Character-actor luminary and former football star Bernie Casey gets one of his few lead roles in this pretty good low-budget blaxploitation flick. Like director William Crain’s previous film, Blacula, this isn’t as campy as its title indicates. It’s a horror film, a 70s update of the Robert Louis Stevenson story. It brings death, monsters, racial politics and one funky music score.
Bernie Casey is a doctor in an inner city free clinic (and thrift store!). He helps out the poor and regularly gives prostitutes their essential medical check-ups without judgement. Casey’s not only a gem of a guy, but he’s also ambitious. He’s working on an experimental cure for liver ailments. When he injects a rat with it, it turns the rat violent and it kills the other rats.
This confuses Dr. Casey and gets him to thinking that maybe he could get more illuminating results if he injected a human with it. And he’s obsessive so he bends a few rules here and there. He tries it on a dying old black woman and the result is that she rises, skin bleached white, and goes for a nurse’s throat.
Somehow, Casey is still not sure what’s up so he starts experimenting on himself.
Next thing you know, he turns into a monster who murders hookers in the night. Like the old woman, his skin also turns white when he becomes a terror to the community.
And that’s a little something that we call social commentary where I come from. Fine with me. Horror is often better with a dose of anger or outlaw spirit injected into it. That’s one experiment that works well from time to time. This film isn’t perfect, but it feels like something that the director (Crain was one of a handful of black directors working at the time; his work was mostly in television) needed to get out.
Also, notable here are some prominent names in the production credits. Future special effects giant Stan Winston did some modest formative work on this one and the cinematographer is Tak Fujimoto, one of those guys who got his start working on productions for Roger Corman’s New World and then made the leap into the mainstream, largely as a constant collaborator with Jonathan Demme.