Looking Back at the Surprisingly Solid 1976 Evil Pimp Possession Horror Shocker J.D's Revenge On its 24th Anniversary or Whatever

Arthur Marks died recently at the ripe old age of 92, a veteran television director and top-tier auteur of Blaxploitation era whose films include the Quentin Tarantino-heralded 1973 cop drama Detroit 9000, which the cult filmmaker re-released through his Rolling Thunder imprint, the tremendously fun 1975 neighborhood comedy Monkey Hustle, which is notable for a majestic lead performance by the great Yaphet Kotto and for being the only major film Rudy Ray Moore made during his Carter-era golden age that wasn’t traditionally a Rudy Ray Moore movie.

As Blaxploitation evolved in weird and interesting and unexpected ways, Marks evolved with it. Blacula and Ganja & Hess helped kick off a horror boom in Blaxploitation that was alternately crowd-pleasing and conventional and arty and metaphorically potent. Marks’ 1976 possession thriller J.D’s Revenge splits the difference between those two approaches and aesthetics with a surprisingly scary, surprisingly substantive exploration of the supernatural angst of Isaac Hendrix, a nice young man played by the great Glynn Turman who undergoes a horrifying transformation when the evil spirit of vicious pimp J.D Walker (David McKnight) takes hold of his body, mind and ultimately life after entering his soul during a hypnotist’s act gone awry. 

The first, and perhaps foremost triumph of J.D’s Revenge is that it’s any damn good at all. The camp comedy potential for a fundamentally serious movie about a man gripped with a bad case of being possessed by an evil pimp from the 1940s who makes him do bad things to the ladies and communicate in an increasingly pimpish, rhyming fashion with each successive scenes is off the chain. It’s bottomless. A movie with this premise shouldn’t be scary at all. It should be absurd, ridiculous, pure kitsch, a film-length Saturday Night Live sketch in an alternate world where Lorne Michaels’ sketch comedy institution employed more than one African-American at a time. 

J.D’s Revenge realizes at least some of its boundless potential for unintentional laughs once the long dead pimp takes over completely and a performance that has otherwise been shockingly well-modulated and restrained becomes big and cartoonishly broad. He becomes a Halloween shop cartoon of a pimp rather than the glowering figure of menace he has otherwise been throughout. 

It helps that Turman, director Marks and screenwriter Jaison Starkes ground the action in a plausible, fully fleshed-out reality. Isaac begins the movie the very picture of steadfast masculine responsibility. He splits his time between going to law school, working a part time job and attending to his girlfriend. His friends think Isaac is dutiful to the point of being boring but that all changes when they head out for a night out in colorful New Orleans and end up taking in a hypnotist who is, if anything, way too real and way too effective. 

While under hypnosis, and consequently very in tune with the spirit world, Isaac falls under the murderous, sadistic spell of a pimp who died violently, and inevitably, in the freezer of a butcher shop in a flashback we literally revisit twenty or thirty times as Isaac relives it over and over and over and over and over again. And then we revisit it some more. It’s a measure of how fundamentally scary the film is that this unrelenting repetition never becomes unintentionally comic, although I will concede that the stark, horrifying images of dead human bodies and the carcasses of cows and blood oozing everywhere grows considerably less scary the thirtieth or so time around. 

The formerly ramrod straight athlete, scholar and hard-working cab driver develops a Jeckyl & Hyde relationship with vengeance-crazed dead pimp J.D Walker, whose malevolent essence crawls opportunistically out of the grave and takes J.D over, little by little, in a mad posthumous quest for revenge. 

In one of the many welcome perversities of J.D’s Revenge, it is established incontrovertibly that our tormented hero/anti-hero/villain is not just a hard working cabbie whose long hours as both a student and taxi driver are continually, and I would argue, incorrectly posited as explanations and excuses for his continual villainous outbursts of flagrant supernatural pimpery, but very specifically an employee of Yellow Cab. 

I can only imagine how overjoyed the corporate offices at Yellow Cab must have been to be associated with a vicious procurer of female flesh and sadist who, at one point in the film, uses a Yellow Cab as a weapon when he purposefully drives in a way that sends his elderly passenger flying violently against the sides of his cab in a manner designed to injure, if not kill. 

Isaac becomes more J.D Walker-like in each successive scene as he diligently, menacingly assembles the wardrobe necessary to recreate the long-dead pimp’s signature “pimp-slap-happy dandy” look. First comes an appropriately pimpish hat, then the equally flamboyant garments that complete the transformation from muscle-bound collegiate jock to supernatural danger to beautiful women and weak, sinful men alike. 

