KEN NORTON BEATS 'MANDINGO' WITH HIS OWN 'DRUM'

Part of a nifty Asian poster for Steve Carver's DRUM Year: 1976

It would take a miracle to erase the glorious cinematic exploitation of MANDINGO, wherein real life boxing champ Ken Norton plays a "Mandingo Fighting Slave" that his new master trains to death-wrestle other slaves, or perhaps just a more contained followup would do the trick...

Not a sequel but, directed by action-auteur Steve Carver, DRUM is an effectively lean, mean, sparse and vastly underrated vehicle that would have worked with or without making up for the catastrophic predecessor that Quentin Tarantino deemed "The SHOWGIRLS of the 1970's," which would make this exceptional entry, with Norton in the title role, a comeback... Although, being a boxer, where the retirement age is usually young and, after enough punches, brain damage can occur, even a bad movie is a good move, especially when surrounded by great actors such as Warren Oates and Isela Vega, together again two-years after Sam Peckinpah's BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, a bizarre labor-of-love almost as Critically-Ashamed as MANDINGO (for completely different reasons), and unfairly so...

Bring Me the Head of DRUM

They're only in a few scenes together, primarily the setup taking place in her mansion (following a quick Cuban-set montage/backstory) where Oates – as a Slave Trading plantation owner – buys Drum to be a (half black) "Breeder" for what were also referred in MANDINGO as "Suckers" i.e. Babies, sold for a generous profit and wanting to give his immense yet unkempt manor more class, particularly when gold-digging Fiona Lewis moves in with an ulterior (marital) motive beyond spreading proper etiquette...

Meanwhile, stealing scenes with more open sexuality and sly manipulation, is the estate's promiscuous daughter... LASERBLAST blonde starlet Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith... who will do anything to grab hold of Drum's stick (sorry, just had to). After he rejects her numerous advances, she sets her determined, lusty sites on his best friend, Blaze, played by the black acting-ringer herein...

A once hard to find VHS is now a terrific Blu Ray

Cult Film Freak's personal acquaintance and interviewee, Yaphet "The Black Brando" Kotto got the acting bug following a New York afternoon screening of ON THE WATERFRONT: He's the perfect partner for Norton, who, as a real life athlete, looks better than he delivers lines... Yet there's a natural, loose vibe about him, effective enough to care about, and one scene, as Kotto knocks him down during the first half of a brawl – which entails boxing instead of wrestling – is like watching Apollo Creed losing to ROCKY Balboa in the beachy foot race in part III...

Rainbeaux Smith

Back on track: Although DRUM doesn't center entirely on the viciousness of slavery or throwing phrases around as if they were commonplace, it deals primarily with a seemingly idyllic homestead in complete disarray, Drum an even-keeled part of it, all leading to a hands-on mutiny that seems as if the slaves, following Kotto's instigating "Fletcher Christian" lead, had screened MANDINGO hours earlier.

Norton with Kotto... FILM SCORE: ***1/2

Warren Oates is good, of course, though not his usual great, and, like Perry King as Norton's previous owner, he's able to be as vulnerable as he's racist, which, to him, is simply part of the job (plus, compared to Royal Dano's truly harsh slave trader, Oates is Mickey Mouse): And for a man who "Doesn't seem to know any better," he learns a prolonged lesson: first through a risqué in-house melodrama and then the literally explosive finale. Meanwhile, a creepy, all-encompassing villain in a bi-sexual Frenchman, played by BATTLESTAR GALACTICA double-crosser John Colicos, gives Norton, and the audience, someone to truly despise. Yet what our titular hero holds back is everything; his expressions speak historic volumes... And it's great Ken had this chance to prove his abilities, which, sadly, didn't last long since, especially at this point, the Blaxploitation genre (where he made a terrific hero) was pretty much dead and gone, ironically caused by Organizations like the NAACP, putting many of their own out of work in movies where, albeit full of cliches, some incredible talent (like Kotto in BONE) had derived and flourished: More proof that the party poopers aren't always narrow-minded, letter-writing church mice!