make their way around all the parked trucks. Their car gets trapped at the exit of a big industrial car wash that the garbage trucks use. Kelly gets out of the car and smashes the fuse box with a wooden pallet because...yeah, there's no reason. It only really serves to create the most homoerotic scene in a movie since the beach volleyball game in Top Gun. Kelly fights literally every single guy in the soap suds and foam spilling out of the truck washer. He throws the guys over to Sydney who puts them all in the back of a garbage truck and hits 'start' on the garbage compactor. I don't think this kills them but she's probably thinking that it does. I can't imagine her disappointment that she doesn't get to hear flesh and sinew becoming pink body mash. There's a lot of dick punching in this fight and even some ball crushing so fans of this won't go hungry. So when Kelly's finished punching everything and Sydney is finished being disappointed that she can't re-stock on human screams, Kelly and Sydney get into the truck with the intention of driving it to the police or the government or God know's who. They're stopped by Government Guy and a load of Policemen who escort the truck out of the city towards somewhere official and government-y.

Disturbingly, it kind of looks like Kelly's beating up a black Santa at one point

So, this is a pretty good movie with some intentionally funny moments. It's a better made movie than Black Samurai so why Jim Kelly didn't keep with a better quality of production like this, I don't know. There are still some bizarre plot inconsistencies though like the photographs which are built up to mean something but then come to nothing and some of the characterisation is odd like Sydney's aggression and Steffano's Aspergers but this is exactly what makes it a classic exploitation movie. Sadly, there’s no decent version of this movie readily available on Region 2 (if, like me, you live in the U.K, this is balls) so you may well have to buy a Region 1 copy and get yourself a multi-regional DVD player. Or tell the man to suck your dick and just download it from a torrent site. I don’t care. Alternatively, we can all band together and option Arrow Video or Shameless Screen Entertainment to give us a shiny new 1080p version? I’m going to start that shit right away. Last one on Arrow’s website gets a punch in the dick.

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