In the kind of performance that would undoubtedly nab an Oscar nomination, or an Oscar, if the Academy didn’t so shamefully and deliberately snub horror movies about clean-cut young men possessed by evil pimps, Turman invests a shocking amount of nuance and subtlety into the surprisingly complicated, metaphorically rich interplay between Ike the nice hard working bore and J.D Walker, sociopathic woman-hater and terror of the New Orleans underworld. 

At first, J.D’s presence manifests himself primarily as a sinister gleam in the eye that wordlessly but powerfully conveys that Isaac has lost control and something evil has taken hold. The two men are a steady in contrasts. Where Isaac is nice if a little boring and predictable, J.D is sexually voracious, sadistic, repeatedly refers to himself as “Daddy” in an unsavorily sexual fashion and says, “I hate you, bitch” so often that it threatens to become his catchphrase. 

In true blaxploitation tradition, J.D’s Revenge makes a point of going too far, of extending sex scenes charged with an air of violence or outright sexual assault long past the point necessary from a narrative standpoint, where it begins to feel ugly and exploitative, if also queasily effective. 

J.D’s Revenge reflects the thorny, complicated racial, class and gender issues at play in the seedy, sensationalistic realm of Blaxploitation. J.D is an old school NAACP establishment civil rights activist’s nightmare, a vicious and all too vividly realized nasty, negative, racist stereotype of African-American men as vicious, heartless sexual sadists lost in a nighttime world of sin and criminality. 

Yet Turman gives the character unexpected depth and nuance. J.D is a misogynistic monster but he’s also a victim, on some level, of the ugliness and racism that shaped and molded him. Turman ultimately goes a little too far and gets a little too big but he manages to hold off broad caricature for so long, and with such craft, that it’s hard to begrudge him a little peacocking, pimp-talking and scenery-chewing once J.D has taken over and the handsome gent makes a transformation into full-on pimp. 

Before watching J.D Revenge I knew Turman had an impressive and lengthy career. I did not realize how auspicious it really was. As a child actor Turman was in the original Broadway production of Raisin in the Sun. He starred in the seminal blaxploitation coming of age cult classic Cooley High, directed and costarred in A Different World and played the mayor on The Wire as well as appearing in movies like Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg, Gremlins,  Deep Cover, Super 8 and Bumblebee. 

Turman’s career would have been even more impressive had George Lucas not gotten cold feet about inter-racial inter-galactic romance and cast him as Han Solo as he reportedly considered doing. Oh, and Turman also includes Aretha Franklin among his ex-wives. The man has led a fascinating life and delivers a genuinely mesmerizing performance here that puts a bracingly harsh blaxploitation spin on the possession subgenre. 

Equally good is a young actor destined for a similarly auspicious career: future Academy Award winner Louis Gossett as Elijah Bliss, a sham preacher who may or may not believe his own flamboyant sermons whose brother has long-ago deadly history with J.D. Having two legitimately great actors in legitimately great roles goes a long way towards setting apart J.D’s Revenge from its peers. Marks always had a great way with actors and he has two heavyweights in demanding and rewarding roles in Turman and Gossett. 

The “Legacy” section of Marks’ Wikipedia page notes, “the A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin opined that, while (Detroit 3000) was flawed, it was also an "interesting, thoroughly watchable film, and considering its genre and origins, that's something of an achievement."[9]

With the benefit of hindsight, I would like to invite the me of eighteen years ago to go fuck himself with that condescending “considering its genre and origins” bullshit. I was stupid to think that there were only a handful of good, let alone great blaxploitation movies. Hell, Marks alone made two other interesting, thoroughly watchable films I hadn’t even seen yet but would go on to sincerely dig in Monkey Hustle and J.D’s Revenge. 

J.D’s Revenge has some genuinely horrifying aspects that have nothing to do with the shockingly real, visceral horror at its core. In one horrifying scene, Isaac’s best friend sidekick tells him that he’s glad that Isaac stopped being so passive and smacked his girlfriend around while under J.D’s influence because a little rough-handling is necessary in a healthy relationship. The friend is never punished for being not just an apologist but an advocate for physically assaulting women, nor is he explicitly established as a bad person we should hate the way we do the pimps and murderers that are the film’s primary villains. 

To say that J.D’s Revenge is problematic would be a phenomenal understatement. Then again you could say that of Blaxploitation as a genre and many, if not most of its films. That’s part of what makes the field so fascinating and transgressive and deep.

In addition to being a genuinely scary horror film for much of its duration, J.D’s Revenge ends up saying a surprising amount about the intersection of gender, race, sex, violence and money, albeit some of it deeply ugly and wrong. 

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