User Reviews

This movie could be shown on 'Cinemax Friday After Dark' and fit right in; a blackplotation movie with a soft-porn touch. The scene where Mr. Johnathan meets a client only to be seduced by client's very young daughters then mom shows up and demonstrates to her girls how to do it right is porn plot 101. The heroine in the movie spends the last half running around with a shirt with no pants or underwear so you see what you see. The movie is about a mob boss trying to get his girl back from this hairdresser dude who's like the John Holmes of hairdresser dude's or something. The thing is, he's horrible a actor. His extremely gay co-workers(not that there's anything wrong with that) are very entertaining and make the move. The mob guys are pretty bad too, but in a low-budget blackplotation you're not going to get Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro.

"Black Sampoo" tells the story of a black hairdresser, who, due to his physics, is booked by lonely ladies hungry for sex. When he falls in love with his new receptionist, things soon turn ugly, as he discovers that she has been previously involved with the organized crime and is now chased by them, thus bringing everyone in the saloon in serious danger.

The movie pretty much starts as a soft porn and develops into a very average mob story. It is neither very creative nor innovative, but at least it tries to provide some sort of story to connect the nude scenes in between. The acting is actually not bad and all together this could be just an average trash movie, if it wasn't for a very ugly scene. In this scene the character tries to rape a girl and, after a while, seems to convince her into mutual sex. Now of course this whole film objectifies women anyway, which is bad enough in itself, nevertheless this tops everything that happened before. The idea that is sent out through this, that "No!" is really just a "Try harder!" is so ugly that I cannot but give the lowest rating here.

All in all this is a lot of nudity connected by a mediocre story and a very unhealthy attitude towards sexual independence.

Just finished watching Black Shampoo - a 70's Blaxploitation flick from Greydon Clark(director of such B-movie shenigans as The Bad Bunch,Joysticks & Skinheads).A paperthin plot loosely based on Warren Beatty's Shampoo - OK well more written to capitalize on the publicity of Shampoo. John Daniels is the hero of the piece - a studly hairdresser who seems to be more of a stud for hire than stylist- sadly John Daniels has very little personality or charisma and seems disinterested whenever women seduce him. Somehow he manages to hire a shapely receptionist(played by Tanya Boyd) who is a former kept woman of a rich bad guy- of course Daniels falls for her and gets entangled in her problems-luckily there was a chainsaw on the rented cabin set ,,,, Black Shampoo is a terrible film- and very much fun- tons of gratuitous nuditity,ridiculous dialogue and a monotone audio commentary by the director(during a nude love scene he mentions how professional the leads were and that they liked each other)- the DVD also includes deleted scenes without audio- the scenes from the C&W Bar-B-Que with the piefight and the chicken toss are dadaist masterpieces. If you are looking for a fun escapist unintentional comedy Black Shampoo is a must rent.

John Daniels, fresh his triumphant portrayal of a smooth mack daddy pimp in the immortal "The Candy Tangerine Man," does his charmless macho black stud muffin on wheels shtick once again as Mr. Jonathan, a tough, irresistible, and extremely promiscuous hairdresser who happily does the deed with his lovely, wealthy, and predominantly white distaff customers. Mr. Jonathan's carefree hedonistic Los Angeles existence gets disrupted when a bunch of pernicious Italian gangsters led by despicable greaseball Joe Ortiz trash his Sunset Strip beauty salon and try to steal his foxy main squeeze Tanya Boyd away from him. Not one to idly tolerate being pushed around, Mr. Jonathan breaks out a handy chainsaw to kick some major syndicate butt! Cheesy, low-rent, and fabulously addle-pated, this honey rates highly as one delectably dopey blaxploitation combination of dippy soap opera and sleazy revenge action: Greydon Clark's unskillful direction manages to be quite savory in a schlocky stupid sort of way, there's plenty of torrid quasi-pornographic sex scenes and mouth-watering full-frontal female nudity (Mrs. Boyd in particular looks blazing hot in her birthday suit), the priceless godawful dialogue will leave you in stitches ("So, Mr. Jonathan, is it true that you are the best in the West?"), the other two male beauty salon employees are hysterically offensive and politically incorrect limp-wristed gay stereotypes (one of these homosexuals winds up having a hot curling iron crammed right where the sun doesn't shine!), the cinematography by Dean Cundey and Michael J. Mileham alternates between the slick and the shoddy with heart-warming frequency, Gerald Lee's get-down funky-grinding score sounds like it belongs in a raunchy 70's X-rated flick, and the climactic outburst of last reel action delivers oodles of bloody excessive violence. Overall, this riotously rancid chunk of prime 70's drive-in junk offers enough seamy thrills to appease even the most jaded "I've seen it all" aficionado of vintage Graze Z exploitation fare.

