Another bottom-of-the-barrel Graze Z exploitation quickie from director Al Adamson, widely considered to be one of the worst directors of all time (even worse than Ed Wood, yes...at least Wood's films were somewhat entertaining). After a run of shoddy horror epics in the late '60s/early '70s, Adamson, ever one to cash in on a popular cinema trend to make a few bucks, turned his hand to the blaxploitation genre and ran off a couple of thrillers (DEATH DIMENSION is another of his cardboard productions, slightly - ever so slightly - more interesting due to the introduction of martial arts). This is a boringly sub-standard cops-and-robbers thriller yarn in which a black policeman goes after the people running a crime syndicate from a brothel which fronts as a hotel. There's more than that, but the plot is so convoluted and contrived that you can't be bothered to care. The only good thing is the funky music score that permeates through the action.

The main problem with the film is that the entire cast is so unappealing. The women are frequently naked (of course) which doesn't help and the men are just sweaty bad actors. Timothy Brown is the blaxploitation hero obviously modelled to be a Shaft clone, yet lacks the natural charisma his role demands - he just seems wooden and a clichéd macho-type (check out his hilariously dated - not to mention - Shaft-style love scene with a reporter). And Russ Tamblyn is just pathetic as a moustachioed villain, his weight blossoming and good looks vanished both at the same time (it's amazing that he enjoyed a second stage of his career in later life, even if it was in the hands of Fred Olen Ray).

The action highlights include a hostage-taker who accidentally blows himself and his hostage up when his bomb becomes trapped in a car door, a handful of boringly routine shoot-outs in the street where bad actors clutch their chests as they die, and a really unexciting car crash where a vehicle rolls down a cliff in slow-motion after some poor editing attempts to convince you it was nudged off the road by another car. Adamson does manage a few choice moments, such as an uncomfortable spot which displays the downside of gambling where a penniless broad bets her body to a group of greasy thugs and loses, but these are few and far between. Mostly it's just rip-off after rip-off after cliché, with that old hoary chestnut of a rooftop chase being dragged out of the closet yet again for another airing down.

The finale involves a police raid on the villains' headquarters, where the lesbian crime queen (!) is arrested and Tamblyn is impaled on a piece of scrap metal (the only moderately gory shot the film offers). Things still drag on though, to a showdown in the desert straight out of CHARLEY VARRICK, where the final bad guy (a Bobby Rhodes wannabe) attempts to escape via plane before it's blown out of the sky by an incredibly lucky - perhaps darned near impossible - shot from Brown's gun. One thing that did make me chuckle was the misleading box art for this video. If you check the top of the box carefully there's a drawing of an airliner exploding. The actual plane in the movie is a BI-PLANE! Yes, once again artistic license is to blame for making a film look more expensive than it really is. SYNDICATE VICE - a film only for those with acute insomnia and looking for a cure.

It's another cheap programmer for Al Adamson as a couple of cops go after an international dope ring. With a post-Motown chick-a-boom soundtrack being run out of a hotel where the women guests are recruited for criminal activities, some of it is shot in Vegas for that gritty-but-luxurious feel that people felt appealed to the 1970s, and some in a pink-walled pool hall.

This seems to have been so discouraging that after appearing in it, Russ Tamblyn didn't show up in another movie for six years. He had been in some awful dreck over the years -- he has an Oscar nomination for PEYTON PLACE -- but some things discourage a man.

Late, great grind-house trash movie-maker Al Adamson takes a stab at the blaxploitation genre -- and, surprisingly, the net result rates a cut or so above the norm, meaning that what we got here is a genuinely solid 70's drive-in black action opus. Former gridiron great Timothy Brown (whose other B-picture credits include "Bonnie's Kids," "The Dynamite Brothers," the Filipino women-in-prison potboiler "Sweet Sugar," and the third Cheri Caffaro "Ginger" feature "Girls Are for Loving") ain't half bad as rough'n'tough streetwise Las Vegas cop Kicks Carter, who's determined to get the goods on a fancy hotel operation which serves as a front for all kinds of illicit and illegal activities (gambling, bribery, gun-running, prostitution, y'know, the usual spit-in-the-face-of-both-the-law-and-morality kind of nasty stuff). The villains of this particular piece are an enjoyably vile pack of vicious down'n'dirty subhuman vermin: the ever-dependable Russ Tamblyn slimes it up delightfully as Ziggy, a brutish, loutish, obnoxious loan shark and nightclub manager (check out the scene where Ziggy gleefully beats a guy up with a sledgehammer and then crushes the dude's legs by running them over with a car!); Darlene Anders oozes coolly understated menace as the motel's evil, predatory lesbian owner, and J.C. Wells shows substantial smooth, slimy, sinister style as Guido, a bald, flinty, very business-like gangster who specializes in selling ill-gotten firearms. On the fetching femme side we've got the supremely sexy'n'slinky Tanya Boyd of "Black Shampoo" and "Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks" fame as a feisty, snoopy TV reporter and love interest for Kicks. And then there's Al's always welcome space cadet wife Regina Carrol, looking unusually haggard and worn-out, but still acquitting herself passably as a melancholy lounge singer (Carrol even belts out the unexpectedly lovely and heart-rending downbeat ballad "No More Mail Until Tomorrow").

Under Al's uncharacteristically proficient direction (Adamson, by the way, can also be briefly glimpsed playing blackjack in a casino during a nifty montage sequence),"Black Heat" measures up as a perfectly agreeable and diverting little low-budget number: we've got typically sharp and crisp cinematography by the tireless Gary Graver, Paul Lewison cuts loose with a righteously grooving, get-down happening jazzy soul score, the gratuitous sex, profanity and violence level is suitably ample and explicit (the movie hits its scuzzy highlight when a disgusting bunch of greasy, grinning slobs cheerfully gang rape luckless compulsive gambler Jana Bellan after she loses a poker game to them and doesn't have any money to cover her loss),the action set pieces are pretty smoking (Carter and Ziggy's final no-holds-barred fisticuffs confrontation in a junkyard definitely hits the stirring spot),and both the hip, slang-ridden dialogue (the word "dig" is said a lot) and especially the gaudy, tacky, eye-wateringly ugly 70's clothes are every bit as laughably dated and ghastly as they ought to be. Granted, "Black Heat" sure ain't another "Shaft," but overall it still qualifies as an above average cops-and-criminals crime/action programmer from our ever-reliable Grade Z schlock flick pal Al. Rest in peace, Mr. Adamson.