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Jun 22, 2015 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Diana “Sugar” Hill sits on a fence overlooking the pig pen where her living dead cohorts have dragged their mobster captive. Sugar’s stylish white suit is dirt-free; the bigoted gangster’s is wrinkled, sweaty. From her perch, she mentions that the hogs haven’t been fed any garbage in days and that they must be quite hungry by now. The mobster begs for mercy. As he screams, the zombies pitch him over the fence, where the pigs converge on him. Sugar Hill smirks: “I hope they’re into white trash.”

“Meet Sugar Hill and her zombie hit men… The Mafia has never met anything like them!” reads the tagline on Sugar Hill’s original 1974 theatrical poster. It’s very much a product of its time: a Blaxploitation flick with a funk soundtrack, full of dated slang and early disco fashion. The film was produced by b-movie factory American International Pictures, who had recently had great success combining Blaxploitation and horror with the Blacula films. The plot is rather straight-forward: in the film’s first few minutes, Sugar’s boyfriend is beaten to death by mafia thugs attempting to strong-arm him into selling his hip nightclub. Grief-stricken and angry, Sugar consults her voodoo priestess relative, Mama Maitresse (The Jeffersons’ Zara Cully), for help. They perform a ritual to summon Baron Samedi (THX 1138’s Don Pedro Colley), the voodoo lord of the dead. After convincing him her hate is strong enough, he provides her with a zombie hit squad (reanimated corpses that had once been slaves) and his assistance in exacting revenge on the men who killed Sugar Hill’s love.

Sugar Hill from that point on is pretty episodic: Sugar moves from one mobster to the next, using voodoo to pick them off one by one in increasingly over-the-top manners. (Despite having a zombie army at her disposal, she’s able to get her revenge without their help as often as not.) The film’s main problem is that it’s neither a great Blaxploitation picture—Marki Bey, who plays Sugar, is no Pam Grier, and doesn’t sell the anger her character supposedly embodies—nor an effective horror flick. (The performances are ultra-campy, and the violence is surprisingly tame.) The zombie design is unnerving, however: the walking corpses are hardly decayed after 100+ years of burial, and all have bulging, round, silver eyes. Zombie connoisseurs will enjoy seeing the monsters returned to their voodoo roots, but should come in expecting a film more goofy than gory.

Kino Lorber Studio Classics’ new Blu-ray of Sugar Hill offers a fine audiovisual presentation for a 40-year-old low-budget feature. Where it really shines, however, is with its bonus features: the disc includes the film’s original trailer, plus interviews with the director and actors. There’s also a full audio commentary by the filmmaker, Paul Maslansky, who only directed this one film, but later went on to find fame as a producer and creator of the Police Academy series.

www.kinolorber.com/video.php?id=2044

Author rating: 6/10