BLACK VOODOO

Al Adamson cheapo released on Xenon video as part of their “Classic Blaxploitation” series, Black Voodoo is really neither of those, classic or blaxploitation. With only 3 black cast members and no Man keeping them down, it’s more of a horror shocker with Voodoo references. It does have a few outstanding scenes, but it's certainly not any kind of classic. Released in 1977, kinda late in the day for blaxpolitation movies, I guess Adamson just threw several genres in a blender and this is what came out. Maybe I’m giving him too much credit. At times it looks like Adamson made this up as he went along.
The plot, if you can call it that, is about the revenge of religious cult leader, Thomas Reanhaur (played wonderfully hammy by Geoffrey Land.) I was drawn to watch Creepy Preacher, with his weird enunciation and screwed up mouth clenched shut and talking out the side of his head. Creepy Preacher died on the operating table a few years back at the hospital which our three young nurses happen to work at. Don’t worry; you get to see him again later, or at least his head, disembodied and floating around laughing the requisite maniacal laughter. He takes revenge from beyond the grave on the denizens of the hospital through possession of one of the nurses, who is initially unaware of her extracurricular activities. The scene where well-endowed nurse Sherri (Jill Jacobson) is possessed is a standout. With laughable special effects like drawing on the film and collage editing, some kinda fantastic cheap-ass psychedelic implied sexual horror scene is done, which achieves being honestly unsettling even as you laugh at the thrift and ridiculousness of it all. There are subplots for each of the nurses and the men they pair up with. One nurse is making whoopee with a patient—gee, do you think anything bad happens to them? The one black nurse Beth, played by Mary Kay Pass (with a brief topless scene), makes friends with a recently blinded pro football player who just happened to grow up in Haiti watching his aunt practicing Voodoo, and thus is an expert on Voodoo. The possessed Sherri continues killing, until her doctor boyfriend figures something’s wrong, and she and the other nurses go to exhume Reanhaur’s body and burn it to stop the eeee-vil.
The nurses are the only ones really appealing in this movie, except for the few scenes with villain Reanhaur, in which he “walks” away with the film. Part of the music for this movie early on felt very inappropriate (leftover from another project?). Later, it got better. Seemingly hobbled together from chewing gum and toothpicks, this film has it’s most flavor in it’s brief violent moments— a pitchfork through the gut, a stabbing, someone falling into iron melting pot, attempted meat cleaver massacre, but also in the udderly amazing tight sweater worn by Pass in the finale. Sherri also looked great in a low-cut slip covered with blood, but hey, who doesn’t? With a boring car chase, objects (including a knife) thrown around a room by the ghost, and gratuitous floating head. Also known as Possession of Nurse Sherri, Beyond The Living, Hospital of Terror, Killer’s Curse, Hands of Death, Terror Hospital, and possibly more titles.