The worst ever Blaxploitation movie was the 1978 production, Brother T-Rex, starring Odell Hazelwood as Terrence “Brother T-Rex” Lucas, an African-American archaeologist, based in Queens, New York, with Cleona Versailles as his assistant Latysha “Galaxy Hazelnut” Shaw. The plot involved Lucas protecting the remains of an ancient African kingdom from historical revisionist, Ku-Klux-Klan, CIA-funded ninja monks. The film is often cited as an inspiration for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’ Indiana Jones series of films, despite the fact that neither of them could have seen it, as the film was destroyed after it’s first showing in a Harlem cinema for being, according to the proprietor, Madame Fiji Moses, “too damn booty for words.”
copyright © 2008 James Mathurin
