"I wasn't saying dirty words just to say them... It was a form of art, sketches in which I developed ghetto characters who cursed. I don't want to be referred to as a dirty old man, rather a ghetto expressionist.
-Rudy Ray Moore
Considering white folks are the undisputed champions of whitewashing shit from other cultures, It's not always so easy to tell exactly where certain tropes have been stolen from. I have seen my fair share of Giallo films, F. W. Murnau's silent classics, and Ingmar Bergman's flicks to know when they are being referenced. So when I saw this movie for the first time, I spent most of its runtime pissed off at a certain toe-sucking filmmaker who is far less original and interesting than I gave him credit for.
Petey Wheatstraw (also known as Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law) is a 1977 American blaxploitation comedy film written and directed by Cliff Roquemore, and starring comedian Rudy Ray Moore alongside Jimmy Lynch, Leroy Daniels, Ernest Mayhand, Ebony Wright, and Wildman Steve Gallon. Beginning life as the afterbirth of a watermelon, the young Wheatstraw becomes a martial artist but is unable to beat the evil comedy team of Leroy and Skillet, who also indulge in wholesale murder. Satan restores the comedians' victims to life and charges Petey with the task of marrying his clock-stoppingly ugly daughter to give him a grandchild. When Petey attempts to default on the deal, he is pursued by the devil's henchmen.
If you we around to see this movie when it first came out, this wouldn't be the first time you had heard the name Rudy Ray Moore. He had already created the character Dolemite the pimp and put a few early 70s comedy albums. in April 1975, Dolemite the movie was released nationally and has been described as "one of the great blaxploitation movies" of the 1970s. The character was "the ultimate ghetto hero: a bad dude, profane, skilled at kung-fu, dressed to kill and hell-bent on protecting the community from evil menaces. He was a pimp with a kung-fu-fighting clique of prostitutes and he was known for his sexual prowess." This movie was one of the later films in his streak of mostly independent films, but that being said we unquestionably get that same loveable Dolemite character in the most exaggerated and ridiculous way possible. Even with no real idea who Rudy Moore is and was, this movie is a damn good time from start to finish.
For a movie that claims to be mostly about a battle between the coolest man who ever lived and Satan himself, I love how the whole devil plot basically gets put on the back burner to focus more on the characters. Besides being an absolute icon, Petey isn't the only master of his craft on screen. Sleazy club owners Skillet (Ernest Mayhand) and Leroy (Leroy Daniels) were a real-life comedy team who started out on the Chitlin' Circuit (a small collection of theatres in the Midwest considered to be by, for, and about black people) back in the 1940s and serve quite well as a potty-mouthed Abbot and Costello. throw in a tracksuit-wearing daughter pimpin devil played bizarrely by G. Tito Shaw, Various horny ladies/demons, and you get a film that is never boring and always bizarre.
In a way, this movie almost feels like a mix between SHAFT and James Bond. a genuinely badass antihero who takes no shit and protects his community at all costs. It is a kind of grindhouse vibe that folks like Tarantino have been trying to match for there whole career, and most likely never will.
10/10
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