Slaughter

Opening with Billy Preston singing about 'bold, beautiful and black... ', this is the familiar mixture of mafia machismo (laced with a little camp) and black avenger theme, as Jim Brown's Slaughter, Vietnam vet, takes out after the syndicate responsible for the death of his parents. Best things about the film are its outrageous set-ups (for once, visual distortion is used to genuinely amazing effect), and Rip Torn's mean-arsed slob of a mafioso. Otherwise it tends to the mechanical: a broad beaten up here, a car chase there... Not in the Superfly class.