I'm a fan of director Greydon Clark. I was able to see him a few years back and the Cinema Wasteland convention. I'd heard the name before but it wasn't until after seeing him and hearing him talk about several of his films that I realized the movies of his that I'd seen. None of them would qualify as amazing movies but they were fun films anyway. So as a fan of Blaxploitation films and Clark when I heard that BLACK SHAMPOO was coming out on blu-ray I was looking forward to it. My hopes were not met.

The movie revolves around Mr. Jonathan (John Daniels), the owner of a hair salon on Sunset Strip who's incredibly successful. In part that's because he and his staff are the best hairdressers around. But it also is due to the fact that Mr. Jonathan not only takes care of his customer's hair but some of their "other needs" as well. Yes, the man is an all-out stud. As a matter of fact before we get to the real story here he takes care of 5 different women.

But his new receptionist Brenda (Tanya Boyd) has a problem. Her past catches up to her when the goons who work for her previous boss Mr. Wilson come to the salon while Mr. Jonathan is out. They rough up the two stereotypical gay hairdressers and tell Brenda to come with them. Rather than go she tells them she'll call later.

When Mr. Jonathan comes back to the shop he's not pleased with what transpired. When Brenda says she plans to leave, he instead tells her they're going out to dinner. We move from there to a montage of dinner set to soft sung music that ends up in a self-propelled peddle paddleboat ride (huh ?). While they're gone the mobsters return and trash the salon.

Returning home Mr. Jonathan and Brenda do what one would expect. They are upset at the carnage, bypass it and go jump in bed together for another round of sexual situations. The next morning Brenda is gone and the staff are cleaning. Mr. Jonathan goes looking for her in his Mercedes convertible. I mean, because it should be easy to find someone who doesn't want to be found by driving around town, right? When he gets back the goons are there again and take him to see Mr. Wilson.

Brenda appears to be happy and content. In reality she has returned to the mobster because she doesn't want trouble for anyone else. Mr. Jonathan leaves and heads to his cabin retreat in the woods so he can shoot pool there (again I say huh?). It isn't long before Brenda gets hold of Wilson's book with information that can jail him and heads to find Mr. Jonathan. Followed by the bad guys a fight is destined and Mr. J comes through, chainsaw and all.

Where to begin? First off the story is ridiculous and unbelievable. The acting is atrocious from everyone involved. The camera work is faded and washed out which stunned me when you see it was done by the amazing Dean Cundey. At least he has the excuse that the film was low budget, he took over after the first day of shooting and this was one of his earliest films. Perhaps that's an excuse for Clark as well since this was only his second film.

Perhaps the one good thing that can be said about the film is that it doesn't use the usual type of lead character that we've had in the past for Blaxploitation films. He isn't a pimp or a drug dealer but the successful owner of a business. That being said the Blaxploitation film had already begun to lose favor with viewers by the time this film came out and it may have contributed to the death of the genre. It truly is a bad movie. Those who love it often cite it as one of those movies that's so bad it's good. I didn't find that to be the case.

One more thing to note that many others have discussed as well. The first part of this movie almost takes it out of the Blaxploitation genre and places it in the sexploitation genre instead. There is plenty of skin on display here and plenty of sex to go with it. One sequence even involves two teenage girls stripping and taking care of Mr. Jonathan before mom comes out and takes over. That seems to be going a bit overboard even for films in the genre. So be aware of that going in if you think this is worth your time. I can't honestly say I'd recommend it though.

