ABAR-THE FIRST BLACK SUPERMAN
Here's something special from 1977 that seems to go largely ignored, perhaps because on home video it was re-titled IN YOUR FACE and given a shitty cover having absolutely nothing to do with the film itself. It's a weird flick, not blaxploitation but more of a message film wrapped in a bizarre allegorical blend of fantasy and black anger. It's crudely put together and acted yet it works in it's own freaky way. I would imagine that people who were expecting a more traditional blaxploitation like the ones that achieved white kid hipsterness about fifteen years back might be put off by the lack of Pam Grier or Rudy Ray Moore - yet ABAR is actually more imaginative than those.
It begins as the Kincaide family moves into their new house. A couple of curious white ladies assume they are the maid and butler, because the Kincaides are black. "No", one says. "You're the maid and you're the butler." Uh oh. Cut to a hangout of some tough looking black dudes as the radio announces "a black family has moved into Meadow Park and this has caused a near riot. Many angry whites have gathered." And they have. With signs waving and for some reason a guy with a swastika arm band sieg heiling the Kincaide house? The protest goes on. A low budget, not very well attended protest, but still. One sign says "Go Home Cooncaide". I should mention Dr. Kincaide is a respected and accomplished physician with apparently no pit bulls or unliscensed firearms. He's no Michael Vick, but a more of a Bill Cosby.
So Abar(Tobar Mayo) and the B.F.U. (Black Front for Unity) arrive to help. Abar has some cool theme music, cool choppers and a bad ass presence. Abar is there to help but wants the Doctor to move back to the ghetto to help the brothers and sisters. The doctor chooses to stay and gets to work in his basement laboratory experimenting on rabbits (more with the rabbits later). Abar pulls up in a garbage truck just in time to kick some white assholes around.
There's more talk and messages about racists having broken minds and hearts while Abar takes a more hard line stance. He feels Kincaide is essentially a traitor for wanting to live in a nice house - "bourgeois blacks" and so on. A weird driving montage with a voice over debate between Abar and Kincaide follows. It's a clumsy scene yet essentially truthful.
Things get truly odd with the young Kincaide boy's dream sequence. He dreams of a western gunfighter named Deadwood Dick (Mayo) who shoots some whites trying to take a sharecropper's forty acres. "My friends call me Deadwood Dick, but my enemies call me smart, black nigger".
Tragedy strikes when the Kincaide boy is run over and killed by an evil white man but it does get us to the bullet proof rabbits. Turns out Kincaide has fashioned a black super soldier serum he wants to use on Abar to make him bullet proof (supreme master of any situation, the greatest human ever) like the bunnies and enable him to get revenge. But Kincaide realizes too late that John Abar is no Steve Rogers ("I didn't realize he was psychopathic") as Abar sets off into the night, now almost super-human. Abar survives a shooting and gains miraculous powers while meditating under the Watts Tower. He can turn hateful cops into hippies, turn ho against pimp and turn an Uncle Tom's plate of spaghetti into worms. He's a black Prof. X which is obviously appropriate. He doesn't appear to be able to fly or talk to sea life however. The conclusion is mind boggling as Abar transcends, becoming similar to that kid Bill Mumy played on the Twilight Zone with the wishing into the cornfield. It's a special moment, as Abar walks off and the "I have a dream" speech plays. King speeches pop up throughout the flick when quiet reflection is needed. Part fantasy, part revenge flick and part civics lesson, ABAR deserves to be seen. Thank you director Frank Packard and screenwriter James Smalley. And Tobar Mayo, where the hell are you?
