Down, dirty and entertaining early work from drive-in legend Ted V. Mikels. Nobody here can act and Mikels directs in blunt, low-budget, the-money-runs-out-at-five-o’clock style, but the sensational story holds up. This is the old “I passed for another race” chestnut. A half-black, half-white bohemian (Richard Gilden) uses his light skin and a bad wig to join the Klu Klux Klan as part of a revenge scheme after his 3-year-old daughter dies in a Klan church-burning. Along the way, he faces complications when his Ivory soap girlfriend follows him from Los Angeles to Alabama and when two militant black cracker-killers (led by a young Max Julien) show up with their own, more cold-blooded plan to take down the white hoods. It’s a film that illustrates the fine line between later blaxploitation movies, where the militants here would be the heroes, and movies like this, in which the makers take headlines from the Civil Rights movement and mine them for pulp and violence while still working the social drama angle (see the closing John F. Kennedy quote). Vintage men’s magazine nude model Maureen Gaffney co-stars as the racist Southern belle who likes to sleep around. There’s also a classic great/awful main titles theme, with 1960s protest story-song lyrics that pretty much spoil the plot, by the mysterious Tony Harris.