The genuinely bad acting in this is so blatant that I'm surprised that the actors didn't have grins when saying their lines. But it's amateurish details like this that makes it so much fun, with only minimal aspects in common with the Warren Beatty straight hair dresser film. The opening sequence is so blatantly raunchy with the white female clients so full of lust for black hairdresser John Daniels that they can't keep their hands off his nether regions. He's willing to oblige, but obviously lust doesn't mean passion, at least for him.

It's ironic that the masculine Daniels works for the openly gay Skip E. Lowe, and has absolutely no homophobia about it. Lowe and his black lover, Gary Allen, may be stereotypes, but they have no shame about it and are certainly no tragic "Boys in the Band" archetypes, and they sure know how to throw a party! They're very protective of him there, keeping the lecherous hawks from swooping in. Lowe and Allen contribute greatly to the story, although they get badly beat in a horrifying moment, Lowe tortured cruelly.

Also in this film's favor are the romantic scenes with Daniels and Tanya Boyd, the new receptionist, the one time mistress of mobster Joe Ortiz who has the salon vandalized. It's obvious that he doesn't feel objectified in their love making, and that's one of the points the film makes. It's cheaply done certainly but has some great vintage L. A. location shots. As poorly made as it is, there's something endearingly sweet about it, even though the direction really makes the film suffer as a whole. After all, nobody makes a John Waters film like the real deal, and this is a poor relation.

Director and writer Greydon Clark had $50,000 and the idea to take Shampoo and make a black version, subverting blacksploitation by having its hero - Jonathan (John Daniels) - be a business owner instead of the expected criminal. The director of photography had a car accident and still said he would show up. He didn't and the film's gaffer, Dean Cundey, took over.

Mr. Jonathan's is the most successful hair salon for women on the Sunset Strip and that's because, well, every old and rich white woman in town is coming to get dicked down by Mr. Jonathan. There's no other polite way to say it. Backed up by hairdressers Artie (Skip E. Lowe, the inspiration for Jiminy Glick) and Richard (Gary Allen), he lives the kind of life that Machete would later imitate.

He soon falls in love with his receptionist, Brenda (Tanya Boyd), who breaks his heart when she disappears. That's because she's been kidnapped by her ex, a white mobster, and Jonathan loses his mind after they tear up his shop and even sexually abuse his hairdressers. So he does what any of us would. He gets a chainsaw and kills everyone.

This is the kind of movie where a white woman looks at a nude black man and says, "Oh my God! Mr. Jonathan, it IS bigger and better!" Perhaps you will not be surprised by just how bad the depiction of its gay characters is. This was made in 1976 and that's in my lifetime. Also: nearly everyone used stage names as it was non-union, so William Bonner is billed as Jack Meoff. That's kind of the name you'd expect from a porn, but this feels like an adult movie for the first section - there's a scene in which two young women in a pool seduce Mr. Johnathan before their mother mounts him and makes them watch - and then it becomes a romance before someone is sodomized with a curling iron and revenge comes with a pool cue, an axe and finally, that chainsaw in a gory climax no one saw coming.

BLACK SHAMPOO is a hilariously camp slice of blaxploitation cheese courtesy of noted B-movie director Greydon Clark. The story sees the wooden, Jim Kelly-lookalike lead running his hairdressers, where he finds plenty of time to romance his clientele in lots of softly-lit softcore sex scenes. The film features a whole slew of young and nubile actresses willing to strip off for their parts while John Daniels looks on impassively.

Later, the film becomes a thriller of sorts, featuring a squad of threatening white gangsters with a rich line in cheesy dialogue who show up to threaten our hero and his business. Violence ensues, although not until the climax which pours on the ketchup quite liberally. As a film, BLACK SHAMPOO is very difficult to take seriously, although genre fans might get a laugh or two out of it.